CRYSTALLINE AND MOLECULAR FORCES. 265 



hundreds of times, but I never look at them without wonder. And, 

 if you allow me a moment's diversion, I would say that I have stood 

 in the spring-time and looked upon the sprouting foliage, the grass, 

 and the flowers, and the general joy of opening life ; and in my 

 ignorance of it all I have asked myself whether there is no power, be- 

 ing, or thing, in the universe whose knowledge of that of which I am 

 so ignorant is greater than mine. I have asked myself, Can it be pos- 

 sible that man's knowledge is the greatest knowledge that man's life 

 is the highest life ? My friends, the profession of that atheism with 

 which I am sometimes so lightly charged would, in my case, be an 

 impossible answer to this question : only slightly preferable to that 

 fierce and distorted theism which I have had lately reason to know 

 still reigns rampant in some minds as the survival of a more ferocious 

 age. 



Everywhere throughout our planet we notice this tendency of the 

 ultimate particles of matter to run into symmetric forms. The very 

 molecules seem instinct with a desire for union and growth. How far 

 does this play of molecular power depend ? Does it give us the move- 

 ment of the sap in trees ? Assuredly it does. Does it give us, in our- 

 selves, the warmth of the body and the circulation of the blood, and 

 all that thereon depend ? We are here upon the edge of a battle-field 

 which I do not intend to enter to-night ; from which, indeed, I have 

 just escaped bespattered and begrimed, but without much loss of heart 

 or hope. It only remains for me to briefly indicate the positions of the 

 opposing hosts. From the processes of crystallization which you have 

 just seen, you pass by almost imperceptible gradations to the lowest 

 vegetable organisms, and from these through higher ones up to the 

 highest. The opposition to which I have referred is : that whereas 

 one class of thinkers regard the observed advance from the crystal- 

 line through the vegetable and animal worlds as an unbroken process 

 of natural growth, thus grasping the world, inorganic and organic, as 

 one vast and indissolubly connected whole, the other class suppose 

 that the passage from the inorganic to the organic required a distinct 

 creative act, and that to produce the different forms, both in the world 

 of fossils and in the world of living things, creative acts were also 

 needed. If you look abroad you will find men of equal honesty, ear- 

 nestness, and intelligence, taking opposite sides as regards this ques- 

 tion. Which are right and which are wrong is, I submit, a problem 

 for reasonable and grave discussion, and not for anger and hard 

 names. The question cannot be solved it cannot even be shelved 

 by angry abuse. Nor can it be solved by appeals to hopes and 

 fears to what we lose or gain here or hereafter by joining the one or 

 the other side. The bribe of eternity itself, were it possible to offer 

 it, could not prevent the human mind from closing with the truth. 

 Skepticism is at the root of our fears. I mean that skepticism which 

 holds that human nature, being essentially corrupt and vile, will go 



