ON THE EVOLUTION MATERIALISM AND THEOLOGY. 337 



ness and though t, the supreme marvel of the universe ; 

 there is the unique energy that slowly awoke to con- 

 sciousness, that alone knows and contemplates all the 

 other energies as well as itself. We might almost con- 

 ceive that everything else might be brought into connec- 

 tion with matter as the central principle; that all the 

 othpr facts in the universe might conceivably be hung 

 from the plastic and flexible principle of matter as now 

 viewed; but consciousness, with all its wonderful contents, 

 this and its evolution are inexplicable by materialism, 

 and can only receive explanation by postulating a prin- 

 ciple wholly different from all that we know of matter. 



Or was consciousness, too, as well as life, only a lucky 

 accident that Nature blindly stumbled upon ? Did 

 Matter, blindly groping, while sorting her old materials, 

 while arranging, and rearranging her atoms, at last hit 

 upon this splendid thing by chance this most surprising 

 thing, had she any intelligence to perceive it and to be 

 surprised. For a spirit arose beneath her blind passes, 

 her fortuitous motions and combinations, destined, if not 

 to give eyes to Matter to read herself, at least to be her 

 master and ruler; a spirit that read into the face of 

 Matter and Nature a divine beauty, and found in her 

 breast a truth unsuspected by herself; a soul, too, that 

 found in itself infinite affections as well as immortal 

 longings for a divine something nowhere discoverable in 

 nature or on the earth ; a soul that, in process of further 

 evolution, began to nourish ambitious and dazzling hopes 

 of a future continued life as its inherent right and 

 privilege, that dreamt of equality with the angels, and of 

 an immortality like the gods : such being the startling 

 phenomenon that was one day born of matter in a 

 mindless universe, the product of a lucky accident ! 



5. The sinister question that lies at the root of all 



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