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Title: Accepting the Universe
Essays in naturalism
Author: John Burroughs
Release date: March 17, 2026 [eBook #78230]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78230
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
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Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE
[Illustration: (Frontispiece; the author)]
ACCEPTING
THE UNIVERSE
_ESSAYS IN NATURALISM_
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
[Illustration: (colophon)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
..._And heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went._
THE RUBÁIYÁT
PREFACE
A wheel may have many spokes, but can have but one hub. So I
may say of this volume of mine that there are many themes and
chapter-headings, but there is but one central thought into which
they all converge, and that is that the universe is good, and that
it is our rare good fortune to form a part of it. As this collection
of essays does not aim to be a systematic treatise on any one theme,
but rather a series of sallies, excursions, into the world of
semi-philosophical speculation, there is inevitably much repetition;
there may even be some contradiction. But I have concluded to let
them stand, as I find myself an interested spectator of the workings
of my own mind when, in following different roads, it arrives at
the same truth. As all roads lead to Rome, so in the realm in which
my mind works in this volume, all roads lead to the conclusion that
this is the best possible world, and these people in it are the best
possible people.
The heart of Nature is sound. I feel toward the great Mother somewhat
as a man does who takes out a policy in an insurance company: he
believes the company is solvent and will meet its obligations. I
look upon the universe as solvent and worthy of trust. In other
words this is a book of radical optimism. It might be described as an
attempt to justify the ways of God to man on natural grounds.
My reader need hardly be told that theological grounds do not count
with me. I want nothing less than a faith founded upon a rock,
faith in the constitution of things. The various man-made creeds
are fictitious, like the constellations--Orion, Cassiopeia’s Chair,
the Big Dipper; the only thing real in them is the stars, and the
only thing real in the creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the
Infinite. This abides, though creeds and dogmas change or vanish.
Empedocles says:
“O, wretched he whose care
Is shadowy speculation on the gods.”
But is not speculation better than indifference? Curiosity about the
gods may lead to a better acquaintance with them. I feel that each of
these chapters might be called an altar to the Unknown God.
JOHN BURROUGHS
CONTENTS
I. SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE? 3
II. MANIFOLD NATURE 19
III. EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE 30
IV. THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE 54
V. THE GOOD DEVILS 73
VI. THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE 90
VII. THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST 112
VIII. A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY 134
IX. THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT 138
X. TOOTH AND CLAW 158
XI. MEN AND TREES 173
XII. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 193
XIII. HORIZON LINES:
I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 203
II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS 205
III. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY 207
IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 211
V. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE? 219
VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER 225
VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS 226
VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS 230
IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE 233
X. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE 237
XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE 238
XII. ILLUSIONS 239
XIII. IS NATURE SUICIDAL? 242
XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY 245
XIV. SOUNDINGS:
I. THE GREAT MYSTERY 253
II. THE NATURAL ORDER 257
III. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 261
IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK 265
V. A PERSONAL GOD 266
VI. THE ETERNAL 270
VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY 275
VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE 278
IX. THE INSOLUBLE 280
X. PAYING THE DEBT 282
XI. DEATH 288
XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH 293
XIII. THINKING AND ACTING 296
XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE 304
XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK 309
XV. THE POET OF THE COSMOS 316
_The frontispiece, showing Mr. Burroughs at his woodpile at
Riverby, is from a photograph taken in 1920 by_ Mr. HERBERT
S. ARDELL
ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE
I
SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?
I
It is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the
universe. “Gad, she’d better!” retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself
did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking
up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: “A sad spectacle! If they
be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be na
inhabited, what a waste of space!”
It ought not to be a hard thing to accept the universe, since it
appears to be a fixture, and we have no choice in the matter; but
I have found it worth while to look the gift in the mouth, and
convince myself that it is really worth accepting. It were a pity to
go through life with a suspicion in one’s mind that it might have
been a better universe, and that some wrong has been done us because
we have no freedom of choice in the matter. The thought would add a
tinge of bitterness to all our days. And so, after living more than
four score years in the world, and pondering long and intently upon
the many problems which life and nature present, I have come, like
Margaret Fuller, to accept the universe, have come frankly to accept
that first verdict pronounced upon creation, namely, that it is very
good--good in its sum total up to this astronomic date, whatever
phases it may at times present that lead us to a contrary conclusion.
Not that cold and hunger, war and pestilence, tornadoes and
earthquakes, are good in a positive sense, but that these and kindred
things are vastly overbalanced by the forces and agencies that make
for our well-being,--that “work together for good,”--the sunshine,
the cooling breezes, the fertile soil, the stability of land and sea,
the gentle currents, the equipoise of the forces of the earth, air,
and water, the order and security of our solar system, and, in the
human realm, the good-will and fellowship that are finally bound to
prevail among men and nations.
In remote geologic ages, before the advent of man, when the earth’s
crust was less stable, when the air was yet loaded with poisonous
gases, when terrible and monstrous animal forms held high carnival in
the sea and upon the land, it was not in the same sense good--good
for beings constructed as we are now. In future astronomic time, when
the earth’s air and water and warmth shall have disappeared--a time
which science predicts--and all life upon the globe fails, again
it will not be good. But in our geologic, biologic, and astronomic
age, notwithstanding the fact that cold and suffering, war and
pestilence, cyclones and earthquakes, still occur upon the relatively
tiny ball that carries us through the vast sidereal spaces, good is
greatly in the ascendancy. The voyage is not all calm and sunshine,
but it is safe, and the dangers from collision and shipwreck are very
remote. It is a vast and lonely sea over which we are journeying,
no other ships hail us and bid us Godspeed, no messages, wireless
or other, may reach us from other shores, or other seas; forces and
influences do play upon us from all parts of the empyrean, but, so
far as we are aware, no living thing on other spheres takes note of
our going or our coming.
In our practical lives we are compelled to separate good from
evil--the one being that which favors our well-being, and the other
that which antagonizes it; but, viewed as a whole, the universe is
all good; it is an infinite complex of compensations out of which
worlds and systems of worlds, and all which they hold, have emerged,
and are emerging, and will emerge. This is not the language of the
heart or of the emotions--our anthropomorphism cries out against
it--but it is the language of serene, impartial reason. It is good
for us occasionally to get outside the sphere of our personal life
and view things as they are in and of themselves. A great demand
is made upon our faith--faith in the absolute trustworthiness of
human reason, and in the final beneficence of the forces that rule
this universe. Not to solve the mysteries, but to see that they are
insoluble, and to rest content in that conclusion, is the task we set
ourselves here.
Evidently the tide of life is still at the flood on this planet; its
checks and counter-currents arise inevitably in a universe whose
forces are always, and always must be, in unstable equilibrium.
The love of the Eternal for mankind, and for all other forms of
life, is not a parental love--not the love of the mother for her
child, or of the father for his son; it is more like the love which a
general has for his army; he is to lead that army through hardships,
through struggles, through sufferings, and through death, but he is
leading it to victory. Many will perish that others may live; the
battle is being won daily. Evolution has triumphed. It has been a
long and desperate battle, but here we are and we find life sweet.
The antagonistic forces which have been overcome have become sources
of power. The vast army of living forms moving down the geologic
ages has been made strong through the trials and obstacles it has
surmounted, till now we behold it in the fullness of its power with
man at its head.
II
There is a paragraph in Emerson’s Journal on Providence, written when
he was twenty-one, which is as broad and as wise and as heterodox as
anything he ever wrote. The Providence he depicts is the Providence
I see in Nature:
“Providence supports, but does not spoil its children. We are
called sons, not darlings, of the Deity. There is ever good in
store for those who love it; knowledge for those who seek it; and
if we do evil, we suffer the consequences of evil. Throughout the
administration of the world there is the same aspect of stern
kindness; of good against your will; good against your good; ten
thousand channels of active beneficence, but all flowing with the
same regard to general, not particular profit.... And to such an
extent is this great statute policy of God carried, that many, nay,
most, of the great blessings of humanity require cycles of a thousand
years to bring them to their height.”
A remarkable statement to be made in 1824, in New England, and by
a fledgling preacher of the orthodox faith and the descendant of a
long line of orthodox clergymen. It is as broad and as impartial
as science, and yet makes a strong imaginative appeal. Good at the
heart of Nature is the purport of it, not the patent-right good of
the creeds, but good, free to all who love it, a “stern kindness,”
and no partial, personal, vacillating Providence whose ear is open
only to the password of some sect or cult, or organization--“good
against your good,” your copyrighted good, your personal, selfish
good (unless it is in line with equal good to others), the broad,
universal beneficence of Nature which brought us here and keeps
us here, and showers its good upon us as long as we keep in right
relations with it; but which goes its appointed way regardless of the
sore needs of warring nations or the desperate straits of struggling
men. That is the Providence that lasts, that does not change its
mind, that is not indulgent, that does not take sides, that is
without variableness or shadow of turning. Suppose the law of gravity
were changeable, or the law of chemical reactions, or the nature of
fire, or air, or water, or cohesion? Gravity never sleeps nor varies,
yet see bodies rise, see others fall, see the strong master of the
weak, see the waters flow and the ground stay. The laws of fluids are
fixed, but see the variety of their behavior, the forms in which they
crystallize, their solvent power, their stability or instability,
their capacity to absorb or conduct heat--flux and change everywhere
amid fixity and law. Nature is infinitely variable, which opens the
door to all forms of life; her goings and comings are on such a large
scale, like the rains, the dews, the sunlight, that all creatures
get an equal benefit. She sows her seed with such a generous hand
that enough of them are bound to fall upon fertile places. Such as
are very limited in range, like those of the swamp plants, are yet
cast forth upon the wind so liberally that sooner or later some of
them fall upon conditions suitable to them. Nature will cover a whole
township with her wind-sown seeds in order to be sure that she hits
the small swamp in one corner of it.
A stream of energy, not described by the adjective “inexhaustible,”
bears the universe along, and all forms of life, man with the rest,
take their chances amid its currents and its maelstroms. The good
Providence shows itself in the power of adaptation which all forms
of life possess. Some forms of sea-weed or sea-grass grow where the
waves pound the shore incessantly. How many frail marine creatures
are wrecked upon the shore, but how many more are not wrecked! How
many ships go down in the sea, but how many more are wafted safely
over it!
The Providence in Nature seems intent only on playing the game,
irrespective of the stakes, which to us seem so important. Whatever
the issue, Nature is the winner. She cannot lose. Her beneficence is
wholesale. Her myriad forms of life are constantly passing through
“the curtain of fire” of her inorganic forces, and the casualties are
great, but the majority get through. The assault goes on and will
ever go on. It is like a stream of water that is whole and individual
at every point, but fixed and stable at no point. To play the game,
to keep the currents going--from the depths of sidereal space to the
shallow pool by the roadside; from the rise and fall of nations, to
the brief hour of the minute summer insects, the one overarching
purpose seems to be to give free rein to life, to play one form
against another, to build up and tear down, to gather together and to
scatter--no rest, no end, nothing final--rocks decaying to build more
rocks, worlds destroyed to build more worlds, nations disintegrating
to build more nations, organisms perishing to feed more organisms,
life playing into the hands of death everywhere, and death playing
into the hands of life, sea and land interchanging, tropic and arctic
meeting and mingling, day and night, winter and summer chasing each
other over the earth--what a spectacle of change, what a drama never
completed! Vast worlds and systems in fiery flux; one little corner
of the cosmos teeming with life, vast areas of it, like Saturn and
Jupiter, dead and barren through untold millions of years; collisions
and disruptions in the heavens, tornadoes and earthquakes and wars
and pestilence upon the earth--surely it all sounds worse than it is,
for we are all here to see and contemplate the great spectacle; it
sounds worse than it is to us because we are a part of the outcome
of all these raging and conflicting forces. Whatever has failed, we
have succeeded, and the beneficent forces are still coming our way.
As I write these lines I see my neighbor and his boys gathering the
hay from the meadows and building it into a great stack beside their
glutted barns. I see a chipmunk carrying stores to his den, I see
butterflies dancing by on painted wings, I see and hear the happy
birds, and the August sun beams his best upon all the land.
The greatest of human achievements and the most precious is that
of the great creative artist. In words, in color, in sounds, in
forms, man comes nearest to emulating the Creative Energy itself.
It seems as if the pleasure and the purpose of the Creative Energy
were endless invention--to strike out new forms, to vary perpetually
the pattern. She presents myriads of forms, myriads of types,
inexhaustible variety in air, earth, water, ten thousand ways to
achieve the same end, a prodigality of means that bewilders the mind;
her aim to produce something new and different, an endless variety
of forms that fly, that swim, that creep, in the sea, in the air,
on the earth, in the fields, in the woods, on the shore. How many
ways Nature has of scattering her seeds, how many types of wings, of
hooks, of springs! In some she offers a wage to bird or quadruped in
the shape of fruit, others she forcibly attaches to the passer-by. In
all times and places there is a riot of invention.
III
Are we not men enough to face things as they are? Must we be cosseted
a little? Can we not be weaned from the old theological pap? Can we
not rest content in the general beneficence of Nature’s Providence?
Must you and I have a special hold upon the great Mother’s apron
strings?
I see the Nature Providence going its impartial way. I see drought
and flood, heat and cold, war and pestilence, defeat and death,
besetting man at all times, in all lands. I see hostile germs in
the air he breathes, in the water he drinks, in the soil he tills.
I see the elemental forces as indifferent toward him as toward
ants and fleas. I see pain and disease and defeat and failure
dogging his footsteps. I see the righteous defeated and the ungodly
triumphant--this and much more I see; and yet I behold through the
immense biological vista behind us the race of man slowly--oh, so
slowly!--emerging from its brute or semi-human ancestry into the
full estate of man, from blind instinct and savage passion into
the light of reason and moral consciousness. I behold the great
scheme of evolution unfolding despite all the delays and waste and
failures, and the higher forms appearing upon the scene. I see
on an immense scale, and as clearly as in a demonstration in a
laboratory, that good comes out of evil; that the impartiality of
the Nature Providence is best; that we are made strong by what we
overcome; that man is man because he is as free to do evil as to do
good; that life is as free to develop hostile forms as to develop
friendly; that power waits upon him who earns it; that disease,
wars, the unloosened, devastating elemental forces, have each and
all played their part in developing and hardening man and giving
him the heroic fiber. The good would have no tang, no edge, no
cutting quality without evil to oppose it. Life would be tasteless
or insipid, without pain and struggle and disappointment. Behold
what the fiery furnace does for the metals--welding or blending or
separating or purifying them, and behold the hell of contending and
destructive forces out of which the earth came, and again behold
the grinding and eroding forces, the storms and earthquakes and
eruptions and disintegrations that have made it the green inhabitable
world that now sustains us! No, the universal processes do not need
disinfecting; the laws of the winds, the rains, the sunlight do not
need rectifying. “I do not want the constellations any nearer,” says
Whitman. I do not want the natural Providence any more attentive. The
celestial laws are here underfoot and our treading upon them does
not obliterate or vulgarize them. Chemistry is incorruptible and
immortal, it is the handmaid of God; the yeast works in the elements
of our bread of life while we sleep; the stars send their influences,
the earth renews itself, the brooding heaven gathers us under its
wings, and all is well with us if we have the heroic hearts to see it.
In the curve of the moon’s or of the planets’ disks, all broken or
irregular lines of the surface are lost to the eye--the wholeness of
the sphere form subordinates and obliterates them all: so all the
failures and cross-purposes and disharmonies in nature and life do
not suffice to break or mar the vast general beneficence; the flowing
universal good is obvious above all.
So long as we think of the Eternal in terms of our experience--of
the knowledge of concrete things and beings which life discloses to
us--we are involved in contradictions. The ancients visualized their
gods and goddesses--Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Juno, and all the others.
Shall we do this for the Eternal and endow it with personality? Into
what absurdities this leads us! The unspeakable, the unseeable, the
unthinkable, the inscrutable, and yet the most obvious fact that life
yields to us! Nearer and more vital than our own bodies, than our own
parents, and yet eluding our grasp; vehemently denied, passionately
accepted, scoffed, praised, feared, worshiped, giving rise to deism,
atheism, pantheism, to idolatry, to persecution, to martyrdom, the
great Reality in which we live and move and have our being, and yet
for that very reason, because it is a part of us, or rather we are
a part of it, are we unable to define it or seize it as a reality
apart from ourselves. Our denial proves it; just as we use gravity
to overcome gravity, so we use God to deny God. Just as pure light
is of no color, but split up makes all the colors that we see, so
God divided and reflected makes all the half-gods we worship in
life. Green and blue and red and orange are not in the objects that
reflect them, but are an experience of the eye. We might with our
tongues deny the air, but our spoken words prove it. We cannot lift
ourselves over the fence by our own waistbands; no more can we by
searching find God, because He is not an object that has place and
form and limitations. He is the fact of the fact, the life of the
life, the soul of the soul, the incomprehensible, the sum of all
contradictions, the unit of all diversity; he who knows Him, knows
Him not; he who is without Him, is full of Him; turn your back upon
Him, then turn your back upon gravity, upon air, upon light. He
cannot be seen, but by Him all seeing comes. He cannot be heard, yet
by Him all hearing comes. He is not a being, yet apart from Him there
is no being--there is no apart from Him. We contradict ourselves when
we deny Him; it is ourselves we deny, and equally do we contradict
ourselves when we accept Him; it is something apart from ourselves
which we accept.
When half-gods go, says Emerson, the gods arrive. But half-gods
never go; we can house and entertain no other. What can we do with
the Infinite, the Eternal? We can only deal with things in time
and space--things that can be numbered and measured. What can we
do with the infinitely little, the infinitely great? All our gods
are half-gods made in our own image. No surer does the wax take the
imprint of the seal than does the Infinite take the imprint of our
finite minds. We create a Creator, we rule a Ruler, we invent a
heaven and hell; they are laws of our own being, seen externally.
How, then, shall we adjust our lives to the conception of a
universal, non-human, non-finite, algebraic God? They adjust
themselves. Do your work, deal justly, love rightness, make the most
of yourself, cherish the good, the beautiful, the true, practice the
Christian and the heathen virtues of soberness, meekness, reverence,
charity, unselfishness, justice, mercy, singleness of purpose; obey
the commandments, the Golden Rule, imbue your spirit with the wisdom
of all ages, for thus is the moral order of the world upheld.
The moral order and the intellectual order go hand in hand. Upon one
rests our relation to our fellows, upon the other rests our relation
to the cosmos.
We must know, and we must love; we must do, and we must enjoy; we
must warm judgment with feeling, and illume conscience with reason.
Admit, if we must, that we are in the grip of a merciless power,
that outside of our own kind there is nothing that shows us mercy
or consideration, that the Nature of which we form a part goes her
own way regardless of us; yet let us keep in mind that the very fact
that we are here and find life good is proof that the mercilessness
of Nature has not been inconsistent with our permanent well-being.
The fact that flowers bloom and fruit and grains ripen, that the
sun shines, that the rain falls, that food nourishes us, that love
warms us, that evolution has brought us thus far on our way, that
our line of descent has survived all the hazards of the geologic
ages, all point to the fact that we are on the winning side, that
our well-being is secured in the constitution of things. For all
the cataclysms and disruptions, the globe has ripened on the great
sidereal tree, and has become the fit abode of its myriad forms of
life. Though we may be run down and crushed by the great terrestrial
forces about us, just as we may be run down and crushed in the
street, yet these forces play a part in the activities that sustain
us; without them we should not be here to suffer at their hands.
Our life depends from moment to moment upon the air we breathe, yet
its winds and tempests may destroy us; it depends from day to day
upon the water we drink, yet its floods may sweep us away. We walk
and climb and work and move mountains by gravity, and yet gravity may
break every bone in our bodies. We spread our sails to the winds and
they become our faithful servitors, yet the winds may drive us into
the jaws of the breakers. How are our lives bound up and identified
with the merciless forces that surround us! Out of the heart of fate
comes our freedom; out of the reign of death comes our life; out of
the sea of impersonal energy come our personalities; out of the rocks
comes the soil that sustains us; out of the fiery nebulæ came the
earth with its apple-blossoms and its murmuring streams; out of the
earth came man. If the cosmic forces were not merciless, if they did
not go their own way, if they made exceptions for you and me, if in
them there _were_ variableness and even a shadow of turning, the vast
inevitable beneficence of Nature would vanish, and the caprice and
uncertainty of man take its place. If the sun were to stand still for
Joshua to conquer his enemies, there would be no further need for it
to resume its journey. What I am trying to get rid of is the pitying
and meddling Providence which our feeble faith and half-knowledge
have enthroned above us. We need stronger meat than the old theology
affords us. We need to contemplate the ways of a Providence that has
not been subsidized; we need encouragement in our attitude of heroic
courage and faith toward an impersonal universe; we need to have
our petty anthropomorphic views of things shaken up and hung out in
the wind to air. The universe is not a schoolroom on the Montessori
lines, nor a benevolent institution run on the most modern improved
plan. It is a work-a-day field where we learn from hard knocks, and
where the harvest, not too sure, waits upon our own right arm.
II
MANIFOLD NATURE
Few persons, I fancy, ever spend much time in thinking seriously of
this vast, ever-present reality which we call Nature; what our true
relations to it are, what its relations are to what we call God, or
what God’s relations are to it; whether God and Nature are two or
one--God and Nature, or only Nature, or only God.
When we identify Nature with God we are at once in sore straits
because Nature has a terrible side to her, but the moment we separate
God from Nature we are still more embarrassed. We create a hiatus
which we must find something to fill. We must invent a Devil upon
whom to saddle the evil that everywhere dogs the footsteps of the
good. So we have both a God and a Devil, or two gods, on our hands
contending with each other. Even our good friends in the churches
talk glibly of the God of Nature, or Nature’s God, little heeding the
terrible black depths that lie under their words.
The Nature that the poets sing and that nature-writers exploit is
far from being the whole story. When we think of Nature as meaning
only birds and flowers and summer breezes and murmuring streams, we
have only touched the hem of her garment--a garment that clothes
the whole world with the terrific and the destructive, as well as
with the beautiful and the beneficent. Yet her fairer forms and
gentler influences are undoubtedly the expression of those forces and
conditions that go hand in hand with the things that make for our
development and well-being.
Probably not till flowers bloomed and birds sang was the earth ripe
for man. Not till the bow appeared on the retreating storm-cloud
was anything like human life possible. Of savage, elemental Nature,
black in tempest and earthquake, hideous in war and pestilence, our
poets and nature-students make little, while devout souls seem to
experience a cosmic chill when they think of these things.
The majority of persons, I fancy, when they consider seriously the
problem, look upon Nature as a sort of connecting link between man
and some higher power, neither wholly good nor wholly bad; divine
in some aspects, diabolical in others; ministering to our bodies,
but hampering and obstructing our souls. They see her a goddess one
hour, and a fury the next; destroying life as freely as she gives it;
arming one form to devour another; crushing or destroying the fairest
as soon as the ugliest; limited in her scope and powers, and not
complete in herself, but demanding the existence of something above
and beyond herself.
Under the influence of Christianity man has taken himself out of the
category of natural things, both in his origin and in his destiny.
Such a gulf separates him from all other creatures, and his mastery
over them is so complete that he looks upon himself as exceptional,
and as belonging to another order. Nature is only his stepmother,
and treats him with the harshness and indifference that often
characterize that relation.
When Wordsworth declared himself a worshiper of Nature, was he
thinking of Nature as a whole, or only of an abridged and expurgated
Nature--Nature in her milder and more beneficent aspects? Was it not
the Westmoreland Nature of which he was a worshiper?--a sweet rural
Nature, with grassy fells and murmuring streams and bird-haunted
solitudes? What would have been his emotion in the desert, in the
arctic snows, or in the pestilential forests and jungles of the
tropics? Very likely, just what the emotion of most of us would be--a
feeling that here are the savage and forbidding and hostile aspects
of Nature against which we need to be on our guard. That creative eye
and ear to which Wordsworth refers is what mainly distinguishes the
attitude of the modern poet toward Nature from the ancient. Sympathy
is always creative--“thanks to the human heart by which we live.”
The Wordsworthian Nature was of the subjective order; he found it
in his own heart, in his dreams by his own fireside, in moments of
soul dilation on his Westmoreland hills, when the meanest flowers
that blow could bring to him “thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears.”
The Nature that to Wordsworth never betrays us, and to Milton was
“wise and frugal,” is a humanized, man-made Nature. The Nature we
know and wrest our living from, and try to drive sharp bargains
with, is of quite a different order. It is no more constant than
inconstant, no more wise and frugal than foolish and dissipated; it
is not human at all, but unhuman.
When we infuse into it our own idealism, or recreate it in our
own image, then we have the Nature of the poets, the Nature that
consciously ministers to us and makes the world beautiful for our
sake.
When in his first book, “Nature,” Emerson says that the aspect of
Nature is devout, like the figure of Jesus when he stands with bended
head and hands folded upon the breast, we see what a subjective and
humanized Nature, a Nature of his own creation, he is considering.
His book is not an interpretation of Nature, but an interpretation
of his own soul. It is not Nature which stands in an attitude of
devotion with bowed head, but Emerson’s own spirit in the presence
of Nature, or of what he reads into Nature. Yet the Emerson soul
is a part of Nature--a peculiar manifestation of its qualities and
possibilities, developed through centuries of the interaction of man
upon man, through culture, books, religion, meditation.
“The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at Nature,” he says,
“is in our own eye.” Is it not equally true that the harmony and
perfection that we see are in our own eye also? In fact, are not
all the qualities and attributes which we ascribe to Nature equally
the creation of our own minds? The beauty, the sublimity, the power
of Nature are experiences of the beholder. The drudge in the fields
does not experience them, but the poet, the thinker, the seer,
does. Nature becomes very real to us when we come to deal with her
practically, when we seek her for specific ends, when we go to her to
get our living. But when we go to her in the spirit of disinterested
science, the desert, the volcano, the path of the cyclone, are full
of the same old meanings, the playground of the same old elements
and forces. Nature is what we make her. In his Journal Emerson for a
moment sees Nature as she is: “Nature is a swamp, on whose purlieus
we see prismatic dew-drops, but her interiors are terrific.”
Man is the only creature that turns upon Nature and judges her; he
turns upon his own body and mind and judges them; he judges the work
of his own hands; he is critical toward all things that surround him;
he brings this faculty of judgment into the world.
Emerson refers to “the great Nature in which we rest as the earth
lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere.” The earth lies in the soft
arms of the atmosphere in the same sense that it lies in the soft
arms of its own grasses and flowers; the atmosphere is an appendage
of the earth. If the earth literally lies in anything, it is in the
soft arms of the all-pervasive ether. Emerson’s statement is the
inevitable poetizing of Nature in which we all indulge. We make soft
arms for our thoughts to lie in, and peaceful paths for our feet to
walk in, whatever the literal truth may be. This is the way of art,
of poetry, of religion. The way of science and of practical life is
a different way. The soft arms become hard with purpose, and rest
and contemplation give place to intense activity. I would not have
the poet change his way; Nature as reflected in his mind soothes and
charms us; it takes on hues from that light which never was on sea
or land. But we cannot dispense with the way of science, which makes
paths and highways for us through the wilderness of impersonal laws
and forces that surge and roar around us. One gives us beauty and one
gives us power; one brings a weapon to the hand, the other brings
solace to the spirit.
When Bryant identifies God with tempests and thunderbolts, with
“whirlwinds that uproot the woods and drown the villages,” or with
the tidal wave that overwhelms the cities, “with the wrath of the
mad, unchained elements”--“tremendous tokens of thy power”--does
he make God more lovable or desirable? Well may he say, “From
these sterner aspects of thy face, spare me and mine.” By way of
contrast let me recall that when an earthquake shook California,
John Muir cheered himself and friends by saying it was only Mother
Earth trotting her children fondly upon her knee! If we identify
God with all of Nature, this wrathful Hebrew Jehovah of Bryant is a
legitimate conception. There are times when the aerial forces behave
like a raving maniac bent upon the destruction of the world--the
insensate powers run amuck upon all living things. This is not the
God we habitually love and worship, but it is a God from whom there
is no escape. As the result of the inevitable action of the natural
irrational or unrational forces, tempests and earthquakes and tidal
waves do not disturb us; but as the will and purpose of an Almighty
Being, Creator of heaven and earth, they give all pious souls a
fearful shake-up. We take refuge in such phrases as “the inscrutable
ways of God,” or “the mysteries of Providence,” a Providence whose
ways are assuredly “past finding out.”
Our State Commissioner of Education, Dr. Finley, in an agricultural
address on “Potatoes and Boys,” showed God coöperating with the
farmer in a way that amused me. “The Almighty,” the Commissioner
said, “can make, unaided of man, potatoes, but only small potatoes,
and of acrid taste. He had to make a primitive man and even teach
him to use a hoe, before He, the Omnipotent One, could grow a patch
of potatoes.” The wild potato, he implied, like the wild grape, the
wild apple, the wild melon, was the work of God before he had man to
help him; now, with man’s help, we have all the improved varieties of
potatoes and fruits. We have heard a good deal about the coöperation
of man with God, and as a concrete example this potato-growing
partnership is very interesting. How far from our habitual attitude
of mind is the thought that the Higher Powers concern themselves
about our potatoes or our turnips or our pumpkin crop, or have any
part or lot in it! Emerson in his Journal expresses another view:
“One would think that God made fig-trees and dates, grapes and
olives, but the Devil made Baldwin apples and pound pears, cherries
and whortle berries, Indian corn and Irish potatoes.”
Sir Thomas Browne called Nature the art of God. Viewed in this light
we get a new conception of Nature, the artistic conception. We do not
ask: Is it good or bad, for us or against us? we are intent on its
symbolical or ideal character. Through it God expresses himself as
the artist does, be he painter, poet, or musician, through his work,
blending the various elements--the light and shade, the good and the
bad, the positive and the negative--into a vital, harmonious whole.
Creation becomes a picture, or a drama, or a symphony, in which
all life plays its part, in which all scenes and conditions, all
elemental processes and displays, play their part and unite to make
a vast artistic whole. The contradictions in life, the high lights,
the deep shadows, the imperfections, the neutral spaces, are but the
devices of the artist to enhance the total effect of his work. In
ethics and religion we ask of a thing: “Is it good?” In philosophy:
“Is it true?” In science: “Is it a fact, and verifiable?” But in art
we ask: “Is it beautiful?” or “Is it a real creation?” “Is it one
with the vital and flowing currents of the world?”
The artist alone is the creator among men; he is disinterested; he
has no purpose but to rival Nature; he subordinates the parts to
the whole; he illustrates the divine law of indirections. The bald,
literal truth is not for him, but the illusive, the suggestive, the
ideal truth. He does not ask what life or Nature are for, or are they
good or bad, but he interprets them in terms of the relation of their
parts, he reads them in the light of his own soul. He knows there
is no picture without shadows, no music without discords, no growth
without decay. The artist has “no axe to grind”; to him all is right
with the world, however out of joint it may be in our self-seeking
lives. Art is synthetic, and puts a soul under the ribs of Death.
Science is a straight line, but Art is symbolized by the curve.
To regard Nature, therefore, as the art of God, is to see it complete
in itself; all the disharmonies vanish, all our perplexing problems
are solved. The earth and the heavens are not for our private good
alone, but for all other things. Opposites are blended. Good and
bad are relative; heaven and hell are light and shade in the same
picture. Our happiness or our misery are secondary; they are the
pigments on the painter’s palette. The beauty of Nature is its
harmony with our constitution; its terror emphasizes our weakness.
Where does the great artist get his laws of art but from his insight
into the spirit and method of Nature? They are reflected in his own
heart; the act of creation repeats itself in his own handiwork. The
true artist has no secondary aims--not to teach or to preach, nor
to praise nor condemn; but to portray, and to show us, through the
particular, the road to the universal.
Eckermann reports Goethe as saying to him that “Nature’s intentions
are always good”; but if questioned, Goethe would hardly have
maintained that the clouds, the winds, the streams, the tides,
gravity, cohesion, and so on, have intentions of any sort, much less
intentions directed to us or away from us. Even the wisest among
us thus make man the aim and object of Nature. We impose our own
psychology upon the very rock and trees.
Goethe always read into Nature his own human traits; always when he
speaks of her he speaks as an artist and poet. He says to Eckermann
that Nature “is always true, always serious, always severe; she is
always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The
man who is incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to
the apt, the pure, the true, does she resign herself and reveal her
secrets. The understanding will not reach her; man must be capable
of elevating himself to the highest Reason to come into that contact
with the Divinity which manifests in the primitive phenomena which
dwell behind them and from which they proceed. The divinity works
in the living, not in the dead; in the becoming and changing, not
in the become and the fixed. Therefore, reason, with its tendency
toward the divine, has only to do with the becoming, the living; but
understanding has to do with the become, the already fixed, that
it may make use of it.” In this last we see the germ of Bergson’s
philosophy. The divinity that dwells behind phenomena, and from which
they proceed, is the attempt of the human mind to find the end of
that which has no end, the law of causation.
III
EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE
“Proud man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’
‘See all for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.”
And the pampered goose was right: all things are just as much for her
use as for man’s, while there are reasonable doubts whether things
were created for the especial use of either.
Man, like the goose, appropriates what suits him, but is slow to
realize the fact that what suits him, or is fitted to his use,
depends upon his own powers of adaptation. We can say that he suits
it, rather than that it suits him. He has lungs because there is air,
and eyes because there are certain vibrations in the ether. In short,
nature is the primary fact, and the forms and organs of life the
secondary fact.
Goethe said to Eckermann that he followed Kant in looking upon each
creature as existing for its own sake. He could not believe, he said,
that the cork-trees grow merely that we might stop our bottles, and,
he might have added, that rubber-trees grow that we might have rubber
overshoes. The lady in a public audience who once asked me what flies
are for, evidently thought that God had made a mistake in creating
that which annoyed her. I was pleased with a remark of John Muir’s
in his Sierra book about the poison-ivy: “Like most other things
not apparently useful to man,” he says, “it has few friends, and the
blind question, ‘Why was it made?’ goes on and on with never a guess
that first of all it might have been made for itself.” Coming from
the mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical doctrine. Muir
had evidently forgotten his early training.
It is possible for man to make use of poison-ivy; in fact it is used
in medicine; but who shall dare to say that it was made for that?
Flies and poison ivy and all other noxious and harmful things are
each and all for their own sakes. They were not made in the sense
that we make things. They have come to be what we now find them
through the action and interaction of a thousand complex influences.
Each has found its place in the scheme of living things, and each
acts directly or indirectly upon other forms--is of use to them,
or the reverse. Ten thousand things are of use to man, and as many
more of no use to him, but to measure all things by his standard of
utility is childish, or to ask what mosquitoes and rattlesnakes are
for, with an implied impeachment of Nature if they are not of service
to man, is an idle question. The water and the air are indispensable
to life, but these things are older than life. Life is adapted to
them, and not they to it.
The body is full of fluids because earth and air are full of water.
From our standpoint man is at the head of animate nature, but the
rest of creation is no more exclusively for him than for the least
of living things. The good of the world is for whatever or whoever
can use it. Houseflies are undoubtedly the enemy of the human race;
so are mosquitoes, so are venomous snakes, so are many forms of
bacteria, and a thousand other things. Our egotism prompts us to ask,
“Why is evil in the world, anyhow?” But our evil may be the good of
some other creature. Our defeat means the triumph of our enemy. It
is through this conflict of good and evil, or of things that are for
us with things that are against us, that species are developed and
perpetuated.
What kind of a world would it be without what we call evil, without
hindrances? To the farmer drought, flood, tornadoes, untimely frosts
are evils which he thinks he could well dispense with, but so far
as they make a greater struggle necessary, so far as they lead to
more self-denial, greater forethought, and so on, they are good in
disguise. Hardy, virile characters, like tough timber, in oaks, are
developed by unfriendly and opposing forces. Intemperance, greed,
cheating, lying, war, are evils in the social and business world;
but they teach us the value of their opposites. We react from them.
It is a child’s question to ask, for example, “Would the world not
have been better had there never been any war?” because, since
mankind is what it is, wars are inevitable. The absence of wars, as
of intemperance, greed, cheating, implies a different mankind, and a
different mankind implies a different system of things.
The problem of evil is the problem of life; no evil, no life. The
world is thus made. Nature is not half good and half bad; she is
wholly good, or wholly bad, according to our relation to her. Fire
and flood are bad when they master us, and good when we master and
control them. Great good has come out of war, and great evil. The
evil always tends to drop out or be obliterated, as the path of
cyclones and earthquakes tend to be overgrown and forgotten. Burned
cities often rise from their ashes to new life. The effects of evil
are finally obliterated; malignant forces have their day, benignant
forces go on forever. The world of life, let me repeat, would not be
here were not the balance of the account of good and evil on the side
of the good, or if good did not come out of evil.
Life is recuperative; if it falls down, it picks itself up again.
If a state is devastated by war, in time the cities and towns are
rebuilt, and the ranks of peace and industry refilled, though the
growth and civilization of that country may have had a terrible
set-back, and the whole progress of the race be retarded. Evil
perishes. The terrible World War, set going by Germany, has depleted
the wealth, the life, the well-being of the whole European world, but
as the scars it made upon the landscape will in time be effaced,
so its effect upon the life of the states and communities will fade
and be a memory only. Still the evils it entailed are none the less
deplorable. Its heritage of hate, of devastated homes, of depleted
treasures, will long continue.
Life, then, in all its forms is for its own sake. It is an end in
itself. Many things are inimical to us, and we are equally inimical
to many things. We lay the whole of Nature under contribution so far
as we can, and we curb and defeat her hostile forces so far as we
can, but the world was no more made for man than it was made for mice
and midges. When we see how irrespective of us the natural forces go
their way, that we can ride them and guide them only as we do wild
horses--by being quicker and more masterful than they are--when we
know that they will tread us down with the same indifference that
we tread down the grass and the weeds, the facts should temper and
modify our egotism. When we look into the depths of merely our own
solar system, and see vast globes like Jupiter and Saturn, so much
older and greater than our little earth, and not yet the abode of any
form of life, and probably not within millions of years of such a
state, how casual and insignificant man seems! How far from being the
end and object of creation!
Doubtless there are numberless worlds and whole systems of worlds in
the depths of sidereal space upon which life has never appeared, and
numberless other worlds and systems upon which it has had its day
and gone out forever. Life is but an incident in the total scheme of
things.
To ask what this or that is for, with reference to ourselves, and
to conclude that some one or something has blundered if it is not
of positive use to us, is, let me repeat, to see and to think as
a child. We know what the hooks on the burdock and the stick-seed
are for, and what the wings on the maple and the ash-seed are for,
but do we know what the stings on the nettle, or the spines on
the blackberry or on the thorn-apple tree are for? The cattle eat
the nettle, the birds eat the berries, and the wild creatures eat
the thorn-apple. How could their seeds get sown if the prickles
and thorns defended them against wild life? Spines and thorns
seem expressive of moods or conditions in Nature, and to be quite
independent of use, as we understand the term.
Nature’s ways are so unlike our ways! Her system of economics would
soon bring us to bankruptcy. She has no rival, no competitor, no
single end in view, no more need to store up wealth than to scatter
it. One form gains what another form loses. Humanly speaking, she is
always trying to defeat herself. The potato-bug, if left alone, would
exterminate the potato and so exterminate itself; the currant-worm
would exterminate the currant; the forest worms would exterminate
the forests, did not parasites appear and check these ravages.
Nature trumps her own trick; she scuttles her own ship; she mines
her own defenses; she poisons her own fountains; she sows tares in
her own wheat; and yet she wins, because she is the All. The tares
are hers, the parasites are hers, the devastating storms and floods
are hers, the earthquakes and volcanoes are hers, disease and death
are hers, as well as youth and health. The cancer that eats into a
man’s vitals--what keeps it going but Nature’s forces and fluids?
The bacteria that flourish in our bodies and bring the scourges of
typhoid fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, are all hers, and a part
of her system of things. A malignant tumor is as much an expression
of Providence as is a baby or a flower. Nature cuts the ground from
under her own feet; she saws off the limb upon which she is perched,
but if she falls, she alights in her own lap.
In walking through a blighted potato-field this morning, I said,
“Here is one form of vegetable life destroying another form and
bringing loss and discontent to the farmer’s heart.” What purpose in
the economy of Nature is served by this blight? Who or what is the
gainer? After the minute organisms that prey upon the potato-vines
have done their work, they too perish, so that two forms of life are
blotted out. What was it all for? Why is this tragedy of one form of
life bringing to naught other forms, which we witness on every hand,
in vegetable and animal life, and in human history, being constantly
enacted? The question, put in this way, is a purely human one; it
is applying to the vast scheme of creation purely human standards.
We instinctively ask the why and the wherefore of things, and in
our practical lives try to avoid letting one hand defeat the other
as Nature does in the above incident. We guard one form of life
against another hostile form. Our aim is to make things pull together
for our own advantage. We seek to check the ravages of the tent
caterpillar, the forest worms, the gypsy moth, the potato-beetle,
and the invisible enemies that rot our grapes and mar our apples, as
well as the germs that sow fatal diseases in our midst. But not so
Nature. She does not take sides. As I have said, she has no special
and limited aims. The stakes are hers, whoever wins. One condition of
the season favors the growth of the potato-vines; another condition
favors the development of the fungus that destroys them. Nature is
just as much on the side of the rat as on the side of the cat; she
arms each to defeat the other, and the fittest survives. She has not
given the rabbit strength or ferocity, but she has given her speed
and a sleepless eye and great fecundity, and her enemies do not cut
her off.
The struggle and competition of life go on everywhere. But life is
not all a struggle; it is unity and coöperation as well. The trees of
the forest protect one another; one form of life profits by another
form.
In the whole drama of organic nature we find waste and prodigality.
Our economics are set at naught by the power that works to no
special ends, but to all ends, and finds its account in the tumor
that eats up the man, as much as in the man himself, in the fungi
that destroy the potato crop, or the chestnut-trees, as truly as in
these things themselves. Yet behold what specialization and what
development has taken place in spite of these cross-purposes, this
chaos of conflicting interests! Out of discord has come harmony; out
of conflict has come peace; out of death has come life; out of the
reptile has come the bird; out of the beast has come man; out of
the savage has come the moral conscience; out of the tribe has come
the nation; out of tyranny has come democracy. It is the waste, the
delays, the pain, the price to be paid, that appall us.
We must regard creation as a whole, as the evolution of worlds and
systems, and not concentrate our attention upon man and his ways, or
upon the earth--so small a part of our solar system.
Our benevolent institutions are not types of the universe; our idea
of fatherhood does not fit the Eternal.
Our fathers had a complete and consistent explanation of the
problem of evil that so perplexes us. They invented or postulated
two opposing and contending principles in the world--one divine,
the other diabolical. One they named God, the other, Satan. Their
conception of God would not allow them to saddle all the evil and
misery of the world upon him; they had to look for a scapegoat, and
they found him in the Devil. One is just as necessary to a consistent
cosmogony as the other. If we must have an all-wise, all-merciful,
all-powerful, all-loving God--the author of all good and the
contemner of all evil--we must also have a god of the opposite type,
the great mischief-maker and enemy of human happiness--the author of
war, pestilence, famine, disease, and of all that hinders and defeats
the reign of the perfect good. Without the conception of the Devil,
we are forced to the conclusion, either that God is not omnipotent,
or that he is responsible for all the sin and suffering in the world.
If you make man this Devil, then who made man?
Wrestle with the problem as we may, we are impaled on one or the
other horn of the dilemma. Our traditional God is more cruel and more
indifferent to human suffering than any tyrant that ever gloated over
human blood and agony, or else he is fearfully limited in his power
for good.
