The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [4]
12. We see how things endure, great crags of basalt and bars of strong iron, demonstrating the foundations of nature’s frame.
13. The entities and forces underlying everything are powerful in their ancient simplicity, knitting and tying all objects.
14. By this they show their strength, binding each other by bonds which our senses do not perceive:
15. A bonding that exists within all parts, in the minima of nature, each thing itself a parcel of another,
16. From which other parts and others similar in order lie, packed in phalanx: the plenitude of body.
17. Whatever has parts, its parts have their bonds, connections and motions, whereby things have being, and continue, decay, and renew.
18. What is less than atoms make atoms; and atoms, molecules; and these in the animate and inanimate make the solid, liquid and gaseous varieties that in their systems and relationships are nature,
19. Forming everything from the animalcule to the host of stars that figure the night with brilliance, vast in time and space.
Chapter 9
1. The generations of the world and life in the world evolve, one from another, through the vastness of time.
2. Earths from each sun burst, and second planets issued from the first;
3. Then the sea at their coeval birth, surge over surge, involved the shoreless earth;
4. Nursed by warm sunlight in the primeval caves, organic life arose beneath the waves.
5. First, heat from chemical changes springs, and gives to matter its elliptic wings;
6. With strong repulsion parts the exploding mass, melts into solids, or kindles into gas.
7. Attraction next, as earth or air subside, the heavy atoms from the light divide,
8. Approaching parts with quick embrace combine, swell into spheres, and lengthen to a line.
9. Last, as fine goads the matter-threads excite, cords grapple cords, and webs with webs unite,
10. And quick contraction with ethereal flame lights into life the atom-woven frame.
11. Hence in biochemical spontaneous birth rose the first specks of animated earth;
12. From nature’s womb the plant or insect swims, and buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.
13. In earth, sea, air, around, below, above, life’s subtle weft in nature’s loom is wove;
14. Points joined to points a living line extends, and touched by light approach the bending ends.
15. Rings join to rings; and outreaching tubes clasp with young lips the nutrient globes or cubes,
16. And urged by new appetencies select, imbibe, retain, digest, secrete, eject.
17. In branching cones the living web expands, organs grow, and life-giving glands;
18. Arterial tubes carry nascent blood, and lengthening veins return the crimson flood;
19. Leaves, lungs and gills the vital ether breathe, on earth’s green surface, or in the waves beneath.
20. So life’s first powers arrest the winds and floods, to bones convert them, or to shells, or woods;
21. Stretch the vast beds of argil, lime and sand, and from diminished oceans form the land.
Chapter 10
1. Next, nerves unite their long synaptic train, and new sensations wake the early brain;
2. Through each new sense the keen emotions dart, flush the cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.
3. From pain and pleasure quick volitions rise, command the limbs and guide enquiring eyes;
4. With reason’s light new-woken man direct, and right and wrong with balance nice detect.
5. Last, multiple associations spring, thoughts join to thoughts, feelings to emotions cling;
6. Whence in long trains of linkage quickly flow imagined joy and voluntary woe.
7. Organic life beneath the shoreless waves was born and nursed in ocean’s pearly caves;
8. First forms minute, unseen by microscope, swim the sea, or climb the muddy slope;
9. These, as successive generations bloom, new powers acquire, and larger forms assume;
10. Whence countless forms of vegetation spring, and breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
11. Thus came our world and life, a natural realm, from nature born, with nature at the helm:
12. By evolution, in the aeons vast, since life first rose,