TIME AND CHANGE 



speck of protoplasm to-day will have the credit of 

 unlocking a power in inorganic nature; he will prove 

 by a short cut how immanent the creative energy 

 or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He 

 will not have eliminated the creative energy; he will 

 only have disclosed it and availed himself of it. 



We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self- 

 kindled, but we do not see the activity of the par- 

 ticles of matter that preceded it or penetrate the 

 secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was 

 potential there in the very constitution of the ele- 

 ments. We flout at miracles, and then we disclose 

 an unending miracle in the life about us. 



All the life upon the globe, including man with all 

 his marvelous powers, surely originated upon the 

 globe, surely arose out of the non-living and the non- 

 thinking, not by the fiat of some power external to 

 nature, but through the creative energy inherent 

 in nature and ever active there. The great physical 

 instrumentality was heat — without heat the reac- 

 tion called fife could never have taken place. This 

 fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only 

 a surface accident in the history of the thermic 

 evolution of the globe. Without the disintegration 

 of the rocks and the formation of the soil and the 

 precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly 

 the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could 

 not have developed. If we succeed in proving that 

 all these things are of chemico-mechanical origin, 



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