“Men ask how did life appear in the world. For myself, I believe that life was created by the explosion, so to speak, of this world energy, which, bound down by the limitations it had reached in the inorganic world, burst the rigid bonds of its prison and found a new field for its labour in the construction of the higher organic world.—And, in parenthesis, let me say that I believe when this same energy reaches rigid limitations in the organic world, it will burst those limits and find its field in a world as yet unknown. “However that may be, I propose to deal only with known facts, and the surest fact on earth is this, that when the first vague sketches of life appeared in the sea, they existed not by the virtue of chemistry, nor the virtue of the life that was in them, but by the virtue of the steadily working benignity of the world energy that had constructed their home. [Sidenote: Conditions] “To me more wonderful than the creation of life is the creation of those external conditions that made life possible. They collectively formed the mould in which life was cast. “Now, in my sketch of the creation of the sun and planets I have just hinted what the brain can scarcely guess—the scenes of fiery storm and horror that preceded the welding of the world into a solid whole and the birth of the conditions that made life possible. But these are less halting to thought than the scenes of ferocity that filled the earth when life awoke, raging and tempestuous, and form began to devour form as though the world energy were eating its way through all forms to reach the form of man. And that is, in fact, the truth. Man has been reached by teeth just as the hills have been reached by fire. And not only man. The dove that was once a pterodactyl, the dog that was once a wolf, the cat that was once a tiger, and a thousand other things once terrible, thoughtless and ferocious, all these have come along the very path that the hills and the seas came along in their making—the path from negation and through ferocity to the benign. “Now, can you not see why the fact that I was once a swimming reptile,—just as you were—devouring other reptiles, is a fact that I would not barter for all fancies? for by its light and by what astronomy and geology and the other sciences tell me I can see that the world, taken as a whole, has a glorious and definite meaning. [Sidenote: The World Spirit]