em to
be in certain men an indication of the impurity of their nature still
conjoined to the material substances which engender us; and the love of
great souls for the straight line seems to show in them an intuition of
heaven. Between these two lines there is a gulf fixed like that between
the finite and the infinite, between matter and spirit, between man and
the idea, between motion and the object moved, between the creature and
God. Ask Love the Divine to grant you his wings and you can cross that
gulf. Beyond it begins the revelation of the Word.

"No part of those things which you call material is without its own
meaning; lines are the boundaries of solid parts and imply a force
of action which you suppress in your formulas,--thus rendering those
formulas false in relation to substances taken as a whole. Hence the
constant destruction of the monuments of human labor, which you supply,
unknown to yourselves, with acting properties. Nature has substances;
your science combines only their appearances. At every step Nature
gives the lie to all your laws. Can you find a single one that is not
disproved by a fact? Your Static laws are at the mercy of a thousand
accidents; a fluid can overthrow a solid mountain and prove that the
heaviest substances may be lifted by one that is imponderable.

"Your laws on Acoustics and Optics are defied by the sounds which you
hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun
whose rays often overcome you. You know no more how light makes itself
seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which
changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires,
emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the
same birds under the cloudy skies of Europe, or whitens it here in the
bosom of our polar Nature. You know not how to decide whether color is a
faculty with which all substances are endowed, or an effect produced by
an effluence of light. You admit the saltness of the sea without
being able to prove that the water is salt at its greatest depth. You
recognize the existence of various substances which span what you think
to be the void,--substances which are not tangible under any of the
forms assumed by Matter, although they put themselves in harmony with
Matter in spite of every obstacle.

"All this being so, you believe in the results of Chemistry, although
that science still knows no way of gauging the changes produced by th