LEAF AND TENDRIL 



escapes which the imagination provides us from 

 the hard and wearing realities of life. Its implacable 

 foe is undoubtedly the scientific spirit — the spirit 

 of the now and the here, that seeks proof and finds 

 the marvelous and the divine in the ground under- 

 foot ; the spirit that animated Lyell and opened his 

 eyes to the fact that the forces and agencies at work 

 every day around us were adequate to account for 

 the tremendous changes in the earth's surface in the 

 past ; that animated Darwin and led him to trace 

 the footsteps of the creative energy in the natural 

 life of plants and animals to-day j that animated 

 Huxley and filled him with such righteous wrath at 

 the credulity of his theological brethren; and that 

 animates every one of us when we clinch a nail, 

 or stop a leak, or turn a thing over and look on the 

 other side, and apply to practical affairs the touch- 

 stone of common sense. 



That man is of divine origin in a sense that no 

 other animal is, is a conviction dear to the com- 

 mon mind. It was dear to the mind of Carlyle, it 

 chimed in well with his distrust of the present, his 

 veneration of the past, and his Hebraic awe and 

 reverential fear before the mysteries of the universe. 

 While Darwin's attitude of mind toward outward 

 things was one of inquiry and thirst for exact know- 

 ledge, Carlyle's was one of reverence and wonder. 

 He was more inclined to worship where Darwin 

 was moved to investigate. Darwin, too, felt the 

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