"Evolution" the reader may say, "does indeed show through its
doctrine of heredity that the living are in one sense really
controlled by the dead. But it also shows that the dead are
within us, not without us. They are part of us;--there is no
proof that they have any existence which is not our own.
Gratitude to the past would, therefore, be gratitude to
ourselves; love of the dead would be self-love. So that your
attempt at analogy ends in the absurd."
No. Ancestor-worship in its primitive form may be a symbol only
of truth. It may be an index or foreshadowing only of the new
moral duty which larger knowledge must force upon as the duty of
reverence and obedience to the sacrificial past of human ethical
experience. But it may also be much more. The facts of heredity
can never afford but half an explanation of the facts of
psychology. A plant produces ten, twenty, a hundred plants
without yielding up its own life in the process. An animal gives
birth to many young, yet lives on with all its physical
capacities and its small powers of thought undiminished. Children
are born; and the parents survive them. Inherited the mental life
certainly is, not less than the physical; yet the reproductive
cells, the least specialized of all cells, whether in plant or in
animal, never take away, but only repeat the parental being.
Continually multiplying, each conveys and transmits the whole
experience of a race; yet leaves the whole experience of the race
behind it. Here is the marvel inexplicable: the
self-multiplication of physical and psychical being,--life after
life thrown off from the parent life, each to become complete and
reproductive. Were all the parental life given to the offspring,
heredity might be said to favor the doctrine of materialism. But
like the deities of Hindoo legend, the Self multiplies and still
remains the same, with full capacities for continued
multiplication. Shinto has its doctrine of souls multiplying by
fission; but the facts of psychological emanation are infinitely
more wonderful than any theory.
The great religions have recognized that heredity could not
explain the whole question of self,--could not account for the
fate of the original residual self. So they have generally united
in holding the inner independent of the outer being. Science can
no more fully decide the issues they have raised than it can
decide the nature of Reality-in-itself. Again we may vainly ask,
What becomes of the forces which constituted the vitality of a
dead plant? Much more difficult the question, What becomes of the
sensations which formed the psychical life of a dead man?--since
nobody can explain the simplest sensation. We know only that
during life certain active forces within the body of the plant or
the body of the man adjusted themselves continually to outer
forces; and that after the interior forces could no longer
respond to the pressure of the exterior forces,--then the body in
which the former were stored was dissolved into the elements out
of which it had been built up. We know nothing more of the
ultimate nature of those elements than we know of the ultimate
nature of the tendencies which united them. But we have more
right to believe the ultimates of life persist after the
dissolution of the forms they created, than to believe they
cease. The theory of spontaneous generation (misnamed, for only
in a qualified sense can the term "spontaneous" be applied to the
theory of the beginnings of mundane life) is a theory which the
evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of
the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The
real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in
bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a
planetary surface) has enormous--nay, infinite--spiritual
significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of
life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from
system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to
cyclonic storms of atomicity; it means that tendencies survive
sunburnings,--survive all cosmic evolutions and disintegrations.
The elements are evolutionary products only; and the difference
of universe from universe must be the creation of tendencies,--of
a form of heredity too vast and complex for imagination. There is
no chance. There is only law. Each fresh evolution must be
influenced by previous evolutions,--just as each individual human
life is influenced by the experience of all the lives in its
ancestral chain. Must not the tendencies even of the ancestral
forms of matter be inherited by the forms of matter to come; and
may not the acts and thoughts of men even now be helping to shape
the character of future worlds? No longer is it possible to say
that the dreams of the Alchemists were absurdities. And no longer
can we even assert that all material phenomena are not
determined, as in the thought of the ancient East, by
soul-polarities.
Whether our dead do or do not continue to dwell without us as
well as within us,--a question not to be decided in our present
undeveloped state of comparative blindness,--certain it is that
the testimony of cosmic facts accords with one weird belief of
Shinto: the belief that all things are determined by the
dead,--whether by ghosts of men or ghosts of worlds. Even as our
personal lives are ruled by the now viewless lives of the past,
so doubtless the life of our Earth, and of the system to which it
belongs, is ruled by ghosts of spheres innumerable: dead
universes,--dead suns and planets and moons,--as forms long since
dissolved into the night, but as forces immortal and eternally
working.
Back to the Sun, indeed, like the Shintoist, we can trace our
descent; yet we know that even there the beginning of us was not.
Infinitely more remote in time than a million sun-lives was that
beginning,--if it can truly be said there was a beginning.
The teaching of Evolution is that we are one with that unknown
Ultimate, of which matter and human mind are but ever-changing
manifestations. The teaching of Evolution is also that each of us
is many, yet that all of us are still one with each other and
with the cosmos;--that we must know all past humanity not only in
ourselves, but likewise in the preciousness and beauty of every
fellow-life;--that we can best love ourselves in others;--that we
shall best serve ourselves in others;--that forms are but veils
and phantoms;--and that to the formless Infinite alone really
belong all human emotions, whether of the living or the dead.