from a star to a thought, or from a flower to an affection, is connected with certain material figures, and with certain mechanical forces.  All have a certain bulk and a certain place in space, and could conceivably be made the subjects of some physical experiment.  Faith, sanctity, doubt, sorrow, and love, could conceivably be all gauged and detected by some scientific instrument—­by a camera or by a spectroscope; and their conditions and their intensity be represented by some sort of diagram.

These marvellous achievements, as I have said, have been often before dreamed of.  Now they are accomplished.  As applied to natural religion, the effect of them is as follows.

Firstly, with regard to God, they have taken away every external proof of His existence, and, still more, every sign of His daily providence.  They destroy them completely at a sudden and single blow, and send them falling about us like so many dead flies.  God, as connected with the external world, was conceived of in three ways—­as a Mover, as a Designer, and as a Superintendent.  In the first two capacities He was required by thought; in the last, He was supposed to be revealed by experience.  But now in none of these is He required or revealed longer.  So far as thought goes, He has become a superfluity; so far as experience goes, He has become a fanciful suggestion.

Secondly, with regard to man, the life and soul are presented to us, not as an entity distinct from the body, and therefore capable of surviving it, but as a function of it, or the sum of its functions, which has demonstrably grown with its growth, which is demonstrably dependent upon even its minutest changes, and which, for any sign or hint to the contrary, will be dissolved with its dissolution.

A God, therefore, that is the master of matter, and a human soul that is independent of it—­any second world, in fact, of alien and trans-material forces, is reduced, on physical grounds, to an utterly unsupported hypothesis.  Were this all, however, it would logically have on religion no effect at all.  It would supply us with nothing but the barren verbal proposition that the immaterial was not material, or that we could find no trace of it by merely studying matter.  Its whole force rests on the following suppressed premiss, that nothing exists but what the study of matter conceivably could reveal to us; or that, in other words, the immaterial equals the nonexistent.  The case stands thus.  The forces of thought and spirit were supposed formerly to be quite distinct from matter, and to be capable of acting without the least connection with it.  Now, it is shown that every smallest revelation of these to us, is accomplished by some local atomic movement, which, on a scientific instrument fine enough, would leave a distinct impression; and thus it is argued that no force is revealed through matter that is not inseparable from the forms revealing it.  Here we see the meaning of that great modern