With a Devil at our disposal to whom we can impute the evils of life,
the situation clears up, and God emerges, shorn of his omnipotence,
it is true, but still the symbol of goodness and love.
In our day the Devil has lost his prestige and is much discredited.
As a power in men’s minds his reign is over, and hell, his
headquarters, no longer casts its lurid light upon human life.
In an equal measure the old Hebraic conception of God as a
much-magnified man, the king and ruler of heaven and earth, with
heaven as his throne, has gone out. God is now little more than a
name for that tendency or power in the universe which makes for
righteousness, and which has brought evolution thus far on its course.
To account for the world as we find it, we are compelled to look
upon it as the inevitable result of the clashing and interaction of
purely natural forces resulting in both so-called good and evil; that
is, in what is favorable to life, and in what is against life. But
as life is adaptive and assimilative, it slowly turns the evil into
good, of course at the expense of delays and waste and suffering, and
thus development becomes possible, and man, after untold millions of
years, appears.
When we look forth upon the universe, what do we see? When we look
upon the non-living world, we see a mere welter and chaos of material
forces--a conflict of chemical and physical principles seeking a
stable equilibrium--water running, winds blowing, mountains decaying,
stars and systems whirling, suns waning or waxing, nebulæ condensing,
vast orbs colliding, and all issuing in a certain order and system
under the rule of purely mechanical and mathematical laws. The
stellar universe is a vast machine, amenable to the measurements and
calculations of the astronomers. The eclipses all occur exactly on
time, and the planets revolve in their orbits without the untruth, as
Whitman says, of a single second. The disorder and disruptions which
occur are inside of vast fundamental laws. Our mountains and seas are
shaken by earthquakes, and the earth’s surface is swept by cyclones
and the seashores are devastated by tidal waves, yet these things are
only phases of the effort toward a fixed equilibrium. The earth’s
surface as we now behold it, the distribution of land and water,
of mountain and plain, the procession of the seasons, our whole
weather system, the friendly and the unfriendly forces, are all the
outcome of this clash and stress of the physical forces, which make a
paradise of some places and the opposite of others.
When we look upon the living world as revealed in the geologic
record, we still see a kind of welter and chaos, but we also see
the advent of new principles not entirely subject to mechanical
and mathematical laws. Life goes its way and takes liberties with
its physical environment. Living bodies change and develop as the
non-living do not. The various organic forms “rise on stepping-stones
of their dead selves,” and incalculably slow transformations of lower
forms into higher take place, but not without appalling delays and
waste and suffering. Chemical and mechanical laws are still in full
force, but they appear to be in the service of a new principle; an
organizing tendency of a new kind is at work in the world; chance and
necessity seem to play a less conspicuous part. Yet there is nothing
that meets our idea of justice, or mercy, or economy of effort.
For millions upon millions of years the earth swarmed with low, all
but brainless creatures. The monsters of sea and land that appeared
in the middle period were huge and terrible in body and limb, but
very small in capacity of brain. Huge ganglions, or knots of nervous
tissue, in different parts of their bodies seem to have served as
a substitute for a centralized brain and a complex nervous system.
The brontosaurus, seventy feet long, with a body weighing many
tons, had a brain not much larger than a man’s double fists. Brains
as yet played a very subordinate part in the world. Reptiles and
half-reptiles possessed the earth. The age of mammals was as yet only
hinted at. But after long geologic ages, mammals came to the front,
holding the precious possibility of man, and reptiles were relegated
to the rear. The animal brain increased, wit began to get the better
of brute force, and the small and feeble ancestors of man appeared in
the biological drama. They were like small and timid supernumeraries
skulking or hiding on the wings of the stage. Lemurs and monkeys
appeared long before there were any signs of the anthropoid apes, and
the anthropoid apes were in evidence long before the first rude man
appeared.
In all the vast stretch of geologic and biologic time, do we see any
evidence of the active existence of the God and the Devil of our
fathers? Not unless we identify them with the material forces that
then ruled and shaped the world, and these forces, by any other name,
are of the same impersonal, impartial, unforgiving character as is
disclosed in our dealings with them to-day.
When we turn to the higher forms of organic life, especially to
man and his history, what do we see? We still behold the same
trial-and-error method, the same cruelty, waste, delays, and
suffering that we behold in the lower forms. We see progress, we see
the growth of ethical principles, we see man’s increasing mastery
over the forces of nature and over himself, but in the competition
of races and nations, the race is still to the swift and the battle
to the strong. We see a high standard of individual morality
contending with a low standard of international morality. We still
see civilized nations looking upon treaties as “scraps of paper”;
we see them regarding their neighbors as rivals and enemies; we see
millions of men that have not the shadow of a grievance against one
another, fiercely trying to slay one another, and praying to the
same God for victory. We see the nefarious doctrine that physical
might makes moral right written in lines of blood and fire across
the face of whole kingdoms; we see the legitimate competitions of
peace and industry turned into the strife of armed conquest; we see
a small and peaceful nation trampled underfoot by a big nation bent
upon plunder and conquest; we see hatred toward a kindred nation
glorified, and the murder of innocent women and children and other
non-combatants adopted as a fixed policy; in fact, we see all the
vast resources of science and of modern civilization wedded to the
spirit of the Hun, and turned loose in a war for world-dominion.
The results of eighteen centuries of Christian culture come off the
German nation like a whitewash in this craze and fury of the military
spirit; the German people stand revealed as at heart unmitigated
barbarians, wonderfully efficient, but wonderfully inhuman. If we
appeal to the supernatural to account for things, we certainly
need a Devil, if not several of them, to account for the temper of
the German mind during the late war. No wonder the good people are
losing faith, and are shocked and dismayed at the thought that their
all-loving, omnipotent God permits these things.
Down the whole course of history we see no other powers at work than
those that are about us. Good is in the ascendancy everywhere, or
soon will be; evil dies out; the wicked cease from troubling; the
amelioration of mankind goes on; and no God or Devil hinders or
favors.
Nature is both God and Devil, and natural law is supreme in
the world. The moral consciousness of man,--all our dreams of
perfection, of immortality, of the good, the beautiful, the true, all
our veneration and our religious aspirations,--this is Nature, too.
Man is a part of the universe; all that we call good in him, and all
that we call bad, are a part of the universe. The God he worships is
his own shadow cast upon the heavens, and the Devil he fears is his
own shadow likewise. The divine is the human, magnified and exalted;
the Satanic is the human, magnified and debased.
We find God in Nature by projecting ourselves there; we find him in
the course of history by reading our own ideals into human events;
we find him in our daily lives by listening to the whisperings of
our own inherited and acquired consciences, and by dwelling upon the
fatality that rules our lives.
We had nothing to do with our appearance here in this world, or
with the form our bodies take, or with our temperaments, and, only
in a degree, with our dispositions. Some power other than ourselves
brought us here and maintains us here for a period, as it brought
here and maintains all other forms of life; but, I repeat, that
power is inseparable from the physical and chemical forces, and goes
its way whether we prosper or perish. Yet it is more positive than
negative, more for us than against us, else we should not be here.
Where does man get his ethical standards? Where does he get his
eyes, his ears, his heart? He gets them where he got his life--from
natural sources. He gets them whence he got his sense of art, of
beauty, of harmony. There are no moral standards in Nature apart from
man, but as man is a part of Nature, so are these, and all other
standards. So are all religions, arts, literatures, philosophies,
heroisms, self-denials, as well as all idolatries, superstitions,
sorceries, cruelties, wrongs, failures, a part of Nature.
Is the big-brained man of to-day any less a part of Nature than the
low-browed, long-jawed man of Pliocene times?
The humanization of God leads us into many difficulties. If He is a
personal being with attributes and emotions like our own, then we
are forced to the conclusion that He is no better than we are--that
He has our faults as well as our virtues, our cruelty as well as
our love. He is a party to all the wrongs and crimes and suffering
that darken the earth; He permits wars and pestilence and famine
and earthquakes and tornadoes, and all the consuming and agonizing
diseases that flesh is heir to. He is an infinite man with infinite
powers for good and evil.
In the long drama of animal evolution there has evidently been as
much suffering as pleasure, and of the drama of human history the
same may be said: pain, failure, delay, injustice, to all of which
our humanized God has been a party. No wonder our fathers struggled
over the problem of the ways of God to man. As soon as they put
themselves in his place, they felt the need of some grounds upon
which to justify his dealings with the beings He had created. But
they searched, and their descendants still search, in vain. If we see
God as a man, no matter how mighty, He is still guilty of what few
finite men would be guilty. What men would be guilty of permitting
the sin and misery that fill the world at this, or any other, time?
The Nature God neither sends calamities nor wills them--they are an
inevitable part of the growth and development of things; they are
eddies in the stream of forces. What we call evil is evil only from
our point of view; evil is a human word and not the word of the
Infinite. If the world were something made by a Maker external to
it, then it were pertinent to ask, Why not make it a better world?
Why not leave out pain and sin and all other phases of evil? But
the world is not something made, and it did not have a Maker, as
we use those words. The universe _is_, and always has been, “from
everlasting to everlasting,” and man is a part of it, and his life
is subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of creation. Man has
come into this sense of right and wrong, of justice and mercy, of
truth and falsehood, of good and evil, as necessary conditions of
his development, but those things are not absolute; they pertain to
him alone. The physical forces break out of their natural bounds
and run riot for a season; the human forces do the same thing and
give rise to various excesses. The crimes and misdemeanors of man
are exceptional as the outbreaks in nature are exceptional. They
relate man to nature and show how the same plan runs through both. A
world with storm and the warring and violence of the elements left
out would be a radically different world--an impossible world. And a
world of man, a Quaker world, is equally impossible.
If some being of infinite wisdom and love had made the world and made
man to live in it, we could ask him some embarrassing questions;
but, let me repeat, the world was not made, it is only a link in a
chain of cosmic events, and it is not for man any more than for any
other creature. Each must “work out his own salvation, with fear and
trembling.”
Introduce design into nature and you humanize it and get into
difficulties at once. It is above design. We have no language in
which to speak the ultimate truth, no language in which to describe
the character and the doings of the Infinite. The ways of the
Infinite are not only past finding out, they are unspeakable by
reason of our finite relations to them. We cannot arraign the Nature
God. It does not design, nor make, nor govern, nor employ means to
ends, as do the man-made gods. It _is_. All things are a part of
its infinite complexity. Nature rests forever in itself. It neither
fails nor succeeds. In itself it is neither good nor evil, neither
divine nor devilish; it is all things to all men, because they are
all things to it. It is neither one nor many; it is the Infinite. In
these vain attempts to define or describe the indefinable I have no
language but that of the finite, no language but that of our limited
or circumscribed relation to the world of concrete and fragmentary
things. Hence I am constantly like the plains ranger caught by his
own lasso, or the angler caught by his own hook.
Emerson said that in trying to define the Eternal we need a language
that differs from our everyday speech as much as algebra differs
from arithmetic. Outside of the physical organism there is neither
pleasure nor pain, good nor bad, light nor dark, sound nor silence,
heat nor cold, big nor little, hard nor soft; all these things are
but words in which we describe our sensations. When there is no ear,
there is no sound, but only motion in the air; when there is no eye,
there is no light or color, but only motion in the ether; when there
are no nerves, there is no heat or cold, but only motion, more or
less, in the molecules of matter. Degrees and differences belong to
the region of our finite minds. In trying to define or state the
Infinite, we are off the sphere, outside the realm of experience, and
our words have no meaning.
It is the circular or orbicular character of creation that baffles
us. We cannot fit the sphere into the triangles and parallelograms
of the terms of our experience. We cannot square the circle of
Infinity. The terms “love,” “anger,” “mercy,” “fatherhood,” do not
apply to God any more than “over” or “under,” or “beginning” or
“end,” apply to the sphere. In regard to God, the language of science
and mathematics is one with the language of worship and ecstasy.
I find I have never been burdened by a sense of my duty to God.
My duty to my fellow-men and to myself is plain enough, but the
word is not adequate to express any relation I may hold to the
Eternal. Do I owe any duty to gravity without which I could not
move or lift my hand, or any duty to the sunshine or to the rains
and the winds? Instinctively, unconsciously, for the most part we
obey the law of gravity, and instinctively we adjust ourselves to
all the natural forces, not from a sense of duty, but from a sense
of self-preservation. These things are a part of our lives and not
something to which we hold only a casual and precarious or external
relation. My relation to the Eternal is not that of an inferior to
a superior, or of a beneficiary to his benefactor, or of a subject
to his king. It is that of the leaf to the branch, of the fruit to
the tree, of the babe in the womb to its mother. It is a vital and
an inevitable relation. It cannot be broken. It is not a matter of
will or choice. We are embosomed in the Eternal Beneficence, whether
we desire it or not. Those good persons who go through life looking
upon the Eternal as a power external to themselves, saluting him as
the soldier salutes his officer, are not as truly religious as they
think they are. The old conception of an external God, the supreme
ruler of the universe, with whom Moses talked and walked and even
saw the hinder parts of, is out of date in our time. Still the
overarching thought of the Infinite and the Eternal, in whom we live
and move and have our being, must at times awaken in the minds of all
of us, and lend dignity and sobriety to our lives.
But the other world fades as this world brightens. Science has made
this world so interesting and wonderful, and our minds find such
scope in it for the exercise of all their powers, that thoughts of
another world are becoming foreign to us. We shall never exhaust the
beauties and the wonders and the possibilities of this. To feel at
home on this planet, and that it is, with all its drawbacks, the best
possible world, I look upon as the supreme felicity of life.
When we look at it in its mere physical and chemical aspects, its
play of forces, tangible and intangible, its reservoir of energy,
its “journeying of atoms,” its radiating electrons, its magnetic
currents, its transmutations and cycles of change, its hidden but
potent activities, its streaming auroras, its changing seasons, its
myriad forms of life, and a thousand other things--all make it a
unique and most desirable habitation.
When we consider it in its astronomical aspects as a celestial body
floating in the luminiferous ether as in a sea, held in leash by the
sun, and as sensitive to its changes as the poplar leaf to the wind,
vast beyond our power to visualize, yet only a grain of sand on the
shores of the Infinite, an evening or a morning star to the beings on
other planets, if there are such, mottled with shining seas or green
and white continents and canopied with many-hued cloud draperies, and
existing in closest intimacies with the wonders and the potencies of
the sidereal heavens--a veritable fruit on the vast sidereal tree of
life--when we realize all this, and more, can we conceive of a more
desirable or a better-founded and better-furnished world? The voyage
we make upon it may be a long one; if we claim the century of life
which Nature seems to have allotted us on conditions, we shall travel
about thirty-six billions of miles in our annual voyages around the
sun, and how many more millions with the sun around his sun, we know
not. A world made of the common stuff of the universe, a handful of
the dust of the cosmos, yet thrilling with life, producing the race
of man, evolving the brain of Plato, of Aristotle, of Bacon, the soul
of Emerson, of Whitman, the heart of Christ--a heavenly abode surely.
Let us try to make amends for depreciating it, for spurning it, for
surrendering it to the Devil, and for turning from it in search of a
better.
Our religion is at fault, our saints have betrayed us, our
theologians have blackened and defaced our earthly temple, and
swapped it off for cloud mansions in the Land of Nowhere. The heavens
embrace us always; the far-off is here, close at hand; the ground
under your door-stone is a part of the morning star. If we could only
pull ourselves up out of our absorption in trivial affairs, out of
the petty turmoil of our practical lives, and see ourselves and our
world in perspective and as a part of the celestial order, we could
cease to weep and wail over our prosaic existence.
The astronomic view of our world, and the Darwinian view of our lives
must go together. As one came out of the whirling, fiery nebulæ, so
the other came out of the struggling, slowly evolving, biological
world of the unicellular life of the old seas.
Biologic time sets its seal upon one, and cosmic time upon the other.
Dignity and beauty and meaning are given to our lives when we see far
enough and wide enough, when we see the forces that minister to us,
and the natural order of which we form a part.
IV
THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE
That bodies rise in the air does not disprove gravity; on the
contrary, it proves it. The pull of gravity never lets go of the
bullet from the gun; no matter how high or how far it goes, down it
comes, sometime, somewhere.
There is no force when there is nothing to resist force. The force
of the chemical reaction in the gun on the explosion of the powder
is hurled back by the mass and resistance of the gun, and sends the
bullet high or far, but does not for a second break its hold upon
it. Smoke rises because the air falls; clouds float because of the
greater weight of something beneath them. The river flows because its
banks do not.
The goodness of nature is the universal fact, like gravity, and its
evils and enmities and hindrances only prove the law.
The waters of the globe seek their level, seek to reach a haven
of everlasting repose; but behold how that purpose is forever
frustrated, and the currents never cease. It is as if the creeks and
rivers never reached the sea; they are traveling that way forever;
it is as if the great ocean currents and submarine Amazons and
Mississippis were seeking an escape which they never find; their
quest is ever renewed. Nature is Nature because her work is never
complete; her journey is never ended; the fixity and equilibrium
which her elements appear to seek, is ever deferred; life can
appear and go on only in a changing, unstable world, and it is
this flux and mutability of things that bring all our woe, and all
our joy as well. If winds did not blow, and bodies fall, and fire
consume, and floods overpower, if the equilibrium of things were not
perpetually broken,--which opens the door to all our troubles and
disasters,--where should we find the conditions of our life?
Life has appeared in an unstable world, and is conditioned upon this
instability. Fixity means death. It is in the line of organic effort
that living forms appear; it is in an imperfect world that we strive
for the perfection that we never reach. Blessed be the fact that our
capacity for life, for happiness, is always greater than the day
yields. Satiety checks effort.
The Nature Providence is stern and even cruel in some of its dealings
with us, but not in all, else we should run away from home. It is
genial and friendly in the genial season--in a June meadow, in a
field of ripening grain, in an orchard bending with fruit, in the
cattle on a thousand hills, in the shade of the friendly trees, in
the bubbling springs, in the paths by the green fields and by still
waters, and in ten thousand other aspects of its manifold works.
It is not friendly in the tropical jungles, nor amid the snows and
blizzards of the polar regions, but upon four fifths of the surface
of the globe it may be said to be friendly or neutral. Man is armed
to face its hostile aspects and to turn its very wrath to account.
If God maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, so man maketh the
wrath of God to serve him, as when he subdues and controls Nature’s
destructive forces, tames the lightning and harnesses Niagara. He has
not bound the cyclone yet, nor warmed himself by the volcano, nor
moved mountains from his path with the earthquake, but he may do it
yet. He is fast drawing the fangs of contagious diseases, thus adding
to his length of days.
The Nature Providence working in man and through him has made the
world more fit for man’s abode.
Action and reaction are the steps by which life ascends. Nature acts
upon man and man reacts upon nature. The labor the farmer puts into
the soil comes back to him with interest, and enables him to labor
more. The capital of life grows in that way; action and reaction; up
we go.
“Are God and Nature then at strife?” asks Tennyson, baffled and
unsettled by what he sees about him. There is strife in the living
world, the struggle of existence. In the non-living, there is
collision, disruption, overthrow. The apparent strife between the two
worlds is an effort toward adjustment on the part of the living--to
master and utilize the non-living. The inorganic goes its way under
the leash of physical laws, heedless of the organic. Myriads of
living things are crushed and destroyed by the ruthless onward
flow of the non-living. There is life in the world because life is
plastic and persistent and adaptive, and perpetually escapes from
the blind forces that would destroy it--the winds, the floods, the
frost, the heat, gravity, earthquakes, chemical reactions, and so on.
Every living thing runs the gantlet of the insensate mechanical and
chemical forces. But this is not strife in our human sense; it is the
discipline of nature. No living thing could begin or continue without
these forces which at times are so hostile. Like faithful gardeners
preparing the seed-beds, they prepared the earth for the abode of man
and all other living forms. They made the soil, they bring the rains,
they begat the winds, they prearranged all the conditions of life;
but life itself is a mystery, the great mystery, super-mechanical,
super-chemical, dependent upon these forces, but not begotten by
them. They are its servants.
The struggle in the world of living forms is a condition of
development, growing things are made strong by the force of the
obstacles they overcome.
From our limited human point of view there are phases of creation
that make it look like a game between intelligent contending forces,
or as if one god tried to undo the work of another god, or at
least to mar and hinder his work--some mischievous and malignant
spirit that sows tares amid the wheat, that retards development,
that invents parasites, that produces the malformed, that scatters
the germs of disease. How much at heart Nature seems to have the
production and well-being of offspring, yet what failures there are!
in the human realm the deformed, the monstrous, the idiotic. It seems
as if all things in heaven and earth had a stake in a perfect baby
and in its growth and development. A land swarming with beautiful and
happy children should make the very stars rejoice. Motherhood itself
is a beautiful and divine symbol, yet what perils attend it! In many
cases mother and child sink into the same grave. Then along comes
some malignant spirit and sows the germs of infantile paralysis,
and great numbers of children perish, and still greater numbers are
crippled and deformed for life. What a miscarriage of nature is that!
What a calamity, and unmitigated evil!
When an insect stings a leaf or plant-stalk and the plant forthwith
builds a cradle and nursery for the young of the insect, that is one
form of life using another form; or when a parasitical bird, such as
the European cuckoo, or our cowbird, lays its egg in the nest of
another bird, that is the same thing--life is still triumphant. But
when the germs of a contagious disease--tuberculosis, diphtheria,
scarlet fever--invade the human system and finally result in its
destruction, then dissolution is triumphant; all this delicately
and elaborately organized matter comes to naught. In this we see
the failure of the tendency or impulsion in matter which results
in organization--the mystery and the miracle of vitality, as
Tyndall called it, and the triumph of the contrary impulse or
disorganization, unless we regard the destructive and death-dealing
germs themselves as a triumph of organization, which, from the
scientific point of view, they surely are. Then we have Nature
playing one hand against the other. From our point of view it is like
pulling down a temple and reducing the bricks and stones to dust for
the use of ants. But who shall say that Nature is not just as careful
of the ant as of the man?--which is, of course, a distasteful bit of
news to the man.
When one thinks of the myriads of minute living organisms that
pervade and make up his own body, of their struggles and activities,
their antagonisms and coöperations, their victories and defeats,--the
cells coöperating and building up the organs, the organs coöperating
and building up the body, the phagocytes policing the blood and
destroying the invading germs, the intestinal flora contending
with one another for the possession of the soil, the ferments,
the enzymes,--when one thinks of all this and more, and how little
aware the man is of all this strife and effort and activity within
him,--how he himself, body and mind, is the result of it all,--one
has a dim vision of all our strife and effort in this world as a part
of the vital movements of a vast system of things, or of a Being that
is no more cognizant of our wars and struggles and triumphs than we
are of the histories of the little people that keep up the functional
integrity of our own systems.
Man can himself make short work of the ants unless he encounters
their devouring hosts in a tropical jungle, in which case they may
make short work of him. He can often slay with his antiseptics the
disease-germs that are destroying him, but not always; the balance
of nature is often on their side. Whichever triumphs, Nature wins,
because all are parts of her system. The capital invested is hers
alone. Man thinks a part of it is his, because he forgets that he too
is a part of Nature, and that whatever is his, is hers.
How are we to reconcile the obvious facts of evolution, namely, that
throughout the biological ages there has been an impulse in Nature
steadily working toward the development of man, with the still more
obvious fact that Nature cares no more for the individual man than
she does for the individual of any other species? She will drown
him, starve him, freeze him, crush him, as quickly as she will any
other form of life. Is the account balanced by the fact that she
has given him the wit and the power to avoid these calamities in a
larger measure than she has given them to any other creature? That
is the way the great mystery works. Every creature is exposed to the
hazards of its kind, but within its reach are always the benefits
and advantages of its kind, and these latter have steadily kept in
the lead. The evolutionary impulse toward the horse, toward the
dog, toward the bird, has apparently been as jealously guarded and
promoted as the impulse toward man. Man in his own conceit is at the
head of the animal kingdom, and the whole creation is for him, though
there are other animals that surpass him in strength, speed, and
endurance. But he alone masters and makes servants of the inorganic
forces, and thus rules the world below him.
I set out to say that the beneficent force or Providence that brought
us here has had to struggle with the non-beneficent in inert matter,
and, at times, with what looks like the deliberately malignant in
living matter; micro-organisms everywhere lying in wait for tangible
bodies and reducing them back to the original dust out of which they
came--the work of one god being held up or wrecked by another god. In
the vegetable kingdom are blights and scabs and many forms of fungous
diseases; in the animal are hostile bacteria and parasites working
without and within. Little wonder our fathers had to invent a Devil,
or a hierarchy of good and evil spirits contending with one another,
to explain the enigmas of life! But that the good spirits have
prevailed over their enemies, that the Natural Providence has been on
our side, is, as I have pointed out, proved by the fact that we are
actually here, and that life is good to us.
The evil of the world is seen to be ingrained in the nature of
things, and it has been a spur to development. All the great human
evils have been disciplinary. There is always a surplusage, rarely
just enough and no more. The gods of life rarely make a clean, neat
job of it; there are needless pains, needless wastes, needless
failures, needless delays. The good of war--the fortitude, the
self-denial, the heroism--we cannot separate from the evil; the good
of avarice or greed--industry, thrift, foresight--we cannot separate
from the evil. The wealth-gatherers keep the currents going, they
subdue the wilderness, they reclaim the deserts, they develop the
earth’s resources, they extend the boundaries of civilization, but
the evils that follow in their train are many and great. Yet how are
we to have the one without the other? Disease is also a kind of trial
by battle; it weeds out the weak, the physically unfit, and hardens
and toughens the race.
The Natural Providence does not study economy, it is not in business
with rivals and competitors; bankruptcy is not one of its dangers,
it can always meet its obligations; all the goods and all the gold
and silver in the universe belong to it. Its methods are too vast
and complex for our ideas of prudence and economy. We cannot deal
with the whole, but only with its parts. There are no lines and
boundaries to the sphere, and no well-defined cleavage between the
good and the evil in nature and in life. The broad margin of needless
misery and waste in the life of a man as of a nation is a part of
the inexactitude and indifference that pervades the whole of nature.
From the point of view of the Natural Providence it does not matter,
the result is sure; but from our point of view--victims of cyclones,
earthquakes, wars, famines, pestilence as we are--it matters a great
deal. The streams and rivers throughout the land are bearers of many
blessings; the evils they bring are minor and are soon forgotten.
The whole living world is so interrelated and interdependent, and
hinges so completely upon the non-living, that our analysis and
interpretation of it must of necessity be very imperfect. But the
creative energy works to no specific ends, or rather it works to all
ends. As every point on the surface of the globe is equally on the
top at all times, so the whole system of living nature balances on
any given object. I saw a book of poems recently, called “The Road
to Everywhere”--vague as Nature herself. All her roads are roads to
everywhere. They may lead you to your own garden, or to the North
Pole, or to the fixed stars, or may end where they began.
Nature is a great traveler, but she never gets away from home;
she takes all her possessions along with her, and her course is
without direction, and without beginning or end. The most startling
contradiction you can make expresses her best. She is the sum of all
opposites, the success of all failures, the good of all evil.
When we think we have cut out Nature, we have only substituted
another phase; when our balloon mounts in spite of gravity, it is
still gravity that makes it mount; when we clear the soil of its
natural growth and plant our own crop, Nature is still our gardener;
we have only placed other seeds of her own in her hands. When we
have improved upon her, we have only prevailed upon her to second
our efforts; we get ahead of her by following out the hints she
gives us; when we trump her trick, it is with her own cards. When we
fancy we assist Nature, as we say that we do with our drugs, it is
she who gives the efficiency to the drugs. We may fancy that the sun
is in the heavens solely to give light and warmth to the planets,
which it surely does, but behold, what a mere fraction of the light
and heat of the sun is intercepted by the slender girdle of worlds
that surround it! The rays go out equally in all directions, they
penetrate all space. The sun, with reference to its light and heat,
is at the center of an infinite hollow sphere, and not one millionth
part of its rays falls upon the worlds that circle around it. This
is typical of Nature’s bounty. The thought and solicitude of the
creative energy is directed to me and you personally in the same
wholesale way. The planets of our system are lighted and warmed
as effectually as if the sun shone for them alone, and man is the
beneficiary of the heavens as completely as if indeed the whole
creation were directed especially to him. Here is another point: the
night and darkness in nature are local and limited; the universe is
flooded with light; the black shadows themselves are born of the
light. Though astronomers tell us that sidereal space is strewn with
dead worlds and extinct suns, give time enough and they will all be
quickened and rekindled. Light and life are the positive facts in
nature, darkness and death the negative.
When we single out man and fix our attention upon him as the sole end
of creation, and judge the whole by his partial standards, man--
“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law--
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed”--
when we do this, all is confusion and contradiction. Love _is_
“creation’s final law,” but not the love of the mother for her
child, or even of the bird for its young, but the love of the eye for
the light, of the flower for the sun, the love of the plants for the
rain and the dew, the love of man for his kind, and of the dog for
his kind. Attraction, affiliation, assimilation--like unto like is
the rule of life.
The organism fits itself to its environment; the Providence in Nature
enables it to do so. The light is not fitted to the eye; the light
creates the eye; the vibrations in the air create the ear. God, or
the Eternal, is love because He brooded man into being, and all other
forms of life that support man. He made the heavens and the earth for
man’s good, by making man a part of them and able to avail himself of
their bounty. But when we look forth into the universe, and expect to
see something like human care and affection in the operation of the
great elemental laws and forces, we are bound to be shocked. It is
not there, and well that it is not. A universe run on the principles
of human economy, human charity, and partiality would be a failure.
It is our human weakness that yearns for this. It is our earthly
father that has begotten in us our conception of a heavenly father.
But then this very conception and desire is a part of nature--springs
from the Eternal, and is in that sense authentic. We cannot separate
ourselves from nature, or from the Eternal, any more than we can jump
off the planet. It is only the conception of a human or man-made God
that men rebel against. Thus comes in the discord that Tennyson sees
and feels. He is looking for a human providence in nature. Wisdom,
love, mercy, justice, are human attributes. We call them divine, and
it is well, but they do not exist outside of man. Man is himself the
only God, and he was evolved from nature. The divine and the godlike
are therefore in nature; yes, in conjunction with what we call the
demoniacal--love twined with enmity, the good a partner with the bad.
“I bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath.”
Plagues and famines and wars are fortuitous and not a part of the
regular order like health, or growth, or development. They are
accidents of nature. The cloud-burst that sends the creek out of
its banks is an accident in the same sense; it is an exceptional
occurrence. If the fountains of nature were not full enough and
permanent enough to stand such drains, or if the tendency in nature
to a certain order and moderation were less marked, life would
disappear from the globe. Nature’s capital of life is invested in ten
thousand enterprises and the risks are many, but if the gains did not
exceed the losses, if more seeds did not fall upon fertile places
than upon barren, if more babies did not survive than perish, what
would become of us? In our human schemes we aim to cut out losses,
waste, delays and failure, and arraign the Eternal when it does
not follow the same methods. But so far as I can see all that the
Eternal aims at in the vast business of the universe is to keep the
capital unimpaired and live on the income. The inroads which storms,
pestilence, earthquakes make upon it are soon made good and some
interest does accrue. Life does advance.
In the course of the biologic ages there has been a great loss in
species, apparently without any loss in the development impulse. New
species appear as the old disappear. Nature’s investment in mere size
and brute strength was doubtless a good one under the conditions, but
she gradually changed it and began to lay the emphasis upon size of
brain and complexity of nervous system, just as man in his material
civilization has passed from the simple to the complex, from the
go-cart to the automobile, from the signal fires to telegraph and
telephone. The failures and shortcomings of the Eternal, as well as
the progress of its work, are analogous to those of man. Indeed, God
is no more a god than man is. He evinces the same methods, the same
mixture of good and evil, the same progress from the simple to the
complex, the same survival of the fittest. We exalt and magnify our
little human attributes and name it God; we magnify and intensify our
bad traits and call it the Devil. One is as real as the other. Both
are real to the imagination of man, but Nature knows them not, except
so far as she knows them in and through man.
On a midsummer day, calm, clear, warm, the leaves shining, the grain
and grass ripening, the waters sparkling, the birds singing, we see
and feel the beneficence of Nature. How good it all is! What a joy
to be alive! If the day were to end in a fury of wind and storm,
breaking the trees, unroofing the houses, and destroying the crops,
we should be seeing the opposite side of Nature, what we call the
malevolent side. Fair days now and then have such endings, but they
are the exception; living nature survives them and soon forgets
them. Their scars may long remain, but they finally disappear. Total
nature is overpoweringly on the side of life. But for all this, when
we talk about the fatherhood of God, his loving solicitude, we talk
in parables. There is not even the shadow of analogy between the
wholesale bounty of Nature and the care and providence of a human
father. Striding through the universe goes the Eternal, crushed
worlds on one hand and worlds being created on the other: no special
act of love or mercy or guidance, but a providence like the rains,
the sunshine, the seasons.
When we say hard things about Nature--accuse her of cruelty, of
savagery, of indifference--we fall short of our proper filial respect
toward her. She is the mother of us all; neither an indulgent mother,
nor a cruel stepmother. In many respects the gifts she has lavished
upon us only make her own poverty the more conspicuous. Where she
got the gift of reason which she has bestowed upon man, together
with the sense of justice and of mercy, the moral consciousness,
the æsthetic perceptions, the capacity for learning her secrets and
mastering her forces, are puzzling questions. We may say that man
achieved these things himself; but who or what made him capable of
achieving them, what made him man, and out of the same elements that
his dog or his horse is made?
Nature does not reason; she has no moral consciousness; she does not
economize her resources; she is not efficient, she is wasteful and
dilatory, and spends with one hand what she saves with the other.
She is blind; her method is the hit-and-miss method of a man who
fights in the dark. She hits her mark, not because she aims at it,
but because she shoots in all directions. She fills the air with her
bullets. She wants to plant in yonder marsh her cat-tail flag, or
her purple loosestrife, and she trusts her seeds to every wind that
blows, and to the foot of every bird that visits her marshes, no
matter which way they are going. And in time her marsh gets planted.
The pollen from her trees and plants drifts in clouds in order that
one minute grain of it may find the pistil that is waiting for it
somewhere in the next wood or field. She trusts her nuts to every
vagabond jay or crow or squirrel that comes along, in hopes that
some of them will be dropped or hidden and thus get planted. She
trims her trees, and thins her forests, or reforests her lands,
in the most roundabout, dilatory, and inefficient manner. No plan,
no system, no economy of effort or of material; and yet she “gets
there,” because she is not limited as to time or resources. She is in
business with unlimited capital and unlimited opportunities; she has
no competitors; her stockholders are all of one mind, and all roads
lead to her markets. The winds, the streams, the rains, the snows,
fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, are all her servitors. She does not
stick for the best end of the bargain, the gain is hers whoever wins.
But behold how she has endowed man to improve upon all her slack
and roundabout methods! She enables him to cheat, and mislead, and
circumvent her. He steals her secrets, he tames her very lightnings,
he forces her hand on a hundred occasions; he turns her rivers, he
levels her hills, he obliterates her marshes, he makes her deserts
bloom as the rose; he measures her atoms and surveys and weighs her
orbs; he reads her history in the rocks, he finds out her ways in
the heavens. He discovers the most completely hidden thing in the
universe, the ether, and he has learned how to use it for his own
purposes; his wireless telegraphy turns it into a news highway; above
the seas, over the mountains, and across continents, it carries his
messages.
In man Nature has evolved the human from the unhuman; she has evolved
justice and mercy from rapine and cruelty; she has evolved the civic
from the domestic, the state from the tribe. She has evolved the
Briton and the Frenchman from rude prehistoric man. She has not yet
got rid of the Hun in the German, but she is fast getting rid of the
German in her overseas Germanic stock. The bleaching process goes on
apace.
Man sees where Nature is blind; he takes a straight cut where
she goes far around. In him she has added reason to her impulse,
conscience to her blind forces, self-denial to her self-indulgence,
the power of choice to her iron necessity. How well she has done by
man, man alone knows. How much he is dependent upon her, he alone
knows; how completely he is a part of her, he alone knows. We may
call man an insurgent in her world, as an English scientist does, but
he is her insurgent; she inspires him to insurrection, and she puts
his weapons in his hands. His cause is her cause, and his victories
are her victories.
Only by personifying Nature in this way, and standing apart from her
and regarding her objectively, can we contrast her methods and her
spirit with our own. The mother she has been to us becomes apparent.
In spite of all her shortcomings and delays and roundabout methods,
here we are, and here we wish to remain.
V
THE GOOD DEVILS
I
This is not an essay on the optimism of a moralist, but on the
optimism of a naturalist.
On the whole and in the long run, as I am never tired of asserting,
Nature is good. The universe has not miscarried. The celestial laws,
as Whitman says, do not need to be worked over and rectified. It is
good to be here, and it must be equally good to go hence. With all
the terrible things in Nature, and all the cruel and wicked things in
history, the world is good; life is good, and the Devil himself plays
a good part.
When Emerson in his Journal says, “It is very odd that Nature should
be so unscrupulous. She is no saint,” one wonders just what he means.
Does he expect gravity, or fire, or flood, or wind, or tide to have
scruples? Should the cat have scruples about dining off the mouse
or the bird, or the wolf about making a meal of the lamb? or the
plants and trees have scruples about running their roots into one
another’s preserves, or cutting off one another’s rain or sunshine?
If our cowbird had the human conscience, we should expect her to have
scruples about laying her egg in the nest of another bird and thus
shirking the labors and cares of parenthood, and we should expect
the jays and crows to have scruples about eating up the eggs and
young of their feathered neighbors, if they, too, were endowed with
conscience. But none of them are troubled in this way, for the simple
reason that they are not human beings. They live below the plane of
man’s moral conscience. Chemistry and the elementary forces have no
scruples. Powder or dynamite will blow up its maker as soon as it
will any one else. The rain does not scruple to spoil the farmer’s
hay, or the floods to wash away his house and destroy its inmates.
We are childish when we marvel at the unscrupulousness of Nature.
Emerson often appealed to the nature of things. It is in the nature
of things that they should be what we name unscrupulous; certainly
Nature “is no saint,” and it is well for us that she is not. If we
identify Nature with what we call God, as many do, then I am saying
that it is well for us that the Eternal is “no saint.” I suspect
that if the drama of life which has been enacted upon the globe,
and is still being enacted, had been modeled upon the principle of
sainthood, you and I would not now be here. More’s the pity, you may
say, but there is no pity in Nature.
II
Is Nature then of the Devil? If we choose to name it so,--if we
choose to revert to the conception of an earlier age,--yes, Nature,
as we see her from our limited human point of view, is more or less
of the Devil--half god and half demon, we may say; divine in some of
her manifestations and diabolical in others, divine when she favors
us and diabolical when she is against us. But what we do not so
readily see is that in the long run the Devil is on our side also,
that he is the divine wearing a mask. The Devil is the absence of
something; he is a negative quantity that stimulates the positive and
sets and keeps the currents going. Our breathing is the result of a
perpetual tendency to a vacuum in our lungs; the growth of our bodies
is the result of a coöperation and agreement between the integrating
and disintegrating forces.
We control the Devil and make him our friend when we control most of
the forces of nature--the fire, the wind, the waters, electricity,
magnetism, gravity, chemical affinity, and so on. If our hold
upon them slips, they destroy us. If we are not watchful in our
laboratories, the same chemistry that builds up our bodies will blow
our bodies to atoms. The tornado, the earthquake, the volcano, the
thunderbolt, have all helped to make the earth what we behold it. The
floods have helped, the avalanches have helped, frost and wind and
snow, tropic heat and arctic cold, have helped. These devils are the
hod-carriers that serve the divine mason--the mixers and builders,
the plowers and the planters, the levelers and the engineer. Hence, I
say: “Good Devil, be thou my friend; you give me power, you sharpen
my wits, you make a man of me.”
This is the tangible, physical Devil; the intangible, moral Devil is
not so easily dealt with. It is not so easy to turn the spirit of
crime, intemperance, cruelty, war, superstition, greed, and so on to
our advantage. Yet there also is power going to waste or misdirected.
There is a light under the feet of these things also. Trade, out of
which has come greed, has opened up and humanized the world; war has
often grafted a superior stock upon an inferior.
“It was for Beauty that the world was made.” Emerson quotes this
verse from Ben Jonson and says that it is better than any single line
of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Only the poet is allowed to make such
extravagant statements. We cannot in soberness and truth say that
the world was made for any particular end. It is out of a certain
harmony of the elements that we arose and our sense of beauty was
developed, but the world exists for as many ends as we have power to
conceive. Order, harmony, rhythm, compensation, equilibrium, circles,
spheres, are fundamental in nature. Music, which is beauty to the
ear, hath power over inert matter. In the Mammoth Cave the very rocks
will sing if you speak to them in the right key. How steel filings
on a metal surface will dance and arrange themselves in symmetrical
groups under the influence of musical chords! Harmony is at the heart
of nature, but, in the music of creation, disharmony plays a part
also. The world is not all beautiful unless seen as a whole; all its
discords are harmonized in the curve of the sphere. Emerson’s own
line, “Beauty is its own excuse for being,” is better and truer than
the one he quotes from Ben Jonson.
When saying that in the music of creation disharmony plays a part
also, I do not mean to imply that this is not also true in human
music. The dissonances are just as much a part of great music as
are the harmonies. What would the operas of Wagner be without the
tremendous dissonances? That is what makes Wagner one of the greatest
in music; he sees things whole, just as Whitman does in his art--sees
that “all are but parts of one stupendous whole,” and that the merely
pretty in music, in poetry, in any art, as in nature, is only one
little phase of it, only an arc of the great circle.
III
What trouble we get into when we identify God with Nature! and what
trouble we get into when we refuse to identify the two! In the first
case we reach the unity that the mind craves, but it is a unity made
up of those antagonisms which revolt us. In the second case it is a
duality that leaves half of the world to the Devil.
We select what we call the divine and stand confused and abashed
before the residue. We must either change our notion about the power
we call God and make it all-inclusive, embracing evil as well as
good, or else we must change our notion about Nature and see no evil
in her. God and Nature are one. If they are two, who or what is the
second?
How can we fail to see that all the shaded part of the picture is
necessary to the picture--that all high lights would not make a
picture, but only a daub; and that all that we call good would not
make a world in which men could live and develop? Life goes on under
conditions more or less antagonistic. The antagonism gives the power;
the friction develops electricity. The vices and crimes and follies
and excesses of society are the riot and overflow of the virtues. The
pride of the rich, the tyranny of power, the lust of gain, the riot
of sensuality, are all a little too much of a good thing--a little
too much heat or light or rain or frost or snow or food or drink.
There can be no perversions till there is something good to pervert,
no counterfeits till there is first the genuine article.
The currents of wild life get out of their banks and we have, for
example, a plague of locusts or moths or forest worms, but the
natural check surely comes. The military spirit of Germany, which
springs from a laudable devotion to the state and to the good of
all, got out of its banks and brought on the World War, but the flood
has subsided and will probably be so dyked that it can never get out
again. It will find its outlet in the arts of peace.
IV
The so-called laws of Nature were not designed and decreed as our
human laws are. There is no great lawgiver. Her laws are a sequence
of events and activities; this sequence has worked itself out through
countless ages. Nothing in the universe was designed in the human
sense: it was not first a thought in some one’s mind, then to become
an act or a contrivance. This concept does not express the mystery of
creation. There is a constant becoming; there was no beginning, there
can be no ending. There is perpetual change and revolution, perpetual
transfer and promotion, but nothing that can be explained in terms
of our human experience and achievement. The world and all it holds
were created as the flower is created in the spring, as the snowflake
is created in the winter, as the cloud is created in the summer sky.
