That now is a mere speculation.  The veil of the unknown is set with the stars; its outer texture is ether and atom and crystal.  The Veiled Being, enigmatical and incomprehensible, broods over the mirror upon which the busy shapes of life are moving.  It is as if it waited in a great stillness.  Our lives do not deal with it, and cannot deal with it.  It may be that they may never be able to deal with it.

4.  The life force is not god

So it is that comprehensive setting of the universe presents itself to the modern mind.  It is altogether outside good and evil and love and hate.  It is outside God, who is love and goodness.  And coming out of this veiled being, proceeding out of it in a manner altogether inconceivable, is another lesser being, an impulse thrusting through matter and clothing itself in continually changing material forms, the maker of our world, Life, the Will to Be.  It comes out of that inscrutable being as a wave comes rolling to us from beyond the horizon.  It is as it were a great wave rushing through matter and possessed by a spirit.  It is a breeding, fighting thing; it pants through the jungle track as the tiger and lifts itself towards heaven as the tree; it is the rabbit bolting for its life and the dove calling to her mate; it crawls, it flies, it dives, it lusts and devours, it pursues and eats itself in order to live still more eagerly and hastily; it is every living thing, of it are our passions and desires and fears.  And it is aware of itself not as a whole, but dispersedly as individual self-consciousness, starting out dispersedly from every one of the sentient creatures it has called into being.  They look out for their little moments, red-eyed and fierce, full of greed, full of the passions of acquisition and assimilation and reproduction, submitting only to brief fellowships of defence or aggression.  They are beings of strain and conflict and competition.  They are living substance still mingled painfully with the dust.  The forms in which this being clothes itself bear thorns and fangs and claws, are soaked with poison and bright with threats or allurements, prey slyly or openly on one another, hold their own for a little while, breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . .

This second Being men have called the Life Force, the Will to Live, the Struggle for Existence.  They have figured it too as Mother Nature.  We may speculate whether it is not what the wiser among the Gnostics meant by the Demiurge, but since the Christians destroyed all the Gnostic books that must remain a mere curious guess.  We may speculate whether this heat and haste and wrath of life about us is the Dark God of the Manichees, the evil spirit of the sun worshippers.  But in contemporary thought there is no conviction apparent that this Demiurge is either good or evil; it is conceived of as both good and evil.  If it gives all the pain and conflict of life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the