Accepting the universe

A wheel may have many spokes, but can have but one hub. So I may say of this volume of mine that there are many themes and chapter-headings, but there is but one central thought...

How, then, shall we adjust our lives to the conception of a universal, non-human, non-finite, algebraic God? They adjust themselves. Do your work, deal justly, love rightness, m...

Life is recuperative; if it falls down, it picks itself up again. If a state is devastated by war, in time the cities and towns are rebuilt, and the ranks of peace and industry...

I find I have never been burdened by a sense of my duty to God. My duty to my fellow-men and to myself is plain enough, but the word is not adequate to express any relation I ma...

Plagues and famines and wars are fortuitous and not a part of the regular order like health, or growth, or development. They are accidents of nature. The cloud-burst that sends...

The guilt falls the same upon the greed and lust of power, even if the gods finally reap a harvest that man’s iniquities have sown. He maketh the wicked to praise Him, but the w...

How haphazard, how fortuitous and uncalculated is all this business of the multiplication of the human race! What freaks, what failures, what monstrosities, what empty vessels,...

Viewed from the sun the earth is a mere speck in the sky, and the amount of the total light and heat from the sun that is received on the earth is so small that the mind can har...

Seriously to discuss in our day the question of the rule of might over right--that force is the arbiter of justice in human relations, except when it is invoked to chastise the...

As man’s moral consciousness has developed, the question of right and wrong has, of course, come more and more to the front; his relations to his fellows, his sense of justice,...

If the horse only knew his own strength, and knew that he had “rights,” would there not soon be a horse rebellion? Would the swine and the cattle fatten in their pens and stalls...

When we project ourselves into Nature out of which we came, or when we see ourselves there objectively,--our virtues, our aspirations, our vices, and our wickedness,--we sow the...

In a living body there are organs which function; in a non-living, there are parts which act and are acted upon. To see mind in all is the task--to see in gravity, in cohesion,...

Man avails himself of all possible aids. His voluntary conquests of nature are many and are constantly increasing, but his involuntary dependencies upon her are many also. He di...

In his “Conduct of Life” Emerson has an essay on “Illusions” in which he describes the semblance to midnight skies paved with stars which the guide produces in the Mammoth Cave...

We may say every man born of woman is an incarnation of the Infinite spirit, and the hyperbole may stand, but to affirm that one particular man in the historic period was an inc...

In humanity alone do we see the face of justice, of mercy, of charity, of forgiveness, of reverence, of renunciation--human virtues, they, too, come out of the heart of Nature....

“It is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was leaving his death-bed and hearing his voice for the last time--“It is all right.” Of course it was all right, and it will be...

Let me again say that by the Natural Providence I mean the general beneficence of Nature, the blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating, inevitable beneficence which brought us her...

He who can bring to Whitman’s rugged and flowing lines anything like the sympathy and insight that beget them, will know what I mean. Our modern nature poets are holiday flower-...