Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/154

142 noticed how frequently I quote Mr. Emerson. I do so mainly because in him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present, or prospective. In his case Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother Science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world. Our present theme is touched upon in the lines—

As regards veracity and insight these few words outweigh, in my estimation, all the formal learning expended by Mr. Martineau in these disquisitions on force, in which he treats the physicist as a conjurer, and speaks so wittily of atomic polarity. In fact, without this notion of polarity—this "drawing" and "driving"—this attraction and repulsion, we stand as stupidly dumb before the phenomena of crystallization as a Bushman before the phenomena of the solar system. The genesis and growth of the notion I have endeavored to make clear in my third lecture on "Light," and in the article "Crystals and Molecular Force," published in this volume.

Our future course is here foreshadowed. A Sunday or two ago I stood under an oak planted by Sir John Moore, the hero of Corunna. On the ground near the tree little oaklets were successfully fighting for life with the surrounding vegetation. The acorns had dropped into the friendly soil, and this was the result of their interaction. What is the acorn? what the earth? and what the sun, without whose heat and light the tree could not become a tree, however rich the soil, and however healthy the seed? I answer for myself as before—all "matter." And the heat and light which here play so potent a part are acknowledged to be motions of matter. By taking something much lower down in the vegetable kingdom than the oak, we might approach much more nearly to the case of crystallization already discussed, but this is not now necessary.

If, instead of conceding the sufficiency of matter here, Mr. Martineau should fly to the hypothesis of a vegetative soul, all the questions before asked in relation to the snow-star become pertinent. I would invite him to go over them one by one, and consider what replies he will make to them. He may retort by asking me "Who infused the principle of life into the tree?" I say in answer that our present question is not this, but another—not who made the tree, but what is it? Is there any thing besides matter in the tree? If so, what, and where? Mr. Martineau may have begun by this time to discern that it is not "picturesqueness," but cold precision, that my Vorstellungs-fähigkeit demands. How, I would ask, is this vegetative soul to be presented to the mind; where did it flourish before