408 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



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 running into organic forms he has no answer. 

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

 materialist is confounded 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 

 regard the improvement from the scientific or from the 

 theological point of view as the result of progressive 

 development, or 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 

 ends with 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 

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

 requisite 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 development of the proper intellectual organs to trans- 

 late them into knowledge as far surpassing ours as ours 

 surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which once held 

 possession of this planet. Meanwhile the mystery is not 

 without its uses. It certainly may be made a power in the 

 human soul; but it is a power which has feeling, not 

 knowledge, for its base. It may be, will be, and I hope is 

 turned to account, both in steadying and strengthening the 

 intellect, and in rescuing man from that littleness to 

 which, in the struggle for existence, or for precedence in 

 the world, he is continually prone. 



