THE NEW HYPOTHESIS. 587 
Thus, when we think of gravity, we call it a law, when it is only a conception 
of a state or relation between parts of a whole, that we call the universe. And 
there is connected with the word law a finite, a restricted idea, whi h, borrowing 
a coloring from our own methods, dwarfs the impression of its infinity, its eternity 
and its expression. We cannot dissociate the idea of its governing the move- 
ments of worlds, when it is only part of the universal whole which cannot be 
suspended, as there never has been a time or a conception of a time when it was 
not—because gravity is creation. We speak of matter under the same disabilities, 
and one of the most difficult things for the mind to do, and we might say impos- 
sible for it to do, is to think of matter without the association of something that is 
tangible to the material sense, something that has substance, form and dimension, 
whereas matter is only the name of the tool for handling an idea. We know 
matter is not the thing we associate it within the mind, for there is no form of 
visible matter that, by methods known to us, cannot be made to disappear from 
all sense. Wecan attain to an intellectual recognition of matter in this con- 
ception, measurably, but as soon as we attempt to speak of it, the forms of speech 
dissipate the true conception again. ‘This disabling obstacle interposes in all 
discussion from facts, and intrudes the physical basis of life asa theory, when 
in the nature of things, as we understand the word, there can be no such thing 
as the physical basis of life. To deal with the subject at all, we must do so by 
hypothesis, and the use of facts is to illustrate or to approve or disapprove the 
theory advanced. And why not? 
Take for example the theory of evolution, to which the school that assumes 
to be pre-eminently scientific seems to hold as the ultimate of science in the 
direction of the origin of life. It is not fact, but only a hypothesis based on a 
hypothesis. ‘The entire structure of materialism and its science, as related to the 
origin of life and the development of living things, rests on the nebular hypoth- 
esis. If that should be discovered not to be well founded, not only evolution, but 
many other far more generally received theories and systems would fall with it. 
Is it not then best to be respectful to hypothesis ? 
And just here allow me to digress and to make an observation pertinent to 
the argument to follow. It has always been a mystery how the advocate of the 
physical basis of life, or the materialist, can ignore the oneness of matter and 
the hypotheses that follow that idea, when the very foundation, the central fact 
upon which his entire theory rests, is that the solar system, the eternal basis of 
all things in his system, was at one time nothing—a mere expression—void. If 
it was so before the beginning, why not so now? Did the evolution into the 
nebulee, and from the nebulee into worlds necessarily change the original order of 
all matter in space? We know it has left an atmosphere as intangible, when at 
rest, as vacuity itself, and why not have left space still more ethereally occupied ? 
In fact it has been negatively demonstrated that space is pervaded by a medium 
that transmits light, heat, and what we call the chemical rays of the sun. What 
are these chemical rays? Why not this very principle of life that we are in search 
