Part 13

Other sociabilities also I have found in the garden. We prate a good deal of "companionship with nature," and go out fussily to seek it, with camera, bird-book, field-glasses, and expensive camping gear. In the garden one loses all this self-consciousness. Instead of personifying nature, and offering her the compliment of man's society, one sinks into one's place as a piece of nature. The catbird spluttering joyous music at me, almost forgetting to be afraid; the cardinal that looks down where I stand tossing off a magnificent plume of spray from my watering-pot, and whistles, "We-e-ell! Who'd-have-thought-to-see-you-keeping-at-it?" and I myself, turning to my own uses the perpetual need of life to renew itself, to evolve out of seed and bulb new seeds and bulbs, which shall give birth in time to other seeds and bulbs--we are all part of the same process.

With our Little Brother the Robin I am approaching intimacy. It is pleasant to see him assume, with almost human egotism, that the worms I turn up, the strings I plant by, the stakes I drive, are special providences for himself. Yet I have never quite won his confidence. I have often longed to speak to him, explaining that there are worms enough for us both, and how easy I find it to scatter a few extra strings for his nest-building; I have longed to reassure the wild doves who run about on their pretty pink feet in the long grass near the garden, and at my approach fly away with a protesting soft "chitter-chitter-chitter." I realize afresh, as I have often realized in watching people coax squirrels to eat from their hands, or children lavishing affection on brainless hens and rabbits, that if there had been no Saint Francis, it behooved mankind to invent him. On the other hand, the gardener, a fighter in the struggle for food, finds the impartial views of the dilettante asking for "companionship with nature" quite unthinkable. The wild rabbit, which only last winter I thought an engaging creature, has not changed the sleekness of his brown coat, his funny little white tuft of tail, or his wavelike movements; but he has become repulsive to me.

A whole new set of values, in fact, takes possession of mind and senses. One comes to like the writhings of the angle worms in the muck, knowing that they do the gardener service. Various sights and contacts, once offensive, being now considered not simply in themselves, but in relation to our purposes, become indifferent or actually pleasurable. Even whiffs of fertilizer, if suggestive merely, give an agreeable sense that the work is going forward. And what an infinite gulf between "dirt" and "soil"! There lies between a whole initiation into secrets chemical and biological. Once I passed by garden tracts with undistinguishing eyes. Now to see them stifled with weeds, or to see the earth stiff and lumpy, affects me like walking in New York slums, or like a hideous grouping of colors; to see the earth mellow and finely tilled is satisfying, like a good chord in music, or like a firm strong drawing.

Digging, planting, transplanting, watching the sky, I have come face to face with the meaning of words I have known all my life, in the dim way we know most things outside our own importunate concerns. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone." It is one thing to understand this saying botanically, and another to see it exemplified when you are breathlessly awaiting the result. "An enemy hath done this!" I cried when the wild rabbit stripped my young bean-plants, or when some great dog made his bed in my onion-patch. All sorts of images, from parable, poem, and story, re-awake in my mind with a morning freshness and brightness. And in my turn I have enacted, or experienced, many a little apologue. For example, I discover that plants grown in over-shaded spots fall victim no less surely to what sun they get, on scorching days, than those quite unprotected. Here are the facts; the moralist may make of them what he will.

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What would any art be without its disappointments and anxieties, its hours of depression that measure the worth of the goal striven for? The amateur gardener has his share. I pass over in forgiving silence--almost silence--the haughty fashion in which the masters of the craft, professing to offer information, so give as to withhold. Your professional is a thorough classicist; "nothing too much" his motto. Enough, and not too much, whether it be vanilla in the cookies, exercise for the invalid, "corroborative detail" in the narrative, or sunshine, water, fertilizer, depth of earth, mulching for your plants. And this all-important but inscrutable rule is the despair of every amateur. A grievance perhaps more personal to myself has been the unnatural behavior enjoined on me toward seedlings of my own sowing, my own cosseting. In a sense, I had brought them into the world, and now I was told some of them must be done away with, that the rest might thrive! As I edged along the rows, unhappily choosing, among all the pretty youngsters, the victims for the sacrifice, I reminded myself of Catiline ('tis consoling, at last to have a use for one's education); _notat et designat oculis ad caedem unumquemque_. Sometimes my human instinct to value every individual and to lavish care on the weak has got the better of me. I do not dwell on the experiments to which I have resorted; but some of them, in spite of the doctrinaires, were triumphs! On the other hand, I have bitterly resented deformities and discolorations in my nursery. For the first time in my life I understand how the Spartans could expose for death infants blemished in mind or body. I understand what fierce parental pride is at the bottom of many a father's or mother's blindness to faults and commonplaceness.

