99. A great physiologist said to me the other day--it was in the rashness of controversy, and ought not to be remembered, as a deliberate assertion, therefore I do not give his name, still he did say--that sight was "altogether mechanical." The words simply meant, if they meant anything, that all his physiology had never taught him the difference between eyes and telescopes. Sight is an absolutely spiritual phenomenon; accurately, and only, to be so defined; and the "Let there be light," is as much, when you understand it, the ordering of intelligence, as the ordering of vision. It is the appointment of change of what had been else only a mechanical effluence from things unseen to things unseeing,--from stars that did not shine to earth that could not perceive;--the change, I say, of that blind vibration into the glory of the sun and moon for human eyes; so rendering possible also the communication out of the unfathomable truth, of that portion of truth which is good for us, and animating to us, and is set to rule over the day and night of our joy and sorrow. 100. The sun was set thus 'to rule the day.' And of late you have learned that he was set to rule everything that we know of. You have been taught that, by the Sirens, as a piece of entirely new knowledge, much to be exulted over. We painters, indeed, have been for some time acquainted with the general look of the sun, and long before there were painters there were wise men,--Zoroastrian and other,--who had suspected that there was power in the sun; but the Sirens of yesterday have somewhat new, it seems, to tell you of his authority, ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ. I take a passage, almost at random, from a recent scientific work. "Just as the phenomena of water-formed rocks all owe their existence directly or indirectly chiefly to the sun's energy, so also do the phenomena interwoven with life. This has long been recognised by various eminent British and foreign physicists; and in 1854 Professor ----, in his memoir on the method of palæontology, asserted that organisms were but _manifestations of applied physics and applied chemistry_. Professor ---- puts the generalisations of physicists in a few words: When speaking of the sun, it is remarked--'He rears the whole vegetable world, and through it the animal; the lilies of the field are his workmanship, the verdure of the meadows, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. He forms the muscle, he urges the blood, he builds the brain. His fleetness is in the lion's foot; he springs in the panther, he soars in the eagle, he slides in the snake. He builds the forest and hews it down, the power which raised the tree and that which wields the axe being one and the same.'"