, or seeing two
worlds instead of one, as our unscientific fathers did--an immaterial or
spiritual world surrounding and interpenetrating the physical world, or
the supernatural enveloping and directing the natural. He sees but one
world, and that a world complete in itself; surrounded, it is true, by
invisible forces, and holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; a
vastly more complex and wonderful world than our fathers ever dreamed
of; a fruit, as it were, of the great sidereal tree, bound by natal
bonds to myriads of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead or
behind them in its ripening, but still complete in itself, needing no
miracle to explain it, no spirits or demons to account for its
processes, not even its vital processes.

In the light of what he knows of the past history of the earth, the man
of science sees with his mind's eye the successive changes that have
taken place in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent matter
rolling through space; he sees the crust cooling and hardening; he sees
the waters appear, the air and the soil appear, he sees the clouds begin
to form and the rain to fall, he sees living things appear in the
waters, then upon the land, and in the air; he sees the two forms of
life arise, the vegetable and the animal, the latter standing upon the
former; he sees more and more complex forms of both vegetable and animal
arise and cover the earth. They all appear in the course of the geologic
ages on the surface of the earth; they arise out of it; they are a part
of it; they come naturally; no hand reaches down from heaven and places
them there; they are not an addendum; they are not a sudden creation;
they are an evolution; they were potential in the earth before they
arose out of it. The earth ripened, her crust mellowed, and thickened,
her airs softened and cleared, her waters were purified, and in due time
her finer fruits were evolved, and, last of all, man arose. It was all
one process. There was no miracle, no first day of creation; all were
days of creation. Brooded by the sun, the earth hatched her offspring;
the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life was in the earth
herself; her womb was fertile from the first. All that we call the
spiritual, the divine, the celestial, were hers, because man is hers.
Our religions and our philosophies and our literatures are hers; man is
a part of the whole system of things; he is not an alien, nor an
accident, nor an interl