Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Louise Pattison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THROUGH NATURE TO GOD BY JOHN FISKE _Soyez comme l'oiseau posé pour un instant Sur des rameaux trop frêles, Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant, Sachant qu'il a des ailes!_ VICTOR HUGO [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN FISKE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO THE BELOVED AND REVERED MEMORY OF MY FRIEND THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY THIS BOOK IS CONSECRATED [Illustration] PREFACE A single purpose runs throughout this little book, though different aspects of it are treated in the three several parts. The first part, "The Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The Idea of God," was designed to supply some considerations which for the sake of conciseness had been omitted from that book. Its close kinship with the second part, "The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice," will be at once apparent to the reader. That second part is, with a few slight changes, the Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered by me at Harvard University, in June, 1895. Its original title was "Ethics in the Cosmic Process," and its form of statement was partly determined by the fact that it was intended as a reply to Huxley's famous Romanes lecture delivered at the University of Oxford in 1893. Readers of "The Destiny of Man" will observe that I have here repeated a portion of the argument of that book. The detection of the part played by the lengthening of infancy in the genesis of the human race is my own especial contribution to the Doctrine of Evolution, so that I naturally feel somewhat uncertain as to how far that subject is generally understood, and how far a brief allusion to it will suffice. It therefore seemed best to recapitulate the argument while indicating its bearing upon the ethics of the Cosmic Process.