The meaning and the method of life - PDF by George M. Gould

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The meaning and the method of life; a search for Religion in Biology

The meaning and the method of life

The ordinary railway labourer, in cutting through a wall of stratified rock that by volcanic action has been tilted or warped out of its original level, never dreams of the causes of the stratification or of its displacement.

To him, the quarrel of the " Neptunists" and the " Plutonists " has never been distantly suggested. He daily sees these peculiarities but to his incurious mind no question of why or how has been aroused thereby. When the railway cut has been completed, thousands of people are rushed through it, but doubtless to very few, if the train were halted in front of the wall, would the significance of the tilted and twisted layers be clear. 

Of the millions drawn by the locomotive engine, few understand the mechanism by which they are so powerfully and rapidly pulled along. Of these few in a million, least of all probably the engineer, who can use the force so perfectly, of these very few, perhaps one may understand the nature of heat and the action of heated water, and how the combined bombardment of billions of crowded atoms striking the piston-head batter it back and forth and transmute atomic vibration into molar motion. Thousands daily pass an optician's window and are not moved to inquire as to the cause of the turning of the vanes in a Crookes' radiometer. 

And yet all these mysteries upon, among, and by which we live, are clearly and easily explainable if our minds but stopped to in-choir; if we desired to know, the knowledge would be forthcoming. One of the saddest things in man is his willingness to be ignorant and incurious of the mystery that he is and by which he is surrounded. A very dis- couraging exaggeration of this willingness is agnosticism, an unmanly resignation and despair after a first defeat. T

he bravest, noblest attitude is that of unsatisfied longing, and the never-stilled faith that light will come into all of our darkness and that the riddle of our lives will be solved. We must trust that light exists, and must persist in trying to find it, must be willing to give up half-truths, for whole truths, and guard the mind against the bias of prejudice. Agnosticism, materialism, atheism, pessimism, sensualism, reckless luxury, despair, rigid creed worship and superstition, and a thousand similar evils of our time, are directly begotten and fostered by this lack of trust in coming light.

NTRODUCTION ...

I. PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL

II. PARTIAL TRUTHS1

III. INCARNATION 

IV. CYTOLOGY. 

V. SENSATION.1VI. EVOLUTION . . 1

VII. REPRODUCTION.

VIII. CONCERNING EVIL

IX. JUSTIFICATION OF THE INCARNATION PROCESS 

X. FREEDOM 

XI. PERSONALITY 

XII. IMMORTALITY.

XIII. ETHICS.

XIV. BEAUTY. 
XV. SLEEP, DREAMING, AND AWAKENING. 284

details :

Author: George M. Gould

Publication date:  1893

Remark  New York, Putman

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