NATURE AND MAN
(Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and is
carrying on her processes and improving upon them.)
If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human morality is not
a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like everything else in the
world, a product of natural evolution. We can trace the history of it,
just as we trace the story of the rocks. It is not a mysterious or
supernatural thing, it is simply the reaction of man to his environment,
and more especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same
inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith which
appears to be the soul of all being.
Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many fundamental
respects his ways are still nature's ways and his laws still nature's
laws. But there are other and even more significant ways in which man
has separated himself from nature and made himself something quite
different. In order to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction
between nature and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear
in mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We
distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at one stage
the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We distinguish the animal
from the vegetable kingdom, despite the fact that in their lower forms
they cannot be distinguished.
What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? The
difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind in her
processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give life to one
salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon to be devoured by
other fish apparently no better than salmon. Poets may take up the
doctrine of evolution and dress it out in theological garments, talking
about the "one far off divine event towards which the whole creation
moves," but for all we can see, nature, apart from man, is just as well
satisfied to move in circles, and to come back exactly where she
started. Nature made a whole world of complicated creatures in the
steamy, luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if deciding
that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not a success,
she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, and we have nothing
but the bones to tell us about them.
No one understands anything about evolution until he has realized that
the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not mean the survival of
the best from any human point of view. It merely means the survival of
those capable of surviving in some particular environment. We consider
our present civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should
cause another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" depended
upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something we could grow by
artificial light in the bowels of the earth.
So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now--whether we say with the
theologians that it was divine providence, or with the materialist
philosophers that it was an accidental mixing of atoms--at any rate it
has come about that nature has recently produced creatures who are
conscious of her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to
take up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or for
worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been on parts of our
planet such a combination of climate and soil as has brought into being
a new product of nature, a heightened form of life which we call
"intelligence." Creation opens its eyes, and beholds the work of the
creator, and decides that it is good--yet not so good as it might be!
Creation takes up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many
respects annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether a
sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a question it
would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should be clear--nature
has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature never produced a sonnet,
nor anything resembling it.
Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. This fact may
shock us, or it may inspire us; to the metaphysically minded it offers a
great variety of fascinating problems. Can it be that God is in process
of becoming, that there is no God until he has become, in us and through
us? H. G. Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the
bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce Mr. Wells as
an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They have been worshipping
their God for some three or four thousand years, and know that He has
been from eternity; He created the world at His will, and how shall
impious man presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine
that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly little toys,
his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony concerts and such pale
imitations of celestial harmonies!
Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has created a bishop
of his own, and no doubt would maintain the thesis that he is a far
better bishop than any created by the God of the Anglican churches. We
will leave Mr. Wells' bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops,
and will merely remind the reader of our warning about these
metaphysical matters. You can prove anything and everything, whichever
and however, all or both; and discussions of the subject are merely your
enunciation of the fact that you have your private truth as you want it.
It may be that there is an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the
whole process of creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and
blunders of nature can be explained from some point of view at present
beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may be that
consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the first time. It may
be that it is an accident, a fleeting product like the morning mist on
the mountain top. On the other hand, it may be that it is destined to
grow and expand and take control of the entire universe, as a farmer
takes control of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as
our individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge into a
family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall some day grope
our way toward the consciousness of other planets, or of other states of
being subsisting on this planet unknown to us, or perhaps even toward
the cosmic soul, the universal consciousness which we call God.
But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: man, the
created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up the world purpose, he
is imposing upon it new purposes of his own, he is attempting to impose
upon it a moral code, to test it and discipline it by a new standard
which he calls economy. To the present writer this seems the most
significant fact about life, the most fascinating point of view from
which life can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into
greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray
Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening essay, with its
fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son."
In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of man revised
and even supplanted the processes of nature? The ways are so many that
it would be easier to mention those in which he has not done so. A
modern civilized man is hardly content with anything that nature does,
nor willing to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's
fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into being. He
is not content with the skin that nature has given him; he has made
himself an infinite variety of complicated coverings. He objects to
nature's habit of pouring cold water upon him, and so he has built
himself houses in which he makes his own climate; he has recently taken
to creating for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which fly
through the air, or which swim under the surface of the sea; so he
carries his private climate with him to all these places. It was
nature's custom to remove her blunders and her experiments quickly from
her sight. But man has decided that he loves life so well that he will
preserve even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a
state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, he blundered
into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But civilized man despises such
a method of maintaining the standard of human eyes; he creates for
himself a transparent product, ground to such a curve that it corrects
the focus of his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten
thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against the harshness
of his ancient mother, and has freed himself from her control.
But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way to act
first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes about that very
few, even of the most highly educated men, are aware how completely the
ancient ways of nature have been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It
is a good deal as in the various trades and professions which have
developed with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper
man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to make shoes, the
optician knows about grinding glasses, but none of these knows very much
about the others' specialties, and has no realization of how far the
other has gone. So it comes about that in our colleges we are still
teaching ancient and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual
practice of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. In all
colleges, except a few which have been tainted by Socialist thought,
the students are solemnly learning the so-called "Malthusian law," that
population presses continually upon the limits of subsistence, there are
always a few more people in every part of the world than that part of
the world is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's
productive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so there
can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, war and famine are
simply nature's eternal methods of adjusting man to his environment.
Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine out of ten of
the students come from homes where the parents have discovered the
modern practice of birth control; all the students are themselves
finding out about it in one way or another, and will proceed when they
marry to restrict themselves to two or three children. In vain will the
ghost of their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be
traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the dreadful crime
of "race suicide"--that is to say, their presuming to use their reason
to put an end to the ghastly situation revealed by the Malthusian law,
over-population eternally recurring and checked by abortion, war and
famine! In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist,
Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in
jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and
for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby
an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or
three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles,
Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese!
Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his
professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of
agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of
land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase
grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much
labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land.
All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and
since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political
science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the
city where the college is located, market gardeners are practicing on an
enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the
"law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke.
As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," the
modern intensive gardener, by use of glass and the chemical test-tube,
has developed an entirely new science of plant raising. He is
independent of climate, he makes his own climate; he is independent of
the defects of the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and
make his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital
investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten times as much.
If his methods were applied to the British Isles, he could raise
sufficient produce on this small surface to feed the population of the
entire globe.
So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in
position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he
is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a
hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But
superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that
land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for
rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"--that old nature of the
"tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who
have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which
has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and
which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the
tomb, for the purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory
financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or
when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do
not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he
mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the
workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the
natural resources of the earth!