ignorance refuses it to Guebres, Hindus, and Confucians.

He evidently holds to the doctrine of progress. With him
protoplasm is the Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word matter
is derived from the Sanskrit {Sanskrit} (matra), which, however,
signifies properly the invisible type of visible matter; in
modern language, the substance distinct from the sum of its
physical and chemical properties. Thus, Matra exists only in
thought, and is not recognizable by the action of the five
senses. His "Chain of Being" reminds us of Prof. Huxley's
Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, Mesohippus, Meiohippus,
Protohippus, Pleiohippus, and Equus. He has evidently heard of
modern biology, or Hylozoism, which holds its quarter-million
species of living beings, animal and vegetable, to be progressive
modifications of one great fundamental unity, an unity of
so-called "mental faculties" as well as of bodily structure. And
this is the jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea that man
is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like
marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which,
strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the
microscope. As man is of recent origin, and may end at an early
epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth all things revolved
round nothing, and may continue to do so after his death.

The Haji, who elsewhere denounces "compound ignorance," holds
that all evil comes from error; and that all knowledge has been
developed by overthrowing error, the ordinary channel of human
thought. He ends this section with a great truth. There are
things which human Reason or Instinct matured, in its undeveloped
state, cannot master; but Reason is a Law to itself. Therefore we