JESCULAPIUS. 495 



This is mournful, and profanely closes the avenues to 

 higher and better light; for, although "matter may be 

 one of the grandest facts that a finite intelligence can 

 know," yet can it also cognize with true spiritual precision 

 and absolute knowledge, other existences, powers, and forces 

 of the world. " The business of philosophy is to discover 

 truths which, as first principles, are to give intelligibility, 

 and which, therefore, cannot be deduced from the facts of 

 experience which they are intended to explain, and to 

 which they are to give unity and connection; they are truths 

 supersensuous. We demand, and the rational mind cannot 

 be satisfied with less, that the facts, phenomena, and 

 changes which form the sphere of our sensible experience, 

 and, collectively, are called nature, shall be rendered intelli- 

 gible to, and rationally accounted for, by our mind. The 

 instincts of reason lead us to investigate what the realities 

 are of which the phenomena are but the outward signs." 

 What are the true moving forces of the universe ? through 

 what miraculous causes does this multiform phenomenal per- 

 form the dramaturgy of nature ? Around us is a fullness of 

 life and power, and the endless procession goes forward with 

 ceaseless regularity, pointing to the net of golden threads of 

 living connection in all things, and asserting through all 

 the kingdoms of being the tyranny of law. We arrive at 

 last, in our investigations, in the dread presence of a range 

 of forces in whose fingers the material universe, or matter 

 with gravity and attraction, is as clay in the potter's hands. 

 They have nothing in common with the sixty ponderable, 

 elementary bodies, recognized and catalogued by chemistry, 

 or any of their combinations, constituting the multifarious 

 forms of outward existences, but antagonize in every single 

 attribute this world of matter with sensible qualities. One 

 class seeking, as if by the instincts of a blind and drowsy 

 soul, to rest and, sleep, holding globes and atoms safely to- 

 gether in concreted masses and revolving spheres ; the other, 

 essentially active, alive, and quick, without an element of 

 sameness or affinity with ponderable bodies, but dissolving, 

 rending asunder, and separating all things as by a fearful in- 



