Strife! The very word was like a bell to toll me back. Those very flowers were fighting for their lives. Their very scents and colours were but enticements for the bee--for the bee which, in turn, with toil, garnered honey against chimenal famine. And those still, stupendous mountains--silent, superb--immobile, massive; their very crags bespoke tremendous struggle, immense upheaval, and the grinding of ice and glacier. Indeed the solid earth and all about me was unrestful, rushing.--I lay on my back on the grass and thrust my finger towards the sky. It seemed steady enough in all conscience. Yet I knew that as a matter of fact that fingertip of mine was performing most astounding feats. It was rushing through space. And in its rush it was pursuing a path would take an expert astronomer to determine. With the rotation of the earth, it was flying eastwards at more than a dozen miles a minute. With the revolution of the earth, it was rushing round the sun some two or three miles in that minute. And with the whole solar system, it was leaping towards the constellation of Hercules with leaps of more than seven hundred miles in each minute![41]--Seven hundred miles a minute![42] It is inconceivable. That enormous mass, the sun, into a spot on which, hundreds of our earths could be dropped like a handful of pebbles into a puddle, it and the farthermost of its planets, three thousand million miles away--all rushing through space ... twenty miles while I sneeze; thirty thousand miles while I sit at dinner; half-a-million miles between going to bed and getting up.... What a stupendous journey! What a mighty company! Where to? What for? Why this terrific expenditure of energy?--Think of the _ergs_ necessary to propel that mass! What is being _done_? Who does it? And for whom? Nothing is immobile in Nature. Nothing is stationary in Life. To exist, to be, to live, is to become, to change, to strive, to achieve. The seeming peace about me was outcome of infinite struggle. Only by struggle does life evolve, does man aspire. * * * * * Return we to my theme. XXIV Warnings to the Over-Zealous § 60