TIME AND CHANGE 



achieve intellectual appreciation in man. While 

 all nature below man is wise only to its own ends 

 and goes its appointed way as void of self -conscious 

 ness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows, 

 the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom 

 and turns upon itself and upon the universe the 

 power of objective thought; it alone achieves un 

 derstanding. 



In our studies of life and of the universe as soon 

 as we begin to bridge chasms by an appeal to the 

 miraculous, or to the extra-natural powers, we are 

 traitors to the scientific spirit which we seek to serve. 

 There are many things that science cannot explain. 

 Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate 

 explanation of anything. It can do little more than 

 tell us of the action, the interaction, and the reac 

 tion of things, but of the things themselves, their 

 origin and ultimate nature, or the source of the laws 

 that govern them, what does it or what can it know? 



Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits 

 the earth after countless generations of animals and 

 plants, and the beneficent forces of wind and rain, 

 air and sky, have in the course of millions of years 

 prepared it for him. His body has been built for 

 him through the lives and struggles of the countless 

 beings who are in the line of his long descent; his 

 mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the 

 mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and 

 unthinking animals that went before him. In the 

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