CHAPTER I

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WHERE SCIENCE AND

RELIGION MEET

WHERE SCIENCE

AND RELIGION

MEET

BY

WILLIAM SCOTT PALMER

"Il paraît juste de voir dans la vie le trait d'union

de la science et de la religion."

_Émile Boutroux._

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

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'We are still, as in Plato's age, groping about for a new method more

comprehensive than any of those that now prevail; and also more

permanent. And we seem to see at a distance the promise of such a

method, which can hardly be any other than the method of idealized

experience, having roots which strike far down into the history of

philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the

past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete, or

theory from fact, or the divine from the human, or one science from

another, but labours to connect them. Along such a road we have

proceeded a few steps, sufficient, perhaps, to make us reflect on the

want of method which prevails in our own day. In another age, all the

branches of knowledge, whether relating to God or man or nature, will

become the knowledge of "the revelation of a single science," and all

things, like the stars in heaven, will shed their light upon one

another.'

JOWETT: _Plato_, Introduction to _Meno_.

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NOTE

I have not named my authorities or given references to any passages in

their books. My critics, friendly or unfriendly, may complain of this

omission. But I hope they will not. I hope they will see that I have

gathered my materials together for a clearly shown purpose with which

particular references and frequent defined quotations would have

interfered. I wanted to build a wayside cottage for travellers who are

in haste and will soon pass on, not a museum for the leisurely student.

I hope, then, that my critics will criticize the cottage to their

hearts' content—I shall do my best to learn from them,—but I beg them

not to treat it as a museum whose curator has either not had the sense

or not taken the trouble to ticket its contents.

In place of references I have given in an appendix two short lists of

easily accessible books which will give technical support to the

substance of this little work. I have learnt much from them and

taken—all but quoted—much. I make no apology for including, among books

from which I have learnt, two of my own. Nothing teaches as solidly as

trying to teach. And the record of a learner sometimes helps learners,

when the oracles of the learned fail. But I must acknowledge here my own

great indebtedness to two of those learned, my old instructors, Sir

Edward Schäfer and Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, whose admirable lessons in

the biological sciences of which they are distinguished professors laid

a scientific foundation in me for all my subsequent study.

W. SCOTT PALMER.

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PART I

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CHAPTER I

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:

The moon is within me, and so is the sun.

The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me;

but my deaf ears cannot hear it.

_Kabir._

Deep in every one of us there is a passion of desire to understand, just

as there is of desire to enjoy and of desire to be somehow or other 'in

the right.' I say deep in us, because we are in the habit either of

burying these desires beneath a pretence of satisfying them or else of

diverting our attention from them and thus letting them sink out of

sight. So we live our life in the pursuit of other ends than those

likely to be reached through understanding and rapture and

righteousness. We falsify ourselves and our desires; yet unless we ruin

the life within us they persist, waiting their hour.

There are moments when it becomes almost impossible for any man who has

seen something of the marvel of every-day affairs to believe that he

might spend time in vain if he were to try to convince his next-door

neighbour that there was anything hard to understand about the crooking

of a finger. Yet that is his experience when he tries. Just because

every man who has a healthy finger in a healthy body and a healthy mind

can and does crook it, there is nothing to wonder at. The whole affair

is plain; it is familiar, happens every day. Familiarity lulls to sleep

both the desire for understanding, and the sense of not understanding.

Consequently there is little that should provoke surprise on our part in

the fact that not one man in (say) ten thousand is consciously puzzled

by any of the deeper problems of life, not one in (say) a hundred

thousand has his imagination either stirred or stunned by the green

blades of the corn, the leaves of the tree, the grass in his fields or

the sheep and cows that are eating it. There is nothing new about all

this, nothing strange; it is familiar—therefore it is understood or

there is nothing that calls for understanding. Yet in these green blades

and leaves is the junction-point between the living and the not-living,

between the plant and animal on the one hand and what we call 'inert

matter' on the other, between the radiant energy of the sun and

ourselves. And we do not understand, nobody understands, how that

junction-point works. It is called chlorophyll; it is found in little

living bodies called chloroplasts; and it is wonderful 'beyond all

whooping'. Yet we do not even whoop. We do not get even thus far. We are

not surprised, we are not enraptured. The thing is at once both too

familiar and too obscure for us.

We cannot do away with the familiarity; but at least, as reasonable

beings possessed of that passion of desire which is a cry of the spirit

within us and which we so often do our utmost to suppress, it will be

well for us to make an attempt to find out how and even why this green

stuff of the plant is so highly distinguished among the wonders of the

world.

But first let us ask ourselves a searching and pertinent question—let us

ask ourselves what it means to be alive. A man is alive, but so are the

cells of his own blood, so is the grass in the fields, so are the small

jellies we call amoebae and the still smaller rods and specks we call

bacteria and 'germs.' Can we say anything about life that will at once

fit these and distinguish them from all else that does not live,

accepting for the moment the distinction between living and not-living

that we ordinarily make?

There are several things that we may say about them. For example, they

grow. But a crystal grows and so does a heap of sand. There are, then,

different ways of growing. The sand heap grows when the wind scatters

particles of sand over it or the sea drives them; or the river, or a

small boy with a barrow, deposits them. It grows by mere addition. The

crystal grows without any such aid and in a different way. If you want

to see an alum-crystal grow you must offer it more alum, dissolved; you

must offer it its own material and it will then grow without other help.

It will grow by what we may call formative accretion. On the other hand

the grass and the corn and the trees grow neither by mere addition nor

by formative accretion, but by converting, assimilating and

incorporating nitrogen, carbon, and so on, compounded either by their

own effort or by the micro-organisms of the soil. They are magicians,

these live creatures. And of all their magic the magic of their green

leaves is chief in our eyes. For it takes the carbonic acid of the air,

a stable compound of one atom of carbon with two of oxygen, and tears it

to pieces, using for that enormous work the radiant energy of the sun.

This carbon, now potent with the potency of the sun, is then united with

other elements to make sugars that nourish the tissues of the plant. In

these sugars power is stored as it is stored in an explosive like

dynamite or trinitrotoluol. But in the plant, power is under strict

control; it is liberated by degrees as it is wanted and is replaced as

it is used; it is controlled, used, replaced in a discriminating,

selective and determining way. The ability to make use of physical

power, within a body, in this discriminating, selective and determining

way and thus to grow is (among other things) what is meant by being

alive.

The chemist in his laboratory can make explosives, chemical compounds

that will easily break down and in breaking down will liberate, for good

or ill, great power. He makes nitroglycerin and trinitrotoluol. He can

also make very elaborate and more stable compounds than a plant makes,

for instance, indigo or madder-red, though for such as these he does not

usually begin like the plant with chemical elements; he begins half

way—with lesser compounds, ready made—and thus, or even sometimes by

building up from the bottom, from elements, like the plant, he makes

what are known as 'organic' substances of many sorts and uses. Is it

possible that he will ever make that organic substance protoplasm, the

life-jelly of living things? He has not done so yet. Suppose he did,

suppose he went on from making indigo to make the indigo-maker itself.

There is nothing of a chemical kind in the indigo-plant which his

laboratory does not contain; there are just the carbon, nitrogen,

oxygen, salts and the rest, with which he deals so successfully

elsewhere. He has all the materials to hand. Why should he not make its

living stuff? Again, suppose he did, for perhaps he will. What then?

Will he have made life, as well as built up the material substance of a

living thing? That is a question of questions.

We know life here only in association with its jelly. What is the

character of that association? Granted that life depends on the jelly,

in what way does it depend? If we can answer these questions we may know

how to answer the one about the chemist's making or not making life, if

and when he makes the jelly.

There are different ways of being dependent, as there are different ways

of growing. The steam depends on the boiler and the boiler-fire. In this

case the dependence is one of being _produced_. The boiler and its fire

produce the steam. So we say, in the ordinary way of speaking of such

things. Again—when I press the trigger of a rifle the bullet is shot

out. I have only pressed the trigger; you can hardly say I have produced

the bullet. What I have done is to release an explosive power that

drives the bullet. That is another kind of dependence, dependence on the

_release_ of power. There may be still, there certainly have been, men

who would tell you that life is produced by protoplasm as steam is

produced by the boiler, or that it is released from a chemical compound

by some chemical or physical trigger action. They might, once they did

in large numbers, say that consciousness is produced by or released from

the brain, and that this must be so because it depends upon the brain.

These two assertions, one about life and the other about consciousness,

stand or fall together; and we can begin to see that they may be made to

fall, as soon as we see that there is a third kind of dependence to be

considered besides the dependence of the bullet and the steam. There is

the dependence of light in a room on the existence of a window. Without

window no light in that room; with window as much light as window

permits to pass. There is a dependence of _transmission_, and

transmission may occur in many wide and fundamentally differing ways. At

a stroke you see the whole question and series of questions take on a

new aspect. If the chemist makes life-jelly he may have made not

something to produce or to release but something to transmit life. He

may doubtless have imitated what there is good reason to think must have

taken place on the earth's surface long ago and may indeed be taking

place now; but in doing this he may only have made a material substance

capable of allowing spiritually potent life to be manifest in it and to

endow it with a share in promoting the purposes of life. He may have

made for the peculiar potency of life a door of entrance to a house, or

rather, since this house is not passive, to a body in which it and the

body will be distinguishable as a living being, an example of life and

matter living and at work together. Why not? The supposition of some

such dependence of the superior power of life upon a body seems quite as

reasonable, even at no more than a first glance, as the other

suppositions made by men who do not acknowledge the specific character

of life. And it accords far better with both knowledge and experience,

when these are taken at their widest and their most profound. The other

suppositions accord only with chosen parts of knowledge and chosen bits

cut out of experience—the parts and bits cut out and chosen by the man

who restricts himself to the specialism and the very right and proper

superficiality of certain sciences. Even there they accord but ill,

because in their inception they trespass beyond the borders of all

science.

Living creatures are the subject of the mere biologist's merely

scientific inquiry—not life. When a biologist, speaking as biologist,

tries to tell us both _that_ life is and _what_ it is, he is

philosophizing. Life is in fact an ultra-scientific problem. We have to

call in philosophy before we can even state the problem. And when either

the biologist or the physicist or the chemist talks of life as a mode of

physical or chemical energy, or as a product of things, he is playing at

philosophy, not soberly working at his science. The biologist shall

teach us about living creatures, the physicist and the chemist about

physical and chemical things and powers; but the philosopher must help

us in our enquiry about life. And this, not because a man shall not be

permitted to transgress boundaries we lay down, but because his chosen

methods preclude his walking safely except within boundaries they

themselves build up. Of every specialist this is true. We must transcend

specialism if we would have 'all things, like the stars in heaven,' shed

'their light upon one another.'

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CHAPTER II

Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties;

which reveals old things in heaven, makes new

discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery.

_Sir Thomas Browne_.

The green leaf of the tree, the blade of the wheat that gives me bread—I

look at them and tell myself, as many a man has told himself before,

that if I could read their secrets I should know, as from the 'flower in

the crannied wall,' 'what God and man is.' So I might, but only as far

as their secrets go. If I could read my own I should go farther and know

more. I am man and hold far greater secrets in being man. And I have the

inestimable advantage of being inside myself, of being alive, besides

looking on at living, of both growing and watching growth. There is no

other live creature on earth who can possibly tell me as much as I can

tell myself about what it means to be alive. And if the blade of wheat

is wonderful beyond words, what am I?

Think of it: I have a history; indeed I am a history, I am time alive,

time that accumulates and lasts. I have a past that is not past, because

it is at work in my present and is writing its indelible signature on my

future. There is no least action in my past that has not left its

impress on me, made me different from what I should have been without

it, and therefore will make my future different too. My whole history is

alive, active and changing in my actions and my change. The history of

my forefathers, too, is alive in me and in my character and powers. I

have an inheritance from their living; I am as and what I am, in part

because they were as and what they were. But I have power and I use it

to create myself and recreate my inheritance through an impetus

transmitted to me in the transmission to me of my life. Therefore every

moment of my life is a unique and original moment of a unique and

original history, mine and mine alone, never to be repeated, never to be

wholly predicted, even by me. The evolutionist philosophy tells me that

I endure, I _last_, and that all my changes and experiences endure,

last, in and with me, changing in themselves and among themselves as

though they were alive to influence and interpenetrate each other.

Indeed they are alive in me and in my life or they could not endure.

