Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/47

 Philosophy, thou'rt sick! else thou wouldest have found a better adapted home for immortal beings, than an electric land formed of the rejected atoms from the various earths. To thee, and in thy light, an oak tree is but an assemblage of material atoms: a rose, its thorns, leaves and moss, are only such: the wild tiger of the jungle, the humped-back camel of Zahara's sands, the sportive lamb, unsightly toad, the serpent in the grass, the dove in its cote; the flitting bat, and the flap-winged night-owl, the majestic giraffe, and the beauty-plumed warbler of the forest, are to thee but mere forms of exuberant life; mere natural products, the spontaneous gifts of an all-bounteous, but unintelligent, non-conscious natural force. Panthea! Shame on thee, Philosophy, shame, because with the open book before thee, thou hast steadily refused to read, nor ever even dreamed that each one of these things indicates the stage of out-growth to which a monad—constituting its spiritual center, has arrived on its journey from God, through Matter, back to God through Spirit! It hath never struck thee that each of these things, and all other objects in the vast material realm, constitute single letters in God's alphabet, and a letter too, having a fixed and absolute meaning, significance, and unalterable value. Weakman! thou dost not even imagine that all these things are of thyself—thy kind—abiding the epoch wherein they will, as thou hast already sprung, leap forth to light, and new, and proper human life.