16 DOGS, BIEDS, AND OTHEKS 



testing against its efforts to have the hedges of our country- 

 side destroyed. Much of our world is like the grand 

 academy of Lagado, in each room of which some special 

 mystery is practised from which the general public is 

 excluded an elaborate system of professionalized Trust 

 knowledge, substituting the " dead blank it " of the 

 universe, as William James said, for the " living thou." 

 It is like parthenogenesis, a stagnant degeneration of 

 sexual function dangerous to the survival of the species 

 that practises it, because there is no external influence to 

 invade, penetrate, and re-vivify it. These letters interfere, 

 they trespass upon the intellectual preserves, and help in 

 the healthiest way to break up the various monopolies of 

 mental tenure, the effect of which is to prevent each one 

 of them from benefiting by the enlightenment of the other. 

 Science is becoming more and more indeterminate, and 

 beginning to recognize the limits and relativity of any 

 single and particular plot of knowledge, to stretch out a 

 hand to the profitable things which may be learned from 

 other plots, and to broaden its perceptions so as to view all 

 the plots as so many individual expressions of a landscape. 

 A great biologist recently said of the nature-poets that they 

 were " the truest because deepest biologists of us all," and 

 it is this latitude of mind which has made much modern 

 science so powerful a humanizing influence. It is not from 

 modern poetry but modern science that the world has 

 received a creative vision of life which is true both to the 

 facts and the spirit, and endorses the validity of religious 

 emotion. But the old priestcraft of science is still in our 

 midst, and assuredly would regard these letters with con- 

 tempt. Let it, for these letters are in their own way 

 truer to the Darwinian concept of the Web of Life, of the 

 indivisibility of creation, than are the scientific medicine- 

 men in their isolation. " All knowledge," as Coleridge 

 said, " begins and ends with wonder, but the first wonder 

 is the child of ignorance, while the second wonder is the 

 parent of adoration." 



