Man sees where Nature is blind; he takes a straight cut where she goes far around. In him she has added reason to her impulse, conscience to her blind forces, self-denial to her self-indulgence, the power of choice to her iron necessity. How well she has done by man, man alone knows. How much he is dependent upon her, he alone knows; how completely he is a part of her, he alone knows. We may call man an insurgent in her world, as an English scientist does, but he is her insurgent; she inspires him to insurrection, and she puts his weapons in his hands. His cause is her cause, and his victories are her victories. Only by personifying Nature in this way, and standing apart from her and regarding her objectively, can we contrast her methods and her spirit with our own. The mother she has been to us becomes apparent. In spite of all her shortcomings and delays and roundabout methods, here we are, and here we wish to remain. V THE GOOD DEVILS I This is not an essay on the optimism of a moralist, but on the optimism of a naturalist. On the whole and in the long run, as I am never tired of asserting, Nature is good. The universe has not miscarried. The celestial laws, as Whitman says, do not need to be worked over and rectified. It is good to be here, and it must be equally good to go hence. With all the terrible things in Nature, and all the cruel and wicked things in history, the world is good; life is good, and the Devil himself plays a good part. When Emerson in his Journal says, “It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint,” one wonders just what he means. Does he expect gravity, or fire, or flood, or wind, or tide to have scruples? Should the cat have scruples about dining off the mouse or the bird, or the wolf about making a meal of the lamb? or the plants and trees have scruples about running their roots into one another’s preserves, or cutting off one another’s rain or sunshine? If our cowbird had the human conscience, we should expect her to have scruples about laying her egg in the nest of another bird and thus shirking the labors and cares of parenthood, and we should expect the jays and crows to have scruples about eating up the eggs and young of their feathered neighbors, if they, too, were endowed with conscience. But none of them are troubled in this way, for the simple reason that they are not human beings. They live below the plane of man’s moral conscience. Chemistry and the elementary forces have no scruples. Powder or dynamite will blow up its maker as soon as it will any one else. The rain does not scruple to spoil the farmer’s hay, or the floods to wash away his house and destroy its inmates.