If we are torn by thorns or stung by nettles or bitten by snakes or suffer from frost-bites or sun-stroke, we accuse Nature of cruelty, always assuming, in our conceit, that we are the lords of creation, and that things were made especially for us. We have no venomous snake that will bite us except in self-defense, nor any bee that will sting us except on the same grounds. Even Darwin, in a letter to his friend Hooker, refers to the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, slow, and horribly cruel works of Nature,” thus treating the All-Mother with scant respect. Amiel cannot say, as he does say, that “Nature is unjust and shameless, without probity and without faith,” unless he makes her over into man or invests her with the human consciousness. Even the good Emerson accuses Nature of being unscrupulous. Did the Concord philosopher expect storms and frost and blight and thunderbolts to have scruples? Did he expect thorns and nettles and fleas and potato-bugs and grasshoppers and disease-germs to consider their ways? A well-known philosopher and writer, Professor Jacks, of Manchester College, Oxford, in writing upon “Our Common Foe,” takes it for granted at the outset that Nature is cruel, and, moreover, that she is as cruel as the Germans showed themselves to be in the cruelest of all wars. “There is a cruelty in Nature,” he says, “and it has been reserved for our age to realize how immense is its range and how appalling its effects”; we realize it, he says, when we read the story of Germany’s treatment of her prisoners, the story of her submarines, and her conduct toward unoffending non-combatants generally. What worse thing could be said about Nature than that she is as bad as the Germans? It almost makes us suspect treachery and death in her summer breezes and her sunshine. Dr. Jacks seeks to justify his charge by averring that man is a part of Nature and that in him are summarized her good and her evil qualities. Of course, in a certain sense this is true. But in seeking to solve the problems of his life, man separates himself from the rest of Nature and holds himself amenable to standards of conduct that he does not apply to the orders below him. He regards himself as a superior being. He is a part of Nature, but of an emancipated and regenerated Nature. He is one with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air only in his purely animal aspects. As a moral and spiritual being with a sense of truth and justice, of mercy and forgiveness, he stands on a higher plane. He cannot justify his conduct by an appeal to brute nature or to biological laws. His sins are more scarlet and his virtues more divine than those of his unmoral and unreasoning brute neighbors. His consciousness of right and wrong is the touchstone by which all his deeds are to be tried.