"Harmony' is certainly an influential idea that should be challenged, because many arguments that should be recognised as open and undecided will seem settled and clear through the application of its apparent force. Some points can be advanced for confrontation at the start. The first point is that, if we exclude humanity, harmony is not part of nature. It can have no meaning to say that one tree is in harmony with another, or that summer is in harmony with winter, unless the meaning is man-made. Nor should we be ready to believe that if we use modern terms like 'environment' or 'eco-system' we are any closer to harmony as a principle of natural function. If we claim that nature operates within balances then this observes only that processes have normal functional parameters depending on constraints and limits, mostly of a material kind. We cannot invest such continuities and ruptures of process in nature with any kind of meaning or value unless we clearly recognise that such investment is man-made, not produced by nature or by some imaginary controlling spirit. To invoke spirits is the merest superstitious animism, and when this is done in a sophisticated human context it always conceals other motives, as if to protect them from rational analysis. "