eve that life will be extinguished in a twinkling as we
collide with some other star, or will simply flicker out again as the
Sun's heat dies down and the Earth becomes cold. If this view be
correct, then that impression of the reliability and kindliness of
Nature which we formed when contemplating the stars in the desert
would be a false impression; our feelings of friendship with Nature
would at once freeze up and our vision of Beauty vanish like a
wraith.

Fortunately Truth and Knowledge do not deal so cruel a blow at
Beauty. Far from it: they take her side. There are no grounds for
supposing that either chance or mechanism produces spirit, or that
from merely physical and chemical combinations spirit can emerge.
Spirit is no casual by-product of mechanical or chemical processes.
Spirit is the governing factor regulating and controlling the physical
movements--controlling them, indeed, with such orderliness that we
may be apt from this very orderliness to regard the whole as a
machine and fail to see that all is directed towards high spiritual
ends.

If we are to appeal to reason, it is much more reasonable to assume
that spirit always existed, and that the conditions for the emergence
of life were brought about on purpose, than to assume that spirit is a
mere excretion, like perspiration, of chemical processes. Certainly
the former assumptions more clearly fit the facts of the case. For
these facts are, firstly, that we spiritual selves exist, next that we
have ideas of goodness and a determination to achieve it, next that
plant as well as animal life on this Earth is purposive, then that the
stars, numbering anything from a hundred to a thousand million,
each of them a sun and many of them presumably with planets, are
made of the same materials as this Earth, the plants, animals, and
ourselves are composed of; that these materials have the same
properties; that the same fundamental laws of gravitation, heat,
motion, chemical and electrical action prevail there as here; and
lastly that they are all connected with the Earth by some medium or
continuum of energies, which enables vibrations, of which the most
obvious are the vibrations of light, to reach the Earth from them.
These facts point towards the conclusion that the whole Universe, as
well as ourselves and the animals and plants on this Earth, is
actuated by spirit. Goodness we have seen to be working itself out
on the Earth; and there is nothing we see in t