nregulated methods of mere chance. We cannot
fail to see that chance does play _some_ part. One seed from a tree
may fall into a rivulet and be swept away to the sea, while another
may be borne by a gust of wind, or by a bird, on to rich soil where
competitors are few, and be able to grow up into a monarch of the
forest, to live for a hundred years, and to give birth to thousands like
itself. This is true. But chance will not produce the advancement and
progress which is observable. Chance will not produce a single one
of those organs of adaptation we see in myriads in the forest. And
chance would not have made the barren earth of a hundred million
years ago bring forth the plant, animal, and human life we see on it
to-day.

The Activity does not work on the haphazard methods of pure
chance. Nor, on the other hand, are its operations conducted in the
rigid, mechanical method of a machine. Nor, again, can the result we
see be due to the working of blind physical and chemical processes
alone. There is a great deal too much variety and spontaneity and
originality about. We could not possibly look upon the forest as a
machine--even of the most complicated kind. A machine goes
grinding round and round, producing things of exactly the same
pattern. Whereas no two things exactly alike are ever turned out in
the forest. And blind physical and chemical processes could by
_themselves_--by themselves alone--never produce the novelties,
the entirely new and unique things, and things higher and higher in
the scale of being, which we see in the forest. Only a man
impervious to the teaching of common sense could suppose that the
care which plant, beast, and man alike show for their offspring could
be the result of bare physical and chemical processes without the
inclusion with these processes of any other agency whatsoever.

Nor, on the other hand, do we see any signs of the forest being the
result of a preconceived plan gradually being worked out--as a
bridge is gradually built up according to the previously thought out
plan of the engineer. The carrying out of a plan means that in course
of time the plan will be completed, and that each stage is a step
towards its completion. But in the forest life there is no sign of any
beginning of an approach towards the completion of a plan. There is
no tendency to a closing in. There is a reaching upward, it is true.
But there is also a splaying outward. One line leads up to man. But
others