Yes, good in everything, because law in everything, truth in
everything, the sequence of cause and effect in everything, and it
may all be good to me if on the right principles I relate my life to
it. I can make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and the
floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynamical forces, serve me,
if I take hold of them by the right handle. The bad in things arises
from our abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations to
them. A thing is good or bad according as it stands related to my
constitution. We say the order of nature is rational; but is it not
because our reason is the outcome of that order? Our well-being
consists in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When we
cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. But Nature in
her universal procedures is not rational, as I am rational when I
weed my garden, prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm
myself with tools or weapons. In such matters I take a short cut to
that which Nature reaches by a slow, roundabout, and wasteful
process. How does she weed her garden? By the survival of the
fittest. How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law of
battle; the strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a slow and wasteful
process. She fertilizes the soil by plowing in the crop. She cannot
take a short cut. She assorts and arranges her goods by the law of
the winds and the tides. She builds up with one hand and pulls down
with the other. Man changes the conditions to suit the things.
Nature changes the things to suit the conditions. She adapts the
plant or the animal to its environment. She does not drain her
marshes; she fills them up. Hers is the larger reason--the reason of
the All. Man's reason introduces a new method; it cuts across,
modifies, or abridges the order of Nature. I do not see design in
Nature in the old ideological sense; but I see everything working to
its own proper end, and that end is foretold in the means. Things
are not designed; things are begotten. It is as if the final plan of
a man's house, after he had begun to build it, should be determined
by the winds and the rains and the shape of the ground upon which it
stands. The eye is begotten by those vibrations in the ether called
light, the ear by those vibrations in the air called sound, the
sense of smell by those emanations called odors. There are probably
other vibrations and emanations that we have no senses for because
our well-being does not demand them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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