Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 153, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 June 1915 — The Unity of Life. [ARTICLE]

The Unity of Life.

There is nothing, I think, that brings home to one more conclusively the unity of life, and therefore the unity of knowledge of that life, than the attempt to study any particular subject by itself and confine yourself to it alone. You find very soon that you cannot do so. No aspect of life ran be separated from the rest and understood even in any small degree without some knowledge of the rest of life. No part of life Btands alone. Every phenomenon of life is the result, not of one or two causes alone, but of the interaction of innumerable causes. To get near the understanding of only one item you must be able to estimate more or less truly all the forces that make life, and the objective of life. As with the eddy of a river, to estimate it you must know not merely the eddy, but much also of the river, its volume and its speed, the density of its waters, the configuration of its banks and its general direction. The observation of the eddy only would lead you into the wildest fallacies.—The Atlantic.