oundary. My paper on the
'Scientific Use of the Imagination,' and my 'Lectures on Light,'
illustrate this point in the amplest manner; and in the Article
entitled 'Matter and Force' in the present volume I have sought,
incidentally, to make clear, that in physics the experiential
incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; that out of experience
there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in
their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part,
the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The
kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment
alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and
experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which
we are forced to fall back upon the picturing power of the mind.

Passing the boundary of experience, therefore, does not, in the
abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for censure. There must have
been something in my particular mode of crossing it which provoked
this tremendous 'chorus of dissent.'

Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular theory as it
was held by Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel, and as it is held by
the best scientific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun
and planets were once diffused through space as an impalpable haze,
out of which, by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the
haze to condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets?
That which rounds a tear--molecular force. For aeons, the immensity
of which overwhelms man's conceptions, the earth was unfit to maintain
what we call life. It is now covered with visible living things. They
are not formed of matter different from that of the earth around them.
They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone, and flesh of its flesh.
How were they introduced? Was life implicated in the nebula--as part,
it may be, of a vaster and wholly Unfathomable Life; or is it the work
of a Being standing outside the nebula, who fashioned it, and
vitalised it; but whose own origin and ways are equally past finding
out? As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature,
no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of phenomena has
ever been observed. The assumption of such a power to account for
special phenomena, though often made, has always proved a failure. It
is opposed to the very spirit of science; and I therefore assumed the
respons