232 v IQ ) 



its modern form as it was in the pre-scientific ages. 

 Phosphorus is known to enter into the composition of 

 the human brain, and a courageous writer has exclaimed, 

 in his trenchant German, " Ohne phosphor kein ge- 

 danke." 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 whence 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 run- 

 ning into organic forms, he has no answer. Science 

 also is mute in reply to these questions. But if the 

 materialist is confounded, and science rendered dumb, 

 who else is entitled to answer? To whom has the 

 secret been revealed ? Let us lower our heads and ac- 

 knowledge our ignorance, 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 

 regard the improvement from the scientific or from the 

 theological point of view as the result of progressive 

 development, 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 by which 

 we are now enfolded may offer itself 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 requisite 



