SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION 141 



notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intel- 

 lectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter 

 which were drilled into us when young. Spirit and mat- 

 ter 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 wonderful; to consider them, in fact, as two oppo- 

 site faces of the self-same 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 pri- 

 meval union between spirit and matter might be consider- 

 ably abated? Without this total revolution of the notions 

 now prevalent, the Evolution hypothesis must stand con- 

 demned; 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 sub- 

 stance, if not in words, their position as regards the rela- 

 tion of spirit and matter is: "What God hath joined to- 

 gether, let no 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- 



