IN THE NOON OF SCIENCE 



and more imaginative endowment, helps us to es- 

 cape. Bergson's work has its root in physical sci- 

 ence also, but you run against no blank wall of ma- 

 terial things in it. On the contrary, it has the charm 

 of the ideal, and is luminous with insight into the 

 more subtle and spiritual processes of the universe. 

 "Creative Evolution" would have appealed to 

 Goethe, and to our own Emerson and Whitman, 

 and to all true idealists curious about the ways of 

 creative power. It puts wings to the results of 

 physical science as no other work with which I am 

 acquainted has done in my time. 



VI 



We must face and accept the new conditions. 

 They will seem less hard to our children's children 

 than to us. If the old awe and reverence must go, 

 the old fear and superstition must go with them. 

 The religious ages begat a whole brood of imps and 

 furies, superstition, persecution, witchcraft, war, 

 and they must go, have gone, or are going. The 

 new wonder, the new admiration, the new human- 

 ism, with the new scientific view of the universe, 

 chilling though it be, must come in. We shall write 

 Jess poetry, but we ought to live saner lives; we 

 shall tremble and worship less, but we shall be more 

 at home in the universe. War must go, the zymotic 

 diseases must go, hidebound creeds must go, and a 

 wider charity and sympathy come in. 

 73 



