IMAGO MUNDI 17 



of India, the famines of Ireland, the tidal-wave that flings up 

 fifty thousand folk like so many drowned rats upon the coasts 

 of Japan. We do not see the purport of an arrangement which 

 covers the fertile lands of Europe and America with a sheet 

 of ice once in a hundred thousand years or so, blotting out all 

 life or banning it for an age. 



Not less vain is our endeavour to find in the cosmic order 

 those qualities which we regard as the highest and noblest 

 among men. Nature is not " wise," it is not " loving," it is 

 not " economical," it is not " moral." It is flaunting in its 

 unchastity, shameless in its impudicity ; its prodigality is not 

 so much reckless as it is riotous. Its cruelty is savage, and 



" Red in tooth and claw, 

 With ravine shrieks against his creed." 



Plundering and murdering at every step, it knows no justice. 

 Fecund as an ale-wife, it abandons its children to every danger 

 and to every ill, careless alike of those who survive or fall. 

 Highly ingenious in some ways, its constructive intelligence is 

 infinitely surpassed by its human progeny. King Alphonso of 

 Castile was not the first to suggest that he would find no 

 difficulty in devising a more perfect world than that in which 

 he found himself. In the larger scheme as in the least, nature 

 seems but a 



" Blind Cyclops, hurling stones of destiny 

 And not in fury." 



The observation is banal ; in the pages of Stuart Mill and Spencer, 

 of Renan, of Huxley, of Tennyson and Leconte de Lisle, of Mathilde 

 Blind and Emily Pfeiffer, and many another, it has found ample 

 expression. After them we may hope to have done with the 

 frivolous and puerile phrases in which the attributes of creation 

 were wont to be dressed. 



A religion of nature is a chimera, an antithesis of terms. 

 The aims of Nature seem as various as its phenomena, and 

 in the future the hallucinated mind which professes to surprise 

 its secret will be regarded as the proper subject of the alienist. 



But if we may not explain, we may at least, in Schopen- 

 hauerian phrase, describe. No untoward visit of some vagrant 

 sun to our system interrupting, we shall in time complete the 

 description of cosmos and of its contents ; but the " why " of 



