Nature has been one of enormous rapidity within the historical period, and within the last two centuries has led on the one hand to immensely increased facilities in the application of mechanical power, in locomotion, in agriculture, and in endless arts and industries; and on the other hand to the mitigation of disease and pain. The men whom we may designate as 'the Nature-searchers'—those who founded the New Philosophy of the Invisible College at Oxford and the Royal Society in London—have placed boundless power in the hands of mankind.
11. The Attainment by Man of the Knowledge of his Relations to Nature.
But to many the greatest result achieved by the progress of Natural Knowledge seems not to have been so much in its practical applications and its material gifts to humanity as in the fact that Man has arrived through it at spiritual emancipation and freedom of thought.
In the latter part of the last century man's place in Nature became clearly marked out by the accumulation of definite evidence. The significance and the immeasurable importance of the knowledge of Nature to philosophy and the highest regions of speculative thought are expressed in the lines of one who most truly and with keenest insight embodied in his imperishable verse the wisdom and the aspirations of the Victorian age:—
'Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies:
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flowerbut if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.'
