Conditions
“To me more wonderful than the creation of life is the creation of those external conditions that made life possible. They collectively formed the mould in which life was cast.
“Now, in my sketch of the creation of the sun and planets I have just hinted what the brain can scarcely guess—the scenes of fiery storm and horror that preceded the welding of the world into a solid whole and the birth of the conditions that made life possible. But these are less halting to thought than the scenes of ferocity that filled the earth when life awoke, raging and tempestuous, and form began to devour form as though the world energy were eating its way through all forms to reach the form of man. And that is, in fact, the truth. Man has been reached by teeth just as the hills have been reached by fire. And not only man. The dove that was once a pterodactyl, the dog that was once a wolf, the cat that was once a tiger, and a thousand other things once terrible, thoughtless and ferocious, all these have come along the very path that the hills and the seas came along in their making—the path from negation and through ferocity to the benign.
“Now, can you not see why the fact that I was once a swimming reptile,—just as you were—devouring other reptiles, is a fact that I would not barter for all fancies? for by its light and by what astronomy and geology and the other sciences tell me I can see that the world, taken as a whole, has a glorious and definite meaning.
The World Spirit
“And the gist of the meaning is this: that side by side with the evolution of world forms, from the liquid lava wave to the solid rock, from the rock to the saurian, and from the saurian to man, has gone the evolution of world character and the development of a world spirit; and that the beauty of kindliness and benignity and good receives its deep, deep significance from the fact that all the labour of the world since the first cooling of its fires has been directed along the path leading to these three gods. Nothing is more clear than that, and nothing can be more definitely proved. There is no use at all in fixing your eyes on the Jurassic period and saying, ‘What monsters are here!’ or on a London slum and saying, ‘How terrible life is! It can have no meaning!’ There is no use in fixing your eyes on a thousand years of history and saying, ‘I see no development. Men were as good then as they are now.’ You must take a billion years in your purview, to see the amazing and glorious thing as it is, and then what you will see will be strangely like the growth and unfolding of a flower—or the flowering of a bramble.”
Hard Facts
“I BELIEVE in dreams, but I have no faith except in hard facts. Those hard facts tell me that the sun, toward which everything grows to-day, is the same sun toward which the seas and the hills and the rocks grew before life exhibited itself first, and toward which life has grown since its birth; and that sun is the sun of Amelioration, Benignity, Good, and Gentleness. Let us call it by the great good word that embraces all these things: Good. Well, then, the world, since the beginning, has grown toward Good.”
“Do you deny the soul?”