I find myself accepting certain things on the authority of science
which so far transcend my experience, and the experience of the race
and all the knowledge of the world, in fact which come so near being
unthinkable, that I call my acceptance of them an act of scientific
faith. One's reason may be convinced and yet the heart refuse to
believe. It is not so much a question of evidence as a question of
capacity to receive evidence of an unusual kind.
One of the conclusions of science which I feel forced to accept, and
yet which I find very hard work to believe, is that of the animal
origin of man. I suppose my logical faculties are convinced, but
what is that in me that is baffled, and that hesitates and demurs?
The idea of the origin of man from some lower form requires such a
plunge into the past, and such a faith in the transforming power of
the biological laws, and in the divinity that lurks in the soil
underfoot and streams from the orbs overhead, that the ordinary mind
is quite unequal to the task. For the book of Genesis of the old
Bible we have substituted the book of genesis of the rocky scripture
of the globe--a book torn and mutilated, that has been through fire
and flood and earthquake shock, that has been in the sea and on the
heights, and that only the palaeontologist can read or decipher
correctly, but which is a veritable bible of the succession of life
on the earth. The events of the days of creation are recorded here,
but they are days of such length that they are to be reckoned only
in millions of years.
The evolution of the horse, according to the best and latest
research, from the eohippus of Eocene times--a small mammal no
larger than the fox--to the proud and fleet creature that we prize
to-day, occupied four or five millions of years. Think of that first
known progenitor of the horse as never dying, but living on through
the geological ages and being slowly, oh, so slowly, modified by its
environment, changing its teeth, its hoofs, enlarging its body,
lengthening its limbs, and so on, till it becomes the horse we know
to-day.
In accepting the theory of the animal origin of man we have got to
follow man back, not only till we find him a naked savage like the
Fuegians as Darwin describes them,--naked, bedaubed with paint, with
matted hair and looks wild and distrustful,--but we cannot stop
there, we must follow him back till he becomes a troglodyte, a
cave-dweller, contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and the
hyena for the possession of this rude shelter; back still, till we
find him in trees living like the anthropoid apes; then back to the
earth again to some four-footed creature, probably of the marsupial
kind; still the trail leads downward and ever downward, till we lose
it in that maze of marine forms that swarm in the Palaeozoic seas,
or until the imagination is baffled and refuses to proceed. It
certainly is a hard proposition, and it puts one upon his mettle to
accept it.
Should we not find equal difficulty in believing the life-history of
each one of us,--the start in the germ, then the vague suggestion of
fish, and frog, and reptile, in our foetal life,--were it not a
matter of daily experience? Let it be granted that the race of man
was born as literally out of the animal forms below him as the child
is born out of these vague, prenatal animal forms in its mother's
womb. Yet the former fact so far transcends our experience, and even
our power of imagination, that we can receive it only by an act of
scientific faith, as our fathers received the dogmas of the Church
by an act of religious faith.
I confess that I find it hard work to get on intimate terms with
evolution, familiarize my mind with it, and make it thinkable. The
gulf that separates man from the orders below him is so impassable,
his intelligence is so radically different from theirs, and his
progress so enormous, while they have stood still, that believing it
is like believing a miracle. That the apparently blind groping and
experimentation which mark the course of evolution as revealed by
palaeontology--the waste, the delay, the vicissitudes, the
hit-and-miss method--should have finally resulted in this supreme
animal, man, puts our scientific faith to the test. In the light of
evolution how the halo with which we have surrounded our origin
vanishes!
Man has from the earliest period believed himself of divine origin,
and by the divine he has meant something far removed from this earth
and all its laws and processes, something quite transcending the
mundane forces. He has invented or dreamed myths and legends to
throw the halo of the exceptional, the far removed, the mystical, or
the divine around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his foot;
he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and looked
to the heavens above for the sources of his life. And then unpitying
science comes along and tells him that he is under the same law as
the life he treads under foot, and that that law is adequate to
transform the worm into the man; that he, too, has groveled in the
dust, or wallowed in the slime, or fought and reveled, a reptile
among reptiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns with
such awe and reverence, or such dread and foreboding, are the source
of his life and hope in no other sense than they are the source of
the life and hope of all other creatures. But this is the way of
science; it enhances the value or significance of everything about
us that we are wont to treat as cheap or vulgar, and it discounts
the value of the things far off upon which we have laid such stress.
