SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM. 113 



tience. It implies a resolution to suppress indignation if 

 the statement of the one-half should clash with our convic 

 tions, and to repress equally undue elation if the half-state 

 ment should happen to chime in with our views. It implies 

 a determination to wait calmly for the statement of the 

 whole, before we pronounce judgment in the form of either 

 acquiescence or dissent. 



This premised, and, I trust, accepted, let us enter upon 

 our task. There have been writers who affirmed that the 

 pyramids of Egypt were the productions of Nature ; and in 

 his early youth Alexander von Humboldt wrote a learned 

 essay with the express object of refuting this notion. We 

 now regard the pyramids as the work of men s hands, aided 

 probably by machinery of which no record remains. We 

 picture to ourselves the swarming workers toiling at those 

 vast erections, lifting the inert stones, and, guided by the 

 volition, the skill, and possibly at times by the whip of the 

 architect, placing them in their proper positions. The 

 blocks in this case were moved and posited by a power 

 external to themselves, and the final form of the pyramid 

 expressed the thought of its human builder. 



Let us pass from this illustration of constructive power 

 to another of a different kind. When a solution of common 

 salt is slowly evaporated, the water which holds the salt 

 in solution diappears, but the salt itself remains behind. At 

 a certain stage of concentration the salt can no longer retain 

 the liquid form ; its particles, or molecules, as they are 

 called, begin to deposit themselves as minute solids, so 

 minute, indeed, as to defy all microscopic power. As evapo 

 ration continues solidification goes on, and we finally obtain, 

 through the clustering together of innumerable molecules, 

 a finite crystalline mass of a definite form. What is this 

 form ? It sometimes seems a mimicry of the architecture 

 of Egypt. We have little pyramids built by the salt, 

 terrace above terrace from base to apex, forming a series of 



