15. If the spiritual question regarding man has remained till our day in a theoretical condition, it is because direct means of observation have failed to establish the material theory of the world, and the field has remained open to the varying conceptions of the human mind; while man has not known the laws which rules matter and has not been able to apply the experimental method, he has erred from system to system concerning the mechanism of the universe and the formation of the Earth. It has been in the moral as in the physical order of things; in the attempt to establish ideas, men have failed in the essential element, - the knowledge of the laws of the spiritual principle. This knowledge was reserved for our epoch, as the discovery of the laws of matter has been the work of the two last centuries.
