'ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



velopment became a biological law and had sur- 

 vival value. Without some degree of right con- 

 duct and fair dealing — some degree of perception 

 of the true and the false — the race of man could 

 never have attained its present high position in the 

 scale of animate nature. Through some inherent im- 

 pulse or tendency in matter, man arose out of the 

 earth, climbing through the many lowly forms to his 

 full estate of a rational being. It has been a long and 

 toilsome and painful journey. But here we are, and 

 ■when we look back through the geologic vistas we 

 are incredulous that we came that road. We in- 

 cline to the short cut through the Garden. But the 

 study of the ways of Nature as we see them in all 

 living things opens our eyes to the truth of evolu- 

 tion. Of course the great puzzle and mystery is, Who 

 or what stamped upon matter this organizing and 

 developing impulse and caused the first unicellular 

 life in the old Azoic or Palaeozoic seas to branch and 

 grow and increase in complexity till it gave birth 

 to all the myriad living forms, high and low, that 

 now fill the earth? But here again I am using the 

 language of half-truth — the language of our ex- 

 perience, which makes us think of some external 

 agent as stamping an impulse upon matter. If we 

 say the impulse was always there, that it is insepara- 

 ble from matter and the laws of matter, just as 

 creation is without beginning and end, center or 

 circumference, we come no nearer speaking the un- 



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