This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ...It offers us a scene, not of uniformity, but variation; not of regularity, but experiment; not of fixity, but change; not of monotony, but diversity, novelty. It feels its way fonvard; it gains new experiences; it tries this, it tries that: now it pauses; now it advances with a rush; now it gets tangled in ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ...It offers us a scene, not of uniformity, but variation; not of regularity, but experiment; not of fixity, but change; not of monotony, but diversity, novelty. It feels its way fonvard; it gains new experiences; it tries this, it tries that: now it pauses; now it advances with a rush; now it gets tangled in some backwater; now it adopts sudden methods which it afterwards drops: by hook, or by crook, it struggles to establish, and invigorate, and extend novel types of plant, or fish, or bird, or insect. It draws, apparently, on some fund of invention which is only restrained by the austere necessities of survival. Now here, surely, is an entirely altered ideal presented to us; an ideal of which uniformity is no longer the ruling thought; an ideal which is full of elasticity, permitting a wide world of variation and change--permitting of experiment, of advance, of development. A new ideal springs up, and we have the right to call this ideal higher than our earlier one. It is drawn from higher springs; it is charged with richer resources; it carries us further. Living growth conveys a fuller message from God than the dead mechanism of matter and force. Yes; we are moving up, we are a stage nearer what God means; we know more of what He is. We peep into a deeper secret of the Divine Will. That old world of solid bodies was magnificent, but its magnificence was only mechanical. God is a living God, and any form of life is a truer symbol of Him, a more significant reflection, a richer suggestion of Him, than anything inorganic and inanimate can possibly be. The ideal is higher; but, nevertheless, it has not, for its characteristic note, uniformity, but variation; not fixity, but change. Nor is that all. There is a fresh wonder ready to appear--a wonder...
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