These are some of the seeds of the new thing I bring, of the new poetry which the world will make, Matter brooding on Matter for centuries to come. Poetry is the flower of what all men are maturing in thought and fancy; I reap a harvest as yet unsown; I come a hundred years before the time--that time foreseen by Wordsworth, "when what is now called science, familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on a form of flesh and blood."
It is a profoundly satisfying thought that no serious pursuit of man, no cherished conception, however erroneous in itself, is ever based in error. Man is Matter, embodied sincerity, and cannot for any length of time concern himself with what is not. I have shown a new thing--that Heaven and Hell were memories of processes of evolution struggling into consciousness; I have reminded the reader that astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and sorcery had, all of them, roots in Material facts, and I have pointed out that these pseudo-sciences and black and white magics were attempts of unenlightened but conscious Matter to reveal itself and its powers. I will now state the Material sources of the stupendous ideas of God and Sin.
Man is inhuman. Humanity is as fanciful an ideal as divinity. From eternity the Matter of which man consists had an unconscious being dissolved in the Ether; thereafter as lightning, and as various Material forms which we call elements: and as these various Material forms which we call elements, as lightning, and once again in the Ether, the Matter of which man consists will have an unconscious being to all eternity. I say an unconscious being: the likelihood that the Matter of man after its devolution into the Ether will again become conscious is inconsiderable. Further, in the event of so remote a chance, it is even more unlikely that the Matter of man, becoming conscious again, should have any recollection of its former consciousness. The present interlude of his conscious being--in the old image like the flight of a night-bird through an illumined hall from darkness to darkness--is so brief, that on that account alone man has had no time to become human. This is true of the individual; and were mankind to end now, or a million years hence, it would also, and still, be true of the race. A million years of consciousness as man would not be an experience long and broad and deep enough to humanize the Matter of which man consists, because except in rare cases the same Matter is never more than once incarnate. From crops grown, and cattle fed, on battlefields, molecules of Matter that were once part of man may become part of man again. Doubtless also cannibals have eaten cannibals, thus giving the same Matter repeated avatars: an instance, however, that does not make for humanity. Even if our earth were to heap geological period upon geological period from our recent era of tertiary and quaternary times to a futurity of centenary and millenary ages, until in the course of a million million of years every electron of the globe transmuted through all forms of Matter, had been reincarnated as Man again and again, that would not be experience enough to fix a permanent memory of humanity in the devolved Matter of man: because this Matter that becomes man, like all Matter, existed from all eternity--during the immeasurable and inconceivable lapse of eternity, existed in the Ether, thereafter as lightning, and as elements on fire, for periods compared with which a million million years are as the time of a single heart-beat compared with a million million years. Like thoughts of childhood in old age, the memory of the diaphanous light of the nebula and of the tumult and fire of its contraction, and the memory of the peace and darkness of its primeval, ethereal being, would overcome all impressions of consciousness in that unconscious memory which Matter is: and even if living experience remained occult in the oxygen and carbon, the hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium which had been man, the tumult and fire of the new nebula into which the Matter of man must devolve, will bray and burn out all sense of life in the most passionate Matter that ever lived and fought, the peace and darkness of the re-entered Ether, of the infinite Lethean Ether, will restore an entire and pure unconsciousness to the Matter which was Christ, to the Matter which was Nero, to the Matter which you are and which I am.