LIFE AND CHANCE 



All the movements of nature may be divided into 

 rational and irrational. The movements of living 

 things are rational; they serve a purpose in meeting 

 the needs of those things; but non-living things have 

 no needs, hence their movements are fortuitous and 

 irrational. 



The collisions and disruptions that take place in 

 the vast depths of sidereal space show that chance 

 takes a hand in the game even there, though the 

 universal law of gravitation is not annulled. 



Ill 



Though one has trouble in reconciling the hit- 

 and-miss method of Nature which one sees all about 

 him — her blind, groping, experimental ways — 

 with the obvious purpose and order which one sees 

 in all living bodies, yet the reconciliation somehow 

 exists. Here life appears and here it goes on amid 

 accidents, delays, waste, failures; at war with itself, 

 at war with the physical forces; rooted in the inor- 

 ganic, but perpetually crushed and destroyed by it ; 

 the long evolutionary process crowned by man as 

 if he were the end of it all, yet man beset by a thou- 

 sand enemies, internal and external; his history 

 marked by war, pestilence, famine, suffering, injus- 

 tice, the monstrous and the abnormal ; the methods 

 and aims of intelligence seen everywhere in the or- 

 ganic world, yet intelligence hampered by matter 

 and struggling to be free; chance taking a hand in 



243 