They would pass like the stages in the height of a sand heap as it

grows, as the little heap it was is merged and lost in the larger heap

it is. They would be lost as the flowing tide is lost when the ebb

succeeds it. Such changes are mere successions, displacements and

replacements; they are not history. They enter history only in sharing

that of the universe which itself endures, lasts, and within which they

are parts.

I, on the other hand, have a life of my own; I am a maker, shaper,

creator. I am a master-worker and freeman in a world of relative

necessity. Yet my wonderful living body, through which I do my work,

depends for its support on the green blades of grass and corn and the

green leaves of the trees. Further—every cell of the millions and

millions in my body is like the amoeba and the cells of the plant in

consisting of protoplasm. Further still—I began my own life as a speck

of protoplasm, and if I could trace all the steps of my pedigree to the

first display of life on earth, from which I am sure I am descended, I

should (I dare to say) find another protoplasmic speck with which every

one of the cells of the vast cellular republic whereby and wherein I

live is in historical continuity. Bodily I am immensely complicated; I

am a congeries and a commonwealth of cells. But the first cell was also

complicated although it was but one. Nothing that lives is simple, no,

not even if we carry the idea of life far beyond the arbitrary

boundaries commonly set to it now. There is unplumbed mystery in the

conjunction of two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen to make a third

and different substance, water; there is unplumbed mystery in every

element and every happening of the world. But some mysterious things are

scientifically more complex than others, and among the most complex is

this thing, protoplasm. Yet it seems that before life could be manifest

in the world the molecular complexity of protoplasm must have been

attained. By storing power in building up the atoms of the chemical

elements from electrons, and making that power useful by the union of

atoms in molecules; then, by a further delicate union between molecules

(much after the fashion of widely branching, but only slightly

tenacious, magnets) forming larger and ever larger groups, a condition

of such plasticity of matter and ready discharge and restoring of power

has been attained as makes it fit for the rank of a recognized life. The

grouped and complicated molecules, each charged with power, are set as

with a double-acting hair-trigger, so ready are they to let go energy in

heat and work as these are wanted; so ready also for their rebuilding in

the peculiar power of the life with which they are imbued.

There are examples of highly complex union to be seen in the chemist's

laboratory and elsewhere which are never called living matter. The

chemist speaks of some of them as colloids (we should naturally call

many of these jellies, or gums) and he calls protoplasm a colloid too.

They have remarkable properties, and the new bio-chemist thinks he may

some day make that elaborate colloid with more remarkable properties,

which we know as protoplasm. He thinks also that we do ill to confine

the first production of life-jellies to the age of steaming seas and

cloud-shadowed lagoons, before the Pre-Cambrian geologic times. He tells

us that in his opinion it may always be going on and always have gone on

since the earth was cool enough to permit of it. He thinks that if all

the living creatures we are aware of were swept out of the world to-day

there would still be living stuff remaining on it of which we are

ignorant now; and that in the course of millenniums this would people it

once more. The beginnings of the life-jelly must be so small as to be

far out of the reach of our microscopes and every other tool we can

bring to bear, as yet, he says. And there, doubtless, he is right.

Let us suppose that he is right, too, in his main contention. Let us

look at inorganic matter with a new eye, seeing in its evolutionary

change the forerunner of greater change and greater evolution, the

preparer of the narrow pathway by which life approaches to its display,

and at last enters on possession of a body that in union with it shall

be the germ of lives to come—enters the realm of physical forces and the

relative necessity of material things, where and by use of those forces

it will subdue necessity to the purposes of freedom. This indeed seems

to be the manner and purposing of life as it extends from the single

cell to the assemblage of cells that constitutes my body. There is

continuity from first to last; and yet the differences between me and

the primitive jelly-speck are even more striking than the resemblances.

Students of the cell itself and students of my body as merely composed

of cells are, naturally, cytologists, histologists, physiologists,

embryologists, and the like. But unless there are others, unless

students of psychology, ethics, aesthetics, social science, history, and

many more, bring their minds to bear on me, I am studied to little sense

and in small part. I am obliged to regard myself as not only physical

but psychical; I seek after, and sometimes find, goodness and truth and

beauty. I admire, I hate or love. I am a hero or a criminal, or both. I

sin. In the advance of life from the minute and primitive colloid lump

to me amazing things have happened. When I see life making its humble

appearance by that speck of jelly, I must in my mind's eye connect it

with what I am, and see there in its almost inchoate wonders the promise

of myself. And still I must look behind even that first living thing and

consider matter as well as life; for the physical potency of that thing

was long of building up; and this physical potency has its place in me.

The material pathway of life is the pathway of my powers, and it

stretches far back into cosmic happenings smaller or (it depends how you

look at these high matters and what you see in them) greater still.

We have no need to stretch imagination unaided; we may watch changes

going on which indicate or, maybe, reproduce, stages in the creation

of our own world and of its very elements. There are stars in which

material elements are being either made or destroyed; it is hard for

us to say which. In the constellation Argo there are two suns—furnaces

of immeasurable heat—in which hydrogen, the lightest and simplest of

our elements, is either being born or disintegrated before our eyes.

There are other stars where hydrogen is in the same state as that in

which we know it here, and more complex elements (for the elements of

the chemist are in reality complex; they are only elements for him,

because he cannot disintegrate them) are being born or, again, are

being destroyed. There are stars in all stages up to the stage of our

own sun and beyond, in age and powers; and there are elements of many

degrees of complexity. In the series of those stars there is a series

of changes which, taken together, mark for us either an ascent of

matter from the immaterial, or a descent towards it. There is iron in

its very infancy to be seen in some—proto-iron we call it—which we are

able to produce ourselves by exposing ordinary iron to the intense

heat of the electric vacuum spark and there disrupting it into a

simpler mode which the spectroscope detects as it detects it in a

star. We are entitled to say that in these changes material elements

declare themselves to be things that somewhere and somehow are born

and grow, whether in any one stage that we watch they are moving in

one direction or another, from birth or down towards death. Indeed the

most probable thing is that in the solar furnace-fires both movements

are going on together; elements are being born and elements annulled.

They have an origin, these elements. Some scientific men suggest to us

that they issue from the universal ether that fills the interstellar

spaces and the spaces of the stars themselves, of our own bodies, of

all things in all worlds. Here the first stones of the pathway on

which life travels may have (in their belief) been shaped. And neither

chemist nor physicist can even guess at anything beyond. We stop here,

as men of science only. It is at a place full of marvels that we are

arrested. This ether is so marvellous that some rash men have deemed

it competent to replace God. They have asked what need we have of any

other God. And, truly, if the creations of worlds that are no more

than physical were all a God was needed for, this amazing source of

worlds would seem, not so unreasonably, to be enough. Whether the

ether is immaterial or not, we might say the same. There are those who

hold that it is the first and finest of the elements of matter. For

men who know most about it, it is no kind of matter. But its power and

fertility remain, however this may be; it is held to be the medium of

communication everywhere, between small and great, distant and near;

and the womb of the worlds. Undoubtedly it may serve the

pseudo-physicist-philosopher in place of God, while he is no more than

that.

The pathway for life has been traced back and back to the utmost of the

regressive journey of science. We have seen (perhaps) the first stones

being fashioned in the fires of the suns; at least we may believe that

in some such place and way they have been and are being fashioned. We

know—radium has shown us and the proto-iron—how chemical elements can be

disintegrated and brought down to lower states of material complexity.

In radio-active matter there is more than a hint that they may be

brought lower still, returned to the fecund mother from which they came,

restored, let us say, to the ether.

We may have learnt—that depends on our prepossessions—we may have learnt

in studying this regress to see in what the chemist calls the 'affinity'

of one element for another, and in its 'valency' (that is, its ability

to grip one or another and even several to itself and take part in

building up compounds), a likeness or a congruity with living stuff. And

we have seen a living thing as compounded physically of the compounds of

the chemist, though not, as yet, compounded by him. Unless our

prepossessions form in us irrational prejudice we may gladly follow the

clue science puts in our hands, and confess a continuous advance in

order upon order of nature from the womb of the ether to ourselves.

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CHAPTER III

There the Eternal Fountain is playing its endless

life-streams of birth and death.

_Kabir._

We have followed the physicist and the chemist to the farthest point

they have reached in their research. They cannot show us anything

beyond, and we, unsatisfied, must look elsewhere. The problems of life

remain. We ourselves stand on the great pathway, its continuous road of

rising orders, and from our place of vantage we contemplate the first

living thing. A profound discrepancy, or what seems like one, stares us

in the face, the discrepancy between our mastery over things and our

self-conscious, self-creative abilities on the one hand, and, on the

other, that first humble yet awe-inspiring revelation by elements

generated, perhaps, within a white-hot star. Science has nothing to do

with meanings and purposes and values in our lives or with our concern

for them. Indeed it has nothing to do, in strictness, with meanings and

purposes and values anywhere. This is the business of philosophy and of

all ordinary men.

We have learnt a lesson as we followed the men of science from step to

step, and heard nature respond to their questions with intelligible

answers. We have learnt that, so far as it has been examined, the

universe, like ourselves, is rational and has a history. It moves,

changes, grows; it is real and its history is real too. And though

science is not concerned with its meaning, we are. We hold fast to our

science, but we care for more than science. We cannot help it, for we

are aware of meaning in ourselves; as the man of science is when he is

not being only scientific. We are aware too of purpose and of values; we

are aware of making and shaping and creating; we know what it is to

choose and direct, to arrange and rearrange, to produce novelty. Both

sides of our knowledge and our caring, the scientific side and the

personal side, make a difficulty for us in regard to the philosophers

with whom we shall put ourselves to school. Our chosen teachers must

reckon with life as we know and possess it in ourselves; but they must

reckon too with every word of the scientific man. Nothing less will

content us now. The philosophers we shall follow must not be playing a

game among themselves, using thoughts like pieces on a board, to be

moved according to rules they have laid down. Neither must they resolve

the great drama of real things and real history into a phantasmagoria of

mind; nor try to educe mind, consciousness, the spiritual activities of

man, from the interplay of parts of a material machine. In our view both

the material and the spiritual are real. It is for the philosopher, so

we think, to show us the real relation between them. To do him justice,

the philosopher has been thoroughly aroused of late years to the

importance of reckoning with science. Consequently he draws to his side

thinking ordinary men as they have perhaps never been drawn before,

except when Socrates at Athenian banquets and in Athenian streets 'made

himself a fool that others by his folly might be made wise.' We have no

difficulty now in finding a philosopher, indeed many philosophers, to

our mind. Philosophy is alive, sitting at our banquets, walking in our

streets, even writing books that ordinary men, living each his own

extraordinary life, can read. We are able to call in our philosopher,

then, as we have called in the bio-chemist, knowing him to be one who

reckons to the full with science, that he may tell us what he can and

will concerning life and living.

A philosopher of that mind and reckoning has presented us with a picture

in which we see life coming (may be from very far, coming, we may think,

although concealed, by the material pathway from the ether that science

has revealed to us) as an enormous impetus which finds the first of its

advantages that are discernible by us, in that colloid assembly of

compounded, complicated, delicately-strung, hair-trigger-hung elements,

the protoplasmic stuff. We plainly see a new beginning which, in

philosophic truth, is a continuance in new manners upon this earth of

that which has no beginning; we see a living thing which lives because

an impulsive and propulsive life, not material but spiritual, has raised

material elements from the rank of dust, and has found a means of using

material powers to purposes and ends. And this philosopher tells us that

from its marvellous but humble first appearing in matter life advances,

not like the trickle of a single stream, but like the bursting forth of

a potent, spreading fountain whose waters part in a thousand directions

to make a thousand streams, each purposive, each at first seeking, but

many of them unsuccessfully, to fulfil some part of the purpose of the

whole. And in regard to this frequent unsuccess, we find the philosopher

borne out by the palaeontologist, whose 'general picture ... of the

evolution of the animal kingdom is accordingly that of an immense number

of ... lives which evolve parallel to one another, and without

coalescing, throughout longer or shorter geological times,' each of

which 'culminates sooner or later in mutations of great size and highly

specialized characters, which become extinct and leave no descendants.'

At the heart of life, as in the philosophic mirror we watch its advance,

there seems one guiding and supreme purpose, which is manifest in the

continuous effort 'to engraft on the necessity of physical forces the

largest possible amount of indetermination,' that is, of freedom in

choice. But this purpose is evidently very hard to fulfil, and as we

see, often fails of being fulfilled.

We may in mind and imagination walk in company with these teachers of

ours; we may see the stages of the past of living creatures marked out

in the geological strata, learning thus how life has grown from less to

more, how its divergent streams have turned this way or that, and how

some have been frustrate, as in the giant saurians and labyrinthodonts.

