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 uni- 
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 mind 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 paleeontology, — the waste, the 
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