An Oration —— Delivered Before the Wesleyan Academy Alumni Association at Wilbraham, Mass, June 29, 1870

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ISBN: 9781330733479 出版年：2016 页码：34 Damon Y Kilgore Forgotten Books

The world is not content. Motion is everywhere throughout the realm of mind. There is no such thing as rest. Inertia is a property of matter recognized by man's outward sense alone. Those atomic energies, inherent in a block of wood or stone, are dormant only to man's touch and vision, because of his too gross perception, or the huge ness of the apparatus with which he works. Whether attraction, repulsion, electricity, and magnet ism are properties of dead matter, or of the elements of life which accompany it; Whether it acts, or is simply acted upon by these and other forces, external and supe rior to itself, one result is reached, a constant, ceaseless motion, a perpetual change. From the minutest cell Of vegetable life, within which narrow limits the vital essence, responsive to the light of heaven, pulsates to the outer wall, or the smallest monad that exhibits active energy, the simplest form of animated being perceptible, through all the realms of intelligent existence up to man, there is no exception to this great law of change.