We may learn too from the biologist that in our own day others (for

instance perhaps those in the elephant and the ostrich and the whale)

are in like manner drawing near to frustration by that impressive

wearing out and perishing of a race, which is so clearly illustrated in

the geological record. We discover that when impulsive life, seeking a

free way, finds advance only through an excessive increase in the size

of some creature, that creature's fate is sealed, and that manner of

advance is barred. Size extending much beyond a certain range normal in

the particular kind of animal is (perhaps in consequence of purely

mechanical influences) to all the main intents and purposes of life no

better than a blind alley. A like impulse, finding its outlet in the

elaboration of nervous apparatus ranging from an all but indiscoverable

structure to that definite and complex yet indefinitely mobile organ of

an indefinitely extending choice—that living instrument for overcoming

mechanism, that 'veritable reservoir of indetermination'—the human

brain, finds there and there alone a road to great and full success. Yet

it finds a road to minor and circumscribed successes in the lives of

plants and animals which, interacting together, become of immeasurable

value for the whole realm of life and the well-being of its citizens—for

that realm of interlacing purposes and ends, where partial failure is so

often converted to a new and a remoter triumph.

It seems as though in many, indeed in most instances, a life current,

instead of driving on towards either greater freedom or complete arrest,

met with a resistance able to constrain it, as it were, into eddies,

wherein it circles as creatures living out either in a relative

independence or in a parasitic state (sometimes of primary development,

at others of degradation from a higher mode) their restricted lives.

They are being fulfilled according to their restricted wants; they are

needing no more of life than they have, and therefore seek no further

than they are. And they have their co-operative value in the whole.

These are the minor, yet many of them—and that in spite of dangers and

pain and death—the delightful, successes of life. Everywhere upon this

earth now, it seems, except in man, we may justly picture the

life-currents as either coming to an end or circling round and round in

some such eddy, at most curving out a little way to change a little in

shape, to form new varieties within a species or, rarely, new species

within a genus. There is in lower animals than ourselves, and in the

plants, a certain contentment, on which tired men have sometimes been

known to look with envy. The realm of nature is well served by servants

such as these, and natural delights, in spite of natural pains, are won.

But not all that life can do and be is represented in those finished

forms. In the plants it seems to be asleep. There the protoplasmic stuff

has built a wall about its soft body, the casing of cellulose behind

which it sleeps, working in sleep, in great measure cut off from the

varied stimulus and many-tongued summons, the resistances and

opportunities, of an outer world. And some of the animals that are now

extinct owe their extinction, not to their gigantic size, but to their

having sought safety rather than adventure, and imprisoned themselves in

their mechanical armour of defence. They too were in their measure cut

off from the stir and help and moving oppositions of associated lives.

In truth and in regard to the supreme purpose manifested in life, all

the non-human creatures of the earth have, within themselves and for

themselves, in one fashion or another barred its advance; although very

many of them are furthering its purposes, indeed giving them

indispensable support, elsewhere. Those which have not been extinguished

and still maintain their place in the world are too complete, too

well-adapted to a satisfying but narrow sphere, for progress to a wider.

Life is not bearing them on; their nervous organ, that structure of

inter-related cells by which they use their world, selecting and

determining this or that, has not like ours capacity for indefinite

change. Theirs is exactly fitted for their narrow use of it, and they

and it are constrained together.

When we look at man through the eyes of the philosopher we see life

clearly as a _spiritual_ impulse, an impulse of a higher order than the

animal, at least as much higher as that is than the material, and ever

driving on. Man is not content; he is not fulfilled. He is fully awake;

and he is not only conserving his long past but peering into the

distances of his future. His brain is flexible, and able to provide a

multitude of new structural arrangements; it is therefore an instrument

of such choice as gives him leave to shape his future. And it is an

active instrument; it brings to him through extending perception a field

for his own spiritual activities that stretches out to match them, and

enables him to become a ruler among circumstances. It allows him to

worship beauty and even to create it; and to seek and worship truth; to

adore goodness and be good. It permits desire to grow and the spirit

within him to reach limit after limit, using each limit as an

opportunity for further growth. All this the brain of man allows and

promotes; and on this earth his brain alone. There is nowhere so

magnificent and marvellous a bodily organ; for in it and by means of it

physical things and physical laws are subdued to the purposes and ends

of a free enduring creation.

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CHAPTER IV

Listen to the moaning of the pine, at whose roots

thy hut is fastened.

_Kabir._

The divergent streams of that primaeval fountain of life as they spread

out upon the earth, in the earth, in the air, in, under and upon the

waters, have given to it the endless variety of its creatures. In this

variety, and of those streams, there are three and no more than three

main currents; there are three directions and grouped characters and

qualities of life. Each of these in its turn branches into minor streams

and differences of creatures. The main currents are those of the plants,

the insects, and the vertebrate animals.

We have seen that one function of the life of plants gives to the whole

world of living creatures access to the energy of the sun. Yet as

regards intelligence and conscious relation with other creatures the

plant may be said to be asleep; it carries on its vital functions and

builds up its manifold and admirable structures, working as though in

sleep. Its whole activity, varied though it be, is like that of a

dreamer. Confined within a wall of cellulose, the plant-cell works out

its life as though, for its awareness, no other creature lived.

With the insect-world we enter on a widely differing scene. There, in

the highest insects, we discover what may well rouse a salutary

discontent with ourselves. The life-current which finds its eddying

termination in the wasps and bees and ants has one, and that its chief,

character pointing to grave but happily not irremediable deficiency in

most of us, if not to some extent in all. The wasp seems to know other

creatures' life, to understand it sympathetically, to touch and feel it

from within, in a manner that to us is marvellous. Life manifests

through this little winged thing a power we call instinct, perfected for

certain uses to a degree not attained outside the insect-world. There

are wasps which sting caterpillars with admirable though not invariable

precision in their nerve-centres, so that they go on living but cannot

move, and thus are made to serve as living larders for the wasp-grubs.

Observers have found that different wasps, seeking different kinds of

prey, sting three times, nine times, in three or nine centres, according

to the number in the body of their selected victim, and that the Scolia

stings the larvae of the rose-beetle in one point only, just where the

motor-ganglia are concentrated. Other observers have noticed some

failures and occasional irregularities. But listen (it may be once more

and after many times) to this well-known story, the story of the

Sitaris, if you want to see what life can do in a fashion for which the

intellectual work of man offers in his experience no parallel. This tiny

beetle lays its eggs in the doorway of the underground passages dug by a

certain bee, the Anthophora. When an egg is hatched the grub awaits an

opportunity to spring upon the male bee as it comes out. You may deceive

it with a substitute, and no doubt it often is deceived without your

help. Nevertheless, if not thus deceived it clings to the bee until the

nuptial flight occurs, when it seizes some chance of shifting from the

male to the female. Now clinging to the female, it waits until the

bee-eggs are as usual laid upon honey. Then it leaps again, this time

upon an egg which serves it at first as a raft on the honey. By degrees

it eats up the egg; then uses as its raft the empty shell. It changes,

undergoes a metamorphosis, and becomes able both to float and feed on

honey, where it remains until it changes for the last time into the

perfect insect, a Sitaris ready in its turn to set going this amazing

cycle of life. It is a life that seems to involve knowledge of things

which, by any knowing such as our intellectual experience provides,

could not be known. Untaught, unaided, without previous experiment, the

creature displays what looks like, but cannot be, true forethought, as

well as ingenuity and adaptive skill; what looks like, but cannot be, a

continued adjustment of reflectively chosen means to reflectively

recognized ends. There can be no question but that all this, under such

conditions, would be beyond the reach of our intellectual powers, and

beyond our reflective thought. We may justly say that it is beyond the

reach of any powers that are merely of reflective thought. Not thus does

intellect carry on its conceptual work. It analyses and reflects, it

separates, compares, and puts together. That is not the way of the grub

of Sitaris, neither is it the way of the solitary wasp. There appears to

be for these and for others of their tribe, in 'perceptual

consciousness,' some mysterious sympathy between the life of the

creature using and the life of the creature used, akin to that sympathy

of digestive secretions with digestible food by means of which our

bodies are nourished, or the process by which the cell becomes the

organized and completed creature. There seem to be also motor-habits

stored up by repetition in forbears, which facilitate the active

expression of this sympathy. When the wasp stings the nerve-centres of

the caterpillar as accurately, as on the whole he does, it seems to us

as though in the mere presence together of wasp and caterpillar two

congruous activities, not two beings, met—the wasp-activity perceiving

rather than thinking about the caterpillar-activity, perceiving it and

attacking it through certain established instrumental means as though

entering into a familiar relation to it. You might be inclined to say

that the sting of the wasp picks out the nervous ganglia of the

caterpillar as a magnet picks out fragments of steel from the dust.

Instinct no doubt means perceiving in sympathetic relation, and has more

than a mere likeness to reflex actions in the body. Like these it may

find its bodily support in a motor tradition, borne from reproductive

germ to reproductive germ, as a structural record of bodily movements

ingrained by the incessant repetition of certain actions through many

continuous generations. But unlike these it may work with and for the

intellect in all its grades.

We may well desire a sympathetic relation with other life, a perceptive

understanding keener, quicker, more direct, more inclusive and more

penetrating. And let us hasten to assure ourselves that we may attain

what we seek, though in ways very different from the insect's, and for

ends very different too. No life-current in any creature is of one

character alone; none but has in it, in some proportion or another and

with this or that degree of emphasis, all characters. The intuitive

character and power of life in perceptive experience and perceptive

consciousness, which though highly emphasized in some creatures becomes

narrowed to their instinct, is not the exclusive prerogative of any one

kind, even of the insects, though within their narrow bounds they have

carried it almost to inerrancy of use; any more than reflective thought

is the exclusive prerogative of man, though he has carried it farther

and wider and deeper than any other creature of the earth. The problem

for us is in great part one of emphasis and proportion. We have

cultivated our reflective thinking more than our perceptive awareness,

our conceptual more than our intuitive power. Because thought exercised

upon external things has given us what we most wanted in the external

world, and is giving us more and more, we have over-emphasized it. We

have strained unceasingly to understand and to manage not life but those

external material things. We are great geometers and artificers; we are

great in our understanding of material things; but there is another

greatness, a perceptual greatness, to which most of us have not

attained, although it lies open to us, in fulness matching the fulness

of our intellectual endowment.

We are not without plain indications of the existence in ourselves of

that intuitive power, which as instinct is amazing to us in the accurate

yet constrained lives of the beetles and the wasps. It is amazing

chiefly because it is not that which we desire and are aware of desiring

or needing to use. There is in every one of us, latent or declared, a

true intuition of life, a truly intuitive awareness, a touch within, a

perceptual knowledge sympathetic in the pure sense of the word, reaching

far beyond the insect's. We may know it for what it is because in us

giving rather than gaining is its secret spring, although gain,

assuredly, comes by giving. Such, for example, is the knowledge of the

artist, won only in his giving of himself to the object of his worship,

in his placing himself by an artistic sympathy within it. Thus he

obtains by sympathetic intuition an understanding that is like a

spiritual touch, that is perceiving not thinking about, that, by

immediate contact with the individual thing, is a knowledge of it in its

own reality. Such again is the intuition of the true lover, who gives

himself to the beloved and in that giving wins a knowledge like the

artist's. They are akin, these two, artist and lover. Their kinship is

grounded in their use of that intuitive character of life which for

humanity as a whole has been cast into the shade by the more practically

useful manners of intellect, and which in the insect-tribe is confined

to the immediate needs of a fixed and narrow mode of existence.

Yet there is in truth a real difference, in these respects, between man

and the insect or any other creature. In the perceptive consciousness of

the insect, restricted by the fixed character of its nervous system, the

intuitive potency of life has shrunk and hardened, as it were, into a

restrained power which deals, and can deal, only with a very small part

of life and the world. This power is forced to work in the windowless

prison of a completed life. Man's life is not completed; in him

consciousness, stretching out ever farther and farther, has passed one

temporary limit after another, function impelling structure to match

itself, mind seeking to go beyond itself. The consciousness of man has

been always opening up for him new fields, adapting itself to new

objects, moving among them, making a way through them, and in all its

growth and change advancing in freedom. To attain this freed human

consciousness seems, we may say, the motive principle of the evolution

of life through man's forerunners. Its driving impulse is both carried

indefinitely further in that consciousness and revealed as what it

really is. Herein lies the difference in order between every animal,

every plant, the most skilful of the beetles or the wasps, and man.

