THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 



organisation, and to bring humanity from the Egypt of necessity into 

 the Canaan of freedom. 



It was mentioned above that love might be considered as the 

 analogue of the physical bonds which unite particles at the molecular 

 level. This was indeed an idea of Henry Drummond's. Though it 

 would have been acceptable to the ancient Ionian scientists, it was 

 doubtless grotesque enough to the Victorians. 



"Is it conceivable," he wrote, "that in inorganic nature, 

 among the very material bases of the world, there should be 

 anything to remind us of the coming of the Tree of Life ? To 

 expect even foreshadowings of ethical characters there were 

 an anachronism too great for expression. Yet there is something 

 there at least worth recalling in the present connection. 



The earliest condition in which science allows us to picture 

 this globe is that of a fiery mass of nebulous matter. At the 

 second stage it consists of countless myriads of similar atoms, 

 roughly outlined into a ragged cloud-ball, glowing with heat, 

 and rotating in space with inconceivable velocity. By what 

 means can this mass be broken up, or broken down, or made 

 into a solid world .^ By two things, mutual attraction and 

 chemical affinity. . . . What affinity even the grossest, what like- 

 ness even the most remote, could one have expected to trace 

 between the gradual aggregation of units or matter in the con- 

 densation of a weltering star, and the slow segregation of men 

 in the organisation of societies and nations ? However different 

 the agents, is there no suggestion that they are different stages 

 of a uniform process, different epochs of one great historical 

 enterprise, different results of a single evolutionary law.^"^ 



Thus as cosm.ic development proceeded, conditions arose in which 

 highly complex molecular aggregates became possible. Various forces 

 joined them together. All things have come into being by way of an 

 eternal battle betv^'een attraction and repulsion, aggregation and dis- 

 aggregation, in which the victories of aggregation, though decisive, 

 are never absolutely complete; remnants of the defeated remaining 

 as essential elements of the new level of organisation. Thus are the 

 Furies conducted to their cave under the Acropolis; and the Dragons 

 incorporated into the Civil Service. 



We are reminded of the Orphic hymn to love in Longus' Daphnis 



^ AOM, p. 432. 



39 



