THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE 



ceremonies. What Brocken shadows our intense 

 personalism casts upon nature ! We see the gigantic 

 outlines of our own forms, and mistake them for a 

 veritable god. But as we ourselves are a part of na- 

 ture, so this humanizing tendency of ours is also a 

 part of nature, a part of human nature — not valid 

 and independent, like the chemical and physical 

 forces, but as valid and real as our dreams, our 

 ideas, our aspirations. All the gods and divinities 

 and spirits with which man has peopled the heavens 

 and the earth are a part of Nature as she manifests 

 herself in our subjective selves. So there we are, on a 

 trail that ends where it began. We condemn one 

 phase of nature through another phase of nature 

 that is active in our own minds. How shall we escape 

 this self-contradiction? As we check or control the 

 gravity without us by the power of the gravity in 

 our own bodies, so our intelligence must sit in judg- 

 ment on phases of the same Universal Intelligence 

 manifested in outward nature. 



It is this recognition of an intelligence in nature 

 akin to our own that gives rise to our anthropomor- 

 phism. We recognize in the living world about us 

 the use of specific means to specific ends, and this 

 we call intelligence. It differs from our own in that 

 it is not selective and intensive in the same way. It 

 does not take short cuts; it does not aim at human 

 efficiency; it does not cut out waste and delay and 

 pain. It is the method of trial and error. It hits its 



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