ONE EMPIRE. . 315 



the grand movement, and held it close to the plan which One 

 Intelligence ordained and One Will perpetuated. 



Such a train of reflections is awakened by the arrival of a 

 ray of evening star-light. But our memories are stocked, I 

 think, with information which bears our thoughts along other 

 lines. We have seen how man's organization is bound up 

 with the constitution and the history of the world. We know 

 that man, in his own person, is the link which binds together 

 the beginning and the end of geological history. In his 

 material substance, he is a part of the material world. In 

 his plan of structure he is brother of the entire sub-kingdom 

 of Vertebrates. In the basis of his life he asserts kinship 

 with all that lives or has ever lived. He can stand erect in 

 the vast and majestic realm of nature and say, I am a part 

 of it. I am bound up with it not with the earth and moon 

 alone, but with the stars. Their vicissitudes are my personal 

 concern. I am made of world-stuff. The soul which swells 

 within me, and seizes on the meaning of the forms of Nature 

 that unites me with the invisible and eternal. 



We note another aspect of the unity of nature. Not 

 alone the unity of things in themselves, but the unity of 

 things with each other. Plant life dawned as soon as the tur- 

 moil of the primitive ocean had subsided. Humble animal 

 forms rose above the horizon of being as soon as a place in 

 the world had been prepared for them. As conditions im- 

 proved organization slowly climbed the ladder of gradations, 

 on whose topmost round man stands erect and regal. Through- 

 out the history of life, the relations between organic and in- 

 organic nature have been reciprocal and responsive insomuch 

 that a careless logic has held the organism to be the result of 

 its environment. 



Observe also, the correlation between the world and intel- 

 ligence. The capacity of knowledge exists in the presence of 

 something to know. And the objects of knowledge are acces- 

 sible to the knowing faculty. With the knowable and the 

 knowing faculty confronting each other, the pleasure of 

 knowing also stimulates the knowing faculty to exercise, and 



