NATURAL VERSUS SUPERNATURAL

A further word must be said as to this word "natural," and its
complementary word "supernatural." I have said in an early chapter that
prehistoric man came, through a use of false inductions, to the belief
in supernatural powers. Let us examine this statement in some detail,
for it will throw much light on our later studies. The thing to get
clearly in mind is the idea that when we say "natural" phenomena we
mean merely phenomena that have been observed to occur. From a truly
scientific stand-point there is no preconception as to what manner
of phenomenon may, or may not, occur. All manner of things do occur
constantly that would seem improbable were they not matters of
familiar knowledge. The simplest facts in regard to gravitation involve
difficulties that were stumbling-blocks to many generations of thinkers,
and which continue stumbling-blocks to the minds of each generation of
present-day children.

Thus most of us can recall a time when we first learned with
astonishment that the earth is "round like a ball"; that there are
people walking about on the other side of the world with their feet
towards ours, and that the world itself is rushing through space
and spinning rapidly about as it goes. Then we learn, further, that
numberless familiar phenomena would be quite different could we be
transported to other globes. That, for example, a man who can spring two
or three feet into the air here would be able, with the same muscular
exertion, to vault almost to the house-tops if he lived on a small
planet like the moon; but, on the other hand, would be held prone by his
own weight if transported to a great planet like Jupiter.

When, further, we reflect that with all our capacity to measure
and estimate this strange force of gravitation we, after all, know
absolutely nothing as to its real nature; that we cannot even imagine
how one portion of matter can act on another across an infinite abysm
(or, for that matter, across the smallest space), we see at once that
our most elementary scientific studies bring us into the presence of
inscrutable mysteries. In whatever direction we turn this view is
but emphasized. Electricity, magnetism, the hypothetical ether, the
inscrutable forces manifested everywhere in the biological field--all
these are, as regard their ultimate nature, altogether mysterious.

In a word, the student of nature is dealing everywhere with the
wonderful, the incomprehe