It ties us to the earth, it calls in the messengers we send forth
into the unknown; it makes the astonishing revelation--
revolutionary revelation, I may say--that the earth is embosomed in
the infinite heavens the same as the stars that shine above us, that
the creative energy is working now and here underfoot, the same as
in the ages of myth and miracle; in other words, that God is really
immanent in his universe, and inseparable from it; that we have been
in heaven and under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew it
not. Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance only so far as
it dispels our illusions and brings us back from the imaginary to
the common and the near at hand. It discounts heaven in favor of
earth. It should make us more at home in the world, and more
conscious of the daily beauty and wonders that surround us, and, if
it does not, the trouble is probably in the ages of myth and fable
that lie behind us and that have left their intoxicating influence
in our blood.
We are willing to be made out of the dust of the earth when God
makes us, the God we have made ourselves out of our dreams and fears
and aspirations, but we are not willing to be made out of the dust
of the earth when the god called Evolution makes us. An impersonal
law or process we cannot revere or fear or worship or exalt; we can
only study it and put it to the test. We can love or worship only
personality. This is why science puts such a damper upon us; it
banishes personality, as we have heretofore conceived it, from the
universe. The thunder is no longer the voice of God, the earth is no
longer his footstool. Personality appears only in man; the universe
is not inhuman, but unhuman. It is this discovery that we recoil
from, and blame science for; and until, in the process of time, we
shall have adjusted our minds, and especially our emotions, to it,
mankind will still recoil from it.
We love our dreams, our imaginings, as we love a prospect before our
houses. We love an outlook into the ideal, the unknown in our lives.
But we love also to feel the solid ground beneath our feet.
Whether life loses in charm as we lose our illusions, and whether it
gains in power and satisfaction as we more and more reach solid
ground in our beliefs, is a question that will be answered
differently by different persons.
We have vastly more solid knowledge about the universe amid which we
live than had our fathers, but are we happier, better, stronger? May
it not be said that our lives consist, not in the number of things
we know any more than in the number of things we possess, but in the
things we love, in the depth and sincerity of our emotions, and in
the elevation of our aspirations? Has not science also enlarged the
sphere of our love, and given us new grounds for wonder and
admiration? It certainly has, but it as certainly has put a damper
upon our awe, our reverence, our veneration. However valuable these
emotions are, and whatever part they may have played in the
development of character in the past, they seem doomed to play less
and less part in the future. Poetry and religion, so called, seem
doomed to play less and less part in the life of the race in the
future. We shall still dream and aspire, but we shall not tremble
and worship as in the past.
We see about us daily transformations as stupendous as that of the
evolution of man from the lower animals, and we marvel not. We see
the inorganic pass into the organic, we see iron and lime and potash
and silex blush in the flowers, sweeten in the fruit, ripen in the
grain, crimson in the blood, and we marvel not. We see the spotless
pond-lily rising and unfolding its snowy petals, and its trembling
heart of gold, from the black slime of the pond. We contemplate our
own life-history as shown in our pre-natal life, and we are not
disturbed. But when we stretch this process out through the geologic
ages and try to see ourselves a germ, a fish, a reptile, in the womb
of time, we are balked. We do not see the great mother, or the great
father, or feel the lift of the great biologic laws. We are beyond
our depth. It is easy to believe that the baby is born of woman,
because it is a matter of daily experience, but it is not easy to
believe that man is born of the animal world below him, and that
that is born of inorganic Nature, because the fact is too big and
tremendous.
What we call Nature works in no other way; one law is over big and
little alike. What Nature does in a day typifies what she does in an
eternity. It is when we reach the things done on such an enormous
scale of time and power and size that we are helpless. The almost
infinitely slow transformations that the theory of evolution demands
balk us as do the size and distance of the fixed stars.
