nto
those black wrappings. To that it may be our God, the Captain of Mankind
will take us.

That now is a mere speculation. The veil of the unknown is set with
the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal. The Veiled
Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the mirror upon
which the busy shapes of life are moving. It is as if it waited in a
great stillness. Our lives do not deal with it, and cannot deal with it.
It may be that they may never be able to deal with it.

4. THE LIFE FORCE IS NOT GOD

So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself to
the modern mind. It is altogether outside good and evil and love and
hate. It is outside God, who is love and goodness. And coming out
of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner altogether
inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse thrusting through
matter and clothing itself in continually changing material forms,
the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be. It comes out of that
inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us from beyond the horizon.
It is as it were a great wave rushing through matter and possessed by
a spirit. It is a breeding, fighting thing; it pants through the jungle
track as the tiger and lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is
the rabbit bolting for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it
crawls, it flies, it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats
itself in order to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every
living thing, of it are our passions and desires and fears. And it
is aware of itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual
self-consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the
sentient creatures it has called into being. They look out for their
little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of the passions
of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction, submitting only to
brief fellowships of defence or aggression. They are beings of strain
and conflict and competition. They are living substance still mingled
painfully with the dust. The forms in which this being clothes itself
bear thorns and fangs and claws, are soaked with poison and bright with
threats or allurements, prey slyly or openly on one another, hold their
own for a little while, breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . .

This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live, the
Struggle for Existence. They have figured it too