



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Louise Pattison and the
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                 THROUGH NATURE
                     TO GOD

                       BY

                   JOHN FISKE

    _Soyez comme l'oiseau posé pour un instant
        Sur des rameaux trop frêles,
    Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant,
        Sachant qu'il a des ailes!_

    VICTOR HUGO

                 [Illustration]

               BOSTON AND NEW YORK
          HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
          The Riverside Press, Cambridge

                      1900




         COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN FISKE

               ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




        TO THE BELOVED AND REVERED MEMORY
                  OF MY FRIEND

              THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

            THIS BOOK IS CONSECRATED




[Illustration]




PREFACE


A single purpose runs throughout this little book, though different
aspects of it are treated in the three several parts. The first part,
"The Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The Idea of God," was
designed to supply some considerations which for the sake of conciseness
had been omitted from that book. Its close kinship with the second part,
"The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice," will be at once apparent
to the reader.

That second part is, with a few slight changes, the Phi Beta Kappa
oration delivered by me at Harvard University, in June, 1895. Its
original title was "Ethics in the Cosmic Process," and its form of
statement was partly determined by the fact that it was intended as a
reply to Huxley's famous Romanes lecture delivered at the University of
Oxford in 1893. Readers of "The Destiny of Man" will observe that