Mechanical View of Nature. 53 could fashion and furnish a world. You could not. It is all guess work. "We are obliged to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some Power by which we are acted upon; though Omnipresence is unthinkable, yet as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of this Power.' There could not be any mechanical adjustment, apart from the Eternal Power. " 1 If it be said "Everything that comes into Nature, or is in Nature, or goes out of Nature, is part of Nature, or Natural." That, meaning the within and the without, concedes the argument by confessing that something not in Nature may come in, remain in, or go out; sustain and interpenetrate every part. Every organism, whether animal or plant, possesses, besides the mechanical, other arrangements not mechanical. Morphologists look upon the forms of animals and plants as something which cannot be mechanically explained. Attempted explanations, by means of descent and modification, rest, for all their power and meaning, on a deep and far-reaching unknown law. The origin of every simple salt crystal, obtained by evaporating its mother liquid, is no less mysterious as to its first cause, and no less incomprehensible in itself, than the most complex animal. Gold and silver crystallise in a cubical; bismuth and antimony in a hexagonal; iodine and sulphur in a rhombic form; the ultimate cause in every case is hidden. Resolve all the appearances, properties, movements of things, into manifestations of energy within space and time; energy, space, time, pass all understanding. Materially and mechanically, beginning is unexplainable. The germ, in and with which we began to exist, was like every other germ; but, in the process of development, came differential characteristics of the sub-kingdoms; then, successively the characteristics of its class, order, family, genus, species, race. Come to identity or personality, that of which every one is conscious, even this cannot fully be known. It is unwise for atheistic physicists to erect elaborate argument and universal denial on absolute ignorance. "The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole Pope. "1 In one sense, physical science knows, or is destined to know everything; in another sense, it knows nothing. Ask the materialist-"Whence came matter and energy? Who or what formed molecules? Who or what made them run into organic forms?" There is no answer. "His mind may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which, in both directions, we have an infinitude of silence." The same fact is put in other words" After all, what do we know of this terrible 'matter,' except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical states of our own consciousness?" 2 We neither know nor can know anything of matter, save through the medium of our senses, and these senses rest upon our intellect, so that we only know matter by mind-the visible by the invisible. "The sciences have in this respect one common aim, to establish the supremacy of intelligence over the world;"3 not the supremacy of the world over intelligence. Matter and its forms are the more marvellous the more investigated; and the attempted interpretation of all phenomena in terms of matter, motion, energy, is an erroneous reduction of our complex symbols of thought to physical symbols; an absurd endeavour to explain mental phenomena by material phenomena; as if disquisition on a flower would explain the hand that grasps, the eye that sees, the intelligence that discerns. God being the Creator of all things-all things must include matter (Col. i. 16). The Bible does not tie us down to the fact that God did absolutely create matter; but we, believing that He did, that He brought it out of the invisible, seek to justify and verify our faith, for " every advance in our knowledge of the natural world will, if directed by the spirit of true humility, and with a prayer for God's blessing, advance our knowledge of God, and prepare us to receive the revelation of His will with profounder reverence." "4 With reverence, therefore, we ask, nor can we help asking "Whence, and to what end is this matter?" The scientific devout man says "It is an earthen vessel, "Matter and Force: " Prof. Tyndall. 2 "The Physical Basis of Life: "Prof. Huxley. "On the Relation of Natural Science to General Science : Helmholtz. • Sir Robert Inglis, British Association, 1847. " Prof. Mind and Matter. 55 framed to display the excellency of the power of God (2 Cor. iv. 7); it is the outer form of the inward and the spiritual (1 Cor. xv. 44); it is the fabric, or house of fashioning and use, for many vessels-some honourable, some dishonourable (2 Tim. ii. 20; 1 Cor. xv. 49)." In the first page of Scripture, matter and spirit are placed in opposition. The space between the two is spanned by creative will when the visible comes forth from the invisible. Matter is substance in various forms which every act of the Divine Spirit brings nearer to the final glorification (Rev. xxi. 3-5). We are told "there is neither more nor less matter in the universe now than there was in the beginning;" in fact, "as to matter, there cannot have been any beginning, as there cannot be any ending." These assertions are worth nothing. In the first place, that which is unthinkable cannot be thought out and made an unquestionable proposition of the highest certainty. In the second place, the capacity or incapacity of the human mind cannot measure nor set boundaries to Divine action. In the third place, we only know of matter by energy, of energy by consciousness, and of consciousness as a sign of the Unknown acting