Man was created as the chick is created in the egg. Man has had a
long day of creation; he has been becoming man since the first dawn
of life in the old Palæozoic seas. His horse and his dog have been
becoming what we behold them through all the geologic ages. This
view does not leave the Eternal out of the universe; it puts Him in
it so that He cannot be got out. It makes Him immanent in it at all
points; it makes Nature transcend human reason and human speech. As
long as we think of God as a kind of superman external to nature, we
can deny Him and cut Him out, but when we identify ourselves and all
things else with Him, there is no escaping Him. We ourselves are a
phase or a fraction of Him. When we select or screen out what we name
the good, the fair, the divine, and call that God, what are we to do
with the residue? Call it the Devil? The Devil, too, then is a part
of the Eternal Good. I want no emasculated universe. I want the fiber
and virility and pungency and power and heat and drive which all that
we call bad gives it.
Our mission is to tame and elevate and direct the elements and forces
without weakening them. Thence comes our power. A perfect world would
not be one without sin or suffering or struggle or failure. There
can be no perfect world. But there can be one more and more livable,
more and more in harmony with those laws that promote our well-being.
Approximations, approximations--that is our success, and never
complete fulfillment! When we say that God is the All, we must have
the courage of our convictions and not flinch at the consequences.
He is all that we call bad as well as all that we call good. What we
call good is _our_ good, and not absolute good. There is no absolute
good any more than there is absolute heat or cold or height or depth.
We work our way through the mazes and contradictions of
things--contradictions from our point of view--as best we can,
eliminating the bad and cleaving unto the good, but the total scheme
of things, the reconciliations and compensations and final results,
we can never grasp. We cannot abate our war upon evil, because we
have our well-being on these terms, but evil is indirectly the father
of good.
V
All religious and ethical systems grow out of our egoism. We plant
ourselves in the middle of the universe and say it is all for us.
We make gods in our own image, we invent a heaven for the good and
a hell for the wicked, and seek to keep down the brute within us
by a system of rewards and punishments. We improve our minds and
souls as we improve the fields; we make them more fair and fertile,
but we do not eliminate Nature; with her own weapons we improve our
relations to her--we promote _our_ good, but we are still Nature’s;
the harvest we reap is still Nature’s. Our improvements upon her are
mere removal of obstructions from the rill that gushes perennially
from her prolific earth. We improve her fruits, her flowers, her
animals--that is, make them more serviceable to us--by means of the
hold we have upon her methods. We add nothing; we utilize what she
has placed within our reach. All of which means that we are Nature’s,
and that our knowing it and thinking of it cannot make the slightest
difference. Our fate is inevitable. There is no escape. Whose else
could we be? We cannot get off the sphere; if we could, we should
still be a part of the All. Our elaborate schemes to appropriate or
propitiate the Eternal, to stand well with Him, to gain heaven and
avoid hell, are devices of cunning Nature to spur us on the road
of development. (How easily one falls into the language of extreme
anthropomorphism!) The beautiful myth of the Garden of Eden and the
fall of man is full of meaning. Surely it was a good devil that put
man in the way of knowing good from evil, and led to his expulsion
from a state of innocent impotence.
Nature’s dealings with man and with the other forms of life are on
the same plan as her dealings with the earth as a whole. The drainage
system of the globe is by no means perfect; there are marshes and
stagnant waters in every country, but how small comparatively the
area they cover! The rains and snows give birth to pure springs in
all lands, which unite to form the creeks, which, again, unite to
form the rivers, which flow into the lakes and seas, giving back to
the great bodies of water what the sun and the winds took from them,
and thus keeping the vital currents of the globe in ceaseless motion.
The same may be said of the weather system of the globe; it is not
perfect everywhere--too much rain here, too much sun there, too hot
in some parts, too cold in others, but on the whole favoring life and
development.
We think we could improve the weather. So we might for our special
purposes at times--when it rains and we have hay down, or a crop to
put in, or a picnic in view; but it is better on the whole that we
adapt ourselves to the weather than that the weather be adapted to
the special needs of each of us. The Lord would be pretty sure to get
mixed up if He tried the latter plan.
A general and not a special Providence is our salvation. Good and
evil mixed make life, as cloud and sun in due proportions make the
best climate.
VI
War is a scourge like fire, the whirlwind, the earthquake, when
viewed in the light of a particular time and people, but good may
come from it after the lapse of ages. It strengthens and consolidates
and develops the heroic virtues. Yet what a legacy of suffering and
death go with it! But to invoke war is like invoking the pestilence,
the tornado, the earthquake. The guilt of the German military staff
in bringing on the World War is of the blackest dye. It may be a
good to man, but it is a terrible evil to men. We cannot afford to
play Providence; we must not play with Jove’s thunderbolts. War
cannot come to any people unless somebody (or some body of men) wills
it, and to will an aggressive war is a crime. No matter if the recent
war puts a final end to war, the gods will not credit us with the
good that flows from our act over and above our purpose and will.
All the good that comes from war comes from struggle, self-denial,
heroism; and all courses of action that develop these traits are
substitutes for war. The farm, the mining-camp, engineering,
exploration, are substitutes. The best war material is recruited
from these fields. The man who can guide the plowshare can wield
the sword; the man who can face the grizzly and the lion can face
the cannon and the torpedo. War develops no new virtues; it helps
rejuvenate the old; obedience, team-work, system, organization and
so on are achievements of an industrial age. In history most wrongs
are finally righted and the balance is fairly kept, but this is not
by the will and purpose of the actors, but by the remedial forces of
nature and life.
The guilt falls the same upon the greed and lust of power, even if
the gods finally reap a harvest that man’s iniquities have sown. He
maketh the wicked to praise Him, but the wicked are to get no credit.
Here is where our moral standards diverge from those of the natural
universal. Our moral standards apply to us alone; they are special
and limited. The gods know them not. The rain falls alike upon the
just and upon the unjust. The poet says, “I judge not as the judge
judges, but as the sunlight falling around a helpless thing.” This
is the voice of the natural universal. When we judge as the judge
judges, we condemn strife and war and all such uncharity, we execute
or imprison criminals, we found asylums and hospitals and other
charitable organizations; when we judge as Nature or the poet judges,
we say to the fallen one:
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves
to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and
rustle for you.”
The All brings mercy out of cruelty, love out of hatred, life out of
death, but man’s orbit is so small that he cannot harmonize these
contradictions. The curve of the universal laws does not bring him
round till generations have passed. To keep on traveling east till
you approach your point of departure from the west, you must have the
round globe to travel on. An empire would not avail.
VII
Good and evil are strangely mixed in this world, and probably in all
other worlds. What is evil to one creature is often good to another.
It is an evil to the vireo or to the warbler when the cowbird lays
its egg in the nest of one of these birds, but it is a good to the
cowbird. It relieves her of all maternal cares, and provides her
young with a devoted nurse and stepmother, but the young warblers or
vireos are likely to perish. All parasites live at the expense of
some other form of life, and are to that extent evils to these forms;
but Nature is just as much interested in one form as in the other; an
ill wind to one blows good to another, and thus the balance is kept.
A world without evil would be an impossible world--as impossible as
mechanical motion without friction or as sunlight without shadow. The
two worlds, the organic and the inorganic, constantly interact. The
former draws all its elements and its power from the latter, which is
passive to it, and goes its way in the inexorable round of physical
laws, irrespective of it. Viewed as a whole, the evils of life
inhere in its elements and conditions. Air, water, fire, soil, give
us our strength and our growth; they also destroy us if we fail to
keep right relations to them. We cannot walk or lift a hand without
gravity; and yet, give gravity a chance, and it crushes us, the
floods drown us, fire consumes us! Could we have life on any other
terms; could God himself annul these conditions?
Hunger is or may become an evil destroying life, but does it not
imply the opposite condition of good--food, an appetite, power of
assimilation in the organism? Disease is an evil to the living body
it attacks, but it does not attack a dead body and it often educates
the body to resist disease. It is a war which may leave the victor
more capable than he was before.
Robert Ingersoll conceived of an improvement in creation--“make
health contagious instead of disease.” But this is to trifle with
words. In a certain sense health is contagious. But physical
health, like peace of mind, is a condition, and must come from
harmony within, while a contagious disease is conveyed by a living
micro-organism, and is truly catching, and to change or reverse all
this would be to destroy the conditions of life itself. To postulate
a world in which two and two would make five, or in which a straight
line is not the shortest distance between two points, is to take the
road to the insane asylum. Evil is positive only in the sense that
shadow or darkness is positive, or that cold is positive. It is a
greater or lesser degree of negation.
In society and in the state we seek to curb or to correct or to
eliminate Nature’s errors, and in doing so often fall into other
errors and cross-purposes. Yet to fight what we call evil, and
promote what we call good, is the supreme duty of all men. Physical
evil the doctors and natural philosophers warn us against; moral
evil, which is a much more intangible thing, our ethical teachers
point out to us; mental evil, ignorance, superstition, false
judgment, and so on, the schools and colleges help us to avoid;
religious evil, economic evil, political evil, all have their
safeguards and guides.
Why could not a world have been made in which there was no evil? In
asking such a question we misapprehend the nature of the world; we
are thinking of something made and a maker external to it; we are
trying the universe by the standards of our human experience. The
world was not made, man was not created in any sense paralleled by
our human experience with tangible bodies. The world and all there is
in it is the result of evolution, or an endless process of creation,
an everlasting becoming, in which the nature of things beyond which
we can take no step plays the principal part. A world on any other
terms would not be the world to which we are adjusted, and out of
whose conflicting forces our lives came.
There will be times when the light will blind the eye; other times
when the darkness will heal and restore it; when the heat will burn
the hand, when the food will poison the stomach, when the friend
will weary you, when home is a prison, when books are a bore.
Our relations to things make them good or bad: our momentary and
accidental relations may make the good things bad, but our permanent
natural relations make the good good, the bad bad.
In a world without the gravity which so often crushes us, we could
not walk or lift the hand; without the friction which so often
impedes us, our train and vehicles would not move; without the water
that could so easily drown us, the currents of our bodies would dry
up; without the germs that so often make war upon us, we should soon
cease to be. Both friendly and hostile are the powers that surround
us,--or, rather, is the power that surrounds us, for it is one and
not two,--friendly when we are in the relation to it demanded and
provided for by our constitution, and unfriendly when we are in false
relation to it. To know this true relation from the false is a part
of the discipline of life.
I know this is not the end of the story; there are more questions to
be asked. We want a solution of the last solution, but this can never
come. Final questions return forever to themselves; they baffle us,
constituted as our minds are; they are circles and not lines.
VI
THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE
I
What unthinking people call design in nature is simply the reflection
of our inevitable anthropomorphism. Whatever they can use, they
think was designed for that purpose--the air to breathe, the water
to drink, the soil to plant. It is as if they thought the notch in
the mountains was made for the road to pass over, or the bays and
harbor for the use of cities and shipping. But in inorganic nature
the foot is made to fit the shoe and not the reverse. We are cast in
the mould of the environment. If the black cap of the nuthatch which
comes to the maple-tree in front of my window and feeds on the suet
I place there were a human thinking-cap, the bird would see design
in the regular renewal of that bit of suet; he would say, “Some one
or something puts that there for me”; but he helps himself and asks
no questions. The mystery does not trouble him. Why should not I,
poor mortal, feel the same about these blessings and conveniences
around me of which I hourly partake, and which seem so providential?
Why do not I, with my thinking-cap, infer that some one or something
is thinking about me and my well-being? The mass of mankind does
draw this inference, and it is well for them to do so. But the case
of the bird is different. The bit of suet that I feed on is not so
conspicuously something extra, something added to the tree; it is
a part of the tree; it is inseparable from it. I am compelled, as
it were, to distil it out of the tree, so that instead of being the
act of a special providence, it is the inevitable benefaction of the
general providence of nature. What the old maple holds for me is
maple-sugar, but it was not put there for me; it is there just the
same, whether I want it or not; it is a part of the economy of the
tree; it is a factor in its own growth; the tree is not thinking of
me (pardon the term), but of itself. Of course this does not make my
debt to it, and my grounds for thankfulness, any the less real, but
it takes it out of the category of events such as that which brings
the suet to the nuthatch. The Natural Providence is not intermittent,
it is perennial; but it takes no thought of me or you. It is life
that is flexible and adaptive, and not matter and force. “We do
not,” says Renan, “remark in the universe any sign of deliberate and
thoughtful action. We may affirm that no action of this sort has
existed for millions of centuries.” I think we may affirm more than
that--we may affirm that it never existed. Some vestige of the old
theology still clung to Renan’s mind--there was a day of creation in
which God set the universe going, and then left it to run itself;
the same vestige clung to Darwin’s mind and led him to say that in
the beginning God must have created a few species of animals and
vegetables and then left them to develop and populate the world.
Says Renan, “When a chemist arranges an experiment that is to last
for years, everything which takes place in his retort is regulated by
the laws of absolute unconsciousness; which does not mean that a will
has not intervened at the beginning of the experiment, and that it
will not intervene at the end.” There was no beginning nor will there
be any ending to the experiment of creation; the will is as truly
there in the behavior of the molecules at one time as at another. The
effect of Renan’s priestly training and associations clings to him
like a birthmark.
In discussing these questions our plumb-line does not touch bottom,
because there is no bottom. “In the infinite,” says Renan with deeper
insight, “negations vanish, contradictions are merged”; in other
words, opposites are true. Where I stand on the surface of the sphere
is the center of that surface, but that does not prevent the point
where you stand being the center also. Every point is a center, and
the sky is overhead at one place as at another; opposites are true.
The moral and intellectual worlds present the same contradictions or
limitations--the same relatively of what we call truth.
Nature’s ways--which with me is the same as saying God’s ways--are
so different from ours; “no deliberate and thoughtful action,”
as Renan puts it, no economy of time or material, no short cuts,
no cutting-out of non-essentials, no definite plan, no specific
ends, few straight lines or right angles; her streams loiter and
curve, her forces are unbridled; no loss or gain; her accounts
always balance; the loss at one point, or with one form, is a gain
with some other--all of which is the same as saying that there is
nothing artificial in Nature. All is Natural, all is subject to
the hit-and-miss method. The way Nature trims her trees, plants
her forests, sows her gardens, is typical of the whole process of
the cosmos. God is no better than man because man is a part of
God. From our human point of view he is guilty of our excesses and
shortcomings. Time does not count, pain does not count, waste does
not count. The wonder is that the forests all get planted by this
method, the pines in their places, the spruces in theirs, the oaks
and maples in theirs; and the trees get trimmed in due time, now and
then, it is true, by a very wasteful method. A tree doctor could
save and prolong the lives of many of them. The small fountains and
streams all find their way to larger streams, and these to still
larger, and these to lakes or to the sea, and the drainage system
of the continents works itself out with engineering exactitude.
The decay of the rocks and the formation of the soil come about in
due time, but not in man’s time. In all the grand processes and
transformations of nature the element of time enters on such a scale
as to dwarf all human efforts.
II
When we say of a thing or an event that it was a chance happening,
we do not mean that it was not determined by the laws of matter
and force, but we mean it was not the result of the human will, or
of anything like it; it was not planned or designed by conscious
intelligence. Chance in this sense plays a very large part in
nature and in life. Though the result of irrefragable laws, the
whole non-living world about us shows no purpose or forethought
in our human sense. For instance, we are compelled to regard the
main features of the earth as matters of chance, the distribution
of land and water, of islands and continents, of rivers, lakes,
seas, mountains and plains, valleys and hills, the shapes of the
continents; that there is more land in the northern hemisphere than
in the southern, more land at the South Pole than at the North,
is a matter of chance. The serpentine course of a stream through
an alluvial plain, a stream two yards wide, winding and ox-bowing
precisely as does the Mississippi, is a matter of chance. The whole
geography of a country, in fact, is purely a matter of chance, and
not the result of anything like human forethought. The planets
themselves--that Jupiter is large and Mercury small; that Saturn
has rings; that Jupiter has seven moons; that the Earth has one;
that other planets have none; that some of the planets are in a
condition to sustain life as we know it, for example, Venus, Earth,
and probably Mars; that some revolve in more elliptical orbits than
others; that Mercury and Venus apparently always keep the same side
toward the sun--all these things are matters of chance. It is easy to
say, as did our fathers, that God designed it thus and so, but how
are we to think of an omnipotent and omniscient Being as planning
such wholesale destruction of his own works as occurs in the cosmic
catastrophes which the astronomers now and then witness in the
sidereal universe, or even as occur on the earth, when earthquakes
and volcanoes devastate fair lands or engulf the islands of the sea?
Why should such a Being design a desert, or invent a tornado, or
ordain that some portion of the earth’s surface should have almost
perpetual rain and another portion almost perpetual drought? In
Hawaii I saw islands that were green and fertile on one end from
daily showers, while the other end, ten miles away, was a rough
barren rock, from the entire absence of showers. Were the trade winds
designed to bring the vapors of the sea to the tropic lands?
In following this line of thought we, of course, soon get where no
step can be taken. Is the universe itself a chance happening? Such
a proposition is unthinkable, because something out of nothing is
unthinkable. Our experience in this world develops our conceptions of
time and space, and to set bounds to either is an impossible task. We
say the cosmos must always have existed, and there we stop. We have
no faculties to deal with the great ultimate problems.
We are no better off when we turn to the world of living things. Here
we see design, particular means adapted to specific ends. Shall we
say that a bird or a bee or a flower is a chance happening, as is the
rainbow or the sunset cloud or a pearl or a precious stone? Is man
himself a chance happening? Here we are stuck and cannot lift our
feet. The mystery and the miracle of vitality, as Tyndall called it,
is before us. Here is the long, hard road of evolution, the push and
the unfolding of life through countless ages, something more than
the mechanical and the accidental, though these have played a part;
something less than specific plan and purpose, though we seem to
catch dim outlines of these.
Spontaneous variations, original adaptations, a never-failing primal
push toward higher and more complex forms--how can we, how shall we,
read the riddle of it all? How shall we account for man on purely
naturalistic grounds?
The consistent exponent of variation cannot go into partnership with
supernaturalism. Grant that the organic split off from the inorganic
by insensible degrees, yet we are bound to ask what made it split
off at all?--and how it was that the first unicellular life contained
the promise and the potency of all the life of to-day? Such questions
take us into deep waters where our plummet-line finds no bottom. It
suits my reason better to say there is no solution than to accept a
solution which itself needs solution, and still leaves us where we
began.
The adjustment of non-living bodies to each other seems a simple
matter, but in considering the adaptations of living bodies to one
another, and to their environment, we are confronted with a much
harder problem. Life is an active principle, not in the sense that
gravity and chemical reactions are active principles, but in a
quite different sense. Gravity and chemical reactions are always
the same, inflexible and uncompromising; but life is ever variable
and adaptive; it will take half a loaf if it cannot get a whole
one. Gravity answers yea and nay. Life says, “Probably; we will see
about it; we will try again to-morrow.” The oak-leaf will become an
oak-ball to accommodate an insect that wants a cradle and a nursery
for its young; it will develop one kind of a nursery for one insect
and another kind for a different insect.
III
As far as I have got, or ever hope to get, toward solving the problem
of the universe is to see clearly that it is insoluble. One can
arrive only at negative conclusions; he comes to see that the problem
cannot be dealt with in terms of our human experience and knowledge.
But what other terms have we? Our knowledge does not qualify us in
any degree to deal with the Infinite. The sphere has no handle to
take hold of, and the Infinite baffles the mind in the same way.
Measured by our human standards, it is a series of contradictions.
The method of Nature is a haphazard method, yet behold the final
order and completeness! How many of her seeds she trusts to the winds
and the waters, and her fertilizing pollens and germs also! And the
winds and the waters do her errands, with many failures, of course,
but they hit the mark often enough to serve her purpose. She provides
lavishly enough to afford her failures.
When we venture upon the winds and the waters with our crafts, we aim
to control them, and we reach our havens only when we do control them.
What is there in the method of Nature that answers to the human
will in such matters? Nothing that I can see; yet her boats and her
balloons reach their havens--not all of them, but enough of them
for her purpose. Yet when we apply the word “purpose” or “design”
to Nature, to the Infinite, we are describing her in terms of the
finite, and thus fall into contradictions. Still, the wings and
balloons and hooks and springs in the vegetable world are for a
specific purpose--to scatter the seed far from the parent plant.
Every part and organ and movement of a living body serves a purpose
to that organism. The mountain lily looks straight up to the sky; the
meadow lily looks down to the earth; undoubtedly each flower finds
its advantage in its own attitude, but what that advantage is, I know
not. If Nature planned and invented as man does, she would attain
to mere unity and simplicity. It is her blind, prodigal, haphazard
methods that result in her endless diversity. When she got a good
wing for the seed of a tree, such as that of the maple, she would,
if merely efficient, give this to the seeds of other similar trees;
but she gives a different wing to the ash, to the linden, to the elm,
the pine, and the hemlock, while to some she gives no wings at all.
The nut-bearing trees, such as the oaks, the beeches, the walnuts,
and the hickories, have no wings, except such as are afforded them
by the birds and beasts that feed upon them and carry them away.
And here again Nature has a purpose in the edible nut which tempts
some creatures to carry it away. If all the nuts were devoured, the
whole tribe of nut-bearing trees would in time be exterminated, and
Nature’s end defeated. But in a world of conflicting forces like
ours, chance plays an important part; many of the nuts get scattered,
and not all devoured. The hoarding-up propensities of certain birds
and squirrels result in the planting of many oaks and chestnuts and
beeches.
The inherent tendency to variation in organic life, together with
Nature’s hit-and-miss method, account for her endless variety on the
same plane, as it were, as that of her many devices for disseminating
her seeds. One plan of hook or barb serves as well as another,--that
of bidens as well as that of hound’s-tongue,--yet each has a pattern
of its own. The same may be said of the leaves of the trees: their
function is to expose the juices of the tree to the chemical action
of light and air; yet behold what an endless variety in their shape,
size, and structure! This is the way of the Infinite--to multiply
endlessly, to give a free rein to the physical forces and let them
struggle with one another for the stable equilibrium to which they
never, as a whole, attain; to give the same free rein to the organic
forces and let their various forms struggle with one another for the
unstable equilibrium which is the secret of their life.
The many contingencies that wait upon the circuit of the physical
forces and determine the various forms of organic matter--rocks,
sand, soil, gravel, mountain, plain--all shifting and changing
endlessly--wait upon the circuit of the organic forces and turn the
life-impulse into myriad channels, and people the earth with myriads
of living forms, each accidental from our limited point of view,
while all are determined by irrefragable laws. The contradictions in
such statements are obvious and are inevitable when the finite tries
to measure or describe the ways of the Infinite.
The waters of the globe are forever seeking the repose of a dead
level, but when they attain it, if they ever do, the world will be
dead. Behold what a career they have in their circuit from the sea
to the clouds and back to the earth in the ministering rains, and
then to the sea again through the streams and rivers! The mantling
snow with its exquisite crystals, the grinding and transporting
glaciers, the placid or plowing and turbulent rivers, the sparkling
and refreshing streams, the cooling and renewing dews, the softening
and protecting vapors, wait upon this circuit of the waters through
the agency of the sun, from the sea, through the sky and land, back
to the sea again. Yes, and all the myriad forms of life also. This
circuit of the waters drives and sustains all the vital machinery of
the globe.
Why and how the sun and the rain bring the rose and the violet, the
peach and the plum, the wheat and the rye, and the boys and the
girls, out of the same elements and conditions that they bring the
thistles and the tares, the thorn and the scrub, the fang and the
sting, the monkey and the reptile, is the insoluble mystery.
If Nature aspires toward what we call the good in man, does she not
equally aspire toward what we call the bad in thorns and weeds and
reptiles? May we not say that good is our good, and bad is our bad,
and that there is, and can be, no absolute good and no absolute bad,
any more than there can be an absolute up or an absolute down?
How haphazard, how fortuitous and uncalculated is all this business
of the multiplication of the human race! What freaks, what failures,
what monstrosities, what empty vessels, what deformed limbs,
what defective brains, what perverted instincts! It is as if in
the counsels of the Eternal it had been decided to set going an
evolutionary impulse that should inevitably result in man, and then
leave him to fail or flourish just as the ten thousand contingencies
of the maelstrom of conflicting earth forces should decide, so
that whether a man become a cripple or an athlete, a fool or a
philosopher, a satyr or a god, is largely a matter of chance. Yet the
human brain has steadily grown in size, human mastery over nature has
steadily increased, and chance has, upon the whole, brought more good
to man than evil. Optimism is a final trait of the Eternal.
And the taking-off of man, how haphazard, how fortuitous it all is!
His years shall be threescore and ten; but how few, comparatively,
reach that age, how few live out half their days! Disease, accident,
stupidity, superstition, cut him off at all ages--in infancy, in
childhood, in youth, in manhood; his whole life is a part of the
flux and uncertainty of things. No god watches over him aside from
himself and his kind, no atom or molecule is partial to him, gravity
crushes him, fire burns him, the floods drown him as readily as
they do vipers and vermin. He takes his chances, he gains, and he
loses, but Nature treats him with the same impartiality that she
treats the rest of her creatures. He runs the same gantlet of the
hostile physical forces, he pays the same price for his development;
but his greater capacity for development--to whom or what does he
owe that? If we follow Darwin we shall say natural selection, and
natural selection is just as good a god as any other. No matter what
we call it, if it brought man to the head of creation and put all
things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough for anybody.
At the heart of it there is still a mystery we cannot grasp. The
ways of Nature about us are no less divine because they are near and
familiar. The illusion of the rare and the remote, science dispels.
Of course we are still trying to describe the Infinite in terms of
the finite.
IV
We are so attached to our kind, and so dependent upon them, that
most persons feel homeless and orphaned in a universe where no
suggestion of sympathy and interest akin to our own comes to us from
the great void. A providence of impersonal forces, the broadcast,
indiscriminate benefits of nature, kind deeds where no thought of
kindness is, well-being as the result of immutable law--all such
ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured ourselves to them.
We love to fancy that we see friendly hands and hear friendly voices
in nature. It is easy to make ourselves believe that the rains, the
warmth, the fruitful seasons, are sent by some Being for our especial
benefit. The thought that we are adapted to nature and not nature
made or modified to suit us, is distasteful to us. It rubs us the
wrong way. We have long been taught to believe that there is air
because we have lungs, and water because we need it to drink, and
light because we need it to see. Science takes this conceit out of
us. The light begat the eye, and the air begat the lungs.
In the universe, as science reveals it to us, sensitive souls
experience the cosmic chill; in the universe as our inevitable
anthropomorphism shapes it for us, we experience the human glow. The
same anthropomorphism has in the past peopled the woods and fields
and streams and winds with good and evil spirits, and filled the
world with cruel and debasing superstitions; but in our day we have
got rid of all of this; we have abolished all gods but one. This one
we still fear, and bow down before, and seek to propitiate--not with
offerings and sacrifices, but with good Sunday clothes and creeds
and pew-rents and praise and incense and surplices and ceremonies.
What Brocken shadows our intense personalism casts upon nature!
We see the gigantic outlines of our own forms, and mistake them
for a veritable god. But as we ourselves are a part of nature, so
this humanizing tendency of ours is also a part of nature, a part
of human nature--not valid and independent, like the chemical and
physical forces, but as valid and real as our dreams, our ideas,
our aspirations. All the gods and divinities and spirits with which
man has peopled the heavens and the earth are a part of Nature as
she manifests herself in our subjective selves. So there we are, on
a trail that ends where it began. We condemn one phase of nature
through another phase of nature that is active in our own minds. How
shall we escape this self-contradiction? As we check or control the
gravity without us by the power of the gravity in our own bodies, so
our intelligence must sit in judgment on phases of the same Universal
Intelligence manifested in outward nature.
It is this recognition of an intelligence in nature akin to our own
that gives rise to our anthropomorphism. We recognize in the living
world about us the use of specific means to specific ends, and this
we call intelligence. It differs from our own in that it is not
selective and intensive in the same way. It does not take short cuts;
it does not aim at human efficiency; it does not cut out waste and
delay and pain. It is the method of trial and error. It hits its
mark because it hits all marks. Species succeed because the tide
that bears them on is a universal tide. It is not a river, but an
ocean current. Nature progresses, but not as man does by discarding
one form and adapting a higher. She discards nothing; she keeps all
her old forms and ways and out of them evolves the higher; she keeps
the fish’s fin, while she perfects the bird’s wing; she preserves the
invertebrate, while she fashions the vertebrate; she achieves man,
while she preserves the monkey. She gropes her way like a blind man,
but she arrives because all goals are hers. Perceptive intelligence
she has given in varying degrees to all creatures, but reasoning
intelligence she has given to man alone. I say “given,” after our
human manner of speaking, when I mean “achieve.” There is no giving
in Nature--there is effort and development. There is interchange and
interaction, but no free gifts. Things are bought with a price. The
price of the mind of man--who can estimate what it has been through
the biological and geological ages?--a price which his long line
of antecedent forms has paid in struggle and suffering and death.
The little that has been added to the size of his brain since the
Piltdown man and the Neanderthal man--what effort and pain has not
that cost? We pay for what we get, or our forbears paid for it. They
paid for the size of our brains, and we pay for our progress in
knowledge.
V
The term “religion” is an equivocal and much-abused word, but I am
convinced that no man’s life is complete without some kind of an
emotional experience that may be called religious. Not necessarily
so much a definite creed or belief as an attraction and aspiration
toward the Infinite, or a feeling of awe and reverence inspired
by the contemplation of this wonderful and mysterious universe,
something to lift a man above purely selfish and material ends, and
open his soul to influences from the highest heavens of thought.
Religion in some form is as natural to man as are eating and
sleeping. The mysteries of life and the wonder and terror of the
world in which he finds himself, arouse emotions of awe and fear
and worship in him as soon as his powers of reflection are born. In
man’s early history religion, philosophy, and literature are one.
He worships before he investigates; he builds temples before he
builds schoolhouses or civic halls. He is, of course, superstitious
long before he is scientific; he trembles before the supernatural
long before he has mastered the natural. The mind of early man was
synthetic as our emotions always are; it lumped things, it did not
differentiate and classify. The material progress of the race has
kept pace with man’s power of analysis--the power to separate one
thing from another, to resolve things into their component parts
and recombine them to serve his own purposes. He gets water power,
steam power, electric power, by separating a part from the whole and
placing his machinery where they tend to unite again.
Science tends more and more to reveal to us the unity that underlies
the diversity of nature. We must have diversity in our practical
lives; we must seize Nature by many handles. But our intellectual
lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all this complexity. Our
religious lives demand the same. Amid all the diversity of creeds
and sects we are coming more and more to see that religion is one,
that verbal differences and ceremonies are unimportant, and that
the fundamental agreements are alone significant. Religion as a key
or passport to some other world has had its day; as a mere set of
statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery it has had its day.
Science makes us more and more at home in this world, and is coming
more and more, to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value.
Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced
mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship
which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe. It quiets
our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the troubled waters
of our lives, and reconciles us to the world as it is. The old
fickle and jealous gods begotten by our fears and morbid consciences
fall away, and the new gods of law and order, who deal justly if
mercilessly, take their places.
“The mind of the universe which we share,” is a phrase of
Thoreau’s--a large and sane idea which shines like a star amid his
many firefly conceits and paradoxes. The physical life of each of us
is a part or rill of the universal life about us, as surely as every
ounce of our strength is a part of gravity. With equal certainty,
and under the same law, our mental lives flow from the fountain of
universal mind, the cosmic intelligence which guides the rootlets of
the smallest plant as it searches the soil for the elements it needs,
and the most minute insect in availing itself of the things it needs.
It is this primal current of life, the two different phases of which
we see in our bodies and in our minds, that continues after our own
special embodiments of it have ceased; in it is the real immortality.
The universal mind does not die, the universal life does not go out.
The jewel that trembles in the dewdrop, the rain that lends itself
to the painting of the prismatic colors of the bow in the clouds,
pass away, but their fountainhead in the sea does not pass away. The
waters may make the wonderful circuit through the clouds, the air,
the earth, and the cells and veins of living things, any number of
times--now a globule of vapor in the sky, now a starlike crystal
in the snow, now the painted mist of a waterfall, then the limpid
current of a mountain brook--and still the sea remains unchanged.
And though the life and mentality of the globe passes daily and is
daily renewed, the primal source of those things is as abounding as
ever. It is not you and I that are immortal; it is Creative Energy,
of which we are a part. Our immortality is swallowed up in this.
The poets, the prophets, the martyrs, the heroes, the saints--where
are they? Each was but a jewel in the dew, the rain, the
snowflake--throbbing, burning, flashing with color for a brief time
and then vanishing, adorning the world for a moment and then caught
away into the great abyss. “O spendthrift Nature!” our hearts cry
out; but Nature’s spending is only the ceaseless merging of one
form into another without diminution of her material or blurring
of her types. Flowers bloom and flowers fade, the seasons come and
the seasons go, men are born and men die, the world mourns for its
saints and heroes, its poets and saviors, but Nature remains and is
as young and spontaneous and inexhaustible as ever. Where is the
comfort in all this to you and to me? There is none, save the comfort
or satisfaction of knowing things as they are. We shall feel more at
ease in Zion when we learn to distinguish substance from shadow, and
to grasp the true significance of the world of which we form a part.
In the end each of us will have had his day, and can say as Whitman
does,
“I have positively appeared. That is enough.”
In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and
enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human
life endures on this planet. It will have achieved the miracle of the
Incarnation, and have tasted the sweet and the bitter, the victories
and the defeats of evolution. The legend of the birth and life of
Jesus is but this ever-present naturalism written large with parable
and miracle on the pages of our religious history. In the lives of
each of us the supreme reality comes down to earth and takes on the
human form and suffers all the struggles and pains and humiliations
of mortal, finite life. Even the Christian theory of the vicarious
atonement is not without its basis of naturalism. Men, through
disease and ignorance and half knowledge, store up an experience that
saves future generations from suffering and failure. We win victories
for our descendants, and bring the kingdom nearer for them by the
devils and evil spirits we overcome.
VII
THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST
I
To say that man is as good as God would to most persons seem like
blasphemy; but to say that man is as good as Nature would disturb
no one. Man is a part of Nature, or a phase of Nature, and shares
in what we call her imperfections. But what is Nature a part of,
or a phase of?--and what or who is its author? Is it not true that
this earth which is so familiar to us is as good as yonder morning
or evening star and made of the same stuff?--just as much in the
heavens, just as truly a celestial abode as it is? Venus seems to us
like a great jewel in the crown of night or morning. From Venus the
earth would seem like a still larger jewel. The heavens seem afar off
and free from all stains and impurities of earth; we lift our eyes
and our hearts to them as to the face of the Eternal, but our science
reveals no body or place there so suitable for human abode and human
happiness as this earth. In fact, this planet is the only desirable
heaven of which we have any clue. Innumerable other worlds exist in
the abysses of space which may be the abodes of beings superior, and
of beings inferior, to ourselves. We place our gods afar off so as
to dehumanize them, never suspecting that when we do so we discount
their divinity. The more human we are,--remembering that to err is
human,--the nearer God we are. Of course good and bad are human
concepts and are a verdict upon created things as they stand related
to us, promoting or hindering our well-being. In the councils of the
Eternal there is apparently no such distinction.
Man is not only as good as God; some men are a good deal better,
that is, from our point of view; they attain a degree of excellence
of which there is no hint in nature--moral excellence. It is
not until we treat man as a part of nature--as a product of the
earth as literally as are the trees--that we can reconcile these
contradictions. If we could build up a composite man out of all
the peoples of the earth, including even the Prussians, he would
represent fairly well the God in nature.
Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best
selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and
devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they
took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to
hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the
ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night. We are not
cut off, we are not isolated points; the great currents flow through
us and over us and around us, and unite us to the whole of nature.
Moses saw God in the burning bush, saw him with the eyes of early
man whose divinities were clothed in the extraordinary, the fearful,
or the terrible; we see him in the meanest weed that grows, and hear
him in the gentle murmur of our own heart’s blood. The language of
devotion and religious conviction is only the language of soberness
and truth written large and aflame with emotion.
Man goes away from home searching for the gods he carries with him
always. Man can know and feel and love only man. There is a deal of
sound psychology in the new religion called Christian Science--in
that part which emphasizes the power of the mind over the body,
and the fact that the world is largely what we make it, that evil
is only the shadow of good--old truths reburnished. This helps us
to understand the hold it has taken upon such a large number of
admirable persons. Good and evil are relative terms, but evil is only
the shadow of good. Disease is a reality, but not in the same sense
that health is a reality. Positive and negative electricity are both
facts, but positive and negative good belong to a different order.
Christian Science will not keep the distemper out of the house if
the sewer-gas gets in; inoculation will do more to prevent typhoid
and diphtheria than “declaring the truth” or saying your prayers or
counting your beads. In its therapeutical value experimental science
is the only safe guide in dealing with human corporal ailments.
We need not fear alienation from God. I feed Him when I feed a
beggar. I serve Him when I serve my neighbor. I love Him when I love
my friend. I praise Him when I praise the wise and good of any race
or time. I shun Him when I shun the leper. I forgive Him when I
forgive my enemies. I wound Him when I wound a human being. I forget
Him when I forget my duty to others. If I am cruel or unjust or
resentful or envious or inhospitable toward any man, woman, or child,
I am guilty of all these things toward God: “Inasmuch as ye have done
it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto
me.”
II
I am persuaded that a man without religion falls short of the proper
human ideal. Religion, as I use the term, is a spiritual flowering,
and the man who has it not is like a plant that never blooms. The
mind that does not open and unfold its religious sensibilities in the
sunshine of this infinite and spiritual universe, is to be pitied.
Men of science do well enough with no other religion than the love
of truth, for this is indirectly a love of God. The astronomer, the
geologist, the biologist, tracing the footsteps of the Creative
Energy throughout the universe--what need has he of any formal,
patent-right religion? Were not Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell,
and all other seekers and verifiers of natural truth among the most
truly religious of men? Any of these men would have gone to hell for
the truth--not the truth of creeds and rituals, but the truth as it
exists in the councils of the Eternal and as it is written in the
laws of matter and of life.
For my part I had a thousand times rather have Huxley’s religion than
that of the bishops who sought to discredit him, or Bruno’s than that
of the church that burnt him. The religion of a man that has no other
aim than his own personal safety from some real or imaginary future
calamity, is of the selfish, ignoble kind.
Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious
value. This has saved many persons in this world--saved them from
mammon-worship, and from the frivolity and insincerity of the crowd.
It has made their lives placid and sweet. It has given them an
inexhaustible field for inquiry, for enjoyment, for the exercise
of all their powers, and in the end has not left them soured and
dissatisfied. It has made them contented and at home wherever they
are in nature--in the house not made with hands. This house is
their church, and the rocks and the hills are the altars, and the
creed is written in the leaves of the trees and in the flowers of
the field and in the sands of the shore. A new creed every day and
new preachers, and holy days all the week through. Every walk to
the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving
ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine
are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics
in Nature’s church; all are believers, all are communicants. The
beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do
not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends, in catacombs, in
garbled texts, in miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars.
It is of to-day; it is now and here; it is everywhere. The crickets
chirp it, the birds sing it, the breezes chant it, the thunder
proclaims it, the streams murmur it, the unaffected man lives it.
Its incense rises from the plowed fields, it is on the morning
breeze, it is in the forest breath and in the spray of the wave. The
frosts write it in exquisite characters, the dews impearl it, and
the rainbow paints it on the cloud. It is not an insurance policy
underwritten by a bishop or a priest; it is not even a faith; it is a
love, an enthusiasm, a consecration to natural truth.
The God of sunshine and of storms speaks a less equivocal language
than the God of revelation.
Our fathers had their religion and their fathers had theirs, but
they were not ours, and could not be in those days and under those
conditions. But their religions lifted them above themselves; they
healed their wounds; they consoled them for many of the failures
and disappointments of this world; they developed character; they
tempered the steel in their nature. How childish to us seems the plan
of salvation, as our fathers found it in the fervid and, I freely
say, inspired utterances of Saint Paul! But it saved them, it built
character, it made life serious, it was an heroic creed which has
lost credence in our more knowing and more frivolous age. We see how
impossible it is, but we do not see the great natural truths upon
which it rests.
A man is not saved by the truth of the things he believes, but by the
truth of his belief--its sincerity, its harmony with his character.
The absurdities of the popular religions do not matter; what matters
is the lukewarm belief, the empty forms, the shallow conceptions of
life and duty. We are prone to think that if the creed is false, the
religion is false. Religion is an emotion, an inspiration, a feeling
of the Infinite, and may have its root in any creed or in no creed.
What can be more unphilosophical than the doctrines of the Christian
Scientists? Yet Christian Science is a good practical religion.
It makes people cheerful, happy, and helpful--yes, and helps make
them healthy too. Its keynote is love, and love holds the universe
together. Any creed that ennobles character and opens a door or a
window upon the deeper meanings of this marvelous universe is good
enough to live by, and good enough to die by. The Japanese-Chinese
religion of ancestor worship, sincerely and devoutly held, is better
than the veneer of much of our fashionable well-dressed religion.
Guided by appearances alone, how surely we should come to look upon
the sun as a mere appendage of the earth!--as much so as is the moon.
How near it seems at sunrise and sunset, and as if these phenomena
directly involved the sun, extending to it and modifying its light
and heat! We do not realize that these are merely terrestrial
phenomena, and that the sun, so to speak, knows them not.
Viewed from the sun the earth is a mere speck in the sky, and the
amount of the total light and heat from the sun that is received on
the earth is so small that the mind can hardly grasp it. Yet for all
practical purposes the sun shines for us alone. Our relation to it
could not be any more direct and sustaining if it were created for
that purpose. It is immanent in the life of the globe. It is the
source of all our energy and therefore of our life. Its bounties are
universal. The other planets find it is their sun also. It is as
special and private to them as to us. We think the sun paints the bow
on the cloud, but the bow follows from the laws of optics. The sun
knows it not.
It is the same with what we call God. His bounty is of the same
universal, impersonal kind, and yet for all practical purposes it
exists especially for us, it is immanent every moment in our lives.
There is no special Providence. Nature sends the rain upon the just
and the unjust, upon the sea as upon the land. We are here and
find life good because Providence is general and not special. The
conditions are not too easy, the struggle has made men of us. The
bitter has tempered the sweet. Evil has put us on our guard and keeps
us so. We pay for what we get.
III
That wise old Roman, Marcus Aurelius, says, “Nothing is evil which
is according to nature.” At that moment he is thinking especially of
death which, when it comes in the course of nature, is not an evil,
unless life itself is also an evil. After the lamp of life is burned
out, death is not an evil, rather is it a good. But premature death,
death by accident or disease, before a man has done his work or used
up his capital of vitality, is an evil. Disease itself is an evil,
but if we lived according to nature there would be no disease; we
should die the natural, painless death of old age. Of course there
is no such thing as absolute evil or absolute good. Evil is that
which is against our well-being, and good is that which promotes
it. We always postulate the existence of life when we speak of good
and evil. Excesses in nature are evil to us because they bring
destruction and death in their train. They are disharmonies in the
scheme of things, because they frustrate and bring to naught. The war
which Marcus Aurelius was waging when he wrote those passages was an
evil in itself, though good might come out of it.
