ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



you why the plant leans toward the light, and why 

 it rights itself when pressed down; but why or how 

 matter organizes itself into the various living forms 

 is a question before which natural philosophy is 

 dumb. Neither chemistry nor physics can give us 

 the secret of life. The ingenious devices to secure 

 cross-fertilization among certain plants, devices for 

 scattering the seed among others, — the hooks, the 

 wings, the springs, — to me all seem to imply in- 

 telligence, not apart from, but inherent in, the 

 things themselves. Power of adaptation — to take 

 advantage of wind and flood, of solid and fluid — 

 is one of the mysterious attributes of life. And yet 

 we know that vegetable life takes advantage of 

 these things not, as we do, by forethought and 

 invention, but by a mysterious inherent impulse. 



How the bee and the bird battle with the wind, 

 the fish with the waves and the rapids, the fur- 

 bearers with the cold and the snow! how all living 

 creatures struggle to escape or resist the dissolving 

 power of the natural forces! 



The ever-present instinct of fear in all wild crea- 

 tures and in children, and the quickness with which 

 it can be aroused in all persons, throw light upon 

 the crueler aspects of this struggle for existence 

 which is common to all forms of animal life. Had 

 life never been beset with perils, we should have 

 been strangers to the emotion of fear, as would all 

 other creatures. Even the fly that alights on my 



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