s far off and
unattainable. Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms of
matter and energy, that it is not to be wondered at that mankind has so
long looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event.
But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial and
the terrestrial are one, and that we are already in the heavens among
the stars. When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of wont and
use, and see with clear vision our relations to the Cosmos, all our
ideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over, and we see how the
two are one; how life and death play into each other's hands, and how
the whole truth of things cannot be compassed by any number of finite
minds.

III

When we are bold enough to ask the question, Is life an addition to
matter or an evolution from matter? how all these extra-scientific
theories about life as a separate entity wilt and fade away! If we know
anything about the ways of creative energy, we know that they are not as
our ways; we know its processes bear no analogy to the linear and
external doings of man. Creative energy works from within; it identifies
itself with, and is inseparable from, the element in which it works. I
know that in this very statement I am idealizing the creative energy,
but my reader will, I trust, excuse this inevitable anthropomorphism.
The way of the creative energy is the way of evolution. When we begin to
introduce things, when we begin to separate the two orders, the vital
and the material, or, as Bergson says, when we begin to think of things
created, and of a thing that creates, we are not far from the state of
mind of our childhood, and of the childhood of the race. We are not far
from the Mosaic account of creation. Life appears as an introduction,
man and his soul as introductions.

Our reason, our knowledge of the method of Nature, declare for
evolution; because here we are, here is this amazing world of life about
us, and here it goes on through the action and interaction of purely
physical and chemical forces. Life seems as natural as day and night,
as the dews and the rain. Our studies of the past history of the globe
reveal the fact that life appeared upon a cooling planet when the
temperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbon
dioxide, were at hand. How it began, whether through insensible changes
in the activities of inert matter, lasting whole geologic ages, or by a