The insect and the bird provide for the
morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility
which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them
remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its
unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes
the negative type of perfect trust."[7]

But to leave his instincts and appetites to work, unimpeded and
unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters
of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do. On the
contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them. He
enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets
his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads
them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he
overloads and maddens them. The instinct for food and drink, which in
the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in
the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the
preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces
sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance
becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the
higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested
service. "Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these
things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"--which
will be probably never.

Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and
appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in
the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of
man? Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and
just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work
evil and death. Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what
man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his
conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none
left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which
only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity? Fix your
consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will
feel a pricking sensation in it. The mind directed intently to any part
of the frame will produce a flow of blood there. Any physician will tell
you that this is one of the greatest difficulties