ting upon. Every advance in science consists in discovering new
subtleties of connection in this magnificent universal order, which already
exists and only needs our recognition to bring it into practical use. If,
then, the highest work of the greatest minds consists in nothing else than
the recognition of an already existing order, there is no getting away from
the conclusion that a paramount intelligence must be inherent in the
Life-Principle, which manifests itself _as_ this order; and thus we see
that there must be a great cosmic intelligence underlying the totality of
things.

The physical history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula
dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a
central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet
consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold
millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest
forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a
majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by
stage to the condition in which we know them now. Looking at this steady
progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the
evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of
the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that,
after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the
race shall still continue:--

"So careful of the type it seems
So careless of the single life."

In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of
Averages which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the
individual.

But the progress towards higher intelligence is always in the direction of
narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and
more out of the law of averages, and substituting the law of individual
selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the
fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea
with them if every individual survived; but the margin of destruction is
correspondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up the
normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale,
reproduction is by no means thus enormously in excess of survival. True,
there is ample margin of accident and disease cutting off numbers of human
beings before they have go