UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
delays, the cosmic cataclysms, the indifference to 
life, a universe sown with dead worlds and with 
extinct suns, the mindless depths, the supremacy of 
mechanical laws, the unconscionable energy, — all 
this and more, with our ideas of a beneficent, om- 
nipotent being governing all, of whose love and 
concern for man this universe is the expression? 
The universe as the theatre of mechanical laws — 
the action and interaction of matter and energy — 
is godless; neither human nor divine attributes are 
displayed there. It is only as the theatre of biologi- 
cal laws that we can recognize in it the sources of 
our own lives or get any glimpse of what we call 
mind. The source and fountain of life in the uni- 
verse is clearly no more intent upon man than upon 
any other form of life, even the humblest. All life 
is cheap in the presence of the material forces. The 
tempest and the earthquake blot out human com- 
munities as unhesitatingly as they blot out commu- 
nities of ants and mice. Fire, flood, gravity, and 
chemical affinity respect nothing that lives. The 
organizing tendency in matter, whatever be its 
source, works as if it knew what it wanted when not 
interfered with; it builds up its predetermined forms 
and hands the secret of the craft down to succeed- 
ing generations unerringly, so long as nothing di- 
verts or confuses it, or imposes foreign purpose upon 
it, as do the many parasites of the animal and vege- 
table world. An insect stings a leaf or a stalk and 
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