7& LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



ultimate essence more miraculous than another; it 

 may be more striking — a greater congeries of shocks, it 

 may be more credible or more incredible, but not more 

 miraculous ; all change is qvA us absolutely incompre- 

 hensible and miraculous ; the smallest change baffles 

 the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its 

 phenomena, be inquired into. 



But however this may be, all organic change is 

 either a growth or a dissolution, or a combination of 

 the two. Growth is the coming together of elements 

 with quasi similar characteristics. I understand it is 

 believed to be the coming together of matter in certain 

 states of motion with other matter in states so nearly 

 similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with 

 and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the 

 other — making, rather than marring and undoing them. 

 Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are 

 an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or 

 smaller attunings and untunings ; organic life is " the 

 diapason closing full in man ; " it is the fulness of a 

 tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics 

 to which it gives rise ; it ranges through every degree 

 of complexity from the endless combinations of life- 

 and-death within life-and-death which we find in the 

 mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba. 

 Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of 

 complexity. All pleasant changes are recreative ; they 

 are pro tanto births ; all unpleasant changes are wear- 

 ing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but we can no more 

 exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can exhaust 

 all the air out of a receiver ; pleasure and pain lurk 