Everything in organic nature--trees, grasses, flowers, insects,
fishes, mammals--is beset by evil of some kind. The natural order
is good because it brought us here and keeps us here, but evil has
always dogged our footsteps. Leaf-blight is an evil to the tree,
smallpox is an evil to man, frost is an evil to the insects, flood an
evil to the fishes.
Moral evil--hatred, envy, greed, lying, cruelty, cheating--is of
another order. These vices have no existence below the human sphere.
We call them evils because they are disharmonies; they are inimical
to the highest standard of human happiness and well-being. They make
a man less a man, they work discord and develop needless friction.
Sand in the engine of your car and water in the gasoline are evils,
and malice and jealousy and selfishness in your heart are analogous
evils.
In our day we read the problem of Nature and God in a new light, the
light of science, or of emancipated human reason, and the old myths
mean little to us. We accept Nature as we find it, and do not crave
the intervention of a God that sits behind and is superior to it. The
self-activity of the cosmos suffices. We accept the tornadoes and
earthquakes and world wars, and do not lose faith. We arm ourselves
against them as best we can. We accept the bounty of the rain, the
sunshine, the soil, the changing seasons, and the vast armory of
non-living forces, and from them equip or teach ourselves to escape,
endure, modify, or ward off the destructive and non-human forces that
beset our way. We draw our strength from the Nature that seems and
is so regardless of us; our health and wholeness are its gifts. The
biologic ages, with all their carnival of huge and monstrous forms,
had our well-being at heart. The evils and dangers that beset our
way have been outmatched by the good and the helpful. The deep-sea
fish would burst and die if brought to the surface; the surface life
would be crushed and killed in the deep sea. Life adapts itself
to its environment; hard conditions make it hard. Winds, floods,
inclement seasons, have driven it around the earth; the severer the
cold, the thicker the fur; compensations always abound. If Nature
is not all-wise and all-merciful from our human point of view, she
has placed us in a world where our own wisdom and mercy can be
developed; she has sent us to a school in which we learn to see her
own shortcomings and imperfections, and to profit by them.
The unreasoning, unforeseeing animals suffer more from the accidents
of nature--drought, flood, lightning--than man does; but man suffers
more from evils of his own making--war, greed, intemperance,
pestilence--so that the development in both lines goes on, and life
is still at the flood.
Good and evil are inseparable. We cannot have light without shade,
or warmth without cold, or life without death, or development without
struggle. The struggle for life, of which Darwinism makes so much,
is only the struggle of the chick to get out of the shell, or of
the flower to burst its bud, or of the root to penetrate the soil.
It is not the struggle of battle and hate--the justification of war
and usurpation--it is for the most part a beneficent struggle with
the environment, in which the fittest of the individual units of a
species survive, but in which the strong and the feeble, the great
and the small of species alike survive. The lamb survives with the
lion, the wren with the eagle, the Esquimo with the European--all
manner of small and delicate forms survive with the great and robust.
One species of carnivora, or of rodents, or herbivora, does not, as
a rule, exterminate another species. It is true that species prey
upon species, that cats eat mice, that hawks eat smaller birds, and
that man slays and eats the domestic animals. Probably man alone
has exterminated species. But outside of man’s doings all the rest
belongs to Nature’s system of checks and balances, and bears no
analogy to human or inhuman wars and conquests.
Life struggles with matter, the tree struggles with the wind and with
other trees. Man struggles with gravity, cold, wet, heat, and all the
forces that hinder him. The tiniest plant that grows has to force its
root down into the soil; earlier than that it has to burst its shell
or case. The corn struggles to lift itself up after the storm has
beaten it down; effort, effort, everywhere in the organic world. Says
Whitman:
“Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.”
IV
Every few years we have an ice-storm or a snowstorm that breaks down
and disfigures the trees. Some trees suffer much more than others.
The storm goes its way; the laws of physical force prevail; the great
world of mechanical forces is let loose upon the small world of vital
forces; occasionally a tree is so crushed that it never entirely
recovers; but after many years the woods and groves have repaired
the damages and taken on their wonted thrifty appearance. The evil
was only temporary; the world of trees has suffered no permanent
set-back. But had the trees been conscious beings, what a deal of
suffering they would have experienced! An analogous visitation to
human communities entails a heritage of misery, but in time it too
is forgotten and its scars healed. Fire, blood, war, epidemics,
earthquakes, are such visitations, but the race survives them and
reaps good from them.
We say that Nature cares nothing for the individual, but only for
the race or the species. The whole organic world is at war with the
inorganic, and as in human wars the individuals are sacrificed that
the army, the whole, may live; so in the strife and competition of
nature, the separate units fall that the mass may prosper.
It is probably true that in the course of the biological history of
the earth, whole species have been rendered extinct by parasites,
or by changing outward conditions. But this has been the exception,
and not the rule. The chestnut blight now seems to threaten the very
existence of this species of tree in this country, but I think the
chances are that this fungus will meet with some natural check.
In early summer comes the June drop of apples. The trees start with
more fruit than they can carry, and if they are in vigorous health,
they will drop the surplus. It is a striking illustration of Nature’s
methods. The tree does its own thinning. But if not at the top of its
condition, it fails to do this. It takes health and strength simply
to let go; only a living tree drops its fruit or its leaves; only a
growing man drops his outgrown opinions.
If we put ourselves in the place of the dropped apples, we must look
upon our fate as unmixed evil. If we put ourselves in the place of
the tree and of the apples that remain on it, the June drop would
appear an unmixed good--finer fruit, and a healthier, longer-lived
tree results. Nature does not work so much to specific as to
universal ends. The individual may go, but the type must remain. The
ranks may be decimated, but the army and its cause must triumph.
Life in all its forms is a warfare only in the sense that it is a
struggle with its outward conditions, in which, other things being
equal, the strongest force prevails. Small and weak forms prevail
also, because the competing forms are small and weak, or because
at the feast of life there is a place for the small and weak also.
But lion against lion, man against man, mouse against mouse, the
strongest will, in the end, be the victor.
Man’s effort is to save waste, to reduce friction, to take short
cuts, to make smooth the way, to seize the advantage, to economize
time, but the physical forces know none of these things.
Go into the woods and behold the evil the trees have to contend
with--all typical of the evil we have to contend with--too crowded
in places, one tree crushing another by its fall, specimens on every
hand whose term of life might be lengthened by a little wise surgery;
borers, blight, disease, insect pests, storm, wreckage, thunderbolt
scars, or destruction--evil in a hundred forms besetting every tree,
and sooner or later leaving its mark. A few escape--oaks, maples,
pines, elms--and reach a greater age than the others, but they fail
at last, and when they have rounded out their green century, or ten
centuries, and go down in a gale, or in the stillness of a summer
night, how often younger trees are marred or crushed by their fall!
But come back after many long years, and their places are filled, and
all the scars are healed. The new generation of trees is feeding
upon the accumulations of the old. Evil is turned to good. The
destruction of the cyclone, the ravages of fire, the wreckage of the
ice-storm, are all obliterated and the forest-spirit is rank and full
again.
There is no wholesale exemption from this rule of waste and struggle
in this world, nor probably in any other. We have life on these
terms. The organic world develops under pressure from within and from
without. Rain brings the perils of rain, fire brings the perils of
fire, power brings the perils of power. The great laws go our way,
but they will break us or rend us if we fail to keep step with them.
Unmixed good is a dream; unmixed happiness is a dream; perfection is
a dream; heaven and hell are both dreams of our mixed and struggling
lives, the one the outcome of our aspirations for the good, the other
the outcome of our fear of evil.
The trees in the woods, the plants in the fields encounter hostile
forces the year through; storms crash or overthrow them; visible
and invisible enemies prey upon them; yet are the fields clothed
in verdure and the hills and plains mantled with superb forests.
Nature’s haphazard planting and sowing and her wasteful weeding
and trimming do not result in failure as these methods do with us.
A failure of hers with one form or species results in the success
of some other form. All successes are hers. Allow time enough and
the forest returns in the path of the tornado, but maybe with other
species of trees. The birds and squirrels plant oaks and chestnuts
amid the pines and the winds plant pines amid the oaks and chestnuts.
The robins and the cedar-birds sow the red cedar broadcast over the
landscape, and plant the Virginia creeper and the poison-ivy by
every stub and fence-post. The poison-ivy is a triumph of Nature
as truly as is the grapevine or the morning-glory. All are hers.
Man specializes; he selects this or that, selects the wheat and
rejects the tares; but Nature generalizes; she has the artist’s
disinterestedness; all is good; all are parts of her scheme. She
nourishes the foul-smelling cat-brier as carefully as she does the
rose. Each creature, with man at the head, says, “The world is mine;
it was created for me.” Evidently it was created for all, at least
all forms are at home here. Nature’s system of checks and balances
preserves her working equilibrium. If a species of forest worm
under some exceptionally favoring conditions gets such a start that
it threatens to destroy our beech and maple forests, presently a
parasite, stimulated by this turn in its favor, appears and restores
the balance. For two or three seasons the beech-woods in my native
town were ravaged by some kind of worm or beetle; in midsummer the
sunlight came into them as if the roof had been taken off; later
they swarmed with white millers. But the scourge was suddenly
checked--some parasite, probably a species of ichneumon-fly, was on
hand to curtail the dangerous excess.
I am only trying to say that after we have painted Nature as black
as the case will allow, after we have depicted her as a savage
beast, a devastating storm, a scorching desert, a consuming fire, an
all-engulfing earthquake, or as war, pestilence, famine, we have only
depicted her from our limited human point of view. But even from that
point of view the favoring conditions of life are so many, living
bodies are so adaptive, the lift of the evolutionary impulse is so
unconquerable, the elemental laws and forces are so overwhelmingly on
our side, that our position in the universe is still an enviable one.
“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Slain, I shall nourish
some other form of life, and the books will still balance--not my
books, but the vast ledgers of the Eternal.
In the old times we accounted for creation in the simple terms of the
Hebrew Scriptures--“In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.” We even saw no discrepancy in the tradition that creation
took place in the spring. But when we attempt to account for creation
in the terms of science or naturalism, the problem is far from being
so simple. We have not so tangible a point from which to start. It is
as if we were trying to find the end or the beginning of the circle.
Round and round we go, caught in the endless and beginningless
currents of the Creative Energy; no fixity or finality anywhere;
rest and motion, great and small, up and down, heat and cold, good
and evil, near and far, only relative; cause and effect merging and
losing themselves in each other; life and death perpetually playing
into each other’s hands; interior within interior; depth beneath
depth; height above height; the tangible thrilled and vibrating with
the intangible; the material in bonds to the non-material; invisible,
impalpable forces streaming around us and through us; perpetual
change and transformation on every hand; every day a day of creation,
every night a revelation of unspeakable grandeur; suns and systems
forming in the cyclones of stardust; the whole starry host of heaven
flowing like a meadow brook, but where, or whence, who can tell? The
center everywhere, the circumference nowhere; pain and pleasure,
good and evil, inextricably mixed; the fall of man a daily and
hourly occurrence; the redemption of man, the same! Heaven or hell
waiting by every doorstep, boundless, beginningless, unspeakable,
immeasurable--what wonder that we seek a short cut through this
wilderness and appeal to the supernatural?
When I look forth upon the world and see how, regardless of man and
his well-being, the operations of Nature go on--how the winds and
the storms wreck him or destroy him, how the drought or the floods
bring to naught his industries, how not the least force in heaven or
earth turns aside for him, or makes any exception to him; in short,
how all forms of life are perpetually ground between the upper and
the nether millstones of the contending and clashing natural material
forces, I ask myself: “Is there nothing, then, under the sun, or
beyond the sun, that has a stake in our well-being? Is life purely
a game of chance, and is it all luck that we are here in a world so
richly endowed to meet all our requirements?” Serene Reason answers:
“No, it is not luck as in a lottery. It is the good fortune of the
whole. It was inherent in the constitution of the whole, and it
continues because of its adaptability; life is here because it fits
itself into the scheme of things; it is flexible and compromising.”
We find the world good to be in because we are adapted to it, and
not it to us. The vegetable growth upon the rocks where the sea is
forever pounding is a type of life; the waves favor its development.
Life takes advantage of turbulence as well as of quietude, of drought
as well as of floods, of deserts as well as of marshes, of the
sea-bottom as well as of the mountain-tops. Both animal and vegetable
life trim their sails to the forces that beat upon them. The image
of the sail is a good one. Life avails itself of the half-contrary
winds; it captures and imprisons their push in its sails; by yielding
a little, it makes headway in the teeth of the gale; it gives and
takes; without struggle, without opposition, life would not be life.
The sands of the shore do not struggle with the waves, nor the waves
with the sands; the buffeting ends where it began. But trees struggle
with the wind, fish struggle with the flood, man struggles with his
environment; all draw energy from the forces that oppose them. Life
gains as it spends; its waste is an investment. Not so with purely
material bodies. They are like the clock, they must be perpetually
wound from without. A living body is a clock, perpetually self-wound
from within.
The faith and composure of the naturalist or naturist are proof
against the worst that Nature can do. He sees the cosmic forces only;
he sees nothing directly mindful of man, but man himself; he sees the
intelligence and beneficence of the universe flowering in man; he
sees life as a mysterious issue of the warring element; he sees human
consciousness and our sense of right and wrong, of truth and justice,
as arising in the evolutionary sequence, and turning and sitting in
judgment upon all things; he sees that there can be no life without
pain and death; that there can be no harmony without discord; that
opposites go hand in hand; that good and evil are inextricably
mingled; that the sun and blue sky are still there behind the clouds,
unmindful of them; that all is right with the world if we extend our
vision deep enough; that the ways of Nature are the ways of God if we
do not make God in our own image, and make our comfort and well-being
the prime object of Nature. Our comfort and well-being are provided
for in the constitution of the world, but we may say that they are
not guaranteed; they are contingent upon many things, but the chances
are upon our side. He that would save his life shall lose it--lose
it in forgetting that the universe is not a close corporation, or a
patented article, and that it exists for other ends than our own. But
he who can lose his life in the larger life of the whole shall save
it in a deeper, truer sense.
VIII
A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY
During the Great War the question was asked, “Do the inexorable laws
of evolution apply to human beings as they apply to the lower animals
and to plants?” Most assuredly they do, but with a difference. Man
is as certainly one of the results of the evolutionary process as is
the horse or the dog, the tree or the plant. We are as certain of
his animal origin as we can well be of anything in the biological
history of the globe. But the inference which has so often been
drawn from this fact--namely, that man’s development involves the
same factors, and is along parallel lines--is a fallacy. That the
supremacy of might, which has ruled, and still rules in nature below
man, justifies the rule of might in human communities in our day, is
an invention of perverted human ambition.
As Nature rules by the law of might, and as man is a part of Nature,
why is he not under the same rule? The answer is that man is an
exceptional creature; that while he is a part of the animal kingdom,
he is a new kind of animal; and while he is the outcome of evolution,
like the rest, new factors which are not operative in the orders
below him have played a leading part in his later development.
These factors are his reason, which gives him a sense of the true
and the false, and his conscience, which gives him a sense of right
and wrong. These faculties subordinate the rule of might to the
rule of right. They have resulted in the establishment of standards
of conduct for individuals, for communities, and for organized
governments that do not exist among the lower animal orders, and only
in a very limited sense in the lower human orders.
There is no question of right and wrong among the plants of the
field, or the trees of the forest, or the birds of the air, or the
beasts of the earth--only the question of power to survive; might in
the sense of power of adaptation settles the question.
Since the dawn of history man’s moral and intellectual faculties have
come more and more to the fore, the moral standards always lagging
a little behind the intellectual and the æsthetic standards. Among
nearly all the more advanced ancient races the concepts of justice,
of mercy, and of fair dealing were dull and sluggish in comparison
with their intellectual acumen and their artistic achievements. The
Greeks would lie and steal and set on foot piratical expeditions
against their neighbors, while yet they produced such men as
Aristotle and Plato, and such artists as Phidias and Praxiteles.
In our day the whole civilized world was shocked and alarmed by
the moral lapse of a great people ranking among the highest in
intelligence and material efficiency, suddenly preaching and
practicing the doctrine of might over right which prevails in the
orders below man. The German philosophers brazenly justified their
nation’s course in their aggressive war, with all its attendant
horrors, by an appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the struggle for
existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, doctrines
which play such a prominent part in biological evolution. The nation
suddenly slumped into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral
Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over the prospect of the
rich plunder and the orgies of wine and lust that awaited him in new
fields of conquest. It was a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity
veil her face and weep tears of blood.
All that was noble and precious in international relations; standards
of conduct that it had taken long generations to achieve; the peace
and good-will of the world; coöperation in scientific fields, and in
endeavors toward human betterment--all went by the board before the
Teutonic debauch of greed and lust for blood and conquest.
Seriously to discuss in our day the question of the rule of might
over right--that force is the arbiter of justice in human relations,
except when it is invoked to chastise the offender--seems a waste
of time. On how low a plane must a people live whose leaders appeal
to the way of the tiger with his prey, or of the boa constrictor
with his victim, in establishing relations with other peoples! This
ferocious appeal of kaiserism to predatory nature--to “Nature red in
tooth and claw”--in order to set itself right before the conscience
of mankind, is as fatuous as it is fallacious. If we could reckon
without the sense of right and wrong, which has a survival value as
real as any form of physical might or power of adaptation, especially
with the later civilized nations (except Germany), a different face
would be put upon the question. But we cannot. The floodtide of world
democracy and humanity is setting too strongly in that direction,
and we can only hope and pray that misguided Germany may in the new
generation be caught up and borne forward to new greatness and world
usefulness, on the bosom of the same tide.
IX
THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT
I
The biological law of the supremacy of the strong over the weak, of
the fit over the less fit, which prevails throughout the world of
living things, gives us pause when it is applied to human history
and to the relations of man with man. Yet it is true that the price
of development is the struggle for life. The road of evolution is an
uphill road. When struggle ceases, progress ceases, and evolution
becomes devolution. Our strength is the strength of the obstacles we
overcome. The living machine, contrary to the non-living, gains power
from the friction it begets.
When we open the book of the biological history of the globe, we
find, to begin with, no force but that which we call brute force,
no justice but power, no crime but weakness, no law but the law of
battle. The victory is to the strong and the race to the swift. And
it is well. It is on this plan, as I have so often said, that the
life of the globe has come to what we behold it. Man has come to his
present estate, the trees in the forest, the grasses and flowers of
the field, the birds in the air, the fishes in the sea, have each
and all attained their present stage of development through the
operation of this law of natural competition, and the survival of
the fittest. Though marked by what we call cruelty and injustice,
in the totality of its operations it is a beneficent law. If it
were not so, how could the world of living things have attained its
present development? If it were a malevolent law, would not life
have suffered shipwreck long ago? The world of living things and of
non-living still merits the primal approval--“Behold, it is very
good!” Not your good, nor my good, but a general good, the good of
all. Nature’s scheme, if we may say she has a scheme, embraces the
totality of things, and that the totality of things is good who but
a born pessimist, a radically negative nature, can deny? Mixed good
undoubtedly it is, but is there, or can there be, any other good in
the universe? Good forever freeing itself from the non-good, or from
the fetters of evil--good to eat, to drink, to behold, to live by, to
die by--good for the body, good for the mind, good for the soul, good
in time, and good in eternity?
From solar systems to atoms and molecules, the greater bodies, the
greater forces, prevail over the lesser, and yet flowers bloom, and
life is sweet, sweet for the minor forms as well as for the major.
Inert matter knows only the laws of force. In the world of living
matter, up to a certain point, the same rule prevails. In the fields
and woods the more vigorous plants and trees run out the less
vigorous. In the dryer meadows in my section of the Catskills the
orange hawkweed completely crowds out the meadow grasses; it plants
itself on every square inch of the surface, and every four or five
years the farmer has to intervene with his plow to turn the battle in
favor of the grass again. In the gardens, unless the gardener take a
hand in the game, the weeds choke down or smother all his vegetables.
The weeds are rank with original sin and they easily supplant our
pampered and cultivated cereals and legumes.
In the animal world there are few exceptions to the rule of the
supremacy of power. There is no question of right or wrong, of mercy
or cruelty. It is not cruel or unjust for the bird to catch the
insect, or for the cat to catch the bird, or for the lion to devour
the lamb, or for the big fishes to eat up the little fishes. It is
the rule of nature, and never a question of right or wrong.
Biological laws are as remorseless as physical laws. The course of
animal evolution through the geologic ages is everywhere marked by
the triumph of new and superior forms over the old and inferior
forms. Among the lower races of man, our remote savage ancestors,
might ruled. The strong and prolific tribes supplanted those that
were less so, and, among the nations, up to our own day, the rule of
natural competition, or survival of the fittest, has held full sway.
Those nations which are dominant are so by virtue of their superior
qualities, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not a question of
might except in so far as this question is linked with the question
of moral and intellectual superiority.
Is there, then, no such thing as equity, justice, fair play in the
world? Shall I seize my neighbor’s farm and despoil him of his goods
and chattels because I am stronger than he? Shall one state invade
and despoil another, or seize its territory, because it is stronger
and considers itself more fit to survive?
The rule of might, as I have said, prevails throughout the world
of matter and of life below man, and long prevailed in pre-human
and human history. But the old law of nature has been limited and
qualified by a new law which has come into the world and which is
just as truly a biological law in its application to man as was the
old law of might. I refer to the law of man’s moral nature, the
source of right, justice, mercy. The progress of the race and of
the nations is coming more and more to depend upon the observance
of this law. Without it there is no organization, no coöperation,
no commerce, no government. Without it anarchy would rule, and our
civilization would crumble and society disintegrate.
The moral sense of mankind is now the dominant fact in human history;
the rule of might has been superseded by the rule of right. It is
this sense in the civilized world that has revolted so overwhelmingly
against the Prussian military power in precipitating the World War;
and this conscience will probably be so developed and intensified by
the useless waste and cruelty of the war that such a calamity will
never again befall the world. Those nations will become the most
powerful that are the most just, the most humane, that develop in the
highest degree a world conscience, and realize the most intensely
that the nations all belong to one family, in which the good and
evil of one are the good and evil of all. What can the progress of
civilization mean but the progress of international comity, sympathy,
coöperation, fair-dealing; in fact, the fullest recognition of
the validity of the ethical laws to which we hold individuals and
communities amenable?
History is full of violence, cruelty, injustice, and the triumph
of the strong over the weak, wherein the end seemed to justify the
means; yet never since the world began did physical might alone make
moral right. The sheriff and the hangman have made the doctrine
unpopular among individuals--the ethical sense of mankind will in
time make it equally unpopular among nations.
Nature is not moral; primitive biological laws are not moral;
they are unmoral. There is no moral law until it is born of human
intercourse; then it becomes more and more a biological law, more
and more prominent in social and national progress. The law of the
jungle begins and ends in the jungle; when we translate it into human
affairs, we must take the cruelty of the jungle out of it, and read
it in terms of beneficent competition. Man is the jungle humanized;
the fangs and claws are drawn, and the stealthy spring gives place to
open and fair competition.
II
In the Darwinian struggle for existence there is first the struggle
with environment, or with the non-living forces--heat, cold, storm,
wind, flood; the organic always at war with the inorganic out of
which its power comes. The fateful physical and mechanical forces go
their way regardless of the life that surrounds them and which draws
its energy from them. Gravity would pull down every tree and shrub
and every animal that walks or flies. The wind and the storm would
flatten down the flowers and grasses and grains like a steam roller,
and often succeeds in doing so. See the timothy and wheat and corn
struggle to lift themselves again. Behold how the trees grip the
rocks and soil, and brace themselves against the wind! This struggle
is, of course, not a conscious one. Apart from the original push of
life, it can all be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. The
bio-chemist will tell you why the plant leans toward the light,
and why it rights itself when pressed down; but why or how matter
organizes itself into the various living forms is a question before
which natural philosophy is dumb. Neither chemistry nor physics
can give us the secret of life. The ingenious devices to secure
cross-fertilization among certain plants, devices for scattering the
seed among others,--the hooks, the wings, the springs,--to me all
seem to imply intelligence, not apart from, but inherent in, the
things themselves. Power of adaptation--to take advantage of wind
and flood, of solid and fluid--is one of the mysterious attributes
of life. And yet we know that vegetable life takes advantage of
these things not, as we do, by forethought and invention, but by a
mysterious inherent impulse.
How the bee and the bird battle with the wind, the fish with the
waves and the rapids, the fur-bearers with the cold and the snow!
how all living creatures struggle to escape or resist the dissolving
power of the natural forces!
The ever-present instinct of fear in all wild creatures and in
children, and the quickness with which it can be aroused in all
persons, throw light upon the crueler aspects of this struggle for
existence which is common to all forms of animal life. Had life never
been beset with perils, we should have been strangers to the emotion
of fear, as would all other creatures. Even the fly that alights on
my paper as I write fears my hand. It is ever on guard against its
natural enemies. This is the proof of the universal struggle. Among
the lower forms the struggle or competition of the fleet with the
slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed, the sharp-eared,
and the keen of scent with those less so; of the miscellaneous
feeders with the more specialized feeders; and, among mankind,
the competition of men of purpose, of foresight, of judgment, of
experience, of probity, and of other personal resources, with men
who are deficient in these things; and, among nations and peoples,
the inevitable competition of those who cherish the highest national
ideals, the best-organized governments, the best race inheritance,
the most natural resources, and so on, with the less fortunate
in these respects--all this struggle and competition, I say, is
beneficent and on the road to progress.
Myriads of different types of animal and vegetable life fit into the
scheme of organic nature without conflict or hindrance, but when
there is conflict, the strong prevail. The small and the gigantic,
the feeble and the mighty, the timid and the bold, the frail and the
robust--birds, insects, mice, squirrels, cattle--exist in the same
landscape and all prosper. Only when there is rivalry do the feeble
go to the wall, which means only that their numbers are kept down.
The cats do not exterminate the mice and rats, nor do the hawks and
owls exterminate the other birds; they are a natural check on their
undue increase. Nature’s checks and balances are all important. When
species subsist upon species, as weasels upon rodents and hawks upon
other birds, there seems to be some law that keeps the bloodthirsty
in check. Why should there be so few weasels, since they appear as
prolific as their victims? Why so few pigeon hawks, since the hawks
have no natural enemies, while the trees swarm with finches and
robins?
The conflicting interests in Nature sooner or later adjust
themselves; her checks and balances bring about her equilibrium. In
vegetation rivalries and antagonisms bring about adaptations. The
mosses and the ferns and the tender wood plants grow beneath the oaks
and the pines and are favored by the shade and protection which the
latter afford them. The farmer’s seeding of grass and clover takes
better under the shade of the oats than it would upon the naked
ground. In Africa some species of flesh-eaters live upon the leavings
of larger and stronger species, and in the tropics certain birds
become benefactors of the cattle by preying upon the insects that
pester them. Fabre tells of certain insect hosts that blindly favor
the parasites that destroy them. The scheme has worked itself out
that way and Nature is satisfied. Victim or victor, host or parasite,
it is all one to her. Life goes on, and all forms of it are hers.
It is easy to see why the wild plants run out the cultivated
ones--the latter are the result of artificial selection. No favor
has been shown the wild ones, and hence only the most vigorous have
survived. The cultivated plants always have a greater burden to bear
than the wild ones, and man helps them to bear it, or, rather, he
saddles it upon them. The cultivated races of man have burdens to
bear also, much greater than the savage tribes, but this is more than
made up to them by their superior brain power, which brain power
again has come about in the struggle for existence. Wild tribes have
also been under the discipline of natural selection, but by reason of
some obscure factors of race or climate or geography they have not
profited as have the European and Asiatic races. Their moral natures
are more rudimentary.
Doubtless some obscure or unknown factors in the original germ-cells,
far back in biological times, caused the divergence and splitting-up
of animal forms, and gave to one an impulse that carried it higher
in the scale of development than its fellows, just as the same thing
happens in human families in our own times. Why some creatures are
higher and some are lower, why some eventuated in the bird and some
in toad and frog and snake and lizard, is one of the mysteries. In
seeking the explanation of these things on natural grounds we are
compelled to resort to the fertile expedient of conjecture, and
pack the germ with many possibilities, each one depending for its
development upon chance occurrence or conditions.
Besides this struggle with the environment there is the struggle
of individuals and of species with one another--of oak with oak,
of beech with beech, of plant with its kind, for the moisture and
nutriment in the soil; of robin with robin for insects and fruit, of
fox with fox for mice and rabbits, and of lion with lion for antelope
and zebra. I say “struggle,” but it is rarely struggle in the sense
of strife or battle, but in the sense of natural competition--the
victory is to the most lucky and the most vigorous--the sharpest eye,
the quickest ear, the most nimble foot; and those most favored by
fortune win.
Under the law of variation some individuals have a fuller endowment
of vital energy than others; under a severe strain and trial of
whatever kind the favored ones will survive, while the others perish.
Some men, some animals, can endure more hardships than others; under
the same conditions all will not starve or freeze or fall exhausted
by the wayside at the same time. In the vegetable world the same
inequality in the gift of life exists, though not in the same degree.
Some seeds will lie dormant in the soil longer than others of the
same kind, and some kinds longer than others. Some seeds will not
sprout after the second year, but a few may sprout after the third
or even the fourth year. The stream of life is not of uniform depth
and fullness; it is shallow in some places, and deep in others, as
regards both species and individuals. In the natural competition
which goes on all around us, the strongest, the fittest, win in the
game, not necessarily by violence, but because, apart from the rôle
played by chance, they carry more pounds of vital pressure. Not all
acorns become oaks, probably not one in thousands; not all bird’s
eggs become birds; occasionally one egg in the nest does not hatch,
probably because of some defect in fertilization. Some nests are
torn out of the trees by storms, or are robbed by crows or jays or
squirrels; they were not well hidden. A large percentage of nests on
the ground is destroyed by night prowlers or by day prowlers; chance
again plays a great part here. Only a small fraction of the spawn
of fishes hatches, and a still smaller percentage of the hatched
ever reaches maturity. Fortune, good or bad, plays a great part
with all forms of life. The acorn that becomes an oak owes much to
chance--chance of position and soil, and chance of the vicissitudes
of the woods and fields. Falling trees or branches, or the foot of a
passing animal, may crush or deform it, or a squirrel or a raccoon
devour it. Barring these accidents, it owes, or may owe, not a little
to its inherent vitality--to its real oakhood.
The natural competition, or the struggle for existence among
mankind, is of similar character, though on the whole less
fortuitous. Coöperation, knowledge, altruism, have done much to
eliminate the element of chance. An acorn becomes an oak where ten
thousand other acorns fail, mainly by luck, while the child becomes
the man mainly through the care and nurture of his parents and of the
community in which he lives, but he reaches a position of power and
prominence largely through his inherent capabilities. Fortune plays a
part here also, as it did with Lincoln and Lee and Grant, but these
men all had the native endowment upon which Fortune could build.
In the natural competition that goes on in every town and city, the
success of one man over another is not, as a rule, the result of
violence or wrong; men of high purpose and character in business and
professional life add to the positive wealth and well-being of all;
they often lift the whole community to a higher and better standard
of living; the unfit profit by the achievements of the fit. The men
who have added to the wealth and well-being of this country could
be counted by the thousands. It is also true that the men who have
accumulated their millions at the expense of others, by fraud and
chicanery, or have diverted the earnings of others into their own
coffers, could be counted by the thousands. It is this class of men
who make the poor poorer. But did the achievements of such men as
the late James J. Hill make the poor poorer? Such men add enormously
to the wealth of the nation.
With all its discounts and set-backs, the natural struggle for
existence has carried the whole race forward. Even business
competition may be entirely beneficent. Two men open shops or houses
in similar lines in the same town and one outstrips the other.
Maybe his location is the better; one side of a street may be more
favorable to success than the other side. Maybe he is more affable
in manner, more thorough in his methods, more accommodating, more
fair-minded, of sounder judgment--in fact, the better man in a
beneficent sense.
On a broad view, throughout any country, this will be found to be
true: success in business, in the professions, on the farm, in the
manufactory, comes to those who deserve it. It cannot be otherwise.
The world is thus made. Among the nations the same rule holds.
England has earned all the power she has got. She is endowed with
the gift of empire. Solid merit alone tells in the long run, as well
among nations as among individual men. The worth of France rests upon
solid qualities. The worth of Germany is inherent in the character
of her people. That she has run to Krupp guns and Kaiserism during
these later generations, and has coveted the land and the gold of her
neighbors, is one of those human calamities analogous to tornadoes
and earthquakes.
In the course of modern history, race supplants race, not so much by
force of arms as by force of brain. The Europeans know how to utilize
the natural forces and make the stars fight on their side. So far as
they have done it by wars of conquest, they have violated the great
moral law and the law of natural competition. All wars of conquest by
civilized nations are wicked wars. They are becoming more and more
odious to mankind, and are bound to become still more so, till they
cease entirely. A century ago the conduct of Germany in the recent
war would have shocked mankind far less than it has to-day. A century
hence such an exhibition of the rule of the jungle among civilized
peoples will be impossible. If Germany could ever come to be the
dominant power in Europe, it would be through the law of natural
competition. Her superior efficiency in the arts of peace, could
alone give her the victory. It would have given her the victory in
her own age had she been contented with its slow but sure operation.
III
The question of right and wrong must have emerged, so as to become a
factor in the evolution of human society, very slowly--how slowly,
we can never know. But it did emerge, and is still emerging more and
more; first probably in the dealing of man with man, then in the
dealing of families with other families. In the dealing of tribes
with tribes in prehistoric times, the question of right and wrong
played probably little or no part; might alone settled matters. In
what we call the pagan world, among the early Egyptians, Hebrews,
Greeks, and Romans, the law of might in the dealings of one nation
with another prevailed, and up to our own time the standard of
international morality has been, and still is, far below the standard
among individuals and neighborhood communities. Even in the United
States there is a crying want of public conscience. The people are
preyed upon by men they elect to serve them. The men or corporations
that take pleasure and satisfaction in serving the public well and
reasonably, or in giving a _quid pro quo_, are rare. Men who are
blameless in their personal dealings with one another will, when
formed into a board of directors or trustees, rob railroads, and
squander money not their own. Capitalists will band together to rob
the state through the construction of sham highways or flimsy public
buildings. A public conscience is among all peoples of slow growth,
and an international conscience is still slower. What part has it
played in the history of Europe? Surely a very minor part. The Golden
Rule has been turned into an iron rule of might over right times
without number, by all the nations recently engaged in war.
As man’s moral consciousness has developed, the question of right
and wrong has, of course, come more and more to the front; his
relations to his fellows, his sense of justice, of truth, of fair
dealing, have occupied him more and more. His savage instincts have
been held more and more in check. The coöperation and sympathy and
good-will which have brought about his present civilization would
have been possible on no other terms. Without a sense of justice, of
love of truth, of ideal right, where should we have been to-day? The
fittest to survive among mankind were those races that had the moral
consciousness most fully developed. This gave a might which led to a
permanent supremacy--a beneficent might. A malevolent might is one
that is founded upon superior brute or material strength alone. The
law of the jungle or of the tornado or of the avalanche, introduced
into human affairs and unchecked by the law of man’s moral nature,
leads to wars of conquest, as it did to the World War.
IV
The expounders of the benefits of war write and speak about it as
if it were some system of hygiene or medicine or gymnastic training
that a people could practice in and of themselves; whereas wars of
conquest do not begin and end at home. There are two parties to such
a war. If it is a benefit to the victors, what is it to the defeated?
I am speaking, of course, of material benefits. The benefits that
come from heroism and self-denial are of another order. If the lamb
inside the lion is a benefit to the lion, what is it to the lamb?
If Germany reaped advantage by her invasion of Belgium, what did
Belgium reap? But the fate of the other party is the last question
that would ever occur to the Prussian military mind. If the doctrine
of frightfulness began and ended at home, the world could not object.
Because burned cities in modern times rise from their ashes in new
beauty and power, shall we therefore seek to rejuvenate our cities
by applying a match to them? Cities rise from their ashes because of
their stored-up wealth and because of the arteries of commerce and
industry that flow through them. Fire does not rejuvenate a dead tree
nor a dead city, nor does war rejuvenate a people who are in a state
of mortal ripening. It did not rejuvenate Rome in ancient times, nor
Spain in modern times, and it does not appear to be rejuvenating
Mexico very fast, nor any of the South American republics. All
depends upon the stock you are trying to rejuvenate.
Lord Roberts is quoted as saying, just before his death, that war is
necessary and salutary, and that it is the only national tonic that
can be prescribed when peace begets degeneracy in an over-civilized
people. He looked upon Germany as the greatest friend of the Allies
when she declared war against them. But could there be any better
proof that peace had not begotten degeneracy in England or France or
Russia than the promptness with which these countries took up the
challenge of Prussian militarism, and the fortitude and self-denial
with which they gave it blow for blow?
Under the smiling face of peace, when the demand is made, the
heroic element is always found to be slumbering. Every day, in the
industrial and scientific fields, men prove themselves the same
heroes that they do on the field of battle, and they prove it without
the excitement and stimulus that war gives; and women prove it in
times of peace and times of war.
The gospel of war as a national tonic in our time is a delusion and
a snare. Are we to get up a war offhand because we think the nations
need that kind of medicine? Blood-letting is a strange remedy for
the depleted condition to which Lord Roberts refers. War sets up the
victorious nation, but how about the defeated one? Have the defeats
of Spain in the past two or three hundred years set her up? Have the
defeats of Turkey redounded to her glory and power? Little doubt that
this World War will bear fruit, but it will be a kind of fruit the
combatant did not seek or expect.
The conclusion, then, that I arrive at is that a new rule of conduct
for nations as for individuals, a new biological law, has come into
being through man’s moral nature, his sense of right and wrong.
There is no question of right or of wrong in the world of living
things below man, and we can persuade ourselves that there is only by
putting ourselves in the place of the struggling animal forces. And
there is no question of right and of wrong in the human world till
man’s consciousness of this difference has begun to dawn. In our day
this consciousness is sufficiently developed to become the ruling
factor in the conduct of national and international affairs, and must
very soon put an end to all armed human conflicts. In saying this
I am not exploiting a theory; I am trying to state an indisputable
scientific fact.
X
TOOTH AND CLAW
I
To deny that Nature is cruel, in the strict sense of the term, were,
to the majority of persons, like denying that blood is red, or that
fire will burn. We use the term “cruel” loosely, and interpret the
ways of Nature in terms of our own psychology.
If we are torn by thorns or stung by nettles or bitten by snakes or
suffer from frost-bites or sun-stroke, we accuse Nature of cruelty,
always assuming, in our conceit, that we are the lords of creation,
and that things were made especially for us. We have no venomous
snake that will bite us except in self-defense, nor any bee that will
sting us except on the same grounds.
Even Darwin, in a letter to his friend Hooker, refers to the “clumsy,
wasteful, blundering, slow, and horribly cruel works of Nature,” thus
treating the All-Mother with scant respect.
Amiel cannot say, as he does say, that “Nature is unjust and
shameless, without probity and without faith,” unless he makes her
over into man or invests her with the human consciousness. Even the
good Emerson accuses Nature of being unscrupulous. Did the Concord
philosopher expect storms and frost and blight and thunderbolts
to have scruples? Did he expect thorns and nettles and fleas and
potato-bugs and grasshoppers and disease-germs to consider their ways?
A well-known philosopher and writer, Professor Jacks, of Manchester
College, Oxford, in writing upon “Our Common Foe,” takes it for
granted at the outset that Nature is cruel, and, moreover, that she
is as cruel as the Germans showed themselves to be in the cruelest
of all wars. “There is a cruelty in Nature,” he says, “and it has
been reserved for our age to realize how immense is its range and
how appalling its effects”; we realize it, he says, when we read
the story of Germany’s treatment of her prisoners, the story of
her submarines, and her conduct toward unoffending non-combatants
generally.
What worse thing could be said about Nature than that she is as bad
as the Germans? It almost makes us suspect treachery and death in
her summer breezes and her sunshine. Dr. Jacks seeks to justify his
charge by averring that man is a part of Nature and that in him are
summarized her good and her evil qualities. Of course, in a certain
sense this is true. But in seeking to solve the problems of his life,
man separates himself from the rest of Nature and holds himself
amenable to standards of conduct that he does not apply to the orders
below him. He regards himself as a superior being. He is a part of
Nature, but of an emancipated and regenerated Nature. He is one
with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air only in his
purely animal aspects. As a moral and spiritual being with a sense of
truth and justice, of mercy and forgiveness, he stands on a higher
plane. He cannot justify his conduct by an appeal to brute nature or
to biological laws. His sins are more scarlet and his virtues more
divine than those of his unmoral and unreasoning brute neighbors. His
consciousness of right and wrong is the touchstone by which all his
deeds are to be tried.
Tennyson’s agonizing line “Nature red in tooth and claw” tends,
especially in the days of world-wide human carnage, to make one see
the whole animal kingdom with blood-dripping claws and jaws. But it
is not so. At its worst this “tooth and claw” business applies only
to a fraction of wild life. The vast army of the seed-eaters, the
plant-eaters, the fruit-eaters, upon which the flesh-eaters subsist,
and which they help keep in check, is greatly in the ascendancy.
The whole truth of this matter of the cruelty of Nature may be put
in a nutshell: Nature as seen in animal life is _sanguinary_, but
only man is _cruel_. Only man deliberately and intentionally inflicts
pain; only man tortures his victims, and takes pleasure in their
agony. No other creature goes out of its way to inflict suffering; no
other creature acts from the motive of cruelty or the will to give
pain.
Nature kills, but does not torture. The biological laws are neither
human nor inhuman; they are _un_human. If in following the rule that
might makes right, the Germans sought justification by an appeal to
biological laws, they fell below the beasts of the fields, because
they are moral beings, and know good from evil.
Biological laws are not concerned about the moral law. Not till
we reach man’s moral nature does this law have any validity; then
it becomes a biological law, because it has survival value. Could
the race of man ever have developed as we now see it without
the conceptions of right and justice and the spirit of mutual
helpfulness? As time passes, other things being equal, the most
righteous and humanitarian nation will be the most powerful and the
most progressive. The great strength of the Allied cause in the World
War was that it was founded upon an ideal conception of international
justice and comity. President Wilson set this forth in such wonderful
completeness that it will shine in our political firmament for all
time like a star of the first magnitude. And the weakness of the
German cause was that it was based upon the spirit and the aims of
the pirate and the highwayman.
When we speak of Nature’s cruelty we are obsessed with the idea that
blood and death necessarily mean cruelty, whereas cruelty, as I have
said, means an intentional infliction of pain or suffering. Is the
surgeon cruel when he performs an operation? Do our own carnivorous
habits imply cruelty? The slaughter-house is not a pleasant object
to contemplate; the sight of blood disturbs most of us; its sight
and smell excite even the unreasoning brutes. But it is the wanton
shedding of blood that reacts unfavorably upon ourselves, and makes
us indifferent to the suffering which blood so often implies. Life is
a wonderful and precious gift, and we do not like to see it wantonly
destroyed.
Professor Jacks speaks of “the hot, foul breath of Nature’s cruelty,”
a sentence mild enough when applied to the Germans, but not justified
when applied to universal Nature. We can hardly accuse the laws of
matter and force of being cruel when they destroy us; if they were
not true to themselves, what permanence would there be to life or
to anything else? Fire and flood, the earthquake and the tornado,
cause pain and death, gravity will crush us as soon as sustain us,
but these forces are not cruel, because there is no will to inflict
suffering; they are a part of the system of things upon which our
life and well-being depend.
