reject everything in the shape of system from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, and all doctrine from Buddha to Christ, and from Christ to Nietzsche. The insane past of mankind is the incubus: the world is really a virgin world awaking from a bad dream. ("The Testament of a Man Forbid.") These are some of the seeds of the new thing I bring, of the new poetry which the world will make, Matter brooding on Matter for centuries to come. Poetry is the flower of what all men are maturing in thought and fancy; I reap a harvest as yet unsown; I come a hundred years before the time--that time foreseen by Wordsworth, "when what is now called science, familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on a form of flesh and blood." It is a profoundly satisfying thought that no serious pursuit of man, no cherished conception, however erroneous in itself, is ever based in error. Man is Matter, embodied sincerity, and cannot for any length of time concern himself with what is not. I have shown a new thing--that Heaven and Hell were memories of processes of evolution struggling into consciousness; I have reminded the reader that astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and sorcery had, all of them, roots in Material facts, and I have pointed out that these pseudo-sciences and black and white magics were attempts of unenlightened but conscious Matter to reveal itself and its powers. I will now state the Material sources of the stupendous ideas of God and Sin. IV GOD AND SIN Man is inhuman. Humanity is as fanciful an ideal as divinity. From eternity the Matter of which man consists had an unconscious being dissolved in the Ether; thereafter as lightning, and as various Material forms which we call elements: and as these various Material forms which we call elements, as lightning, and once again in the Ether, the Matter of which man consists will have an unconscious being to all eternity. I say an unconscious being: the likelihood that the Matter of man after its devolution into the Ether will again become conscious is inconsiderable. Further, in the event of so remote a chance, it is even more unlikely that the Matter of man, becoming conscious again, should have any recollection of its former consciousness. The present interlude of his conscious being--in the old image like the flight of a night-bird through an illumined hall from darkness to darkness--is so brief, that on that account alone man has had no time to become human. This is true of the individual; and were mankind to end now, or a million years hence, it would also, and still, be true of the race. A million years of consciousness as man would not be an experience long and broad and deep enough to humanize the Matter of which man consists, because except in rare cases the same Matter is never more than once incarnate. From crops grown, and cattle fed, on battlefields, molecules of Matter that were once part of man may become part of man again. Doubtless also cannibals have eaten cannibals, thus giving the