Though the secret of life is under our feet, yet how strange and mysterious it seems!  It draws our attention away from matter.  It arises among the inorganic elements like a visitant from another sphere.  It is a new thing in the world.  Consciousness is a new thing, yet Huxley makes it one of his trinity of realities—­matter, energy, and consciousness.  We are so immersed in these realities that we do not see the divinity they embody.  We call that sacred and divine which is far off and unattainable.  Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms of matter and energy, that it is not to be wondered at that mankind has so long looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event.  But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial and the terrestrial are one, and that we are already in the heavens among the stars.  When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of wont and use, and see with clear vision our relations to the Cosmos, all our ideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over, and we see how the two are one; how life and death play into each other’s hands, and how the whole truth of things cannot be compassed by any number of finite minds.

III

When we are bold enough to ask the question, Is life an addition to matter or an evolution from matter? how all these extra-scientific theories about life as a separate entity wilt and fade away!  If we know anything about the ways of creative energy, we know that they are not as our ways; we know its processes bear no analogy to the linear and external doings of man.  Creative energy works from within; it identifies itself with, and is inseparable from, the element in which it works.  I know that in this very statement I am idealizing the creative energy, but my reader will, I trust, excuse this inevitable anthropomorphism.  The way of the creative energy is the way of evolution.  When we begin to introduce things, when we begin to separate the two orders, the vital and the material, or, as Bergson says, when we begin to think of things created, and of a thing that creates, we are not far from the state of mind of our childhood, and of the childhood of the race.  We are not far from the Mosaic account of creation.  Life appears as an introduction, man and his soul as introductions.

Our reason, our knowledge of the method of Nature, declare for evolution; because here we are, here is this amazing world of life about us, and here it goes on through the action and interaction of purely physical and chemical forces.  Life seems as natural as day and night, as the dews and the rain.  Our studies of the past history of the globe reveal the fact that life appeared upon a cooling planet when the temperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbon dioxide, were at hand.  How it began, whether through insensible changes in the activities of inert matter, lasting whole geologic ages, or by