416 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



brings us to the borderland between the material and that beyond, for which the 

 great student had such strong partiaUty, 



And here I will refer to one more fact, the bearing of which will be seen on 

 the thought involved. That is that Edison has, in the face of the negative of ma- 

 terialistic science, succeeded in passing a current of electricity through a vacuum. 

 This implies, in the opinion of this remarkable genius, to whom electricity seems 

 a native element, that there is still a more subtile medium, universal in nature, 

 which acts as an agent for the transmission of electricity, light, heat and magnet- 

 ism, and that the results of his experiment may be almost revolutionary in the 

 finer calculations of astronomical science. 



Are there any more barriers remaining to the conception of the spiritual ? 

 Science has about passed the limit of special interest in mere physics by these 

 discoveries of yesterday. Matter, motion, heat, light, magnetism, electricity and 

 force as studies must now give way to what is shown to control them. The day 

 of the dreamer is dawning, and the time of the "crank" is near at hand. We 

 may now return to our subject more direct. We have seen that astronomy, bi- 

 ology, chemistry and electricity have given up secrets that change the whole 

 field of investigation and challenge the human intellect to new paths of explor- 

 ation. 



We cavalierly dismiss the wisdom of the ancients as too grotesque for mod- 

 ern consideration. But, after all, may it not be their way of accounting for things 

 as we comprehend it rather than the conception underlying ? We replace astrol- 

 ogy with astronomy and substitute chemistry for alchemy, but are we sure they 

 did not apprehend the cause, the principle, better than we. For it is a fact that 

 every step forward in our researches brings us nearer to the ancient mysteries. 

 The mineral to them was sentient, it is magnetic with us — but with both the fact 

 remains of endowment with a quality that we can express in no better way than 

 to call it life. 



The great trouble after all is from the want of thinking. It seems as if a 

 theory was necessarily a centenarian, and must live so long, no matter how 

 many new births may happen. Newton for twenty years doubted his own theory 

 of gravity, and now it has to bear many burdens which never had his authority 

 or sanction. The same is true as to evolution — many things being credited to 

 Darwin that he never taught. The power of thinking possessed by these great mas- 

 ters seems not to have survived them, and their hypotheses, instead of being 

 modified by new facts, have been made procrustean beds to which all new discov- 

 eries have been compelled to conform. Their disciples have been too much like 

 the man who when facts differed with his theory, said : " So much the worse for 

 the facts." 



A certain school have assumed that there is no such thing as inteUigence in 

 the order of nature — because they know nothing of it. Another school assumes 

 to know, absolutely, all about the nature of the intelligence. And if a fact dif- 

 fers from either assumption the fact does not exist. Between the two truth has 

 had a hard struggle. The one has its standard in what it thinks was said thous- 