Their way is closed. His lies before him wide open. He _is_ the open

way, the one open way on earth for life in its harmony of intuitive and

intellectual power both fulfilled. And if hitherto we and our

forefathers have in practice over-emphasized conceptual thinking and the

intellect, our over-emphasis and its practical results have set us in a

place where sympathetic intuition in perceptive experience has a new

advantage. In us it will not, or rather it need not, be narrowed down.

It may stretch out into every field that discursive and reflective

thought has opened up, and it may pass beyond them to lead them on. The

attainment by man of his high calling and of the destiny of which he is

capable depends in truth on this expansion of his life. So the

philosopher assures us. So, also—and this is noteworthy—does the

psychologist: 'with the development of "psychical integration" both

sides develop, and their relation, that is experience, therefore expands

into a meaning inclusive of more and more, till, in the human being, it

may be inclusive of all things actual and possible, the universe in

space, and history in time from the remotest past, and, in imagination,

to the most distant future.' The psychologist too, is not without his

vision.

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CHAPTER V

If any one should care to say that unless I have

bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I

could not do what I would, that is well enough:

but to say that I act as I do because of them, and

that this is the way in which my mind acts, and not

from choice of the best, why, that is a very careless

and idle way of speaking.

_Plato._

There are signs that the life of the body is even in the lower animals

to some extent imbued with the free creative spirit. There are creative

efforts of determination, changes of direction, triumphs over

circumstance, that find their enlightening context in the more

emancipated life of man.

A sea-urchin's egg, for instance, begins its development by dividing

into two cells. Normally these cells, by a like division, share between

them the making of the respective halves of the creature's body. If you

remove one cell after the first division of the egg you may expect (you

certainly should and will if you take your stand with the mechanistic

theorists) to find that you have mutilated the creature. You may or will

expect to see the remaining half of the egg grow to a half-embryo. Under

some circumstances you will see what you expect; but if you are very

skilful and are acquainted with the new methods you will have the

disturbing joy of seeing the half-egg—you may even see a

quarter-egg—take on the work of the whole, and grow to a complete though

small embryo; and not only to an embryo but to a larva. You may do the

same with a newt's egg or a frog's. With your mind's eye, then, you may

if you like, and if you thus interpret things, watch the sea-urchin's,

the frog's, or the newt's life, overcoming, according to a 'primary

purposiveness' of its own, your effort to thwart its intention. You may

watch it determining new contrivances from within to meet an unexpected

emergency that threatens to mar the complete whole it means to be,

changing a normal to an abnormal course of activity, that it may still

attain its end—in short 'working out its own salvation,' as a

morphologist remarks, 'upon original and individual lines.'

It would seem difficult not to recognize in these changes a likeness

to what you know in yourself as intelligent action. Studying them it

is hard for any but a confirmed mechanist to resist the contention

of men who tell us that the vital _is_ the intelligent. Whereas

purely material changes, if they are left to themselves, follow the

way of least material resistance, life, whether in the cell or in

the organism, moves in an opposite direction. The living vegetable

cell raises carbon and other elements from relative inertness to a

condition charged with newly available power. And in these

developmental changes the organism seems to manifest itself as in

very truth 'a living, active, responsive thing, quite capable of

relinquishing at need the beaten track of normal development,' like

ourselves as we make our bodily, intellectual, moral and spiritual

decisions. The mechanist is ready with his retort when we say this,

but it is a poor retort. He tells us of mysterious 'specific

organ-forming substances' which are not ordinary chemical substances

of any kind; and which no research is able to detect, except it be

as pictured behind the very processes of growth that are telling

_us_ of the organ-forming determination of a specific mode of life.

For both us and the mechanist there is the same process and result.

He sees, but only with his mind's eye, these utterly mysterious

'substances' he has himself invoked; we see, with our mind's eye,

the sea-urchin's, or the newt's, life issuing in that purposeful

endeavour which always and everywhere, we say, is a mark of the life

we know. We may even admit the possibility of the existence of his

organ-forming substances, but only as conditions of life's

organ-forming, not as effective causes—a distinction of fundamental

importance for the careful thinker not content to be arrested by the

look of things, however scientific. We cannot rest in a mechanical

interpretation which at best only thrusts the problem one stage

farther away, as does the pseudo-physicist-philosopher's ether-God.

Life to us seems effective, and under all conditions determining,

within the limits of those conditions. Organ-forming substances

there may be; but they are either the co-operative servants of life

(if they exist at all) like other substances, or they are no better

than names for the modes in which life is at work. To us life seems,

from its first entrance into possession of a body, when it gave to

material substances a higher status, to have worked always towards

dominance over the established laws and customs (that is the habits)

of matter, as no substances have ever worked. At first it did little

more with matter than lift physical or chemical elements upward in

heightening states of energy, within a body, against physical or

chemical tendencies that would take them downward to their physical

or chemical equilibrium; later it went on, through the organizing of

an ever more and more complex and variable nervous system, to a

man's brain, where the control of intelligence over the living

instrument that is its very active servant became strong enough to

guide into ever-widening relations and possibilities an activity

seeking spiritual advance. An activity, straining for liberation

against some resistance by which nevertheless it was itself made

effectual, could—we are driven to think—do no other than find its

way imperfectly and by slow degrees; yet on its way it has shown

even in very lowly creatures signs of what it really is. That any

'substance' the mechanist can acknowledge has done this of its own

motion and power, we take leave to doubt. And we have learnt to

understand the mechanist.

* * * * *

If the train of reflexion thus suggested is followed up, some of us will

find ourselves compelled to readjust certain beliefs in regard to

spiritual life as related to the life of the body, and in regard also to

bodily life as related to the life of the spirit. We shall perhaps learn

that in looking upon spirit as altogether separate from matter or as

connected with matter only by some fortuitous or indeed unhappy link, we

may indeed have kept it safe from the attacks of the materialist, but

only at the cost of emptying it of value for ourselves, except in so far

as it is, perhaps, an all but invisible _point de repère_ round about

which our vague religious sentiments are grouped. Just as in the

evolution of elements and compounds afterwards united in the marvel of

life-jelly, we traced the preparation of a pathway for life moving

towards its first manifestation, so we should trace in the successive

phases of that manifestation a development of co-operative relations

between spirit and matter, a development rendering matter more and more

plastic to spirit, and spirit more and more responsive to the character

of the far from inert instrument through which its purpose is effected.

The evolutionist philosopher has told us that we may picture life as a

rising wave opposed by the contrary movement of matter towards

stability. The greater part of the whole volume of the wave, after

reaching one height or another, is arrested; and going no further it

is at each several height converted into the whirling eddies, the

contented plants and animals of which we have already spoken. At one

point only, where it rises highest, does the wave find a free passage

(and of this too we have spoken) along which it carries with it,

converted to its further purpose, the material obstacle, condition,

and means that will, in a sense and for a time, still in some degree

encumber, but cannot now arrest, its advance. The life-current

continues to flow, a gathering wave of conscious life grown to

self-consciousness and world-consciousness. It flows on from this

point of conquest through generation after generation of men in and to

whom its spiritual character is now plainly revealed. For each man it

is a rill from the great human river of life—life natural and

spiritual, spiritual because so fully natural—which has become his own

and is indeed himself. For each the material but living brain is the

chief instrument and helper by means of which he himself stretches

forth towards wider and wider relations, not only with material

objects but with other spiritual beings. And as the spirit of a man

thus expands, amassing life and becoming, by the sympathetic spiritual

inclusion of other lives, greater in its reach and in itself, it is

confirmed and consolidated in its self-ownership. You may say that as

a self-knowing, self-governing, creative being, an owner of means and

a seeker after ends, man's life has at last taken possession of the

kingdom of itself, and that it has reached this all-important status

through the medium and condition of a body and by the experience of an

earthly world.

We will let the philosopher tell us the gist of this in his own words:—

'While we watch the birth of consciousness we are confronted, at the

same time, by the apparition of living bodies, capable, even in their

simplest forms, of movements spontaneous and unforeseen. The progress of

living matter consists in a differentiation of function which leads

first to the production and then to the increasing complication of a

nervous system capable of canalizing excitations and of organizing

actions: the more the higher centres develop, the more numerous become

the motor paths among which the same excitation allows the living being

to choose in order that it may act. An ever greater latitude left to

movement in space—this indeed is what is seen. What is not seen is the

growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time. Not only, by

its memory of former experiences, does this consciousness retain the

past better and better, so as to organize it with the present in a newer

and richer decision; but, living with an intenser life, contracting, by

its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number of external

moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable of creating

acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a

multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass the more

easily through the meshes of necessity. Thus, whether we consider it in

time or in space, freedom always seems to have its roots deep in

necessity and to be intimately organized with it. Spirit borrows from

matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores them to matter in

the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.'

Any philosopher, after writing or speaking some such words as these, may

well ask us to consider—when we have watched the hard-won triumph of

life over so great difficulties and so many obstacles, when we have

discovered what seems to us clear evidence that it has for age upon age

pursued with immeasurable power and resource a purpose which the

spiritual consciousness of man is alone competent to fulfil, and that it

has thus attained in man a position of supreme advantage for this

fulfilment—whether we ought not to regard ourselves as paltering with

reason if we expect that pursuit and that attainment both to be in vain.

Is life, just where it seems in sight of final triumph, to be overcome

at the last by death? Why should it be overcome by this when it has

vanquished so much else? Why, if the world is rational, should we expect

all the ages of preparation to be brought to naught, and the splendour

of man's promise to be laid low in the grave?

We have to confess, I think, that reason is against this, and that when

we allow ourselves to expect or to fear such an anti-climax we are

influenced rather by prejudice, conscious or unconscious. Prejudice is

born of our every-day dealing with things and our every-day notions

about causes and about bodies. We think spirit is dependent upon matter,

not as upon a living and responsive instrument of transmission and

self-development to a certain necessary point of self-consolidation; but

as most things we deal with depend upon other things, which, as we say,

cause them, produce them, or make them do and be and happen. We suppose

all too easily that just as steam ceases when the boiler-fires are

drawn, so when the body dies life, its product, ceases too. We see the

leaves fall from the trees to perish. _Tout passe, tout casse, tout

lasse,_—it is the common lot of things and men. It is familiar—what more

need be said? The burden of proof lies on the man who would tell us of

exceptions to the rule.

Yet, if and when we come to examine things and men, do we discover any

such rule applicable to men? Are we not all but compelled, reading the

astounding story of evolution in the light cast upon it by its

culmination in man, to question every uncriticized and easily formed

opinion on a subject so complex and profound? If indeed there is

evidence to show that life is neither produced by nor released from

matter, but is in some sort conjoined with matter, lifting it from its

own level, and using its powers in a way altogether different from their

normal material course; if there is evidence that these powers are made

to fulfil a purpose that can be no other than a purpose for life; then,

obviously, matter, in the order of power and of nature, is life's

subordinate. We must, indeed, as reasonable beings, correct those easy

opinions—these things being thus. The similes and illustrations of every

day do not fit the case. Intimate as is the relation between spirit and

matter, there is no more reason to think life is produced by a material

substance than to think the boiler-fire is produced by the steam. Both

thoughts are equally absurd, and perhaps the chief cause of our thinking

so easily the one and of our being quite unable to think the other is

that we can see and touch boilers and the like, and cannot see and touch

'spirit and life.'

'Lamps burn in every house, O blind one! and you

cannot see them.

One day your eyes shall suddenly be opened, and

you shall see: and the fetters of death shall

fall from you.'

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CHAPTER VI

Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves,

and within it is the Creator:

Within this vessel are the seven oceans and the

unnumbered seas.

_Kabir._

When the brain dies it is resolved in the ordinary way gradually, or may

be resolved in a laboratory quickly, into its constituents, which the

chemist may collect as water, carbonic acid and so forth, together with,

roughly, a few pinches of ash. Nothing is lost of what, as we say, it

was made of. After death it is left to fall from its temporary high

estate of power, and travel along the line of least physical and

chemical resistance to the low estate from which life had raised its

matter-stuff. Material necessity, such as we picture it, then resumes

its sway; physical laws, that is, let us say, established physical

habits, dominate once more.

But this brain, while human life employed and profited by it, was in

vital and structural continuity with the first life-jelly that appeared

upon the earth. You may trace, in the pictorial scientific way, all its

many cells to the germ-cell or egg from which the whole body sprang.

