When the man of science seeks to understand and explain the world in
which we live, he guards himself against seeing double, or seeing two
worlds instead of one, as our unscientific fathers did--an immaterial or
spiritual world surrounding and interpenetrating the physical world, or
the supernatural enveloping and directing the natural. He sees but one
world, and that a world complete in itself; surrounded, it is true, by
invisible forces, and holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; a
vastly more complex and wonderful world than our fathers ever dreamed
of; a fruit, as it were, of the great sidereal tree, bound by natal
bonds to myriads of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead or
behind them in its ripening, but still complete in itself, needing no
miracle to explain it, no spirits or demons to account for its
processes, not even its vital processes.
In the light of what he knows of the past history of the earth, the man
of science sees with his mind's eye the successive changes that have
taken place in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent matter
rolling through space; he sees the crust cooling and hardening; he sees
the waters appear, the air and the soil appear, he sees the clouds begin
to form and the rain to fall, he sees living things appear in the
waters, then upon the land, and in the air; he sees the two forms of
life arise, the vegetable and the animal, the latter standing upon the
former; he sees more and more complex forms of both vegetable and animal
arise and cover the earth. They all appear in the course of the geologic
ages on the surface of the earth; they arise out of it; they are a part
of it; they come naturally; no hand reaches down from heaven and places
them there; they are not an addendum; they are not a sudden creation;
they are an evolution; they were potential in the earth before they
arose out of it. The earth ripened, her crust mellowed, and thickened,
her airs softened and cleared, her waters were purified, and in due time
her finer fruits were evolved, and, last of all, man arose. It was all
one process. There was no miracle, no first day of creation; all were
days of creation. Brooded by the sun, the earth hatched her offspring;
the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life was in the earth
herself; her womb was fertile from the first. All that we call the
spiritual, the divine, the celestial, were hers, because man is hers.
Our religions and our philosophies and our literatures are hers; man is
a part of the whole system of things; he is not an alien, nor an
accident, nor an interloper; he is here as the rains, the dews, the
flowers, the rocks, the soil, the trees, are here. He appeared when the
time was ripe, and he will disappear when the time is over-ripe. He is
of the same stuff as the ground he walks upon; there is no better stuff
in the heavens above him, nor in the depths below him, than sticks to
his own ribs. The celestial and the terrestrial forces unite and work
together in him, as in all other creatures. We cannot magnify man
without magnifying the universe of which he is a part; and we cannot
belittle it without belittling him.
Now we can turn all this about and look upon it as mankind looked upon
it in the prescientific ages, and as so many persons still look upon it,
and think of it all as the work of external and higher powers. We can
think of the earth as the footstool of some god, or the sport of some
demon; we can people the earth and the air with innumerable spirits,
high and low; we can think of life as something apart from matter. But
science will not, cannot follow us; it cannot discredit the world it has
disclosed--I had almost said, the world it has created. Science has made
us at home in the universe. It has visited the farthest stars with its
telescope and spectroscope, and finds we are all akin. It has sounded
the depths of matter with its analysis, and it finds nothing alien to
our own bodies. It sees motion everywhere, motion within motion,
transformation, metamorphosis everywhere, energy everywhere, currents
and counter-currents everywhere, ceaseless change everywhere; it finds
nothing in the heavens more spiritual, more mysterious, more celestial,
more godlike, than it finds upon this earth. This does not imply that
evolution may not have progressed farther upon other worlds, and given
rise to a higher order of intelligences than here; it only implies that
creation is one, and that the same forces, the same elements and
possibilities, exist everywhere.