THE CONSTITUTION OF MATTER. 25 
affirm that they have some analogy with the inner light 
which fills us, and which we shed forth from us, and which 
teaches us, by its mysterious contact with the outer world, 
the infinite order of the universe.’ 
The danger from materialism is not, as we usually in- 
cline to think, corruption of morals by degradation of the 
soul. Too much use, for censure’s sake, has been made, 
against this system, of the seeming ease with which its 
professors have convinced themselves that they cut up by 
the roots the very principles of morality and duty. Histo- 
ry proves, by examples too infamous, that barbarism and 
license are the privilege of no philosophic sect. The real 
enemies of society always have been, and always will be, 
the ignorant and the fanatical, and it must be frankly 
owned that, if these exist within the pale of materialism, 
there are quite enough of them outside. The danger in 
the doctrine which reverses the natural relation of things, 
and asserts that spirit is the product of matter, when in 
truth matter is a product of spirit, this danger is of another 
kind; materialism is fatal to the development of the experi- 
mental sciences themselves. If, in such a case, the exam- 
ple of men of genius might be appealed to, how eloquent 
would be the testimony of the two greatest physicists of 
this age, Ampére and Faraday, both so earnestly con- 
vinced, so religiously possessed by the reality of the un-" 
seen world! But there are other arguments. ‘“ All that 
we see of the world,” says Pascal, “is but an impercep- 
tible scratch in the vast range of Nature.” The claim of 
1 “That cause, mould, or type, of all constitutions of beings,” says De 
Rémusat, in a famous essay on this subject, “that general Nature, the 
original or principle of all natures, that force which fashions, specifies, 
and characterizes all these kinds of beings, cannot be conceived of as 
a constant property of any being, because the diversity between all these 
beings is what it has to account for. I look upon this as the strongest 
proof of the presence of a will and an intelligence exerting their power 
throughout all Nature.” 
