sh; but you have these
things on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution on
condition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologic
ages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm. When you fail, or are crushed
or swallowed by my remorseless forces, do not blame my gods, or your
own; there is no blame, there is only the price to be paid: the hazards
of invading the closed circle of my unseeing forces."

In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature
deals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los
Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It had
been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated--her
wild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic ages
made visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animal
bones. There was nearly as much bone as pitch. The fate of the unlucky
flies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been the
fate of the victims that had perished here. How many wild creatures had
turned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they felt
themselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch! In like
manner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in flood
and fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpitying
heavens! There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apart
from our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows one
pitying glance upon us. Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of a
long line of hostile forces, and escapes by dint of fleetness of foot,
or agility in dodging, or else by toughness of fibre.

Yet here we are; here is love and charity and mercy and intelligence;
the fair face of childhood, the beautiful face of youth, the clear,
strong face of manhood and womanhood, and the calm, benign face of old
age, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, but
seeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart of
Nature. Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playing
into the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of the
inorganic, at strife with it, hourly crushed by it, yet sustained and
kept going by its aid.

III

Vitality is only a word, but it marks a class of phenomena in nature
that stands apart from all merely mechanical manifestations in the
universe. The cosmos is a vast machine, but in this machine--thi