elopments. Youth full of hope trips
lightly over the ground, without a thought that the ground it treads on
is the vast cemetery of all past generations. If we fix our thoughts on
the permanence of life and the manifestations of progress, time appears
to us as the great producer. Destroyer of all that is, producer of all
that is to be, time has thus a double form. It is a mysterious tide,
ever rising and ever receding; it is the power of death, and it is the
power of life. All this, Gentlemen, is for the imagination. In the view
of a calm reason, time is the simply negative condition of all
development, as space is the negative condition of all motion. Just as
without bodies and forces infinite space could not produce any motion;
so, without the action of causes, ages heaped on ages could neither
produce nor destroy a single atom of matter, or a single element of
intelligence. Time is the scene of life and of death; it neither causes
to be born, nor to die.

The struggle which we are now maintaining against the philosophers of
matter is as ancient as science, and was going on, nearly in the same
terms, more than two thousand three hundred years ago. About five
hundred years before the Christian era was born at Clazomenae, a city of
Ionia, the son of Eubulus, who was to become famous by the name of
Anaxagoras. He fixed his abode at Athens, and the Athenian people gave
him a glorious surname,--they called him _Intelligence_. On what
account? There were taught at that time doctrines which explained the
world by the transformations of matter rising progressively to life and
thought, without the intervention of a mind. The philosopher Anaximander
gave out that the first animals had their origin in the watery element,
and became modified by living in drier regions, so that man was only a
fish slowly transformed. "I am quite willing to grant it," replied
Anaxagoras; "but for your transformations there must be a transforming
principle. Matter is the material of the world, no doubt; but it could
not produce universal order except as ruled by intelligence." The
Athenians admired this discovery. For us, Gentlemen, the discovery has
been made a long while. Let us not then be talking in this discussion
about modern science and the lights of the age. Our natural history is
much advanced as compared with that of the Greeks; but the vital
question has not varied. Does nature manifest the intervention of a
directing mind, or do we see i