ith the cultivation of physical science. Its prestige
is overwhelming. Its prevalent methods and results give a
materialistic turn of interpretation to the popular mind upon all
subjects. The direct consequence, among that class of minds who
put physical science above theology, is the spreading disavowal of
all belief in the immortality of the soul. The fallacy is obvious,
and the remedy is simple, if there be at hand but enough of modest
candor and patience fairly to weigh the facts of the case in the
scales of a sound logic.

In the first place, by the very structure of our being, by the
very necessity of our experience, the universe is divided into two
irreconcilable classes of realities, namely, spiritual subjects
and material objects. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts,
volitions, all qualities of mind, all states of consciousness, are
absolutely immaterial. They are more real to us, that is to say,
they more inexpugnably assert and maintain themselves, than
material things do: and it is only hopeless vulgarity and
incompetence of thinking which can ever confuse or merge them with
material things. Matter is that which proves itself to spirit by
the effects it produces on spirit. Spirit is that which is its own
evidence. The center of consciousness in us is its own proof of
its own being, and all that occurs within it is its own proof, and
is unsusceptible of any other or foreign demonstration. Hope,
fear, love, imagination, reason, are absolutely unthinkable as
forms of material substance, however exquisitely refined and
exalted. There is no conceivable community of being between a
sentiment and an atom, a gas and an aspiration, an idea of truth
in the soul and any mass of matter in space. Each of these facts,
conscious thought and material extension, has its own incommunicable
and incomparable sphere of being and laws of action, which can be
confused only by ignorance and sophistry.

So clear has this become to all profound reflection, that the ablest
supporters of the theory of evolution, with all their preponderant
bias in favor of physical science, declare, in the words of
Herbert Spencer, that if compelled to choose between thinking of
spirit in the terms of matter and thinking of matter in the terms
of spirit, they should take the latter alternative and give an
idealistic interpretation to nature rather than a materialistic
interpretation to the soul. It is logically clear, then, despite
the fall