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I can fancy brute matter saying to life: “You tarry with me at your peril. You will always be on the firing-line of my blind, contending forces; they will respect you not; you must take your chances amid my flying missiles. My forces go their eternal round without variableness or shadow of turning, and woe to you if you cross their courses. You may bring all your gods with you–gods of love, mercy, gentleness, altruism; but I know them not. Your prayers will fall upon ears of stone, your appealing gesture upon eyes of stone, your cries for mercy upon hearts of stone. I shall be neither your enemy nor your friend. I shall be utterly indifferent to you. My floods will drown you, my winds wreck you, my fires burn you, my quicksands suck you down, and not know what they are doing. My earth is a theatre of storms and cyclones, of avalanches and earthquakes, of lightnings and cloudbursts; wrecks and ruins strew my course. All my elements and forces are at your service; all my fluids and gases and solids; my stars in their courses will fight on your side, if you put and keep yourself in right relations to them. My atoms and electrons will build your houses, my lightning do your errands, my winds sail your ships, on the same terms. You cannot live without my air and my water and my warmth; but each of them is a source of power that will crush or engulf or devour you before it will turn one hair’s-breadth from its course. Your trees will be uprooted by my tornadoes, your fair fields will be laid waste by floods or fires; my mountains will fall on your delicate forms and utterly crush and bury them; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy whole tribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust of my earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropical growths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of the myriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; through immense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces will drive on like the ploughshare that buries every flower and grass-blade and tiny creature in its path. My winds are life-giving breezes to-day, and the besom of destruction to-morrow; my rains will moisten and nourish you one day, and wash you into the gulf the next; my earthquakes will bury your cities as if they were ant-hills. So you must take your chances, but the chances are on your side. I am not all tempest, or flood, or fire, or earthquake. Your career will be a warfare, but you will win more battles than you will lose. But remember, you are nothing to me, while I am everything to you. I have nothing to lose or gain, while you have everything to gain. Without my soils and moisture and warmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you can do or be nothing; without my sunshine you perish; but you have these things on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution on condition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologic ages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm. When you fail, or are crushed or swallowed by my remorseless forces, do not blame my gods, or your own; there is no blame, there is only the price to be paid: the hazards of invading the closed circle of my unseeing forces.”

In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature deals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It had been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated–her wild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic ages made visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animal bones. There was nearly as much bone as pitch. The fate of the unlucky flies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been the fate of the victims that had perished here. How many wild creatures had turned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they felt themselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch! In like manner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in flood and fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpitying heavens! There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apart from our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows one pitying glance upon us. Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of a long line of hostile forces, and escapes by dint of fleetness of foot, or agility in dodging, or else by toughness of fibre.