NO CONFINING PLAN 143 



also spend their entire lives in selecting and reject- 

 ing — in selecting and assimilating what will nourish 

 their growth and enable them to propagate their 

 kind, and in rejecting what would be useless or 

 harmful. These are something more than 

 mechanical operations ; and if Nature were a 

 machine, not even plants, much less animals and 

 men, could have been produced. The operations 

 of Nature, though orderly, are not mechanical only, 

 and we cannot regard Nature as a machine. 



And if Nature is purposive, she is at work at 

 something more than the completion of a pre- 

 arranged plan. We do not picture Nature as a 

 structure, as a Cathedral, for example, designed 

 by some super-architect, in process of construction. 

 In a Cathedral each stone is perfectly and finally 

 shaped and placed in a position in which it must 

 ever after remain, and the whole shows signs of 

 gradual completion as it is being built, and when 

 it is built remains as it is. The architect has made 

 and carried out his plan, and there is an end of the 

 matter. It is not thus that we view Nature, for 

 everywhere we see signs of perfectibility in the 

 component parts and in the whole together. Only 

 if the Cathedral had in it the power to be continually 

 making its foundations deeper, to be ever towering 

 higher, and to be perpetually shaping itself into 

 sublimer form, should we look on Nature as a 

 Cathedral. But in that case the mind of the 

 architect would have to dwell in each stone and in 

 all together, and the Cathedral would be something 

 more than a structure in the ordinary use of the 

 word. 



