TIME AND CHANGE 
achieve intellectual appreciation in man. While 
all nature below man is wise only to its own ends 
and goes its appointed way as void of self-conscious- 
ness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows, 
the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom 
and turns upon itself and upon the universe the 
power of objective thought; it alone achieves un- 
derstanding. 
In our studies of life and of the universe as soon 
as we begin to bridge chasms by an appeal to the 
miraculous, or to the extra-natural powers, we are 
traitors to the scientific spirit which we seek to serve. 
There are many things that science cannot explain. 
Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate 
explanation of anything. It can do little more than 
tell us of the action, the interaction, and the reac- 
tion of things, but of the things themselves, their 
origin and ultimate nature, or the source of the laws 
that govern them, what does it or what can it know? 
Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits 
the earth after countless generations of animals and 
plants, and the beneficent forces of wind and rain, 
air and sky, have in the course of millions of years 
prepared it for him. His body has been built for 
him through the lives and struggles of the countless 
beings who are in the line of his long descent; his 
mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the 
mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and 
unthinking animals that went before him. In the 
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