THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER. 25 



affirm that they have some analogy with the inner light 

 which fills us, and which we shed forth from us, and which 

 teaches us, by its mysterious contact with the outer world, 

 the infinite order of the universe. 1 



The danger from materialism is not, as we usually in- 

 cline to think, corruption of morals by degradation of the 

 soul. Too much use, for censure's sake, has been made, 

 against this system, of the seeming ease with which its 

 professors have convinced themselves that they cut up by 

 the roots the very principles of morality and duty. Histo- 

 ry proves, by examples too infamous, that barbarism and 

 license are the privilege of no philosophic sect. The real 

 enemies of society always have been, and always will be, 

 the ignorant and the fanatical, and it must be frankly 

 owned that, if these exist within the pale of materialism, 

 there are quite enough of them outside. The danger in 

 the doctrine which reverses the natural relation of things, 

 and asserts that spirit is the product of matter, when in 

 truth matter is a product of spirit, this danger is of another 

 kind ; materialism is fatal to the development of the experi- 

 mental sciences themselves. If, in such a case, the exam- 

 ple of men of genius might be appealed to, how eloquent 

 would be the testimony of the two greatest physicists of 

 this age, Ampere and Faraday, both so earnestly con- 

 vinced, so religiously possessed by the reality of the un- 

 seen world ! But there are other arguments. " All that 

 we see of the world," says Pascal, " is but an impercep- 

 tible scratch in the vast range of Nature." The claim of 



1 " That cause, mould, or type, of all constitutions of beings," says De 

 Remusat, in a famous essay on this subject, " that general Nature, the 

 original or principle of all natures, that force which fashions, specifies, 

 and characterizes all these kinds of beings, cannot be conceived of as 

 a constant property of any being, because the diversity between all these 

 beings is what it has to account for. I look upon this as the strongest 

 proof of the presence of a will and an intelligence exerting their power 

 throughout all Nature." 



