Chapter 16
Evolution is creative, as Bergson contends. The wonder is that, notwithstanding the indifference of the elemental forces and the blind clashing of opposing tendencies among living forms,--a universe that seems run entirely on the trial-and-error principle,--evolution has gone steadily forward, a certain order and stability has been reached in the world of inert bodies and forces, and myriads of forms of wonderful fitness and beauty have been reached in the organic realm. Just as the water-system and the weather-system of the globe have worked themselves out on the hit-and-miss plan, but not without serious defects,--much too much water and heat at a few places, and much too little at a few others,--so the organic impulse, warred upon by the blind inorganic elements and preyed upon by the forms it gave rise to, has worked itself out and peopled the world as we see it peopled to-day--not with forms altogether admirable and lovely from our point of view, but so from the point of view of the whole. The forests get themselves planted by the go-as-you-please winds and currents, the pines in one place, the spruce, the oaks, the elms, the beeches, in another, all with a certain fitness and system. The waters gather themselves together in great bodies and breathe salubrity and fertility upon the land.
A certain order and reasonableness emerges from the chaos and cross-purposes. There are harmony and coöperation among the elemental forces, as well as strife and antagonism. Life gets on, for all groping and blundering. There is the inherent variability of living forms to begin with--the primordial push toward the development from within which, so far as we can see, is not fortuitous, but predestined; and there is the stream of influences from without, constantly playing upon and modifying the organism and taken advantage of by it.
The essence of life is in adaptability; it goes into partnership with the forces and conditions that surround it. It is this trait which leads the teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environment when its fitness is a foregone conclusion. Shall we praise the fitness of the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the winds for filling our sails? If we cannot say explicitly, without speaking from our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in the evolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that the struggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universe and that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebula itself.
XII
THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE
I
William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was to contradict other philosophers. I may add in the same spirit that one of the fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradict themselves. I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but I have little doubt that a critical examination of his works would show that he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had trouble to make both ends of his philosophy meet. Any man who seeks to compass any of the fundamental problems with the little span of his finite mind, is bound at times to have trouble to make both ends meet. The man of science seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knows what is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it. But the philosopher works with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky if he is ever aware when both ends fail to meet.
I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well as a great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theory of the origin of species through natural selection working upon fortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that he could not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of mere chance. The result of chance man certainly is--is he not?--as are all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon the organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves no intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories?
I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both ends of his argument did not quite meet when he contended for the truth of determinism--that there is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and at the same time set man apart from the cosmic order, and represented him as working his will upon it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of his earlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of living things, as contrasted with the student of inert matter, the aspect of nature is reversed. "In living matter, incessant, and so far as we know, spontaneous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the anomaly, to be accounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium," except the equilibrium of death. This is good vitalistic doctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between the matter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atoms are aggregated. Probably the only difference between a diamond and a piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an oyster-shell, is the manner in which the atoms are aggregated; but that the secret of life is in the peculiar compounding of the atoms or molecules--a spatial arrangement of them--is a harder proposition. It seems to me also that Haeckel involves himself in obvious contradictions when he ascribes will, sensation, inclination, dislike, though of a low order, to the atoms of matter; in fact, sees them as living beings with souls, and then denies soul, will, power of choice, and the like to their collective unity in the brain of man.
A philosopher cannot well afford to assume the air of lofty indifference that the poet Whitman does when he asks, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself"; but he may take comfort in the thought that contradictions are often only apparent, and not real, as when two men standing on opposite sides of the earth seem to oppose each other, and yet their heads point to the same heavens, and their feet to the same terrestrial centre. The logic of the earth completely contradicts the ideas we draw from our experience with other globes, both our artificial globes and the globes in the forms of the sun and the moon that we see in the heavens. The earth has only one side, the outside, which is always the upper side; at the South Pole, as at the North, we are on the top side. I fancy the whole truth of any of the great problems, if we could see it, would reconcile all our half-truths, all the contradictions in our philosophy.
