SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM. 121 



known to enter into the composition of the human brain, 

 and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, " Ohne 

 Phosphor, kein Gedanke." That may or may not be the 

 case ; but even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge 

 would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone 

 here assigned to the materialist he is equally helpless. If 

 you ask him wdience is this " Matter " of which we have 

 been discoursing, who or what divided it into molecules, 

 who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running 

 into organic forms, he has no answer. Science is mute in 

 reply to these questions. But if the materialist is con- 

 founded and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared 

 with a solution ? To whom has this arm of the Lord been 

 revealed ? Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our 

 ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all. 



Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge 

 at some future day. The process of things upon this earth 

 has been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the 

 Iguanodon and his contemporaries to the President and 

 members of the British Association. And whether we re- 

 gard the improvement from the scientific or from the theo- 

 logical point of view, as the result of progressive develop- 

 ment, or as the result of successive exhibitions of creative 

 energy, neither view entitles us to assume that man's present 

 faculties end the series — that the process of amelioration 

 stops at him. A time may therefore come when this ultra- 

 scientific region b}>- which we are now enfolded may offer it- 

 self to terrestrial, if not to human investigation. Two-thirds 

 of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse in the eye the 

 sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ requi- 

 site for their translation into light does not exist. And so 

 from this region of darkness and mystery which surrounds 

 us, rays may now be darting which require but the develop- 

 ment of the proper intellectual organs to translate them 

 into knowledge as far surpassing ours as ours surpasses 

 G 



