444 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



peach the power and wisdom of the great moral force. These physical forces are 

 not matter, are not mind, but are laws enacted by the great force to prepare a place 

 for the culture, increase and expansion of mental and moral power to inhabit, the 

 moral Universe, which is destined to take the place of the material Universe. 

 The physical forces having bad a beginning will necessarily have an ending and 

 when the laws which originated, governed, directed and controlled matter cease, 

 matter must of necessity cease and become entirely extinct and the great moral 

 Universe, be inaugurated and naught will exist in that Universe but mental and 

 moral power. Then that vast amount of mind which has been in a preparatory 

 and tutelary state in the material Universe will be transplanted into the great 

 moral Universe to enter on a new state of existence running parallel with eterni- 

 ty, increasing and expanding as the cycles of eternity roll on. 



In the incomprehensible eternity of the past there must have been a frag- 

 mentary part of that eternity when there were no physical forces and consequent- 

 ly no matter — nothing but the great moral force. To argue against this hypothe- 

 sis is to claim the physical force, the inferior and the creature, the equal of 

 the superior and creator, the great moral and eternal, which is to main- 

 tain the eternity of matter, as the physical forces could not have existed with- 

 out producing matter governing, directing and controlling it. 



How long these physical forces have existed, or how long they will exist, is 

 a secret in the bosom of the great moral force, and can be, under the present lights 

 of science, but a matter of conjecture, and as philosophy does not deal in conjec- 

 ture we will not attempt to discuss a subject which has no data from which to 

 reason. 



Is it insisted that these are assumptions without any authority to sustain 

 them ? We reply they have a basis as broad as the verdict of the advanced 

 thought upon the improvements, discoveries and advancement in scientific knowl- 

 edge. We are sustained by the cultured and educated mind, the world over, 

 where science is made a study and particularly by the savants, scientists, mathe- 

 ticians and chemists, that matter is exclusively governed, directed and controlled 

 by fixed laws, the physical forces. 



The astronomer, familiar with the heavenly bodies and with the physical 

 forces governing, directing and controlling those bodies, can foretell centuries in 

 advance with absolute mathematical precision the very moment when an eclipse 

 of the Sun or Moon will begin or go off, when a comet that has not been seen for 

 half a century will make its appearance and when it will take its departure, as 

 well as other phenomena which are occasionally taking place in the heavens. 

 The chemist in his laboratory, from his knowledge of affinities and certain of the 

 physical forces, can make compounds with the most implicit confidence as to the 

 result. While in another branch of science the age of our planet has been told 

 probably with some accuracy, but from the fact that the science in which they have 

 made their discoveries and from which they have drawn their data is yet in its 

 infancy conclusions are not satisfactory, but vary from two hundred millions of 

 ^ears up to six hundred millions— sooner or later more dihgent and accurate re- 



