LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
putting on and off form after form, till man appears 
at the end of the series. 
This is the ministry of physical science, to reveal 
to us the divinity that lurks in the ground under- 
foot. We do not so much need its services to point 
out the glory and grandeur overhead. In all ages 
man has been aware of this; but the soil he treads, 
the bodies that impede his way, he has spurned with 
his foot; they were anathema to him. They were the 
antithesis of spirit, and his enemy. The heavens 
declared the glory of God because they were so far 
off; near at hand, they were of the earth, earthy. 
Science teaches us that the earth is a celestial body 
also, and that there is no better or finer stuff in 
the heavens above than in the earth beneath, and 
Whitman’s lines indicate this fact — 
“Underneath, the divine soil, 
Overhead, the sun.” 
But the moral and religious import of this stupen- 
dous truth has not yet influenced our habits of 
thought; we are still the prisoners of the old dualism. 
I 
As I have said, the two types of mind, the scien- 
tific and the artistic, the analytic and the synthetic, — 
look upon nature and life with quite different eyes. 
Wordsworth said of his poet that he was quite “con- 
tented to enjoy what others understood.” When 
Whitman, as he records in one of his poems, fled 
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