Again, and in the same manner, you may trace this germ-cell, this egg,

to another from which it was derived. Some scientific men will tell you

that in every developing egg, during the very first stages of its

division, cells are set apart as germ-cells to continue the race in the

next generation. There runs, they will say, through the generations of

men a continuous underground river-system of protoplasm, a continuous

streaming of cells from which are thrown up at intervals jets, as it

were, of living material which become individual lives. Or we may put it

that as in certain plants there is a creeping root-stock hidden

underground and giving origin here and there to new specimens of the

plant, so there is (according to this opinion) a root-stock of

germinative material passing on and giving rise to body after body,

through all mankind. The source of this branching, interlacing

germ-structure is in the beginnings of the world, and the beginnings of

the world are—where? In the ether, the physicist may say. In the place

and state from whence my elements have come, the chemist says. At

present we, studying in these pages, are content to say that whatever

the scientific details may be, the pathway of life that we see is one,

from wherever the chemist and the physicist allow of a beginning to the

place where both must own themselves confounded, the brain of man.

It is well to study that brain more carefully and try to relate it with

the germ-cells of the protoplasmic streams from which it arose. We have

to consider how it is that the brain of a son comes to resemble the

brains of his parents, when the carrier of his parents' lives to him was

only that fertilized germ-cell, a jelly with a nucleus, to all

appearances no more. Here we must confine our study to one problem, that

of memory, partly because we have no space for more, but chiefly because

memory is an 'Open Sesame' to many wonders. We may if we please link it

with heredity, with that passing on of characters and habits from

parents to child through the comparative, but only comparative and very

misleading, simplicity of the germ-cell.

'The man who could penetrate into a brain,' it is said, 'and watch what

happens there would very likely see it full of sketched-out movements,

there is no evidence that he would see anything else. He would have no

more knowledge of what was going on in the corresponding consciousness

than we should have of a play were we watching the comings and goings of

the actors on the stage without hearing a word of it. If the play were

no more than a pantomime the movements of the players would tell us

nearly everything about it; if it were a comedy of life and manners they

would give us next to nothing.' It has been said, too—and the simile is

illuminating—that the brain is like a sort of central telephone

exchange, permitting, delaying, or arresting communication. It is an

instrument of analysis, of hesitation and of choice; but its office is

said to be limited to the transmission and division of movement,

movement started by things outside the body and movement started from

within the body. The body is the conductor of these movements to and fro

between objects acting upon it and objects upon which it acts.

Only in the form of motor contrivances do brain and body, we are told,

store up the action of the past. This is a point of great importance in

regard to both our own lives and our inheritance from our forerunners.

We may distinguish two kinds of memory; one graven as it were in the

living stuff of our body; another enshrined and active in the fluent

personal history we ourselves most really are. Let us see what the

evolutionist philosopher has to tell us about this. Let us illustrate

our subject after his fashion.

In the matter of learning by heart, for example, there are two facts to

be noted and two memories to be distinguished. When I know a poem by

heart and can repeat it I say that I remember it. But I say also,

perhaps, that I remember the stages by which I came to learn it. I

remember, or may remember, occasion after occasion of my more or less

successful repetition of the poem while I was learning it. I can recall,

or may recall, step after step of my advance towards perfectly

'remembering' it. When it is learnt I say that it is imprinted on my

memory; but I may also say that the steps of my progress towards knowing

the poem are in like manner imprinted on my memory. Yet a very little

thought shows that these are two kinds of memory, not one; and that

there are two kinds of imprinting, not one. The memory of the poem

itself has every mark of an acquired habit, even that of the disastrous

effect of an interruption. When I have repeated a poem for the twentieth

time without mistake I may be thrown out of my declamatory stride by the

banging of a door, and become unable either to tell myself how far I had

gone in the poem or to pick up its broken thread. About a memory like

this there is the mechanical look of an ingrained and almost unconscious

habit. It is bodily, like the memory of a sonata for the pianist as he

is playing, a memory which seems to him rather in his fingers than in

his mind. But the memory of the steps and process by which I gradually

learnt my poem is quite different. That is a history, not a habit. Each

stage occurred only once; no one was graven into permanence by

repetition, indeed no one was, or could be, ever repeated. Each was

unique and had its own date in the history of the process and of my

enduring life.

Here is a difference indeed to be reckoned with. There is a kind of

memory that _represents_ our past to us; and there is another kind (if

it is memory at all) that _acts_ it. I say, emphatically, if it is

memory at all, this latter; for it does not really preserve the past, it

only continues into the present an effect or a result of happenings of

the past. In true memory history is preserved; the history of our whole

lives is preserved in our true memory. But only the effects or results,

only indeed certain effects and results, of the living real happenings

in our living and real duration are graven in the body stuff as habits,

as, if we like to call them so, habit-memories. The establishing of

these memories is an affair of training and practice. The brain and body

have to be forced into them; structure has to be shaped and taught, that

it may carry on automatically, or all but automatically, some particular

mode of action. And we note that the more nearly automatic these

habit-memories are the better they work. When the nerve-paths in the

structure of the brain and body are beaten smooth by treading and

retreading the work goes easily and well.

There is nothing whatever of this kind about the true and unlearnt

memory of events in our history, the memory which represents them. But

just because the habit-memory is more immediately and constantly useful

to us we notice it more. Indeed we frame on it our familiar conception

of what memory really is, and come to regard the true memory of

spontaneously arising recollections as only a bad example of the other.

'We ignore the fundamental difference,' so we are told, 'between that

which has to be built up by repetition and that which is essentially

incapable of being repeated.'

No doubt the two intermingle in every-day life and are therefore the

more easily confused, not only by our every-day and usually careless

selves but even by some careful thinkers. The confusion is dangerous for

the thinker and the thinker in consequence becomes dangerous for us. Out

of it has come in great part the unreasonable belief that a material

brain is the storehouse of immaterial recollections, and that these

after becoming either material or, in the physical sense, 'energetic'

(as they must be to be stored in a material or 'energetic' way), in some

altogether miraculous fashion at times take on consciousness and, as

once more immaterial recollections, carry us into our own past. To say

that motor-habits, with which when they are established consciousness

may have little to do, can be registered in a flexible motor instrument

and _acted_ over and over again, is reasonable enough; but that

conscious recollections can thus be registered is not only a gratuitous

assumption unsupported by the facts of matter or energy or life, but is

strictly incredible by any man who really knows and faces those facts.

It is better to know and face them with the philosopher, and confess the

reality of a spiritual life in which history endures, as well as the

reality of a living instrument in which habits are established. No doubt

an effort is required if we are to distinguish between the spontaneous

and the habitual memories, between the memory of spirit and the

habit-memory of its living instrument, the brain and body which together

with the spirit are the man; but the effort is well worth making. It

gives us a key to unlock many close-shut doors. When we try to learn

something (as we are now about to do) concerning the problem of the

transmission, through the succession of germ-cells, of the characters

that mark out men—the problem of heredity—we find a conspicuous and very

interesting use for it. But it has many uses besides that. We can use it

with advantage in dealing with all the problems concerning the relations

of spirit with matter.

Before we go on to deal with heredity we should note the value for our

own lives of our ability to establish habits at all, to inscribe records

of action in our instruments of body and brain which shall be capable of

an almost automatic repetition. That is the way in which intellectual

and bodily skill makes progress. We build a stairway too for our minds

and spirits as well as for our bodies, when we lay down step after step

of habitual action, handing over to it the carrying-on of what at first

we had to think out, and then by degrees learnt to do skilfully and well

almost without thought at all. That is the stairway by which the pianist

advances towards a perfect execution of his music and the skater mounts

towards perfect execution of a figure which at first was beyond his

power. Throughout our lives we are handing actions over to be conducted

by our bodies and brains as effects of work done consciously before, to

be acted over and over again and pass beyond the need of conscious

intervention, and in the end to be carried on the better without that

aid. A man skates, or plays his violin, or writes a poem, or rides a

horse, or walks, or dances, all the better when and if he does not have

to think about the appropriate movements of his hands or feet or legs,

or the necessary letters of his words, to all of which he once had to

give minute attention. Perceptive and creative consciousness is thus set

free. His mind, in its originality of creation and perceiving, is

enabled to pour itself into the instrumental habit it has laid down and

infuse it with his spirit, his poetic, musical, or athletic spirit. He

may endow his motor instrument with his graces now that it works without

his conscious aid.

* * * * *

We approach the problem of heredity from a new direction and with new

eyes. Let us picture to ourselves (as has been suggested), instead of a

succession of lives, a single life which goes on like the continuous

germ-plasm of some biologists, and never grows old or dies. This one

continuous life would pass through every stage of the succession of

lives from the jelly-speck onwards. One immortal developing creature

would accomplish (in our picture) the whole evolution from the original

protoplasm to man. And this development would be effected by forming

habits and rising step by step in and through and upon them. Is this in

fact what actually has been done along the path of the ascent of

species? That is the question which at once springs to our lips. Is

heredity akin to the habit-memory which is preserved in our brains and

bodies? There are men who tell us that the best conception of heredity

they can form is something of this kind. They tell us that they think of

individual lives as inscribing on germ-cells, by constant repetition,

effects of what they have done. They tell us that the habit-memory of

ancestral and thus communicated experience enables the baby to pump food

into its mouth with that accurate adjustment of muscular means to

exterior conditions and the principles of hydrostatics which it always

shows. They go even farther and tell us that the development of any

embryo from any egg is on the same lines of unfolding the habit-memories

essential to its living as it does. Life in progressing from the single

cell learnt, they think, by degrees, and consolidated its lessons into

motor-habits graven in living stuff. Sometimes they point to the nucleus

of the germ-cell as possibly the instrument for preserving these habits

for other members of the race as the brain preserves less established

habits for the man; sometimes they say that the cytoplasm acts in the

same way. And whether we accept these suggestions or reject them we may

recognize with some satisfaction that throughout the whole plan there

runs the belief (or assumption—what you will) that function is primary,

not structure, though structure once organized is the instrument and

condition that contributes to the shaping of specific character.

Again we find ourselves both ready and called upon to emphasize the

reality and the conservative office of matter, yet to regard it as

subordinate to the reality and the initiative of life. We acknowledge

once more the immeasurable import for life of its relations with matter.

When structure is organized for function, when habit-memories become

instrumental for life, function and life are in turn shaped by their

instrument. Hence, probably, we have that condensed and fragmentary

representation by the developing embryo of stages through which life

passed slowly in epochs long ago, and during which (according to this

hypothesis) it registered the fruits of its effort, by repetition after

repetition, in the cell. The embryo chicken, the embryo child, both show

in the course of their development signs (for instance the gill-clefts

of the fish) of stages through which life had to pass before it became

chicken or child life. But they pass very quickly from sign to sign. 'It

took thousands of years to produce the first chicken, but the hen's egg

reaches the same level in three weeks.' Each is obliged to pass these

stages, it seems; the 'organ-forming substances' (as some say) of the

germ-cell compel it, or (shall we carry our thought farther and say) the

habit-memories recorded in it must be worked out lest the creature be

brought to confusion; as the habit-memories of a pianist are and must be

when he gives aright his rendering of the music he had learnt.

The memory-hypothesis concerning heredity does not involve the idea of

compulsion or doom, it leaves room for the creature to work out its 'own

salvation' on a basis inheritance supplies. It does not of itself regard

the creature as doomed; whether the child or the chick is or is not

doomed depends on what it is, that is to say, upon the character not

upon the mode of its inheritance. Chick-character is one of doom; not so

child-character. The child, starting from the point his race has reached

as a race, may go on in virtue of an endowment of impulsive and creative

power and a flexible brain and body absent in the chick. He may build

his house of life, adorning or disfiguring his inheritance with a

new-made character that is his own. This fruitful and interesting

hypothesis of memory-inheritance may or may not stand tests that are to

come. But we may accept it provisionally as what it is, sure that if it

is displaced its successor will be more welcome still. That is the way

of science; we pass always from good to better, from a guess that holds

for one range of facts to another that holds for more.

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CHAPTER VII

And is this life but the child of death? Then

blessed also be the word Death, the mother of life;

I will no more call thee Marah, but Naomi; for thou

art not bitter, but sweet; more pleasant, though

swifter in thy gait, than roe or hind.

