● ● ● Has matter innate motion? Then each atom,
Asserting its indisputable right
To dance, would form a universe of dust:
Has matter none? Then whence these glorious forms,
And boundless flights, from shapeless and repos’d?
Has matter more than motion? has it thought,
Judgment, and genius? is it deeply learn’d
In mathematics? has it fram’d such laws,
Which, but to guess, a Newton made immortal?—
If so, how each sage atom laughs at me,
Who think a clod inferior to a man!98
It was in 1844 that the great Michael Faraday himself, the discoverer of electromagnetic induction, in a paper published in the Philosophical Magazine avowed his belief in the immateriality of physical objects. And in a newspaper article “On Protoplasm” which Mrs. Glover pasted into her scrapbook some years later occurs this passage: “But who can say what ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are, except as names for the unknown and supposed substrata of our consctious states? As Professor Huxley says, ‘Matter may be regarded as a form of thought, or form may be regarded as a property of matter.’ ”99
These speculative, philosophical questions were reinforced in her case both by religion and practical experience.
Her own explanation of the religious motivation is found in Retrospection and Introspection: “From my very childhood I was impelled, by a hunger and thirst after divine things,—a desire for something higher and better than matter, and apart from it,—to seek diligently for the knowledge of God as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe.”100
Experience early drove home to her the conviction she expressed in a girlhood poem: “This life is a shadow, and hastens away.”101