a creator and director,
sitting apart from the universe and shaping and controlling all its
affairs, a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in my mind.
Kings and despots have had their day, both in heaven and on earth. The
universe is a democracy. The Whole directs the Whole. Every particle
plays its own part, and yet the universe is a unit as much as is the
human body, with all its myriad of individual cells, and all its many
separate organs functioning in harmony. And the mind I see in nature
is just as obvious as the mind I see in myself, and subject to the
same imperfections and limitations.

In following Lamarck I am not disturbed by the bogey of teleology, or
the ghost of mysticism. I am persuaded that there is something
immanent in the universe, pervading every atom and molecule in it,
that knows what it wants--a Cosmic Mind or Intelligence that we must
take account of if we would make any headway in trying to understand
the world in which we find ourselves.

When we deny God it is always in behalf of some other god. We are
compelled to recognize something not ourselves from which we proceed,
and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or
will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are
a part of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or the cloud.
Each of us is a fraction of the universal Eternal Intelligence. Is it
unscientific to believe that our own minds have their counterpart or
their origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is our own
intelligence all there is of mind-manifestation in the universe? Where
did we get this divine gift? Did we take all there was of it?
Certainly we did not ourselves invent it. It would require
considerable wit to do that. Mind is immanent in nature, but in man
alone it becomes self-conscious. Wherever there is adaptation of means
to an end, there is mind.

Yet we use the terms "guidance," "predetermination," and so on, at the
risk of being misunderstood. All such terms are charged with the
meaning that our daily lives impart to them and, when applied to the
processes of the Cosmos, are only half-truths. From our experience
with objects and forces in this world, the earth ought to rest upon
something, and that object upon something, and the moon ought to fall
upon the earth, and the earth fall into the sun, and, in fact, the
whole sidereal system ought to collapse. But it does not, and will
not. As nearly as we c