SCIENCE AND ART 177 



Another impression of a basal sort is that the 

 world is a network of inter-relations. Nature 

 is a vast system of linkages. There is a corre- 

 lation of organisms in Nature comparable to the 

 correlation of organs in our body. There is a 

 web of life. Cats are connected with the clover 

 crop, rats with plague, earthworms with our food- 

 supply, the spring sunshine with mackerel. The 

 face of Nature is like the surface of a gently 

 flowing stream, where hundreds of dimpling 

 circles touch and influence one another in an 

 intricate complexity of action and reaction beyond 

 the ken of the wisest. 



These impressions of manifoldness, of intri- 

 cacy, of inter-relatedness are relatively modern, 

 as is also a sense of the crowning wonder of the 

 world, that the succession of events has been in 

 the main progressive. What we more or less 

 dimly discern in the long past is not like the 

 succession of patterns in a kaleidoscope; it is 

 rather like the sequence of stages in the individual 

 development of a plant or an animal stages 

 whose import is disclosed more and more fully 

 as the development goes on. It is not a phan- 

 tasmagoric procession that the history of animate 

 Nature revels: it is a drama. As Lotze said, 

 there is "the unity of an onward-advancing 

 melody." 



NATURE MORE THAN A MIRROR. We are 



