4 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



our present experience it does not always continue to 

 exist, for it may be and is frequently in a state of absolute 

 suspension. It is not therefore true, on any principle 

 either of direct or analogous reasoning, that because a thing 

 exists it must have always existed, or must always con- 

 tinue to exist.* The very converse is the rule of human 

 experience, and it is a rule which admits of no demon- 

 strable exception ; for even matter did not always exist to 

 human consciousness : hence the eternal endurance, or in- 

 destructibility of matter is not demonstrable by so limited 

 and finite a being as man. He can no more tell or de- 

 monstrate what shall be after him than he can prove or 

 demonstrate what from all eternity has been before him ; 

 and he is no more warranted in assuming that matter is 

 indestructible, simply because he cannot destroy it, than 

 he would be in assuming that the moon and planets are 

 incombustible because he cannot set them on fire. Man's 

 ordinary and too popular inference, therefore, that matter 

 is indestructible is an impotent conclusion, founded 

 entirely on the assumption that his own small and limited 

 powers are the boundary of all physical possibility and all 

 knowledge, and not on any complete and absolute ac- 

 quaintance with the whole laws and possible conditions of 

 matter. This defective knowledge of man may be proved 

 by facts recently observed which are exceptions to all 

 the chemical laws and conditions of matter with which 

 human science is acquainted : Biela's Comet, a small 

 nucleus comet without a tail which moves round the sun in 

 a short orbit, which it traverses every six years and a half, 

 was in 1846, without any ascertainable cause, observed to 

 divide into two parts, which have since continued in a state 



* Plato's reasoning, even in his own hands, results in the con- 

 clusion, not so much that the human soul is immortal, as that soul 

 must have existed from all eternity ; in other words, there must have 

 been a Living First Cause. 



