And then, what answer does she get from the great mystery of life? She sees a gigantic system of force and matter in interaction, set in motion, working, displaying itself under the silent impulse of an invisible power, and having neither existence nor beauty apart from an end external to itself. The governor of this world is man, endowed with an intelligence more potent than matter, so that he finds himself placed here below as the ambassador of life and the type of beauty. He himself obeys practically one only motive power, love; he cannot be strongly stirred save by passion. Thus the whole world obeys the law of beauty and of love. Truth and goodness form, so to speak, its skeleton; beauty is its life; love, the instrument of its life. Certain modern aesthetes, seeking to establish an antinomy between man and Nature, represent man as a foe who in employing Nature necessarily violates and deforms her, whereas left to herself she would be always lovely.[125] To subordinate man to Nature in this way seems to us untrue and disastrous. Surely the contrary is the case: we may put anything to wrong uses, but material forces cannot but gain if we direct them aright. Our part is to live in harmony with Nature, conformably to the magnificent and universal law that love grows by spending itself. “Go and give all your goods to feed the poor,” says the Gospel: that is nobility! Sow, give: give always! Give the labour of the arm to the fields as yet sterile; give your heart to hearts that are dull and dead! Beauty and niggardliness cannot live together. At one end of the scale there are those who are incapable of giving, frozen hard, as it were, against love: at the other are those who in a splendid profusion of generosity pour out their gifts without taking count of them: and the whole world lies between. From the pebble sensible only to mechanical attraction, to the flower that scents the air, one profound idea holds good, one great song rises, all mortal things cry in unison, and the burden of their united voices is, love. Every moving thing tends to entwine itself about something else, to unite inextricably with it; all life tends to pour itself into another, to surrender itself, and thereby it has a second birth, and all individual vibrations coalesce into one grand note. And, above this symphony of material things, the heart of man outpours itself in similar strains in the spiritual spheres of true life which stretch up to God. The love of man, to adopt the phrase in the _Imitation_, is a cry flung out towards God. Love, then, is the ruling principle of the world, a noble, superb, necessary thing; extending its broad wings it easily dominates the littlenesses and conventions of life, responds to all needs, whether of the individual soul or of society, sets frail hearts athrob with life. But it is obvious, too, what a strife it is sure to excite, by its double nature, between spirit and matter—a strife wonderful and delightful and fierce.