that he can pass
beyond this position. I do not think he is entitled to say that his
molecular groupings, and motions, explain everything.

In reality they explain nothing. The utmost he can affirm is the
association of two classes of phenomena, of whose real bond of union
he is in absolute ignorance. The problem of the connection of body
and soul is as insoluble, in its modern form, as it was in the
prescientific ages. Phosphorus is known to enter into the composition
of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, 'Ohne
Phosphor, kein Gedanke!' That may or may not be the case; but even if
we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our
darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist
he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this 'Matter' of
which we have been discoursing--who or what divided it into molecules,
who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running into organic
forms--he has no answer. Science is mute in reply to these questions.
But if the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who
else is prepared with a solution? To whom has this arm of the Lord
been revealed? Let us lower our heads, and acknowledge our ignorance,
priest and philosopher, one and all.

Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge at some future
day. The process of things upon this earth has been one of
amelioration. It is a long way from the Iguanodon and his
contemporaries, to the President and Members of the British
Association. And whether we regard the improvement from the
scientific or from the theological point of view--as the result of
progressive development, or of successive exhibitions of creative
energy--neither view entitles us to assume that man's present
faculties end the series, that the process of amelioration ends with
him. A time may therefore come when this ultra-scientific region, by
which we are now enfolded, may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to
human, investigation. Two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail
to arouse the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ
requisite for their translation into light does not exist. And so
from this region of darkness and mystery which surrounds us, rays may
now be darting, which require but the development of the proper
intellectual organs to translate them into knowledge as far surpassing
Ours, as ours surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles, whi