It is undeniably true that the progress of scientific thought and
speculative inquiry, both in this country and in Europe, is rapidly
tending towards a purely materialistic view of the universe, or one that
utterly excludes the ancient and long-predominating metaphysical
conceptions of Life, to say nothing of the more regnant and universally
prevailing conception of a God. And it is quite as undeniable that the
current of experimental research and investigation is setting, with equal
rapidity, in the same direction. According to the views of many of our
more advanced chemists, physiologists, and other scientific and
speculative writers and thinkers--those whose experimental investigations
have, it is claimed, reached the ultimate implications of all material
substance--there are but two immutable, indestructible, and thoroughly
persistent elements in the universe--_Matter_ and _Motion_. Everything
else, they confidently assert, is either purely phenomenal, or else
essentially mutable, ephemeral, transitory. Force, according to their
theory, is only another name for motion or its correlates, and, hence, the
two terms are interchangeably used by them in predicating their ultimate
conclusions respecting matter.

Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, molecular force,
and even life itself, are only so many manifestations or expressions, they
claim, of one and the same force in the universe--_Motion_, With the
exception of matter, it is the only self-persistent, permanently enduring,
ever active and reactive agency.

Light, they say, is dependent, heat conditional, electricity and magnetism
more or less phenomenal, chemical affinity and molecular force mere modes