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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