If this last shall seem to squint toward special pleading, let it be considered that, as we see things, it is precisely those views that take hold of the issues upon which our very being and all its activities depend, that serve best to train youth to broad views and penetrating thought. Such thinking seems to me to form the very essence of a really liberal education.
Not only is this definition of the sphere of geology comprehensive, but it has the special merit of being _dynamic_, rather than material. Such a dynamic definition comports with the view that earth-study should center on the forces and energies that actuated its evolution, since these are the most vital feature of the evolution itself. It is important to form adequate concepts of the energies that have maintained the past ongoings of the earth not only, but that still maintain its present activities and predetermine its future. It is the study of the forces and the processes of past and of present evolutions that constitute the soul of the science, rather than the apparently fixed and passive aspects of the earth's formations and configurations which are but the products of the processes that have gone before. Even the apparent passiveness of the geologic products is illusive, for they are in reality expressions of continued internal activities of an intense, though occult, order. These escape notice largely because they are balanced against one another in a system of equilibrium which pervades them and gives them the appearance of fixity. To serve their proper functions as sources of higher education, the concepts of the constitution of the earth should penetrate even to these refined aspects of physical organization and should bring the whole into harmony with the most advanced views of the real nature of physical organisms. This removes from the whole terrestrial organism every similitude of inertness and gives it a fundamental refinement, activity, and potency of the highest order. To form a true and consistent concept, the enveloping earth-science must be assumed to embrace, potentially at least, the essentials of all that was evolved within it and from it, with, of course, due recognition of what was added from without.