THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE 



march towards an associative structure. With 

 it love becomes a purer and an enduring social 

 factor. We have this to thank for the fact of 

 our higher stage of culture, that we have raised 

 and ennobled the word love and made it the 

 watch word of our highest spiritual and social 

 strivings. From the sex-love we have evolved to 

 love of humanity. This is the foundation of 

 our approaching great humanity. 



The colored coral meadow here nas another 

 fundamental characteristic other than its social 

 unity of life. Again the thought wanders far 

 from these lukewarm waters to yonder distant 

 actual sod on the high mountain. I lie stretched 

 out on the burning blood red carpet of the Al- 

 pine rose field, and my hand loosens with its 

 roots one of the bunches of plants. It had bored 

 down quickly through the thin piece of turf. 

 Then it seized on the naked rock — old red slate 

 stone. As I push my Alpine stick into the rock 

 a thin slab peels off from the solid mass. On 

 such fragments of slate there appear strange 

 marks. Shadow-like traces of life are written 

 therein, looking like erased writing: a ribbed 

 mussel-shell, a stalk of a sea-lily (the crinoid). 

 Were these rocks once life.'' Have they hard- 

 ened out of life? What relation has this ghost- 

 like life in the rocks of the earth, to the twining 

 Alpine rose that today blossoms a few inches 

 from it? I understand. This is primitive rpck» 

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