UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



do not plant our forests or sow our seed or trim our 

 trees, or drain our land, as Nature does; we abbrevi- 

 ate, and select, and take short cuts, and do in a sea- 

 son what Nature takes years to accomplish. Her 

 forests get planted, her trees get trimmed, her canals 

 get dug, but think how modern business methods 

 would improve her processes. We see what we call 

 intelligence in organic nature, — adaptation, selec- 

 tion, the use of means to an end, — but it is all a 

 kind of blind, groping, experimenting intelligence, 

 like that of man in a new and strange field, when he 

 feels his way, tries and tries again, and reaches his 

 end after many delays and failures. 



If our minds only knew all that our bodies know, 

 or knew how our bodies come to know the things 

 they seem to know, then we should have the secret 

 of organization, of inheritance, of adaptation, and 

 of many other things. The body knows how to 

 build itself up from single cells, how to preserve its 

 form, how to run itself, how to repair and reproduce 

 itself, and many other things. But it does not know 

 how to combat certain enemies that attack it as well 

 as we know how. We can aid it in many of its func- 

 tions, and relieve it in many of its obstructions. 



What I know, and what my body knows, are two 

 different things. We can separate the mind from 

 the body in this way, and we can and do separate 

 man from physical nature in the same way, but the 

 truth is that the mind and the body are one, and 



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