splay out to insects, birds, and elephants.

Another noticeable fact is that nowhere is perfection reached. If a
plan were being worked we should expect to see the lower stages
--like the foundations of the bridge--well and truly laid, incapable of
improvement. But no living being--neither the lowliest nor the
highest--is itself as a whole or in any one particular absolutely
perfect. There is room for improvement everywhere. Most
wonderful things we see. But not perfection. The eye is a wonderful
thing. But an oculist would point out defects in even the best.

And if it be argued that there has not been sufficient time yet to
work out a plan, the reply is that there has been infinite time. Time
is infinite. If the Activity were merely working out a plan, the plan
would have been completed ages ago.

So the Organising Activity which we see must be working at the
back of things, keeping all the separate individuals together in a
connected whole, not only preserves the strictest order among them,
but grants them freedom, stimulates emulation among them, inspires
them to reach upward and to look into and provide for the future.
Such an Activity is no mere mechanical activity. It is a purposive
Activity. It is an essentially _spiritual_ Activity. Spirit is not the
casual flash flaming up from the working of blind physical and
chemical forces. Spirit dominates these blind forces. Spirit is a true
determining factor in the whole process. Spirit is at the root and
source and permeates the whole.

This Spiritual Activity is what in ordinary language we speak of as
"the Spirit of Nature," and emanates from the Heart of Nature.

* * *

When, therefore, our Artist sums up his impressions of Nature as
epitomised in the life of the forest; when he has been able to feel
that he has, as it were, got inside the skin of Nature, entered into her
Spirit and really understood her--as the artist-midge we have
referred to would enter into the nature of a man and try and
understand him--he will probably find that Nature works in very
much the same way as he himself works, and is of much the same
character as himself.

The Artist will observe that Nature neither works by mere chance,
tossing up at each turning whether she shall go to the right or to the
left, and quite indifferent as to which way she takes; nor in the set
and rigid manner of a machine; nor yet, again, in the cut-and-dried
fashion which the execution of a previously co