IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 353 



ransacked and despoiled; and the whole household of 

 nature, sweetened and illumined by his love, was 

 thrown open to public pleasures and profitable usages. 



At last the dreadful fictions of the waning mental 

 night vanished in the white light of realities, and the 

 narrow womb of time and space, which hemmed in 

 man's endeavors, opened wide delivering him into a 

 world of unlimited opportunities. 



The new-born man was deeply humiliated by his 

 self-revealed nakedness; by his poverty in godliness, 

 and by his infinitesimal insignificance as part and par- 

 cel of the material universe. He was deeply chagrined 

 by the discovery that he was but one of nature's count- 

 less products, privileged solely by his flickering vision 

 of right and wrong, and wholly dependent on his 

 knowledge of nature and himself for his support. 

 Henceforth his burnt offerings and propitiatory divi- 

 dends to the gods were to be the sacrifices of a self- 

 consuming labor on the altar of his fellow-creatures. 

 On him fell the heavy obligation to deliver himself 

 from evil, and to quench his thirst for constructive 

 Tightness from the well springs of Tightness all about 

 him. 



All unconsciously the methods of science demon- 

 strated to man's unwilling mind the universality of his 

 democracy, and his kinship to nature. Neither arro- 

 gance, nor pride of place, the humility of misfortune, 

 nor the bitterness of defeat, could long survive the 

 knowledge that man, and beast, and flower, and sun, 

 and soil, are made of the same universal stuff and 

 moved by the same universal forces. That kings and 

 paupers, black, and yellow, and white, are born in 

 the same way, fed with the same foods, respond phys- 