On every side I hear from fellow-enthusiasts detailed schemes for next year's garden, vows of perpetual gardendom. I do not echo them. I have been initiated; a certain bond with my kind is mine henceforth. But the purest of human pleasures, as Bacon called it, is likewise the most tyrannous. Other joys may be caught up in Gideon's fashion, while one marches on one's way. Once the garden possesses you, it leaves no room for anything beside. The garden-seat of Adam and Eve has been universally regretted. But what had they to do except name the creatures, dig, sow, and reap? They did not have to pay their way with money, nor answer letters, nor read the newspapers, nor vote, nor keep track of the bacterial count in the milk they drank, nor study past history in order to interpret the present, nor even to learn the science of horticulture.

WAR FOR EVOLUTION'S SAKE

In its last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting and degrading methods of its conduct bear the "made in Germany" stamp, so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to the winner, nothing to the loser.

In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning, wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.

Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural selection on a basis of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature's principle is mutual fight and antagonism.

Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy. In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people; namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. The _Gott_ of the German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth from _Gott und uns_; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.

I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was well illustrated by the conditions of the moment--and it was a memorable one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and cunning, apparently winning in this biological struggle for existence,--and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its evolution in harmony with natural law.

But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.

First we can say of this natural law that it isn't natural law. Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution.

The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.

The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can be, looked on in a light free from control by dogma. When this is done the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day.

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Let us glance over the history of the doctrine.

The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination. Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer formulations of the present and just passed centuries.

Even the essence of Darwin's famous explanation of evolution by natural selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural conditions.

But it was the great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, who first expressed the evolution conception in fully worked out and reasonable form, while it was Lamarck who first offered a simple and wholly plausible explanation of evolutionary cause and control. His explanation remains to-day the simplest and most appealing to the reasoning mind of any that has been offered.

Unfortunately it lacked, and still lacks, the necessary basis of indispensable proof for its most fundamental assumption, to-wit, "the inheritance of acquired characters," that is, the inheritance by the immediate offspring of those structural and functional changes or "acquirements" which came to the parents during their life because of their special use or disuse of parts and their individual reactions to environmental conditions. The young giraffe had a longer neck than it otherwise would have had because its parents had stretched their necks by continual reaching up to the leaves on the highest branches. The young man-thing of Glacial Times had weaker and less developed scalp muscles because its parents had gradually given up any considerable use of these muscles for twitching their heavy shocks of hair to frighten away the flies.

Then came Darwin with his natural selection explanation, a very different explanation from Lamarck's, and one also very plausible and logical. Darwin did not altogether disbelieve in Lamarck's theory; but he believed much more in his own. Later came the Neo-Darwinians, and they went the whole way of rejecting Lamarck's explanation entirely, and accepting the natural selection explanation as the wholly sufficient cause and the only one needed to explain all evolution. The leader of the Neo-Darwinians was August Weismann of the University of Freiburg. He had as followers most of the German natural philosophers.

What is this "natural selection" that we all know so well by name, and so little, I am afraid, by content? For natural selection is much more widely known as a dominating scientific dogma, accepted popularly with little question as a sufficient explanation of evolution, than as something to be itself explained and viewed with a proper scientific doubt. As a matter of fact, it is high time that it should be generally known that not many naturalists of standing today accept natural selection as a sufficient explanation of the thoroughly accepted fact of evolution, or even as the most important among the numerous probable contributing factors of evolution. Indeed there are many reputable naturalists who repudiate natural selection altogether, as an actual contributing factor in species-forming and descent, and concede its influence as an evolutionary control, only in most general relations.

