Chapter VI: Our Impartial Mother

The laws and processes of Nature which to us are so beneficent, and which seem made for our especial benefit, were in full operation before life as we know it had become established. In fact, the fatherhood and motherhood of Nature are all thoughts of our own, inventions of our necessities. The paternity of gravitation and the maternity of frost and snow are in no respect different. We are the chance children--chance from our limited point of view--of an impersonal, unhuman, universal mother. We may say, humanly speaking, that Nature takes forethought of her children, but not afterthought. She provides that they shall actually appear in due time in this universe of conflicting and struggling forces, then lets them shift for themselves. They are born on the firing-line, in the field of perpetual war, and none escape unscathed. Indeed, they are moulded and adjusted and equipped by the very conditions in which the peril of their destruction lies. Gravity crushes them, and gravity gives them their powers. Fire consumes them, and water drowns them, and yet out of these things they came.

It is as if some god had planned the universe as a vast plant for the production of the myriad forms of life, each in its own place and season. In our little corner of it at a given hour of the great geologic clock one form appears, or many forms; at another hour other forms emerge, till man himself emerges as the culmination of a long line of lowly forms, many vestiges of which still cling to him. But the world is no more for man than for the mice and vermin that pester him. It is for all.

The mystery back of all--what shall we say of it? And the good and the evil that are so inextricably blended with it--what of them?