COSMOLOGICAL THEORIES. 115 



triumphs of human genius. Yet, even while overwhelmed 

 with a sense of its sublimity, one can not well suppress a sense 

 of sadness as he contemplates its cold, mechanical lifelessness 

 I had almost said Godlessness ! Contemplated in this light, 

 the universe appears somewhat analogous to an ingeniously 

 constructed machine, which is wound up, and left to go of 

 itself, while its maker withholds all further exercise of power 

 from it, and forever withdraws all immediate personal care 

 over it, as being unnecessary. With this philosophy impressed 

 upon our minds, we look up into the heavens, and, though we 

 behold incessant motion and activity in every direction, we 

 see no necessary evidence of immanent life or spirit nothing 

 with which our souls can sympathize as the present pervading 

 Animus and constantly impelling Cause of the phenomena we 

 behold ; and it is only by an almost painful stretch of the 

 powers of inductive reasoning, that we can attain to any sub- 

 stantial conviction of a spiritual or voluntative Cause, as having 

 been connected with the system even at its origin ! 



It may be added, that thousands of persons, on arriving at 

 a full comprehension and conviction of the truth of the Newto- 

 nian theory of a merely mechanical universe, and of vacuity 

 in the interplanetary and interstellar spaces, have anxiously 

 inquired, " Where and what, then, is that spiritual world to 

 which our interior natures aspire, and for which Revelation 

 encourages us to hope]" and nature, viewed in this aspect, 

 has not only refused to respond in language which appeals to 

 the conceptive and reasoning powers, but has interposed a 

 cloud of darkness and doubt between the inquirer and the sub- 

 ject which he seeks to comprehend ! In its efforts to satisfy 

 the irrepressible yearnings of the spirit within, Fancy has 

 erected a formless, unextended, unsubstantial even unaerial 

 figment, that bears no relation to space or the material uni- 



