was only when the mammal man, in the process of the ages of development, had become thoughtful that he became free, and becoming free became a chooser, and deliberately because he volitionally chose. "Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil." This was the fall of man, because, having the power to choose the good, he chose the evil.

When a point is projected into space the result is a line; when the line is rotated in the same plane the result is area or surface; when the area is rotated on an axis the result is volume. Space of one dimension (linear) becomes, by Action, space of two dimensions (area), and space of two dimensions, by further action, becomes volume.

If you take a steel bar, like a knitting-needle, and cause it to revolve in the same plane around one of its ends, if the rotation be sufficiently rapid the result will be a flat disk whose diameter will be twice the length of the needle. This disk will be practically a surface, on which, for a practical demonstration, you may place any number of articles; their weight, and the ability of the single needle to sustain them bearing a strict mathematical relation to the swiftness of rotation of the needle.

Now this disk, or an ordinary plate of material (so called), may be rotated in like manner, and a resultant solid be formed. Its impenetrability-the very first attribute of matter-will be dependent upon the velocity of rotation, and upon nothing else. In this way a thin plate of metal will turn a bullet, or the bullet will flatten against the sequence of positions of the planes that constitute the revolutions. An illustration in practice of this principle may be seen at any hydraulic mine, where an axe wielded with the utmost power will rebound from the jet at the nozzle of the hose, battered and broken at the edge, as from impact with a solid bar of iron. This is caused by the resistance, not of water, but of speed; not of matter, but of motion.

This, then, is the essence of the creative functions in nature; this the reality underlying the phenomena of matter. Not points endowed with force, nor centres of force make matter; but matter is. a phenomenon of pure motion, not something moving; the motion itself is the something.

This motion in its variant relations makes the elements and their combinations and permutations:

I. Position multiplied by Motion is Light. II. Light multiplied by Motion is Matter. III. Matter multiplied by Motion is Life.*

The same sort of potency which whirls the spirals of nebulæ, and sends stars and planets and systems on their orbits, forms the tiny globules of ether and the aggregates of atoms. This potency, this principle, does not stop with the line, after passing through the surface and solid; it goes even to the point-that which has no attribute but position; and this is spirit; this is substance.

The chemist has already found these facts; he knows practically that matter is not quiescence, but inconceivably rapid motion.

And those same principles of evolution, which are now coming to be accepted by the whole world, apply to the remotest past—the things perceived were born of the things conceived, things from thoughts, all things from the All, all from the One.

When, over the stretched membrane or the sonorous copper cymbal, the swath of scattered sand hears the notes of the violin, at once among the throng of tiny fragments a huge commotion ensues, and thousands start up, eager, expectant; and then, at the tone of the command, as the bow vibrates the tense string, they rush, pellmell, hither and thither, jostling, hurrying, each, like a sentient self, to his appointed place, till in long lines and delicate curves the seemingly conscious sand takes station, and the geometer starts amazed at the wonderful dexterity and grace of movement and at the mathematical accuracy of the result.

But this is not yet all; the sand, or better yet, a pure, free, not too viscous liquid, shows even vaster evidences of a profound intelligence the obedience of the mote to the note, the dominance of action over being, the ward of nature finding the way from the word. Here we may see the freer motions fit themselves yet more wonderfully to the harmony. The figures which one chord made geometric,

* But "the gift of God is eternal life." Immortality is the choice of man, and not the consequence of mortal life, of which more will be said in the following

papers.

another makes artistic; and a song makes a rose, a thistle, or a lily, lifeless but beautiful—a demonstration of the power of music to bring order out of confusion, law out of chaos, the formed crystal out of the amorphous mass, life out of dust, divinity out of humanity.

The rhythm and music of the spheres is not imaginary; it is of the same order of reality as that tact of tone in the voice which means always, truth-that union of good-will and self-possession that has power over the savage and brute, and is able to exact tribute from all the world. It is in the mechanic's problem, the statesman's diplomacy, the sage's logic, the artist's dream, the fine frenzy of the poet, and the voice of the leaders of men.

So æons in the past, for this one of countless universes, out of the silence and darkness the spirit moved, and the choir invisible of the morning stars sang together. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God."

It would be futile to declare absolutely the validity of all the received dicta of science. The magnificent nebular hypothesis of La Place must take its rightful rank in our thoughts as an hypothesis. But if a theory may be ignored by philosophy, a fact demands recognition. It comes with credentials from its sovereign; it comes with a letter of introduction from The Truth. Laplace may not be absolute, but Kepler was; Darwin and Lamarck and, older yet, Anaximander, may have proposed theories somewhat astray from the right line of verity, but Euclid's metaphysics, and Edison's and Tesla's achievements cannot err. The practical result of a true theory smiles at fine-drawn sophistry, and defies the point of the most abstruse argument.