In considering this problem of the mystery of living things, I have had a good deal of trouble in trying to make my inborn idealism go hand in hand with my inborn naturalism; but I am not certain that there is any real break or contradiction between them, only a surface one, and that deeper down the strata still unite them. Life seems beyond the capacity of inorganic nature to produce; and yet here is life in its myriad forms, here is the body and mind of man, and here is the world of inanimate matter out of which all living beings arise, and into which they sooner or later return; and we must either introduce a new principle to account for it all, or else hold to the idea that what is is natural--a legitimate outcome of the universal laws and processes that have been operating through all time. This last is the point of view of the present chapter,--the point of view of naturalism; not strictly the scientific view which aims to explain all life phenomena in terms of exact experimental science, but the larger, freer view of the open-air naturalist and literary philosopher. I cannot get rid of, or hold in abeyance, my inevitable idealism, if I would; neither can I do violence to my equally inevitable naturalism, but may I not hope to make the face of my naturalism beam with the light of the ideal--the light that never was in the physico-chemical order, and never can be there?
II
The naturalist cannot get away from the natural order, and he sees man, and all other forms of life, as an integral part of it--the order, which in inert matter is automatic and fateful, and which in living matter is prophetic and indeterminate; the course of one down the geologic ages, seeking only a mechanical repose, being marked by collisions and disruptions; the other in its course down the biologic ages seeking a vital and unstable repose, being marked by pain, failure, carnage, extinction, and ceaseless struggle with the physical order upon which it depends. Man has taken his chances in the clash of blind matter, and in the warfare of living forms. He has been the pet of no god, the favorite of no power on earth or in heaven. He is one of the fruits of the great cosmic tree, and is subject to the same hazards and failures as the fruit of all other trees. The frosts may nip him in the bud, the storms beat him down, foes of earth and air prey upon him, and hostile influences from all sides impede or mar him. The very forces that uphold him and furnish him his armory of tools and of power, will destroy him the moment he is off his guard. He is like the trainer of wild beasts who, at his peril, for one instant relaxes his mastery over them. Gravity, electricity, fire, flood, hurricane, will crush or consume him if his hand is unsteady or his wits tardy. Nature has dealt with him upon the same terms as with all other forms of life. She has shown him no favor. The same elements--the same water, air, lime, iron, sulphur, oxygen, carbon, and so on--make up his body and his brain as make up theirs, and the same make up theirs as are the constituents of the insensate rocks, soils, and clouds. The same elements, the same atoms and molecules, but a different order; the same solar energy, but working to other ends; the same life principle but lifted to a higher plane. How can we separate man from the total system of things, setting him upon one side and them upon another, making the relation of the two mechanical or accidental? It is only in thought, or in obedience to some creed or philosophy, that we do it. In life, in action, we unconsciously recognize ourselves as a part of Nature. Our success and well-being depend upon the closeness and spontaneousness of the relation.
If all this is interpreted to mean that life, that the mind and soul of man, are of material origin, science does not shrink from the inference. Only the inference demands a newer and higher conception of matter--the conception that Tyndall expressed when he wrote the word with a capital M, and declared that Matter was "at bottom essentially mystical and transcendental"; that Goethe expressed when he called matter "the living garment of God"; and that Whitman expressed when he said that the soul and the body were one. The materialism of the great seers and prophets of science who penetrate into the true inwardness of matter, who see through the veil of its gross obstructive forms and behold it translated into pure energy, need disturb no one.
In our religious culture we have beggared matter that we might exalt spirit; we have bankrupted earth that we might enrich heaven; we have debased the body that we might glorify the soul. But science has changed all this. Mankind can never again rest in the old crude dualism. The Devil has had his day, and the terrible Hebrew Jehovah has had his day; the divinities of this world are now having their day.
