inseparably blended; that the celestial and the terrestrial are
under the same law; that we can never be any more in the heavens
than we are here and now, nor any nearer the final sources of life
and power; that the divine is underfoot as well as overhead; that we
are part and parcel of the physical universe, and take our chances
in the cosmic processes the same as the rest, and draw upon the same
fund of animal life that the other creatures do. We are identified
with the worm underfoot no less than with the stars overhead. We are
not degraded by such a thought, but the whole of creation is lifted
up. Our minds and bodies are not less divine, but all things are
more divine. We have to gird up our loins and try to summon strength
to see this tremendous universe as it is, alive and divine to the
last particle and embosomed in the Infinite.
II
Evolution is not the final explanation of the universe, but it is
probably the largest generalization of the modern mind. Science has
to start somewhere, and it starts with the universe as it finds it
and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; the evolutionist
seeks to trace the footsteps of creative energy in the world of
animal life. How did God make man? Out of the dust of the earth,
says the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches essentially
the same thing, only he does not abridge the process as the
catechism has abridged it for us; he would fain unfold the whole
long road that man has traveled from the first protozoic cell to the
vast communities of cells that now make up his physical life. He
would show how man has risen on stepping-stones of his dead self.
These stepping-stones have been the animal forms below him. In them
and through them something, some impulse, some force, has mounted
and mounted through all the enormous lapse of geologic time. In
imagination we see the dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling in
a vast number of earlier forms. He has struggled upward through the
invertebrates, through the fish, through the reptile, through the
lower mammals, through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goal
in the man we know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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