the phenomena of our visible world with those of an invisible one. Without imagination we never could have risen to the conceptions which have occupied us here to-day; and in proportion to your power of exercising this faculty aright, and of associating definite mental images with the terms employed, will be the pleasure and the profit which you will derive from this Lecture. The outward facts of nature are insufficient to satisfy the mind. We cannot be content with knowing that the light and heat of the sun illuminate and warm the world. We are led irresistibly to enquire what is light, and what is heat? and this question leads us at once out of the region of sense into that of imagination.
Thus pondering, and asking, and striving to supplement that which is felt and seen, but which is incomplete, by something unfelt and unseen which is necessary to its completeness, men of genius have in part discerned, not only the nature of light and heat, but also, through them, the general relationship of natural phenomena. The power of nature is the power of motion, of which all its phenomena are but special forms. It manifests itself in tangible and in intangible matter, being incessantly transferred from the one to the other, and incessantly transformed by the change. It is as real in the waves of the ether as in the waves of the sea;
