Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/32

 There exists one striking principle of distinction between the works of Nature and the works of Art. Art completes what it undertakes, and therewith makes its products more or less independent from each other. But Nature never has made for us, and never will make, any one thing complete, detached from all other kinds, really independent and finished as a product, by itself. She refuses any labour that has nothing to do with the rest of her cosmic, cyclic, general scheme. Nature in all her work, here or there, is perpetually referring us back or forward to other creations; to things "the same yet not the same"; to the like but not the identical. Putting a little more into one expression of herself, a little less into another, often merely using the same materials in another recipe. Nature keeps on melting, fusing, half-melting, half-fusing one set of her principles and products with another, almost as if in capricious experiment, or as aiming toward some perfect and independent thing never to be realized. She works along an endless chain, full of interrelationships; gracefully playing with what are not detached performances from her fine hand but merely between-expressions. All is of mere degrees, all, along her vast system of organic life.

Between whitest of men and the blackest negro stretches out a vast line of intermediary races as to their colours; brown, olive, red tawny, yellow. Between a protozoan and the most perfect development of the mammalia, we trace a succession of dependent intersteps. From a fish to a giraffe we can establish a series of details that unites them as form of life; while each middle link has its own place. A trilobite is at one end of Nature's workshop; a Spinoza, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven is at the other; led-to by cunning gradations. Nature can "evolve" an onion into a philosopher, or a mollusk to a prime-minister. The spectrum is a chain. Prom violet and indigo into scarlet, there is nothing but