Taken separately from all substance, and flying with the feathered flock of thoughts, The idea of a thing hath the nature of its Soul, a separate seeming essence: Intimately linked to the idea, suggesting many qualities, The name of a thing hath the nature of its Mind, an intellectual recorder: And the matter of a thing, concrete, is a Body to the perfect creature, Compacted three in one, as all things else within the universe. Nothing canst thou add to them, and nothing take away, for all have these proportions, The thought, the word, the form, combining in the Thing: All separate, yet harmonizing well, and mingled each with other, One whole in several parts, yet each part spreading to a whole: The idea is a whole; and the meaning phrase that spake idea, a whole; And the matter, as ye see it, is a whole; the mystery of true triunity: Yea, there is even a deeper mystery,--which none, I wot, can fathom, Matter, different from properties whereby the solid substance is described; For, size and weight, cohesion and the like, live distinct from matter, Yet who can imagine matter, unendowed with size and weight? As in the spiritual, so in the material, man must rest with patience, And wait for other eyes wherewith to read the books of God. Men have talked learnedly of atoms, as if matter could be ever indivisible; They talk, but ill are skilled to teach, and darken truth by fancies: An atom by our grosser sense was never yet conceived, And nothing can be thought so small, as not to be divided: For an atom runneth to infinity, and never shall be caught in space, And a molecule is no more indivisible than Saturn's belted orb. Things intangible, multiplied by multitudes, never will amass to substance, Neither can a thing which may be touched, be made of impalpable proportions; The sum of indivisibles must needs be indivisible, as adding many nothings, And the building up of atoms into matter is but a silly sophism; Lucretius, and keen Anaximander, and many that have followed in their thoughts, (For error hath a long black shadow, dimming light for ages,) In the foolishness of men without a God fancied to fashion Matter Of intangibles, and therefore uncohering, indivisibles, and therefore Spirit.