es the idealist, "Show me your matter, however small
a piece, and I will yield to your argument." Spirit is no
phenomenon to be shown, and matter is an inference from thought:
thus the counter statements of physical science and ideal
philosophy fairly offset each other, and throw their respective
advocates back upon the natural ground of unsophisticated faith
and observation. Standing there unperverted, man has an invincible
reliance on the veracity of his faculties and the normal reports
of nature. Through immediate apprehension of his own conscious
will and the posited experience of his senses, he has knowledge
both of causal forms of being, or free productive force, and of
resultant processes and phenomena. And surely sound logic teaches
that the latter may alter or disappear without implying the
annihilation of the former. If all material substance, so called,
were destroyed, not only would space remain as an infinite
indivisible unity, but the equivalents

39 Drossbach, Die individuelle Unsterblichkeit vom monadistisch
metaphysischen Standpunkte betrachtet.

of what had been destroyed must remain in some form or other. Who
shall say that these equivalents would not be intelligent points
of power, capable of organizing aggregate bodies and of
reconstituting the universe in the will of God, or of forming from
period to period, in endless succession, new kinds of universes,
each abounding in hitherto unimagined modes of life and degrees of
bliss? To our present faculties, with only our present
opportunities and data, the final problem of being is insoluble.
We resolve the properties of matter into methods of activity,
manifestations of force. But there, covered with alluring awe, a
wall of impenetrable mystery confronts us with its baffling "Thus
far, and no farther, shall thine explicating gaze read the secrets
of destiny." We cannot tell what force is. We can conceive neither
its genesis nor its extinction. Over that obscure environment,
into the immense empire of possibilities, we must bravely fling
the treasures of our love and the colors of our hope, and with a
divine impulse in the moment of death leap after, trusting not to
sink as nothing into the abyss of nowhere, but, landing safe in
some elysium better than we know, to find ourselves still in God.

In dealing with moral problems in the realm of the higher reason,
intuitions, mysterious hints, prophetic feelings, instinctive
apprehensions of fitness a