IS LIFE UNIVERSAL? 153 



His playfellow the human soul." Nature sports with 

 us, presenting to us easy questions in hard ways. 

 She gives us riddles the fact simple, the mode in 

 which it is put before us complicated and involved. 

 We think in every possible wrong way, before we 

 find the right ; but in the meantime our faculties are 

 strengthened and enlarged. Our chief difficulty in 

 comprehending Nature is her simplicity, the multi- 

 tude and boundless variety of results which she 

 educes from one law, and this law, it may be, self- 

 evident and impossible not to be. We cannot, till 

 we have learnt by long experience, understand what 

 great events from simple causes spring, nor how 

 truly "the workmanship of God is such that He 

 doth hang the greatest weight upon the smallest 

 wires." 



How amazing it is to trace the wonderful pro- 

 cesses of life, even so partially and feebly as we have 

 done, to the simplest laws of force. And yet more 

 amazing is it, to reflect that these same laws extend 

 illimitably over the field of nature. If they bear 

 such fruit in one least corner of the universe for 

 "if a man meditate upon the universal frame of 



