TIME AND CHANGE 



passes into day. Where does one end and the other 

 begin? No man can tell. There is no beginning and 

 no ending of either, and yet night comes and goes 

 and day comes and goes — a constant becoming and 

 a constant ending. We are probably in the midday 

 of the life of the globe — life huge and rank and 

 riotous — the youth of life has passed, life more se- 

 date and aspiring and spiritual has come. The gi- 

 gantic has gone or is going, the huge monsters of the 

 sea and of the land have had their day, man appears 

 at the end of the series of lesser but more complete 



forms. 



Ill 



Many intelligent persons who have been rocked 

 in the cradle of the old creeds still look upon evolu- 

 tion as a godless doctrine and accuse it of vulgariz- 

 ing high and sacred things. This state of mind can 

 only be slowly outgrown by familiarizing ourselves 

 with the processes of nature or of the creative en- 

 ergy in the world of life and matter about us; with 

 our own origin in the low fishlike or apelike creature 

 in the maternal womb; with the development of 

 every plant, tree, and animal from a microscopic 

 germ; with the unbroken sequence of natural law; 

 with the waste, the delays, the pains, the failures 

 on every hand; with the impersonal and the impar- 

 tial character of all the physical forces; with the 

 transformations and metamorphoses that marked 

 the course of animal life; and, above all, with the 



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