270 The Formative Power in Nature . [May, 
the theories advanced as the real outcomes and the matured 
conclusions of Science, when generally they are the baldest 
hypotheses. New theories crowd upon us ; but when we 
find it advanced as a serious conclusion that every particle 
of matter in the universe is self-conscious, thinking, and 
sensitive, we are much inclined lo use the talk of the show- 
man, and enquire “What comes next, Mr. Merryman ?” 
As a general principle it is not my wont to indulge in new 
theories, or strive for originality ; my effort generally is to 
state my proposition in plain words, addressing myself to 
the common sense of my readers rather than to the endea- 
vour to excite their wonderment. New theories, too usually, 
present the very bathos of absurdity. One theory, now old, 
which at the present time is the very basis of Kosmic ideas, 
however extreme it may be in idea, meets with a general 
acceptance. The conflagration theory, with flaming hydro- 
gen and nitrogen, — a world of combustion ! — although based 
on the nebular theory of the great Kant and confirmed by 
the mathematical precision of the equally great Laplace, or 
rather I should say contemporaneously thought out by these 
great minds, and by the latter produced as a mathematical 
formula, is to my mind untrue and unscientific. The ab- 
surdity of such a Kosmic scheme is well illustrated by a 
very celebrated popular scientific lecturer : he accepts the 
scheme, and there was no irony in his idea when he wrote 
“ Not alone the mechanism of the human body, but that of 
the human mind itself, — emotion, intellect, and will, and all 
their phenomena, — were once latent in a fiery cloud.” To 
suppose the possibility of intellect being but an emanation 
from “ a fiery cloud,” even though the conflagration were 
general, seriously proposed, the assumption in itself is a 
reductio ad ahsurdum .* We know that all substances 
can be resoived into gases, but we do not perceive them as 
subsisting flaming elements. Another peculiar hypothesis, 
that of another distinguished physicist, is that life was in- 
troduced upon the earth by an atom from an exploded world. 
The wonder is not that such an hypothesis was conceived, 
but that it is said to be accepted by Prof. Helmholtz, a clear 
and acute reasoner : surely he would at the least have seen, 
supposing it were so, that the origin of life is not thereby 
accounted for ; come from what or whence it may, its ante- 
cedent must have been a living intelligent energy. Great 
philosophers and great workers frequently, when they stray 
without the pale of their specialities, indulge in eccentricities 
* Vide, for the author’s Kosmic idea, pp. 19 to 24 “ Scientific Materialism,” &c. 
