Physical science is itself only a specialized branch of universal science. no longer hunt for the philosopher's stone, for the secret of the renewal of youth, or for a method of attaining perpetual motion. The investigator of nature has ceased to look for power, and is content with process. He does not peer into a gland with his microscope in the hope of finding ego there. In tent on the secret of the origin of life, he has given up the idea that the living proceeds from the non-living without the intervention of pre ceding life.
(3) Illustrations. The story of the flood is to him a matter of serious study. The student of comparative philology is prepared to detect in the simple story of Babel some strange intervention, which may account for the remarkable divergence of human language. The crossing of the Red Sca is now' regarded as a fact, not fiction. The ancient Biblical law of heredity has emerged as a scientific discovery.
Parthenogenesis is a familiar topic to the nat uralist, and perhaps supplies an illustration of one of the most mysterious facts of Christianity, whilst another mystery—that which concerns the Triune God—may at least be symbolized by the presence of several sense centers in one organ ism in what are usually regarded as among the most primitive kinds of animated life.
One is inclined to ask : is evolution a law? Is it final ? Or is it an ad interim speculation -,elp ful and suggestive, and calculated to lead up to something which may have more of finality about it? There is a tendency in Bible readers to disre gard the processes of nature on the ground that the Scriptures claim all nature as under direct Divine administration; and there is a counter tendency of science to economize the Divine action to the uttermost, to push it back into the region of the prehistoric and mythical whence it fades from view altogether. A careless student might imagine that by the discovery of the law called conservation of energy there was neither room nor need left for God in the universe. But those who first announced this law did not drift to an athe istic conclusion. The more one speculates on these things the more one sees that conservation of energy simply means conservation of physical energy, and only applies to one side of existence, the same being the rase with the earlier discov ery of the correlation of the physical forces and its offspring, the continuity of physical force.
The substitute for creative action is automatic action. But automatic action, which in its true sense is as old as the Greek Testament, by no means dispenses with a preceding intelligence and force.
All machinery, even the machinery of the uni verse, is the product of intelligence and of power.
(4) Results. We are thus led to a more full apprehension from a strictly scientific point of view of the mental and spiritual side of human nature.
We come to believe that every human being is on the border of two worlds; he belongs to both, and both belong to him. Ile is the true meeting place between them.
Another desideratum is a free and full historical inquiry into the original nature and position of man. \Vhilst the tendency of geology is to reduce the time needed for mans first appearance to a comparatively modern period, the archaeologist is pushing up the age of literature and civiliza tion until it is almost within sight of the era of primeval man.
It would be strange if, after all, the earliest evidences of the existence of man should point to a time when the traces of his mental powers were particularly conspicuous. And yet such a conclusion is within the bounds of possibility.
It is, to say the least, conceivable that the spe cial force which caused the first real man to be— whether that force worked through slow grada tions or in the twinkling of an eye—may have prepared him for his unique position as a master upon earth by making him inventive and adaptive, long-lived and strong, to a degree which we can not now easily comprehend.
The materials in the hand of the anthropologist are not as yet sufficient for the solution of this problem, but it is an intensely interesting one, and must be kept steadily to the front in the present century.
Nor is it to be forgotten that we are in the midst of a geographical discussion as to the posi tion of Paradise; whilst the last word has not been said on the original language of man, and on the dissemination of primitive written characters in their simplest forms, cast and west.