acious influences of habit to the contrary, that no
progress of the physical sciences, no conceivable amount of
induction and generalization as to the composition or decomposition
of material bodies, can throw any new light or darkness on the
nature and destiny of the immaterial soul.

The incessant flux of phenomena constructing and destroying apparent
things, though studied till the observing eye sees nothing but
mirage anywhere, has nothing to do with the steady persistence of
spiritual identity. To force it to discredit our claim to a divine
descent and an endless inheritance is a glaring sophism. The
question must be snatched back from the assumption of the retort
and crucible, the observational and numerical methods of the
physical realm, and relegated to the legitimate tests of the moral
and metaphysical realm.

Again, there is furnished in the results of the study of physical
science itself, as pursued by its most gifted masters, a glorious
overthrow and neutralization of the moral and religious doubts
called out in its shallower votaries by their absorption in its
more superficial phases. The scientific men of the most profound
intellectual power and the most brilliant original genius, the
supreme heads of chemistry, dynamics and mathematics, have applied
to the phenomena of the material creation modes of observation and
instruments of reasoning before whose compelling efficacy the
whole frowning vastitude of the outer universe melts into ideal
points of force and forms of law. Everything in time and space is
reduced to molecular vibrations, regulated by the mental
conceptions of number, weight and measure. The reasonings of such
men as Oersted and Faraday on electricity and magnetism; of Sir
William Thomson and Clerk Maxwell on thermodynamics; the theories
of the greatest mathematicians, grasping all things in heaven and
earth with their irresistible calculus, literally using infinites
as toys, creating imaginary quantities, and, going through certain
operations with them, actually discovering new truths in the solid
domain of reality yield conceptions of order, beauty and
sublimity, and emotions of wonder, awe and delight, nowhere else
surpassed. They exalt the spectacle of nature into a vision of
poetic intelligence, and show the theorizing mind of man to be
akin to the creating mind of God. Thus, if skepticism as to the
deathless royalty of soul is bred in the physicist who constantly
stoops with the sc