Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/772

750 I was walking not long ago in the garden with a little girl, to whom I told James Whitcomb Riley's story of the "goblins that get you if you don't watch out"—a story supposed to be peculiarly attractive to children. "But there isn't any such thing as a goblin," said the practical little girl, "and there isn't ever going to be any such thing." Mindful of the arguments of Berkeley and Balfour, I said to her in the spirit of philosophic doubt, "Maybe there isn't any such thing as anything, Barbara?" "Yes, there is," she said, "such a thing as anything," and she looked about her for unquestioned reality; "there is such a thing as anything; there is such a thing as a squash."

And in this conclusion of the little girl the reality of the objective world, the integrity of science, and the sanity of man are alike bound up. And for its evidence, if we are not confined to Balfour's arguments in a circle, we may look to the facts of organic evolution, of which the existence of man is a part.

Each living being is a link in a continuous chain of life, going back in the past to the unknown beginnings of life. Into this chain of life, as far as we know. Death has never entered, because only in life has the ancestor the power of casting off the germ cells by which life is continued. Each individual is in a sense the guardian of the life-chain in which it forms a link. Each link is tested as to its fitness to the conditions external to itself in which it carries on its functions. Those creatures unadapted to the environment, whatever it may be, are destroyed, as well as those not adaptable; and this environment by which each is tested is the objective universe. It is not the world as man knows it. It is not the world as the creature may imagine it. It is the world as it is.

Nature has no pardon for ignorance or illusions. She is no respecter of persons. Her laws and her penalties consider only what is, and have no dealings with semblances. By this experience we come to know what reality is, that there is an external world to the demands of which our senses, our reason, our powers of action are all concessions. The safety of each chain of life is proportioned to the adaptation of its links to these conditions. This adaptation is in its essence obedience. The obedience of any creature is conditioned on its response in action to sensations or knowledge. Sense perception and intellect alike stand as advisers to its power of choice. The power of choice involves the need to choose right. For wrong choice leads to death. Death ends the chain of which the creature is a link, and the life of the world is continued by those whose choice has not been fatal. That "the sins of the fathers are visited on the children" is, in the long run, the expression of Infinite Mercy, "the goodness and severity of God." Severity of condition and