_Henry Montague._

In a world of creatures where the interests of each kind are focused on

the preservation of the species, and each individual's attention and

powers are in the main concentrated on the pressing need for

reproduction, and for food and shelter to maintain life in itself and

its young progeny, conflict must ensue, a conflict of both ends and

means. Because, too, in these creatures the way of life is not open, as

in man, habit-memories may be taken as being the chief agents for

ensuring both species-life and individual life, and as dominating both

their history and their character. Indeed the contracted world and the

completed character of such creatures with rare exceptions shuts out the

interests of other species. Hence the struggle for existence. Hence a

nature 'red in tooth and claw,' despite the general signs of a love that

of itself is ample prophecy of an enlargement beyond the bounds of such

restricted interests; despite also a general and very obvious enjoyment

of life for life's own sake. We must not exaggerate either pain or its

significance in creatures who have neither our sensitive nervous system,

nor our ability not only to look forward and see consequences and

imagine our pain prolonged and growing, but to increase that very pain

by dwelling on it and exercising in regard to it, more than it deserves,

the magical power of attention. Yet if we do not exaggerate, neither

must we ignore. Suffering, conflict, death are there and must be

reckoned with.

That the biologists of the latter part of the last century should

magnify beyond due measure the place of natural selection in one regard,

that of the origin of species, was to be expected. It was a great

discovery; it filled men's minds. That they minimized, where they did

not deny, the importance of the selective, determining and creative

power of life itself was also to be expected. All this last was for the

time obscured for want of evidence. Few men indeed, and those not

biologists, then kept a level head. It is for this century to bring

about a much needed balance in reckoning and in esteem.

Natural selection means for the most part a struggle ensuring the death

of the weak and the 'unfit.' The survival of the fittest means that

those creatures survive who are best adapted to all their circumstances,

whether these are favourable or unfavourable to the maintenance of a

high standard of living. That 'nature' may carry out selection it is

necessary that there shall be no outside interference, say of man, able

to stave off death, whether of the individual or of the race. Death, you

see, is the protagonist in this biological play, or rather the

mainspring of the machine. And, undoubtedly, death is not only

conspicuous in nature but is of profound significance for life. Is it or

is it not also of value in a sense surpassing that which the biologist

acknowledges? Ought we to look upon it as the enemy or as the friend of

life?

One thing is plain. Those men of science who saw it as protagonist were

right in thinking that by the death, that is, by the natural selection,

of the unfit from among the fit, the survival of useful variations may

be assisted. Death, of course, cannot have anything to do directly with

the originating of better lives (that is of better accommodated lives),

but once they have come into being it can help to keep them in the

ascendant as begetters of their kind. Natural selection has its

use—shall we say its value?—for the advance of life.

Need we be surprised at this, we who have a more than scientific sense

of values and have discovered purpose? Need we be surprised to find

death a friend to life, seeing it everywhere? Matter is life's friend as

well as means and hindrance. So too is death.

Let us consider the beginning of death on the earth; that is, of

natural, not of merely accidental death. For it had a beginning, not

coeval with the coming of life. There are living creatures now who

normally escape it, who die only by accident, are, in fact, if they die,

always killed. There are creatures alive now whose years are to be

numbered by thousands upon thousands upon thousands, yet who have never

grown old. The Pyramids of Egypt are of yesterday compared with the

amoeba in the nearest pond.

The manner of life of a one-celled creature is this: it grows, and when

it has grown to a size presumably inconvenient it divides into two

creatures, both of which, obviously, are the same age. The creature

itself becomes two instead of remaining one. The two creatures who were

one repeat the process and become four. The four become eight and so on

to the end of the earth. None die naturally, and when or if the end of

the earth and of themselves is reached they will all be killed and every

one of them will be of the same age; but none will be aged. They will be

cut off, these naturally immortal creatures, in unimpaired maturity and

the perfection of their structure and functions. But, you observe, if

life on earth had not passed beyond the one-celled condition it would

never, to our minds (if our minds could have been arrived at in some

other sphere), have been worth living. All the potency and promise of

life which have slowly been revealed through the improvement of its

creaturely medium would have remained hidden behind the screen of those

immortal jellies. Life began to create a new engine of advance when cell

and cell were built up together, and the many-celled creatures started

on their mortal and masterful career. For, note, the aggregation of

cells in an organized body precludes their individual immortality. They

become differentiated and associated for special purposes and they lose

the opportunity of preserving life by continuous division. They are

mutually imprisoning, they grow old, in time they die—they must die.

Life, in beginning this advance, embraced inevitable death. Death, if

you like, is the price—if indeed it should be counted a price and not a

boon—that we pay for freedom to live as what we are and to become what

we shall be. The immortal amoeba is after all a slave. It is this

creature that manifestly pays a price, one at which no man of us would

buy immunity from death.

There are many values and orders to be considered; and for the highest

values and order of living, for the magnificent possibilities open to

spiritual attainment, who would not barter an earthly immortality which

should erect a barrier that spirit could not pass? But then we come to

another consideration. Is death itself a barrier spirit cannot pass? All

that I have written hitherto in these pages is directed towards an

answer to that question. What should make us change the cumulative 'No'

which our study of the processes and character of life forces to our

lips? Already we human creatures, incomplete though we are, reveal life

as an impulsive, enriching and creative power given in us and become

ourselves—a power by which we may continue the line of a direct advance

and pass on in a creative evolution which reasonably should have no end.

What wonders may we not reveal, what wonders may we not discover thus,

in that advance? But only if for the true life that is ourselves, the

life which as ours is manifest in its use of body and brain and of the

inheritance they bring, there is a triumph over the last of the many

obstacles it encounters upon earth. For, let there be no mistake, the

immortality of the race upon earth, even if it be possible, is not

enough to satisfy reason and accord with the promise of every individual

man as what he is for himself, and in his own special relation and

contribution to the well-being of the whole. Each man becoming as he

should become has his own peculiar value, each his own spontaneity and

continuous creative power. If he is lost all this comes to an end, and

the world of men is the poorer for want of what he might have given.

There is no shifting of our reasonable demand for the conquest of death

from the individual man to his race, even if (as is not so much as

probable) his race does not die in the cooling or drying or heating of

his earth.

After all, what is 'this body of death' from which every man must part?

It is, we declare, his medium of transmission and the motor and sensory

instrument and condition by means of which he had both inherited a

foundation upon which to build his own life, and entered into relations

with an outside world of things and persons. Chemically and physically

it is a stream of particles always passing away, always being renewed,

at one rate or another. The few particles unchanged during his life are

not actively sharing his life; they are only its physical supports.

Whatever shares his life changes. This stream that his food and the air

and the water make, he takes up, transforms, uses and dismisses. All his

life long he is dying bodily, and is growing, or should be growing,

spiritually. Death is for him the finishing of a process in his body

that has always gone on, the final casting away of material elements he

has always cast away when he had done with them. And meanwhile, in the

spiritual duration of his life, its minister the body has consolidated

his self-conscious unity, so that he dies, or should die, a true owner

of his real and true and valuable self. For this end earthly life seems

to the eye of reason ever to have been striving. Is its striving to be

finally in vain? Everything that we have considered in these pages

declares the unlikeliness of that.

Is a man then to pass from this world bodiless, as some of the ancients

thought? To be able to offer a tentative answer to this question we must

go back to one of our earlier chapters and remind ourselves of the ether

which, the physicist says, interpenetrates all the molecules of our body

now, and is the medium of communication everywhere through the systems

of the worlds. May I think of the ether, then, as being in my body the

medium of communication between me, as spiritual life and consciousness,

and the material elements and structures of my body? If the

comparatively coarse granular matter of the chemist's colloids and the

protoplasmic speck shows such a congruity with my life as makes it fit

to live in me and be the bearer to me of ancestral habits, may I not

think that a still closer congruity exists between this ether and my

life? And, again, is it not possible, or even likely, that it is through

the ether of my body that I influence its matter and its matter

influences me? If these things are so, then my ether-body is more fully

mine and more closely bound to me than is my matter-body. I think of

myself passing at death into, or discovering myself in, an ethereal

country where my ethereal body shall serve me even better than my

matter-body serves me in this matter-country. And if this thought seems

the plain man's plain thought about the physicist's hypothesis and is

condemned for that, I retort that the plain man through his rejection of

constraint by specialism, and by ideal or abstract schemes which flout

the wholeness of experience, is coming now into his own in science, in

philosophy and in religion. He has his rights and is taking possession

of them in a new fashion and with new significance.

One thing more I think of. The physicist says that what he calls 'bound

ether,' that is ether within the spaces of a material thing, differs in

its character from the free ether of the interstellar spaces. He has

been able to prove this, he says, by experiments on the transmission of

light through ether 'bound' in water.

What more do I want? The ether changes in character from association

with matter in a body. I see it in my mind's eye changed by constant

association with my brain and limbs and with my active consciousness as

it could never be changed in water. Am I right, I wonder? Shall I see

some day how it has been changed? Shall I see my more intimate body

revealed and know it and myself raised to high estate?

However this may be, the life that made for itself body after body on

earth, conquering the habits and reluctances of matter that it might use

it for a spiritual purpose, is possessed of a creative and organizing

power to which no man should dare to set bounds, and which by me at

least shall be trusted to the end. That which builds from the egg the

chicken, and from the first jelly-specks all the races of the globe,

must still be capable of looking after me—if I am worth it.... I am bold

enough and plain man enough to say with the poet,—

'Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss

where swells up the music of toneless strings I shall

take this harp of my life.'

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CHAPTER VIII

The soul needs only to open the door.

_Boehme._

By the establishing of habit-memories in the nervous structures of man

consciousness is liberated for another and, if the man will, a nobler

use. The instrument may be forgotten, the work goes on. This liberation

of the spirit from attention to modes of activity and actions that can

be automatically or almost automatically carried on is among life's

greatest triumphs. And the triumph is indefinitely extended in man's

peculiar relation to his tools, and through the peculiar character of

both his tools and his tool-making.

An animal's tools are parts of its body; they are stings, claws, fangs

and so on. Some of the tools of man are also parts of his body; but

there are others, not his natural organs, by which its instrumentality

is extended—and that, you may say, without signs of coming to an end. It

seems as though life had a sort of prophetic instinct in this business;

for primitive man was driven to search for these new tools by his lack

of organic armament of either the offensive or the defensive kind. He

had no protective shield like the armadillo or the crab; and even the

scanty covering of hair, which contrasted so ill with the close fur of

his cousins, grew scantier still, until it became altogether useless

against rain or cold or storm. He had no claws, no tusks, worth

considering as weapons of offence; but he had a desirous and adventurous

mind, and both by his necessities and his mind he was driven to the

making of tools. He owned also one very remarkable natural tool. He had

an archaic five-fingered hand inherited from his amphibian ancestors,

which had not been specialized into a wing or a shaft ending in a hoof

or a paw—a hand plastic, mobile, delicate and sensitive, a very

'instrument of instruments' for a creature opening wide the gate for

life.

We are apt to think of this beautiful tool of ours as highly

specialized. It is not; it was preserved unspecialized from the

amphibian stage throughout a long pre-human history, as though life had

indeed foreseen just what was coming and knew that its versatility would

make it the worthy partner of man's versatile brain. Let us put it that

way. (Or let us say that it was a happy accident. As you please; anyhow

the fact remains.) The result was that man possessed a natural tool

beautifully adaptable for making and using many and various artificial

tools. And there was not another creature upon earth that had not either

spoilt its hand for those various uses by specializing it for some

narrow use, or like the monkeys and the apes, had no brain to match. Man

specialized his feet, as the monkeys and the apes did not; he left his

multifarious hand alone.

By means of this hand he projected into space the powers of his body and

his mind. He began, no doubt, with sticks and stones; he went on to

strings; and from sticks and stones and strings he passed to telescopes

with which he reached new stars, spectroscopes with which he saw what

they were made of, telegraphs and telephones through which his speech

and hearing stretched out from land to land, and destructive machines by

which his delicate fingers shattered and blasted with the power of a

thousand storms. These things and more he has done; and all the tools he

has used are extensions of both his body and his mind. So too are the

industrial machines by which he manufactures (note the word) what his

newly-complicated needs demand of clothes and food and furniture and the

like. So too are the astounding machines which make for him other and

different machines. And everywhere we see that in the advance of his

tool-devising he draws nearer to making those which will work either

without his aid or with very little of it. His tools grow more and more

automatic, more and more saving of the labour of mind. He makes, you may

say, artificial habit-bearers, motor-structures by which the devices of

his mind are carried into action independent of his mind, as other

devices are through his nervous system and his muscular limbs. Thus he

follows the example set him by life in its organizing of living tools.