But in the popularization and wide acceptance of the natural selection dogma, we are in face of one of those familiar histories of the rise and dominance of a plausible, logically-constructed, apparently simple and sufficient explanation of a great problem pressing for solution. It is difficult for the world to accept the evolution theory without a causal explanation of it. But as the known facts prove the theory beyond reasonable doubt, it is necessary to accept it. Hence there is to most people a simultaneous necessity for accepting some explanation of it. Natural selection has had the fortune of being, since Darwin's time, the generally accepted explanation. What then is it, really?

It is an explanation of evolution which it is the merit of Darwin to have devised;--or perhaps we ought already to say in the light of the fatal results brought about by the wide unreasoning acceptance of it, it is the demerit of Darwin to have devised;--an explanation based partly on certain observed facts, but more largely on a certain logical elaboration of argument for which the observed facts are assumed to be sufficient base.

The more relevant of these facts are the production by parents of too many young and the slight differing of these young among themselves in most of their characters, physical and mental. The production of too many young leads, according to the natural selectionists, to a life and death struggle for existence among them, and the slight differences among them lead to a decision in this struggle on a basis of the slight advantages or disadvantages of these differences. The two logical conclusions seem to be inevitable on the basis of the two facts.

On the structure so far reared, however, other blocks are placed. The selectionists believe that by the laws of heredity, although the young of a different parent or pair of parents do differ among themselves, they resemble their own parents more closely than they resemble other individuals of their kind of species. So that the young produced by the survivors in the struggle for existence, although again slightly differing from their parents and each other, will, by the laws of heredity, tend to reproduce in their make-up the advantageous variations which were possessed by their parents and which gave these parents success in the struggle for life.

More than that: some of these young will tend to possess those advantageous differences--this by the laws of variation as antidote needed just here for the laws of heredity--in even more marked degree than existed in the parents, while others will possess them in less degree and still others in about the same degree. Hence, the particular young showing the increased differences will be the individuals of this generation to survive in the struggle. These will then leave behind them new young again tending to possess in varying degree those advantageous variations from the old or species type that make them especially "fit for the conditions under which they must live."

Thus there will result, in a series of many generations, a gradual shifting of the character of the species to the type characterized by an ever increasing and perfecting of the original advantageous differences. This is "species transformation," or the "origin of species" by natural selection. It is evolution on a basis of life and death struggle; extinction of the unfit; and survival of the fit, fitter or fittest. And just as with the different individuals inside the species, so with the different varying species. Each struggles with the other and the one or ones with the advantageous differences win at the expense of the others.

There is no doubt of the fascinating plausibility and seeming reality and sufficiency of this explanation. It makes a strong appeal to the logical mind; to the theory-spinning brain. You can understand it, prove it, expand it, improve on it, and, all this almost without ever seeing an animal or a plant, or knowing anything of its actual life and relations to the world it lives in. No wonder it fascinated and seized a world demanding a logical explanation for the theory of evolution. No wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.

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Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not be.

It was Weismann's new facts and new theories about heredity that did much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible and absurd the German claims of the _Allmacht_ of natural selection as evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of the potent causes and controls of evolution--if we may call that revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do not understand.

If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.

The new heredity, to characterize by this term the extraordinary increase and the more exact kind of knowledge of heredity acquired since the first recognition, in 1900, of Mendelism, has so shattered the seemingly unassailable logical structure of the natural selection explanation of evolution that it stands now only as a tottering skeleton of its once imposing self. It had always too much assumption of premises for its foundation and too much logic and finespun theory in its superstructure to be an enduring building. Even before the new knowledge of the facts and mechanism of heredity was available natural selection was already weakening under the criticism of scientific men, although but little of this was known to the man in the street. And even now when the new heredity has furnished the knowledge for a complete undermining of the natural selection theory as a species-forming factor, only occasional rumors of the disaster find their way into popular literature.