Judging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly
cultivated and indeed superior persons to whom the material world is
altogether contemptible; who can see nothing in a handful of garden
soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive and the corruptible.
To modern science, these assumptions are as much out of date as the
equally venerable errors, that the sun goes round the earth every
four-and-twenty hours, or that water is an elementary body. The handful
of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of busy workers; the
rusty nail is an aggregation of millions of particles, moving with
inconceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect
measure; harmonic with like performances throughout the solar system.
If there is good ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief
that the substance of these particles has existed and will exist, that
the energy which stirs them has persisted and will persist, without
assignable limit, either in the past or the future. Surely, as
Heracleitus said of his kitchen with its pots and pans, "Here also
are the gods." Little as we have, even yet, learned of the material
universe, that little makes for the belief that it is a system of
unbroken order and perfect symmetry, of which the form incessantly
changes, while the substance and the energy are imperishable.