In fact “intelligence” exists very truly, in a certain sense, in the admirably directed actions blindly performed by living beings. It is not, however, “formally” in them, but exists formally in their ultimate cause. Nevertheless that intelligence is so implanted within them that it truly exists in them “materially” though it is not “formally” in them. We have here, then, the answer to the question, “What is the rationality of the irrational?” It is a rationality which is very really, though not materially, present in the irrational world, while it is formally present in that world’s cause and origin. To every Theist this answer will be a satisfactory one. To him who is not a Theist there is no really satisfactory answer possible. This is a question not of theology but of pure reason antecedent to all theology. To reason, and to reason only, I appeal when I affirm that the existence of a constant, pervading, sustaining, directing, and all-controlling but unfathomable Intelligence which is not the intelligence of irrational creatures themselves, is the supreme truth which nature eloquently proclaims to him who with unprejudiced reason and loving sympathy will carefully consider her ways. He can hardly fail to discover, immanent in the material universe, “an action the results of which harmonize with man’s reason; an action which is orderly, and disaccords with blind chance, or ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ but which ever eludes his grasp, and which acts in modes different from those by which we should attempt to accomplish similar ends.”[38] For myself, I am bound humbly to confess that the more I study nature the more I am convinced that in the action of this all-pervading but inscrutable and unimaginable intelligence, of which self-conscious human rationality is the utterly inadequate image, though the image attainable by us, is to be sought the sole possible explanation of the mysterious but undeniable presence in nature of a rationality in that which is in itself irrational.—_Fortnightly Review._ [38] _Lessons from Nature_, ch. xii. p. 374. John Murray, 1876. CONCERNING EYES. BY WILLIAM H. HUDSON.