That was, I suppose, owing to the
survival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creation
ought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That which
was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary
processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its
value. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took
pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of
thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something
supernatural; that state of culture in which there was an
altogether inadequate appreciation of the amount of grandeur that
there might be in the slow creative work that goes on noiselessly
by little minute increments, even as the dropping of the water that
wears away the stone. The general progress of familiarity with the
conception of evolution has done a great deal to change that state
of mind. Even persons who have not much acquaintance with science
have at length caught something of its lesson,--that the infinitely
cumulative action of small causes like those which we know is
capable of producing results of the grandest and most thrilling
importance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmic
and miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we are
outgrowing with wider experience.
The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact the whole advance of
modern science from the days of Copernicus down to the present day,
have consisted in the substitution of processes which are familiar
and the application of those processes, showing how they produce
great results.
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