And we ought to tell ourselves (parenthetically) at this point that the

one reasonable and worthy use of all our machinery is just this—to

follow the example of life not only in the actual organizing but in the

purpose and meaning of organization. We ought to acknowledge to

ourselves that unless our machinery liberates the mind and spirit of man

to serve better and more freely his spiritual needs it will of a

certainty enslave him. At present, because most of us are in the dark as

to the direction in which life strives to conduct us, machinery is used

to emancipate the few and to enslave the many. We do not know what we

are doing, we do not understand what the primacy of spirit means or

should mean for us all. We do not know how we ought to grow, every one

of us, in the natural, that is, in the spiritual way.

Why do I venture to say that in the spiritual way we _ought_ to grow?

And what in fact is that spiritual way? Do life and experience point out

the way and emphasize the 'ought'? Here we come to the gist of our whole

inquiry.

If in looking back along the road on which, in these chapters, we have

been trying to pick out stage after stage, we discern a governing

purpose and the foreshadowing of an end; and if we also discern not only

the possibility but also the means, through intellect and intuition,

through action and feeling and thought, of identifying ourselves with

that purpose and throwing the energy of our own lives into furthering

it, we shall see both the ought and the way. We shall dimly discern,

too, the promise of the end, although we do not and cannot yet know what

we shall be. From the moment when the life-current driving onward and

overcoming one by one the reluctances of matter along the genealogical

ascent to man, reached him—_homo faber_, the skilful tool-maker, _homo

sapiens_, the able thinker—from that moment the sublime purpose of all

that had gone before began to be revealed.

The advance of life's main stream in all its variety of operation shows,

from the beginning until now, one character and motive-principle. It

begins, as we have said, by subduing to its purpose the inveterate

habits of material elements, those habits we speak of as physical

necessity and law, raising their status that they may be servants in new

power to a freedom foreign to themselves. From subduing and assembling

elements within cells it passes to the assembling of cells and lifts up

these in their turn to higher place. They play their part in a

commonwealth; they are servants whose habits, like those of matter,

further the cause of a freedom they cannot reach. Their own relative

necessity is subdued and used through their coöperating. They promote

what they neither see nor know. Finally they reach their highest

function in a man's brain, where they coöperate to carry power to an

incalculably various use. There it is that life, by a very splendour of

new emancipation, passes, as the philosopher says, 'through the meshes

of necessity,' passes through that net the cords of which it has itself

both spun and knotted from the refractory substance of material things.

Man comes into his heritage. He inherits, we may allow ourselves to say,

from the habits of elements and from the habit-memories of cells, single

and corporate. He inherits from the habit-memories of every living

creature in his ancestry. And each habit-memory of them all has

contributed to his setting free. Now he is so far master that life has

put into his hands the choice between a greater freedom still towards

which its impulsive purpose has been directed from the first, and a new

slavery that the man himself is able to make for himself. For—and surely

we need to note this for our warning—the conduct and determination of

life, which is in some small measure in the power of every creature

within its manner of life, is given over to man; and the next step in

emancipation is for him to take or leave as he will. He may dominate the

whole chain of habits and go forward; or he may wind it about him and

entangle his spirit in its fetters.

Matter, his body, the habits or habit-memories he inherits or makes for

himself, all these may either be instruments of his growing liberation

or machines that turn him to the likeness of themselves. The pianist who

has wrought his music into the living instrumentality of his fingers may

leave his fingers to work as mechanism, or he may pour into their

established habit the riches and beauty of an artistic soul. Thus it is

with all the heritage and possessions of a man. He may submit to them as

to a constraining mechanism and grow mechanical himself, or he may

infuse them with his spirit and raise them and himself to that further

altitude which spirit seeks. We may well say of some men that they are

the slaves of habit; we may well think more than we do of the many kinds

of habit to which men may be slaves.

To look on heredity as an affair of transmitted habit-memories is to

discover our true relation with it, once we have come to see what the

spiritual memory of an enduring and accumulating spiritual life, lived

according to its proper meaning, may be for man. In the chick the

inherited habit-memory of its race is as the boundary wall of cellulose

is for the plant-cell; in the child it is a standing ground from which,

while his creative spirit stirs within him, he surveys the kingdoms of a

world. In the man, like the habits he himself builds up, it may come to

be a hill-top from which he looks down upon all those kingdoms and their

glory. Life incurred death when first the cells were summoned out of

solitude to work together in a body. And here, too, it is as though it

foresaw what was coming, saw in a vision a creature come to being who

should have life in himself and be divinely discontent, seeking to go

on. It is hard to think that a creative impulse beginning so low down,

so humbly, and yet purposive enough and skilful and potent enough to

reach the immeasurable wonder and promises of man, should ever have been

blind, or in the last resort should be no more and no greater than

himself.

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CHAPTER IX

The human animal desires to escape from its

animal prison by means of all kinds of love, by

freedom of emotion no less than of action and thought.

And it attains to the freedom of emotion when it is

aware of beauty. It cannot be aware of beauty

except in self-forgetfulness, and it cannot produce

beauty except in self-forgetfulness.

_Arthur Clutton-Brock._

No doubt the great question for any man in regard to himself—if he is

able and willing to put one so searching—is whether he is or is not on

the way to aid in the fulfilment of the promise of life. It is a

question hard to answer, for the promise of life grows ever greater in

our eyes once we have begun to see it at all. There was a time when for

our ancestors of the caves it must have called for little more than

strength and skill, courage and perseverance, in attack or in defence

and in the procuring of shelter, food and wives. The bitter struggle in

which they were engaged was a real struggle for existence in which every

man must fight for his own hand, or at best for his little group of near

kindred. There were not many differences then between the practical

demands of the daily life of men and those of the daily life of the

hyenas or the wolves. But there were other differences, and they were

great and significant. One in particular has left a wealth of evidence

behind it, evidence graven and painted in certain caverns. There are

bisons, for example, painted by some of the men whom we call primitive,

or savage, which are of the truest art. There is no such difference and

no such likeness between those bisons and the artistic work of to-day as

there is between the flint-headed arrow and the machine-gun. The arrow

and the gun are products of an intellectual ingenuity, practising and

becoming expert through practice and concentrated on the external

relations of thing with thing; the painting comes of a direct intuition

of the reality and the essential beauty in a bison's life. They are

alive for us, those bisons, and they are beautiful. Their creator was a

true artist, able to throw himself into the object he wished to

discover, to feel and to depict; and he was able to endow his picture

with the bison's life and his own. If you are in aesthetic sympathy with

him you can feel the creature he paints as you feel the man painting.

The intellect that devised the arrow has always to travel onward by an

accumulating process, from step to step; the intuition that felt the

bison arrived at once. No doubt there is not only intellect but

intuition in the arrow; and there is not only intuition but intellect in

the painting; but the emphasis and the proportion are contrasted in the

two.

Why did this primitive artist paint at all? There are those who suggest

that he had some practical end in view to be reached by the magic of

representation—an idea perhaps of thus ensuring luck for his hunting.

But at least that can hardly be true of the graceful form and the

conventional adornment he gave to some of his tools. It is far more

likely that even if he began with magic and a practical end he went on

to paint for the pure joy of it, the pure spiritual joy of inspired

admiration glowing to a creative act, and winning admiration in its

display. That is the manner of art—even to the delight in its being

admired by those to whom it is made known—and this man's work is the

work of an artist. I should say these men's work is the work of artists,

for there were many of them in many generations. There was not merely a

single eccentric genius—though even one would have sufficed us for a

revelation. Here then, in these caverns, we have a kind of work done by

many men, who, however much they looked for admiration from their

fellows, worked in something of the self-forgetfulness of an artist; so

we may presume. The man who pursued it did not in any lesser way profit

by it (unless his fellows were self-forgetful enough to pay him for the

joy he gave, and that only extends and strengthens the case); but he

assuredly profited in his spirit, which there found its outlet as

creative, there showed its self-forgetting love of something beyond

self, there in consequence found its joy. The true artist paints or

sings for the love of it, and because he must; and wins his joy, even

though in and with the artist's pain, and the man's self-seeking. The

spirit within him drives him on; no outward necessity, no carnal

attraction, no mere self-seeking, is adequate to force or draw him. Art,

however skilled and taught, however marred by human weakness, is

spontaneous as love. We are in presence here of that of which only faint

adumbrations can be discerned in any other creature than man. There are

adumbrations; and there is at least a plain foreshadowing of love. But

full and lasting self-forgetfulness is to be attained only in man, and

true art and true love, like true joy, depend upon it.

* * * * *

The declared promise for the further advance of life in us demands and

displays growth in self-forgetfulness. The man who strikes us as being

above other men is one who shows us powers other men either have not or

do not use, and uses them as other men very often do not use them. He is

always stamped with the stamp of spirit. He is creative and he is

self-forgetful. We do not really, or at least readily and spontaneously,

admire any man who does things from self-interested motives. We may

admire the things he does, but we do not admire the man. If, for

example, we are religious ourselves, and however much we wish other

people to be so too, we do not admire the man who, we know, is religious

because he sees his profit in religion either for this world or the

next. We do not admire the kind of artist who clutches at beauty because

it feeds that deadly appetite which is no other than aesthetic greed. We

want him to admire a beautiful thing for its own sake, because it is

what it is and is altogether admirable. And no lover holds our respect

if for him his beloved is merely a curio to be proud of or a

satisfaction of the flesh. We say justly that he is only a lover of

himself. To command our admiration a man must stretch out his desire and

enlarge his interests beyond the boundary of self; he must give himself,

not necessarily without reward—for the joy set before him often

comes—but without making the attainment of it a motive spring.

That simple fact proves the spirits that we are. And it is shown in

strange places. Even the leader of the gang of thieves wins admiration

by his carelessness of personal gain. Robin Hood is always both

honourable and honoured, though he steals.

Think then how much life had gained in power of expression when the

painters of the caves were reached. Yet the philosopher reminds us that

indeed this gain began with the beginning of love. Self-forgetfulness

began before man came to show himself called by spirit and life to die

daily. Yet in and by him they call with an emphasis and solemnity new in

the tale of creation. He is to die to the struggle and the desire to

live; he is to give himself and grow by self-giving. That is his proper

way.

Not without reason does the philosopher tell us that the supreme secret

of life begins to be revealed in the plant which surrenders its own life

for its seed. But if we ignore the far plainer voice of man, how can we

hear what has been whispered by the plant? If we are made mechanical by

slavery to our own tools how can we discern either? And unless we listen

with the ears of our intuitive soul we shall never hear what it is that

they are saying. Unless we immerse ourselves in the current of the

spirit, unless we confide ourselves to the life that would bear us on,

we shall miss the fulfilment of our promise. The whole long weary road

of life has been travelled on our behalf in vain, unless through the

adventure of self-giving we become unceasing spiritual creators of

greater selves than those we are now.

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CHAPTER X

If thou hast union now, thou shalt have it hereafter.

_Kabir._

Without social life no one of the peculiarly human powers of a man comes

to fruition. He may chatter, for example; he cannot speak. He has all

the necessary organs and all the necessary power, but man-language is

part of an inheritance stored up for him in community life. It is stored

up there, just as clinging with his hands and sucking with his lips are

stored up ready for him at birth, in his body. Society is for him an

immense extension of his body, and therefore a further means of

extension for his spirit. It is also an immense extension of the bodies

and spirits of other men with whom he may enter upon relations. You may

look on it as supplying a brain common to all men which all may use

together, and in which their activities should find not only a recording

medium but an unfailing stimulus and contributory aid. But the social

brain is in a peculiar sense men's own making, as free and capable

creators. They have come to be owners of life and directors of its

course in a degree they certainly had not attained when their bodily

brains were slowly growing to be what they are. This brain of theirs,

used in community, is as truly built by their own efforts as are the

houses in which they live. The evolution of man has to all intents of

spirit ceased to advance by changes in his body, but it goes on by

incessant change and enormous amplification in his community life.

Here, too, in this many-bodied and many-souled community, as well as in

the individual man's life, function determines structure. But function

has there become self-conscious and world-conscious, aware of the many

bodies and the many souls, aware of their needs and dangers, aware of

their giving and their gaining. Men have societies within the community

such as on the whole their conscious desires and purposes, their

attitude towards their fellows, their sense of responsibility and

obligations, their aims and ideals, demand. We have indeed the societies

we deserve. We may well ask ourselves why we deserve to have them as

they are; we may well say to ourselves—'"Prisoner, tell me, who was it

that wrought this unbreakable chain?"' And the answer is clear,

convicting not only of error but of what some of us have learnt to know

as actual sin, sin against the call and promise of life. '"It was I,"

said the prisoner ... "when at last the work was done and the links were

complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip."'

