LIFE AND CHANCE 
All the movements of nature may be divided into 
rational and irrational. The movements of living 
things are rational; they serve a purpose in meeting 
the needs of those things; but non-living things have 
no needs, hence their movements are fortuitous and 
irrational. 
The collisions and disruptions that take place in 
the vast depths of sidereal space show that chance 
takes a hand in the game even there, though the 
universal law of gravitation is not annulled. 
Ili 
Though one has trouble in reconciling the hit- 
and-miss method of Nature which one sees all about 
him — her blind, groping, experimental ways — 
with the obvious purpose and order which one sees 
in all living bodies, yet the reconciliation somehow 
exists. Here life appears and here it goes on amid 
accidents, delays, waste, failures; at war with itself, 
at war with the physical forces; rooted in the inor- 
ganic, but perpetually crushed and destroyed by it; 
the long evolutionary process crowned by man as 
if he were the end of it all, yet man beset by a thou- 
sand enemies, internal and external; his history 
marked by war, pestilence, famine, suffering, injus- 
tice, the monstrous and the abnormal; the methods 
and aims of intelligence seen everywhere in the or- 
ganic world, yet intelligence hampered by matter 
and struggling to be free; chance taking a hand in 
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