The word "God" is simply born of our ignorance. We go as far as we can, and we say the rest of the way is "God." We look as far as we can, and beyond the horizon, where there is nought so far as we know but blindness, we place our Deity. We see an infinitesimal segment of a circle, and we say the rest is "God." Man must give up searching for the origin of anything. No one knows the origin of life, or of matter, or of what we call mind. The whence and the whither are questions that no man can answer. In the presence of these questions all intellects are upon a level. The barbarian knows exactly the same as the scientist, the fool as the philosopher. Only those who think that they have had some supernatural information pretend to answer these questions, and the unknowable, the impossible, the unfathomable, is the realm wholly occupied by the "inspired." We are satisfied that all organized things must have had a beginning, but we cannot conceive that matter commenced to be. Forms change, but substance remains eternally the same. A beginning of substance is unthinkable. It is just as easy to conceive of anything commencing to exist _without_ a cause as _with_ a cause. There must be something for cause to operate upon. Cause operating upon nothing--were such a thing possible--would produce nothing. There can be no relation between cause and nothing. We can understand how things can be arranged, joined or separated--and how relations can be changed or destroyed, but we cannot conceive of creation--of nothing being changed into something, nor of something being made--except from preexisting materials. _Question_. Since the universal testimony of the ages is in the affirmative of phenomena that attest the continued existence of man after death--which testimony is overwhelmingly sustained by the phenomena of the nineteenth century--what further evidence should thoughtful people require in order to settle the question, "Does death end all?" _Answer._ I admit that in all ages men have believed in spooks and ghosts and signs and wonders. This, however, proves nothing. Men have for thousands of ages believed the impossible, and worshiped the absurd. Our ancestors have worshiped snakes and birds and beasts. I do not admit that any ghost ever existed. I know that no miracle was ever performed except in imagination; and what you are pleased to call the "phenomena of the nineteenth century," I fear are on an exact equality with the phenomena of the Dark Ages.