The puzzle or the contradiction in the naturalistic view of life appears when we try to think of a being as a part of Nature, having his genesis in her material forces, who is yet able to master and direct Nature, reversing her processes and defeating her ends, opposing his will to her fatalism, his mercy to her cruelty--in short, a being who thinks, dreams, aspires, loves truth, justice, goodness, and sits in judgment upon the very gods he worships. Must he not bring a new force, an alien power? Can a part be greater than the whole? Can the psychic dominate the physical out of which it came? Again we have only to enlarge our conception of the physical--the natural--or make our faith measure up to the demands of reason. Our reason demands that the natural order be all-inclusive. Can our faith in the divinity of matter measure up to this standard? Not till we free ourselves from the inherited prejudices which have grown up from our everyday struggles with gross matter. We must follow the guidance of science till we penetrate this husk and see its real mystical and transcendental character, as Tyndall did.
When we have followed matter from mass to molecule, from molecule to atom, from atom to electron, and seen it in effect dematerialized,--seen it in its fourth or ethereal, I had almost said spiritual, state,--when we have grasped the wonder of radio-activity, and the atomic transformations that attend it, we shall have a conception of the potencies and possibilities of matter that robs scientific materialism of most of its ugliness. Of course, no deductions of science can satisfy our longings for something kindred to our own spirits in the universe. But neither our telescopes nor our microscopes reveal such a reality. Is this longing only the result of our inevitable anthropomorphism, or is it the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for, the prophecy of our kinship with the farthest star? Can soul arise out of a soulless universe?
Though the secret of life is under our feet, yet how strange and mysterious it seems! It draws our attention away from matter. It arises among the inorganic elements like a visitant from another sphere. It is a new thing in the world. Consciousness is a new thing, yet Huxley makes it one of his trinity of realities--matter, energy, and consciousness. We are so immersed in these realities that we do not see the divinity they embody. We call that sacred and divine which is far off and unattainable. Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms of matter and energy, that it is not to be wondered at that mankind has so long looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event. But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial and the terrestrial are one, and that we are already in the heavens among the stars. When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of wont and use, and see with clear vision our relations to the Cosmos, all our ideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over, and we see how the two are one; how life and death play into each other's hands, and how the whole truth of things cannot be compassed by any number of finite minds.
III
When we are bold enough to ask the question, Is life an addition to matter or an evolution from matter? how all these extra-scientific theories about life as a separate entity wilt and fade away! If we know anything about the ways of creative energy, we know that they are not as our ways; we know its processes bear no analogy to the linear and external doings of man. Creative energy works from within; it identifies itself with, and is inseparable from, the element in which it works. I know that in this very statement I am idealizing the creative energy, but my reader will, I trust, excuse this inevitable anthropomorphism. The way of the creative energy is the way of evolution. When we begin to introduce things, when we begin to separate the two orders, the vital and the material, or, as Bergson says, when we begin to think of things created, and of a thing that creates, we are not far from the state of mind of our childhood, and of the childhood of the race. We are not far from the Mosaic account of creation. Life appears as an introduction, man and his soul as introductions.
Our reason, our knowledge of the method of Nature, declare for evolution; because here we are, here is this amazing world of life about us, and here it goes on through the action and interaction of purely physical and chemical forces. Life seems as natural as day and night, as the dews and the rain. Our studies of the past history of the globe reveal the fact that life appeared upon a cooling planet when the temperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbon dioxide, were at hand. How it began, whether through insensible changes in the activities of inert matter, lasting whole geologic ages, or by a sudden transformation at many points on the earth's surface, we can never know. But science can see no reason for believing that its beginning was other than natural; it was inevitable from the constitution of matter itself. Moreover, since the law of evolution seems of universal application, and affords the key to more great problems than any other generalization of the human mind, one would say on _a priori_ grounds that life is an evolution, that its genesis is to be sought in the inherent capacities and potentialities of matter itself. How else could it come? Science cannot go outside of matter and its laws for an explanation of any phenomena that appear in matter. It goes inside of matter instead, and in its mysterious molecular attractions and repulsions, in the whirl and dance of the atoms and electrons, in their emanations and transformations, in their amazing potencies and activities, sees, or seems to see, the secret of the origin of life itself. But this view is distasteful to a large number of thinking persons. Many would call it frank materialism, and declare that it is utterly inadequate to supply the spiritual and ideal background which is the strength and solace of our human life.
