THE NEW HYPOTHESIS. 089 
pose, and as we know, to uniform results. We call all this ‘‘ force,” but it is only 
a confusion induced by the necessity of words. In our mechanical contact with 
material objects, that we employ to control them we call force, and so in the 
barrenness of physical speech we apply the same term to this work of the creative 
energy, and this manifestation of an eternal and infinite purpose. But in the case 
of a tree we find the same as in that of the bones—the trunk, the wood, the bark 
and the leaves are forms of matter, but they are not necessary to the perpetuation 
of the life of the tree—that isin the seed. What isin the seed? That is just what 
we have never been able to discover. Here lies the mystery, and if we cannot 
grasp its presence, why try before we gain that secret, to question it as to its origin? 
Now let us turn to a wider field. Many years ago the furnace and retort of 
the chemist fournd.certain substances that were obdurate and refused to obey cer- 
tain so-called laws that other substances did obey. These were called elements, 
and they were called so as forming the original substances of our world. Then 
came the discovery of the spectroscope, and it was found that some of these ele- 
ments, many of them, existed in the sun. Then came the hypothesis, or scien- 
tific deduction, that the sun, earth and all the family of the solar system were of 
like composition—the same elements of matter. It is strange that with the nebu- 
lar hypothesis as the basis of the solar system, this fact had not been accepted be- 
fore. Itis hard to conceive how it could be otherwise, if we place law over all. 
But is it not equally strange, that the other presumption was not considered ? that 
as all were once mere nebulz, that as the matter composing sun and worlds was 
in different states than in the beginning, that these differing states were only the 
different aspects of the same original nebulous mass; and it is still more strange, 
when we reflect that science held all the time to the theory of atoms and knew the 
law of atomic combination. The world had not then, nor has it now, got beyond 
the idea of matter, that it is something you can eat or kick. 
But after the spectroscope came, the men with hypotheses began to investigate, 
and they found one line merging into another, one part, for example, of the sun’s 
rays or atmosphere, or what they may be called, gave less lines or elements than 
another, until at one culminating point in the wondrous laboratory of our central 
orb, all disappear but the hydrogen line; or that all forms of matter, all elements, 
are but differing conditions of hydrogen. Still there are men, who having follow- 
ed the study of matter from the supposed simples of the elements of our globe, 
up to this generalization of all substances into one, who yet deny the inevitable 
conclusion—the unity of matter. It is this class of conservatives who have plac- 
ed, always, the barriers and finalities to knowledge, who seem afraid to face the 
tremendous fact that these discoveries suggest. And here they stop, and instead 
of a god of fossils and evolution, they make a hydrogen god, and shut the door 
in the face of the hypothesis, that there is still a God beyond the veil of hydrogen ; 
that matter is still capable of a condition beyond that burning atmosphere which 
has absorbed all known forms of matter into its own. 
But it may be asked in view of this criticism: Are we to give up scientific 
