mpede or mar him. The very forces that
uphold him and furnish him his armory of tools and of power, will
destroy him the moment he is off his guard. He is like the trainer of
wild beasts who, at his peril, for one instant relaxes his mastery over
them. Gravity, electricity, fire, flood, hurricane, will crush or
consume him if his hand is unsteady or his wits tardy. Nature has dealt
with him upon the same terms as with all other forms of life. She has
shown him no favor. The same elements--the same water, air, lime, iron,
sulphur, oxygen, carbon, and so on--make up his body and his brain as
make up theirs, and the same make up theirs as are the constituents of
the insensate rocks, soils, and clouds. The same elements, the same
atoms and molecules, but a different order; the same solar energy, but
working to other ends; the same life principle but lifted to a higher
plane. How can we separate man from the total system of things, setting
him upon one side and them upon another, making the relation of the two
mechanical or accidental? It is only in thought, or in obedience to some
creed or philosophy, that we do it. In life, in action, we unconsciously
recognize ourselves as a part of Nature. Our success and well-being
depend upon the closeness and spontaneousness of the relation.

If all this is interpreted to mean that life, that the mind and soul of
man, are of material origin, science does not shrink from the inference.
Only the inference demands a newer and higher conception of matter--the
conception that Tyndall expressed when he wrote the word with a capital
M, and declared that Matter was "at bottom essentially mystical and
transcendental"; that Goethe expressed when he called matter "the living
garment of God"; and that Whitman expressed when he said that the soul
and the body were one. The materialism of the great seers and prophets
of science who penetrate into the true inwardness of matter, who see
through the veil of its gross obstructive forms and behold it translated
into pure energy, need disturb no one.

In our religious culture we have beggared matter that we might exalt
spirit; we have bankrupted earth that we might enrich heaven; we have
debased the body that we might glorify the soul. But science has changed
all this. Mankind can never again rest in the old crude dualism. The
Devil has had his day, and the terrible Hebrew Jehovah has had his day;
the divinities of this world are now having their day.