The Infinite Presence - 1910 Author:George Milbry Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in MATERNAL, LOVE IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION In his address before the British Association Lord Salisbury stated anew the three great mysteries to the s... more »olution of which science has in vain directed her attention. The origins of atoms, of ether, and of life, are to-day the most utter mysteries. To account for them no human mind has framed even the faintest concept worthy of consideration. We have only the merest hints of the possibility of explanation of gravitation; concerning electricity we are getting only a little better idea; but as to physiologic chemistry our little knowledge serves only to make our great ignorance more frightful. All origins of things are shrouded in impenetrable mystery, and our philosophies are but weakand sorry attempts to widen a little the light-space about us. No philosophy and no religion explains finalities, and all efforts end only in resolving many lesser mysteries into fewer great mysteries. The conception of Biologos, incoming light and love, entering inorganic worlds and matter as a great incarnation-principle and spiritualizing force, electrifies and quickens the mental, imaginative, and moral man as none other; but, of course, it too ends only in a little broadening of the light-way about our darkness-encircled lives. 1 Read before the Wistar Biological Association, Philadelphia, Dec. 14, 1894; The Philadelphia Association of Kindergartners, April 7, 1896, etc. But it seems to me that so far as concerns the individual manifestations of life, we may and we must differentiate clearly between the love of one's own life and the love of the life of one's descendants. The cuckoo bird has not enough strength of the maternal instinct to build a nest and incubate her own eggs. In pigeons the male has a far stronger maternal instinct tha...« less