Nature, in the action of her mechanical and chemical forces as they
go their way about us, is, as I have so often said, apparently as
indifferent to man as to all other forms of life, but, to speak in
the same terms of our human experience, something must have been
solicitous about man or he would not be here in a world so well
suited to his development and well-being. In the conflict of forces
he has had to take his chances with other forms of life, but his
powers of adaptation and invention far surpass those of all other
creatures. Not an atom, not a pebble, will turn aside to save him
from destruction. Unrelenting and unpitying Nature is the school in
which his powers have been developed, and for him to call Nature
“cruel” in her treatment of him is for a child to upbraid the parent
whose guidance and discipline foster and safeguard the coming man.
Could man have become man on any other terms?
Love is creation’s final law, though Tennyson seems to doubt
it when he sees Nature “red in tooth and claw.” But tooth and
claw do not necessarily imply cruelty, since the cruelest of all
animals--man--has them not; they imply the dependence of one form
of life upon another form, and are associated in our minds with
that most heinous of all crimes, murder. It is Nature’s seeming
indifference to life which causes us to charge her with cruelty. Our
minds can take in but a fraction of the total scheme of things, and
what we do take in we make a personal application of to ourselves. We
humanize when we should generalize.
The Germans willfully turned their backs upon the natural biological
law of righteousness or rightness, and their punishment has been
swift and adequate. They made a religion of cruelty, as man alone
has exhibited it, and cultivated the will to destroy and defame till
mankind, with one accord, bestowed upon them their ancestral name,
the Huns. They went forth to burn and pillage and murder, and, so
far as lay in their power, to destroy the very earth of the peoples
they sought to conquer. They summoned to their aid all the diabolical
forces of which chemistry is capable, and if they could have
controlled the seismic and meteorological forces as well, who doubts
that they would have made a desert, blackened with fire and torn by
earthquakes, where dwell the nations that opposed them?
The spirit they showed in the World War, and the nefarious crimes of
which they were guilty, make it a serious question whether or not
they should not be forever cast out from the family of civilized
nations; whether, indeed, they should not be completely wiped off the
map as a nation, and their power for further evil forever destroyed.
“There is no place in the world of the future,” says Dr. Jacks, “for
a people whose policy is tainted by the instinct for cruelty.”
If Nature were as cruel as the Germans are, if the same lust for
blood and suffering had run in her veins, if she had, in the same
spirit of riot and wantonness, destroyed her own creatures and laid
waste her own provinces, would you or I, or any one else, have been
here to pass judgment upon her doings?
There is blood and death in the jungle, but no lust of pain; but
in the German prisons, and in the path of Germany’s armies, there
was the deliberate infliction of suffering and agony for their own
sakes, so that for generations to come the name of Germany will stand
for all that is selfish, cruel, unchivalrous, ignoble, insulting,
and bestial in human history. The Prussian officer spat in the face
of his prisoners of a like rank, and followed this with insulting
epithets and blows, seeking in every way to bring them down to his
own bestial level. The Prussian nurse brought to a wounded British
soldier the glass of water he begged for, held it close to his face
then poured it on the ground, handing him the empty glass.
II
Nature has an anæsthetic of her own which she uses in taking life.
The carnivorous animals inflict far less pain than appearances would
seem to indicate. Tooth and claw usually overwhelm by a sudden blow,
and sudden blows benumb and paralyze. Violence in this light is the
handmaiden of Mercy. If the surgeon could perform his operations in
the same sudden and violent manner, an anæsthetic would rarely be
needed. Livingstone was conscious of but little pain when in the jaws
of a lion, and its prey no doubt feels as little. The human criminal,
electrocuted or hung or beheaded, probably experiences but little
physical suffering. Any one whose life has been suddenly imperiled by
a railway or a runaway accident knows how blessed is the blankness
which comes over his mind at the most critical moment; the suddenness
and intensity of his alarm blots out consciousness, and he retains no
memory of just what happened. The soldier in battle may be seriously
or fatally wounded and not be aware of it till some time afterward.
A crushing or tearing blow disrupts the machinery of sensation. It
is only when we put ourselves in the place of the mouse with which
the cat is playing that we pity it; it does not experience the agony
we should feel under like conditions; it is usually unwounded; it
does not know what awaits it and its comparative freedom of movement
soothes its alarm.
Dr. Jacks speaks of the bloody work of the struggle for existence,
but the struggle for existence is largely a bloodless struggle of
adaptation. Through it, every creature sooner or later finds its
place, finds where it fits into the scheme of things. Through it
the mouse finds its place, and the lion its, and man has found his.
Living bodies are not ready-made, so to speak, like the parts of
machinery; they are constantly in the making, and their making is a
process of transformation. The horse, as we know him, was millions of
years in the making; so was the elephant; so was man; so was every
other form of life. The struggle for existence as a whole is cruel
only so far as all discipline and all insensible modifications
and adaptations under the pressure of environment are cruel; it is
good in the guise of evil; it is the stern beneficence of impartial
law. The greater the power of adaptation, the more fit is the
animal or plant to survive, and this power of adaptation is mainly
what distinguishes living bodies from non-living. Inanimate bodies
tend to adjust themselves to one another through mechanical laws;
animate bodies tend to adapt themselves to one another and to their
environment through vital law.
The struggle for existence is for the most part a struggle with
inanimate nature--with climate, soil, wind, flood. A peaceful
struggle is going on all around us at all times, among men as among
animals and plants: a struggle to live, to compel Nature to yield
us the things needed for our lives. It is not often competition--an
effort to win what another must lose; it is an effort to seize and
appropriate the elements that all may have on equal terms, by the
exercise of strength, industry, wit, prudence. Life is predaceous
only to a limited extent. In the wilds, in the jungle, one form
devours another form, but nature compensates. A fuller measure of
life is given to those forms that are the prey of other forms;
they are more prolific. The rats and mice are vastly more prolific
than the weasels or the owls that feed upon them; the rabbits have
ten young to one of their enemy, the fox; the lesser birds greatly
outnumber the hawks; the little fishes that are the food of the big
fishes swarm in the sea.
Probably no species is ever exterminated by its natural enemies.
These enemies only keep it in check. The birds keep the insects
from ruining vegetation, which is the source of all food. Slay all
the lions in Africa, and probably the struggle for existence of the
antelope tribe would soon be harder than it is now. Hence the animals
of prey are a good gift even to the animals they prey upon. The
plus of the breeding instinct of the latter would in time result in
overpopulation and in famine.
The things that are preyed upon are more joyous and contented than
their enemies. The carnivorous animals are solitary and morose; the
birds of prey are the same. The chipmunk seems to have a much better
time than the weasel, the bluebird than the owl that lines its nest
with blue feathers. One might envy the song sparrow, or the vesper
sparrow, or the robin, but never the shrike nor the sharp-skinned
hawk that pursues them. The eagle is a grand bird, but evidently the
lark is much the happier. The jay devours the eggs and the young of
the smaller birds, but these birds greatly outstrip him in the race
of life. The murderers evidently have less joy in their lives than
the murdered. The crow rarely sheds blood, and, compared with the
hawk, he is a happy-all-the-year-round vagabond.
Nature has made the wild creatures fearful of their natural enemies,
and has endowed them with means to escape them; then she has equipped
these enemies with weapons and instincts to defeat this (her own)
purpose. She plays one hand against another. Wild life is divided
into two warring camps, and, as in our own wars, new devices for
defense on the one hand are met with new devices of attack on the
other. The little night rodents have big and sharp eyes, but the owl
that preys upon them has big and sharp eyes also, and his flight is
as silent as a shadow. You see, Nature is impartial; she has the
good of all creatures at heart. If it is good for the hawk to eat
the bird, it is good for the bird to be equipped with swift wings
and sharp eyes to evade the hawk. A little more advantage on either
side and the game would be blocked--the birds would fail or the hawks
would starve. As it is, “the race is to the swift and the battle to
the strong.” Nature keeps the balance. Action and reaction are equal.
The skunk and the porcupine have little or no fear; neither have they
much wit. Their weapons of defense are nearly always ready, and that
of the porcupine acts automatically; that of the skunk is a little
more deliberate and inflicts less pain, but gives great discomfort
and discomfiture.
Nature keeps one form in check with another form, and thus, like
a wise capitalist, distributes her investments so that the income
is constant. If she put her funds all in mice and birds, the cats
and owls would soon starve; if she put them all in woodchucks, the
pastures and meadows would soon fail the herds. And this reminds me
how man often disturbs the balance of nature; the clearing-up and
the cultivation of the land have held in check the natural enemies
of the woodchucks--foxes and owls--at the same time that they have
greatly increased the woodchuck’s sources of food-supply, so that in
some sections these rodents have become a real pest to the farmer.
The same changed conditions appreciably favor the meadow mice, and
they, too, seem to be on the increase. But this increase again may
stimulate the increase of the mice-hunting hawks, and thus the
balance be maintained. Herein lies the danger of introducing new
forms of wild life in a country--their natural enemies are not always
on hand to check them. The mongoose has overrun Jamaica and has not
yet found an adequate natural enemy. Introduced into this country, it
would be an incalculable calamity, though in time it would doubtless
meet with a natural check. Our weasels, related to the mongoose, are
prolific, and seem to have few natural enemies, and yet they do not
unduly increase; it seems as if some unknown hand must stay them.
They prey upon all the smaller rodents and find them easy victims,
yet these rodents are vastly more numerous than the blood-suckers. I
often see marks upon the snow where the muskrat and the rabbit have
fallen before them, and yet one sees scores of these animals to one
weasel or mink.
How our domestic animals would suffer if they had the gift of
ideation and knew what awaited them! Pope anticipated me when he
wrote:
“The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason could he skip and play?
“Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.”
If the horse only knew his own strength, and knew that he had
“rights,” would there not soon be a horse rebellion? Would the swine
and the cattle fatten in their pens and stalls if they knew what is
before them? Animals suffer no mental anguish either over the past
or concerning the future; they live in the present moment; no future
looms before them, no past haunts their memories. Their pain is
brief, their joy is unconscious; they live to feed and breed; they
slay without penalties, and they are slain without remorse; they find
their place and live their day, and Mother Nature reaps the harvest.
Would we have a world without struggle or pain or friction of any
kind? Good means ease, leisure, security; but it means something
more: it means achievement, victory, the overcoming of evil, the
development of power, the making of the world a better place to live
in, and much more. Is Nature a tyrant because we have to earn our
living? Because we have to plow and plant and hoe? Because flood and
fire will destroy us, and the winds rack us, if we loose our grip?
We have life on these terms; they are the conditions that beget and
sustain life. A world void of evil, as we use the word, would be a
world void of good also, a negative world. Without death there can be
no life; without struggle there can be no power.
XI
MEN AND TREES
I do not see that Nature is any more solicitous about the well-being
of man than she is, say, about the well-being of trees. She is
solicitous about the well-being of all life, so far as the conditions
of life favor its development and continuance--men and trees alike.
But all have to run the gantlet of some form of hostile forces--the
trees one kind, man another. What I mean is that evil in some form
waits upon all--hindrances, accidents, defeat, failure, death.
The trees and the forests have their enemies and accidents and
set-backs, and men and communities of men have analogous evils.
Trees are attacked by worms, blight, tornadoes, lightning, and
men are attacked by pestilence, famine, wars, and all manner of
diseases. Every tree struggles to stand upright; it is the easiest
and only normal position. Men aspire to uprightness of thought and
conduct, but a thousand accidental conditions prevent most of them
from attaining it. One tree in falling is likely to bring down,
or to mutilate, other trees, as the moral or business downfall of
a strong man in a community is quite sure to bring evil to many
others around him. Trees struggle with one another for moisture
and sustenance from the soil, and for a place in the sun, as men
do in the community, and the most lucky, or the most fit, survive.
Nature plans for a perfect tree as she plans for a perfect man, but
both tree and man have to take their chances with hostile forces
and conditions amid which their lot falls, so that an absolutely
perfect oak or elm or pine is about as rare as a perfect man. Of
course Nature has endowed man with mental and spiritual powers which
she has not bestowed upon trees. These powers give man an advantage
over trees, but not the same advantage over men--his own kind of
tree--because his fellows are similarly endowed. His struggle with
his own kind is as inevitable as the struggle of trees with their
kind, with this advantage in favor of the trees: theirs is always a
peaceful competition, it never takes the form of destructive wars.
Trees of opposite kinds will draw away from one another; a pine will
draw away from a maple or an oak, not, I suppose, because of any
natural antagonism, but because it is less mobile and its tender but
more rigid branches cannot stand the buffetings of the more mobile
and flexible deciduous trees. Pine loves to associate with pine,
and spruce with spruce. The spirit, the atmosphere of a pine or a
hemlock forest, how different from that of a beech or a maple! Most
trees tend to associate themselves together in large bodies, as did
primitive man, and civilized man, too, for that matter. The conifers
are more clannish than the deciduous trees.
Are not a generation of leaves and a generation of men subject to
about the same laws of chance? The baby leaves have their enemies
in insects that devour them, in blight that withers them, in frost
that cuts them short, and when they are matured, how the winds buffet
them (Nature doesn’t temper the wind to the tender leaf), how the
gales lash them, how the hail riddles them! If they had powers of
thought, what a struggling, agitated, unstable world they would think
themselves born into! When a summer tempest strikes a maple- or an
oak-tree, the strain and stress of the foliage is almost painful to
witness. Yet when the tempest subsides, hardly a leaf is torn or
detached, and when autumn comes, the ranks of the vast army of the
leaves are but little thinned, and the great majority of leaves ripen
and fall to the ground unscathed. They have come through the campaign
of life and have experienced many ups and downs, and yet, on the
whole, they have each had an active and useful life. The leaf-rollers
have made their nests in a few of certain kinds of them, the
leaf-cutters have made holes in certain other kinds, the gall insects
have made their nurseries at the expense of still other kinds; but
all these things amount to a small fraction of the whole. When a
plague of forest worms comes and strips the maples or the beeches,
or a plague of elm-beetles strips the elms, and the invasion of
a foreign deadly fungus kills all the chestnuts, these calamities
are paralleled by the plagues that in past times have swept away
large numbers of human beings and depopulated whole countries, or by
epidemic diseases, such as infantile paralysis, that now and then
rage over widespread areas.
Go and sit down in our mixed beech, maple, birch, and oak woods and
witness the varying fortunes of the trees. How many of them have had
misfortunes of one kind or another! How few, if any, have reached
their ideal! How many are diseased or dying at the top or decaying
at the root! Some have been mutilated by the fall of other trees.
Youth and age meet and mingle. Some trees in their teens, as it
were, are very thrifty; others are old and decrepit. In fact, the
fortunes of the individual trees are much like those of men and women
in a human community--struggle, competition, defeat, decay, and
death on all sides. All, or nearly all, the evils that afflict men
have their counterpart in the evils that afflict the trees of the
forest. When some species of forest worm threatens the destruction
of our beech or maple forests some other form of insect-life steps
in and puts an end to their increase, and the plague vanishes. The
gypsy and the brown-tailed moths which have so ravished the groves
and forests of the Eastern States will doubtless in time be held in
check by their natural enemies. The plague of tent caterpillars that
got such headway in New York State that it threatened to become a
public calamity was effectually checked by the cold and rain of the
May of 1917. Not one tent caterpillar have I seen during the past
three years. The plague of currant-worms was checked in the same
way. Sooner or later any excess is sure to be corrected. But so far
as we can see, such things as the chestnut blight and hickory blight
must rage like a fire till they have spent themselves and there
are no more chestnut- or hickory-trees to be destroyed. Throughout
the course of the biological history of the globe, both plants
and animals have dropped out in some such way, and new forms come
in--come in through the slow action of the evolutionary impulse.
The Providence I see at work in the case of the trees does not differ
at all from the Providence I see at work in the case of men. It is
one and the same, and that one is as I have so often said, wholesale,
indiscriminating, regardless of individuals, regardless of waste,
delays, pain, suffering, failure, yet insuring success on a universal
scale, the scale of centuries and geologic periods. Our standards of
time compared with Nature’s standards are like our interplanetary
spaces compared with the inconceivable abysses of the sidereal
heavens--minutes compared to centuries. Our little family of planets
moves round the fireside of our little sun--a small chimney-corner in
the vast out-of-doors of astronomic space, where suns and systems
and whole universes of worlds drift like bubbles on the sea. Give
Nature time enough, and the world of to-day, or of any day, becomes
an entire stranger to you. Orion will no longer stalk across the
winter skies, the pole-star will no longer guide your ships, if,
indeed, there remains any ocean for your ships to sail upon.
The Natural Providence is not concerned about you and me. In
comparison it is concerned only about our race, and not lastingly
concerned about that, since races, too, shall go.
“Races rise and fall,
Nations come and go;
Time doth gently cover all
With violets and with snow.”
As I sit here under an old heavy-topped apple-tree on a hot midsummer
day, a yellow leaf lets go its hold upon the branch over my head and
comes softly down upon the open book I am reading. It is a perfect
leaf, but it has had its day. The huge family of leaves of which it
was a member are still rank and green and active in sustaining the
life of the tree, but this one has dropped out of the leafy ranks.
There are a few small dark spots upon it, which, I see with my pocket
glass, are fungus growths, or else some germ disease of apple-tree
leaves, perhaps, like pneumonia, or diphtheria, or tuberculosis among
men. One leaf out of ten thousand has fallen. Was Fate cruel to it?
From the point of view of the leaf, yes--could a leaf have a point
of view; from the point of view of Nature, no. The tree has leaves
enough left to manufacture the needed chlorophyl, and that satisfies
the law. If all the leaves were blighted, or were swept off by insect
enemies, or stripped by hail and storm, that were a calamity to the
tree. But one leaf, though all the myriad forces of Nature went to
its production, though it is a marvel of delicate structure and
function, though the sun’s rays have beaten upon it and used it, and
been kind to it, though evolution worked for untold ages to bring its
kind to perfection--what matters it? It will go back into the soil
and the air from which it came, and contribute its mite to another
crop of leaves, and maybe it has rendered the molecules of carbon and
hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed more ready and willing to
enter into other living combinations. And the fungus germs that have
preyed upon it, they, too, have had their period of activity, and
have justified themselves. Nature thus pits one form against another,
and her great drama of life and death goes on. Are her stakes more in
the one than in the other, since she favors both? Yes, she has more
at stake in health than in disease. If disease always triumphed, all
life would go out. Of course, in the sum total of things, the life
of this old tree counts for but little, but if it failed to bear
apples, its chief end would be defeated. Evil is limited; it is a
minor counter-current, but it is just as real as the good; it is a
phase of the good; we have evil because we first have good. Both are
relative terms. We are prone to speak of good and evil as if they
were something absolute, like gravity or chemical affinity. But are
they any more absolute than heat and cold, or than big and little?
What pleases us, and is conducive to our well-being, we call good,
and its opposite we call evil. We are not to make our wants and
dislikes, our pleasures and our pain, the measure of the universe, as
we do mathematics and physics. We can think of things in terms of art
and literature, of beauty or ugliness, or in terms of morality and
religion, or we may think of them in terms of science and of exact
knowledge. When we say they are good or bad, we are thinking of them
in terms of morals or of religion; when we say they are beautiful or
ugly, we are describing them in terms of æsthetics; when we say they
are true or false, real or delusive, we are talking of them in terms
of science.
This sere and prematurely ripened leaf appeals to my literary and
imaginative faculties through its beauty and its symbolic character;
it appeals to my understanding, my love of accurate knowledge, by
reason of the blight that caused its fall.
Our going out of the world seems equally fortuitous and haphazard in
infancy, youth, middle life, old age; before we have fairly lived, or
after life has lost its value, or in the height of our powers, or in
the decrepitude of old age: which shall it be?
The naturist sees all life as a whole. Man is not an exception,
but part of the total scheme. The life principle is the same in
him as in all else below him--the principle that organizes matter
into countless new forms; that crosses and uses the mechanical and
chemical forces, and begets numberless new compounds; that develops
organs and functions, and separates the living world so sharply from
the non-living. In the weed, the tree, and in man, the principle is
the same. What has set up this organizing power and so impressed it
that it goes on from lower to higher forms, and unfolds the whole
drama of evolution through the geologic ages, is the mystery of
mysteries. To solve this mystery, mankind invented God and acts
of creation. But a God apart from Nature is to me unthinkable,
and science finds no beginning of anything. It finds change,
transformation, only. When or where did man begin? Where does the
circle begin? Self-beginning--who can think of that? Can we think
of a stick with only one end? We can think of a motion as beginning
and ending, but not of substance as beginning and ending. When the
metabolism of the body ceases, death comes. Do we think of life,
or the organizing principle, as then leaving the body? It ceases,
but does it leave the body in any other sense than that the flame
leaves the candle when it is blown out? And is this any different
in the case of man than it is in the case of a tree or a dog? We
postulate what we call a soul in man, which we deny to all other
forms of life--an independent entity which separates from the body
and lives after it. But we run into difficulties the moment we do so.
In the biologic history of man, when and where did the soul appear?
Did the men of the old Stone Age, of whom Professor Osborn writes
so graphically and convincingly, have it? Did the Piltdown man, the
Neanderthal man, the Java man of Dubois, have it? Did our ancestral
forms still lower down have it? Do babies have it? Do idiots and
half-witted persons have it?
All we can claim for man above the lower orders is higher
intelligence, greater brain power, the power of reflection, and
the logical process. His dog has perceptive intelligence, but not
reflective; animals act from inherited impulse; man from impulse,
thought, ideation. Man’s instinctive impulses are guided or
restrained by thought; his emotions--anger, love--wait upon thought;
his migratory instinct waits as that of the lower animals does not.
But when this extra power began, who can say? It had no beginning,
it dawned by insensible degrees, as do all things in Nature. We have
only to heighten our conception of Nature and matter to see the
difficulties vanish--and the stigma of materialism loses its terrors.
In these later centuries mankind has steadily grown bolder and
bolder in dealing with its deities and its devils. A few heroic
spirits have always questioned the truth of the popular creeds, but
in our day a very large majority question or even deny them. Fear of
the wrath above or the wrath below has fled. Men are fast coming to
see that devotion to the truth is the essence of true religion, and
that the worst form of irreligion is the acceptance of creeds and
forms without examining them, or upon the sole authority of some book
or sect. The truth-loving man is the God-loving man. We no longer
talk of God-fearing men--this negative attitude has given place to
the positive attitude of love and enjoyment. The wrath of God no
longer makes us tremble. The swift and sure vengeance of violated
law, both in the physical world without us and the physiological
world within us, we understand and appreciate, but the fury and
revenge of the offended gods no longer disturb our dreams. Nature
has no mercy, is no respecter of persons, is one to the just and
the unjust. Only the moral nature of man knows right from wrong;
only the reason of man knows truth from falsehood. When or how man
got this moral and intellectual nature is a question upon which
men themselves will never agree. Did it come from without or from
within--through evolution or revelation? The naturalist or naturist
is bound to believe that it came from within through the long
process of evolution. Whatever favored man’s development became a
biological law and had survival value. Without some degree of right
conduct and fair dealing--some degree of perception of the true and
the false--the race of man could never have attained its present
high position in the scale of animate nature. Through some inherent
impulse or tendency in matter, man arose out of the earth, climbing
through the many lowly forms to his full estate of a rational being.
It has been a long and toilsome and painful journey. But here we are,
and when we look back through the geologic vistas we are incredulous
that we came that road. We incline to the short cut through the
Garden. But the study of the ways of Nature as we see them in all
living things opens our eyes to the truth of evolution. Of course the
great puzzle and mystery is, Who or what stamped upon matter this
organizing and developing impulse and caused the first unicellular
life in the old Azoic or Palæozoic seas to branch and grow and
increase in complexity till it gave birth to all the myriad living
forms, high and low, that now fill the earth? But here again I am
using the language of half-truth--the language of our experience,
which makes us think of some external agent as stamping an impulse
upon matter. If we say the impulse was always there, that it is
inseparable from matter and the laws of matter, just as creation is
without beginning and end, center or circumference, we come no nearer
speaking the unspeakable. But it seems to me we do, in a measure,
satisfy the reason; we make it see or realize its own limitations;
reason guides reason.
The infinite knows neither time nor space, neither extension nor
duration; it knows only the here and the now. It does not wait for
time to pass or for eternity to begin. Eternity is now. Man, and all
that has arisen out of him, is a part of universal nature. Are we not
held to the sphere? Can we disturb it in its orbit? Can we banish
one atom from it or add one atom to it? We are a fragment of it, its
laws pervade our minds, and we cannot get away from the necessity of
putting our thoughts and emotions in the terms of our experience as
dwellers upon this astronomic globe. We may fancy that we get away
from it in moments of abstract thought, but we do not; we do not get
away from ourselves any more than we can outrun our shadow. We can
let our imaginations course with the spheres that circle through
the abysmal depths of space, but we can put our emotions only in
the words that we have invented to describe our experiences in this
little three-dimensional corner of creation. If our terms were formed
from our experiences amid the spheres, we might be able to give some
hint of the Infinite. We might learn how to describe our sensations
when emancipated from the standards and limitations of the world in
which we live.
Conventionally religious persons shrink from having their spiritual
life discussed in terms of psychology, because psychology smacks of
science and science acts like a blight upon religion. It dispels
mystery and lets the light of day--the garish, irreligious day--into
the twilight or the darkness of religious emotion. We do not want
our relation to the spiritual world explained in terms of our common
knowledge--such is our hankering after the unknown, the mysterious,
the transcendent.
One side of our nature fears the Infinite, and we experience a
chill when the methods of this world obtrude themselves there. We
have convinced ourselves that the part of our inner life which we
call the soul is something more sacred and mysterious and nearer
to the Infinite than our ordinary faculties. What victims we are
of words! What is the value of this feeling, and how did it arise?
Our appreciation of the beautiful, in art and nature, is equally
extra and transcends our practical faculties. Man’s belief in
another world--an ideal world of the absolute good--is, of course,
the result of his strong reaction from the pain, the struggle, the
incompleteness of this world. Evolution is a hard road to travel.
Being born is evidently not a pleasant experience for the baby, and
in this world man is constantly struggling through new experiences
into a higher and larger life. His measure of happiness is never
full and he looks for compensation in another and better world.
He does not see that there can be no better world--that pain and
struggle and disappointment are necessary for his development, and
that to long for a state in which these things do not exist is like
the stream longing for a dead equilibrium. All power and all growth
come from a break in the repose of the physical forces. There is
no power in a uniform temperature, nor in water at a dead level.
Mechanical power comes down an incline, vital power is a lift on
an up-grade--all growing things struggle upward; the vegetable and
animal world lift the earth elements up against gravity into an
unstable equilibrium. Mechanical things run down the scale toward a
stable equilibrium.
Our life goes on by virtue of some principle or force in matter that
tends constantly to break up the stable into the unstable, to force
the elements into new chemical combinations. Our machines dissipate
energy in doing work; the living body conserves energy in the same
process. It grows strong by the obstacles it overcomes, up to the
limits of its powers. The clock runs down, the energy we put into it
in winding it up is dissipated; but the growth of a living body is
a winding-up process, a drawing-in and a storing-up process. In the
wood and coal we burn is stored up the heat of the sun. In burning
them and driving machinery by means of the heat developed, the energy
is dissipated. In manual labor the human body dissipates energy
also, and it is the same solar energy that the engine dissipates,
and it does it in the same mechanical way; and it is constantly
replenished from without through the food consumed. But the human
or living engine stokes itself. It is a clock that winds itself up,
a gun that loads and points itself. Because the living body in its
final analysis turns out to be a machine as absolutely dependent upon
mechanical and chemical principles as any other machine, there are
those who see no radical difference between the mechanical and the
vital.
I conclude that it is equally up-grade from the vital or
physiological to the psychical. How the two connect we can never
know, but that the thinking man dissipates energy there is no doubt.
The body and the soul are one in a way past our finding out. When
we discuss these things in terms of metaphysics, we launch upon a
boundless sea and reach no real port.
When we project ourselves into Nature out of which we came, or when
we see ourselves there objectively,--our virtues, our aspirations,
our vices, and our wickedness,--we sow the seeds of our religion. We
grow a crop of gods and of devils, and heaven and hell become fixed
realities to us. So do we make the world in which we live, and it in
turn makes us. So does the divine in us keep pace with the divine we
see in Nature. So does the beauty of our own characters grow as we
see beauty in the character of others. So do our love, faith, hope,
charity, develop and augment as we see these things in the world
about us. The universe is thus constituted, and that is all we can
say about it.
That right, human right, in the end and on a large scale, prevails, I
believe to be true; the right that in long periods of time means, or
rather secures, the well-being of the race--the greatest good to the
greatest number.
In discussing the final problems of the universe, we are attempting
to describe the Infinite in terms of the finite--an impossible
task. We think and speak of God as a person, because our experience
gives us no other terms in which to conceive Him except in terms
of personality. He sees, hears, plans, governs, creates, loves,
suffers, is angry, we say,--in fact, has all human attributes and
characteristics vastly magnified. He is an omnipotent and omnipresent
man. He is the creator and organizer and director of the universe,
and hence is responsible for everything in it, the evil as well
as the good. Our attitude toward Him is that of a subject toward
his sovereign, or toward a supreme judge. We must praise, exalt,
supplicate, propitiate Him. There is lying upon my table a recent
volume of sermons by an English divine called “The Justification of
God”--his justification in the face of the terrible World War which
he might have prevented. Thus, just as soon as we conceive of God in
terms of our human nature, these baffling problems thrust themselves
upon us. We must seek some grounds upon which we can excuse or
vindicate or justify this supreme man for permitting the terrible
happenings which darken the world. As this is not an easy task, men
say in their hearts, and often with their lips: “There is no God.”
Better no God than a being who would permit the sin and suffering we
see daily all about us, and that history reveals to us.
The only alternative I see is to conceive of God in terms of
universal Nature--a nature God in whom we really live and move and
have our being, with whom our relation is as intimate and constant
as that of the babe in its mother’s womb, or the apple upon the
bough. This is the God that science and reason reveal to us--the God
we touch with our hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and
from whom there is no escape--a God whom we serve and please by works
and not by words, whose worship is deeds, and whose justification
is in adjusting ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves of his
bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting to everlasting. Of
course in the light of the old theology this is no God at all. It was
to emancipate us from the rule of this God that the old conceptions
of a being above and far removed from Nature were formulated. Nature
is carnal and unholy. Our theory compels us to say to matter and
the laws of matter, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” We struggle and
suffer in this debasing world for a season, and then escape from
it to a higher and better one. In all the dark, prescientific ages
during our own era--dark in regard to man’s real relation to the
universe in which he finds himself, but often luminous with flashes
of insight into the nature of man himself--these conceptions ruled
man’s religious aspirations. In our own times they still largely
rule in various modified forms. The old theological dogmas are more
or less discredited, but a religion founded upon science makes
little headway with the average man. We are shaping our practical
lives--our business, our social, our economical relations, more and
more according to scientific deductions. We seek more and more a
scientific or naturalistic basis for our rules of conduct, for our
altruism, for our charitable organizations, for our whole ethical
system. Any principle that squares with natural law is indeed founded
upon a rock. The stars in their courses fight for the cause that is
founded upon natural right, which in human relations does not mean
the right of the strong to trample upon the weak, but the right of
all to their full measure of free development.
Right and wrong are, of course, finite terms, and apply only in the
human sphere. Universal Nature, as it appears among non-living bodies
and forces, knows neither right nor wrong; it knows only might.
As it appears among the orders below man, it knows neither right
nor wrong. Physics and chemistry have no consciousness; neither
have beasts or bacteria; but man has, and this fact will in time
determine the whole course of human history. Naturalism makes for
righteousness, or right-mindedness, as surely as it makes for health
and longevity.
XII
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
I
How has the problem of evil tried men’s souls! How have their
gods failed to live up to the character they have given them! How
have they confused our moral standards! The trouble lies in a
misconception of the nature of evil, and in a false idea of the
universe itself.
There is no problem of evil until we have made or imagined an
unnatural and impossible world. When we have enthroned in the
universe a powerful man-made God who is the embodiment of all we
call good and the contemner of all we call evil, then we have our
insoluble problem. To help ourselves out we invent another being who
is the embodiment of all we call evil and enthrone him in regions
below. Upon him we saddle the evil, and thus we try to run the
universe with these two antagonistic principles yoked together, and
no end of confusion in our religious ideas results.
The moment we postulate an all-loving, all-merciful, all-wise, and
just being to rule the affairs of this world, and place him in such
intimate relations with it that not a sparrow falls to the ground
without his will and cognizance, then, indeed, are we in troubled
waters and have lost our reckoning. We cannot excuse such being on
the ground that his ways are inscrutable and past finding out. A
creator who sends into the world the malformed, the half-witted, the
bestial, the naturally depraved, and then holds them to high ethical
standards, is condemned by the ideals which he has implanted within
us.
Now the naturalist has no such trouble. He sees that good and evil
are only relative terms; that they both grow on the same tree; that
we should not know good were there no evil; that there would be no
development were there not what we call evil. Pain and suffering
are inseparable from the human lot. They are a part of the price
we pay for our place in the world. All struggle we look upon as
evil. Disease, failure, death are looked upon as evil, but they
are conditions of our lives. Through sickness we learn the laws
of health. The lower animals have no such troubles--no sickness,
intemperance, or war or avarice. They know without reason how to
live, but man has reason, and the joy of its exercise and the peril
of its failure. Are we not all willing to pay the price?--to take it
on these terms rather than to change places with the brutes?
What a troublesome time the good orthodox brethren have with their
God! He does, or permits such terrible things. Only yesterday He sent
a cyclone through the State of Illinois that killed hundreds of
innocent persons, and destroyed hundreds of peaceful homes, wiping
out at one blow the results of long years of human labor. A few years
ago He sent or permitted the scourge of infantile paralysis that
desolated tens of thousands of homes and left a trail of thousands
of crippled and enfeebled children. Again He sent or permitted the
influenza to sweep over the land, claiming more victims than did
the Great War; and so on. How our fathers, rocked in the cradle of
the old creeds, wrestled with this problem! How could a paternal
and all-loving God do these things? The naturalist reads nature
differently. His god is no better than Nature. In fact, his god and
Nature are one and inseparable. Nature goes her way and her ways are
not our ways. We take our chances in the clash and war of physical
forces. They have developed us and made us what we are.
It was only a few years ago that the President of the United States
asked all good people to assemble in their respective places of
worship and pray to God to stop the tornado of war and crime that
was then devastating Europe. Is it possible to conceive of a being
anywhere in the universe, with power to stop such a world calamity,
who would complacently look on and wait till the sufferers could
unite in a petition to him? What a false man-made god such a
conception holds up to us! No wonder the World War shattered this
conception in thousands of minds, and left them without any faith at
all!
Rogers said in regard to evil that Sir John Mackintosh and Malthus
and another philosopher whose name has escaped me, all agreed that
the attributes of the deity must be in some respects limited, else
there would be no sin and misery in the world.
We use the words “good” and “evil” in a narrow, personal sense. To
the farmer the frost that blights his crops is an evil, but not to
the squirrels who are waiting for the nuts to fall, or to the man who
suffers from hay fever. Rain is a blessing, but how easily it becomes
a curse! A cold wet spring cuts off the insect pests, but delays the
plowing and planting. It is hard on the insectivorous birds, but the
plants and trees profit. The grasshoppers that eat up the farmer’s
pasturage make good provender for his flock of turkeys.
Blight and struggle, frost and drought, weed out the weaklings and
beget a hardier race.
Moral evil--intemperance, avarice, war, lying, cheating--are on
another plane. They are peculiar to man. Nature below him knows them
not. But as they are against nature, they perpetually tend to correct
themselves. The business world has learned that honesty is the best
policy. Cheating is unpopular because, in the long run, it does not
pay.
The most aggressive and warlike nation upon the globe has at last
got its eyes open to the evils of militarism, and has bought its
emancipation at a heavy price. Tyranny and oppression are finally
doomed by the nature of man. Nature’s ways are roundabout, and often
regardless of cost. The chaos and waste and suffering in Europe
to-day are in keeping with her spendthrift methods. She knows that
the most turbulent and muddy stream will clear itself and quiet down.
The track of the cyclone through the forest will in time entirely
disappear. Evil perishes, the good increases more and more. God is
not so bad as we paint him, and we have no need of a devil. All is
good. Gravity would glue our feet to the ground and we have to defeat
it every time we lift a foot, and yet how could we walk or work
without gravity? The bad, or the evil, dogs one’s footsteps, but it
teaches us circumspection, and to beware of dangerous paths.
How easy to put one’s finger on this or that and say, “Here are
positive evils!”--all diseases, smallpox, infantile paralysis,
influenza, and so on--but they are only remote contingencies, and,
on the whole, most of us find life good. There are good germs and
there are bad germs, but the good vastly predominate. And the bad
germs are only bad from our point of view. Our doors and windows let
in the cold or the heat, as the case may be. We have them on these
conditions. Fruits and grains nourish us, but they may injure us also.
In 1916 my naturalist’s faith prompted me to write thus of the World
War: Two world forces are at death grips in this war. In terms of
government it is autocracy against democracy; in terms of biology it
is the unfit against the fit; in terms of man’s moral nature it is
might against right. Whatever triumph Prussian aggressiveness and
ruthlessness may meet with, they must in time meet with defeat, else
Evolution has miscarried, and its latest and highest product, man’s
moral nature, is, in its survival value, but dust and ashes.
II
There is positive good and there is negative good. We may say of
health that it is a positive good, and of sickness that it is a
negative good, because it reveals to us the conditions of health.
In disease the body is struggling to regain its health--to recover
and retain its normal condition. Its well-being is the result of a
certain balance between contending forces. What we call the hostile
forces appear only as the result of wrong living. The lower animals
have none of our distempers because they live according to nature.
Cattle do not get rheumatism by lying upon the wet, cold ground, nor
pneumonia from exposure to cold and storm. In the freedom of the
fields and woods it is quite certain that they would never become
infected with tuberculosis. I doubt if the wild dog or the wolf ever
have dog distemper, or if wild horses ever have crib-bite. Disease,
as we know it, is a product of civilization.
Death, of course, is not an evil when it comes in the regular
course of nature; it is an evil when it comes prematurely. The
various social evils tend to correct themselves. Moral evils--lying,
cheating, selfishness, uncharitableness--also tend to correct
themselves. Righteousness exalteth a nation because righteousness
has great survival value. The unrighteousness of Germany caused her
final downfall. In an earlier age, when ethical standards were lower,
she might have succeeded in dominating Europe. Our susceptibility to
pain is not an evil inasmuch as it safeguards us against a thousand
dangers. What I would say in a score of ways is that there is no evil
in the human world not of our own making. Plagues and famines are
always the result of human folly or short-sightedness. Filth breeds
disease. Typhoid fever is a filth disease and is preventable. There
is no god to blame for our distempers. Nature’s hands are clean. The
wind is never tempered to the shorn lamb, in spite of the proverb,
but the shorn lamb has not been fleeced by Nature. A heavy snowfall
is an evil in towns and cities, but a good thing for the country.
It enables the meadow mice to girdle the apple-trees, but it is a
coverlid that greatly profits the meadows themselves. It is therefore
good to both mice and meadows.
Our greatest philosopher, William James, had a wide grasp of
fundamental questions, but it seems to me that he did not fully grasp
the problem of evil; he saw the universe as a dual universe, two
principles, good and evil, struggling with each other. He seemed to
look upon good and evil as positive entities in themselves, whereas
naturalism sees in them only names which we give to our experiences
with objects and conditions in this world. What favors us, as I have
so often said, we call good, and what antagonizes we call evil;
but absolute good and absolute evil do not exist, any more than do
absolute up and down; or absolute near and far. The absolute admits
of no degrees, but there are all degrees of good and bad. Some
hostile germs are worse than others, and some friendly germs are
better than others. Again I say, we live in a world of relativity.
Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature,
it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you
prefer.
James was fond of quoting Walt Whitman, but he does not see, as
Whitman did, that there is no evil, or, if there is, that it is
just as necessary as the so-called good. From James’s point of view
Nature is a harlot to whom we owe no allegiance, and another world is
demanded to correct and compensate the failures and disappointments
of this.
Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made the
heaven and the earth, and who on looking upon them said that they
were very good. Here is where the trouble begins--a Creator apart
from the universe who looks upon and approves the work of his hands.
This is the early, childish view of mankind. As Bergson says, when we
apply to the universe our idea of a maker and a thing made, trouble
begins. The universe was not made; it is, and always has been. God is
Nature, and Nature is God. If this is pantheism, then we are in good
company, for Goethe said that as a philosopher he was a pantheist.
Even the atheist has a god of his own. He knows that there is
something back of him greater than he is.
Most persons are pantheists without knowing it. Ask any of the
good orthodox folk what God is, and they will say that He is a
spirit. Ask them where He is, and they will answer, He is here,
there, everywhere, in you and in me. And this is pantheism--all
god--cosmotheism.
“Truly all that we know of good and duty proceeds from Nature; but,
none the less so, all that we know of evil.”
“If there be a divine spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we
know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man,” says James.
But does he not see that this term “divine spirit” is born of man’s
narrowness and partiality; that Nature is all of one stuff, divine
or diabolical, just as we elect? He says that the naturalistic
superstition, the worship of God in nature, has begun to lose its
hold upon the educated mind; that the first step toward getting into
healthy relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against
the God of nature.
Poor James Thomson, the British poet whose pessimism, perhaps, caused
him to commit suicide, whom our James loves to quote, hurled his
scorn at a fiction of his own brain when he wrote:
“Not for all thy power, furled or unfurled,
For all thy temples to thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.”
The whole value of philosophy is to help us to a rational view of the
universe, and when it fails to do this, it falls short of fulfilling
its proper function. The contradictions of which James speaks do not
disturb the naturalist at all. Nature would not be Nature without
these contradictions; they do not disturb the unity of Nature.
Empedocles taught that “there is no real creation or annihilation
in the universal round of things, but an eternal mixing--due to the
two eternal powers, Love and Hate--of one world-stuff in its sum
unalterable and eternal.” And Whitman’s large lines mean the same
thing:
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
XIII
HORIZON LINES
I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
In dealing with fundamental questions like the origin of life, how
prone our natural philosophers are to assume the existence of that
which they set out to prove. Thus Pflügler assumes _living_ protein
in the shape of a cyanogen radical, and assumes that this radical
possesses a large amount of internal energy, and thus “introduces
into the _living_ matter energetic internal motion.” As cyanogen and
its compounds arise only in incandescent heat, he concludes that life
is derived from fire, that its germ was in the earth when it was
still an incandescent ball.
“As soon as oxides can be there,” says Moore, “oxides appear.”
“When temperature admits of carbonates, then carbonates are
forthwith formed.” But are oxides and carbonates mere fortuitous
compounds--just chance hits? Moore helps himself out by formulating
what he calls the “Law of Complexity,” a law that holds throughout
all space. But is the law, again, fortuitous? Is it not rather
organized intelligence? “Atoms, molecules, colloids, and living
organisms arise as a result of the operation of this law.” Allen
says, “Life arose at the period when the physical conditions of the
earth came to be nearly what they are at present.” Of course. But is
not this begging the question? We do not know life apart from these
conditions; hence we assume that the conditions beget the life.
What is life anyhow? May we not say that it is a new motion in
matter? It does not introduce a new chemistry, or a new physics, but
it uses these to new ends. New and unstable compounds arise. Solar
energy, says Allen, acting on various carbon and nitrogen compounds,
would set up various anabolic and catabolic reactions which resulted
in life--life of a very humble and rudimentary form, but life.
Troland gets life from the enzymes, but how does he get his enzymes?
