Читать книгу Intelligence in Plants and Animals онлайн

2 страница из 113

Though made “a little lower than the angels,” yet, through the mighty play of forces that have been at work in the world, which we, in the latter half of this enlightened century, are just beginning to recognize and comprehend, he has been lifted from the mire of degradation and placed upon a higher social, intellectual, moral and spiritual level. Out of the animal, in the scheme of Deity, the spiritual system of things is to be elaborated, and not the animal out of the spiritual. This natural world, so to speak, is the raw material of the spiritual. Therefore, ere man can understand the spiritual, he must understand the natural. Though his knowledge was at first about material things, or such as pertained to natural phenomena, yet from this through the ages has been builded, little by little, that mountain-height of knowledge, intellectual and moral, which, if rightly directed, is to bring him into fellowship with Deity. “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly,” or, Lord from heaven.