In society, where man is constantly scheming out methods of procedure and how his ideas and feelings and appetites can be brought to a harmonious workable state, a certain reciprocating smoothness of exchange and balance must be, and apparently has been, achieved. It is like those constructive adjustments which make any machine possible, and has apparently given rise to such conceptions of the necessary conditions for exchange as are indicated by the words “harmony,” “justice,” “truth,” possibly even “tenderness” and “mercy,” all of which mean but one thing, if they mean anything at all: the need of striking a balance or achieving an equilibrium between plainly restless and conflicting elements. (Why restless? Who knows? Why conflicting? Who knows?) However, it is this same equation or balance which conditions so large a thing as a universe, whose prime impulse apparently is to achieve endless variety in homogeneity, and vice versa. But these have been assumed, in an absolute and not a relative sense, to be attributes of a Supreme Being who is all-just, all-truthful, all-merciful, all-tender, rather than as mechanic or, if one accepts the created theory of life, as an intelligently and yet not moralistically worked-out system of minor arrangements, reciprocations and minute equations, which have little to do with the aspects and movements of much larger forces of which as yet we know nothing and which at first glance hinder rather than aid the intellect in perceiving the ultimate possibilities of the governing force in any direction. Indeed the rough balance or equation everywhere seen and struck between element and element, impulse and impulse, need and need, while they might seem to lend color to the existence of absolute right, justice, truth, honor, etc., really indicates nothing more than this rough approximation to equation in everything--force with matter, element with element--as an offset to incomprehensible and, to mortal mind, even horrible and ghastly extremes and disorder; nothing more. For in the face of all the schemes and contrivances whereby man may live in harmony with his neighbor there is the contrary fact that all these schemes are constantly being interfered with by contrary forces, decays, mistaken notions, dreams which produce inharmony. This can mean nothing if not an inherent impulse in Nature that makes for change and so rearrangement, regardless of any existing harmonies or balances, plus the curious impulse in man and Nature (inertia?) which seems to wish to avoid change.