He assumes that at some moment in the earth’s history a small amount
of a certain autocatalytic enzyme--a self-created enzyme--suddenly
appeared at a definite time and place within the yet warm ocean
waters which contained in solution various substances reacting very
slowly to produce an oily liquid immiscible with water. Troland
postulates the auto- or self-catalytic character of the initial
enzyme, which is virtually postulating the life-impulse itself.
Osborn, in his work on the “Origin and Evolution of Life,” also
virtually starts by assuming that which he sets out to prove.
He suggests that the initial step in the origin of life was the
coördinating and bringing together of the then primordial elements
of water, nitrates, and carbon dioxide, “which so far as we know had
never been in combined action before.” Was their coming together
a blind, fortuitous affair? Osborn assumes that these elements
were gradually bound by a _new_ form of mutual attraction “out of
which arose a new form of unity in the cosmos, an organic unity or
organism. It was an application of energy new to the cosmos. In fact
it was life.” “When the earth had in the course of its physical
evolution become adapted as the abode of life, living substances came
into being.” By their own independent action, or by what?
In trying to account for happenings on the earth’s surface, we follow
the chain of cause and effect. But when we try to explain origins, we
are dealing with a chain which has only one end.
Picted, a Swiss scientist, concluded that because all chemical action
of the kind which goes on in living things is annihilated at one
hundred degrees below zero Centigrade, therefore chemical action and
life are one. But chemical action is as old as the earth. Is life as
old?
II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS
I fancy I am not alone in having difficulty in uniting the two
worlds--the living and the non-living--and in seeing them under
the same law. In the one I see something like mind and purpose;
every living thing shows something for which we have no name but
intelligence. Organization demands an organizing principle. There is
purpose in the wings of a bird, the legs of an animal, the fins of a
fish, but where is there purpose in the orbs, in the comets, in the
meteors? Or, to come down to the earth, where is there purpose in
the mountains, in the stratified rocks, in the ocean, or in the air
currents?
In a living body there are organs which function; in a non-living,
there are parts which act and are acted upon. To see mind in all is
the task--to see in gravity, in cohesion, in chemical affinity, in
dissolution, anything at work akin to ourselves. We see irrefragable
law; we see the sequence of cause and effect; we see the weather
system work itself out--evaporation, condensation, precipitation,
resulting in clouds, rainfall, springs, streams, lakes, and seas; we
see the never-failing succession of the seasons; we see the law of
the conservation of force; but do all these things imply the same
intelligence, though unconscious, which we see in the sitting bird,
or in the growing plant or tree? Is the cosmic order akin to the
vital order? Of course mechanics and chemistry are one the universe
over; atoms and molecules are atoms and molecules; but where does
mind end, and law begin? Or, is it all law, or all mind, according
to our point of view? The moral order, which is man’s order, we
know has its limits, but I am trying to see if the rational order
is coexistent with nature. The unity we seek we may find in the old
conception of God, but this saddles all the turmoil and disorder and
evil of the world upon an all-wise, all-good Being.
Shall we adopt the idea of a primal mind as distinct from the human
mind, as the poets do? I grasp at anything that will help me see that
I am akin to the farthest star, in my mind as in my body. I cannot
think of a dual or a divided universe. I want to see myself as strung
upon the same thread as all the rest of nature.
In organic evolution I see the workings of the creative impulse--or
growth, as opposed to mere accretion or accumulation. In the light
of the same law does one not see worlds and suns potential in the
spiral nebulæ? Science helps us to see the evolution of the chemical
elements, or to follow up this defining and differentiating process.
Could we fly to the uttermost parts of the heavens, we should find
the Cosmic Mind there before us.
III. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY
Is it possible to think of any ingenious contrivance in nature as
the result of chance, or of the fortuitous clashing and jostling of
the elements? Living things are full of these ingenious contrivances
which serve a definite end and keep life going. In the inorganic
world there are no such contrivances; there is not the simplest bit
of machinery--parts adjusted to parts, and the whole adjusted to
some specific end. In all the clashing and jostling of bodies and
forces through all the astronomic and geologic ages, not so much as
the simplest mechanical device--a coiled spring or a carpenter’s
hammer--has been struck out, and never can be. It is true that there
are certain static conditions of matter that suggest design--natural
bridges, natural obelisks, rude architectural and monumental
structures, and human profiles on the rocks; but these are not the
result of a constructive process, of a building-up, but the result
of degradation: the erosive forces carve them out in obedience to
the laws of matter and energy. We easily see how it all came about;
and we can guide these forces so that they will repeat the process.
But we do not see how the living body, with all its marvelous
adjustments and coördinations, came about, and we cannot manipulate
matter so as to produce the simplest living thing. Darwinians
profess to see in natural selection--which is simply a name for an
eliminating or sifting process--the explanation of even man himself.
But the elimination of the weaker forms, which has gone on for whole
geologic ages--for example, in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado--has
not resulted in so much as one perfect, four-square foundation, or
one perfect flying arch. Natural selection is not a creative, but a
purely mechanical, process. We involuntarily personify it, and think
of it as involving will and power of choice; think of it as selecting
this and that, as a man does when he weeds his garden or selects his
seeds, or breeds his animals. But it is not positive at all. It is
negative--a dropping-out process.
Chance, or chance selection, works alike in the organic and the
inorganic realms, but it develops no new forms in the inorganic,
because there is no principle of development, no organizing push.
But in organized matter there is, in and behind all this organizing,
a developing principle or tendency; the living force is striving
toward other forms; in other words, development occurs because there
is something to develop. An acorn develops, but a quartz pebble only
changes.
The living body is placed in a world of non-living bodies and forces,
and it takes its chances; it develops only by their aid; if warmth
and moisture are withheld, it ceases to develop; or, if warmth and
moisture are in excess, it ceases to develop; its well-being is
insured when it rides the inorganic forces, and is not ridden by
them. It is subject to the law of chance of the world in which it is
placed, but that law of chance does not explain its origin or its
development as it does that of the non-living forms.
That it is all the result of design or purpose of an all-wise Being,
working his will upon matter, is equally unthinkable. Yet if it
is the result of chance, then the world of mind and soul is only
a phase of mechanics and chemistry. In that case the head of a
Paul or a Homer is no greater wonder than a volcanic bomb, having
essentially the same origin. If we regard it as the work of design,
we are compelled to saddle all the sin and misery, all the delays and
failures and wastes of the geologic ages, upon Infinite Wisdom and
Goodness, together with all the famine and pestilence and carnage and
miscarriages of history.
For untold millions of years the earth was given up to low,
groveling, all but brainless, bestial forms, devouring and devoured;
for other untold millions it was the scene of a carnival of terrible
dragon-like monsters--in the sea, on the earth, and in the air--a
tragedy of monstrous forms enacted upon an unstable stage that rose
and sank or was overwhelmed by fire and flood. For other long ages
it was the scene of ape-like creatures struggling to be man, living
in caves, contending with savage beasts, hirsute, forbidding, living
by tooth and claw and muscular strength more than by wit, followed
by the long historical period during which man appeared and has
fought his way to his present stage of development, through blood
and carnage and suffering and misdirected activities, dogged by all
the evil and destructive passions, obstructed and thwarted, cut
off by plagues and wars, engulfed by earthquakes, devoured by fire
and flood, blinded by his own ignorance, consumed by his own evil
passions, yet making steady progress toward the position which he now
holds in the animal kingdom.
IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM
The bogey of teleology frightens a good many honest scientific minds.
To recognize anything akin to intelligence in nature, or to believe
that a universal mind is immanent in, or a part of, the cosmos, is
looked upon as disloyalty to the scientific spirit.
Lamarck’s idea of an indwelling directing principle in organic
evolution discredited him with Darwin, and with the leading
biologists since his time. Yet Darwin said he could not look upon the
universe as the result of chance. But he faltered before the other
alternative--that any will or design lay back of it.
It is unfortunate that these words connote things purely human, and
to that extent are likely to lead us astray. But are not all our
terms human, even the word “astray” itself? Can we have any other?
Emerson says that anything may be affirmed or denied of the Infinite,
and that God can be hinted only in signs and symbols. In trying to
describe time, we need a new language that differs as much from our
ordinary speech as algebra differs from arithmetic. The circle and
sphere are the only complete types of Infinity.
In Professor Loeb’s mechanistic conception of life there is no hint
of mind or soul; all is matter and force. All the mechanists and
energists and materialists unconsciously endow their matter and force
with creative power, thus elevating them to the rank of a _Deus_.
Science knows no mysteries; it knows only insoluble problems and
comparatively few of them. But may not one see mysteries in nature
without being a mystic? Physical facts may be inexplicable, but we
do not call them mysteries. The birth and development of the cell is
wonderful, but can we say that it is mysterious? Does not mystery
imply something occult and unknowable? Is a biologist or evolutionist
to be charged with mysticism because he refuses to admit that the
development of species is all a matter of chance? If he believes,
for instance, that the horse as we know him was inevitable in that
small beast of Eocene times, the eohippus, is he to be charged with
a teleological taint? Or if we speak of the predestined course of
evolution are we unfaithful to the true scientific spirit? Is not the
acorn predestined to become an oak? Does growth imply a mysterious
guiding force or principle? The little brown house wren that fusses
and chatters here around its box on my porch has come all the way
from Central America. Did something guide it? Life is full of this
kind of guidance. Not much of nature can be explained by addition and
subtraction; not much of it can be explained by mere mechanics, or
physics; not much of it can be explained by the doctrine of chance.
There are reasons behind reasons. You may give good physiological
reasons why the heart beats, why the liver secretes bile, why the
digestive processes go on and our food nourishes us, but can you find
the mind by dissecting the brain or connect mind with matter?
Mysticism belongs to the sphere of our religious emotions, and when
we read natural phenomena through these emotions we are mystical.
We cannot say that the course of evolution has been directed, and
we cannot say it goes by chance. The changes of the seasons are not
directed; the circuit of the waters from the earth, through the sea
to the clouds and back to the earth, is not directed; the orbs in
their courses are not directed; the sap in the trees, the blood in
our veins, are not directed; neither are these things by chance. “An
inward perfecting principle” is the divinity that shapes the ends of
all organisms.
Many scientific men are so shy of teleology that they tend to the
other extreme and land in a world of chance.
Now, if man and all the other forms of life are the result of chance,
then Chance is a very good god and should be written with a capital.
No matter what we call the power out of which the universe flows, or
with which it is identified, it is a veritable _Deus_.
We cannot affirm that we are the result of chance, nor the result
of design, as we use these words in our daily lives. These words
apply to parts and fragments of which our lives are made up. They
do not help us in dealing with the whole. We share in the life of
the universe; we are a part of it, and what keeps it going keeps us
going. What set evolution on foot and evolved the organic from the
inorganic is the parent of us all. It is not we that are immortal;
it is life, and the universe. We pass like shadows, but the sun
remains--for a season. We say of a thing, or an event, that it came
by chance, when we see no will like unto our own directing it; at
the same time we know that the laws of matter and force control
everything. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without their immutable
decrees. In the same sense the hairs of our heads are numbered.
When we discuss or describe the universe in terms of experience, we
are dealing in half-truths. We cannot describe a sphere in terms of
angles and right lines; no more can we describe or interpret the All
in terms of our own experience.
If it were Chance, or Darwin’s Natural Selection, or orthogenesis, or
whatever it was, that brought me and all other forms of life here,
that gave me my mind and body, that put my two eyes and my two ears
just where they are of most service to me, and my two arms and hands,
and my two legs and feet, and all my internal organs, my double
circulation, my heart to pump the blood and keep the vital machinery
going, my secretions and my excretions, my lungs to lay hold of the
air and purify the blood, my liver and kidneys to eliminate the
poisons and effete matter, my marvelous digestive system to furnish
the fuel that generates the physical power, and, more than all
these things, that looked after my germ in the old Cambrian seas
and brought it safely down through the hazards of the long road
of evolution and developed it and made me a man, and gave me the
capacity to contemplate and enjoy this amazing universe--the power or
the blind force or the law of chance, I say, that could do all this
is god enough for me. I want no other.
Do we expect to see the Natural Providence at work as we see man at
work? Nature works from the inside. In the human sphere there is a
maker and a thing made. Not so in the universe. Things are in their
place without being made. Our concepts of the beginning and the end
do not apply to them. The words “chance” and “design” are born of our
limited knowledge.
That man or an ant or a leaf or a flower could result from the
haphazard jostling together of the molecules of matter, or the units
of force, is unthinkable. Could one get an intelligent sentence, or
one’s own name, by putting the letters of the printer’s type in a
hat and shaking them up till the crack of doom?--an old and trite
comparison, but it seems to state the case fairly. And yet, how can
a naturalist fall back upon teleology? Is not Nature sufficient unto
herself? Must we inject our own little methods and makeshifts into
the ways of the Eternal? We might as well try to walk off the sphere
as try to compass this problem in the terms of our own experience.
The inscrutable, the unthinkable, the unknowable, confront us on all
sides.
So far as I can see the Creative Energy in nature has no plan nor
end. Plans are the ways of the finite, not of the Infinite. Man alone
has plans and ends. The Infinite cannot be defined or interpreted in
terms of our human lives. It transcends all speech. To name any one
thing as the purpose and end of creation is like naming the end of a
sphere, or the direction of a circle. All bodies with which we deal
on the earth have an upper and an under side, but the earth itself is
all top side; there is no under side, though the orbs in the heavens,
to our eye, have a lowest point or bottom side. Every tangible body
with which we deal rests upon some other body, but the orbs float in
vacuity. The irregular solid bodies with which we deal have three
dimensions--length, breadth, and thickness--but, properly speaking,
the sphere has none of these; it has only mass.
When we discuss or attempt to describe what we call God, or what I
call the Eternal, in terms of man, as the theologians do, something
within us rises up and says, No. A magnified man, or a man raised
to the _n_th power, is not God; he is still man. I fancy that with
most men the denial of a God means simply this: there is no God who
can be described in the terms usually employed. One is an atheist
because he cannot accept a God made in man’s image. It belittles the
Mystery. Our belief in God is so radical that we reject half-gods.
The fatherhood of God means no more than the manhood of God, or the
governorship, or the judgeship, of God.
In many respects the manlike God falls below his human prototype,
being more cruel than any human being dares to be.
No, we cannot measure the Infinite Mystery with our foot-rule.
Boundless space is the negation of space. We can say that there is
no space in the sense that we can say that there is no God. There is
no motion unless there is something at rest; there is no Infinite
Good unless there is Infinite Evil. Hence we have invented a hell to
balance heaven, a Devil to offset God.
The universe is a reality, though we cannot define it. Life goes
on, though we cannot account for it. Boundless space exists, though
words fail us in the attempt to fathom it. The earth has its center,
though we do not know whether we should be standing on our heads or
our heels were we to reach it. Heavenly bodies do collide, though we
cannot visualize the collision. Our language fails us when we come to
the ultimate questions.
That this is the best possible world, humanly speaking, I have no
doubt, yet sin and misery are on every hand. Sin and misery are
terms of our own which simply express some of the conditions of our
development. They are like the terms “up” and “down,” “east” and
“west,” and “near” and “far”; they are relative. Nature knows no good
and no bad; all is good; that is, all favors development. The rivers
reach the sea, no matter what the obstacles in the way. The seasons
come and go, no matter how delayed.
Nature’s ends, so far as we can name them, are wholesale--to keep the
game going, to heap the measure, to play one hand against the other.
She is more solicitous about the race than about the individual. The
wreck of worlds or suns in sidereal space matters little; there are
infinite worlds and suns left. What would really matter would be
failure of celestial mechanics. The eclipse of the sun and the moon
occurring exactly on time, “without the untruth of a single second,”
tells how perfectly the great machine runs. The eclipse itself is an
accident, but a harmless one; it is not a necessity in the movements
of our system.
If man is the end of things, as we would fain believe, then why
was he so long a-coming? Why will he as surely disappear from the
earth? Why has he not come to other planets in our system? When he
disappears from our solar system, will not the great procession go
on just the same without him? No doubt of it. He is only an incident,
and maybe an accident--a lucky throw of the dice.
V. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE?
We cannot put to Nature the direct questions we put to ourselves.
Namable purposes and designs rule our lives. Not so with the All. I
told Father Goodman the other day, much to his bewilderment, that I
did not think the air was made for us to breathe, nor the water for
us to drink, nor food for us to eat. We breathe and drink and eat
because our organization is adjusted to these things. The shoe is
made over the last, not the last to fit the shoe. The organization
is fitted, or fits itself, to its environment. Nature is first, man
is afterwards. Is the notch in the mountain made for the road to go
through? Is the land-locked harbor made to protect our shipping?
Would it not be as true to say that the wind was made to fill the
ship’s sails, as that air was made to fill our lungs? In dealing with
this question of design many persons get the cart before the horse.
Of course there is purpose or design in living things in a sense that
there is not in the non-living. Every part of a living organization
is purposeful. There is purpose in our lungs, our hearts, our
kidneys, in short in every part of our bodies. There is purpose in
the varnish on leaves, in the down and resin on buds, in the wings
and hooks of seeds, in the colors of flowers and of animals, in
fact, in everything that makes for the well-being of living things.
But not in the same sense is there purpose in the wind, the rain,
the snow, the tides, the heat, the cold, the rocks, the soil, the
fountains. Animate nature struggles; inanimate nature passively
submits. Dead matter forever seeks an equilibrium; living matter
forever struggles against an equilibrium. The waters separate the
clay and the sand and the pebbles from the soil and deposit each
in its own place; but it is not a struggle or an effort; it is
mechanical adjustment. It is not an effort for certain liquids to
form crystals, or for certain elements to combine with certain other
elements and form new compounds, but it is an effort for a tree
to resist the wind, to lift up tons of water and minerals against
gravity, to force its roots through the soil or grip the rock, and it
is an effort for the mother to bear and nurse her young. For anything
to live and grow, effort is needful; not commonly a painful effort,
but a joyous one.
So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what
part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as
a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think
not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass.
There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The
distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of
design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or
Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s moons. The circular forms and orbits
of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force
that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of
the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands
on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom
question we can never reach and formulate. The earth rests on nothing
and floats as lightly as a feather. All matter is probably only a
phase of the ether, but the ether defies all proof and all negation.
How quickly we get where no step can be taken! We cannot step off
the planet, though we may step off from every object on its surface.
There is no heat in sunlight till it reaches the earth; heat is an
experience of our bodies, and beings on the remotest planets, if
there are any, may and must receive adequate heat, and beings on
Mercury and Venus no more. Terrestrial physics and celestial physics
must be the same, and yet celestial mechanics find no place on the
surface of our planet. The laws of the cosmos bring to naught our
mundane conceptions. Where are up and down, east and west, over
and under, out in sidereal space? We balk at perpetual motion, yet
in the heavens, and in the interior of matter, behold perpetual
motion! Behold motion without friction and energy without waste or
dissipation! On the earth every visible body rests on some other
body, everything has a beginning and an end, but where is the
beginning or the ending of the cosmos? Where, then, in this quest do
we touch bottom? Nowhere. There is no bottom. Only measurable, finite
things have bottoms and bounds. The immeasurable, the Infinite, is
over us and under us, and our lives are like sparks against the
night. But, just as we live in the heavens and do not know it, so we
live and move and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off;
it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from it as from
gravity.
We are not like beings who have moved into a house, made and
furnished and provisioned in anticipation of our coming. We are
creatures born in a house, or amid an environment to which we
must slowly and more or less painfully fit ourselves. We are the
consequent, not the antecedent. In a different world we should have
been differently constituted. In a bigger world no doubt our bodies
would have been bigger and our strength greater; with less or with
more oxygen in the air, no doubt our lungs would have been different.
With less light no doubt our eyes would have been larger, and with
more light they would probably have been smaller. We do not feel
the pressure of the atmosphere, but make the pressure more or less,
and we are at once disturbed. The deep-sea fishes fairly explode
when brought to the surface, and no doubt the surface fishes would
be crushed in the deep sea bottoms. Just as we adjust our flying
machines to the tenuity of the air, and our oversea and undersea
boats to the density and weight of the water, so Nature adjusts her
organisms to their environment.
Man avails himself of all possible aids. His voluntary conquests of
nature are many and are constantly increasing, but his involuntary
dependencies upon her are many also. He did not launch himself into
this world, and he did not give his body, with all its wonderful
organs and powers, the shape it has, or elect to breathe or see or
hear or breed or eat or sleep. Something else determined all these
things for him. What is that something else? Our fathers called it
God; we call it Nature, because we live in a scientific and not in a
theological age. We are pantheistic and not theistic. Our gods are
everywhere, in everything created. Our minds are no longer hampered
by the idea of a maker and a thing made, a ruler or a governor and a
thing ruled or governed. The unity of Nature and God is a conception
fostered by science. We are compelled to adjust our minds to the idea
of a causeless universe, to a universe without beginning and without
ending, without a maker or a designer.
Our conception of cause and effect, or beginning and ending,
applies only on the surface of the earth; where currents and
counter-currents, action and reaction and interaction, are in
perpetual see-saw; where every body rests upon some other body, and
every cause has its antecedent cause; where we can live only by
dealing with parts and fragments, and by separating one thing from
another. The astronomic laws and conditions, or our conceptions of
them, are thrown into confusion the moment we try to apply them in
our practical mundane lives. In vain we try to abolish friction
and achieve perpetual motion, but the heavenly bodies move without
friction, and move forever and ever. Motion is the prime condition
of the universe. It is the condition or necessity we are under in
this world, on the surface of this planet, that sets us on the
quest of final causes and gives rise to our conceptions of the made
and the maker, the good and the bad, the end and the beginning. We
cannot say that we are watched over by the gods--our personification
of the universal mind that pervades nature--nor that we are not
watched over by them, because that were to use the language of our
surface existence. All we can say is that we are a part of the
cosmos, fragments of the total scheme of things, and share its laws
and conditions, and that the more perfectly we adjust the nature
within us to the nature without us, the better we fare. With the
Infinite there is no time and no space, only an everlasting here, an
everlasting now.
Yet how can puny man interpret the universe or say aught of it in
terms of his mundane experiences?
VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER
The laws and processes of Nature which to us are so beneficent, and
which seem made for our especial benefit, were in full operation
before life as we know it had become established. In fact, the
fatherhood and motherhood of Nature are all thoughts of our own,
inventions of our necessities. The paternity of gravitation and the
maternity of frost and snow are in no respect different. We are
the chance children--chance from our limited point of view--of an
impersonal, unhuman, universal mother. We may say, humanly speaking,
that Nature takes forethought of her children, but not afterthought.
She provides that they shall actually appear in due time in this
universe of conflicting and struggling forces, then lets them shift
for themselves. They are born on the firing-line, in the field of
perpetual war, and none escape unscathed. Indeed, they are moulded
and adjusted and equipped by the very conditions in which the peril
of their destruction lies. Gravity crushes them, and gravity gives
them their powers. Fire consumes them, and water drowns them, and yet
out of these things they came.
It is as if some god had planned the universe as a vast plant for
the production of the myriad forms of life, each in its own place
and season. In our little corner of it at a given hour of the great
geologic clock one form appears, or many forms; at another hour
other forms emerge, till man himself emerges as the culmination of a
long line of lowly forms, many vestiges of which still cling to him.
But the world is no more for man than for the mice and vermin that
pester him. It is for all.
The mystery back of all--what shall we say of it? And the good and
the evil that are so inextricably blended with it--what of them?
VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS
The grand movements of Nature, both in the heavens and in the earth,
are on such a scale of time and distance that without the aid of
science we could get little or no hint of them. Immeasurably slow
and slight they are, according to our standards. The stars are
fixed points in the sky to our unaided vision. Throughout the whole
historic period they have shown little or no change in their relative
positions, though they are moving in varying directions at the rate
of many miles a second. Come back in a thousand years and there is
no change; in thirty or forty thousand years, and changes of place
might be barely perceptible to an unaided eye. Not till hundreds
of thousands of years would Orion, or the Big Dipper, have become
noticeably distorted, and probably not till millions of years would
the heavens present combinations of stars forming new constellations.
The Pole Star will after millions of years probably drift far from
its present position, and the Milky Way be found in another part of
the heavens. When viewed from the extreme points in space one hundred
and eighty millions of miles apart which the earth’s orbit around the
sun gives us, the fixed stars remain fixed, they show little or no
parallax. To touch but the skirts of the Infinite exhausts our powers.
The geological changes upon the surface of this earth--mere
mustard-seed in space that it is--are on such a scale of time that
only an unfaltering scientific faith can take them in. The mountains
and the valleys seem eternal, but to the eye of the geologist they
are as flitting as the summer clouds. Look upon a Catskill landscape
with its long, flowing mountain-lines curving over summits three or
four thousand feet high, and its deep, broad, cradle-like valleys
checkered with fertile farms and homesteads, and try to think of it
as all the work of the slow and gentle rains and snows--geologic
time stroking them almost as gently as a mother caresses her baby.
Tried by human standards we live in a stable universe; change stops
with the hills and the stars; but, tried by geologic and astronomic
standards, it is as unsubstantial as the snows of winter or the dews
of summer. Perpetual flux and transition mark even the stars in their
courses. Astronomers calculate the weight of the earth in terms of
its own tons, something like six sextillion tons, but in and of
itself it weighs nothing; its weight is the pull of some other body,
in itself pound balances pound; it is only by detachment from it
that bodies have weight. As we approach the center, a pound would
be less and less; halfway down it would weigh eight ounces only; at
the center weight would disappear, the pull of matter on all sides
would be equal, there would no longer be up or down. Gravitation is
not a demon at the center of the earth, pulling all things toward
him; it is a force in every atom, pulling and being pulled in every
direction. Seek the center of the pulling, and all power vanishes.
The globe is on such a scale of size with reference to our lives and
powers that by no effort of the imagination can we adjust ourselves
to the contradictions presented. It is not by experience, nor by
living and acting, that we know it as a sphere, but by thinking and
speculating. Even if we travel round it, we get no other impression
than that it is an endless plain. We find no under side; it is all
top side. The practical inferences we draw from looking at the moon
are all contradicted by our experiences here. The lower limb of the
moon is not lower, as we should find if we were to go there, and the
under side of the earth is also the upper side.
Our astronomy is sound, but our actual life gives us no clue to its
truths. Only when we turn philosophers do we know the tremendous
voyage we are making, and then we only know it abstractly. We never
can know it concretely. The swift turning of the planet under our
feet, and its enormous speed in its orbit around the sun, are not
revealed to our sense as motion, but as changes from night to day
and from one season to another. Slow, soft, still, the moon and the
sun rise and drift across the heavens, and the impassive earth seems
like a ship becalmed. No hint at all of the more than rifle-bullet
speed through space. It is all too big for us. The celestial machine
is no machine at all to our senses, but its vast movements go on as
gently and as easily as the falling of the dew or the blooming of the
flowers, and almost as unconsciously to us as the circulation of the
blood in our hearts.
We are in the heavens and are a part of the great astronomical whirl
and procession, and know it not. It is symbolical of our lives
generally. We do not realize that we are a part of Nature till we
begin to think about it. Our lives proceed as if we were two--man
and Nature--two great antagonistic or contrary facts, but the two
are one; there is only Nature. We can draw circle within circle, and
circle around circle, but we cannot circumscribe Nature. That is the
fact over all.
As struggling human beings we diverge from one another, oppose one
another, defeat one another. All our differences and antagonisms
arise from our need of action and of living. The lesson of the sphere
is hard to learn, hard to state. Our powers of detachment are hardly
equal to it. Our lives are rounded by the great astronomic curves.
The contradictions which the intellect reveals, the unthinkable
mysteries that surround us, the heavens over us, the earth under us
always--the relativity of all things--thus does thought set us adrift
on a shoreless sea.
VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS
Bergson says that we are in trouble the moment we think of a creator
and a thing created; in other words, the moment we apply to the
universe as a whole the concepts which our practical lives yield us.
The only alternative I see is to think of the universe as uncreated,
which, I confess, does not make the problem much easier. I try to
help myself out by saying that our concepts are formed in a world
in which we deal with parts and fragments, lines and angles on the
surface of a sphere, and not with the sphere as a whole. Our senses
do not reveal the earth to us as a globe, but as a boundless plain
with no under side; we find no limits, and if we continue our search
long enough, we come back to the place from which we set out, but
from the opposite direction.
When we try to think in terms of spheres and solar systems, our
everyday concepts avail us very little; in fact, they set us down
wrong-end up. We look at the moon or the sun and we say, Surely if
we were at the South Pole of either of these bodies, we should be as
truly on the under side of it as the fly is when it alights at the
South Pole of the globe in our study. We should be in a position
opposite to that which we should occupy at the North Pole. That every
point on the surface of a cosmic sphere should be on top, or rather
that there should be no top, and no bottom; that these concepts
should be abolished; that if two inhabited globes should come in
collision, each would seem to the people upon the other to be falling
down out of the heavens upon them; that out in sidereal space not
even the Huns could drop bombs, or send up balloons, because there
would be no up and no down--when we grasp these facts, I say, we are
at the end of our tether; we not only do not know “where we are at,”
but we find there is no “at.” Our minds can deal with the cosmos
only in an abstract or mathematical way. As a concrete fact even our
little earth is too much for us. Not merely too big, it contradicts
all our experience. If we could build a sphere a mile through, or
ten miles or a hundred miles, or ten thousand miles through, could
we stand upon it at the South Pole? When we think of the daily
revolutions of the earth upon its axis, we are compelled to think of
it as turning over, because it brings the sun above us by day and
beneath us by night, and hence the puzzle to the unlettered mind as
to why the lakes and ponds do not all spill out.
Among the heavenly bodies other laws prevail; there is motion without
friction or dissipation of energy; there is no body at rest; there
is no motion in right lines, but only in curved lines; there is no
beginning nor ending; there is only eternal progression; and this is
a condition of things that throws our mental adjustments all out of
gear. The problem of God, the problem of creation, the problem of
future life, throw our mental adjustments out of gear in the same way.
There is order and harmony in our own solar system and doubtless in
countless others in the immensity of space, but the cosmos as a whole
does not seem to present this harmony, as collisions actually occur.
Astronomers tell us that the units of the starry hosts are moving in
all directions and that collisions are inevitable, though at such
vast intervals, owing to the inconceivable spaces, that human time
can take no note of them. A billion of our years, like a billion of
our miles, count for but little in the infinitudes of the universe.
When we try to think that the universe had a creator, that there
was a time when it did not exist, that it was called into being by
a power apart from itself, do we not fall down completely? We can,
of course, think in arbitrary terms; our imaginations are equal to
almost any feat (Lewis Carroll’s was equal to “Alice in Wonderland”;
Dante’s was equal to making the world shudder over his pictures of
the inferno): but the understanding has to have solid ground to go
upon, and where is the solid ground in our idea of creation? We are
off the sphere, alone in space, face to face with the Infinite, and
we have no language in which to express ourselves.
IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE
We habitually think or speak of ourselves as something apart from
Nature, as belonging to some higher order of reality, when, in fact,
we are as much a part of the total scheme of things as are the trees
and the beasts of the field. True, we are separated from them by a
gulf, but the gulf has been bridged, and bridged by Nature, and both
sides are equally her territory.
Nature is the one supreme reality, the sum total of the visible
and invisible bodies and forces that surround us, out of which we
came and of which we form a part. Nature is all things to all men,
because she is the larger fact, and holds an infinite diversity in an
all-embracing unity.
When we come to look upon man in this light, when we see his whole
civilization and all his achievements upon the earth--his science,
his philosophy, his art, his religion, yea, his follies and crimes
and superstitions, his wars and hatreds, as well as his heroism and
devotion--as parts of Nature, as expressions of the same total cosmic
energy as are all things else, we have gained an astronomic point of
view; we see things in orbic completeness.
Nature is all-inclusive. We cannot draw a circle around that circle.
We have so long been wont to solve our riddles by invoking the
supernatural that the habit has become ingrained. We can only do
as Carlyle did, feed our minds with words and fall back upon the
natural-supernatural.
Our attitudes toward Nature differ as widely as do our occupations,
our characters, and our temperaments. There is the direct, practical
attitude of the farmer, the miner, the engineer, the sailor, the
sportsman, the traveler, and the explorer; there is the gay and
holiday attitude of the camper-out and the picnicker; there is the
sympathetic and appreciative attitude of the nature-lover; there is
the imaginative and creative attitude of the artist and the poet;
there is the more or less rapt and mystical attitude of the religious
enthusiast; there is the inquisitive and experimental attitude of the
man of science; and there is the meditative and speculative attitude
of the philosopher.
We almost invariably personify Nature and read our own traits and
limitations into her. We say she is wise or she is foolish; she
is cruel or she is kind; she fails or she succeeds. The early
philosophers said that Nature abhorred a vacuum. Darwin says that
she “tells us in the most emphatic manner that she abhors perpetual
self-fertilization.” There are times when the most rigid man of
science humanizes Nature in this way. We look upon ourselves as
taking liberties with her; we discipline her and train her in the
ways she should go for our good; we pit her forces against one
another. Her flowers, her birds, her sunsets, her rainbows, her
waterfalls, her mountain lakes, her ocean-shores, her midnight skies,
at times move us and lift us above ourselves. On the other hand,
there are times when we frown upon her, or despitefully use her and
call her hard names. When her storms or her frosts or her blights or
her droughts or her insect hordes destroy our crops, or lay waste our
forests or sweep away our buildings or kill our cattle or inundate
our towns and villages, we instinctively look upon her as our enemy,
and, so far as we are able, arm ourselves against her. Emerson
speaks of Nature as that “terrific or beneficent force.” It is both.
Indeed, we may use a stronger adjective and say that at times it is a
malevolent force.
We ascribe all our human qualities and traits to Nature. Indeed, we
can hardly speak of her without personifying her. As we are a part of
her, how can we fail to see our own traits in her? At least, how else
can we interpret her except in terms of our own being? Early man did
this entirely. All the natural forces and appearances took on his own
image, and were for or against him. When we seek to interpret Nature
we still do it in the terms of literature, of poetry. We humanize
her, which means, of course, that we interpret ourselves. Nature
reflects the spirit we bring to her. She is gay, somber, beautiful,
winsome, repellent, wise or foolish, just in the degree in which we
ourselves are capable of these emotions or possess these qualities.
She is terrifying because we have a capacity for terror. She is
soothing when we are in a mood to be soothed. She is sublime only so
far as we have the capacity to experience this emotion.
It is our reactions to Nature that give rise to the qualities we
ascribe to her. The music of the æolian harp is not in the wind; its
origin is the reaction of the harp to the wind, but it is not music
until it reaches the human ear. The colors of the landscape are not
in the rocks and trees and waters, but in the experiences of the eye
when the vibrations of ether which we call light are reflected back
to it from these objects.
We create the world in which we live. I love Nature, but Nature does
not love me. Love is an emotion which rocks and clouds do not feel.
Nature loves me in my fellow beings. The breezes caress me, the
morning refreshes me, the rain on the roof soothes me--that is, when
I am in a mood to be caressed and refreshed and soothed. The main
matter is the part I play in these things. All is directed to me and
you because we are adjusted to all. No more is the kite or the sail
adjusted to the wind, the water-wheel to the falling water, than are
we adjusted to outward Nature. She is the primary and everlasting
fact; we, as living beings, are the secondary and temporary facts.
X. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE
The survival of the fittest does not mean the survival of the best
from the human point of view. The lower orders of humanity are better
fitted to survive than the higher orders--hardier, more prolific,
having a fuller measure of life. The cultivated plants--wheat, corn,
rye, barley, oats--are less fitted to survive than what we call
weeds. The latter can shift for themselves, but the former cannot.
We lament the decay of the native Anglo-Saxon stock in this country,
and the increase of the races from southern Europe and from the
Orient. They stand our pitiless sunlight better than do the
descendants of our Puritan ancestors. From our point of view this
rule of natural selection will not result in a superior race, but in
an inferior; not in better men, but in better animals. Character and
intellect win in those fields where character and intellect tell, but
where muscle and brawn and vitality tell more they fail.
The Japanese have great power of survival; they are hardy, prolific
and pushing. The Germans also have great survival power, greater
than the French; they are more prolific, more materialistic, nearer
the brutes; they are not handicapped with much soul. They are
morally blind, but intellectually clever. Their moral blindness and
insensibility have resulted in their downfall. Great Britain leads
the European nations because she is not only hardy and prolific, but
she also has the gift of empire; she builds upon law and order; she
establishes justice and fair play.
In the Darwinian sense the Jews are the fittest to survive of all the
races of man. They are prolific and grasping; they will always get
what belongs to them, and a little more; they are bound to possess
the earth. The only drawback I see is that they do not take kindly to
the soil. Trade alone will not give a nation the supremacy.
XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE
Think how we come into the world, what an important thing it is to
each of us and to the world, and yet how fortuitous and haphazard it
all is, and what precautions are often taken to prevent our coming!
See the deformed, the half-witted, the low-browed, the degenerate,
that come. The great army of the common, the few capable of higher
and finer things. Nature apparently finds her account in one class
the same as in the other, in Pat as well as in Paul, in the inferior
races as well as in the higher.
In our manufacturing affairs we aim to turn out the best article
possible--the best shoe, the best hat, the best gun, the best book;
but Nature makes no such effort in the case of man, though she does
in the case of the lower orders. Probably every individual bird or
bug or four-footed beast in a state of nature is perfect of its
kind, that is, suited to its place in the scheme of organic life. But
how different with man! It is the price he pays for his freedom, his
power of choice. The birds and the beasts have no power of choice,
they are entirely in the hands of Nature. They are all moulded to one
pattern.
The advantage that comes to man from his power of choice is greater
variation, hence greater progress. He crosses or reverses or turns
aside the laws of Nature, or bends them to his will, and for this
privilege he pays the price of idiocy, deformity, and the vast mass
of commonplace humanity. His gain is now and then men of exceptional
ability, geniuses, who lead the race forward. We know that every
improved breed of chicken or sheep or swine will come true, but we
do not know in anything like the same degree of certainty that the
Emersons and the Lincolns and the Tennysons will repeat and continue
the type. Cultivated fruit relapses in the seed, and cultivated
persons often do the same.
On the other hand, rude and ordinary humanity now and then far
transcends itself in its offspring, just as the new and choice apple
or peach or plum has its humble origin in a seedling.
XII. ILLUSIONS
In his “Conduct of Life” Emerson has an essay on “Illusions” in which
he describes the semblance to midnight skies paved with stars which
the guide produces in the Mammoth Cave by hiding himself and throwing
the rays of his torch athwart the ceiling set thick with transparent
rock crystals. The effect is quite startling. For the moment it is
hard to resist the conviction that you are actually looking upon the
cloudless sky at night. But in reality is not the noonday sky just as
much of an illusion, except that there are no mimic stars? The blue
dome overhead is an illusion. There is no dome there. The sky is a
mere apparition. It is not a body or a reality as it seems to be;
it is mere empty space, though it has the effect upon us of a vast
blue dome. How genial and inviting it looks when we see it peeping
through the clouds, and how glorious when we see it swept free from
clouds! Its purity, its serenity, its elevated character, move us to
regard it as the abode of superior beings. The telescope dispels our
illusions; the sky is not a transparent realm, but only an extension
of earthly conditions. Heaven, the abode of the blest, takes its name
from this negation of vacancy. Our notions of a personal God are
similar illusions. God is as real as the sky is, and no more so, even
though in our devout moods we lift our eyes heavenward and identify
him with this comforting illusion.
All our life illusions brood over us. The night is only a shadow--the
negation of light; and yet it plays a part in our lives as real as
that of health or friends or climate, as real, but of another kind.
Time itself is an illusion. The future does not exist nor the past;
yet how are our lives influenced by the memory of the one and our
anticipations of the other!
The world is, indeed, full of illusion. We fancy that luminous
bodies shoot out rays of light such as we appear to see when we look
at them. We see beams and scintillations when we look at the stars
and the sun; but is it not all a trick of the eye? The light from a
luminous body goes out in all directions, not in separated rays, but
as vibrations in the ether. When we throw a stone into a still pool
of water a wave motion is set up which spreads in concentric circles.
But the vibrations called “light,” considered as a whole, assume the
form of a sphere; they go from the luminous body to every point of
a hollow sphere. We see a star as a bright point in the sky, but if
the universe were full of eyes, every eye could see that star; its
light goes to every point of the hollow sphere of Infinity. But no
more than does the light of the candle in your hand, or the lamp on
your table go to Infinity, if unobstructed. Stars which cannot be
seen by the most powerful telescope must yet radiate their light into
infinite space. Is that light lost? Modern science seems to hold to
the view that in the ether of space no rays of light can ever be
lost. What becomes of them? It is certain that a wavelet in a lake
can be lost if the lake is large enough. It soon dies out. It becomes
dissipated. Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered or
turned into heat or light or electricity, and the waves that break
and die upon the beach, no matter how cold they are, give up their
energy as heat. They must raise the temperature some fraction of a
degree.
XIII. IS NATURE SUICIDAL?
Emerson never committed himself to a belief in immortality as usually
understood--continued existence in another world; but he was always
on the lookout for hints and suggestions to spur his lagging faith on
the subject. He read Martial and praised his literary faculty. He is
the true writer, he said, a chemical and not a mechanical mixture:
“Martial suggests again, as every purely literary book does, the
immortality. We see we are wiser than we were: we are older. Can
Nature afford to lose such improvements? Is Nature a suicide?” The
same questions I have heard Whitman ask, questions asked probably by
thoughtful men in all ages.
But are not such questions prompted by our own petty economies? We
must save what we have gained. Not so Nature. Gain and loss with her
are one. All is hers. She has infinite time, and infinite abundance.
How can she afford so many dead worlds and burnt-out suns scattered
throughout sidereal space, like boulders in a New England field? How
can she afford to wait millions of years before life comes to the
superior planets, if it ever comes? What economy is that which strews
the way of evolution with untold numbers of extinct species? What
economy is that which makes one species prey upon another?--which
undoes with one hand what she achieves with the other? Nature was
millions of years in bringing man out of the earth,--the end and
flower of her whole scheme from our point of view,--and probably
in far less time he will have disappeared from the earth. How can
she afford it? “Is Nature suicidal?” She certainly is, tried by
our standards. Not that she is less than we, but so inconceivably
more. She plays the game for her own amusement. She evaporates the
rivers and the seas, confident that the water will come back again.
She keeps the currents going; the ebb and flow never cease. Night
and day, life and death, go hand in hand. Her “improvements” are
improvements for a day, an hour, a moment--like snowflakes on the
river--“a moment white, then gone forever.” They are crystals that
perish, flowers that fall. Nature knows no exhaustion; she can repeat
the process continuously. Only the unlimited is inexhaustible. The
infinite goes on forever. Our economics pale in the face of Nature’s
prodigalities. A race like the Greeks perishes, and Nature’s treasury
is still full. Every spring in our climate the marvel of leaf and
flower is repeated in the plants and forests, and every fall the work
is undone. The great, the noble, the heroic, youth, age, manhood,
womanhood, fail and disappear, and still the game goes on. The rivers
drain the hills and mountains, and still they never run dry. Spring
and summer do not exhaust the fertility of Nature. The rivers carry
the soil into the sea, but they do not carry it off the globe. We
cannot defertilize the earth. What the seas lose, the clouds gain;
what the clouds lose, the earth gains; what the hills lose, the sea
gains; and so the circle is complete.
