The intelligence that appears to pervade the organic world, and that reaches its conscious expression in the brain of man, is just as manifest in all the forms of animals and plants that are inimical to him, in all his natural enemies,—­venomous snakes and beasts of prey, and insect pests,—­as in anything else.  Nature is as wise and solicitous for rats and mice as for men.  In fact, she has endowed many of the lower creatures with physical powers that she has denied him.  Evidently man is only one of the cards in her pack; doubtless the highest one, but the game is not played for him alone.

There is no economy of effort or of material in nature as a whole, whatever there may be in special parts.  The universe is not run on modern business-efficiency principles.  There is no question of time, or of profit, of solvency or insolvency.  The profit-and-loss account in the long run always balances.  In our astronomic age there are probably vastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal space than there are living suns and planets.  But in some earlier period in the cycle of time the reverse may have been true, or it may be true in some future period.

There is economy of effort in the individual organism, but not in the organic series, at least from the human point of view.  During the biologic ages there have been a vast number of animal forms, great and small, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in his line of descent, and played no part in his evolution.  During that carnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestor of man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life was constantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it.  That it survived at all in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those early ages, is one of the wonders of time.  The drama or tragedy of evolution has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who have played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purpose was the entertainment of some unseen spectator.  When we reach human history, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, what futile undertakings!—­war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress or bringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men!  Those who live in this age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogous to the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men who never saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engage in a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries of science and civilization can give them—­a tragedy that darkens the very heavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and good will to men.  It is a catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms of geologic time when whole races disappeared and the face of continents was changed.  It seems that men in the aggregate, with all their science and religion, are no more exempt