LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 



putting on and off form after form, till man appears 

 at the end of the series. 



This is the ministry of physical science, to reveal 

 to us the divinity that lurks in the ground under- 

 foot. We do not so much need its services to point 

 out the glory and grandeur overhead. In all ages 

 man has been aware of this; but the soil he treads, 

 the bodies that impede his way, he has spurned with 

 his foot; they were anathema to him. They were the 

 antithesis of spirit, and his enemy. The heavens 

 declared the glory of God because they were so far 

 off; near at hand, they were of the earth, earthy. 

 Science teaches us that the earth is a celestial body 

 also, and that there is no better or finer stuff in 

 the heavens above than in the earth beneath, and 

 Whitman*s lines indicate this fact — 



"Underneath, the divine soil. 

 Overhead, the sun." 



But the moral and religious import of this stupen- 

 dous truth has not yet influenced our habits of 

 thought; we are still the prisoners of the old dualism. 



II 



As I have said, the two types of mind, the scien- 

 tific and the artistic, the analytic and the synthetic, 

 look upon nature and life with quite different eyes. 

 Wordsworth said of his poet that he was quite "con- 

 tented to enjoy what others understood." When 

 Whitman, as he records in one of his poems, Ikd 



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