re is, in all things, an appearance which strikes
your senses; under that appearance stirs a soul; a body is there and a
faculty is there. Where do you teach the study of the relations which
bind things to each other? Nowhere. Consequently you have nothing
positive. Your strongest certainties rest upon the analysis of material
forms whose essence you persistently ignore.

"There is a Higher Knowledge of which, too late, some men obtain a
glimpse, though they dare not avow it. Such men comprehend the necessity
of considering substances not merely in their mathematical properties
but also in their entirety, in their occult relations and affinities.
The greatest man among you divined, in his latter days, that all was
reciprocally cause and effect; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated
among themselves and subject to worlds invisible. He groaned at the
recollection of having tried to establish fixed precepts. Counting up
his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through ether, he had explained
their coherence by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction.
You bowed before that man of science--well! I tell you that he died in
despair. By supposing that the centrifugal and centripetal forces,
which he had invented to explain to himself the universe, were equal, he
stopped the universe; yet he admitted motion in an indeterminate
sense; but supposing those forces unequal, then utter confusion of the
planetary system ensued. His laws therefore were not absolute; some
higher problem existed than the principle on which his false glory
rested. The connection of the stars with one another and the centripetal
action of their internal motion did not deter him from seeking the
parent stalk on which his clusters hung. Alas, poor man! the more he
widened space the heavier his burden grew. He told you how there came
to be equilibrium among the parts, but whither went the whole? His mind
contemplated the vast extent, illimitable to human eyes, filled with
those groups of worlds a mere fraction of which is all our telescopes
can reach, but whose immensity is revealed by the rapidity of light.
This sublime contemplation enabled him to perceive myriads of worlds,
planted in space like flowers in a field, which are born like infants,
grow like men, die as the aged die, and live by assimilating from their
atmosphere the substances suitable for their nourishment,--having
a centre and a principal of life, guaranteeing to each other their
cir