able to see Beauty which escapes the eye of the eagle. Because
of our higher receptiveness and responsiveness we may be able to
receive and respond to spiritual calls from the Heart of Nature. And
thus it may have been that we men learned to see Beauty, and now
learn to see it more and more. There may be parts of the Universe
where people live their lives in a blaze of Beauty, and are as anxious
to impart to us their enjoyment of it as certain Freedom-loving
Englishmen are to instil ideas of Freedom into the villagers of India.

These, at any rate, are among the possibilities of existence. It would
be the veriest chance if on this little speck of an Earth the highest
beings of all had come to birth. It may be so, of course. But the
probabilities seem to be enormously great against it. It seems far
more probable that among the myriads of stars some higher beings
than ourselves have come into existence, and that conditions on this
Earth are affected by the influence which they exert. We are under
no compulsion whatever to believe that we men are completely at
the mercy of blind forces or that chance rules supreme in Nature.
We have firm ground for holding that it is spirit which is supreme,
and that every smallest part and the whole together are animated by
Purpose.

So when we view Nature in the tropical forests and in barren deserts,
in mountains and in plains, in meadows and in woodlands, in seas
and in stars, in animals and in men, we do not see Nature as a
confused jumble with all her innumerable parts come together in
haphazard fashion as the grains of sand shovelled into a heap--a
chance aggregate of unrelated particles in which it is a mere toss-up
which is next to which and how they are arranged. Nature is
evidently not a chance collection of unrelated particles. We came to
that conclusion when studying the forest, and a study of the stars
shows nothing to weaken that conclusion. Nature is animated by
Purpose.

Yet because Nature is animated by Purpose, we need not regard her
as a machine, a piece of mechanism which has been designed and
put together, wound up and set going by some outside mechanician,
and regard ourselves as cogs on the wheels, watching all the other
wheels go round and through the maze of machinery catching sight
of the mechanician standing by and watching his handiwork. A cog
on the wheel as it revolved would be rigidly confined in its
operations: it would have no choice as to what means i