time: the refreshing river 



laws discovered by physicists, chemists and biologists, especially the 

 latter, and certain spiritual (or, as we might say to-day "psycho- 

 logical") laws, found to be valid in the realm of religious experience. 

 Drummond was indeed severely criticised for basing his case wholly 

 upon an argument from analogy. But this was a complete misunder- 

 standing of his work. He meant very much more. "The position we 

 have been led to take up," he writes,^ "is not that spiritual laws are 

 analogous to natural laws, but that they are the same laws. It is not a 

 question of analogy, but of identity. The natural laws are not the 

 shadows or images of the spiritual in the same sense as autumn is 

 emblematical of decay, or the falling leaf of death. The natural laws, 

 as the law of continuity might well warn us, do not stop with the 

 visible and then give place to a new set of laws bearing a strong 

 similitude to them. The laws of the invisible are the same laws, pro- 

 jections of the natural, not supernatural." 



The implications of this position are indeed far-reaching. Basic to 

 Drummond's ideas was the conception of continuing evolution. This 

 was what he meant by the "law of continuity." The universe consists 

 of a series of levels of complexity and organisation, hierarchical in 

 thought and successive in time, for the simpler preceded the more 

 complicated. First came an evolution of the chemical elements (the 

 "immortal families" of electrons), and the preparation of the stage 

 for the drama of life as the solar systems were formed. In Auden's 

 words : 



"The universe of pure extension where 

 Nothing except the universe was lonely, 

 For Promise was occluded in its womb 

 Where the immortal families had only 

 To fall to pieces and accept repair. 

 Their nursery, their commonplace, their tomb. 

 All acts accessory to their position 

 Died when the first plant made its apparition." 



Then came the whole long course of biological evolution, leading 

 from the single-celled organism to the primates and man. But still 

 the onward course of organisation did not cease, and man's great and 

 complex brain permitted the development of psychological and above 

 all, of social, organisation. Sexual units united into tribes, tribes into 

 peoples, peoples into nations, and the end of this process is not yet, 



iNLSW, p. II. 

 30 



