THE BREATH OF LIFE 



fugitive as this blossoming of the water. More and 

 more does science hold us to the view of the unity 

 of nature — that the universe of life and matter 

 and force is all natural or all supernatural, it mat- 

 ters little which you call it, but it is not both. One 

 need not go away from his own doorstep to find 

 mysteries enough to last him a lifetime, but he will 

 find them in his own body, in the ground upon 

 which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in 

 the invisible forces that play around him. We may 

 marvel how the delicate color and perfume of the 

 flower could come by way of the root and stalk of 

 the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth 

 to the rainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious 

 metals and stones arise from the flux of the baser 

 elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and finds 

 itself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not 

 invoke the supernatural to account for these things. 

 It is certain that in the human scale of values the 

 spirituality of man far transcends anything in the 

 animal or physical world, but that even that came 

 by the road of evolution, is, indeed, the flowering of 

 ruder and cruder powers and attributes of the life 

 below us, I cannot for a moment doubt. Call it a 

 transmutation or a metamorphosis, if you will; it 

 is still within the domain of the natural. The spirit- 

 ual always has its root and genesis in the physical. 

 We do not degrade the spiritual in such a concep- 

 tion; we open our eyes to the spirituality of the 



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