144 ^^^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



same. I see what he sees with a wonder superadded. To me as to 

 him nay, to me more than to him not even Solomon in all his glory 

 was arrayed like one of these. 



I have spoken above as if the assumption of a soul would save Mr. 

 Martineau from the inconsistency of crediting pure matter with the 

 astonishing building power displayed in crystals and trees. This, 

 however, would not be the necessary result; for it wovild remain to 

 be proved that the soul assumed is not itself matter. When a boy, 1 

 learned from Dr. Watts that the souls of conscious brutes are mere 

 matter. And tlie man who would claim for matter the human soul 

 itself, would find himself in very orthodox company. " All that is 

 created," says Fauste, a famous French bishop of the fourth century, 

 " is matter. The soul occupies a place ; it is inclosed in a body ; it 

 quits the body at death, and returns to it at the resurrection, as in 

 the case of Lazarus ; the distinction between hell and heaven, be- 

 tween eternal pleasures and eternal pains, jiroves that, even after 

 death, souls occupy a place and are corporeal. God only is incor- 

 poreal." Tertullian, moreover, was quite a physicist in the definite- 

 ness of his conceptions regarding the soul. "The materiality of the 

 soul," he says, " is evident from the evangelists. A human soul is 

 there expressly pictured as suffering in hell ; it is placed in the middle 

 of a flame, its tongue feels a cruel agony, and it implores a drop of 

 water at the hands of a happier soul. Wanting materiality,'''' adds 

 Tertullian, " all this would he xoithout meaning.'''' One wonders what 

 would have happened to this great Christian father amid the roaring 

 lions of Belfast. Could its excellent press have shielded him from its 

 angry pulpits, as it sheltered me ? * 



I have glanced at inorganic Nature at the sea, and the sun, and 

 the vaj^or, and the snow-flake and at organic Nature as represented 

 by the fern and the oak. That same sun which warmed the water 

 and liberated the vapor, exerts a subtiler power on the nutriment of 

 the tree. It takes hold of matter wholly unfit for the purposes of nu- 

 trition, separates its nutritive from its non-nutritive portions, gives 

 the former to the vegetable, and carries the others away. Planted in 

 the earth, bathed by the air, and tended by the sun, the tree is trav- 

 ersed by its sap, the cells are formed, the woody fibre is spun, and the 

 whole is woven to a texture wonderful even to. the naked eye, but 

 a million-fold more so to microscopic vision. Does consciousness mix 

 in any way with these processes ? No man can tell. Our only ground 



' The foregoing extracts, which M. Alglave recently brought to light for the benefit 

 of the Bishop of Orleans, are taken from the sixth lecture of the " Cours d'Histoire Mo- 

 derne " of that most orthodox of statesmen, M. Guizot. " I could multiply," continues M. 

 Guizot, " these citations to infinity, and they prove that in the first centuries of our era 

 the materiality of the soul was an opinion not only permitted, but dominant." Dr. 

 Moriarty, and the synod which he recently addressed, obviously forget their own ante- 

 cedents. Their boasted succession from the early Church renders them the direct off- 

 spring of a " materialism " more " brutal " than any ever enunciated by me. 



