HORIZON LINES 



VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER 



The laws and processes of Nature which to us are so 

 beneficent, and which seem made for our especial 

 benefit, were in full operation before life as we know 

 it had become established. In fact, the fatherhood 

 and motherhood of Nature are all thoughts of our 

 own, inventions of our necessities. The paternity of 

 gravitation and the maternity of frost and snow are 

 in no respect different. We are the chance children 

 — chance from our limited point of view — of an 

 impersonal, unhuman, universal mother. We may 

 say, humanly speaking, that Nature takes fore- 

 thought of her children, but not afterthought. She 

 provides that they shall actually appear in due time 

 in this universe of conflicting and struggling forces, 

 then lets them shift for themselves. They are born 

 on the firing-line, in the field of perpetual war, and 

 none escape unscathed. Indeed, they are moulded 

 and adjusted and equipped by the very conditions 

 in which the peril of their destruction lies. Gravity 

 crushes them, and gravity gives them their powers. 

 Fire consumes them, and water drowns them, and 

 yet out of these things they came. 



It is as if some god had planned the universe as a 

 vast plant for the production of the myriad forms of 

 life, each in its own place and season. In our little 

 corner of it at a given hour of the great geologic 

 clock one form appears, or many forms; at another 



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