mystery enough to stagger any scientific mind. It
is not the volume of the change; it is the quality or kind. Chemistry
and mechanics we have always known, and they always remain chemistry and
mechanics. They go into our laboratories and through our devices
chemistry and mechanics, and they come out chemistry and mechanics. They
will never come out life, conjure with them as we will, and we can get
no other result. We cannot inaugurate the mystic dance among the atoms
that will give us the least throb of life.

The psychic arises out of the organic and the organic arises out of the
inorganic, and the inorganic arises out of--what? The relation of each
to the other is as intimate as that of the soul to the body; we cannot
get between them even in thought, but the difference is one of kind and
not of degree. The vital transcends the mechanical, and the psychic
transcends the vital--is on another plane, and yet without the sun's
energy there could be neither. Thus are things knit together; thus does
one thing flow out of or bloom out of another. We date from the rocks,
and the rocks date from the fiery nebulae, and the loom in which the
texture of our lives was woven is the great loom of vital energy about
us and in us; but what hand guided the shuttle and invented the
pattern--who knows?

III

A WONDERFUL WORLD

I

Science recognizes a more fundamental world than that of matter. This is
the electro-magnetic world which underlies the material world and which,
as Professor Soddy says, probably completely embraces it, and has no
mechanical analogy. To those accustomed only to the grosser ideas of
matter and its motions, says the British scientist, this
electro-magnetic world is as difficult to conceive of as it would be for
us to walk upon air. Yet many times in our lives is this world in
overwhelming evidence before us. During a thunderstorm we get an inkling
of how fearfully and wonderfully the universe in which we live is made,
and what energy and activity its apparent passivity and opacity mark. A
flash of lightning out of a storm-cloud seems instantly to transform the
whole passive universe into a terrible living power. This slow, opaque,
indifferent matter about us and above us, going its silent or noisy
round of mechanical and chemical change, ponderable, insensate,
obstructive, slumbering in the rocks, quietly active in the soil, gently
rustling in the trees, sweetly purling in the brooks, slowly, invis