The All-pervading Unknown Energy.

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form of crystal, the ultimate cause in every case is hidden from us. 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, our own beginning is unexplainable and full of mystery. The germ, in and with which we began to exist, was like every other germ; but, in the process of development, it acquired the 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, the most certain of all facts, even this cannot truly be known-knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of thought. It is unwise, therefore, for atheistic physicists to erect so elaborate an argument and such universal denial on absolute nescience, They cease to be guides when they forsake their own line of things. Knowing that matter and thought, even in their simplest elements, are incomprehensible-both ends being beyond mental grasp-they speak as if things were in their grasp and fully known: they are deceivers.

In one sense, physical science knows, or is destined to know everything; but, 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? He has 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?" 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; not the supremacy of the world over in1 "Matter and Force :" Prof. Tyndall.

2

"The Physical Basis of Life: " Prof. Huxley.

"On the Relation of Natural Science to General Science: " Prof. Helmholtz.

telligence. Hence, so far from matter being the only thing we can know amongst the many unknown, and the only certainty amongst those which must for ever remain uncertain, it is, if not inferior in certainty, surely subordinate to that greater truth-the existence of mind. Whoever knows that matter and its forms are shown to be the more marvellous the more they are investigated, and, in their ultimate natures, absolutely incomprehensible; knows also that 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 a disquisition on a flower would explain the hand that grasps, the eye that sees, the intelligence that discerns. It is an ignorant attempt to bridge over that chasm between consciousness and physics which must ever remain intellectually impassable.

It must strike even the most careless who realise the supremacy of mind that God being the Creator of all thingsall 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 us in our knowledge of God, and prepare us to receive the revelation of His will with profounder reverence." 1 With reverence, therefore, we ask, nor can we help asking "Whence, and to what end is this matter?" The scientific devout man hesitates not to say-" It is an earthen vessel, framed to display the excellency of the power of God (2 Cor. iv. 7); it is the outer form of natural bodies, from which are evolved 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 essential opposition. The space between the two is spanned by creative will when the visible comes forth from the invisible. 1 Sir Robert Inglis, British Association, 1847.

Creation of Matter.

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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, however, that "the creation of matter is unthinkable, even as the annihilation of matter is unthinkable; "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 nothing more than hypotheses. In the first place, that which is unthinkable cannot be so thought out as to become an unquestionable proposition of the highest certainty. In the second place, the capacity or incapacity of the human mind cannot, in any sense, measure or set boundaries to Divine action. In the third place, the eternal existence of matter is as inconceivable as its non-existence; we only know of matter by energy, and 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. To say that creation of matter out of nothing is unthinkable is merely this-that we don't know how to do it, nor how any one else can do it.

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."1 The mind of Socrates willed his body into the prison-house. Divine energy brought matter into exist

1 "Plato:" Jowett's Translation.

F

ence to be, in its manifold shapes, the visible outer-works of an invisible universe.

Natural phenomena are consequently physical signals of an ever-present energy, and afford analogies whereby we rise to the conception, at least in some degree, of existences, absolutely immaterial and spiritual. 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 are unable to attain the principle containing in itself all the various complicated conditions which evolve the seen from the unseen; but may represent them, not by that simplicity of motion once considered to be possessed by the planets in their repeated circular motion, but by those now known curves of complicity wherein all the various motions are contained, consequent on the unsymmetrical distribution of forces around the planetary bodies. As a matter of fact, we are acquainted with the transfer in the visible world of one grade of being to another, can conceive of a translation from some other state to this, and from this to some state connected with it. We can imagine 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. In this way 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.

The same fact as to spirit and matter may be otherwise thought of. Different orders of being pervade the grosser and more material. All kinds of 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, so that 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 is child of experience in union with science, that not only human but other finite intelligences pass and repass. Such passage from the unseen to the seen, from the immaterial to the material, 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, may be taken as material analogue of spiritual migration and mutation.

We may have a sort of embodiment as to this by experiment. Take a glass tube, three feet long by three inches wide, perfectly cleanse it, and follow the example of 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.

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, at least we may think so, a beautiful example of the material texture out of which was framed the visible world by Invisible Mind. As to the second experiment, our own intelligence directing the light that reveals existence of which we were before unconscious, not only yields