USE OF THE IMAGINATION. 441 
The law of Relativity, 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 concerning 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 won- 
derful; to consider them, in fact, as two opposite faces of 
the selfsame mystery. Supposing that in youth we had 
been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe, 
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 Relativity 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 muststand condemned; 
but in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a revolution 
has already taken place. They degrade neither member of 
the mysterious duality referred to; but they exalt one of 
them from its abasement, and repeal the divorce hitherto 
existing between them. In substance, if not in words, 
their position as regards the relation of spirit and matter is: 
"What God hath joined together, let not man put 
asunder." 
You have been thus led to the outer rim of speculative 
science, for beyond the nebulae scientific thought has never 
hitherto ventured. I have tried to state that which I con- 
sidered ought, in fairness, to be outspoken. I neither 
think this Evolution hypothesis is to be flouted away con- 
temptuously, nor that it ought to be denounced as wicked. 
It is to be brought before the bar of disciplined reason, and 
there justified or condemned. Let us hearken to those who 
wisely support it, and to those who wisely oppose it; and 
let us tolerate those, whose name is legion, who try fool- 
ishly to do either of these things. The only thing out of 
place in the discussion is dogmatism on either side. Fear 
