The Higher Mode of Intelligence.

We cannot avoid the conclusion that a paramount intelligence must be inherent in the Life-Principle, which manifests itself as this order; and thus we see that there must be a great cosmic intelligence underlying the totality of things.

The physical history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula A cloud of gas and dust in outer space. dispersed over vast infinitudes of space. Later, this condenses into a central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets, which at that stage were hardly yet solidified from the plastic primordial matter The fundamental, original substance from which all things are created.. Then follow untold millenniums of slow geological formation: an earth peopled by the lowest forms of life, whether vegetable or animal. From these crude beginnings, a majestic, unceasing, and unhurried forward movement brings things stage by stage to the condition in which we know them now.

Looking at this steady progression, it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each species that, after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the race shall still continue:

"So careful of the type it seems,
So careless of the single life."
A quotation from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850), reflecting on the perceived cruelty of nature's evolutionary process.

In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of Averages, which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the individual.