No observation or study of evolution on a small scale and near at
hand in the familiar facts of the life about us can prepare us for
it, any more than lake and river can prepare us for the ocean, or
the modeling of miniature valleys and mountains by the rain in the
clay bank can open our minds to receive the tremendous facts of the
carving of the face of the continent by the same agents.
We do not see evolution working in one day, or in a century, or in
many centuries. Neither do we catch the gods of erosion at their
Herculean tasks. They always seem to be having a holiday, or else to
be merely toying with their work.
When we see a mound of earth or a bank of clay worn into miniature
mountain-chains and canons and gulches by the rains of a season, we
do not doubt our eyes; we know the rains did it. But when we see the
same thing copied in a broad landscape, or on the face of a state or
a continent, we find it hard to believe the evidence of our own
senses. The scale upon which it is done, and the time involved, put
it so far beyond the sphere of our experience that something in us,
probably the practical, everyday man, refuses to be convinced.
The lay mind can hardly have any adequate conception of the part
erosion, the simple weathering of the rocks, has played in shaping
our landscapes, and in preparing the earth for the abode of man. The
changes in the surface of the land in one's lifetime, or even in the
historic period, are so slight that the tales the geologists tell us
are incredible.
When, during a recent trip through the great Southwest, I saw the
earth laid open by erosion as I had never before dreamed of,
especially when I visited those halls of the gods, the Grand Canon
and Yosemite Valley, I found my capacity to believe in the erosive
power of water and the weather quite overtaxed. It must be true, I
said, what the geologists tell us, that water and air did all this;
but while you look and wait, and while generations before you have
looked and waited, all is as quiet and passive as if the slumber of
ages wrapped hill and vale. Invisible giants have wrought and delved
here of whom we never catch a glimpse, nor shall we, wait and watch
we never so long. No sound of their hammers or picks or shovels or
of the dynamite ever breaks the stillness of the air.
I have to believe that the valleys and mountains of my native
Catskills were carved out of a great elevated plain or plateau;
there is no other explanation of them. Here lie the level strata,
without any bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and upheavals,
horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake in which their
sediments were originally laid down; and here are these deep, wide
valleys cut down through these many sheets of stratified rock; and
here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, made up of the
rock that the forces of air and water have left, and with no forces
of erosion at work that would appreciably alter a line of the
landscape in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know
anything about the physical history of the earth, that erosion has
done this work, carved out these mountains and valleys, from the
Devonian strata, as literally as the sculptor carves his statue from
the block of marble.
Above my lodge on the home farm the vast layers of the gray,
thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out and look across the valley to
their fellows two or more miles away where they crop out in a
similar manner on the opposite slope of the mountain. With the eye
of faith I see the great sheets restored, and follow them across on
the line which they made aeons ago, till they are joined again to
their fellows as they were before the agents of erosion had so
widely severed them.
These physical forces have worked as slowly and silently in
sculpturing the landscapes as the biological laws have worked in
evolving man from the lower animals, or the vertebrates from the
invertebrates. The rains, the dews, the snows, the winds--how could
these soft, gently careering agents have demolished these rocks and
dug these valleys? One would almost as soon expect the wings and
feet of the birds to wear away the forests they flit through. The
wings of time are feathered also, and as they brush against the
granite or the flinty sandstone no visible particle is removed while
you watch and wait. Come back in a thousand years, and you note no
change, save in the covering of trees and verdure. Return in ten
thousand, and you would probably find the hills carrying their heads
as high and as proudly as ever. Here and there the face of the cliff
may have given way, or a talus slid into the valley, or a stream or
river changed its course, or sawed deeper into the rock, and a lake
been turned into a marsh, or the delta of a river broadened--minor
changes, such as a shingle from your roof or a brick from your
chimney, while your house stands as before. In one hundred thousand
years what changes should we probably find? Here in the Catskills,
where I write, the weathering of the hills and mountains would
probably have been but slight. It must be fifty thousand years or
more since the great ice-sheet left us. Where protected by a thin
coat of soil, its scratches and grooves upon the surface rock are
about as fresh and distinct as you may see them made in Alaska at
the present time. Where the rock is exposed, they have weathered
out, one eighth of an inch probably having been worn away. The
drifting of the withered leaves of autumn, or of the snows of winter
over them, it really seems, would have done as much in that stretch
of time. Then try to fancy the eternity it has taken the subaerial
elements to cut thousands of feet through this hard Catskill
sandstone! No, the evolution of the landscape, the evolution of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms, the evolution of the suns and
planets, involve a process so slow, and on such a scale, that it is
quite unthinkable. How long it took evolution to bridge the chasm
between the vertebrate and the invertebrate, between the fish and
the frog, between the frog and the reptile, between the reptile and
the mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the highest, who can
guess?
