However indifferent the individual may be to the sufferings of those about him, he will make any sacrifice for his offspring. There is some instinct within plants and animals alike which impels them to sacrifice themselves that their kind may continue. So that Activity which is at the source of all life, and is keeping living things together in an interconnected whole, not only forces them upward in the scale of being, but is also driving them to look forward into the future, to provide for the future--and, indeed, to make the future better than the present. * * * This seems to be the way--judging by what we see in the forest--the Activity works. Things have I not come to be as they are by the slap-dash, irresponsible, unregulated methods of mere chance. We cannot fail to see that chance does play _some_ part. One seed from a tree may fall into a rivulet and be swept away to the sea, while another may be borne by a gust of wind, or by a bird, on to rich soil where competitors are few, and be able to grow up into a monarch of the forest, to live for a hundred years, and to give birth to thousands like itself. This is true. But chance will not produce the advancement and progress which is observable. Chance will not produce a single one of those organs of adaptation we see in myriads in the forest. And chance would not have made the barren earth of a hundred million years ago bring forth the plant, animal, and human life we see on it to-day. The Activity does not work on the haphazard methods of pure chance. Nor, on the other hand, are its operations conducted in the rigid, mechanical method of a machine. Nor, again, can the result we see be due to the working of blind physical and chemical processes alone. There is a great deal too much variety and spontaneity and originality about. We could not possibly look upon the forest as a machine--even of the most complicated kind. A machine goes grinding round and round, producing things of exactly the same pattern. Whereas no two things exactly alike are ever turned out in the forest. And blind physical and chemical processes could by _themselves_--by themselves alone--never produce the novelties, the entirely new and unique things, and things higher and higher in the scale of being, which we see in the forest. Only a man impervious to the teaching of common sense could suppose that the care which plant, beast, and man alike show for their offspring could be the result of bare physical and chemical processes without the inclusion with these processes of any other agency whatsoever.