190 THE HEART OF NATURE 



In some of her aspects Nature may be stern and 

 exacting. But she is never sheerly hard. She is 

 compounded of mercy and compassion as well as of 

 rigid orderliness. And her essential character is 

 Love — and Love of no impassive and insipid kind, 

 but of a power and activity beyond all human 

 conception. 



The importance and significance of this con- 

 clusion, if we accept it, is that we definitely abandon 

 the repellent conception of Nature as governed by 

 chance, or as cold and mechanical, or as guided 

 solely by the principle of the survival of the fittest, 

 and we accept instead the humaner and diviner view 

 that Nature is actuated by Love ; and, accepting 

 that more winning conception, we can enter un- 

 reservedly into the Spirit of Nature and see her 

 Beauty. Unless we had been assured in our minds, 

 without any possibility of doubt whatever, that we 

 could love Nature, we could never really have en- 

 joyed her Beauty. 



So Nature is not something static, fixed, and 

 immovable, determined once and for all like a rock 

 is, at least to outward appearance. Nature is a 

 Person, and a Person is a process. Nature flows. 

 Nature is always moving on. As our thoughts 

 are all connected with one another and passing 

 into one another ; as all events are connected 

 with one another and are continually passing 

 from one into another, and form one great all- 

 inclusive event which is in continual process of 

 happening ; so is Nature always in process of passing 

 from one state into another state, while the whole 



