PRIMEVAL MAX . 371 



nitely more of the spiritual! Once he contented himself 

 to capture prey sufficient for food, as the bear and the tiger 

 did in whose company he lived. But — oh, how uncon- 

 scious of his powers ! he held even then the spark of divin- 

 ity which the bear and the tiger had not, and he has risen, 

 while they grovel on the plane from which he sprang. 

 From age to age he has learned to commune more and 

 more with the unseen — the ideal — the good and the true. 

 He has made achievements which were once beyond the 

 reach of dreams. Steam, electricity — what miracles do 

 they not summon into mind ? What does a retrospect of 

 fifty years disclose? And is not man even yet on the 

 march of improvement ? What does a forward glance of 

 fifty years unfold to imagination ? What now irresolvable 

 mysteries may not be explained in the school-books of 

 our grandchildren? There is nothing which it is rever- 

 ent to pronounce inscrutable among the works of God. It 

 remains for us to penetrate the world of invisible things. 

 We have already sundry rumors and pretences — shadows 

 cast before, perhaps — but as yet unsatisfactory and unin- 

 telligible, and, above all, unreduced to a philosophy. There 

 must be a substratum that has not yet been sounded lying 

 beneath the confused and apparently capricious phenomena 

 of clairvoyance, mesmerism, dreams, and spiritual manifes- 

 tations. With much imposition, there is much which can 

 not be scientifically ignored. It remains to resolve the 

 mystery of these sporadic phenomena — to reduce them to 

 law, and to open under the law some regular and intelligi- 

 ble intercourse with the unseen world. The unseen world 

 is destined to become like a newly discovered continent. 

 We shall visit it — we shall hold communion with it — we 

 shall wonder how so many thousand years could have 

 passed without our being introduced to it. We shall learn 

 of other modes of existence — intermediate, perhaps, between 



