Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/156

144 same. I see what he sees with a wonder superadded. To me as to him—nay, to me more than to him—not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.

I have spoken above as if the assumption of a soul would save Mr. Martineau from the inconsistency of crediting pure matter with the astonishing building power displayed in crystals and trees. This, however, would not be the necessary result; for it would remain to be proved that the soul assumed is not itself matter. When a boy, I learned from Dr. Watts that the souls of conscious brutes are mere matter. And the man who would claim for matter the human soul itself, would find himself in very orthodox company. "All that is created," says Fauste, a famous French bishop of the fourth century, "is matter. The soul occupies a place; it is inclosed in a body; it quits the body at death, and returns to it at the resurrection, as in the case of Lazarus; the distinction between hell and heaven, between eternal pleasures and eternal pains, proves that, even after death, souls occupy a place and are corporeal. God only is incorporeal." Tertullian, moreover, was quite a physicist in the definiteness of his conceptions regarding the soul. "The materiality of the soul," he says, "is evident from the evangelists. A human soul is there expressly pictured as suffering in hell; it is placed in the middle of a flame, its tongue feels a cruel agony, and it implores a drop of water at the hands of a happier soul. Wanting materiality," adds Tertullian, "all this would be without meaning." One wonders what would have happened to this great Christian father amid the roaring lions of Belfast. Could its excellent press have shielded him from its angry pulpits, as it sheltered me?

I have glanced at inorganic Nature—at the sea, and the sun, and the vapor, and the snow-flake—and at organic Nature as represented by the fern and the oak. That same sun which warmed the water and liberated the vapor, exerts a subtiler power on the nutriment of the tree. It takes hold of matter wholly unfit for the purposes of nutrition, separates its nutritive from its non-nutritive portions, gives the former to the vegetable, and carries the others away. Planted in the earth, bathed by the air, and tended by the sun, the tree is traversed by its sap, the cells are formed, the woody fibre is spun, and the whole is woven to a texture wonderful even to. the naked eye, but a million-fold more so to microscopic vision. Does consciousness mix in any way with these processes? No man can tell. Our only ground