a sudden transformation at many points on the earth’s surface, we can never know.  But science can see no reason for believing that its beginning was other than natural; it was inevitable from the constitution of matter itself.  Moreover, since the law of evolution seems of universal application, and affords the key to more great problems than any other generalization of the human mind, one would say on a priori grounds that life is an evolution, that its genesis is to be sought in the inherent capacities and potentialities of matter itself.  How else could it come?  Science cannot go outside of matter and its laws for an explanation of any phenomena that appear in matter.  It goes inside of matter instead, and in its mysterious molecular attractions and repulsions, in the whirl and dance of the atoms and electrons, in their emanations and transformations, in their amazing potencies and activities, sees, or seems to see, the secret of the origin of life itself.  But this view is distasteful to a large number of thinking persons.  Many would call it frank materialism, and declare that it is utterly inadequate to supply the spiritual and ideal background which is the strength and solace of our human life.

IV

The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man of science feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of the natural order.  To the scientist the universe is complete in itself.  He can admit of no break or discontinuity anywhere.  Threads of relation, visible and invisible,—­chemical, mechanical, electric, magnetic, solar, lunar, stellar, geologic, biologic,—­forming an intricate web of subtle forces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmic unity.  Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere which rests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds all forms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning and no ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines are fluid and continuous.  The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy we see are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war with itself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to the universe, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit; all is inside; deep beneath deep, height above height, and this mystery and miracle that we call life must arise out of the natural order in the course of time as inevitably as the dew forms and the rain falls.  When the rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall,—­a time which science predicts,—­then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish from the earth.  Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves, as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still not exempt from the operation of the universal physical laws.  It came by them or through them, and it must go by them or through them.