The appearance of nature is nearly always, not false, but illusive, and our first interpretations of natural phenomena usually are the reverse of the reality. This is the wisdom of creation—the secret of the world; else knowledge would be immediate, and man a mere eye for seeing. Nature puts the reality at a distance, and hides it behind a veil, and it is the office of mind to penetrate the distance and get behind the veil. Mind rounds the fiat world into a sphere, and fixes the moving sun in the heavens. Truth is always an achievement, and it becomes such by reversing appearances, turning rest into motion, centres into orbits, breaking up inclosing firmaments into infinite spaces.
The human mind tends to rest in the first appearance. Science, more than any other teacher, tells it that it may not. To break away from the appearance of death—this is the imperative need, and the larger word and method of science justify us in the effort. When Sir William Thompson, led by a hint of Faraday's, advances the theory, that all the properties of matter probably are attributes of motion, a surmise is awakened if matter be not a mere semblance or phantasm, and if force, or that which creates force, is not the only reality,—the true substance, upon which this play and flux of unstable matter takes place. Under the theory of advanced science, it is no longer spirit which seems vague, illusive, unreal, but matter—slipping away into modes of motion, dissolving into mere activity, and so shading off toward some great Reality, full of life and energy—not matter, and therefore Spirit.
Science has led up to the point where matter, and not God, becomes the unknowable.
