Substance and Shadow

man of science attributes certain facts of na- ture to what he calls the influence of gravi- tation, he has or should have no intention to intimate that there is any such thing in na- ture, any such substance or entity, as gravi- tation. The word marks a mere mental gen- eralization on our part of certain widely diffused and various facts of experience, the generalization itself being only an instinctive effort of the common or associate mind of the race to indue itself, by the instrumental- ity of the individual mind, with that perfect scientific form or order which shall constitute its own eventual and permanent self-conscious- ness. All these generalizations of our natu- ral experience are only so many approxima- tions, on the part of the common mind of the race, to the recognition of its own univer- sality and unity. Nature is but the spiritual man turned inside out, or the contents of his otherwise unknown and unimaginable spiritual personality revealed to his senses. It is not a substance, but the shadow of a substance whose reality is altogether spiritual. Yet when you see the energy with which our so-called philosophers pursue cause to its last fastness, and seek to waylay heat and take light cap- tive in the web of their cunning devices, or bleat forth idle prayers to know what after all is electricity and what magnetism, you must inevitably infer that the living and unitary sub- stance they seek under all these shifting forms, the absolute personality they demand under ail