ent, the struggle for existence, and
the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent
tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution?
Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate
species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a
species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of the
rocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession in
geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.

Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the result
of a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees the
creative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe in
something like this to account for the world as we see it? And to
account for us also?--a universal mind or intelligence

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mystery
in terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and the
thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire
and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not
look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the
origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said,
speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they
"have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great
philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind
grouping of irrational forces.

VI. A LIVE WORLD

It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked
upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this
world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."
But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a
disordered mind.

Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on
the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living
organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and
palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms
do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held
in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast
sidereal tree, that