310 THE FUTUKE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



cosmic vapour broke from its quiescent and homogeneous 

 state, there was an existence different from it ; under it 

 there was something superior to it and animating it. It 

 is not asserted that matter was not coeternal with the 

 principle that first moved it, and of which it was but the 

 phenomenal expression. This may or may not have been 

 the case ; but if, as is true, we cannot think the absence 

 of matter, much less dare we suppose the absence of its 

 immanent moving principle, which declared itself in the 

 cosmos, in life, and at length in human thought as Hegel 

 maintains. In a word, behind the materialist's army of 

 hydrogen atoms, prepared to create worlds, we are still 

 compelled, even on the materialist's own showing, to 

 posit a marshalling and directing agency, to postulate a 

 principle of movement which we cannot mentally picture 

 to the imagination, but which we must yet think as 

 existing. 



