breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.

In saying this, I do not forget our debt to science. It has done much
in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our
conception of man. With Hamlet it contemptuously says, 'What is this
quintessence of dust!' It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of
the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the
cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that
it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions,
forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man
has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate,
them. Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous
than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to
light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius
in the bottle, in the underground railway. Mere size seems unimpressive
when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that
pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including
within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a
politician, and a merchant. That such and so many faculties should have
room to operate within that tiny body--there is a marvel before which,
it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the
jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively
insignificant and conceivable.