Great Penitents (1921)

The real world about us, the age has discovered, is not phenomena but forces ; and these forces act not capriciously, but by fixed principles. The world of nature is built up, not like a pile of stones, by the addition of one independent phenomenon after another, but as a plant grows ; each new fact springing from the one before it, and formed by a central force, which runs through each succeeding event as the sap of the plant runs through root and stalk and stem and bud.