* * * * *

There are other societies besides those of men. Some are far more

completely organized. The bees and the ants have carried social

organization to a state of harmony and of adjustment to ends which is as

strongly marked in its contrast with any that human societies present,

as is the triumphant surgery of the solitary wasp by contrast with the

blunders of an untrained man. In 'the civility of these little citizens'

society is carried to a completeness corresponding with that of the life

of the creatures who are its parts. In an ant-hill or a hive we have

before us, some may say, a model of what a society should be. Perfect

co-operation, complete subordination of individual to social ends, the

highest possible working efficiency of each and all—it sounds well, and

no one can deny that for bees and ants it works well. Would it work

equally well for men?

The answer we give to this question will depend on two things. It will

depend first on whether we think that men are or are not competent to

advance, and are aided to advance, as beings not only spiritual in

essential character and purpose, but self-creative and so able to reach

both an efficiency beyond all constraint by institutions and machines,

and an enlargement of community-life which shall embrace society upon

society in all their diverse modes. Secondly, it will depend on whether

we are or are not willing to organize any society by what used to be

called biological methods, that is by the methods of the arena—of the

'gladiators' show.' If we decide on the gladiators' show and a social

efficiency with no further outlook than a highly superior human

ant-hill's, we pronounce ourselves believers that in principle the

ant-hill manner of life with its isolation of society from society will

work for men. We may be wrong even in a short view or a narrow view of

man's capacities and existence; we are certainly wrong if spiritual

progress lies before him as a glorious prospect not only for this man or

society of men here, or another there, but for all men as members of an

all-containing community made one only by an all-containing principle.

In face of the promise and adventure of life we are as certainly wrong

in giving consent to the ant-hill principle for society as we should be

if we consented to exchange our own pregnant incompleteness for the

perfection of the ant. Yet we of the modern civilized nations of Europe

and America have been far too much influenced of late years, not only by

our animal inheritance and the passions that we share with 'ape and

tiger,' but by what is now a powerful tradition and in the last century

was a new force—the mechanistic conception of social life. Our reasoning

about society, our social science, even our social practices, have by

this tradition been made not only more materialistic—many of us know

that—but more plausibly mechanistic. It has seemed to us that we have

science and nature both on our side, in trusting less to the initiative

of life and more to its organization of circumscribed institutions and

ordered means. We have taken a biological hypothesis far too seriously.

And no doubt we have done this in great part because it has enabled us

to leave uncriticized, or even to justify, habitual ways of acting and

thinking which have about them still the taint of the pit from which we

have been digged. These ways of ours were laid down for us in the long

effort of each man to keep his footing on earth for himself and for the

few he recognized as his own; but we have made them both more difficult

and more dangerous by loading ourselves with a burden of perverted or

artificial needs which not only call for perverted or artificial means

to satisfy them, but set us in opposition to other men from whom we

wrest their satisfaction. Those ways and this burden are proper to a

creature who in very truth is seeking so to encumber life as to prevent

its carrying him on, so to contract his own life as to prevent its

intermingling with the lives of others. In short they are proper to one

who is arresting life in himself as it has been arrested in the tiger or

the ant. It will be arrested at a higher point—that is all; and it will

be consciously arrested by the conscious building up of an obstacle far

more serious than death. Therefore it is no mere failure; it is sin—sin

against the true nature of human life.

The mechanistic theories of biology, which have helped to confirm men in

an evil course, are fast being discredited. With them will go a false

philosophy which has been widely current of late and has had an

influence reaching far beyond an acquaintance with its authors' names.

Critical and careful biologists are now undoubtedly doing much to effect

this salutary change. Yet, may be, we shall be driven to call some of

their opponents (as has been prophesied) by the bad name of

necrologists, that we may perhaps shock them into self-knowledge. It is

a name only too grievously appropriate now, since the picture of natural

evolution they have, all innocently, drawn has not only foreshadowed,

but contributed to fill, the grave-yard of the peoples dug in the great

war.

We are changing this baleful picture; we are learning too, partly in

consequence, that the self-interest of utilitarian economists and the

ruthless search for individual advantage which social mechanists have

commended are not the mainsprings of evolution. Of far greater, more

lasting, and more profound significance and effect than the

self-interested struggle for existence among animals and plants has been

the species-interest to which self-interest has been subordinated. A

creature must first eat and only afterwards reproduce; but this in no

way justifies us in thinking that competition for food is charged with

more meaning in the long story of life than the protective care of

parents for their offspring and the eminently natural self-sacrifice it

involves. Progress among both animals and vegetables has been secured

more by 'species maintaining' efforts than by a mere self-seeking

struggle for self-restricted ends. It is a recognition of this fact that

makes a distinguished biologist say, 'The ideal of evolution is thus no

gladiator's show, but an Eden; and although competition can never be

wholly eliminated ... it is much for our pure natural history to see no

longer struggle, but love as "creation's final law."'

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PART II

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CHAPTER I

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything

would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has

closed himself up, till he sees all things through

narrow chinks of his cavern.

_Blake._

As we looked at chlorophyll, at colloids and the sea-urchin's egg, so

let us look at Christian habits and beliefs. And in the first place we

will fix our attention on the central 'mystery' of worship in the

Christian Church. All the world over and from the first days of

Christian apostles and brethren, a man going into one of their places of

assembly would at some hour or another find their devotion apparently

gathered about common, familiar, bread and wine, or, sometimes, bread

alone. They would tell him that this bread 'is no longer common bread.'

Nevertheless, in the ordinary or the scientific sense, it is, just as

much 'common bread' as chlorophyll is the common colouring matter of the

green wheat. They will tell him, too, that it is a 'sacramental' means

of communion between God and themselves and between them and Christ, the

Anointed Son of God. Just as we insist scientifically upon the fact that

chlorophyll is the meeting-point between the power of the sun and our

living selves, so Christians insist that the sacramental bread, whatever

else it is or does, constitutes a meeting-point between them and God and

his Christ. No doubt (they may say, if they understand such matters),

for the mathematical physicist, bread, like everything else, may be

finally reduced to a series of dynamical equations. Or it may be taken

as ether and electrons; or as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and so forth; or,

roughly, as what it comes to be at last, gases, water, and dust, like

the bodies of us all. But each of these ways of looking at bread

manifestly, even to the mind of that scientific man, leaves out

something of its richness and fails to reckon with its use and purpose

for life. By ordinary persons it is known as the 'staff' of life; and

these ordinary persons, when they say it is this, are speaking poetry.

In fact if you are to do justice to bread you must be something of an

artist; you do it gross injustice—that is, you leave out of your account

the most valuable thing about it—when you do not go beyond the

scientific man's idealistic or abstract summing up. The poet's vision

does better when he mates in the corn and the grape the glories of the

sun and the expectancy of earth, and sees the bringing forth and

revealing and communicating, through the grain and the wine, of a

concealed and straining life. But the philosopher also has his

contribution to a fulness of justice. He insists, after his manner, on

'spirit and life'; he disdains mechanism; he opens gates that science

cannot pass, and shows that all real things have depth it cannot reach—a

third dimension where it has discovered only two. He solidifies the

schematic diagrams of the scientific man and gives reasons for the faith

of the religious man, who goes further still.

Here in the Christian Sacrament, where the Christian says that the

fullest justice is done to bread and wine in lifting them up to be a

means of communion between God and man, science and philosophy, religion

and art, may meet together.

For nearly two thousand years Christians have seen in 'this bread' of

theirs matter impenetrated by spirit, and raised by it into another and

a higher order. They have held to a doctrine of both in which neither

was despised, or thought of as deceiving or unreal. Materialistic

thought and theory, abstract spiritualism, all theories or doctrines

that cut the world of experience in two with a rationalizing hatchet,

have been powerless to loosen their hold. Matter informed and

transformed by spirit; spirit pre-eminent over and including

matter—these have been cardinal and inevitable implications in the

sacramental worship of Christians. Cardinal and inevitable, too, is, in

consequence, their view of the world as an affair of order superposed on

order in a nature capable of being raised to the height of that which

they call the supernatural, an earth that may become a new earth, a city

of men that should rise to the noble state of a City of God.

* * * * *

We look back on the chemist's colloid that becomes, as protoplasm, no

longer common colloid but one from which a world of living creatures has

arisen. We see again a wonderful life informing and transforming matter,

pre-eminent over it yet dependent on and manifesting through it. We see

the chlorophyll of the plant raising chemical elements to a new order of

being, and life in its onward march from order to order of manifesting

consciousness, attaining at last man, creative in his spiritual freedom

and dominance. We see that a Christian might point to man himself as the

summing up of outward and visible signs and an inward and spiritual

grace which science has made known, as reasonably as he may take bread

as the central symbol of his worship. And he may tell us, or we may tell

him, that these things are one—that there is everywhere 'continuity of

process with the emergence of real differences' in a world that is

'sacramental' from its lowest to its highest order, from the speck of

jelly to man. He and we both may see it as a world of outward and

visible signs, each manifesting what the Christian names 'an inward and

spiritual grace,' and we name—how do we name it? So far, only _life_,

mysterious and mysteriously potent, communicating and communicated life.

We are encouraged to consider, further, this name and its meaning for us

and above all in us. In us, we justly say, life is really different from

what it is in the plant. We are 'persons'; plants are not. Life in us is

personal, in the plant it is less than personal. But it is life, all the

same and all through, from the impersonal to us, different though we

assuredly are from the impersonal. And we can hardly escape asking

ourselves whether, as they are now, men are of the highest order of real

difference among the different orders embraced in the potency of life.

Can life do no more and better, seeing that it has done so much? Is it,

in itself, no more and better? The Christian answers these questions

without one moment of hesitation. He says that 'the Holy Ghost,' the

divine Spirit and Lord, is the 'Giver of Life'; and that there is an

order of life in which this Lord and Giver is brought into personal

relations with us, communicating with and communicated to us; so that by

this communication we are raised beyond the state of children of earth

and of the merely earthly life, to the high place of Sons of God, who

know their Father and are at one with each other and with him.

If there is a thorough-going evolutionist anywhere it is the Christian.

And it is his sacramental doctrine that gives consistency and

persistence to his evolutionary convictions, if and when they are

consistent and persistent. At times they are neither. At times the

Christian, like the rest of us, fails to see the grandeur and

universality of his own deepest principles. And then he belies them in

word and deed; and his picture of the world of men and things is false

to them and to himself.

It is these deepest principles that the enquirer should search out. When

he has caught one glimpse of them he should thereby be strengthened

against the falsifications that are offered him either by Christians or

their contemners. Great principles are there, for his vision and

enlightening. And in them he will find his own raised to a higher power.

His evolution is then carried beyond the point where it so abruptly and

unsatisfactorily breaks off. His potent life is there borne upward to

the meeting-place with a Lord and a Giver of life. His personal,

self-conscious and world-conscious, loving and self-sacrificing man, the

crown of his evolutionary process, comes face to face with the source

and fulfilment of all that he is and all that he so brokenly promises to

be. Man himself crowns the sacramental world and is its greatest

sacrament, revealing as in a glass darkly and by foretelling, the

fulness of beauty and glory in all its grace. And the Christian points

to one man as above all other men in the revealing office of mankind. He

says that this man in no way distorts the beauty and glory given him;

that in him very God is made known in and as very man. Here, plainly,

the sacramental principle reaches its supreme height, and is taken

beyond detail after detail to a wholeness covering every detail. If any

one man is thus the unclouded revelation of God in terms of man, then it

is true—as the Christian says it is—that the whole world of men and

things is best, most faithfully and fully, stated, reasoned about,

interpreted, through this man. Every particle of the bread we eat

becomes for us no longer 'common bread.' It is bread shown for what it

really is in the plan and process of God as these are made present to

us, alive, pregnant of glory and beauty and power, in the living

revelation of Jesus Christ.

* * * * *

The Christian sets his consecrated bread apart from all the rest of

bread and things, and, we must own, he does well. For men see all things

as in a glass darkly, and we are, most of us, the slaves of habit and

victims of familiarity. What is everywhere and always soon comes to be

nowhere and never for our interest and our attention. If the Christian

had not kept as a rare thing, a thing enthroned, the bread that is for

him no longer common bread, he would of a certainty often, if not for

ever, have lost hold on the sublime principle it enshrines for him and

for the world. The conflicting currents of speculative thought, as well

as the weaknesses of his mental grasp, would have made him loose his

hold upon it. Just because it stands there as the central symbol

gathering up and establishing his worship and its sanctifying

associations, it has lasted through the centuries, preserving its own

great principle, a witness, a token and a sign not empty but

'effective'—_signum efficax_ not only for thought but for all human life

in its amplitude.

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