UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



active in streams or winds or tides, or in any of the 

 blind mechanical forces? All these things go their 

 appointed ways and their ways are not as our ways; 

 they are void of purpose, void of will, void of any 

 suggestion of a rational principle; they are ruled by 

 irrefragable law. 



Mind as we know it, and can only know it, is 

 associated with life. Not the caressing winds, nor 

 the sparkling currents, nor the beauty of crystals 

 and precious stones, nor the glory and the majesty 

 of the heavens, suggest mind; they suggest power 

 and measureless energy. The midnight skies fill us 

 with awe, they overwhelm us with a sense of our 

 own insignificance, but do we see anything akin to 

 ourselves in them? Do we not rather see that which 

 leaves us out of the account entirely? An infinity 

 of celestial bodies ruled by rigidly mechanical laws, 

 going their inevitable rounds at the risk of cosmic 

 collisions and disruptions in which suns and systems 

 are at times shipwrecked, unutterably sublime and 

 awe-inspiring, but lifeless, mindless, unhuman. In 

 all the vast depths of sidereal space, strewn with 

 celestial bodies as a June meadow with clover blos- 

 soms, we see but the dance and whirl of dead matter. 

 The heavens declare the glory of a god who hath not 

 one attribute akin to our own. What shall we say, 

 then? What can we say but that this astronomic 

 background of cosmic matter and energy seems but 

 a vast theatre upon which a small fraction of the 

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