ey make themselves or
did nature make them? Who, then, is nature? Is it a masculine, feminine,
or neuter? If nature can choose, then it can also think and produce. But
can it? No, nature is a word, very useful for certain purposes; but empty,
intangible, and incomprehensible. Nature is an abstraction, as much as dog
or tree, but far more inclusive. When we recognise thought, reason,
purpose in nature, still it is all in vain, we must assume a thinker in,
above, behind nature, and we must as a matter of course have a name for
him. The infinite thinker of all things, of all ideas, of all words, who
can never be seen and never comprehended, because he is infinite, but in
whose thoughts all creatures, the entire creation, have their source, and
who when rightly understood approaches us palpably or symbolically in all
things, in the sole path of sense by which he can approach us sentient
beings, why should we not call him Mind, or God, or as the Jews called
him, Jehovah, or the Mohammedans, Allah, or the Brahmins, Brahman? Either
reason operates in nature, or nature is without reason, is chaos and
confusion. Neither survival of the fittest nor natural selection could
bring order into this confusion; we might as well believe that if the type
in a printing office be thoroughly shaken and mixed, it could produce
Goethe's _Faust_ by chance. If we insist upon adhering to the theories of
natural selection, or survival of the fittest, be it so; we only transfer
the choice to a Something which can choose, and leave the fitness or
adaptability to the judgment of an originator, who can really judge and
think.

"I hope that I have made this plain to you; but what would be plain to us
would not be plain to children, and still less to mankind in its infancy
five thousand or fifty thousand years ago. I have especially endeavoured
to discover what led these men of old, in many respects so uncultivated,
to believe in something beyond, invisible, superhuman, supernatural. We
can see from their language and from the oldest monuments of their
religion that they early observed that something happened in the world.
The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke,
and asked himself and the sunshine. 'Whence?' he said; 'stop, what is
there? who is there?' Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own
volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was
considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest wo