nts.

One sees with his mind's eye this stream of energy, which we name the
material universe, flowing down the endless cycles of time; at a certain
point in its course, a change comes over its surface; what we call life
appears, and assumes many forms; at a point farther along in its course,
life disappears, and the eternal river flows on regardless, till, at
some other point, the same changes take place again. Life is inseparable
from this river of energy, but it is not coextensive with it, either in
time or in space.

In midsummer what river-men call "the blossoming of the water" takes
place in the Hudson River; the water is full of minute vegetable
organisms; they are seasonal and temporary; they are born of the
midsummer heats. By and by the water is clear again. Life in the
universe seems as seasonal and fugitive as this blossoming of the
water. More and more does science hold us to the view of the unity of
nature--that the universe of life and matter and force is all natural or
all supernatural, it matters little which you call it, but it is not
both. One need not go away from his own doorstep to find mysteries
enough to last him a lifetime, but he will find them in his own body, in
the ground upon which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in the
invisible forces that play around him. We may marvel how the delicate
color and perfume of the flower could come by way of the root and stalk
of the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth to the
rainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious metals and stones arise from
the flux of the baser elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and finds
itself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not invoke the
supernatural to account for these things.

It is certain that in the human scale of values the spirituality of man
far transcends anything in the animal or physical world, but that even
that came by the road of evolution, is, indeed, the flowering of ruder
and cruder powers and attributes of the life below us, I cannot for a
moment doubt. Call it a transmutation or a metamorphosis, if you will;
it is still within the domain of the natural. The spiritual always has
its root and genesis in the physical. We do not degrade the spiritual in
such a conception; we open our eyes to the spirituality of the
physical. And this is what science has always been doing and is doing
more and more--making us familiar with marvelous and transcendent powers
that hedge us about and