And yet just here another interesting fact stands out, and that is that whether or not he is a machine, Nature, or his Creator, appears to be quite definitely opposed to his finding out about himself or even to his delving into the matter, and throughout recorded science there is no evidence of the least willingness on the part of Nature or the life constructing forces to yield a single fact of any kind without a struggle. Man has fumbled and stumbled, dying by billions in one erroneous way, or another, until at last, by mere chance apparently, he has stumbled upon one helpful fact or another. It is as if the fable of Prometheus or that other of Adam and Eve were true. The seekers after knowledge of any kind have almost invariably been fought or their work brought to nothing, and even where man has apparently proven victorious or where he has seemingly been aided only that has been yielded which has tended to further him as an ignorant and yet useful machine, never as a thinker. No one who has tended to throw a clear light on the internecine struggles of Nature Herself, Her cruelties and brutalities, has prospered. If one doubts this he has only to consider the fumbling, haphazard progress of man, his warring notions as to his source and import, his strange aberrant evolution and the persistent and discouraging hindrances cast in the way of his intellectual evolution; i. e., the rise of impossible and even ridiculous leaders and religious theories--Christianity, Shintoism, Mohammedism--and the arrival of such dark figures as Attila (self-styled “the scourge of God”), Alaric, and Mohammed with his houris’ dream, upon the scene of fairly acceptable intellectual conditions. The deaths of endless prying inventors, their pursuit by the religionists in darker ages, the periodic rise of-isms and world-sweeping folderol, political and other notions, all seem to point to but one thing: Nature’s indifference if not opposition to man’s tendency to develop intelligence and desire to know--if such a thing can be assumed, for it cannot be proved. For since when has the dulness of the mass, or man, his ignorance or indifference, apparently calculated and conditional, not stood their ground against the overtures of intelligence, science, the arts, philosophy? Nothing flourishes on earth so well as vain theory. Energetic thought is all but taboo. False dreams and false hopes are invariably encouraged by apparently some chemical or mechanical condition in the so-called brain of man himself. It is scarcely so much that he dare not as that he cannot.