170 MATTER, ENERGY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRIT 



long road to travel from the stars to the kingdom of 

 heaven. But there seems to be but the one chasm 

 that cannot be crossed, and which, though the gulf 

 ever narrows, still remains unbridged. As Tennyson 

 has it 



" Flower in the crannied wall, 

 I pluck you out of the crannies, 

 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 

 Little flower but if I could understand 

 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

 I should know what God and man is." 



SOME CONSEQUENCES OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



The link in the chain that binds man and his 

 destiny with the external universe is as dangerous 

 to ignore as is the link forged by ethics and 

 philosophy that connects man with his fellow-men 

 and with the realm of spiritual things. Physical 

 science divorces power from will, two very important 

 functions that theology in the past has confused to 

 the unutterable discomfiture of mankind. The will 

 to perform, and, in the special sense that concerns 

 human beings, the goodwill to perform good, is in 

 its nature and origin alone an attribute of life. The 

 power to perform is derived in toto from the inanimate 

 world, however many elaborate metamorphoses it 

 may undergo, and through however many organisms, 

 vegetable and animal, it may pass before it reaches 

 man. 



The world that is dead vitally and spiritually is 

 not dead physically. The moon, it is commonly 

 supposed, is a dead world, though since the same 

 sun shines upon it as upon us it cannot be really 

 dead. It is in the present state of physics impossible 

 to conceive of a physically dead world, that is to say, 

 a world without any available source of energy. The 

 discovery of radioactivity has revealed an immense 



