Post 24184
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In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theodore Parker did, of the universe as a “handful of dust which God enchants,” or we may speak of it, as Goethe did, as “the living garment of God”; but as men of science we can see it only as a vast complex of forces, out of which man has arisen, and of which he forms a part. We are not to forget that we are a part of it, and that the more we magnify ourselves, the more we magnify it; that its glory is our glory, and our glory its glory, because we are its children. In some way utterly beyond the reach of science to explain, or of philosophy to confirm, we have come out of it, and all we are or can be, is, or has been, potential in it.
The evolution of life is, of course, bound up with the evolution of the world. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higher and higher forms–forms with larger and larger brains and more and more complex nerve mechanisms–have appeared.
Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primary elements–hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and the like–takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperature decreases, one after another of the chemical elements makes its appearance, the simpler elements appearing first, and the more complex compounds appearing last, all apparently having their origin in some simple parent element. It appears as if the evolution of life upon the globe had followed the same law and had waited upon the secular cooling of the earth.