THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 
we still want to know who or what instituted these 
chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that 
govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics 
is as mysterious as creation by miracle. We must 
still have a creator, while we can do nothing with 
him nor find any place for him in an endless, begin- 
ningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. 
We go out of the same door by which we came in. 
When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will 
when the condition of heat and moisture has radi- 
cally changed, and eternal refrigeration sets in — 
what then? The potencies of matter will not have 
changed and life will reappear and go through its 
cycle again on some other sphere. 
Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the 
old sense, but by miracle in the new scientific sense 
— by the immanence and ceaseless activity of the 
creative energy in the physical world about us— 
in the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air 
currents, and in the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hy- 
drogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime, iron, silex, phos- 
phorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its 
laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its 
affinities, its likes and dislikes, and life is bound up 
with all of them. ,If we hypothesize the ether to 
explain certain phenomena, why should we not 
hypothesize a vital force to account for other mys- 
teries? 
The inorganic passes into the organic ‘as night 
Q11 
