292 THE PRESENT IMPORTANCE OF SCIENCE 



tion would choose this kind of imagination? Possibly a few 

 modern mystics and people of irrational and superstitious 

 type of mind. 



When men first observed the changeless motion of the 

 stars "without haste, without rest," and gained an inkling 

 that the same orderly sequence might apply to all natural 

 phenomena, the opportunity for imagination was not lost. 

 It was placed on a higher plane. The inhabitants of Europe, 

 whose forefathers once imagined the Islands of the Blest to 

 lie beyond the Atlantic and the Inferno of lost souls to be 

 within the bowels of the earth, have undoubtedly relin- 

 quished many fields in which the imagination of medieval 

 man found exercise. But what a vista has been opened! 

 Consider the sweep through time and space of the concept of 

 evolution : The measureless past even of our own planet, the 

 cooling of the gaseous and later molten mass, the differentia- 

 tion of the land, the seas, and the atmosphere, the appear- 

 ance of the earliest life, and its progress through time, the 

 age of invertebrates, the ages of fishes, amphibia, reptiles, 

 and mammals, the emergence at length of the ape who walked 

 like a man, and the struggling ascent of his descendants 

 during the glacial epoch. The account of creation in the 

 book of Genesis, when compared with the tale outlined by 

 modern science, is like some nursery story, cherished as part 

 of a departed childhood and wonderful in its proper setting, 

 but not to be classed with the great symphony made known 

 by science, although having its place in legendary literature. 3 



The clouds are no less wonderful because we know some- 

 thing of their relation to the weather. One can watch the 

 sunset, entranced by its colors and imagining islands in a 

 flaming sea or castles in the air. The ocean still "goes 

 nakedly between the weed-hung shelves." 4 Or let us think 



3 A vivid portrayal of these steps in evolution is given at some length in the 

 opening chapters of the "Outline of History," by H. G. Wells. This author 

 has made an eloquent plea for a new "Bible of Civilization," in his volume 

 "The Salvaging of Civilization." 



4 Leslie Stephen has well answered the yearning sometimes expressed for a 



