one substance into another, the consequences to the world must be profound. Labor for one's daily bread will be a thing of the past, when bread may be made out of stones by the mere setting-up of a particular vibration. The race for wealth will cease, when every one is equally able to command all the resources of the globe. The whole point of view regarding the material aspects of life will be vitally altered; leisure (so far as necessary physical effort is concerned) will inevitably be universal. For when we consider what have been the true motives of civilization and its appurtenances during the greater part of the historical period, we find it to be the desire to better our physical condition. It is commerce that has built cities, made railroads, laws, and wars, maintained the boundaries of nations, and kept up the human contact which we are accustomed to call society. When commerce ceases as it will cease, when there is no longer any reason for its existence - all the results of it that we have mentioned will cease also. In other words, civilization and society, as we now know them, will disappear. Human beings will stay where they are born, and live as the birds do. There will be no work except creative or artistic work, done for the mere pleasure of the doing, voluntarily. Society will no longer be based upon mutual rivalries and the gain of personal advantage. Science will not be pursued on its present lines, or for its present ends; for when the human race has attained leisure and the gratification of its material wants, it would have no motives for further merely physical investigation. This would seem to involve a new kind of barbarism. And so, no doubt, it would, were the discoveries of our Columbus to be limited to the material plane. But it is far more probable that material transubstantiation will be merely the corollary or accompaniment of an infinitely more important revelation and expansion in the spiritual sphere. What we are to expect is an awakening of the soul; the re-discovery and re-habilitation of the genuine and indestructible religious instinct. Such a religious revival will be something very different from what we have hitherto known under that name. It will be a spontaneous and joyful realization by the soul of its vital relations with its Creator. Ecclesiasti cal forms and dogmas will vanish, and nature will be recognized as a language whereby God converses with man. The interpretation of this language, based as it is upon an eternal and living symbolism, containing infinite depths beyond depths of meaning, will be a sufficient study and employment for mankind forever. Art will receive an inconceivable stimulus, from the recognition of its true significance as a re-humanization of nature, and from the perception of its scope and possibilities. Science will become, in truth, the handmaid of religion, in that it will be devoted to reporting the physical analogies of spiritual truths, and following them out in their subtler details. Hitherto, the progress of science has been slow, and subject to constant error and revision, because it would not accept the inevitable dependence of body on soul, as of effect on cause. But as soon as physical research begins to go hand-in-hand with moral or psychical, it will advance with a rapidity hitherto unimagined, each assisting and classifying the other. The study of human nature will give direction to the study of the nature that is not human; and the latter will illustrate and confirm the conclusions of the former. More than half the difficulties of science as now practised is due to ignorance of what to look for; but when it can refer at each step to the truths of the mind and heart, this obstacle will disappear, and certainty take the place of experiment. The attitude of men towards one another will undergo a corresponding change. It is already become evident that selfishness is a colossal failure. Viewed as to its logical results, it requires that each individual should possess all things and all power. Hostile collision thus becomes inevitable, and more is lost by it than can ever be gained. Recent social theorists propose a universal co-operation, to save the waste of personal competition. But competition is a wholesome and vital law; it is only the direction of it that requires alteration. When the cessation of working for one's livelihood takes place, human energy and love of production will not cease with it, but will persist, and must find their channels. But competition to outdo each in the service of all is free from collisions, and its range is limitless. Not to support life, but to make life more lovely, will be the effort; and not to make it more lovely for one's self, but for one's neighbor. Nor is this all. The love of the neighbor will be a true act of Divine worship, since it will then be acknowledged that mankind, though multiplied to human sense, is in essence one; and that in that universal one, which can have no self-consciousness, God is present or incarnate. The divine humanity is the only real and possible object of mortal adoration, and no genuine sentiment of human brotherhood is conceivable apart from its recognition. But, with it, the stature of our common manhood will grow towards the celestial. Obviously, with thoughts and pursuits of this calibre to engage our attention, we shall be very far from regretting those which harass and enslave us to-day. Leaving out of account the extension of psychical faculties, which will enable the antipodes to commune together at will, and even give us the means of conversing with the inhabitants of other planets, and which will so simplify and deepen language that audible speech, other than the musical sounds indicative of emotion, will be regarded as a comic and clumsy archaism, -apart from all this, the fathomless riches of wisdom to be gathered from the commonest daily objects and outwardly most trivial occurrences, will put an end to all craving for merely physical change of place and excitement. Gradually the human race will become stationary, each family occupying its own place, and living in patriarchal simplicity, though endowed with power and wisdom that we should now consider god-like. The sons and daughters will go forth whither youthful love calls them; but, with the perfecting of society, those whose spiritual sympathies are closest will never be spatially remote; lovers will not then, as now, seek one another in the ends of the earth, and probably miss one another after all. Each member of the great community will spontaneously enlist himself in the service of that use which he is best qualified to promote; and, as in the human body, all the various parts, in fulfilling their function, will serve one another and the whole. Perhaps the most legitimately interesting phase of this speculation relates to the future of these qualities and instincts in human nature which we now call evil and vicious. Since these qualities are innate, they can never be eradicated, nor even modified in intensity or activity. They belong with us, nay, they are all there is of us, and with their disappearance, we ourselves should disappear. Are we, then, to be wicked forever? Hardly so; but, on the contrary, what we have known as wickedness will show itself to be the only possible basis and energy of goodness. These tremendous appetites and passions of ours were not given us to be extinguished, but to be applied aright. They are like fire, which is the chief of destroyers when it escapes bounds, or is misused; but, in its right place and function, is among the most indispensable of blessings. But to enlarge upon this thought would carry us too far from the immediate topic; nor is it desirable to follow with the feeble flight of our imagination the heaven-embracing orbit of this theme. A hint is all that can be given, which each must follow out for himself. We have only attempted to indicate what regions await the genius of the new Columbus; nor does the conjecture seem too bold that perhaps they are not so distant from us in time as they appear to be in quality. They are with us now, if we would but know it. THE UNKNOWN. PART I. BY CAMILLE FLAMMARION. Translated from the author's manuscript, by G. A. H. Meyer and J. II. Wiggin. Croire tout découvert est une erreur profonde: (To fancy all known is an error profound, The sky-line mistaking for earth's utmost bound.) THE idea expressed in this distich is so self-evident that we might almost characterize it as trite. Yet the history of every science marks many eminent men, of superior intelligence, who have been arrested in the way of progress by a wholly contrary opinion, and have very innocently supposed that science had uttered to them her last word. In astronomy, in physics, in chemistry, in optics, in natural history, in physiology, in anatomy, in medicine, in botany, in geology, in all branches of human knowledge, it would be easy to fill several pages with the names of celebrated men who believed science would never pass the limits reached in their own time, and that nothing remained to be discovered thereafter. In the army of wise men now living it would not be difficult to name many distinguished scholars who imagine that, in the spheres whereof they are masters, it is needless to search for anything new. It may be unbecoming to talk about one's self, but as, on the one side, some have done me the honor to ask what I think of certain problems,- while, on the other side, I have been more than once accused of busying myself, in a rather unscientific way, with certain vague investigations,—I will begin by acknowledging that the maxim contained in the two verses of my motto has been the conviction of my whole - life; and if, from my callow youth until this very day, I have been interested in the study of phenomena pertaining |