at
there is something. The proposition falls not within the domain of
scepticism. It must be true. To suppose it false is literally
impossible. Its falsehood would involve contradiction, and all
contradiction involves Impossibility. But, if proof of this were needed,
we have it in the fact that no man, sage or simple, ever pretended to
deny there is something. Whatever men could doubt or deny they have
doubted or denied, but in no country of the world, in no age, has the
dogma--there is something--been denied or even treated as doubtful. Here
then Universalists, Theists, and Polytheists agree. They agree of
necessity. There is no escape from the conclusion that something is,
except we adopt the unintelligible dogma--there is nothing--which no
human being can, as nothing amounts to nothing, and of what amounts to
nothing no one can have an idea. To define the word something by any
other word would be labour in vain. There is no other word in any
language whoso meaning is better understood, and they who do not
understand what it means, if such persons there be, are not likely to
understand the meaning of any word or words whatever. Ideas of nothing
none have. That there is something, we repeat, must be true, all dogmas
or propositions being necessarily true whose denial involves an
impossibility. What the nature of that something may be is a secondary
question, and however determined cannot affect the primary dogma--things
are things whatever may be their individual or their aggregate nature.
Nor is it of the least consequence what name or names we may see fit to
give things, so that each word has its fixed and true meaning. Whether,
for example, we use for the sign of that something which is, the word
Universe, or God, or Substance, or Spirit, or Matter, or the letter X,
is of no importance, if we understand the word or letter used to be
merely the sign of that something. Words are seldom useful except when
they are the sign of true ideas; evidently therefore, their legitimate
function is to convey such ideas; and words which convey no ideas at
all, or what is worse, only those which are false, should at once be
expunged from the vocabularies of nations. Something is. The
Universalist calls it matter. Other persons may choose to call it other
names: let them. He chooses to call it this one--and no other.

There ever has been something. Here, again, is a point of unity. All are
equally assured there ever has been somethin