an put it into words, the whole visible universe
floats in a boundless and fathomless sea of energy; and that is all we
know about it.

If chance brought us here and endowed us with our bodies and our
minds, and keeps us here, and adapts us to the world in which we live,
is not Chance a good enough god for any of us? Or if Natural Selection
did it, or orthogenesis or epigenesis, or any other genesis, have we
not in any of these found a god equal to the occasion? Darwin goes
wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he describes or
characterizes the activities of Nature in terms of our own activities.
Man's selection affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best to
man is not the best to Nature. For instance, she is concerned with
color and form only so far as they have survival value. We are
concerned more with intrinsic values.

"Man," says Darwin, "selects only for his own good; Nature only for
the good of the being which she tends." But Nature's good is of
another order than man's: it is the good of all. Nature aims at a
general good, man at a particular good to himself. Man waters his
garden; Nature sends the rain broadcast upon the just and the unjust,
upon the sea as upon the land. Man directs and controls his planting
and his harvesting along specific lines: he selects his seed and
prepares his soil; Nature has no system in this respect: she trusts
her seeds to the winds and the waters, and to beasts and birds, and
her harvest rarely fails.

Nature's methods, we say, are blind, haphazard; the wind blows where
it listeth, and the seeds fall where the winds and waters carry them;
the frosts blight this section and spare that; the rains flood the
country in the West and the drought burns up the vegetation in the
East. And yet we survive and prosper. Nature averages up well. We see
nothing like purpose or will in her total scheme of things, yet inside
her hit-and-miss methods, her storms and tornadoes and earthquakes and
distempers, we see a fundamental benefaction. If it is not good-will,
it amounts to the same thing. Our fathers saw special providences, but
we see only unchangeable laws. To compare Nature's selection with
man's selection is like arguing from man's art to Nature's art.
Nature has no art, no architecture, no music. Her temples, as the
poets tell us, are the woods, her harps the branches of the trees, her
minstrels the birds and insects, her gardens the fields and
waysides--all safe compari