their mighty calculus, translate
all quantities and qualities, all objects and operations, into
numerical symbols, and with these intellectual toys play the same
miraculous tricks that the Creator himself plays with the
originals. They symbolize purely imaginary quantities, bring them
into relations and pass them through certain operations, and
thereby discover truths which are found to have permanent
objective validity. It demonstrates, as said before, that the
filial mind which thus wanders in thought through the house of the
Father, and, everywhere making itself familiarly at home, disports
among His treasures, is of the same type with the parental Mind.

And now, still farther, that the cultivators of physical science
are pushing their discoveries and their theories to ultimates, we
begin to see the adamantine structure of material nature melting
into a system of ideal equivalents, vaporizing into an undulatory
ether, vanishing before our microscopes in immaterial bases of
thought, reason, law and will. The gases have just been first
liquified and then actually solidified, confirming the speculative
announcement long before made that oxygen and hydrogen are metals
volatilized. Many valuable and strange discoveries have been
reached in physical science by following prophetic declarations
made a priori on grounds of pure reason. The same proofs of
intellectual design and purpose are discerned in the order of
atomic combination, in the beauty of crystals and dewdrops and
snowflakes, in the perfect geometrical symmetry of minerals and
flowers, and in the same spiral adjustment of the leaves on a tree
and of the orbits of the planets in the sky, as in the artistic
works of man. Intellect and will are as much shown in the
production of a palm tree as they are in the production of a poem
And so, before the gaze of the accomplished and devout scientist,
matter is translated into terms of mind, rather than the reverse,
and the whole cosmos is transmuted into a divine laboratory of
ideal powers, a divine gallery of ideal pictures, a divine theater
for the eternal adventures of conscious spirits.

In mental conception man deals with mathematical infinites as
easily as with the pettiest objects, dilates a point to the
universe and shrinks the universe to a point, condenses eternity
into a moment or stretches a moment to eternity. It has been shown
that if correspondent diminution or enlargement in the faculties
of sense and