The Metaphysics of a Naturalist 
83 
So long as we find in the universe only a hostile array of antago- 
nistic forces thrusting us down, our case may well seem hopeless. 
But, not so; even in the very sense of sin there is revealed the 
fact that there is a helping Hand let down. It is only in the 
limited view that nature is a ^^foe to grace; the clearer eye will 
discern the fatherhood of God, the suggestion of forgiveness 
and the promise of ultimate success, where at first there only 
seemed a losing fight. 
Forgiveness and regeneration appear, therefore, to be facts 
of ethical experience. Accepting the above view, we may admit 
with Bacon that 
The world’s a bubble and the life of man 
Less than a span; 
In his conception wretched, from the womb 
So to the tomb; 
Curst from his cradle and brought up to years 
With cares and fears. 
Who then to frail mortality shall trust 
But limns on water, or but writes on dust. 
But, however unlovely the units, when we contemplate them 
as organic parts of the majestic pageant of history, necessary 
stones in the temple of the omnipotent, they are clothed with the 
borrowed beauty of the completed whole. 
How small a value does nature place upon the individual! 
Life is prodigal of its forces and wasteful of its products, but 
with what grim persistency does nature cling to its real gains. 
The new organ, once developed, reappears with mechanical 
infallibility and, even when rendered unnecessary by change of 
habitat, may remain for thousands of generations as a vestigial 
structure. 
For it is not the individual but only the species, that nature cares for, 
and for the preservation of which she so earnestly strives, providing for 
it with the utmost prodigality through the vast surplus of the seed and 
the great strength of the generative impulse. The individual, on the 
contrary, neither has nor can have any value for nature; for her kingdom 
is infinite time and infinite space and, in these, infinite multiplicity of 
possible individuals. Thus nature naively expresses the great truth 
that only ideas, not individuals, have, properly speaking, reality, i. e., 
are the complete objectivity of the wiU. {Schopenhauer, The World as 
Will, Book IV.) 
