the play and transformations of matter and energy that are
taking place all around us; though it seems a long and impossible road
from mere chemistry to the body and soul of man. But if life, with all
that has come out of it, did not come by way of matter and energy, by
what way did it come? Must we have recourse to the so-called
supernatural?--as Emerson's line puts it,--

"When half-gods go, the gods arrive."

When our traditional conception of matter as essentially vulgar and
obstructive and the enemy of the spirit gives place to the new
scientific conception of it as at bottom electrical and all-potent, we
may find the poet's great line come true, and that for a thing to be
natural, is to be divine. For my own part, I do not see how we can get
intelligence out of matter unless we postulate intelligence in matter.
Any system of philosophy that sees in the organic world only a
fortuitous concourse of chemical atoms, repels me, though the
contradiction here implied is not easily cleared up. The theory of life
as a chemical reaction and nothing more does not interest me, but I am
attracted by that conception of life which, while binding it to the
material order, sees in the organic more than the physics and chemistry
of the inorganic--call it whatever name you will--vitalism, idealism, or
dualism.

In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theodore Parker did, of the
universe as a "handful of dust which God enchants," or we may speak of
it, as Goethe did, as "the living garment of God"; but as men of
science we can see it only as a vast complex of forces, out of which man
has arisen, and of which he forms a part. We are not to forget that we
are a part of it, and that the more we magnify ourselves, the more we
magnify it; that its glory is our glory, and our glory its glory,
because we are its children. In some way utterly beyond the reach of
science to explain, or of philosophy to confirm, we have come out of it,
and all we are or can be, is, or has been, potential in it.

IX

The evolution of life is, of course, bound up with the evolution of the
world. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higher
and higher forms--forms with larger and larger brains and more and more
complex nerve mechanisms--have appeared.

Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primary
elements--hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and the
like--takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperat