A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES 



Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

 And the round ocean and the living air, 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. 



Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to 

 the Infinite Mystery in terms of our own wills and 

 acts. When we think of a Creator and the thing 

 created as two, we are in trouble at once. They 

 are one, as fire and light are one, as soul and body 

 are one. Darwin said he could not look upon the 

 world as the result of chance, and yet his theory 

 of the origin of species ushers us into a chance 

 world. But when he said, speaking of the infinite 

 variety of living forms about us, that they "have 

 all been produced by laws acting around us," he 

 spoke as a great philosopher. These laws are 

 not fortuitous, or the result of the blind grouping 

 of irrational forces. 



vi. A LIVE WORLD 



IT WAS "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler 

 calls him, who looked upon the earth as animated 

 in the fashion of an animal. "To him this world 

 is so endowed with activities that it is to be ac- 

 counted alive." But his critics looked upon this 

 fancy of Kepler's as proof of a disordered mind. 

 Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son 

 of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth 

 in many ways behaves more like a living organism 



169 



