Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/39

 those who deny its existence, who make light of the innate divine flame in man, who can not see anything outside of matter, or anything but matter in matter, to these materialists I offer the perfume of the rose, the light of the sun, the emanation of a firefly, the aura of a planet, to say nothing of the human understanding. Are these material? Do they, to go back to fundamentals in physics, occupy the same space with the objects from which they emanate? The room in which I write, to take a simple example, becomes dark after sunset. It is not, you will concede, a vacuum. It is filled with air. But I turn a switch in the wall and the electric bulbs fill it also with light. The two substances, light and air, occupy the same space simultaneously. Now, if light were matter, it would have a specific gravity; and this specific gravity, were it heavier than that of the air, would chase it out of the room. In which case, I could not continue to write—I would cease forthwith to exist. And what is true of