INTRODUCTION. 



given us. These researches, preliminary reconnais- 

 sances though they be, are surely worthy of being 

 looked upon as a whole. No one can say that this 

 multitude of observers is not in earnest, nor their 

 work honest, nor their methods competent to the last 

 powers of science. Whatever the uncertainty of the 

 field, it is due to these pioneer minds to treat their 

 labor with respect. What they see in the unexplored 

 land in which they travel belongs to the world. By 

 just such methods, and by just such men, the map of 

 the world of thought is filled in — here from the trac- 

 ing up of some great river, there from a bearing taken 

 roughly in a darkened sky, yonder from a sudden glint 

 of the sun on a far-off mountain-peak, or by a swift 

 induction of an adventurous mind from a momentary 

 glimpse of a natural law. So knowledge grows ; and 

 in a century which has added to the sum of human 

 learning more than all the centuries that are past, it is 

 not to be conceived that some further revelation 

 should not await us on the highest themes of all. 



The day is forever past when science need apolo- 

 gize for treating Man as an object of natural research. 

 Hamlet's " being of large discourse, looking before and 

 after" is withal a part of Nature, and can neither be 

 made larger nor smaller, anticipate less nor prophesy 

 less, because we investigate, and perhaps discover, the 

 secret of his past. And should that past be proved to 

 be related in undreamed-of ways to that of all other 

 things in Nature, " all other things " have that to gain 

 by the alliance which philosophy and theology for 

 centuries have striven to win for them. Every step 

 in the proof of the oneness in a universal evolutionary 

 process of this divine humanity of ours is a step in the 



