But the hypothesis would probably go even
farther than this. Many who hold it would probably assent to the
position that, at the present moment, all our philosophy, all our
poetry, all our science, and all our art--Plato, Shakspeare, Newton,
and Raphael--are potential in the fires of the sun. We long to learn
something of our origin. If the Evolution hypothesis be correct, even
this unsatisfied yearning must have come to us across the ages which
separate the primeval mist from the consciousness of to-day. I do not
think that any holder of the Evolution hypothesis would say that I
overstate or overstrain it in any way. I merely strip it of all
vagueness, and bring before you, unclothed and unvarnished, the
notions by which it must stand or fall.

Surely these notions represent an absurdity too monstrous to be
entertained by any sane mind. But why are such notions absurd, and
why should sanity reject them? The law of Relativity, of which we
have previously spoken, may find its application here. These
Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the
intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter which
were drilled into us when young. Spirit and matter have ever been
presented to us in the rudest contrast, the one as all-noble, the
other as all-vile. But is this correct? Upon the answer to this
question all depends. Supposing that, instead of having the foregoing
antithesis of spirit and matter presented to our youthful minds, we
had been taught to regard them as equally worthy, and equally
wonderful; to consider them, in fact, as two opposite faces of the
self-same mystery. Supposing that in youth we had been impregnated
with the notion of the poet Goethe, instead of the notion of the poet
Young, and taught to look upon matter, not as 'brute matter,' but as
the 'living garment of God;' do you not think that under these
altered circumstances the law of Relativity might have had an outcome
different from its present one? Is it not probable that our
repugnance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter
might be considerably abated? Without this total revolution of the
notions now prevalent, the Evolution hypothesis must stand condemned;
but in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a revolution has already
taken place. They degrade neither member of the mysterious duality
referred to; but they exalt one of them from its abasement, and repeal
the divorce hitherto exist