relative in the physics of the brain, I
think the position of the "Materialist" is stated, as far as that position
is a tenable one. I think the materialist will be able finally to maintain
this position against all attacks; but I do not think, in the present
condition of the human mind, that he can pass beyond this position. I do
not think he is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and his
molecular motions _explain_ everything. In reality, they explain nothing.
The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of phenomena,
of whose real bond of union he is in absolute ignorance.

The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble in its
modern form as it was in the pre-scientific ages. Phosphorus is known to
enter into the composition of the human brain, and a trenchant German
writer has exclaimed, "Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke."[4] That may or may
not be the case; but, even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge
would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to
the materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this
"Matter" of which we have been discoursing, who or what divided it into
molecules, who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running into
organic forms, he has no answer. Science is mute in reply to these
questions.

But if the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who else
is prepared with a solution? To whom has this arm of the Lord been
revealed? Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and
philosopher, one and all. Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into
knowledge at some future day. The process of things upon this earth has
been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the iguanodon and his
contemporaries to the President and the Members of the British
Association. And whether we regard the improvement from the scientific or
from the theological point of view, as the result of progressive
development, or as the result of successive exhibitions of creative
energy, neither view entitles us to assume that man's present faculties
end the series--that the process of amelioration stops at him.

A time may therefore come when this ultra-scientific region by which we
are now enfolded may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to human,
investigation. Two thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse in
the eye the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ
requisite for t