Nature has her own economies that answer to our own. In the use of
means to an end, as in the living world, there must be economy of
time, of space, of power; there must be adjustments, compensations,
and so on. In the tropics vegetation takes its time. No hurry; the
heat does not fail. In the temperate zone there is less time, and
the pace of vegetation is faster. In the frigid zone it is faster
still, the time is brief; there is no prodigality of leaf and stalk
and flower; hurry up is the cry. The stalk is short, the flowering is
brief, the goal is the seed which must be matured. In our climate,
if a plant gets a later start, or is cut down and compelled to bloom
again,--for example, the burdock,--how it hastens, how it pushes out
its seed-vessels from the main stalk! The late fall dandelions do not
indulge in long stalks; they bloom close to the ground and develop
their down-seed balloons or parachutes at once. In the Far North the
willow and birch are mere running vines, but they achieve fruit.
The economy of living nature is the basis of our economy; we improve
upon it, we take a short cut, we save time and save power. We trim
our trees, we remove obstructions, we fertilize, we graft, we sow
and plant. Nature is prodigal of her spawn and pollen to offset the
element of chance that enters into the action of the winds and the
waves.
The wild creatures have their instinctive economies and ways of
getting on in the world. They prepare for the winter; they provide
for their young; they practice the arts of concealment; they are
wise for their own good; they do not commit suicide. The plants have
their economies, and the insects have theirs, but when we talk of
the economy of Nature, we are beyond soundings. Nature cannot spend
more than she earns; her ledgers always balance; her capital cannot
be impaired. There is no waste, in our sense, in the universe. Can
you destroy magnetism by pulverizing the magnet? Would electricity be
quenched if no storm-cloud ever again appeared in the sky?
XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY
Is it not reassuring to know that we cannot get out of the
universe--that whatever is real about us cannot be destroyed, but can
only suffer change? All the elements that enter into my body must
persist; they always have persisted through all the vicissitudes of
astronomic and geologic time. We are as sure of that as we are sure
of anything, and we are sure that they will continue in some form
to exist. We believe it without proof. Our scientific faith carries
us over this gulf--our faith in the oneness and integrity of the
universe. Is there anything real, in the same sense, in what we call
our minds or souls? Huxley was convinced that consciousness was as
real as matter and energy, and must persist like them--persist in
other persons who follow us; but how about our individual selves?
And how about consciousness when the race of man becomes extinct?
We can only take refuge in the thought that consciousness will
dawn and continue in other worlds through all time, or rather
endless time, since the all of a thing implies limits. Equally to
make consciousness coeval with matter and energy, we must think
of it as having existed in other worlds throughout an endless and
beginningless past. But my consciousness and your consciousness
are bound up with certain combinations of matter which we know are
unstable--in fact, are the result, in a sense, of their instability,
their ceaseless change.
In the final change, which we call death, what happens to
consciousness? When we try to think of it in terms of our actual
experience with tangible bodies, we think of it as gone out,
non-existent, as truly so as is the flame of the candle when we blow
it out, or as is the star form of the snowflake when it is melted.
Does it help us any to think of the soul, or consciousness, in terms
of the imponderable bodies--light, electricity, radio-activity?
Do all these wireless messages that go forth into the air, go on
forever? Do these impulses reach the farthest stars, and still
persist? Do our thoughts persist upon the ether? Here, in this room,
here in this air that you may inclose with your two hands, are
vibrating wireless messages from far and near, though we are not
able to detect them. Here also the ether may be tremulous with the
thoughts of our friends on the other side of the globe, yes, and with
the thoughts of our friends who have ceased to live, as we know life.
The ether of space may still be vibrating with the thoughts of Plato
and Aristotle, of Moses and Solomon.
Do we impress ourselves momentarily upon the ether around us,
and is this what the mediums and the clairvoyants recover? Is
the persistence of our thoughts upon the ether the secret of the
mind-reader’s art, and of all the marvelous things disclosed by
psychic research? Is this the only immortality, the immortality of
the endless persistence of vibrations from our brains? Or must we
think of our personalities as disembodied and drifting about as
separate entities in the great Nowhere?
Though a dreamer and an idealist, I am only truly interested in a
natural explanation of things--an explanation that is in harmony with
our experiences in this world. The so-called supernatural explanation
does not interest me at all. We cannot grasp it and bring it to the
test of reason and experience. It is like a bridge with one or more
spans missing--only faith can carry us over, and faith that has
nothing to stand upon cannot really carry us over. It travels in a
circle, and leaves us where it found us.
Energy is certainly one of the realities of the cosmos, though we may
not be able to form a concept of it as we do of matter. We cannot
visualize it. We know it only through its effects upon tangible
bodies. Why may there not be a principle of life or vitality as
real as is energy--another form of energy which we can know only
through its effects upon matter; inseparably bound up with matter as
energy is; not with all matter, but with a limited amount of matter,
as is magnetism--a peculiar form of force or energy, dependent
for its manifestations upon well-defined conditions and reaching
its highest manifestations in the mind or consciousness of man.
Spirit, as we name it, is only a word which stands for no verifiable
reality--something separable from matter and independent of it.
What victims we are of words! When we get a name for a thing we are
persuaded the thing exists. The vital process is inseparable from
the physical processes; it supplements or controls them, but is more
than they are. Life is not a spirit, but a form of energy potential
in matter, and developed and active when the conditions are right.
A living body is moved by a new force just as truly as a piece of
magnetized steel is moved by a new force, or as truly as a new force
streams through the telegraph-wires--a transformation of other
forces, and behaving in a new way, and producing new results. There
is nothing new under the sun; all are made of one stuff; but there
are endless transformations and permutations of this one stuff, and
one of them is the phenomenon of life, or vitality.
Electricity is not matter, but it is the most unmistakable and
ubiquitous form of energy known to us. The human mind is a phenomenon
of matter; how related to the electro-magnetic world we know not, but
undoubtedly in some way bound up with it.
To discuss the soul or attempt to interpret it in terms of these
mundane forces will, of course, offend the so-called spiritualists.
So long have we been taught to look upon the soul as belonging to
another world, another order of things from that of the body. Whitman
says that soul and body are one, and leaves his puzzled reader to
solve the riddle as best he can. Heaven and earth are one in the same
sense--there is nothing alien or irreconcilable between them. The
flower and its stalk, the perfume and the root, are one in the same
sense. The mind resides in the gray matter of the brain, and depends
upon the food we eat as truly as does the body.
When we discuss these questions in terms of our religious training
we reach far different conclusions, or, rather, we start with far
different conclusions; but how can we relate these conclusions to the
concrete facts as we know them?
There is enough that is verifiable in clairvoyance and mind-reading
and mental healing to convince us that we are immersed in a world
of subtle forces that ordinarily we wot not of; that in some way a
process of give and take between us and these things is constantly
going on, and that our relation to them is at least one form or
suggestion of our immortality. We are a part of the wave of energy
that sweeps through the cosmos, as truly as the drops of the sea hold
and convey the tidal impulse. We know, or think we know, the sources
of this tidal impulse, but the attraction between earth and moon and
sun is reciprocal--a give-and-take process--and is only a phase of
the sum total (if the Infinite can be said to have a sum total) of
the energy of the cosmos.
The magnet and magnetism are one. If you melt or pulverize the
magnet, you dissipate, but do not destroy the magnetism. The clouds
come and go; now we see them, and then there is only blue sky where
they were. Change, but not destruction. When the thunder-cloud
disperses, where are its terrible bolts? Withdrawn, probably, or
redistributed into the inmost recesses of matter or of the ether. The
energy of the human brain and body cannot be destroyed by death, only
changed. If consciousness is a force, then it, too, must persist. It
seems, in some way, the equivalent of the force of the body, at least
one of its phenomena. But is it anything more than the analogue of
the light which the electric spark emits, and which is light only
to the eye? Consciousness is such only to itself; it cannot be seen
or felt or known by other consciousnesses. What we know about the
consciousnesses of others, we know through our own.
In the presence of the death of our friends no doubt this is a
cheerless and depressing kind of philosophy, but in the pursuit of
truth, if we are sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm
and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness will be measured
by the extent to which we put all these things behind us. Heroic
self-denial finds a field here as well as in the struggles of life.
We do not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter how
welcome they are. “All’s right with the world.” The laws of life and
death are as they should be. The laws of matter and force are as they
should be; and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good.
I have had life on those terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course
of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where
you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the
soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love
me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may
never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My
elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which
they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful,
divine cosmos.
XIV
SOUNDINGS
I. THE GREAT MYSTERY
No man in his senses can fail to grant the reality of the Great
Mystery, the inscrutable and unspeakable Something which lies back of
us and works in and through us, the vast Cosmic Energy of which we
and all forms of life are manifestations, and in which we live and
move and have our being, call it physical energy or psychic power, or
what you will.
We are not here by our wills; we do not have our eyes and ears,
and the other wonderful mechanisms of our bodies, and all our
varied instincts and capacities and aspirations of our own will and
invention. We have little or nothing to do with the functioning of
our various bodily organs, scarcely more than we have to do with the
color of our eyes, our innate dispositions, and our mental aptitudes.
In something not of us, at least not subject to our wills and
wishes, is to be sought the explanation of our appearance, and that
of all other forms of life, in this world. In other words, we are
an integral part of a system of things which transcends our powers
and baffles our understanding. After we have granted all this, can
we still feel the solid ground beneath our feet in accepting the
explanation and interpretation which any of the formal religious
systems, old or new, place upon it? I think not.
In the presence of the midnight skies, of the creative and
destructive cosmic processes constantly going on in the awful depths
of the sidereal space, of suns and systems coming in and going out
like blooming and fading flowers, in the presence of the geological
and biological histories of the globe, or of the histories of the
different nations and races of the globe, does not most of our
Christian mythology seem utterly childish?
How strange that we should crave a creed or a belief that goes
outside of our experimental knowledge; that is independent of it,
not subject to its tests and limitations; something afar off and
irrational and inexplicable, and beyond the reach of time and change!
Who is the philosopher who said that we are guided by our common
sense in everything but our religious beliefs?
We can taste and see and touch and smell and eat and drink and
measure and accumulate and organize and assimilate scientific
knowledge; it gives us a place whereon to stand our Archimedean lever
with which we can move the world and the whole sidereal system of
worlds. But with our so-called theological knowledge, and with much
of our metaphysical knowledge, it is like trying to move with a lever
the mountain upon which one stands.
Furthermore, grant that the religious sense of mankind is real, one
of the most real things in life,--so real and valuable that the
life, the literature, and the art which have it not seem shallow
and ephemeral,--a living sense of the Infinite Mystery in which we
are embosomed and our constant relation to it,--grant this, I say,
and yet our creeds and systems of salvation do not minister to it.
They are too legal; they know and explain too much. With them the
administration of the universe is as simple and judicial as a police
court, save that in human courts of justice there is no deputed sin
or atonement. This is a gratuitous, manufactured mystery of the
theologians, as are the Trinity and the saving grace of rites and
ceremonies.
Science has real mysteries. Catalysis is one. How or why the presence
of one body should cause two other bodies to unite chemically without
parting with an atom of their own substance--as in several cases in
industrial chemistry--is certainly a mystery. On the strength of such
and similar facts in chemistry, shall we image or invent a whole
category of mysteries which are beyond the reach of verification?
What mystery hovers about all chemical reactions! What a miracle
that two invisible gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, should, when
chemically united, produce a body so utterly unlike either as is
water! The turning of water into wine is as nothing in comparison,
but even that feat we want to see done if we are to believe it.
What a mystery shrouds the whole subject of electricity and
electro-magnetism! A sort of disembodied force, working its will upon
matter and yet subject to none of the laws of matter. Spirit?--but a
spirit we can evoke at will, and make to do our bidding, to run our
errands, a spirit more friendly than unfriendly. How prone the common
mind is to think that because a thing is mysterious it must be true!
As I have already emphasized, as man is a part of Nature, so are all
his creeds and myths, his religions and his philosophies, a part of
Nature. What validity does that give them? What support is lent to
our creed by the fact that it has been slowly evolved out of the
religious experiences of the centuries? Our sense of truth is also
an evolution, and varies from age to age. That a thing is a part
of Nature does not settle its value. Shadows are a part of Nature;
puff-balls, fungi, marsh-gas, disease-germs, and a thousand other
undesirable things are a part of Nature.
Although the various religious systems of mankind must have their
natural history, I regard them only as so many diverse attempts to
clothe the spirit against the cosmic chill of the vast, unhoused,
unsanctified, immeasurable out-of-doors of the universe. This they
do in varying degrees, and will continue to do, some appealing to
one type of mind, or--shall we say?--one stage of development, some
to another. The philosopher looks on and smiles, or pities, and is
content.
II. THE NATURAL ORDER
Even great thinkers like Mr. Balfour recoil from naturalism and
cheerfully embrace supernaturalism. Mr. Balfour finds the key to the
fundamental problems of life in the miracle of the Incarnation. He
injects into the natural order a theological concept, and the riddle
of man’s life is solved. To the naturalist such a conclusion is as
impossible as to hope to quench his thirst with the symbols, H_{2}O.
We may say every man born of woman is an incarnation of the
Infinite spirit, and the hyperbole may stand, but to affirm that
one particular man in the historic period was an incarnation in an
entirely other and more significant sense, is to read magic into
matters of common sense. It is an imaginary solution. It is an appeal
from the natural to the non-natural. It is offering an artificial
solution to a natural problem. One might as well attribute a failure
of the crops to one of the political parties, or an epidemic of
disease to an historical document. The doctrine of the Incarnation
is as far outside the realm of natural law as is magic, and to see
in this the master key to creation is like ascribing all the sin
and misery of the world to Adam’s transgression in the Garden of
Eden. The childish plan of salvation of our fathers is as good as
any other so long as it holds men up to higher standards of life and
of thought; but the day is fast passing when it can do this; natural
standards must in the end as surely prevail in religion as in our
daily lives.
The nature that we see about us is enough for all forms of life
except man; why should he flatter himself that his appearance and
life demand something extra, some miracle, something mysterious and
incomprehensible? Why not invest the gods we have and know with the
extra power demanded, rather than appeal to gods we know not? How
the fire warms us, how our food nourishes us, how we sprang from a
microscopic germ and grew to be the men we are, are miracles enough.
Every living thing is a miracle as wonderful as the Immaculate
Conception or the Incarnation, but of a different order. If I knew
how the meat and bread which the poet eats is turned into poetry,
or how the pond-lily weaves its satin and gold out of the muck and
slime of the creek-bottom, I should possess a secret that would make
me cease to wonder at the so-called “miracles.” In the face of the
marvels we hourly see about us in living Nature, why should we look
afar off and invent marvels of a new order? Why should we invent
impossible problems, and then invent impossible explanations of them?
The nature gods we know; we live in daily and hourly converse with
them; we see and know that we are dependent upon them every moment
of our lives. These gods--air, water, fire, earth--and the greater
gods whose eyes blink to us in the midnight skies, why not credit
them with the gifts that we ascribe to the imaginary gods of the
supernatural?
The more we search into the ways of Nature, the more wonderful and
potent we find them to be. It may be that if we could penetrate to
the true inwardness of matter, we should find the key to the mystery
of the soul and the master key to all our problems. But we feel that
we must look afar off, we must have recourse to the strange and the
miraculous. How the impossible does attract us! Even the fantastic
may be made the basis of a religious cult. In Florida, in a remote,
secluded place we found a religious sect, embracing men and women
of culture and refinement, who upheld the social and civic virtues
and cultivated the industrial arts, yet who deemed it essential for
their soul’s salvation to disbelieve all our popular astronomy, and
hold to the idea that, instead of living on the outside of a globe,
we live inside of a hollow sphere, and that the sun, moon, and stars
are appendages of this sphere, and not at all what we ordinarily take
them to be. The expounders of this faith are not at all disturbed by
such facts as a ship at sea dropping below the horizon, or an eclipse
of the moon showing the shadow of a round body falling upon it.
Such appearances only confirm their theory. These Florida fanatics
defy common sense and the exact demonstrations of science. Our
supernaturalists superinduce another order above and around the order
we call “natural,” and in a theological concept, the Incarnation,
link the two together. That they are linked at any other point is not
claimed. In the age of miracles they were linked at many points and
on many occasions. Any saint could link them together at will, and
reverse or hold up the processes of the natural order and substitute
those of the supernatural.
Such events as miracles come very easy to the mind imbued with the
old theological concepts. Why should not this omnipotent being who
made and rules the world and all that it holds, and who has a scheme
of his own to carry out with regard to man, step in at any time and
annul natural law or link it up with the supernatural? Belief in the
theory of such a being cuts many knots, while it ties others that
defy all our wits.
Life is so great a mystery that we need not invent others. We have
the proof of life always, what proof have we of the Incarnation? We
know what destroys life, what favors it, what conserves it, but we
do not know its origin. We know something about the stars, and we
know the constellations are only imaginary groupings. The historical
events upon which our creeds are founded are of the same character.
The Trinity is a constellation. The miraculous birth of Christ is a
constellation. The fixed stars of man’s moral nature and religious
aspirations are alone real. All the mythologies built upon them are
as fanciful as Orion and the Big Dipper. All the various religions of
the world, with all their supernatural features, are a part of the
natural history of man’s religious instincts. Man’s craving for the
supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment,
and no more significant. The natural becomes trite and commonplace
to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.
The understanding becomes sated, and we long for something we cannot
understand.
III. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
Of late years I am often moved to say to myself: “Why kick the old
theology after it is dead?”--as I have often been tempted to do.
It is almost like spurning the bodies of one’s father and mother.
The old creeds may be outworn, but they have fathered and mothered
us all. They have served and saved untold generations of men.
Christianity, mythical and irrational as much of it is, has yet been
the salvation of the world for nineteen centuries. Of course it has
been a source of evil as well as of good, as all religions are, but
the good has greatly predominated. In fact, it is the bed-rock upon
which our civilization is founded. It has saved men in this world by
inspiring them with the desire to be worthy of a better and future
world.
We are saved, I often say, not so much by the truth of what we
believe, as by the truth of our belief, by its genuineness, its power
over our imaginations, its hold upon our character, its fostering
of an incentive to right conduct and noble deeds. Whether it be
Catholicism or Calvinism or Methodism or Quakerism or Christian
Science or the Japanese ancestor worship or Buddhism, if it holds us
to higher ideals and gives sobriety and sincerity to our lives, that
is its true function.
In fact, any religion is good which supplies a man or a people with
a workable theory of the universe. In practical matters, in dealing
with real facts and forces, man is compelled to be logical or he
comes to grief--he must keep fire and powder apart. But in his
religion and speculations he is bound by no such necessity; he is
free to indulge the wildest dreams.
Man does not expect fire or flood or frost or wind or rain to favor
him. He does not put fluids in leaky vessels, nor a leaky roof
over his head, nor plant his house on a foundation of sand. His
carpenter’s level does not lie, nor his plumb-line make a mistake.
But in his religion he may be as capricious and fantastic as he
pleases; he has a free hand; he may even flog his gods if they
displease him, and it is all the same. His creed is a passport to an
entirely different world.
The religious sect which I visited in Florida, which held that we
live upon the inside of a hollow sphere, treated our astronomy with
scorn, yet seemed to live sober, sane lives, and to do honest work.
But if they carried out the theory of the hollow sphere in practice,
in their navigation, in their clocks and sun-dials, or in anything
else, how quickly they would come to grief!
Christianity is a workable hypothesis; it solves the problem of
life to vast numbers of persons; but how irrational and puerile its
philosophy, founded upon the myth of the fall of Adam in the Garden
of Eden! Destroy this myth and you have cut off the tap-root of
Christianity. But do we not know, in the light of evolution, that
man’s course has been upward and not downward, that his “fall” was,
in fact, development into a higher state of being?
Thinking men must find some sort of a solution of the problems of the
universe, and feeling men and women must have some tangible, concrete
thing that in a measure satisfies their emotional natures. The human
heart cannot live on cold philosophical abstractions. The ceremonies
and observances and rituals of the Church give one something he can
see and feel. For my own part I do not need this sort of thing. Every
day is a Sabbath day to me. All pure water is holy water, and this
earth is a celestial abode. It has not entered into the mind of any
man to see and feel the wonders and the mysteries and the heavenly
character of this world.
All religions look away from the earth to some fairer and better
abode, quite oblivious of the fact that heaven, wherever we find it,
will be of our own making. If we do not find it here, we shall not
find it anywhere. But the great mass of struggling, toiling, human
kind must be comforted and encouraged by the prospect of emancipation
from the grossness and suffering of this world. Goethe acutely said
to let those who could not have literature or art or science, have
religion.
Think of the many sturdy, God-fearing, church-going, simple folk one
has known in his youth--how impossible their creeds, but how worthy
their lives! It requires the heroic fiber to accept the creed of
Calvinism; it is a proposition that tries a man’s mettle. The current
generation is too frivolous and empty to be impressed by it; not
one in a thousand is man enough to accept it. The movies suit them
better. But what granite stuff went to the making of our Pilgrim
fathers!
Cease all Christian effort, all organized Christian charities, all
Christian enterprises in the fields of education, social betterment,
sanitation, amelioration of the masses, and our civilization would
suffer. Then why rail at the old creeds, I say again. They prepared
the way for science, and for the religion of nature. Carlyle said
to Emerson on that memorable day in 1833 when the two sat down in
their walk over the Scottish hills, “Christ died on the tree: that
built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together.” The
old creeds nursed heroic, God-fearing and God-loving men. True, they
sometimes disguised the wolf in sheep’s clothing also, but that is
the fault of human nature.
Let us be as faithful to our day and generation as our fathers were
to theirs. Wendell Phillips said that to be as good as our fathers
were, we must be a good deal better. Shall we rail at our Puritan
ancestors for the hardness of their creeds? Although the Pauline plan
of salvation seems childish to us, it seemed the foundation of the
universe for our fathers. To clinch a nail you need something hard,
and the Calvinistic creed has clinched the resolution of many a man.
IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK
It makes me more charitable toward my neighbor’s creed, childish
though I think it is, to remember that it came out of his life,
or out of the life around him, as truly as did my own. We cannot
separate man, and all that revolves around him, from the totality
of things. There is no depravity or cruelty or perversion in the
world that is not fed by the life of the world. The war that has
depopulated and devastated Europe is just as legitimate a part
of total Nature as were all the fruits of the ages of peace and
prosperity. Everything in the woods is a part of the woods, and bears
their stamp; everything in the sea is a part of the sea. The tumor,
the ulcer, and the disease, are a part of our bodies, and are fed by
its vitality. In our practical lives we are compelled to separate
a part from the whole, to accept this and reject that, but when we
essay to comprehend the whole we must see that all are but parts, and
that our philosophy is lame if it does not see that the so-called
good and the so-called bad are fruit of the same tree.
We are prone to separate ourselves from the rest of Nature and to
claim for ourselves much that we deny to all other animals, such as
the existence of the soul, and its immortality. But we are all of
one stuff. Out of the earth has come a creature that has changed the
surface of the earth over vast areas; that has changed the course of
rivers, and the face of continents; that has harnessed the forces of
the earth and turned them against themselves. How the earth elements
came to organize themselves into this creature--here we can take no
step!
V. A PERSONAL GOD
I once heard an Irish laborer refer solemnly, with an upward lift
of the head, to the man up above. He did not refer to the man down
below, but no doubt might have done so had occasion required. If we
have one, we must have the other to keep the balance. The man up
above must keep his skirts clean, and to admit of this the man down
below must be the scapegoat.
How long has the belief in the reality of these two manlike beings,
the one all good, the other all evil, ruled in the minds and hearts
of men! The old Hebrew prophets were drunk with the idea of a manlike
Jehovah. A terrible man they made of him--a cruel, despotic ruler,
wreaking his vengeance on his enemies, exacting an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth, a lover of righteousness, but a vengeful,
jealous, angry God. And the man down below was his fit counterpart,
blocking and marring or defeating the plans of the man up above.
These conceptions go with the infancy of the human reason.
So many phases of our religious belief are the result of imperfect
knowledge and false conceptions of the world in which we live! They
come down to us from an earlier time, when the earth was regarded as
the center of the universe, all other bodies revolving around it. Man
lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven in an appeal to the heavenly
powers.
It seems as if the religious sense of the mass of mankind was, by
the operation of some psychological law, forced to externize and
visualize, yes, and humanize, the object upon which its interest
centers. Orthodox religion, while proclaiming that God is a spirit,
that He is everywhere, that He fills all nature, that not a sparrow
falls to the ground without his notice, and that heaven is not a
place, but a state of mind, yet makes its God a personal being,
endowed with our human attributes, with likes and dislikes, sorely
tried by our sins and weaknesses; nearer us sometimes than at others,
present everywhere, yet abiding in one particular place called
heaven--these and many other childish and contradictory things.
That keen, clear-minded man, Cardinal Newman, regarded God under the
image of a maker, detached absolutely like any human workman from
the work of his hand. He is the Eternal King, absolutely distinct
from the world as being its center,--“Upholder, Governor, and
Sovereign Lord.” “He created all things out of nothing, and preserves
them every moment, and could destroy them as He made them.” “He is
separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all his
attributes.” This being is always described and interpreted in terms
of man, or of our own finite human nature, reflecting in his outlines
human history, human political and social institutions, and the aims
and objects of concrete human beings. He does not hesitate to relate
this God to “every movement which has convulsed and refashioned the
surface of the earth,” and hence to make him responsible for the
death and destruction and misery which have attended earthquakes and
have set back the tide of human progress. Of course every noxious
insect, every noxious plant and beast and death-dealing germ is from
Him also. “Wars when just” are from Him also. Who or what are they
from when they are not just, the great Cardinal does not say. Can
both sides be just? Into such absurdities does the conception of a
manlike God lead us.
The modern scientific mind, quite as imaginative--if not more so--as
the typical theological mind, never gets mired in such contradictions
or tangled up in such childish anthropomorphism. Such confusion
arises out of the habit of mind which sees the whole creation
directed to man; his good is its one object and aim, and when his
good suffers, something has miscarried. The cruel and destructive
things in nature can only be accounted for on the theory that some
aboriginal calamity, like the fall of man, had visited the world
before God took charge of things.
The naturalist sees this as the best possible world, sees that Nature
is not an indulgent stepmother, but a strict disciplinarian; that
the good and well-being of all is her aim; that suffering and defeat
are relative; that God’s ways to man are not justified in a day or a
week, or in this place or that, but require ages and continents to
come to their full fruition. The good and the evil that will come
out of the terrible World War will not all be apparent this year, or
next, but only in the perspective of history--in the sum total of
human progress of the ages. Such a view is a slap in the face of our
egotism which demands instant returns, and which makes the individual
supreme.
With Nature, as I have so often said, our standards of good and
evil apply to us alone, and they change with the changing years.
The naturalist sees that pain and delay and defeat are the price
of development; that the world is imperfect, and man is imperfect,
because growth and development are the law of nature; that there is
always a higher level, and always will be, which we realize only when
we look back. A perfect world, as we use the term, would mean the end
of all development.
VI. THE ETERNAL
How much is in a name! When we call the power back of all God,
it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance,
persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and
summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and
sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes,
of jungles and wildernesses, of disease and death, too, but these
things make it all the more real to us.
The word “God” has so long stood for the conception of a being who
sits apart from Nature, who shapes and rules it as its maker and
governor. It is part of the conception of a dual or plural universe,
God and Nature. This offends my sense of the oneness of creation.
It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total
problem of life and Nature than what is called “pantheism,” which
identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all
these diverse manifestations one absolute being. As Emerson truly
says, pantheism does not belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes
the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which
we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation.
The moment we seek to interpret the Eternal in terms of our own
psychology, we get into trouble. We cannot measure the Infinite by
the standards of the finite. Our economies, our methods, our aims are
not those of Nature. God, in the sense in which I use the term, does
not plan and design and adapt means to ends as does man. God is no
more the maker than He is the thing made. How natural for us to think
that the air was made for us to breathe, the water for us to drink,
the light for us to see, and the earth for us to inhabit! But these
things are older than we are. I have seen a pumpkin growing in the
fence and fitting exactly into the niche amid the rails, but was not
the fence there before it was?
There is design in Nature, but not in the sense that there is design
in human affairs and contrivances. There is no designer. There are
living machines, but no machinist. Things grow. Evolution is a vital
process. Man’s course is a right line, Nature’s is a circle. Man
aims to cut out the waste, the pain, the failures. How does Nature
trim her trees or renew her forests or weed her gardens? Only by a
survival of the fittest or the luckiest. Every branch that dies and
decays and falls from the tree does so at the risk of the health
and well-being of the whole tree. Often the decayed branch leaves a
hole that in time causes the death of the tree. See how evenly the
pine and spruce and hemlock and oak forests get planted by Nature’s
haphazard method, but think of the time involved! But what is time
to the Eternal? Man cuts out the time and gets his forest quickly.
He trims his wood and avoids the danger of delays and decaying wood.
He selects such plants for his garden as he desires, and avoids the
dangers of the struggle to survive. He takes the side of the weak
against the strong, but Nature favors only the strong.
The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. The weather goes its way
irrespective of you and me. Storm, tempest, frost, drought, sunshine,
are no respecters of persons. The seasons came and went before man
appeared, just as they do now. The Eternal never takes sides as
man takes sides, but because it does not, should we lose faith?
The Eternal takes sides as the sun takes sides, and not otherwise.
The light shines for all. Providence is a universal beneficence.
The clouds go their way. The beneficence is seen in the slow
amelioration of meteoric conditions through countless æons, till the
cloud and the bow appeared, and with them conditions favorable to
life. The impartial rains are oblivious to our human needs, but, as I
so often say, they are on the side of life. They are on the side of
development. They made the sublime drama of evolution possible.
The weather favored us æons before we were born, because it favored
life. Therefore, when we say that the Eternal is neither for us nor
against us, we mean in our special human sense. He is on the side of
the righteous only when the righteous live according to the rule of
Nature or rightness, or in harmony with the eternal order. And he is
against the unrighteous when they transgress this order. In vain do
we pray for victory on the eve of battle, except in so far as prayer
puts courage into our hearts. Victory is for him who marshals the
physical and moral forces the most skillfully. The victory is from
the Eternal whoever wins, because it is the fruit of the order which
It established, or, rather, which It is.
As we cannot get away from Nature, we cannot get away from the
Eternal. He sticketh closer than a brother, closer than the blood in
our own hearts, not always to bless and to cheer, often to hinder
and depress. Not all ease and joy is life; it is as often struggle,
tears, defeat.
Not by placing God afar off in the heavens--a supersensuous,
supermundane, supernatural being--do we make the problem easier.
Not till we bring Him down to earth and incarnate Him (the old myth
of Christ again), and identify Him with everything without us and
within--not till God becomes man--do we see a light under the feet of
Fate; not till then do we see love and fatherhood and brotherhood and
sacrifice and humility and beneficence and altruism in Nature. When
we see man as a part of Nature, we see him as a part of God.
In humanity alone do we see the face of justice, of mercy, of
charity, of forgiveness, of reverence, of renunciation--human
virtues, they, too, come out of the heart of Nature. If this is a
hard gospel, still it is tangible, real, livable. We cannot live
other than on familiar terms with Nature. In her we see the sources
of our power, our help, our health. We know the conditions of our
well-being. We know the price we have to pay for each blessing. Our
reason, our intelligence, we come by honestly and inevitably. Their
fountainhead is in Nature.
Amid the agony and turmoil of war we need not lose faith. We know
that Nature is still Nature. If disease and pestilence and famine
rage, we know that there are weapons with which to fight them. We
know that order comes out of chaos, that life comes out of death. We
have neither to curse our gods nor to praise them, neither to do
penance nor to offer burnt offerings, but only to take and use wisely
the gifts they bestow.
VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY
What difficulties and contradictions we fall into the moment we
identify Nature with God, and what equal or greater difficulties we
fall into if we refuse to identify Nature with God! True it is that
in the former case we bring God very near and make him very real; we
see and feel our direct and continuous dependence upon Him--indeed,
that we are a part of Him; that every breath we draw, and every
thought we think, and every pound of energy we put forth is in and
through Him; and that we can no more wander or escape from Him than
we can escape gravity or chemical affinity. There are no skeptics or
atheists in regard to Nature. It alone exists and goes on forever.
But here comes the pinch! God as Nature is not only the author of the
good, He is the author of what we call evil also; He is as many-sided
as Nature is. The savage and merciless aspects of Nature are of
Him also; He is in the jungles of Africa, as well as in the walks
of culture and refinement; in the destroying tornado as well as in
the gentle summer breeze; in the overwhelming floods as well as in
the morning dews. He is as much the author of disease as He is of
health; of war, pestilence, famine, as He is of peace, plenty, and
the progress of the world. He is in the trenches and the slaughter
of the contending armies as truly as in the most peaceful and pious
family or social circle in the world. The asphyxiating gases are his,
and the bursting bombs, no less than the breaking hearts and the
prayerful souls at home. The comets that come like apparitions in the
heavens, and then are gone, and the stars that shine steadfastly,
are all a part of the same scheme. The dragons and monsters that
possessed the earth and the fruits thereof for millions of years in
geologic time were the work of that divinity which shapes our ends
to-day.
We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter ourselves that we
belong to another and higher order; that we alone are of divine
origin, and not involved in the fate of the rest of Creation; but
we are fragments of the same granite that forms the foundation of
the earth. “I am stuccoed with birds and quadrupeds all over,”
says Whitman. The reptile was our ancestor; we were cradled in the
old seas; we are kin to the worm and the mollusk; we derive from
creeping, swimming, noisome things, from the slime and mud of the
old sea bottoms, from the cosmic dust and the solar radiations. Why
should we put on superior airs when not one atom of matter will turn
aside for us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save us from
destruction? The vast army of elemental forces knows us not. We may
divert them and bend them to our will, but they heed us not; they
destroy us the moment we lose control.
Nature does not love us any more than she hates us; she goes her way,
indifferent.
The best we can say about it all is that Nature, or the Natural
Providence, is too big for us to grasp; that in these seas we can
find no soundings. But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is
worth living, love always pays; Nature serves us when we know how to
use her; when we plant and sow wisely God will send the increase.
Friendly or unfriendly, of God or of the Devil, the physical forces
have ministered to us. More things have been for us than have been
against us; more winds have blown our barks into safe harbors than
have dashed us upon the rocks. There are more refreshing showers
than devastating tornadoes; more sunshine than forked lightning;
more fertile land upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader
belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. Thorns and spines
and nettles are the exception in vegetation; stings and venomous
fangs are the exception in animal life. Hawks can catch the smaller
birds, yet there are vastly more small birds than hawks. The weasel
can catch the rabbit and the squirrel and the rat, yet there are
ten-fold, fifty-fold, more of these rodents than there are weasels.
The carnivorous beasts of the plains and of the jungle do not
exterminate the herbivorous; there is more good than evil everywhere;
more peace than war; more kindness than cruelty. The God of Nature
goes his way, but his way is our way; we have arisen out of Nature;
as it is, the chances of life have been in our favor; the stream
makes its own channel; the waters find their way to the sea; they
do not all stagnate on the way. Some of the seed which the winds
sow falls upon barren places, but not the most of it. Some men are
born criminals or cripples or malformed, but not the majority. The
creatures preyed upon always vastly outnumber the creatures that prey
upon them. And in truth, in the whole realm of Nature more things
wait upon man than war upon him.
VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE
The unnamable, the unthinkable, the omnipotent, the omnipresent,
we cannot discuss or define in terms of our humanity. The moment
we try to do so we are involved in contradictions, just as we are
when we try to define the sphere in terms of the plane. The sphere
has no length, it has no breadth, it has no thickness, in the sense
that bodies upon its surface have. It has no weight, and it has no
beginning and no end, and we may say that its motion is eternal rest;
yet rest implies motion, and motion implies rest.
When we say that there is no God, we only mean that there is no
being that we can define or conceive of in terms of man. Nothing in
the finite can help us in dealing with the infinite. The Infinite,
the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, cannot be a being without sharing
the limitations of being, or without being subject to the bounds
of time and space. If God is everywhere, He is nowhere; if He is
all-powerful, his power has no contrary, and hence ceases to exist.
One after another the human and personal attributes we ascribe to Him
disappear when we try to conceive of Him in terms of the infinite.
The infinite is equivalent to negation. There are no terms in which
we can define the ether; it is the negative of all things that have
length and breadth and thickness, or motion or rest or substance, or
friction or cohesion, or place or power. An infinite being is as much
a contradiction of terms as a square or plane sphere would be. If
God is a person, with human-like attributes and emotions,--though we
call them divine,--it is legitimate to ask, Where is He? where was He
before the solar systems took form? where will He be after they have
again become formless?
Our inevitable anthropomorphism prefigures the Infinite as superman;
He is man magnified to infinity. He is the supreme king or ruler of
the universe. We dream of seeing Him face to face; He has eyes, ears,
hands, feet, and the emotions of love, anger, pity, and the like. Man
thus imposes his own form upon the power that is and upholds the
cosmos. He carves it into his own image, and then seeks to propitiate
it and influence it as He Himself is propitiated and influenced.
Praise is sweet to it, honor is sweet, revenge is sweet, because
these things are sweet to man.
When we call this force Nature, we bring it near to us and can see
and feel our direct relation to it. We are bone of its bone and
flesh of its flesh. We see its impersonal or unpersonal character.
We get light on the vexed problem of good and evil which is such an
insoluble enigma to the theologians.
Nature embraces all; she fathers and mothers all; has no
partialities, knows no exceptions, no miracles, no deputied
atonements, no evil apart from the good and no good apart from the
evil, no life without death and no death without life.
IX. THE INSOLUBLE
What desperate efforts mankind has made to shape this vast, blind,
unconscionable power we call Nature into an image of a God that would
satisfy our moral and spiritual wants and aspirations! Where did men
get their standards of such a God? They have evidently been slowly
evolved through the friction of man with man. They have possessed
survival value. Love, truth, justice, mercy, have contributed to
the fullness of life and to length of days. One may adopt Biblical
language and say that righteousness endureth forever. The triumph
of the wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season, it
may embrace whole periods of human history, and entail measureless
suffering on the human race, but change and retribution surely
come. The way of man’s moral and material progress is like the
stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now disrupted and noisy in
rapids and falls, now sluggish and almost stagnant in long level
reaches, but which does go forward and reach its goal at last. But
is there not some predetermined bent toward righteousness,--not of
the ecclesiastical sort, but of the scientific sort,--toward the
relations of man with man, that results in the greatest good to the
greatest number,--a bent inherent in the nature of things? Would
evolution have taken the road toward man and all the other forms of
life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started at all had there
not been some initial impulse, or some thought, somewhere, of all
that was to follow?
The doctrine of design does not meet the problem; the doctrine of
chance does not meet it. Design in our human world means a designer.
What, then, does it mean in the non-human world? There can be no
design in such a world, because the human mind is not present. There
can be no chance, because a chance jumbling and collision of the
primordial elements could not result in the organized matter that is
life, any more than a thousand of brick dumped upon the ground can
take the form of a house. The brick and mortar demand an architect,
and organized matter demands an organizing principle. Whence its
source? There we are where no further step can be taken. What about
the divine mind? But that is jumping the whole question. If you place
your God here, I shall ask him some embarrassing questions, such as,
Where did you come from? Where have you been all these æons? Why are
you so wasteful and dilatory in your methods? Why have you made the
world so full of misery? Or, I might ask the question a little boy
asked his father: “Why did God make Satan?” The problem, it seems to
me, is quite as embarrassing to us mortals with a God as without one.
It is just as hard to account for a God as to account for the initial
impulse. In both cases we have in our hands a rope with only one end.
In trying to find the other end, we only get ourselves hopelessly
tied up.
X. PAYING THE DEBT
In my youth I often heard the old people speak of death as “paying
the debt of Nature”--“He has paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to
Nature--the earth, the air, the water--for the elements of our bodies
and the powers of our minds, and the time inevitably comes when we
must settle the account. That we are going to have something left
over--that we have only to pay the debt of the body, and not of the
mind--is one of the dreams that it is hard for most persons to give
up. Will not then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim its
own also? Can you and I hope to remain detached from it forever? Is
that a consummation devoutly to be wished?
Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be lost. But
processes may cease; the flame of the lamp may go out, and the sum
total of force and matter remain the same. When a blade of grass
dies, a process has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on in
Cæsar’s brain and body. And when all life on the earth and in our
universe ceases, if it ever does, the problem would remain just as
puzzling, if we can fancy ourselves still here to puzzle over it. We
are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate
the material from what we call the spiritual.
The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed as a dewdrop
yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor of the sunrise or sunset,
or played a part in the bow in the clouds. To-morrow it may be
whirling in the vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the
life of a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on the
window-pane. The movements of the brain molecules in which the
phenomena of thought and consciousness are so mysteriously involved,
they, too, are links in the cycle of change.
One of our younger poets, John Russell McCarthy, has had the courage
to say:
“that we must look for life
Hereafter, not by one and one,--your soul
Alone among the souls of other men,
Drifting and staying, a thing apart forever--
But we must see when all at last is counted
And the great sum is made, how one by one
We have returned to Her, the Mother of All,--
The bit of soul-stuff that She loaned us.
For we must live at last a part of Her--
For we shall be forever as one with Her.”
The reverent old people to whom I just referred paid the debt long
ago, and the day of reckoning for some of us cannot be far off. After
the account is closed who or what has profited by the transaction? We
are prone to put such questions to Nature, but they are irrelevant.
The universe is not run for profit, as we use the term. So far as we
can see, it is run just to satisfy the æsthetic and creative feeling
of the Eternal. When the sidereal systems in space run down, they are
wound up again, and suns and planets are started anew. The great game
never comes to an end; in fact, it is unthinkable that it should ever
have begun, except as the flowers begin in spring, or as a man begins
when he is born. Antecedents! Antecedents!--always. We cannot apply
our standards of loss and gain to the dealings of the Eternal with
us. “That I have positively appeared,” says Whitman, “that is enough.”
Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast
of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect
that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end
in itself. To ask what the great spectacle is for, is to betray our
tradesman habit of mind. Man is a link in an endless chain of being.
If we ask what he is for, the old answer of the catechism is as good
as any--“To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” In other words, to
make the most of his life and strive for the highest happiness, which
is knowledge and appreciation of the universal. Coleridge says we
glorify God when we work for the well-being of mankind.
How quite impossible it is for us to adjust our minds to the thought
of death--to the thought of the absolute negation of life! When we
torment ourselves about death, about the coldness and darkness of the
grave, about being cut off from all the warm and happy currents of
life that flow about us, we are unconsciously thinking of ourselves
as still living, or as conscious of the gloom and negation that
await us. Thus, when Huxley wrote to a friend (John Morley) that the
thought of extinction disturbed him more and more as he neared the
end of life, he fell into this common fallacy, or contradiction. “It
flashes across me,” he writes, “at all sorts of times with a sort of
horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on
than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a good deal--” as if he
expected to lie awake nights in his grave lamenting his sad fate and
saying to himself, “I had sooner be in hell,” where also he expected
he would be conscious of his improved condition!
What possible difference could it make to him if he did not know
any more in 1900 than he did in 1800? Did he expect to enjoy his
knowledge in 1900? If not, why worry about it? What he was really
lamenting was that he did not know then and there what he might
know if he lived till 1900. He knew that human knowledge was making
tremendous strides, and the thought that he should not share in its
advancement chilled him.
It is all very human, but very childish. We may to-day dread some
task or ordeal that we are to face to-morrow, because to-morrow we
expect to be alive, but shall we shrink from the to-morrow of death
on the same grounds?
There is wisdom as well as wit in the epitaph in dialogue which a
clever Greek Byzantine composed for Pyrrho:
“Art thou dead, Pyrrho?”
