62 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
vency will the “heavens roll away asa scroll,” nor “the 
universe shrivel up as a cast-off snake skin.” 
In the growing recognition of law has lain the prog- 
ress of science. From the casting aside of human no- 
tions of chance and whim the “-warfare of science” has 
had its rise. For every fact carried over into the realm 
of law some man has given his life. Many a time in the 
growth of humanity it has been necessary that the wisest, 
clearest, most humane should die on the stake or the 
gibbet or the cross, that men should come to realize 
the power of an idea; that they’ should know the mean- 
ing of truth. 
Many men have been distressed over the insensibil- 
ity of Nature. She goes on with her own affairs. If 
the ship leaks, she drowns a prophet as 
she would a rat. The stones in the 
street should have cried out at the mur- 
der of Cesar. But they did not. It was only men who 
cried. Once, when a fugitive slave was seized in Massa- 
chusetts, there were those who felt outraged that Nature 
did not rebel against it. It was a surprise to Thoreau 
that the squirrels went on with their hoard and the wind 
rustled in the trees, as though nothing had happened. 
But what should Nature do? She attends only to her 
own affairs. She is only a figure of speech by which we 
personify her affairs. Her “just keeping on the same, 
calmer than clockwork and not caring,” is the expression 
of the solidity of the universe. She is as indifferent as 
the multiplication table is, for the multiplication table 
is only another expression of unchanging law. A law 
of Nature is “no respecter of persons.” A varying mul- 
tiplication table would be the destruction of mathe- 
matics. A varying law of Nature would be the destruc- 
tion of the universe, 
The laws of evolution have in themselves no neces- 
The indifference 
of Nature. 
