494 THE MOUNTAIN. 



and functions only, it reveals facts of the senses and under- 

 standing alone, giving an interpretation of nature which 

 leaves the mind in the mire. Gravity and the affinities of 

 chemistry, pathology or the gross outward results of dis- 

 ease, it recognizes with sufficient precision. It does not 

 believe that the fall of an apple could introduce the mind of 

 man to the mysteries of the mechanism of the heavens, and 

 reveal the miraculous dance of the worlds in time and space ; 

 it does not believe that a flash of the soul in the darkness 

 of the night called life, may illume the celestial mountain- 

 tops of undiscovered continents of knowledge ; that gleams 

 or great intuitions of the mind, may let us as deeply into the 

 laws of nature as the anatomist's knife or chemist's crucible. 

 It forgets that nature is but a name for an effect, whose 

 cause is the absolute and infinite spirit; assiduously and 

 devoutly acquainting itself with external results, material 

 phenomena merely, it does not reflect that the " visible is but 

 the terminus of the invisible;" that what we see and touch 

 is dead; that "the body is itself but the drowsy brute that 

 the Eternal hath yoked to the chariot of life to urge man 

 across the finite." 



The constantly recurring mistake of the profession, in its 

 phantasmal dance of theories, has always been infinite faith 

 in matter. From earliest dreams of atomists, humeralists, 

 and solidists, mechanical laws, and powers of polarity, with 

 elixirs of life and philosophers' stones, to the modern swarm 

 of drugs whose name is legion, the profession has been 

 blundering over its mountains of matter, and had its faith 

 only in heroic doses of heroic remedies, and in the most 

 absolute of "material aids." Its theory of nature is gross 

 and mechanical, an hypothesis accounting for the universe on 

 the purely physical laws of natural philosophy, architecture, 

 and chemistry. Thus, in its conception of diseases also, it 

 is like the medicine-man of the Thibetans ; believing and 

 calling the destroying powers material devils, it would scare 

 them into cages with gourds and calabashes, and destroy 

 them with the sword. 



