332 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



so labyrinthine, with never a collision, time so exactly 

 kept that the earth is never a fraction of a second late 

 in her vast annual journey. Nor have you explained 

 how these huge spinning spheres, some of them hundreds 

 of thousands of miles in thickness, are hung in the 

 heavens self-supported. Are they really so ? No, the 

 law of gravitation keeps them all in their places. And 

 what is gravity ? A universal property of matter, like 

 inertia, you say. And why is not matter rather a pro- 

 perty of it of this mysterious invisible something that 

 admittedly governs it everywhere and at all times ? 

 What is this gravity ? We cannot tell. It is a word 

 for universally observed effects ; but we believe there is 

 a cause for it which is not matter itself. To say that 

 matter moves itself, and that gravity is a necessary law 

 of matter in motion, looks like an explanation, but is 

 really none. 



Then, according to your story, after innumerable 

 tentative trials, at last elementary life appeared. Life 

 was a happy hit, a fortunate and unexpected product, 

 entirely uncontemplated by Nature ! Let us grant this 

 too. Did it appear first in the plant or the animal ? 

 We cannot say positively ; probably simultaneously, here 

 affixing itself to a particular spot as a plant, and there 

 finding itself wonderfully endowed with the faculty of 

 locomotion. Still, this new property of self-movement 

 at pleasure is a very remarkable fact, for though the 

 planets move, they are not supposed to be self-moved, 

 but must obey a fixed external law of movement. 

 Whence have the elementary forms of organic life this 

 singular difference ? Then the feeling of sentiency, and 

 its gradual increase to consciousness, is a still greater 

 marvel. Automatic movement and life might, it is 

 faintly conceivable, be products of chemical and physical 



