Surely these notions represent an absurdity too mon- 

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

 however, give them fair play. Let us steady ourselves 

 in front of the hypothesis, and, dismissing all terror and 

 excitement from cur 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 op- 

 posite faces of the self-same mystery. Supposing that 

 in youth we had been impregnated with the notion of 

 the poet Goethe, instead 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 repugnance 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 hypothesis 

 must stand condemned ; but in many profoundly 



