t should
employ to carry out its end. Yet even plants have the power of
choice, as we have seen, and use different means to achieve the
same end. They also spend their entire lives in selecting and
rejecting--in selecting and assimilating what will nourish their
growth and enable them to propagate their kind, and in rejecting
what would be useless or harmful. These are something more than
mechanical operations; and if Nature were a machine, not even
plants, much less animals and men, could have been produced. The
operations of Nature, though orderly, are not mechanical only, and
we cannot regard Nature as a machine.

And if Nature is purposive, she is at work at something more than
the completion of a prearranged plan. We do not picture Nature as a
_structure,_ as a Cathedral, for example, designed by some
super-architect, in process of construction. In a Cathedral each stone is
perfectly and finally shaped and placed in a position in which it
must ever after remain, and the whole shows signs of gradual
completion as it is being built, and when it is built remains as it is.
The architect has made I and carried out his plan, and there is an end
of the matter. It is not thus that we view Nature, for everywhere we
see signs of perfectibility in the component parts and in the whole
together. Only if the Cathedral had in it the power to be continually
making its foundations deeper, to be ever towering higher, and to be
perpetually shaping itself into sublimer form, should we look on
Nature as a Cathedral. But in that case the mind of the architect
would have to dwell in each stone and in all together, and the
Cathedral would be something more than a structure in the ordinary
use of the word.

Nature is not a chance collection of particles, nor is she a mere
machine, nor some kind of structure like a Cathedral in course of
construction. But she is a Power of some kind, and what we have to
determine is the kind of Power she is. Now we have seen that
running through the life of the forest, controlling and directing the
whole, is an Organising Activity. And our observation of the stars
leads us to think that this same Organising Activity runs through
them also. There is quite evidently an Activity at work keeping the
whole together--the particles which go to form great suns, the
particles which go to form a flower, and the particles which go to
form a man; and all in their togetherness. Only we would not look
upon this Activ