sons for purposes of literature, but not for
purposes of science.

Man alone selects, or works by a definite method. Might we not as well
say that Nature ploughs and plants and trims and harvests? We pick out
our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our
purpose. We go straight to our object, with as little delay and waste
as possible. Not so Nature. Her course is always a round-about one.
Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Our choice selection of
rich milkers, prolific poultry, or heavy-fleeced sheep is with her
quickly sacrificed for the qualities of strength and cunning and
speed, as these alone have survival value. Man wants specific results
at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled
only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of
her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome.

What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthropomorphic view of
Nature--Nature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural
Selection is man's selection read into animate nature. We see in
nature what we have to call intelligence--the adaptation of means to
ends. We see purpose in all living things, but not in the same sense
in non-living things. The purpose is not in the light, but in the eye;
in the ear, but not in the sound; in the lungs, and not in the air; in
the stomach, and not in the food; in the various organs of the body,
and not in the forces that surround and act upon it. We cannot say
that the purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun to give
light and warmth, in the sense that we can say it is the purpose of
the eyelid to protect the eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or
of the varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves.

The world was not made for us, but we are here because the world was
made as it is. We are the secondary fact and not the primary. Nature
is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is
from her that we get our ideas of all these things. All parts and
organs of living bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is blind,
but she knows what she wants and she gets it. She is blind, I say,
because she is all eyes, and sees through the buds of her trees and
the rootlets of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her
animals. And, though I believe that the accumulation of variations is
the key to new species, yet this accumulation is not based upon
outward utility but u