ence? I think it
probable that, after a full discussion of the question, Mr. Martineau
would agree with me in ascribing the building power displayed in the
crystal to the bits of water themselves. At all events, I should
count upon his sympathy so far as to believe that he would consider
any one unmannerly who would denounce me for rejecting this notion of
a separate soul, and for holding the snow-crystal to be matter.'

But then what an astonishing addition is here made to the powers of
Matter! Who would have dreamt, without actually seeing its work, that
such a power was locked up in a drop of water? All that we needed to
make the action of the liquid intelligible was the assumption of Mr.
Martineau's 'homogeneous extended atomic solids,' smoothly gliding
over one another. But had we supposed the water to be nothing more
than this, we should have ignorantly defrauded it of an intrinsic
architectural power, which the art of man, even when pushed to its
utmost degree of refinement, is incompetent to imitate. I would
invite Mr. Martineau to consider how inappropriate his figure of a
fictitious bank deposit becomes under these circumstances. The
'account current' of matter receives nothing at my hands which could
be honestly kept back from it. If, then, 'Democritus and the
mathematicians' so defined matter as to exclude the powers here proved
to belong to it, they were clearly wrong, and Mr. Martineau, instead
of twitting me with my departure from them, ought rather to applaud me
for correcting them. [Footnote: Definition implies previous
examination of the object defined, and is open to correction or
modification as knowledge of the object increases. Such increased
knowledge has radically changed our conceptions of the luminiferous
aether, converting its vibrations from longitudinal into transverse.
Such changes also Mr. Martineau's conceptions of matter are doomed to
undergo.]

The reader of my small contributions to the literature which deals
with the overlapping margins of Science and Theology, will have
noticed how frequently I quote Mr. Emerson. I do so mainly because in
him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and
entirely undaunted by the discoveries of Science, past, present, or
prospective. In his case Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes
her graver brother Science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal
laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually
tra