A FLEA FOR THE OCCULT. 415 



ciple, one potency — the phenomena we see being the expression of this one All. 

 Such is to be the monotheism of the future. 



Science, in the pursuit of the constitution of things physical, pursues the right 

 method in the study of ultimates. But science as to philosophy begins at the 

 wrong end. You can ascertain the combinations of matter by this method, but 

 you cannot build a world by analysis, or discover the law of God by disintegra- 

 tion. You can take a watch apart, count and name the pieces, but the watch is 

 gone, and the secret of the maker is his secret still — his thought has escaped you. 

 But if you accept the maker and study it in its related parts, his idea and its uses 

 become clear. So we cannot find the principle of things by breaking them to 

 pieces by the blows of analysis, but we may comprehend the purpose of nature 

 by accepting the idea of its unseen power and reading by the light of manifested 

 phenomena. It is the synthetic not the analytic method that investigation must 

 follow in this direction, because that was the method of world building. Analy- 

 sis is valuable in giving the support of facts to synthesis, by showing that matter, 

 from its law of affinity and repulsion, is adapted to world building and individual- 

 ization, but it usurps a place for which it is not adequate when it assumes to be 

 the only mode of demonstration — or the primary mode. It can show that all 

 matter must have been homogeneous because it can be reduced to that condition 

 — proving the direct process by the inverse method. And this is all that science 

 has been able to do. 



And here, in this connection, it may be pertinent to refer to a few recent 

 discoveries which remove the last refuge of materialism and the mechanical theory 

 of worlds — the heretofore unanswerable argument against the ultimate theory of 

 spirit. Reference is made to elemental matter. The chemist had found certain 

 substances that refused to yield to his forces, and these he called elements, and 

 assigned to them ultimate qualities. Anything that did not recognize these ele- 

 mentary things was not true. The New Chemistry was printed in 1874 and con- 

 tains a list of sixty-three of these substances. The revised edition of that book 

 is just out, prepared by the same author, in which this formidable list is swept 

 away, and in his preface the author says : " Except in a very Hmited sense, the 

 so-called elementary substances are now seen to be as truly compounded as any 

 other substances, and it is manifest that their qualities must depend upon mole- 

 cular structure, or on the resulting dynamical relations, as well as on the funda- 

 mental attributes of ultimate atoms. There is, therefore, no longer any reason 

 for limiting the statement of the great fundamental law of definite proportions to 

 the relation of elementary substance, and clearness of exposition is gained by giving 

 the statement the widest possible scope." 



And so goes down this support of the physical school as the interpreter of 

 cosmic law. . And it brings into the foreground the singularly ignored discovery 

 of Crookes, to which reference was made in a paper read before this Academy in 

 1 88 1, as to the fourth or radiant state of matter. The only reason that seems to 

 exist for this long neglect of a discovery by the foremost investigator of his time, 

 is probably found in the closing sentence of his remarkable paper : That it 



