After thirty
years' study of the fossil Crinoids, I am every day astonished by some
new evidence of the ingenuity, the invention, the skill, if I may so
speak, shown in varying this single pattern of animal life. When one
has become, by long study of Nature, in some sense intimate with the
animal creation, it is impossible not to recognize in it the immediate
action of thought, and even to specialize the intellectual faculties
it reveals. It speaks of an infinite power of combination and analysis,
of reminiscence and prophecy, of that which has been in eternal harmony
with that which is to be; and while we stand in reverence before the
grandeur of the Creative Conception as a whole, there breaks from it
such lightness of fancy, such richness of invention, such variety and
vividness of color, nay, even the ripple of mirthfulness,--for Nature
has its humorous side also,--that we lose our grasp of its completeness
in wonder at its details, and our sense of its unity is clouded by its
marvellous fertility. There may seem to be an irreverence in thus
characterizing the Creative Thought by epithets which we derive from
the exercise of our own mental faculties; but it is nevertheless true,
that, the nearer we come to Nature, the more does it seem to us that
all our intellectual endowments are merely the echo of the Almighty
Mind, and that the eternal archetypes of all manifestations of thought
in man are found in the Creation of which he is the crowning work.
Pages:
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276