BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1193 



that is liberating man's intelligence more than any other, even 

 towards a fuller vision of his own life. 



As a discipline for the mind, Natural History is very different 

 from the exacter sciences, of mathematics and physics; but it has 

 educative value of its own. It engenders not only the habit of 

 observation, but a peculiar subtlety, a deepening judgment, in its 

 revelation of intricate inter-relations and unending consequences. 

 Animate Nature is a rare Euclid; it bristles with unsolved problems; 

 it provokes man into questions. Natural History is a brain-stretching 

 discipline. 



This Book of Nature is open before us, though it is not always 

 easy to read or to turn the page. It gives us interesting pictures, 

 beauty-feasts ever spread, many a dramatic thrill, some great ideas 

 without which we are poor, and a supply of unsolved problems that 

 makes life an intellectual adventure. These are five great gains; and 

 there are two more, to make up the perfect number. Of these the 

 first consists of certain fundamental impressions of the world of 

 life which cannot be safely dispensed with — impressions that come 

 not so much from inquiry as from sympathetic sojourning with 

 living creatures in the country. As Walt Whitman said, "There was 

 a child went forth every day, and what that child saw became part 

 of him for a day, or for a year, or for stretching cycles of years." 

 Nothing in the world can take the place of these deep impressions, 

 as of growing, developing, multiplying, entailing, struggling, 

 changing. Organisms cannot be safely nurtured on mechanisms 

 merely. Wonder-mongering may sometimes be a refuge for intelli- 

 gences that will not exert themselves; but when we get close to the 

 Magnalia Naturae most of us are inclined to say: This is too wonder- 

 ful for me! In Natural History, as elsewhere, perhaps more than 

 elsewhere, what Coleridge said holds good : "All knowledge begins and 

 ends with wonder; but while the first wonder is the child of ignor- 

 ance, the second is the parent of adoration," as poet and mystic 

 have ever known. 



There is a seventh gain that comes from reading in the Book — 

 the Bible — of Nature; and that is moral encouragement. Nature is 

 almost all for health and almost all for beauty; the exceptions arie 

 warnings to man — warnings against giving up struggling, warnings 

 against the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. Animals are not con- 

 sciously moral agents; they cannot be credited with the concept of 

 duty; but they have the raw materials of the primordial virtues — 

 control, courage, self-subordination, parental care, kin-sympathy, 

 and often each to sacrifice. No doubt there are queer ongoings in 

 some corners of the realm of organisms; but there are dominant 

 trends whose momentum is with man at his best. For man is grounded 

 in the pre-human; he is no moral Melchisedek "without descent"; 

 his being includes strands of goodness, transmuted in a new 



