ON THE BEAUTY OF NATURE. 257 
And how came that endless variety ? It is hard enough for 
us to invent a little that is beautiful every now and then, and 
very seldom without some great defect or mistake. What we 
call Nature makes no mistakes, and yet is always producing 
novelties, and never by any accident repeats anything exactly. 
It is idle, and for scientific men absurd, to talk about chance 
doing these things, for science knows that there is no such 
thing ; and the more it talks about the immutable uniformity 
of laws of nature, the more it declares that what we call 
chance is only the result of some of those very laws, of which 
perhaps we know nothing. Set the cleverest artist to draw 
a thousand of the most varied patterns he can of the leaves 
of any tree, or indeed of any other thing, and you will soon be 
sick of their monotony. Yet his, according to the “ persistent 
force” and evolutionary philosophers, is the highest intelligence 
in the universe, and “ nature’s”’ artistic work is only the result 
of laws of absolute uniformity. Which ought to be the most 
full of variety and “life” on their theory ? And which is? 
I might logically stop here, and say to the evolutionist, 
“Your theory, your only theory, that pretends to explain the 
beauty of nature by explaining it away and calling it con- 
ventional, is done for, even if you had far more evidence than 
you have of natural selection, or any of your other inventions, 
to account for the beauty of living or reproducing objects.” 
For, after all the complicated and portentous definitions of 
natural life, | think a capacity for reproduction is practically 
the best, though we can easily imagine once-produced creatures 
that might exhibit all the usual phenomena of life except 
that, and except mortality too, theoretically. I mean 
generically, not individually—such as mules, or other barren 
individuals of a species. 
But I will not shrink from facing the automatic philosophers 
on the ground where they are a little stronger than they are 
with reference to non-living objects, and from inquiring how 
far their selection and survival theories can carry them 
towards accounting for the immense preponderance of beauty 
over ugliness in the world. One very large and immeasurable 
class of living objects—viz., trees of all kinds—we may sweep 
off at once with the remark that the evolutionists do not even 
pretend to have invented any theory to explain why all trees 
should not be as ugly as toadstools. And we must add that 
it is by no means an even chance whether things should be ugly 
or beautiful, though those are as opposite words as yes and 
no, or black and white. For everybody who has ever tried to 
produce anything beautiful, even in his own opinion, or has 
watched the attempts of other people, knows how difficult it 