In that remarkable debate between Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer on "The Nature and Reality of Religion," Spencer's “Unknowable" is mercilessly attacked as a positive negation; his Unknown Deity is satirized as " and man caricatured as nr; the former expression denoting some final power of an assumed variable, unknown in man and therefore continuing unknown though raised to an infinite power, and the latter being an expression for the natural man as some number of functions of his final self. Harrison says: "The Unknowable is practically nothing"; a proposition which

every day's experience practically disproves; matter, for instance, in the present state of science, is unknowable, and yet is a very obtrusive fact. On such a basis we should be compelled to deny our own existence, because thought and the surgeon's knife and the highest powers of the microscope fail to disclose the secret of existence. Such reasoning would imply that there is a point somewhere in philosophy, as we know theologians assert that there is in religion, beyond which it is not safe to venture in quest of the Holy Grail of Truth.

The jest's prosperity, Shakspere says, lies in the ear of the hearer; and it is quite equally evident that in practical experience alone is to be found proof or disproof of theory, in the demands of a posteriori, the claims of a priori. It is the attribute of intelligence to investigate and to learn. We shall find at the very outset unforeseen conditions besetting us; the roads of progress ramify till they appear a very labyrinth; the forest of facts grows dark and dismal-we feel lost in the jungle of inquiry. But behind us thought has blazed upon the boles a straight line. It is ours to face forward and follow that, prolonging it—our mete-wand-to the stars. Facts and conditions, ideas and circumstances, increase and multiply, more and more complexity as we grow to more and more knowledge. But by and by, even through the interlacing boughs, glistens above and beyond a light. We press on and up, and lo! the temperate oak replaces the torrid palm, and the arctic pine thrusts back the oak. And the pines are stunted and hug the ground, and then rocks are bare, or garbed only in lichens. The light we have seen is that of an unknown and faroff luminary shining on the snow. We rise upon the highest peak of intellect and are in a frozen world. Shall we then say, having traversed with all our experience all the zones, "What is all this worth? It arose out of nothing and into nothing it must lapse; dust we are and unto dust we shall return?"

Not so; these are thoughts of folly and delusion, for the same power that brought us to this sterile height is able to conduct us. yet further. The sensuous suffers, but thought need not suffer: beyond the range of perception lie the "Delectable Mountains," balmy with the breath of verity. There is a certainty higher than physical science; a truth greater than fact; a faith nobler than fortune. A

fact alone is not truth, and does not become true till we have fixed its place in eternal principle, till we have, by ordinates and abscissa, fixed its trueness immovably by the great planes.

If we take for our guide the nebular hypothesis and limit its puissance to the universe of which our sense takes cognizance, how quickly as many a thinker has before-we flounder in the morasses of speculation. The vagaries of life, as we look backward, vanish in the inconstancies of chemic changes and geologic upheavals, and chaos and darkness, and a globe of fire, and a fiery ring and a vortex of furious flame more and more tenuous, the vastly extended matter merging into ether, and the light fading as the frontiers expand, then a faint nucleus, and then-nothing!

Physical Science, mailed and booted and armed, no matter how just its quarrel with the elements of being, comes to the confines of the worlds and finds its profoundest thinking, its highest climbing, has brought it at the last to naught—the worlds have left not a rack behind.

But philosophy-that of the foundations of rock, that of the divine man, that of God himself-finds here no obstacle to progress. The unharnessed Berserker goes on his way unharmed—

"The soul goes forth not like a vessel wrecked

That drifts dismantled to an unknown shore,
But like a barque for fresh discoveries decked

That spreads its sails new countries to explore."

If that congeries of shining points of light piercing the blue-black dome of night were all, then perhaps we might be content with the last word of science, even content to submit, as the children of Saturn, to be devoured by their unnatural creator. But this dynamo, the sun, with his dark retinue of planets, is not all. Beyond the solar system, beyond the mighty company of stars of the Via Lactea, beyond, far beyond the outermost bounds of our immense system other points. and patches of radiance stud the midnight sky. Some of these are distant kin of ours, galaxies like our own made up of countless stars. each perhaps brooding like our own Helios, over her offspring planets. But some are of a different order, of a nature as different as the fœtus