KEY. J. MARTINEATJ AND BELFAST ADDRESS. 239 



vite Mr. Martineau. to consider how inappropriate 'his 

 figure of a fictitious bank deposit becomes under these 

 circumstances. The * account current' of matter re- 

 ceives nothing at my hands which could be honestly 

 kept back from it. If, then, ' Democritus and the 

 mathematicians ' so defined matter as to exclude the 

 powers here proved to belong to it, they were clearly 

 wrong, and Mr. Martineau, instead of twitting me with 

 my departure from them, ought rather to applaud me 

 for correcting them.* 



The reader of my small contributions to the litera- 

 ture which deals with the overlapping margins of 

 Science and Theology, will have noticed how fre- 

 quently I quote Mr. Emerson. I do so mainly because 

 in him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, 

 who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries 

 of Science, past, present, or prospective. In his case 

 Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver 

 brother Science by the hand, and cheers him with im- 

 mortal laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions 

 are continually transmuted into the finer forms and 

 warmer hues of an ideal world. Our present theme is 

 touched upon in the lines 



The journeying atoms, primordial wholes 

 Firmly draw, firmly drive by their animate poles. 



As regards veracity and insight these few words out- 

 weigh, in my estimation, all the formal learning ex- 

 pended by Mr. Martineau in those disquisitions on 

 Force, where he treats the physicist as a conjuror, and 



* Definition implies previous examination of the object de- 

 fined, and is open to correction or modification as knowledge of 

 the object increases. Such increased knowledge has radically 

 changed our conceptions of the luminiferous aether, converting its 

 vibrations from longitudinal into transverse. Such changes also 

 Mr. Martineau's conceptions of matter are doomed to undergo. 



