The Freedom To Create Is

For The First Time In Four Billion Years A Living Creature Had Contemplated Himself And Heard With A Sudden, Unaccountable Loneliness, The Whisper Of The Wind In The Night Reeds.

I Once Saw, On A Flower Pot In My Own Living Room, The Efforts Of A Field Mouse To Build A Remembered Field. I Have Lived To See This Episode Repeated In A Thousand Guises, And Since I Have Spent A Large Portion Of My Life In The Shade Of A Nonexistent Tree I Think I Am Entitled To Speak For The Field Mouse.

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

It Is Frequently The Tragedy Of The Great Artist, As It Is Of The Great Scientist, That He Frightens The Ordinary Man.

After Chiding The Theologian For His Reliance On Myth And Miracle, Science Found Itself In The Unenviable Position Of Having To Create Mythology Of Its Own: Namely, The Assumption That What, After Long Effort, Could Not Be Proved To Take Place Today Had, In Truth, Taken Place In The Primeval Past.