SYNTHESIS OF THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL 



which is the creative cause of harmonious movements. 

 Tyndall, some forty years ago, in his famous address at 

 Belfast, inspired by the far shining Hght of evolution, was 

 carried on to say, in words which became historic, ' ' there 

 is in matter the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." 

 But even he, when pressed by Martineau to define his 

 terms, took refuge in the phrase, " those mysterious things 

 called atoms," thereby revealing his sense of an Energy 

 whose ways or laws are known to science, but whose 

 intrinsic nature is too fine to be touched by the instru- 

 ments of science. And this consciousness, in the years 

 vsince then, has become more distinct in the minds of men 

 of science. They see that, within and beyond the 

 evolutionary process, there is the evolutionary cause, and 

 that the latter is expressing itself through the former. 

 Thus the representatives of a purified supernaturalism and 

 an open-minded science are agreed that their respective 

 spheres of study are two aspects of existence as a whole, 

 that the one is never apart from the other, and that each 

 can be understood only through the other. They are 

 agreed also in the view that what we call the supernatural 

 is to be known through our experience of it in the sky, the 

 mountain, the valley, the river and ocean, and through the 

 history of man — in a word, through the whole volume of 

 nature, taking the word in the largest sense as inclusive of 

 all experience. And, on the other hand, they are seeing 

 that the natural cannot be known if we confine our 

 attention to physical processes and leave out of account 

 those experiences which cannot be classified on the dead 

 level of the physical. 



IV. 



This happy reapproachment between an intelligent 

 supernaturalism, and a science hospitable to all truth, has 

 been greatly furthered, strange to say, by the doctrine of 

 evolution. This hypothesis has supplied a point of view 



