Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/160

148 —with its lens, and its humors, and its miraculous retina behind. Consider the ear with its tympanum, cochlea, and Corti's organ—an instrument of three thousand strings, built adjacent to the brain, and employed by it to sift, separate, and interpret, antecedent to all consciousness, the sonorous tremors of the external world. All this has been accomplished not only without man's contrivance, but without his knowledge, the secret of his own organization having been withheld from him since his birth in the immeasurable past, until the other day. Matter I define as that mysterious thing by which all this is accomplished. How it came to have this power is a question on which I never ventured an opinion. If, then. Matter starts as "a beggar," it is, in my view, because the Jacobs of theology have deprived it of its birthright. Mr. Martineau need fear no disenchantment. Theories of evolution go but a short way toward the explanation of this mystery; while, in its presence, the notion of an atomic Manufacturer and Artificer of souls raises the doubt whether those who entertain it were ever really penetrated by the solemnity of the problem for which they offer such a solution.

There are men, and they include among them some of the best of the race of men, upon whose minds this mystery falls without producing either warmth or color. The "dry light" of the intellect suffices for them, and they live their noble lives untouched by a desire to give the mystery shape or expression. There are, on the other hand, men whose minds are warmed and colored by its presence, and who, under its stimulus, attain to moral heights which have never been overtopped. Different spiritual climates are necessary for the healthy existence of these two classes of men; and different climates must be accorded them. The history of humanity, however, proves the experience of the second class to illustrate the most pervading need. The world will have religion of some kind, even though it should fly for it to the intellectual whoredom of "spiritualism." What is really wanted is the lifting power of an ideal element in human life. But the free play of this power must be preceded by its release from the torn swaddling-bands of the past, and from the practical materialism of the present. It is now in danger of being strangled by the one, or stupefied by the other. I look, however, forward to a time when the strength, insight, and elevation, which now visit us in mere hints and glimpses during moments "of clearness and vigor," shall be the stable and permanent possession of purer and mightier minds than ours—purer and mightier, partly because of their deeper knowledge of matter and their more faithful conformity to its laws.