science, but for literature and philosophy. My imagination and ingrained
humanism are appealed to by the facts and methods of natural history. I
find something akin to poetry and religion (using the latter word in its
non-mythological sense, as indicating the sum of mystery and reverence
we feel in the presence of the great facts of life and death) in the
shows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and woods. The
love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the
two may go together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of "something
far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is
probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds.
To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense
of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the
emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art,
no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the
brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of,
and superior to, natural laws, is the question. For my own part I
content myself with the thought of some unknown and doubtless unknowable
tendency or power in the elements themselves--a kind of universal mind
pervading living matter and the reason of its living, through which the
whole drama of evolution is brought about.

This is getting very near to the old teleological conception, as it is
also near to that of Henri Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge. Our minds
easily slide into the groove of supernaturalism and spiritualism because
they have long moved therein. We have the words and they mould our
thoughts. But science is fast teaching us that the universe is complete
in itself; that whatever takes place in matter is by virtue of the force
of matter; that it does not defer to or borrow from some other universe;
that there is deep beneath deep in it; that gross matter has its
interior in the molecule, and the molecule has its interior in the atom,