Part 12

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?