LEAF AND TENDRIL 



superhuman, as in the myth of Genesis. True it is 

 that it fixes our attention upon this world and upon 

 forces with which we are more or less familiar, but 

 it implies an element or a power before which we 

 stand helpless and dumb. What fathered this man- 

 impulse, what launched this evolutionary process, 

 what or who stamped upon the first protoplasm 

 the aspiration to be man, and never let that aspira- 

 tion sleep through all the tremendous changes of 

 those incalculable geologic ages ? What or who first 

 planted the seed of the great biological tree, and 

 determined all its branchings and the fruit it should 

 bear ? If you must have a God, either apart from 

 or imminent in creation, it seems to me that there 

 is as much need of one here as in the Mosaic cos- 

 mology. The final mystery cannot be cleared up. 

 We can only drive it to cover. How the universe 

 came to be what it is, and how man came to be 

 man, who can tell us ? 



That somewhere in my line of descent was an 

 ancestor that lived in trees and had powerful arms 

 and weaker legs, that his line began in a creature 

 that lived on the ground, and his in one that lived 

 in the mud, or in the sea, and his, or its, sprang 

 from a germ at the bottom of the sea, but deepens 

 the mystery of the being that is now here and can 

 look back and speculate over the course he has 

 probably come; it only directs attention to ugly 

 facts, to material things, to the every-day process 

 228 



