ies; the process of
dissolution is continuous, until at length the restorative power itself
will desert us and the process will be complete.

But at the heart of this universal impermanence there is a soul of
reality which the poet discerns amid the fleeting atoms of the stone
and the fibre of the growing tree. It is as though we found ourselves
in a vast hall, filled to repletion with machinery in every condition
of motion, from the slowest and scarcely perceptible movements of the
hour hand of a watch up to the incalculable rapidity of a fly-wheel.
All is flux, change, consumption of energy, wear and tear of the
machinery itself. We know it must run down sometime, we know one day
it must all be renewed. But amid all this instability we are well
aware that there is a secret source of power, a centre whence a renewal
of energy ceaselessly arises. Without its incessant action not one
single movement in that vast hall could be obtained. It is the one
real thing amidst a world of others which are wearing and wasting away
and therefore in a true sense unreal. The secret spring whence the
energy is generated may be invisible, but we _know_ it is somewhere,
and if any one denied its existence we should not take the trouble to
answer him. A faint, halting symbol is this of the eternal and
unchanging reality at the heart of the worlds--a dim light whereby to
illustrate the most solemn of truths, that always and everywhere, in
the lightest as in the greatest movements of nature, in the fragrance
of a flower, the iridescence of a crystal, or the fierce energies which
shoot up mountains of hydrogen flames hundreds of miles high from the
crater of the sun, we have the revelation of "a Power without
beginning, without end," [3] permanent while all is in a condition of
ceaseless flux and change, living while all around are hastening to
their deaths, the one only truly existent Being anywhere, the hidden
source of all existence and life.

So far, we are justified in saying that we stand on the ground of
indisputable fact. It is no mere hypothesis of science, still less a
figment of the metaphysician's imagination, or an outpouring of a
poet's inspiration, that Permanence is the indispensable postulate of
the commonest facts of material existence. We have no explanation to
give as to the _method_ of such action as has been described on the
part of the invisible and universal Energy, for we cannot even explain
the _nexus_ bet