inner quality
which we call "goodness." The fittest, that which has survived and
will survive in the struggle of organic growth, is (we see it in these
flowers) in man's estimation the beautiful. Is it possible to doubt
that just as we approve and delightedly revel in the beauty created by
"natural selection," so we give our admiration and reverence, without
question, to "goodness," which also is the creation of Nature's great
unfolding? Goodness (shall we say virtue and high quality?) is, like
beauty, the inevitable product of the struggle of living things, and
is Nature's favourite no less than man's desire. When we know the ways
of Nature, we shall discover the source and meaning of beauty, whether
of body or of mind.

As these thoughts are drifting through our enchanted dream we suddenly
hear a deep and threatening roar from the mountain-side. We look up
and see an avalanche falling down the rocks of the Jungfrau. The vast
mountain, with its dazzling vestment of eternal snow, and its slowly
creeping, green-fissured glaciers, towers above into the cloudless
sky. In an instant the mind travels from the microscopic details of
organic beauty, which but a moment ago held it entranced, to the
contemplation of the gigantic and elemental force whose tremendous
work is even now going on close to where we stand. The contrast, the
range from the minute to the gigantic, is prodigious yet exhilarating,
and strangely grateful. How many millions of years did it take to form
those rocks (many of them are stratified, water-laid deposits) in the
depths of the ocean? How many more to twist and bend them and raise
them to their present height? And what inconceivably long persistence
of the wear and tear of frost and snow and torrent has it required to
excavate in their hard bosoms these deep, broad valleys thousands of
feet below us, and to leave these strangely moulded mountain peaks
still high above us? And that beauty of the sun-lit sky and of the
billowy ice-field and of the colours of the lake below and of the
luminous haze and the deep blue shade in the valley--how is that
related to the beauty of the flowers? Truly enough, it is not a beauty
called forth by natural selection. It is primordial; it is the beauty
of great light itself. The response to its charm is felt by every
living thing, even by the smallest green plant and the invisible
animalcule, as it is by man himself. As I stand on the mountain-side
we are all, from ani