408 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist he 
is equally helpless. If you ask hirn whence is this " Matter " 
of which we have been discoursing who or what divided 
it into molecules, who or what impressed upon them this 
necessity of running into organic forms he has no answer. 
Science is mute in reply to these questions. But if the 
materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who 
else is prepared with a solution? To whom has this arm 
of the Lord been revealed? Let us lower our heads, and 
acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one 
and all. 
Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge 
at some future day. The process of things upon this earth 
has been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the 
Iguanodon and his contemporaries, to the President and 
Members of the British Association. And whether we 
regard the improvement from the scientific or from the 
theological point of view as the result of progressive 
development, or of successive exhibitions of creative energy 
neither view entitles us to assume that man's present 
faculties end the series, that the process of amelioration 
ends with him. A time may therefore come when this 
ultra-scientific region, by which we are now enfolded, 
may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to human, investigation. 
Two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse 
the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ 
requisite for their translation into light does not exist. 
And so from this region of darkness and mystery which 
surrounds us, rays may now be darting, which require but 
the development of the proper intellectual organs to trans- 
late them into knowledge as far surpassing ours as ours 
surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which once held 
possession of this planet. Meanwhile the mystery is not 
without its uses. It certainly may be made a power in the 
human soul; but it is a power which has feeling, not 
knowledge, for its base. It may be, will be, and I hope is 
turned to account, both in steadying and strengthening the 
intellect, and in rescuing man from that littleness to 
which, in the struggle for existence, or for precedence in 
the world, he is continually prone. 
