igent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clash
of forces, the battle to the strong and the race to the fleet.

It is hard to believe that the course of organic evolution would have
eventuated in man and the other higher forms of life without some
guiding principle; yet it is equally difficult to believe that the
course of any guiding intelligence down the ages would have been strewn
with so many failures and monstrosities, so much waste and suffering and
delay. Man has not been specially favored by one force or element in
nature. Behold the enemies that beset him without and within, and that
are armed for his destruction! The intelligence that appears to pervade
the organic world, and that reaches its conscious expression in the
brain of man, is just as manifest in all the forms of animals and plants
that are inimical to him, in all his natural enemies,--venomous snakes
and beasts of prey, and insect pests,--as in anything else. Nature is as
wise and solicitous for rats and mice as for men. In fact, she has
endowed many of the lower creatures with physical powers that she has
denied him. Evidently man is only one of the cards in her pack;
doubtless the highest one, but the game is not played for him alone.

There is no economy of effort or of material in nature as a whole,
whatever there may be in special parts. The universe is not run on
modern business-efficiency principles. There is no question of time, or
of profit, of solvency or insolvency. The profit-and-loss account in the
long run always balances. In our astronomic age there are probably
vastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal space
than there are living suns and planets. But in some earlier period in
the cycle of time the reverse may have been true, or it may be true in
some future period.

There is economy of effort in the individual organism, but not in the
organic series, at least from the human point of view. During the
biologic ages there have been a vast number of animal forms, great and
small, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in his
line of descent, and played no part in his evolution. During that
carnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestor
of man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life was
constantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it. That it survived at
all in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those early
ages,