THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 



we still want to know who or what instituted these 

 chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that 

 govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics 

 is as mysterious as creation by miracle. We must 

 still have a creator, while we can do nothing with 

 him nor find any place for him in an endless, begin- 

 ningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. 

 We go out of the same door by which we came in. 



When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will 

 when the condition of heat and moisture has radi- 

 cally changed, and eternal refrigeration sets in — 

 what then? The potencies of matter will not have 

 changed and life will reappear and go through its 

 cycle again on some other sphere. 



Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the 

 old sense, but by miracle in the new scientific sense 

 — by the immanence and ceaseless activity of the 

 creative energy in the physical world about us — 

 in the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air 

 currents, and in the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hy- 

 drogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime, iron, silex, phos- 

 phorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its 

 laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its 

 affinities, its likes and dislikes, and life is bound up 

 with all of them, tif we hypothesize the ether to 

 explain certain phenomena, why should we not 

 hypothesize a vital force to account for other mys- 

 teries? 



The inorganic passes into the organic as night 



211 



