ermit-saint who would influence others to do as he.

FATE AND ANTI-FATE

In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the
smallest things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the great
suns and stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a swirl in
the primeval ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, cities,
empires, elements of an increasing complexity, through stages of a
relative stability, like lead or gold. Until it reaches the stage of
integration which wills its own disintegration, that we have been
taught to look upon with proper awe and reverence as radium. And we
are told that nebulae wander until they collide and give birth to
stars, stars wander and collide and give birth to nebulae. Life begins
as a quivering colloid, goes on painfully to build a brain, which
automatically refines itself to the point of discovering and using
the most efficient methods of destroying others, and by a boomerang
effect, itself. Fate!

The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula for
tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and effect
within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp and ken,
or power to modify, originated with them. But they must also be given
the credit for having conceived an idea and started a process which,
at first slowly and gropingly, now slipping and falling, torn and
bleeding among the thorns of the dark forest of human motives,
presently goes on, with a firmer, more practiced, more confident step,
to emerge into the light as the deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That
idea-process, this Anti-Fate is Science.

Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, who
revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics
concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the
priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know
anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, the
Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation
of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research
and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the
essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of
Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life,
undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain
cells.

Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by
men with very small intentions