SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION. 133 



yearning must have come to us across the ages which 

 separate the primeval mist from the consciousness of 

 to-day. I do not think that any holder of the Evolution 

 hypothesis would say that I overstate or overstrain it in 

 any way. I merely strip it of all vagueness, and bring 

 before you, unclothed and unvarnished, the notions by 

 which it must stand or fall. 



Surely these notions represent an absurdity too 

 monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind. But 

 why are such notions absurd, and why should sanity 

 reject them ? The law of Eelativity, of which we have 

 previously spoken, may find its application here. These 

 Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only 

 for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas con- 

 cerning matter which were drilled into us when young. 

 Spirit and matter have ever been presented to us in 

 the rudest contrast, the one as all-noble, the other 

 as all- vile. But is this correct ? Upon the answer to 

 this question all depends. Supposing that, instead of 

 having the foregoing antithesis of spirit and matter 

 presented to our youthful minds, we had been taught to 

 regard them as equally worthy, and equally wonderful ; 

 to consider them, in fact, as two opposite faces of the 

 self-same mystery. Supposing that in youth we had been 

 impregnated with the notion of the poet Groethe, instead 

 of the notion of the poet Young, and taught to look 

 upon matter, not as ' brute matter,' but as the ' living 

 garment of God ; ' do you not^ think that under these 

 altered circumstances the law of Eelativity might have 

 had an outcome different from its present one ? Is it 

 not probable that our repugnance to the idea of primeval 

 union between spirit and matter might be considerably 

 abated ? Without this total revolution of the notions 

 now prevalent, the Evolution hypothesis must stand 

 condemned ; but in many profoundly thoughtful minds 



