biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows
and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they
are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature
interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her
terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her
presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him
his susceptibility to beauty.

It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in
the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall
into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the
flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in
the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot
of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn,
the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no
resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the
laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of
brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.

The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul
through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's
color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is
in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and
the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of
physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the
perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that
apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret
the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in
the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the
huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or
Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's
mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.

All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an
unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of
ch