nd comes to
a conclusion that breaks his head; least of all, can you induce a
man to believe that the scolding of his wife is nothing but the
buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and her too free use of his
purse only the loss of some golden fancies from his memory. We are
all safe against such idealism as Bishop Berkeley reasoned out so
logically. Byron's refutation of it is neat and witty:

"When Bishop Berkeley says there is no matter,
It is no matter what Bishop Berkeley says."

And yet, by more satisfactory evidence than that which the
idealists propose, we are warned against confounding the conception
of substance with matter, and confining it to things we can see and
grasp. Science steps in and shows us that the physical system of
things leans on spirit. We talk of the world of matter, but there
is no such world. Everything about us is a mixture or marriage of
matter and spirit. A world of matter--there would be no motion, no
force, no form, no order, no beauty, in the universe as it now is;
organization meets us at every step and wherever we look;
organization implies spirit--something that rules, disposes,
penetrates and vivifies matter.

See what a sermon astronomy preaches as to the substantial power of
invisible things. If the visible universe is so stupendous, what
shall we think of the unseen force and vitality in whose arms all
its splendors rest? It is no gigantic Atlas, as the Greeks fancied,
that upholds the celestial sphere; all the constellations are kept
from falling by an impalpable energy that uses no muscles and no
masonry. The ancient mathematician, Archimedes, once said, "Give me
a foot of ground outside the globe to stand upon, and I will make a
lever that will lift the world." The invisible lever of
gravitation, however, without any fulcrum or purchase, does lift
the globe, and makes it waltz, too, with its blonde lunar partner,
twelve hundred miles a minute to the music of the sun--ay, and
heaves sun and systems and Milky Way in majestic cotillions on its
ethereal floor.

You grasp an iron ball, and call it hard; it is not the iron that
is hard, but cohesive force that packs the particles of metal into
intense sociability. Let the force abate, and the same metal
becomes like mush; let it disappe