THE PRIMAL MIND 



other, as they are at this moment upon this war- 

 scarred planet! Astronomy and geology grind away 

 at their everlasting tasks, but biology is as a flower 

 that Cometh in a day and on the morrow is cut down. 

 Our greedy anthropomorphism sees the whole imi- 

 verse travailing in pain to bring forth man — sees 

 him as the sum and purpose of it all; but clearly the 

 cosmic gods have taken very little thought about 

 him; if his patrimony is this vast sidereal province, 

 he is likely to come into possession of a very small 

 part of it. He is of secondary importance, as are all 

 forms of life, though he alone can assign each god 

 his rank and sit in judgment in the council-chamber 

 of the Infinite. 



I am only trying to see with modern eyes, and in 

 the light of modern science, what the old Hebrew 

 seers and prophets saw so long ago — the littleness 

 of man, and his brief, uncertain foothold in the total 

 scheme of things. His glory is that he is a part, an 

 infinitesimal part, of this total scheme, and that 

 with his finite miud he can to some extent grasp and 

 measure it. The secret of his relation to it, the close- 

 ness of his kinship with it, whether he came out of 

 it through the inevitable operation of natural laws, 

 or was grafted upon it by an omnipotent power 

 external to it, is a question that opens up a line of 

 inquiry of which he never tires. 



Is it possible to reconcile the revelations of astron- 

 omy, of geology, of palaeontology, — the waste, the 

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