FIELD AND STUDY 



can find no other. The whole procession proceeds 

 according to natural law. No hand is reached forth 

 out of the void arbitrarily to change anything, or to 

 introduce anything, or to interfere with the regular 

 order. Everything has its antecedent, or refers to 

 something gone before. Nothing begins de novo. 

 We appear and play our part in a series of events 

 which we fancy must have had a beginning and 

 which will have an ending, but we deceive ourselves; 

 we measure the infinite by the finite; there is no 

 beginning or ending to the universe, there is only 

 continuance with incessant change. The earth did 

 not begin as the world we know;; it did not begin as 

 we find it in any past geologic age, or astronomic 

 age. It probably came out of the sun, and it came 

 out of a vast cyclone of star dust; and it came out of 

 what? Be assured out of some preceding condition 

 of eternal matter. 



§ 



The change of man's attitude toward nature is 

 one of the most, if not the most, remarkable changes 

 in his mental and spiritual story in modern times. 

 It amounts to a revolution. Whathe once feared and 

 fled from, he now loves and studies and endows with 

 a high degree of religious and spiritual value. 



The fields, the woods, the waters, the starry 

 night, have an attraction and a meaning to the mod- 

 ern mind that the mind of the prerscientific ages had 

 no conception of. 



244 



