hereas a wider survey would lead us to regard all Law as
essentially Spiritual. To magnify the Laws of Nature, as Laws of this
small world of ours, is to take a provincial view of the universe. Law
is great not because the phenomenal world is great, but because these
vanishing lines are the avenues into the eternal Order. "It is less
reverent to regard the universe as an illimitable avenue which leads up
to God, than to look upon it as a limited area bounded by an
impenetrable wall, which, if we could only pierce it would admit us at
once into the presence of the Eternal?"[28] Indeed the authors of the
"Unseen Universe" demur even to the expression _material universe_,
since, as they tell us "Matter is (though it may seem paradoxical to say
so) the less important half of the material of the physical
universe."[29] And even Mr. Huxley, though in a different sense, assures
us, with Descartes, "that we know more of mind than we do of body; that
the immaterial world is a firmer reality than the material."[30]

How the priority of the Spiritual improves the strength and meaning of
the whole argument will be seen at once. The lines of the Spiritual
existed first, and it was natural to expect that when the "Intelligence
resident in the 'Unseen'" proceeded to frame the material universe He
should go upon the lines already laid down. He would, in short, simply
project the higher Laws downward, so that the Natural World would become
an incarnation, a visible representation, a working model of the
spiritual. The whole function of the material world lies here. The world
is only a thing that is; it is not. It is a thing that teaches, yet not
even a thing--a show that shows, a teaching shadow. However useless the
demonstration otherwise, philosophy does well in proving that matter is
a non-entity. We work with it as the mathematician with an _x_. The
reality is alone the Spiritual. "It is very well for physicists to speak
of 'matter,' but for men generally to call this 'a material world' is an
absurdity. Should we call it an _x_-world it would mean as much, viz.,
that we do not know what it is."[31] When shall we learn the true
mysticism of one who was yet far from being a mystic--"We look not at
the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the
things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen
are eternal?"[32] The visible is the ladder up to the invisible; the
temporal is but the scaffoldin