THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE 



bodies, or about a flower, or a bird, or a tree, or a 

 cloud, are they less beautiful and wonderful ? The 

 mysteries of generation, of inheritance, of cell life, 

 are rather enhanced by science. 



VI 



When the man of science seeks to understand and 

 explain the world in which we live, he guards him- 

 self against seeing double, or seeing two worlds in- 

 stead of one, as our unscientific fathers did — an 

 immaterial or spiritual world surrounding and in- 

 terpenetrating the physical world, or the super- 

 natural enveloping and directing the natural. He 

 sees but one world, and that a world complete in 

 itself; surrounded, it is true, by invisible forces, and 

 holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; a 

 vastly more complex and wonderful world than our 

 fathers ever dreamed of; a fruit, as it were, of the 

 great sidereal tree, bound by natal bonds to myriads 

 of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead or 

 behind them in its ripening, but still complete in 

 itself, needing no miracle to explain it, no spirits or 

 demons to account for its processes, not even its 

 vital processes. 



In the light of what he knows of the past history 

 of the earth, the man of science sees with his mind's 

 eye the successive changes that have taken place 

 in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent mat- 

 ter rolling through space; he sees the crust cooling 



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