The whole living world is so interrelated and interdependent, and hinges so completely upon the non-living, that our analysis and interpretation of it must of necessity be very imperfect. But the creative energy works to no specific ends, or rather it works to all ends. As every point on the surface of the globe is equally on the top at all times, so the whole system of living nature balances on any given object. I saw a book of poems recently, called “The Road to Everywhere”--vague as Nature herself. All her roads are roads to everywhere. They may lead you to your own garden, or to the North Pole, or to the fixed stars, or may end where they began. Nature is a great traveler, but she never gets away from home; she takes all her possessions along with her, and her course is without direction, and without beginning or end. The most startling contradiction you can make expresses her best. She is the sum of all opposites, the success of all failures, the good of all evil. When we think we have cut out Nature, we have only substituted another phase; when our balloon mounts in spite of gravity, it is still gravity that makes it mount; when we clear the soil of its natural growth and plant our own crop, Nature is still our gardener; we have only placed other seeds of her own in her hands. When we have improved upon her, we have only prevailed upon her to second our efforts; we get ahead of her by following out the hints she gives us; when we trump her trick, it is with her own cards. When we fancy we assist Nature, as we say that we do with our drugs, it is she who gives the efficiency to the drugs. We may fancy that the sun is in the heavens solely to give light and warmth to the planets, which it surely does, but behold, what a mere fraction of the light and heat of the sun is intercepted by the slender girdle of worlds that surround it! The rays go out equally in all directions, they penetrate all space. The sun, with reference to its light and heat, is at the center of an infinite hollow sphere, and not one millionth part of its rays falls upon the worlds that circle around it. This is typical of Nature’s bounty. The thought and solicitude of the creative energy is directed to me and you personally in the same wholesale way. The planets of our system are lighted and warmed as effectually as if the sun shone for them alone, and man is the beneficiary of the heavens as completely as if indeed the whole creation were directed especially to him. Here is another point: the night and darkness in nature are local and limited; the universe is flooded with light; the black shadows themselves are born of the light. Though astronomers tell us that sidereal space is strewn with dead worlds and extinct suns, give time enough and they will all be quickened and rekindled. Light and life are the positive facts in nature, darkness and death the negative.