Organic Natures Riddle 357 



:ists formally in their ultimate cause. Nevertheless that 

 itelligence is so implanted within them that it truly exists 

 them ' materially ' though it is not ' formally ' in them. 

 We have here, then, the answer to the question, ' What 

 the rationality of the irrational?' It is a rationaHty 

 rhich is very really, though but materially, present in 

 le irrational world, while it is formally present in that 

 rorld's cause and origin. 



To every Theist this answer will be a satisfactory one. 

 him who is not a Theist there is no really satisfactory 

 Lswer possible. This is a question not of theology but of 

 pure reason antecedent to all theology. To reason, and to 

 reason only, I appeal when I affirm that the existence of a 

 constant, pervading, sustaining, directing, and all-controlling 

 but unfathomable intelligence which is not the intelligence 

 of irrational creatures themselves, is the supreme truth 

 which nature eloquently proclaims to him who with unpre- 

 judiced reason and loving sympathy will carefully consider 

 her ways. He can hardly fail to discover, immanent in the 

 material universe, ' an action the results of which harmonises 

 with man's reason ; an action which is orderly, and dis- 

 accords with blind chance, or " a fortuitous concurrence 

 of atoms," but which ever eludes his grasp, and which acts 

 in modes different from those by which we should attempt 

 to accomplish similar ends.'^ For myself, I am bound 

 humbly to confess that the more I study nature the more 

 I am convinced that in the action of this all-pervading but 

 inscrutable and unimaginable intelligence, of which self- 

 conscious human rationality is the utterly inadequate image, 

 though the only image attainable by us, is to be sought the 

 sole possible explanation of the mysterious but undeniable 

 presence in nature of a rationality in that which is in itself 

 irrational. 



^ Lessons from Nature, ch. xii. p. 374. John Murray, 1876. 



