● ● ● the way. Already Thomas Huxley was considering thought as a mere by-product of material force, like the heat thrown off by the passage of an electric current through a wire.
Yet thought had its own universe, a realm where design, purpose, meaning, and values all had place. Even Huxley had to acknowledge this realm as a reality in acknowledging the value of truth. It was a universe that seemed to be constantly striving to break through all the waste and violence of the long evolutionary struggle, as though the first pre-Cambrian sandworm had been trying to be man and the first brutish cave dweller to be the son of God.
Regarded as an effort of the material universe to lift itself by its own bootstraps to the condition of pure mind or spirit, the whole process was foredoomed to failure; but there might be other ways of looking at it, without falling into the religious sentimentalism of those who merely glossed over the cruelty and waste inherent in the trial-and-error process of natural selection.
Kierkegaard had given a hint in his Purity of Heart: “The temporal as we know it cannot . . . be the clear radiance of eternity; so far as it has reality at all it is through the eternal that strives to master it. The more the eternal stirs within its witness, the mightier is the struggle.”55 So far as it has reality at all. This could mean that the struggle has meaning only to the degree that the eternally real breaks through into temporal experience. The ceaseless struggle of animate nature would then belong with the blind dance of the atoms except as it let through a larger measure of spirit.
“The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” waiting for “the manifestation of the sons of God,” Paul had written.56 Yet once in history a total breakthrough had occurred and a new and wonderful reality, a new kind of man, had appeared. Orthodoxy had relegated that event to the realm of special miracle, but both the orthodox believer and the unorthodox seeker knew that here if anywhere was the answer to life’s riddle.
Mary Baker Patterson would pass through many years of development before she could write:
55 Søren Kierkegaard, Purify Your Hearts!, trans. A. S. Aldworth and W. S. Ferrie (London: C. W. Daniel, 1937), p. 110. The title is more usually translated Purity of Heart.
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