Give free rein to our anthropomorphic tendencies, and we fill the world with spirits, good and bad—­bad in war, famine, pestilence, disease; good in all the events and fortunes that favor us.  Early man did this on all occasions; he read his own hopes and fears and passions into all the operations of nature.  Our fathers did it in many things; good people of our own time do it in exceptional instances, and credit any good fortune to Providence.  Men high in the intellectual and philosophical world, still invoke something antithetical to matter, to account for the appearance of life on the planet.

It may be justly urged that the effect upon our habits of thought of the long ages during which this process has been going on, leading us to differentiate matter and spirit and look upon them as two opposite entities, hindering or contending with each other,—­one heavenly, the other earthly, one everlasting, the other perishable, one the supreme good, the other the seat and parent of all that is evil,—­the cumulative effect of this habit of thought in the race-mind is, I say, not easily changed or overcome.  We still think, and probably many of us always will think, of spirit as something alien to matter, something mystical, transcendental, and not of this world.  We look upon matter as gross, obstructive, and the enemy of the spirit.  We do not know how we are going to get along without it, but we solace ourselves with the thought that by and by, in some other, non-material world, we shall get along without it, and experience a great expansion of life by reason of our emancipation from it.  Our practical life upon this planet is more or less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; of its true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change and transformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell us nothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed in radio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, they tell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could not see or live at all, they tell us nothing.  In fact we live and move and have our being in a complex of forces and tendencies of which, even by the aid of science, we but see as through a glass darkly.  Of the effluence of things, the emanations from the minds and bodies of our friends, and from other living forms about us, from the heavens above and from the earth below, our daily lives tell us nothing, any more than our eyes tell us of the invisible rays in the sun’s spectrum, or than our ears tell us of the murmurs of the life-currents in growing things.  Science alone unveils the hidden wonders and sleepless activities of the world forces that play through us and about us.  It alone brings the heavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds.  It alone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendly powers wait upon him day and night.  It alone shows him the glories and the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar ground—­we cannot get away from home.