Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/279

Rh hundreds of times, but I never look at them without wonder. And, if you allow me a moment's diversion, I would say that I have stood in the spring-time and looked upon the sprouting foliage, the grass, and the flowers, and the general joy of opening life; and in my ignorance of it all I have asked myself whether there is no power, being, or thing, in the universe whose knowledge of that of which I am so ignorant is greater than mine. I have asked myself, Can it be possible that man's knowledge is the greatest knowledge—that man's life is the highest life? My friends, the profession of that atheism with which I am sometimes so lightly charged would, in my case, be an impossible answer to this question: only slightly preferable to that fierce and distorted theism which I have had lately reason to know still reigns rampant in some minds as the survival of a more ferocious age.

Everywhere throughout our planet we notice this tendency of the ultimate particles of matter to run into symmetric forms. The very molecules seem instinct with a desire for union and growth. How far does this play of molecular power depend? Does it give us the movement of the sap in trees? Assuredly it does. Does it give us, in ourselves, the warmth of the body and the circulation of the blood, and all that thereon depend? We are here upon the edge of a battle-field which I do not intend to enter to-night; from which, indeed, I have just escaped bespattered and begrimed, but without much loss of heart or hope. It only remains for me to briefly indicate the positions of the opposing hosts. From the processes of crystallization which you have just seen, you pass by almost imperceptible gradations to the lowest vegetable organisms, and from these through higher ones up to the highest. The opposition to which I have referred is: that whereas one class of thinkers regard the observed advance from the crystalline through the vegetable and animal worlds as an unbroken process of natural growth, thus grasping the world, inorganic and organic, as one vast and indissolubly connected whole, the other class suppose that the passage from the inorganic to the organic required a distinct creative act, and that to produce the different forms, both in the world of fossils and in the world of living things, creative acts were also needed. If you look abroad you will find men of equal honesty, earnestness, and intelligence, taking opposite sides as regards this question. Which are right and which are wrong is, I submit, a problem for reasonable and grave discussion, and not for anger and hard names. The question cannot be solved—it cannot even be shelved—by angry abuse. Nor can it be solved by appeals to hopes and fears—to what we lose or gain here or hereafter by joining the one or the other side. The bribe of eternity itself, were it possible to offer it, could not prevent the human mind from closing with the truth. Skepticism is at the root of our fears. I mean that skepticism which holds that human nature, being essentially corrupt and vile, will go