LEAF AND TENDRIL 



prognostications have disappeared. Dread of Na- 

 ture has been followed by curiosity about Nature, 

 and curiosity has been followed by love. Men now 

 love Nature as I fancy they have never loved her 

 before. I fancy also that we have come to realize as 

 never before the truth of the Creator's verdict upon 

 his work : " And behold it was good." 



To what do we owe this change ? To the growth 

 of the human reason led and fostered by science. 

 Science has showed man that he is not an alien in 

 the universe, that he is not an interloper, that he 

 is not an exile from another sphere, or arbitrarily 

 put here, but that he is the product of the forces 

 that surround him. Science has banished the arbi- 

 trary, the miraculous, the exceptional, from nature, 

 and instead of these things has revealed order, sys- 

 tem, and the irrefragable logic of cause and eflFect. 

 Instead of good and bad spirits contending with 

 one another, it reveals an inevitable beneficence 

 and a steady upward progress. It shows that the 

 universe is made of one stuff, and that no atom 

 can go amiss or lose its way. 



When we look at man and his goings and comings 

 at a far enough remove, I think we surely see that 

 he is under laws and influences that he knows not of. 

 In the Orient he shows one set of influences, in the 

 Occident another. In the south he is of one temper, 

 in the north of another. The stamp of his environ- 

 ment, of his climate, is upon him. Bom in one age, 

 280 



