EARLY YOUTH 19 



flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. He is its 

 child. A thousand tongues proclaim the truth to 

 him, a naive, almost simple, revelation of reality. 

 He digs in the earth, and ancient bones and skulls 

 tell him vaguely of the past. Such once was he, 

 devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal 

 world. He searches his frame through and 

 through for further light. There is the brain, 

 where the thoughts crowd together. There is the 

 cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that 

 so closely resembles the lowest of all living 

 things, not yet distinct enough to be either 

 animal or plant. Here are the forms that he 

 successively assumes in his mother's body, before 

 he is born — forms that can hardly be distinguished 

 from those of the animal at the same stage of 

 development. From almost divine heights he has 

 sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell — nay, 

 deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled 

 matter of the universe. 



But this early picture dissolves at once in an 

 ennobling and inspiring truth. Nature becomes 

 man. In this he presses once more to the heart 

 of the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang 

 of God-Nature. The new God pulses in every 

 wave of man's blood. In Michael Angelo's picture 

 God breathes his spirit into Adam. The new 

 Adam of the nineteenth century is God's spirit, in 

 body and soul, from the very first, for he is 

 Nature. He needs no more. When he looks up 

 to the shining stars, he looks into the eyes of God 

 and his own. He has come down from those stars 



