Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE FACT OF DIRECTION IN NATUBB! Having given in the last chapter some account of how nature speaks to us, or of the method of revelation through evolution, we pass next to a study of some of the chief words which nature may have to declare, as we ourselves have become intelligences sufficiently evolved to hear whatever nature is waiting to make known to us. The first question — a vital one for the subsequent interpretation of nature — relates to the guidance of evolution: Does nature show direction towards any definite end? Has the created world rightly been compared to a ship which has been abandoned as a derelict upon the high seas, in itself evidently fitted up and ordered for some good voyage, yet left without helmsman to drift as an aimless world over the deeps of infinite space : or has the world received from the beginning definite direction toward some goal, and has it kept that direction throughout its age-long course, — is it keeping itself true to it now? As Mr. Ward tersely puts it, Is evolution "without guidance or with guidance " ? Observe, as a preliminary consideration, that any evidence which the course of nature may disclose of direction towards some end, is not to be set aside by any ignorance of ours concerning the nature of the end towards which all things may be moving. It would not follow that a ship may not be sailing on a predetermined course, because it may be sailing under sealed orders, and no one on board may know well its ultimate destination. Even if nature be under orders whose seal no man may break, nevertheless it may be moving on towards something which is yet to be revealed. The first question for us to determine is one of fact, whether it is moving along any definite, progressive course. Neither would it necessarily ...