LECTURES AND ESS A YS 



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 pre- 

 pared 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 Iguanodonand his contem- 

 poraries 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 deve- j 

 lopment, or of successive exhibitions of ! 

 creative energy neither view entitles us I 

 to assume that man's present faculties j 

 end the series, that the process of j 

 amelioration ends with him. A time | 

 may therefore come when this ultra-scien- 

 tific 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 translate them into knowledge 

 as far surpassing ours as ours surpasses 

 that of the wallowing reptiles which once 

 held possession of this planet. Mean- 

 while 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 strengthen- 



ing the intellect, and in rescuing man 

 from that littleness to which, in the 

 struggle for existence, or for precedence 

 in the world, he is continally prone. 



Musings on the Matterhorn, 

 July 27th, 1868. 



HACKED and hurt by time, the aspect 

 of the mountain from its higher crags 

 saddened me. Hitherto the impression 

 it made was that of savage strength ; 

 here we had inexorable decay. But this 

 notion of decay implied a reference to a 

 period when the Matterhorn was in the 

 full strength of mountainhood. Thought 

 naturally ran back to its remoter origin 

 and sculpture. Nor did thought halt 

 there, but wandered on through molten 

 worlds to that nebulous haze which 

 philosophers have regarded, and with 

 good reason, as the proximate source of 

 all material things. I tried to look at 

 this universal cloud, containing within 

 itself the prediction of all that has since 

 occurred; I tried to imagine it as the 

 seat of those forces whose action was to 

 issue in solar and stellar systems, and all 

 that they involve. Did that formless 

 fog contain potentially the sadness with 

 which I regarded the Matterhorn ? Did 

 the thought which now ran back to it 

 simply return to its primeval home ? If 

 so, had we not better recast our defini- 

 tions of matter and force ; for, if life and 

 thought be the very flower of both, any 

 definition which omits life and thought 

 must be inadequate, if not untrue. Are 

 questions like these warranted? Why 

 not? If the final goal of man has not 

 been yet attained ; if his development 

 has not been yet arrested, who can say 

 that such yearnings and questionings are 

 not necessary to the opening of a finer 

 vision, to the budding and the growth of 

 diviner powers ? When I look at the 

 heavens and the earth, at my own body, 

 at my strength and weakness, even at 

 these ponderings, and ask myself, Is 