behind it. This Unknown makes our consciousness aware that it is abstractedly possible for energy to compress matter to such an extent as to be without limit; and thus, as the space occupied is indefinitely decreased, and the space unoccupied indefinitely increased, even though we may not be able to conceive matter reduced to nothing, we can and do get an approximate conception; and we get no more than an approximate conception even of those things which we pretend to know fully. Matter is in the world, and the pious mind conceives it came there because the Supreme Mind so willed. Socrates said that he was in prison of his own will, awaiting death, but his muscles and bones of their own will would have gone off to Megara or to Boeotia"By the dog of Egypt they would, if they had been guided by their own ideas, and if I had not chosen, as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the State inflicts." The mind of Socrates willed his body into the prison-house. "Plato;" Jowett's Translation, 1 Divine energy brought matter into existence to be the visible outer-works of an invisible universe. It may be asserted-"We cannot argue from one state to the other;" nevertheless, the connection between mind and matter is intimate, and our consciousness of identity linking the invisible with the visible, the past with the present, forms a sound basis for argument. We may represent the principle of the complicated conditions which evolve the seen from the unseen, by those now known curves of complicity wherein all the various motions are contained, consequent on the symmetrical and unsymmetrical distribution of forces around the planetary bodies. As a matter of fact, we are acquainted with transfers in the visible world of one grade of being to another, translations from some other states to this, and from this to future states. We know the change of visible or invisible energy into heat, some potential, some kinetic; then build up the natural conception by a notion of gas or vapour, indefinitely diffused, condensing either by contraction or by diminution of heat, until a liquid is formed; then regard the process as visible by which a liquid passes into a solid. A scientifically exercised imagination obtains a view of the passage of things from the unseen to the seen, and how the operation of energy in and upon the matter of the universe produces infinite varieties of existence. Different orders of being pervade the grosser and more material. Attractions and affinities exist where none could be expected. Mind, incorporate with matter, acts upon it and is reacted upon. The partitions between the visible and invisible are pierced; human intelligence permeates from one to the other. It is an unworthy imagination that infinite space contains nothing but matter which is infinitesimal in comparison. The conception that intelligences pass and repass is child of science. Such passage is in perfect agreement with the existing arrangement of worlds. The actions and passings of electricity, magnetism, light, out of invisible state and place into perceptible condition, are material analogues of spiritual migration and mutation. Take a glass tube, three feet long by three inches wide, perfectly cleanse it, and follow Professor Tyndall in his experiments on light. Roll a small bit of bibulous paper into a pellet not a fourth of the size of a small pea, moisten it with a liquid of higher boiling point than water. Hold the pellet in your fingers till it is almost dry, then place it in a small pipe serving for the introduction of gas into the main tube, and allow dry air to pass over it into this tube. The air charged with the modicum of vapour thus taken up will, when subjected to the action of light, begin immediately to form a blue actinic cloud, and in five minutes the blue colour will extend quite through the tube. At the end of fifteen minutes the blue becomes a dense white cloud filling the tube. Take away the pellet, empty the tube, sweep it by passing a current of dry air through, and fill it again with the vapour of hydrochloric acid. Now, though the amount of "light generating matter is almost infinitesimal, when the electric lamp pours light through the tube, in one minute a faint cloud shows itself, grows in beauty, and in fifteen minutes the body of light is astounding. Throw light into your method; then if your method is true every employment will have its joy. When we think of the small amount of vapour carried in by the air at the first experiment, the appearance of a cloud so massive and luminous seems like the creation of a world out of nothing, and is, we may think, a beautiful example of the material texture out of which was framed the visible world by Invisible Mind. As to the second experiment, our intelligence directing the light that reveals existence of which we were before unconscious, not only yields an example of passage from the unseen to the seen, but the passing and repassing of those mysterious influences which are so active in the existing arrangement of worlds— "Thro' all our life the charm does talk about our path, It hovers near with words of promise in our walk, And whispers voices in our ear.' We are not at the end of the series. Every physical experiment, every mental inquiry, prove that we are only beginning to know. Our sense of Divinity has feeling rather than knowledge for basis. We are on the threshold of creation, in the childhood of intellectual life; nevertheless, even now, "the soul," says Francis Newman, "is that side of our nature which is in relation with the Infinite; therefore, we are the amalgam of two substances;" or, as Isaac |