IV
The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man of science feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of the natural order. To the scientist the universe is complete in itself. He can admit of no break or discontinuity anywhere. Threads of relation, visible and invisible,--chemical, mechanical, electric, magnetic, solar, lunar, stellar, geologic, biologic,--forming an intricate web of subtle forces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmic unity. Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere which rests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds all forms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning and no ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines are fluid and continuous. The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy we see are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war with itself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to the universe, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit; all is inside; deep beneath deep, height above height, and this mystery and miracle that we call life must arise out of the natural order in the course of time as inevitably as the dew forms and the rain falls. When the rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall,--a time which science predicts,--then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish from the earth. Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves, as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still not exempt from the operation of the universal physical laws. It came by them or through them, and it must go by them or through them.
The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all these things as the lay mind cannot be, used to the searching laboratory methods, and familiar with the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, dealing with the wonders of chemical compounds, and the forces that lurk in molecules and atoms, seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution of the earth, only the operation of mechanical and chemical principles; seeing the irrefragable law of the correlation and the conservation of forces; tracing consciousness and all our changes in mental states to changes in the brain substance; drilled in methods of proof by experimentation; knowing that the same number of ultimate atoms may be so combined or married as to produce compounds that differ as radically as alcohol and ether,--conversant with all these things, and more, I say,--the strictly scientific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the mechanistic conception of all life phenomena.
Science traces the chain of cause and effect everywhere and finds no break. It follows down animal life till it merges in the vegetable, though it cannot put its finger or its microscope on the point where one ends and the other begins. It finds forms that partake of the characteristics of both. It is reasonable to expect that the vegetable merges into the mineral by the same insensible degrees, and that the one becomes the other without any real discontinuity. The change, if we may call it such, probably takes place in the interior world of matter among the primordial atoms, where only the imagination can penetrate. In that sleep of the ultimate corpuscle, what dreams may come, what miracles may be wrought, what transformations take place! When I try to think of life as a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mystic dance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people taking hold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing all sorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's throats, or occupying one another's bodies, thrilled and vibrating at an inconceivable rate.
The theological solution of this problem of life fails more and more to satisfy thinking men of to-day. Living things are natural phenomena, and we feel that they must in some way be an outcome of the natural order. Science is more and more familiarizing our minds with the idea that the universe is a universe, a oneness; that its laws are continuous. We follow the chemistry of it to the farthest stars and there is no serious break or exception; it is all of one stuff. We follow the mechanics of it into the same abysmal depths, and there are no breaks or exceptions. The biology of it we cannot follow beyond our own little corner of the universe; indeed, we have no proof that there is any biology anywhere else. But if there is, it must be similar to our own. There is only one kind of electricity (though two phases of it), only one kind of light and heat, one kind of chemical affinity, in the universe; and hence only one kind of life. Looked at in its relation to the whole, life appears like a transient phenomenon of matter. I will not say accidental; it seems inseparably bound up with the cosmic processes, but, I may say, fugitive, superficial, circumscribed. Life comes and goes; it penetrates but a little way into the earth; it is confined to a certain range of temperature. Beyond a certain degree of cold, on the one hand, it does not appear; and beyond a certain degree of heat, on the other, it is cut off. Without water or moisture, it ceases; and without air, it is not. It has evidently disappeared from the moon, and probably from the inferior planets, and it is doubtful if it has yet appeared on any of the superior planets, save Mars.
Life comes to matter as the flowers come in the spring,--when the time is ripe for it,--and it disappears when the time is over-ripe. Man appears in due course and has his little day upon the earth, but that day must as surely come to an end. Yet can we conceive of the end of the physical order? the end of gravity? or of cohesion? The air may disappear, the water may disappear, combustion may cease; but oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon will continue somewhere.
V