258 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



Hell and Heaven, between eternal pleasures and eternal 

 pains, proves that, even after death, souls occupy a place 

 and are corporeal. God only is incorporeal." Tertullian, 

 moreover, was quite a physicist in the definiteness of his 

 conceptions regarding the soul. *'The materiality of the 

 soul," he says, "is evident from the evangelists. A hu- 

 man soul is there expressly pictured as suffering in hell; 

 it is placed in the middle of a flame, its tongue feels a 

 cruel agony, and it implores a drop of water at the hands 

 of a happier soul. Wanting materiality ^^^ adds Tertullian, 

 *'aZ? this would be without meaning.'" * 



I have glanced at inorganic nature — at the sea, and the 

 sun, and the vapor, and the snow-flake, and at organic 

 nature as represented by the fern and the oak. That 

 same sun which warmed the water and liberated the 

 vapor exerts a subtler power on the nutriment of the 

 tree. It takes hold of matter wholly unfit for the pur- 

 poses of nutrition, separates its nutritive from its non- 

 nutritive portions, gives the former to the vegetable, and 

 carries the others away. Planted in the earth, bathed by 

 the air, and tended by the sun, the tree is traversed by 

 its sap, the cells are formed, the woody fibre is spun, and 

 the whole is woven to a texture wonderful even to the 

 naked eye, but a million-fold more so to microscopic vis- 



* The foregoing extracts, •which M. Alglave recently brought to light for the 

 benefit of the Bishop of Orleans, are taken from the sixth Lecture of the "Cours 

 d'Histoire Moderne" of that most orthodox of statesmen, M, G-uizot. "] could 

 multiply," continues M. Guizot, "these citations to infinity, and they prove that 

 in the first centuries of our era the materiality of the soul was an opinion 

 not only permitted, but dominant." Dr. Moriarty, and the synod which he 

 recently addressed, obviously forget their own antecedents. Their boasted suc- 

 cession from the early Church renders them the direct offspring of a "material- 

 ism" more "brutal" than any ever enunciated by me. 



