SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM 97 



reptiles which once held possession of this planet. Mean- 

 while 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 rescu- 

 ing man from that littleness to which, in the struggle for 

 existence, or for precedence in the world, he is contin- 

 ually prone. 



Musings on the Matterhorn, July 27, 1868 



Hacked and hurt by time, the aspect of the mountain 

 from its higher crags saddened me. Hitherto the impres- 

 sion it made was that of savage strength; here we had 

 inexorable decay. But this notion of decay implied a 

 reference to a period when the Matterhorn was in the 

 full strength of mountainhood. Thought naturally ran 

 back to its remoter origin and sculpture. Nor did 

 thought halt there, but wandered on through molten 

 worlds to that nebulous haze which philosophers have 

 regarded, and with good reason, as the proximate source 

 of all material things. I tried to look at this universal 

 cloud, containing within itself the prediction of all that 

 has since occurred; I tried to imagine it as the seat of 

 those forces whose action was to issue in solar and stellar 

 systems, and all that thev involve. Did that formless 

 fog contain .potentially the sadness with which I regarded 

 the Matterhorn? Did the thought which now ran back to 

 it simply return to its primeval home? If so, had we 

 not better recast our definitions of matter and force; for, 

 if life and thought be the very flower of both, any defi- 



SCIENOE 5 