“I do not know.”
If we put the same question to our own dead, if they could answer,
they would say, “We do not know.” If they knew, would not that be
proof that they were not dead? May we not answer Huxley that if
consciousness is extinguished with life, he is not going to lie
awake nights in his grave worrying about it? There is comfort in the
thought that if there is no immortality, we shall not know it.
Rereading that wise and delightful old Frenchman, Montaigne, I find
that more than three hundred years ago he was of the same mind that
I am in this matter: “Why should we fear a thing whose being lost
cannot be lamented?” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred
years hence is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a
hundred years ago.”
An avaricious man might worry if he knew he would have no more money
on the next Christmas than he had on the last, unless his physician
had assured him that he could not be alive on the next Christmas.
Then, if he worried, it would be on account of his heirs. But one’s
heirs cannot inherit his wisdom; it dies with him.
Death is such an extraordinary, such an unspeakable event that we
cannot think of ourselves as non-existent. When you try to see
yourself in your own coffin, or standing beside your own grave, it
is still as a living man that you thus behold yourself. It is, of
course, as living men and women that we are disturbed over thoughts
of the grave. The future is just as secure for us all as is the past.
A moment between two eternities is life; a spark that draws a brief
line upon the darkness and is gone. The spark has its antecedent
condition in the wood and coal and the processes of combustion
from which it sprang, and it has its subsequent conditions in the
invisible gases into which it has vanished, but as a point of heat
and light, it exists no more. Our wise attitude toward death is, I
think, to forget or ignore it entirely. We shall not know it when it
overtakes us. “_Avida nunquam desinere mortalitas._” “Men must endure
their going hence, even as their coming hither--ripeness is all.”
XI. DEATH
I
In death the elements of the body are not changed--oxygen is still
oxygen, carbon still carbon. What has happened, then? Can it be
explained by saying that a process has been reversed? Does it bear
any true analogy to the redistribution of type after the printer
has set it up and printed his book? The type is the same, but the
relation of all the units has been changed. The printer has arranged
them so that collectively they expressed to him certain meanings or
ideas. These ideas did not exist in the type, but in the order of
its arrangement. In one order or combination the letters meant one
thing; in another order or combination they expressed quite another.
The same type will spell dog or God. When redistributed and returned
to the different fonts, the letters express nothing but themselves.
If this is a true analogy, then, in the case of the living book, man,
what stands for the compositor and printer? We can only call the
compositor the organizing impulse; but whence this impulse, and whose
idea is it trying to express? The redistribution of the elements of
the body is done through the activity of other forms of life--the
micro-organisms--those minute forms reduce the body to its original
elements. As we thus have life at the end of the life of an organism,
do we also have life at the beginning of the organism? Ancestral life
certainly, or the primordial germ; but is there a living principle
back of and before all? Does the logic of the situation force us to
the belief in an original Creator? The human mind is so constituted
that in some form or under definite concepts, we have to postulate a
first or primal Cause; we have to think of a beginning; but is there
any beginning to a circle, or any center to the surface of a sphere?
There may be no beginning or no limit in time or space to the cosmos.
This is unthinkable to us in our present state. Yet in making that
statement I am thinking of the unthinkable. We can deal only with
parts of Nature; as a whole it is beyond our power to grasp. All
bodies on the earth’s surface unsupported fall; this is our universal
experience. All moving bodies come to a standstill unless power from
without is constantly supplied. Perpetual motion is impossible, but
the earth and the other planets are unsupported, and their motion is
perpetual. Or we may say that they fall forever toward the sun and
never reach it, and that the sun falls forever toward some other
sun or system and never reaches it. The laws of force and matter as
we contend with them in our experiences are inoperative in sidereal
space; there is motion without friction, energy without waste,
dissipation without exhaustion. Neither upper nor under, neither
falling nor rising, neither end nor beginning. Cause and effect,
rest and motion, are one. The self-activity of the universe quite
transcends our experiences; the self-maintenance of living bodies
is far beyond our reach; any end to the chain of causal sequence is
quite unthinkable to us. Our minds are made in that way. They are
fashioned in the school of cause and effect.
Nothing can get out of the universe because there is no out to the
universe. Can that which has no ending have a beginning? Can that
which has no circumference have a center? Can we think of anything
so hot that it could not be hotter? Or so small that it could not
be smaller? Or so big that it could not be bigger? No, because our
minds have been schooled in this comparative method. Our sense shows
us a world of degrees. We can think of absolute darkness, but not
of absolute light. In the Mammoth Cave you may realize absolute
darkness; but even on the sun itself would you experience absolute
light? We seem to be able to find an end to the negative, but not to
the positive. We can think of a body as at absolute rest, but can we
conceive of it going so fast that it could not go faster?
Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in matter, just as
life is our consciousness of the opposite change--one destructive,
the other constructive. The constituents of the body remain
unchanged, but a peculiar activity set up among the particles,
by what, we know not, is instituted in life and ceases in death.
An organism is made up of organs, all working together, but each
subordinated to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may
cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet the minute
subdivisions, the cells, may be alive. Certain ferments in the body
may go on for some time after the life of the man has gone out. And
living cells may go on multiplying endlessly without producing an
organized being.
II
“It is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was leaving his
death-bed and hearing his voice for the last time--“It is all right.”
Of course it was all right, and it will be all right when each and
all of us fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be.
Our being here is all right, is it not? “Friendly and faithful,”
says Whitman, “are the arms that have helped me,” and friendly and
faithful must be the arms that bear us away. If it was good to come,
it will be good to go--good in the large, cosmic sense, good in that
it is in keeping with the spirit of the All. Not the good of our
brief personal successes and triumphs, but good as evolution is good,
as the processes of growth and decay are good. If life is good, death
must be equally good, as each waits upon the other. From what point
of view can we say that death is not all right? Certainly not from
the point of view of this universe. Archimedes could have moved the
world had he had some other world upon which to place his lever, and
we must have some other universe to plant our feet upon to condemn
death.
As I have already said, we look upon death as an evil because we look
upon it from the happy fields of life, and see ourselves as alive in
our graves and lamenting that we are shut off from all the light and
love and movement of the world. Does our prenatal state seem an evil?
Did anything begin _de novo_, when we came into being? Not the
elements of our bodies surely; they were as old as the cosmos; not
the germ of our minds and souls; they were as old as the human
race and older--old as the first dawn of life. Is it the _I_ that
is new?--that which makes you you and me me? And that is probably
nothing more than a new distribution and arrangement of the physical
and psychical elements and forces of which and by which we are made.
The pattern of our personality is new; each of us differs somewhat
from all the myriads of human beings who have lived upon the earth;
but is form, pattern, personality, separable from the material that
composes it?
It may be cheerfully admitted that when we look at the question in
this light, we are whistling to keep our courage up. What of it? The
band plays to keep the courage of the soldiers up when they go into
battle, and what are we but soldiers fighting the good fight of truth
against error, of courage against fear, of the heroic against the
pusillanimous? The whole is greater than any of its parts. Nature is
more than man. We must learn to efface ourselves. The soul knows no
rewards or punishments. If it be heroic to sacrifice life in this
world, it may be equally heroic to sacrifice life in any other world,
so that we prove ourselves worthy of the gods.
XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH
Truly things are not what they seem. When we put heaven and earth
far apart, we think as children. Heaven and earth are pretty close
together. The shortest arm can reach from one to the other. When we
go to heaven we shall not have far to travel, and I dare say the
other place is quite as near, and, if reports be true, the road is
broader and easier to travel. What children we are in such matters!
The wisest men have the language of ignorance and superstition
imposed upon them. How difficult it is not to think of the heavens up
there as a reality, something above us and superior to us, a finer
world, nearer God, lighted by the stars, the abode of spirits, the
source of all good, our final celestial home. Did not Elijah ascend
into heaven? Did not Paul have heavenly visions? Have not the saints
in all ages turned their faces and lifted imploring hands to heaven?
How these things have burnt themselves into our minds! We cannot
escape them.
In our floods of religious emotion we instinctively look away from
the earth. The mystery, the immensity, the purity of the heavens
above us make us turn our faces thitherward, and as naturally make us
turn downward when we consider the source of evil. The poor old earth
which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our
awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not of. Our
senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us. It is only
Whitman with his cosmic consciousness that can closely relate the
heavens and the earth:
“Underneath the divine soil,
Overhead the sun.”
To most of us the morning stars that once sang together are of
another stuff. The music of the spheres must be vastly different from
the roar and grind of our old rusty and outworn planet. So we turn
to the heavens, the abode of purity and light. So do we discount and
black-list the earth where we have to pay in struggle and pain the
price of our development. Think you we should not have to pay the
same price in any other world worth living in?
Emerson in his Journal quotes his brother Charles as saying long ago
that “the nap was worn off the earth”; it was become threadbare, like
an outworn garment. Probably it seems so to each of us as time goes
on. In places in Europe the nap must be very short at this time. But
the nap will come again, even on those shell-swept regions, after
Nature has had her way. Nature grows old in geologic or in cosmic
time; the mountains decay, the waters recede; but in man’s time the
earth is endowed with perennial youth.
Science strips us of our illusions and delusions; it strips us of
most of the garments in which the spirit of man has sought in all
ages to clothe itself against the chill of an impersonal universe;
it takes down the protecting roof of the heavens above us and shows
us an unspeakable void strewn with suns and worlds beyond numbers
to compute, but nowhere any signs of the blessed abode to which our
religious aspirations have pointed.
It is interesting, in this connection, to note the attitude of the
old writers, such as Cornaro, the Italian, toward the heavens. They
evidently look upon the heavens as outside of Nature. In speculating
as to why it is that some persons have so little vitality, Cornaro
reckons the influence of the heavens may be one cause. He says he
never could persuade himself to believe that Nature, being the mother
of all, could be so ungenerous to any of her children; hence it must
be some hostile influence from above. Similar notions seem to have
been held in Shakespeare’s time:
“It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and make could not beget
Such different issues.”
XIII. THINKING AND ACTING
It is true we do not, as a rule, act without thinking, or without
some sort of psychic process, but thinking and acting are radically
different. Or, we may say that the practical reason is alone
concerned in action, and the abstract intellect in general reasoning.
When we come to act, we know that we are free to choose between two
or more objects or courses; when we think or reason abstractly, we
know the will is not free. Every act has its antecedent cause. But
we are practically free because we feel no restraint or compulsion.
We feel responsible for our acts. We do not blame our red-haired
father, or our grandfather of Irish blood, for our hasty temper; we
feel that this is our very selves. What we call moral responsibility
rests upon this sense of freedom. We are not aware of the fatality
that binds us, any more than we are of the weight of the atmosphere
that presses upon us so tremendously. At the court of absolute
reason we see what puppets and automata we are, but at the court of
practical justice we see and feel that we are free to do right as we
see the right. The contradictions which Balfour sees, in his chapter
on “Naturalism and Ethics,” between the results of practical life and
of abstract reasoning is of a kind which one sees everywhere in the
universe. The circle is a perpetual contradiction. How can a line go
in all directions?--and in no direction? In our practical lives there
is an upper and an under, an up and a down, but away from the earth,
or considering the earth as a whole, there is no such thing.
Righteous indignation at the misconduct of others, or
self-condemnation, repentance, remorse, are reasonable feelings
because we actually feel them. We have no choice in the matter. To
whatever conclusion abstract reason leads us in regard to them, it
does not affect our practical conduct, because our conduct is founded
upon the sense of freedom. We are here to act, to do, and not to
reason abstractly. This is the tree of the forbidden fruit. When we
eat of it we know things that may stand in the way of our practical
living. Balfour should see that we are determinists or naturists when
we reason, but free agents when we act, and that there is no getting
away from the contradiction.
I may be the duplicate of my father, or of my grandfather; every one
of my traits may be inherited; but that does not prevent me from
feeling that they are my own; they are vital in me as they were in
him, and I feel responsible for my own acts just as he did for his,
though I could not act otherwise. I could not, but I did not know it.
I thought I could act as I pleased.
The world which philosophy reveals to us is vastly different from
the world practical life reveals. We are sure that light and sound
are real entities, but philosophy tells us that one is the sensation
which vibrations in the ether, set going by the sun, make upon the
optic nerve, and that sound is the sensation which vibrations in
the air make upon the auditory nerve. When we know this we do not
change our action in reference to them--they are still just as real
to our senses as ever they were. The moral law is not discredited
or overthrown when we discover through the abstract reason that
fate, or necessity, rules our lives. We made the moral law and we
try to live up to it. We do not always succeed. All trees aim at the
vertical position; it is the position which gravity imposes upon
them; but owing to various accidents and conditions the trees are
not all plumb. How free they seem to grow at almost any angle with
the plane of the earth’s surface! How they run out their branches
horizontally in defiance of the gravity that rules them and lift up
in their trunks and leaves tons of water and other minerals against
the pull of gravity! How free they seem, how they bend to the wind
that would overthrow them, how various they are in form and habit of
growth, in the shape of their leaves, the kinds of their fruits, the
character of their roots! Yet science shows us how the unalterable
physical laws rule them. They lean toward the light and the free air
in obedience to physical and chemical laws. And yet, no doubt, if
the trees were conscious of themselves, as we are, every oak-tree
would say, “I feel free to be an oak,” and every pine-tree and beech
and willow and maple would feel a like freedom. The Irishman feels
no compulsion or necessity in being an Irishman, nor the Frenchman
in being a Frenchman. All life is held in the leash of physical and
chemical laws, and yet knows it not.
We feel that there is beauty in nature; when we reflect, we know
that the feeling for beauty is an emotion of our own minds, and
not a quality of outward things. Scenes radically different awaken
the emotion in us, or may awaken it in one and not in another
(see Emerson’s ecstasy on a bare moor). The world is what we make
it, and duty is what we make it, and the ugly is what we make it.
Putrefaction, repulsive to us, is to science a beautiful chemical
process. Odors that are offensive to us are evidently agreeable to
the dog. Sounds which please us seem to disturb him. The absolute
is outside of life. If the orbs of the heavens were conscious, they
would doubtless feel free to go where they do go; it would be their
choice; it would pain them to do otherwise. The comet rushes toward
the sun with joy; the music of the spheres is the expression of their
freedom and contentment. Can you help winking when the flashlight
goes off, or when a missile passes near your eyes? Our voluntary
actions are equally based upon physical laws.
Balfour, in his “Foundation of Belief,” talks about the beauty of
holiness, the beauty of sanctity, but these things are beautiful
only to a certain type of mind. The time will come when they will
not be looked upon as beautiful or desirable. These conceptions
grew when men lived for another world, when this world stood to
them as the sum of evil. Men then saw nothing holy or divine on
earth except the denying of earth. That state of mind has largely
passed. Holy men have had their day. We see now that this world is
a celestial body, and that all our conceptions of heavenly abodes
are untenable. For my part the most lovable and admirable men and
women I have known had no savor of sanctity. They were wise, kind,
helpful, loving, living with zest the life of every day, intent on
making their earthly lives square with what is generally accepted
as right conduct, and therefore comfortably indifferent to what the
theologians are so concerned about--salvation after death, and the
securing of their “mansions in the skies.” Martyrdom bravely faced
excites our admiration, all heroic acts are beautiful and admirable,
and there are good naturalistic reasons why this should be so. But
our religious history has begotten a whole brood of ideas that must
gradually fade and go out, and our standards will more and more be
those of this world.
Mr. Balfour would hardly deny that the organ with which we do our
thinking and reasoning and form our deductions, the organ which
is the seat of our emotions of the beautiful and of religious
aspirations, is a mass of gray and white matter, and that all these
things are the result of certain molecular changes or movements in
the fluids or solids of the brain substance; in other words, that
there is a physical and physiological basis to all our mental and
emotional life. Does this material side in any way discredit these
faculties and feelings? Does not all that we call the spiritual
adhere in the material? Can we find that inner world, or any clue to
it, by dissecting the brain? Has it, therefore, any reality except in
our imagination? Prove that it exists apart from or independent of
the body, and there is no more to be said.
But what I wanted most to say is that the reason of things, or final
explanation of things seems to take the poetry and romance out of
them. Reduce religion or æsthetics or art to terms of psychology, and
they no longer appeal to the emotions or stimulate the imagination.
Naturalism is true--reason can reach no other conclusion--but the
truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.
The heart is a big, strong, self-acting, muscular pump, but when
we lay our hand upon the heart and refer our emotions, our love,
our aspirations, to it, we idealize it, we do not then think of its
physical function and character. By this act we are still deferring
to the ancient and outworn belief that in this region resides the
soul--the part of man that loves and hates and hopes and fears.
The brain is the temple of the mind or the vestibule of the spiritual
world, but we can explain it only in terms of anatomy, physiology,
and physics which darken and chill our sensibilities.
Things and movements come about through natural processes, not
through supernatural ones, but when we state these processes in the
only terms in which they can be stated, the religious soul feels
hurt and orphaned. All our religious or theological explanations of
things discredit matter and the material world, discredit Nature and
all her processes. Evolution is anti-religious; that man is of animal
origin is still a hard doctrine to the old-fashioned theologian. Why
is it not equally a hard doctrine to him that we were ever babies
or embryos, carried about and associated with the viscera of our
mothers’ bodies? We have got to exalt the natural, the material, and
free our minds from the illusions of the old theologies before we can
see the truth and beauty of naturalism. The sacred, the celestial,
the divine, the holy, all are terms that date from a prescientific
age, before man’s relation to the universe was understood. They are
significant only in reference to another world and another life of an
entirely different order.
The eternal, immutable moral law to which Balfour refers, what is
it? Who instituted it? Is it other than the law of right and wrong
which mankind is coming more and more clearly to see, and more and
more fully to value in the course of evolution? You may set the
seal of some hypothetical, supernatural power upon it, but what
about supernatural powers in a universe governed by natural laws?
The religious enthusiasm of the race, the saints, the devotees, the
so-called holy ones, have doubtless had their value; they have helped
lubricate the grinding machinery of life; but their day is at an end.
We must invest our fund of love, our veneration, our heroism, our
martyrdom in this world, and not look to the next.
That Nature is irrational, unhuman, no one can deny, not because she
is less, but because she is more; she is above reason, above man.
Our reason calls Nature irrational because the reason is a special
faculty, and is limited; it takes in the arc, so to speak, but
not the full circle. Nature is irrational, not because she is not
suffused with mind, but because she does not count the cost, because
our economies do not fit her especial scheme. Life is synonymous
with intelligence; all organic nature shows the working of the primal
mind--the adaptation of means to specific ends, and the steady
improvement from lower to higher.
What we think, when trying to render an account to the reason of
the enigma of life, often has little relation to what we do, as
practical, struggling beings. We are free to think in all directions,
free to move in but few. Our thoughts are like the vapors that drift
with the winds, or that expand equally in all directions. Our actual
lives are like the waters that must flow in definite channels,
and turn some wheel or irrigate some tract of land, or quench
some creature’s thirst. That naturalism, with minds which take an
interest in it, should result in low standards of life, or in any
form of disorder or failure, I do not believe. Only clear, strong,
truth-loving spirits can accept this explanation of things. Much more
mentality is demanded than is demanded by the old conceptions. Hence
one has to face the terrible realities and discipline the spirit to
accept them. In the old views, in supernaturalism, all this is done
for one by the Church and one is a member of a personally conducted
party to heaven.
XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE
We cannot find God by thinking. Thinking starts us on an endless
quest. We can find neither end nor beginning to the sequence of
cause and effect. It is a circle that ends and begins forever in
itself. Men find what they call God in action, in experience, because
in these practical dealings with the forces of this world they are
under the law of cause and effect. They find beginnings and endings,
they find an upper and an under side, they find a lower and a higher,
a greater and a smaller: but in thought all things are relative. Some
wise man has said that if there were no God, we should have to invent
one--invent one if we wish to explain the world in the terms of human
experience. Thinking turns the world topsy-turvy.
Our religious natures are still Ptolemaic. The heavens still revolve
around us. We do not with the eye of the flesh see ourselves in this
world as on a sphere--on a celestial body floating in space; we see
ourselves as on an endless plain over and under which the heavenly
bodies pass. It is only with the eye of the mind that we see things
in their true relation and see that there is no up and no down, no
under and no over, apart from the earth, and no God who rules as
a ruler rules. We do not gain the tremendous facts of astronomy
through our everyday experience; our search after scientific truth
reveals them to us. Through this inquiry we see the grand voyage we
are making among the stars, and see that the heavens are not a realm
apart from us, the abode of superior beings, but are our veritable
habitat; that our earth is a celestial body among myriads of others,
and that when we solemnly lift our eyes heavenward, we are lifting
them to other worlds made of the same stuff as our own. Our religious
emotions and aspirations lead us to look away from the earth and
to imagine finer and fairer realms, but disinterested science does
not humor our illusions; it brings us back to earth again, back
to the heaven we despise. Hence the trouble the narrow religious
nature has with science. It experiences a cold shudder before its
revelations and will none of it. It will have beginnings and endings,
boundaries and limitations, heavenly and earthly, and will read the
impersonal laws of the universe in terms of our personal human needs
and relations. It sets up a judge and ruler of creation modeled on
our human plan, and then to get out of the dilemma in which it finds
itself, with all the sin and misery and injustice of the world which
it finds upon its hands, and which omnipotent love and mercy could
never tolerate, dopes itself with theological casuistry that seeks
to justify the ways of God to man. It is a world-old problem. The
only way I see out of it is by purging our minds of the old dogmas
and boldly facing the reality as science shows it to us. Religion
as the world has so long used the term--that human mixture of fear,
reverence, superstition, and selfish desire--has had its day. We
may still marvel and love and admire and rejoice, but let us fear
and plead and tremble no more. There is nothing to be afraid of
worse than ourselves, and nothing to implore and propitiate farther
removed from us than the rain and the sunshine. In the end all things
work together for our good--not always for the good of to-day, or
of to-morrow, or for this man or that man, but for the good of all,
for the good which evolution brings in its train. Evolution brings
what we call evil also, but evil is a term of our human experience,
and the Infinite, the Eternal, knows it not. What is evil to one
creature in the struggle for life we have seen to be good to another,
and often what our religious fears recoil from, science sees as
the beneficent operation of law. In Nature nothing is unclean; her
chemistry meets and appropriates all, even when we flee or faint. Our
physical well-being forces upon us the conception of the clean and
the unclean, but in the processes of the Nature that sustains us both
are one.
We are adjustable creatures. We are neither sugar nor salt, neither
round nor square, neither iron nor lead; we yield and we resist,
we melt and we freeze. We are as adjustable and as adaptive as the
leaves of the forest. The firmly woven texture of the leaf, its
mobile stem, the flexible branch to which it clings, make it secure
against the ordinary vicissitudes to which it is subject.
Man is the most adaptive of all creatures; he is as local as the
turtle, and as cosmopolitan as the eagle. All climes, all conditions
of wet and dry, of plain and mountain, of sea and shore, of island
and continent, are his. His home is the world. Lately he has
conquered the air with forces of the earth. Will he yet conquer the
ether with forces of the air? Already the ether conveys his messages,
but no mechanical contrivance of his can yet lay hands upon it.
Let me again say that by the Natural Providence I mean the general
beneficence of Nature, the blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating,
inevitable beneficence which brought us here and keeps us here,
and makes it good for us to be alive, despite the vicissitudes and
the occasional apparently lesser phases of malevolence to which we
are subject. The changing seasons, the fertile soils, the rains,
the dews, the snows, the blue skies, the green earth, the flowing
streams, the gentle winds, in fact all the conditions that make life
possible and permanent, are expressions of this beneficence. The
whole movement of evolution, with all its dark and forbidding phases,
is an expression of it. Allow time enough and the turbid stream
flows itself clear, and the stream of evolution is fast losing, has
lost, most of its terrible and repellent features. At its flood, in
earlier geologic times, one may say that its waters were charged
with the elements of huge, uncouth, and terrible forms which have
been mostly eliminated; the current has cleared and purified as
it advanced; the dragons and monsters have nearly disappeared; the
reptiles have receded and left the fowl and birds; the saurians are
gone, and in their stead we have the more comely and useful forms
of mammalian life. From our human point of view--and we can have
no other--creation has refined. The tide of life is still like a
river that has its noisome and unlovely margins, but how has it
cleared and sweetened since Permian and Jurassic times! The scale
of animal life has changed, less bone and muscle and more nerve and
brains, less emphasis laid upon size and more upon wit. Only in
the insect world are the dragons and monsters, and the carnival of
blood and slaughter, repeated. In the shade of a summer tree, or in
a clover-field, one may see minute creatures pursuing or devouring
one another which, if enough times magnified, would rival any of the
dragons of the prime.
XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK
I
Probably that overwhelming calamity, the World War, set more good
people adrift upon the sea of religious doubt and skepticism than all
the accumulated evils of the past ten centuries. Men were everywhere
outspoken in their want of faith in the Providence in which they
had so long trusted. I heard of an English clergyman who declared
that if the Germans won in the war he would never open his Bible
again. Another English parson, with the thought of the war weighing
upon him, published a volume of discourses which he called “The
Justification of God.” But judging from my own experiences with the
book, the lay mind will find the grounds for justification as hard a
riddle to read as the original one.
Only a faith founded upon the rock of natural law can weather such a
storm as the world passed through in the Great War, but unfortunately
such a faith is possible to comparatively few--the faith that the
universe is radically good and beneficent, and that the evils of life
grow upon the same tree with the good, and that the fruits called
evil bear only a small proportion to those called good. Persons who
do not read the book of nature as a whole, who do not try their
faith by the records of the rocks and the everlasting stars, who
are oblivious to the great law of evolution which has worked out
the salvation of man and of all living things, through good and ill
report, through delays and sufferings and agonies incalculable, but
the issues of which have been unfailing, who do not see the natural
universal order working in the fiery ordeal through which all nations
during the historic period have passed, who have not learned that
the calamities of men and of peoples are not the result of the wrath
of some offended divinity, but the ups and downs in the long, hard
road of human development, and that, in the nature of things, justice
is meted out to all men--if not in a day, then in a year, or in a
thousand years; if not to the individual, then to his family, or to
his race--those who take no account of all these things soon lose
their reckoning in times like ours.
Every good deed, every noble thought, counts in the counsels of the
Eternal. Every bad deed, every ignoble thought, counts also. But the
stream tends to purify itself; the world is thus made; evil is real,
but short-lived; the remedial forces of life and nature burn it up or
convert it into good. Our fertile landscapes are the result of the
wear and tear of geologic ages; fire, flood, tornadoes, earthquakes,
volcanoes, have all had a share in shaping them. Decay and death have
fed the sources of life. Our own history as a people and the history
of the European countries exhibit a like contrast and mingling of
good and evil. We are too personal in our estimates, too limited in
our perspectives; thoughts of our own comforts and private aims are
too much with us. We must give Providence the advantage of a wiser
perspective.
The thoughtful mind, capable of viewing these things on a bigger
scale, does not need a world calamity to reveal the unsatisfactory
character of the reigning gods. The daily course of events does
that. Infantile paralysis, for example, with its long train of the
crippled, unoffending children, or a man being slowly eaten up with
cancer, or a mother losing her life in trying to save her child from
flood and fire, and scores of other similar things, show what a thin
veneer our theology puts upon ugly facts.
Our ecclesiastical faith must be housed in churches and kept warm
by vestments. The moment we take it out into the open and expose it
to unroofed and unwarmed universal nature, it is bound to suffer
from the cosmic chill. For my part, I do not have to take my
faith in out of the wet and the cold. It is an open-air faith, an
all-the-year-round faith; neither killing frosts nor killing heats
disturb it; not tornadoes nor earthquakes nor wars nor pestilence nor
famine make me doubt for one moment that the universe is sound and
good. The forces which brought us here and provided so lavishly for
our sustenance and enjoyment; that gave us our bodies and our minds;
that endowed us with such powers; that surrounded us with such beauty
and sublimity; that brought us safely through the long and hazardous
journey of evolution; that gave us the summer sun, the midnight
skies, and the revolving seasons; that gave human love and fellowship
and coöperation, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood, and the sense
of justice and mercy, are beneficent and permanent forces. They are
directed to me personally because they are directed to all that live;
they are the cause of the living, the essence and the sum of all
life of the globe. I do not mind if you call them terrestrial forces;
the terrestrial and the celestial are one. I do not mind if you call
them material forces; the material and the spiritual are inseparable.
I do not mind if you call this view the infidelity (or atheism) of
science; science, too, is divine; all knowledge is knowledge of God.
I have never taken shelter in any form of ecclesiasticism. I
have never tried to clothe myself in the delusive garments of a
superstitious age. I have never pinned my faith to a man-made God,
however venerable. I have inured my mind to the open air of the
universe, to things as they are, to the dealings of a Power that
exacts an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; a power that deals
on the square. Those apparent outlaws of the heavens, the comets, do
not disturb the naturist; sidereal space strewn with dead worlds and
burnt-out suns do not disturb him; the spectacle of the great planets
rolling through space void of life for untold millions of years, does
not disturb him; and if life should never come to them, and should
ultimately disappear from the earth, he would not lose faith; he
could behold Europe drenched with the blood of a needless, wicked war
and not lose faith; he could see civilization retarded and the unjust
cause triumph, and still know that the Creative Energy has our good
at heart and always will have it.
II
The demand of our day is for a scientific religion--an attitude of
mind toward creation begotten by knowledge, in which fear, personal
hopes, individual good, and the so-called “other world,” play little
part. Virtuous actions, upright conduct, heroic character, the
practice of the Golden Rule, are seen to be their own reward, and
the security of the future is in well-doing and well-being in the
present. This is not religion in the old ecclesiastical sense, but
in the new scientific sense; a religion that moves us to fight vice,
crime, war, intemperance, for self-preservation and in brotherly
love, and not in obedience to theological dogma or the command of a
God; a religion that opens our eyes to the wonder and beauty of the
world, and that makes us at home in this world. The old religion is a
tree that has borne its fruit. It is dying at the top; it is feeble
at the root. It no longer touches men’s lives as of old. The great
things that are done to-day are not done in the name of religion, but
in the name of science, of humanity, of civilization. The brotherhood
that has force and meaning is no longer a sectarian brotherhood; it
is larger than all the churches combined.
The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in
this world. He experiences no miracles; he sees the cosmic energy as
no respecter of persons; he sees the rains falling alike upon the
just and the unjust; he sees the vast, impartial, undiscriminating
movements of Nature all about him; he learns that the land cannot
sustain life without the fertilizing rains, yet he beholds the clouds
pouring out their bounty into the sea just as freely as upon the
land; he beholds the inorganic crushing the organic all about him,
and yet he knows that the latter is nothing without the former.
If God and the universal cosmic forces are one, how surely is God
on both sides in all struggles, all causes, all wars, righteous and
unrighteous! We behold warring nations praying to the same God for
victory; we see this same God now apparently favoring one side,
now the other, and we are bewildered. Our theology takes us beyond
soundings. But the naturist is not bewildered; he can read the riddle
and reconcile the contradictions. Napoleon (if it was Napoleon)
was right when he said that God was on the side of the heaviest
artillery--the more power, the more God.
This may be a hard, chilling gospel; it is like going naked into the
storm; but how can we deny it? Can we refuse to face it?
XV
THE POET OF THE COSMOS
The world has had but one poet of the cosmos, and that was Whitman.
His mind, his sympathies, sweep through a wider orbit than those of
any other. I am bold enough to say frankly that I look upon him as
the greatest personality--not the greatest intellect, but the most
symbolical man, the greatest incarnation of mind, heart, and soul,
fused and fired by the poetic spirit--that has appeared in the world
during the Christian era.
In his lines called “Kosmos” he describes himself:
“Who includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and
sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the
earth, and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look’d forth from the windows, the eyes, for
nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers
for nothing,
Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most
majestic lover,
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,
spiritualism, and of the esthetic, or intellectual,
Who, having consider’d the body, finds all its organs and
parts good,
Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body,
understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of
these States;
Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but
in other globes with their suns and moons,
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day
but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable
together.”
Let me say at once that, whatever else “Leaves of Grass” may
be, it is not poetry as the world uses that term. It is an
inspired utterance, but it does not fall under any of the usual
classifications of poetry. Lovers of Whitman no more go to him for
poetry than they go to the ocean for the pretty shells and pebbles on
the beach. They go to him for contact with his spirit; to be braced
and refreshed by his attitude toward life and the universe; for his
robust faith, his world-wide sympathies, for the breadth of his
outlook, and the wisdom of his utterances.
Whitman is first and last a seer and a philosopher, but his
philosophy is incarnated in a man; it is fluid and alive; it breathes
and talks, and loves and breeds; it nurses the sick and wounded
soldiers in the hospitals; it makes him the friend and brother of all
types of humanity, of the outcast woman not less than of the man or
woman of perfect blood:
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves
to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and
rustle for you.
* * * * *
“Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid
and liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.”
My studies of nature and of the universe help me to understand
Whitman much more than does my reading of literature itself.
Whitman is rapt and thrilled when he looks up to the midnight sky.
His very style is orbicular and concentric. The scientific aspects
of astronomy do not engage him for a moment, any more than they did
the old Hebrew prophets; his science becomes human emotion. He is the
human soul matching itself against the starry hosts, coping with them
and absorbing them:
“This day before dawn I ascended the hill and look’d at the
crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those
orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in
them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?_
And my spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and
continue beyond._”
Is there not more than astronomy in these passages?
“I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I can see multiplied as high as I can cypher edges but
the rim of the farther system.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.
My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside
them.”
Again he says:
“It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving
so exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one
jolt, or the untruth of a single second.”
He is filled with “the great thoughts of space and eternity,” and
common things assume new meanings in his eyes:
“I lie abstracted and hear the meanings of things and the
reason of things.
They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.”
Who before Whitman ever drew his poetic, his æsthetic, and ethical
standards from the earth, from the sexuality, from the impartiality
of the earth, or his laws for creations from the earth? Only the
wisest readers are prepared for their unliterary flavor:
“I swear there can be no greatness or power that does not
emulate those of the earth.
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborates
the theory of the earth.
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of
account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth.”
We all see in Whitman, as we see in Nature, what we bring the means
of seeing. Readers of him are likely to see their own limitations
for the limitations of Whitman. It is as if we thought that the
length of our sounding-line was the measure of the ocean’s depth. It
may be so, but it is not always so. A man of strict moral and ethical
ideas, according to conventional standards, will find Whitman rank
with original sin. Is not Nature rank with the same form of evil?
Whitman did not shrink from natural tests. Naturalism was the essence
of his religion.
“Nothing out of place is good, nothing in its place is bad.”
But the good in Nature is vastly more than the evil, else you and I
would not be here, and the good in Whitman is vastly more than the
evil, or he would have been forgotten long ago.
Evil, as we use the term, attends all great things. Evil--some man’s
evil--comes out of the sunshine, the rains, the protecting snows. One
of our poets objects to Whitman’s saying that evil is just as perfect
as good. Whitman does not say it is just as desirable, but just as
perfect. Are not these things we call evil perfect--snakes, nettles,
thorns, volcanoes, earthquakes? Is not a fungus as perfect as a
rose?--a toad as perfect as a bird? Each obeys its own law. The germs
of typhoid fever and of pneumonia are just as perfect as the germs
that favor us. Whitman said:
“I permit to speak at every hazard Nature without check, with
original energy.”
The hazards are great, but the stakes are great also. Readers who
cannot stand an utterance of this sort should go to Pollock’s “Course
of Time,” or Young’s “Night Thoughts,” or Dr. Holland’s “Bitter
Sweet.”
Whitman bares his mind and soul to us as he bares his body. There are
no masks or disguises. His inmost heart is as nude as his anatomy.
Nothing is dressed up. No fashionable tailoring at all. There is
nowhere the air of the studied, the elaborated. When other poets
stand before the mirror, Whitman looks off at the landscape, or goes
and bathes and admires himself. Or, to vary the image, when other
poets distill perfumes, Whitman aims to give us the fresh breath
of the unhoused air. In this respect he stands alone among modern
English-speaking poets. He is the air of the hills and the shore, and
not of a flower garden, or of a June meadow, or of parlors. That is
what disappoints people. He aims at beauty no more than a wood or a
river or a lake or a jungle does. His aim is to tally Nature.
It was my rare good fortune to know this quiet, sympathetic, tolerant
man for more than thirty years, and to walk or saunter with him at
all seasons and hours. Often at night he would stop and gaze long
and silently at the stars, and then resume his walk. He was an
easy-going, lethargic man--nothing strenuous about him, never in a
hurry, never disturbed or excited, always in good humor, cleanly,
clad in gray, with a fresh, florid complexion, large, broad, soft
hands, blue-gray eyes, gray-haired and gray-bearded. He was fond
of children and old people. What a contrast were his placid and
easy-going ways to the astronomic sweep and power of his poems, his
spirit darting its solar rays to the utmost bounds of the universe.
When I was with him I did not feel his mighty intellect, I felt most
his humanity, his primitive sympathy, the depth and intensity of his
new democratic character, perhaps also that in him which led Thoreau
to say that he suggested something a little more than human.
Whitman’s attitude toward Nature stands out in contrast to that of
all other poets, ancient or modern. It was not that of the poet who
draws his themes from Nature, or makes much of the gentler and fairer
forms of wood and field, spring and summer, shore and mountain, as
has been so largely the custom of poets from Virgil down. Take all
the Nature lyrics and idyls out of English and American poetry,
and how have you impoverished it, how many names would suffer! Nor
does Whitman’s attitude in any degree conform to the worshipful
attitude of Wordsworth and so many other poets since his time. He
did not humanize Nature or read himself into it; he did not adorn
it as a divinity; he did not see through it as through a veil to
spiritual realities beyond, as Emerson so often does; he did not
gather bouquets, nor distill the wild perfumes in his pages; he did
not fill the lap of earth with treasures not her own--all functions
of true poetry, we must admit, and associated with great names. Yet
he made more of Nature than any other poet has done; he saw deeper
meanings in her for purposes of both art and life; but it was Nature
as a whole--not the parts, not the exceptional phases, but the total
scheme and unfolding of things.
He sings more in terms of personality, of democracy, of nationalism,
of sex, of immortality, of comradeship; more of the general, the
continuous, the world-wide; more of wholes and less of parts,
more of man and less of men. His religion takes no account of
sects and creeds, but arises from the contemplation of the soul,
of the Eternal, of the universe. We do not get the solace and the
companionship with rural nature in Whitman that we get in the modern
nature poets. With them we admire the “violet by a mossy stone,”
or the pretty shell on the seashore; with Whitman we saunter on
the hills, or inhale the salt air of the seashore, or our minds
open under the spread of the midnight skies--always the large,
the elemental, the processional, the modern. The scholarly, the
elaborated, the polished, the architectural, the Tennysonian perfume
and technique, the Wordsworthian sweet rusticity and affiliation with
fells and groves, the Emersonian mysticism and charm of the wild and
the sequestered, were not for him or in him; nor the epic grandeur of
Milton, the dramatic power of Shakespeare, nor, usually, the lyric
thrill of many of the minor poets. You embark on an endless quest
with Whitman; not on a picnic, nor a “day off,” but a day-by-day and
a night-by-night journey through the universe:
“I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut
from the woods.
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the
public road,
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.”
He who can bring to Whitman’s rugged and flowing lines anything like
the sympathy and insight that beget them, will know what I mean. Our
modern nature poets are holiday flower-gatherers beside this inspired
astronomer, geologist, and biologist, all in one, sauntering the
streets, loitering on the beach, roaming the mountains, or rapt and
silent under the midnight skies. When, now, in my old age, I open his
pages again and read the “Song of the Open Road,” “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry,” “The Song of the Broad-Axe,” “This Compost,” “Walt Whitman,”
“Great are the Myths,” “Laws for Creation,” and scores of others, I
seem to be present at the creation of worlds. I am in touch with
primal energies. I am borne along by a tide of life and power that
has no parallel elsewhere in literature. It is not so much mind as it
is personality, not so much art as it is Nature, not so much poetry
as it is the earth, the sky. Oh, the large, free handling, the naked
grandeur, the elemental sympathy, the forthrightness, and the power!
Not beauty alone, but meanings, unities, profundities; not merely the
bow in the clouds, but the clouds also, and the sky, and the orbs
beyond the clouds. A personal, sympathetic, interpretive attitude
toward the whole of Nature, claiming it all for body and mind,
drawing out its spiritual and æsthetic values, forging his laws for
creation from it, trying his own work by its standards, and seeking
to emulate its sanity, its impartiality, and its charity.
Whitman wrote large the law of artistic productions which he sought
to follow:
“All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world;
There shall be no subject too pronounced--all works shall
illustrate the divine law of indirections.
What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free,
and own no superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways,
but that man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach creations through such
laws?”
Whitman’s standards are always those of Nature and of life. Emerson
hung his verses in the wind--a good thing to get the chaff out of
poetry or wheat. Whitman brings his, and all art, to the test of the
natural, universal standards. He read his songs in the open air to
bring them to the test of real things; he emulated the pride of the
level he planted his house by. Always is his eye on the orbs, and on
the earth as a whole:
“I feel the globe itself swift swimming through space.
I will confront the shows of day and night,
I will see if I am to be less real than they are.”
He would have his songs tally “earth’s soil, trees, winds, waves.”
“Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?”
he demands of those who would create the art of America.
His poems abound in natural images and objects, but there is rarely a
trace of the method and spirit of the so-called nature poets, some of
whom bedeck Nature with jewelry and finery till we do not know her.
In one of his nature jottings, written in 1878 at his country retreat
not far from Camden, New Jersey, he speaks thus of the emotional
aspects and influences of Nature:
I too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from all
the prevailing intellections, literature, and poems) to turn
everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death.
Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results,
influences of Nature at all, but of our own distorted, sick, or
silly souls. Here amid this wide, free scene, how healthy, how
joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet!
I do not wonder that Whitman gave such a shock to the reading public
sixty years ago. This return, in a sense, to aboriginal Nature,
this sudden plunge into the great ocean of primal energies, this
discarding of all ornamentation and studied external effects of
polish and elaboration, gave the readers of poetry a chill from which
they are not yet wholly recovered. The fireside, the library corner,
the seat in the garden, the nook in the woods: each and all have
their charm and their healing power, but do not look for them in Walt
Whitman. Rather expect the mountain-tops, the surf-drenched beach,
and the open prairies. A poet of the cosmos, fortified and emboldened
by the tremendous discoveries and deductions of modern science, he
takes the whole of Nature for his province and dominates it, is at
home with it, affiliates with it through his towering personality and
almost superhuman breadth of sympathy.
The egotism of Whitman was like the force of gravity, like the poise
of the earth, the centrality of the orbs. Nothing could disturb it,
no burden was too great for it to bear. He seemed always to have in
mind the self-control and the _insouciance_ of Nature. He would fain
try himself by the self-balanced orbs. His imagination was fired by
the undemonstrative earth; he would be as regardless of observation
as it was. He was moved by the unsophisticated freshness of Nature.
He saw that the elemental laws never apologized; he would emulate the
level he planted his house by:
“these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they are.”
He will not be outfaced by irrational things:
“I will see if I have no meanings, while the houses and ships
have meanings,
I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for
themselves, and I not to be enough for myself.
I match my spirit against yours, you orbs, growths, mountains,
brutes.
Copious as you are, I absorb you all in myself, and become the
master myself.”
It is these cosmic and natural-universal standards to which Whitman
appeals, that mark him off from all other poets or bards who have
yet appeared, and which, I hope, justify me in singling him out and
giving him a place in this volume.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
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