night's use. It was yet to be known that the sun which was to rule the day, was the cause of the day. Day and night, it was said, were created on the first day, and the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day. It was not known that the sun, and the earth, and moon, are but atoms in the universe. The thunder was the voice of the Great Spirit; the lightning, the thunderbolt, was the instrument of his vengeance. The Great Spirit was busy in the battle field, and the plague was the effect of his wrath. Misfortunes and good fortune were all the doings of the Great Spirit. -Under such ideas, men blindly submitted to an inscrutable destiny, and believed in the most fatal of fatalisms. Or, if they exerted themselves, it was in prayer and beseechings; in offerings, to propitiate their offended God. Science is gradually leading through these notions of the cave into open daylight, by showing the undeviating laws of nature: and thus men are gradually drawn out of the church into the lecture-room. The divine will become the philosopher; and the philosopher the divine. Knowledge is power, and rules the mind, as well as enables the mind to rule. In a transition state, men may reject innovation, and storm, and feel deeply shocked, and most indignant at the new doctrine; while Science, like the needle, guides them through the darkness, and shows the cause of the storm, and how the storm of the mind is related to the storm in the clouds; how they are the same foot-prints of Nature on different surfaces or spheres. From a knowledge of particular laws, we gain a notion of universal Law: and from this occurs the idea of a Unity in Nature, just as from the finite we suppose the infinite, and universality. I remember when a youth, sitting on the marble rocks of Devonshire, to rest, after investigating the nature of the marbles and the plants of the district. I had observed that certain dark veins in the marble must have been cracks, filled up by vegetable deposits, which afterwards became stone: and then I thought of the diamond which I had been told was convertible into charcoal: and I picked up a blade of grass and asked myself, "What was this a month ago ? And those sheep,-what were they a few months ago ? And myself,-what was I a few years back? And will not the grass grow fresh upon my grave when I am dead? And what was the substance of the globe before it took the form of chalk and clay and silex,— vegetables and thinking substances ?" And I became impressed with the fact that Nature is one, and that all things are but varieties of the same material: and I was elated with the idea, which seemed to me to be of vast consequence; and I determined to collect specimens and facts to illustrate the notion. I was not then aware that the notion was as old as the hills ; that the ancients, with less fact to support them, had thought the same; and that the alchemists, in the same belief, were seeking how to convert one substance into another. Science is now affording proof of what was before only conjecture; though a conjecture having the appearance of a necessary consequence or fact. Liebig says, "Isomorphism, or the quality of form of many chemical compounds having a different composition, tends to prove that matter consists of atoms, the mere arrangement of which produces all the properties of bodies. But when we find that a different arrangement of the same elements gives rise to various physical and chemical properties, and a similar arrangement of different elements produces properties very much the same, may we not inquire whether some of those bodies which we regard as elements, may not be merely modifications of the same substance, whether they are not the same matter in different states of arrangement? &c." Thus we draw the circle of facts closer and closert to the centre, which is Unity. In this centre the Mind holds its position, and is enabled to take in the whole range of facts. Not as before, to be whirling round and round in a little eddy of fact: but floating down the wide stream of knowledge. Bacon was very near the centre of the circle: and consequently, how few have understood him! But, while we dilate the sight in the sense of the unity of Nature, and the relations of the sciences, we must not forget to contract the sight to every particular and circumstance; that nothing may be omitted, and Nature may be searched for the truth which is said to lie at the very bottom of the well for that which is most potent, and has most the character of universality, is most hid, and least palpable to the ordinary sense, indolently applied.† Appendix Z. : * Chemical Letters, p. 54. Bacon compared knowledge to a pyramid : physical facts nearest the base, and gradually narrowing and rising to metaphysics: and again, to a tree, in which there is no division; but all the branches form a whole, and unite in one stem. And this is the true cosmical view of Nature: the sense of variety in unity, and unity in variety: the whole in the parts, and the parts in the whole; all of one growth and origin, and consequently presenting those true correspondences, exhibiting the same law under various aspects, and all evolved, and fitting together as closely as the seal to the print, each symbolical of all, and all of each. As it is with the conditions of matter, so it is with the properties of matter. It is now recognised by Faraday and others, that all the properties of matter are but various conditions of the same: that light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, &c., are convertible, or evolved one by the other. This wondrous fact is now exhibited, daily, at the Polytechnic Institution. Decompose one grain of water, and the power which held the particles of gas together in the form of water evolves into as much. electricity as we have exhibited in an ordinary thunder-storm. Electricity is evolved in a most brilliant light which lives under water, the decomposing or consuming substance being at a distance; and the influence or power passes unobserved along the wire, and is manifested at the end. Thus flame is not, as was supposed, a heated substance in the ordinary sense. Instead of light, intense heat may be made to occur or magnetism. The lecturer suggests the question,-What is electricity, light, heat, &c.? The cause, he says, is not yet discovered: but he would more properly have said that the cause never could be discovered; that we know only the form of matter, and not its cause. So, likewise, we know only the form or character of the phenomena of matter, and the order of its development. The cause is material, that is, inherent in what we call substance. We know no more; nor can we know more. All that we can know is the form of the conditions, and the form of the effects-the laws. More we neither know nor can know. It is the real and fundamental law and conditions of the fact that we want to know: and this we may know. Electricity, light, heat, are not fluids, but forms of action, the same as common motion or force. By friction, new chemical powers are given to the homœopathic medicines. Squeeze a pear, and it becomes sweet. By friction, light, heat, electricity, or magnetism, is evolved. And what are the instinct of animals and the mind of man but a result of chemical action or material process? What is mind but an evolved condition or form of the powers of nature, like light, heat, magnetism?-a form of the phenomena of the fundamental power which is acting throughout nature, and may, perhaps, be said to constitute nature. Mind, that is, thought, and sensation, which we term mind, pass away like light, and influence things without. Mind is but a transient condition and memory but acquired forms. Light evolves thought; and thought again evolves light. : |