And even for those who are unacquainted with the GREAT SCIENCE, the description given by a well-trained child-psychometer of the genesis of a grain, a fragment of crystal, or any other object—is worth all the telescopes and microscopes of “exact science.” There may be more truth in the adventurous pangenesis of Darwin—whom Tyndall calls a “soaring speculator” than in the cautious, line-bound hypothesis of the latter; who, in common with other thinkers of his class, surrounds his imagination “by the firm frontiers of reason.” The theory of a microscopic germ which contains in itself “a world of minor germs,” soars in one sense at least into the infinite. It oversteps the world of matter, and begins unconsciously busying itself in the world of spirit. If we accept Darwin’s theory of the development of species, we find that his starting-point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold, {15} beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the _Unutterable_. If our mortal language is inadequate to express what our spirit dimly foresees in the great “_Beyond_” while on this earth—it _must_ realize it at some point in the timeless Eternity. Not so with Professor Huxley’s theory of the “Physical Basis of Life.” Regardless of the formidable majority of “nays” from his German brother-scientists, he creates a universal _protoplasm_ and appoints its cells to become henceforth the sacred founts of the principle of all _life_. By making the latter identical in living man, “dead mutton,” a nettle-sting, and a lobster; by shutting in, in the molecular cell of the protoplasm, the life-principle, and by shutting out from it the divine influx which comes with subsequent evolution, he closes every door against any possible escape. Like an able tactician he converts his “_laws_ and _facts_” into sentries whom he causes to mount guard over every issue. The standard under which he rallies them is inscribed with the word “necessity;” but hardly is it unfurled when he mocks the legend and calls it “an empty shadow of my own imagination.”[68] The fundamental doctrines of spiritualism, he says, “lie outside the limits of philosophical inquiry.” We will be bold enough to contradict this assertion, and say that they lie a great deal more within such inquiry than Mr. Huxley’s protoplasm. Insomuch that they present evident and palpable facts of the existence of _spirit_, and the protoplasmic cells, _once dead_, present none whatever of being the originators or the bases of life, as this one of the few “foremost thinkers of the day” wants us to believe.[69] The ancient Kabalist rested upon no hypothesis till he could lay its basis upon the firm rock of recorded experiment.