160 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



before you unclothed and unvarnished the notions by which 

 it must stand or fall. 



Surely these notions represent an absurdity too mon- 

 strous to be entertained by any sane mind. Let us, how- 

 ever, give them fair play. Let us steady ourselves in front 

 of the hypothesis, and, dismissing all terror and excitement 

 from our minds, let us look firmly into it with the hard sharp 

 eye of intellect alone. "Why are these notions absurd, and 

 why should sanity reject them ? The law of Relativity, of 

 which we have previously spoken, may find its application 

 here. These Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and 

 fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas 

 concerning matter which were drilled into us when young. 

 Spirit and matter have ever been presented to us in the 

 rudest contrast, the one as all-noble, the other as all-vile. 

 But is this correct ? Does it represent what our mightiest 

 spiritual teacher would call the Eternal Fact of the Uni- 

 verse ? Upon the answer to this question all depends. 

 Supposing, 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 opposite faces 

 of the self-same mystery. Supposing that in youth we had 

 been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe, in- 

 stead of the notion of the poet Young, looking at 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 repug- 

 nance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and 

 matter might be considerably abated ? Without this total 

 revolution of the notions now prevalent, the Evolution hy- 

 pothesis must stand condemned ; but in many profoundly 

 thoughtful minds such a revolution has already taken place. 

 They degrade neither member of the mysterious duality 



