But who shall decide that this doctrine has been discredited by the progress of science? What special discovery of modern science has so revealed to us the ultimate constitution of matter, that we can affirm its absolute reality and its eternal existence? Nay, are the most advanced physicists and physiologists agreed as to whether, apart from our subjective, ideal conceptions, matter has any reality? If we are not utterly mistaken, the entire tendency of science is to reduce matter from the rank of entities to the rank of phenomena. "The old speculations of Philosophy, which cut the ground from Materialism by showing how little we know of matter, are now being daily reinforced by the subtle analysis of the physiologist, the chemist, and the electrician. Under that analysis matter dissolves and disappears, _surviving only as the phenomena of Force_."[121] We offer no opinion as to the validity of this new doctrine, but are sure it is the doctrine of modern science as represented by Faraday, Owen, McVicar, Bayma, Exley, Wallace, Poisson, Poyntong, Laycock, and, we think, Huxley. If modern science has resolved all our external sensations, even the feeling of resistance, into "phenomena of Force," then, according to the doctrine of Mr. Martineau, it had a beginning--"_phenomena demand causation_.... Supreme Entity needs no cause." "The universe resolves itself into a perpetual genesis," and "the Theist is perfectly justified in treating it as disqualified for self-existence."[122] Sir William Hamilton contends that "an absolute commencement" is inconceivable. All the conception we can possibly form of Creation is "merely as the evolution of new forms of existence by the fiat of the Deity." "Let us suppose the very crisis of creation. Can we realize it to ourselves in thought, that the moment after the universe came into manifested being there was a larger complement of existence in the universe and its Author together than there was the moment before in the Deity himself alone? This we can not imagine."[123]