But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in this teeming world
of life and beauty, with a terrible past behind us, but a brighter
and brighter future before us.
X
"THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN"
When our minds have expanded sufficiently to take in and accept the
theory of evolution, with what different feelings we look upon the
visible universe from those with which our fathers looked upon it!
Evolution makes the universe alive. In its light we see that
mysterious potency of matter itself, that something in the clod
under foot that justifies Emerson's audacious line of the "worm
striving to be man." We are no longer the adopted children of the
earth, but her own real offspring. Evolution puts astronomy and
geology in our blood and authenticates us and gives us the backing
of the whole solar system. This is the redemption of the earth: it
is the spiritualization of matter.
In imagination stand off in vacant space and see the earth rolling
by you, a huge bubble with all its continents and seas and changing
seasons and countless forms of life upon it, and remember that you
are looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with the vital
currents of the universe, and that what it holds of living forms
were not arbitrarily imposed upon it from without, but vitally
evolved from within and that man himself is one of its products as
literally as are the trees that stand rooted to the soil. Revert to
the time when life was not, when the globe was a half-incandescent
ball, or when it was a seething, weltering waste of heated water,
before the land had yet emerged from the waves, and yet you and I
were there in the latent potencies of the chemically and dynamically
warring elements. We were there, the same as the heat and flame are
in the coal and wood and as the explosive force of powder is in the
grains. The creative cosmic chemistry in due time brought us forth,
and started us on the long road that led from the amoeba up to man.
There have been no days of creation. Creation has been a continuous
process, and the creator has been this principle of evolution
inherent in all matter.
Man himself was born of this principle. His genealogy finally runs
back to the clod under his feet. One has no trouble in accepting the
old Biblical account of his origin from the dust of the earth when
one views that dust in the light of modern science.
Man is undoubtedly of animal origin. He is embraced in the same
zoological scheme as are all other creatures, and did not start as
man any more than you and I started with our present stature, or
than the earth sprang from chaos as we now behold it.
His complete physical evolution must have been achieved thousands of
centuries ago, but his full mental and spiritual evolution is not
yet.
I think of his physical evolution as completed when he assumed the
upright attitude or passed from a quadruped to a biped, which must
of itself have been a long, slow process. Probably our whole
historic period would form but a fraction of this cycle of
unrecorded time. Man's complete emergence from the lower orders, so
that he stood off in sharp contrast to them in his physical form
probably occurred in later Tertiary times, and what the meaning of
this stretch of time is in human years we can only conjecture.
During this cycle of numberless millenniums till the dawn of
history, man's development was mainly mental. He left the brute
creature behind because his mind continued to develop after his
physical form was complete, while the brute stood still. Whence the
impulse that sent man forward? Why was one animal form endowed with
the capacity for endless growth and development, and all the others
denied it? Ah! that is the question of questions. Compared with the
development of his bodily powers, man's mental and spiritual growth
has been very rapid. He seems to have been millions of years in
getting his body, while he has been only millenniums in getting his
reason and intelligence. What progress since the dawn of history!
Compare the Germans of the time of Tacitus, or the Gauls of the time
of Caesar, or the Britons of the time of Hadrian with the people of
those countries to-day.
We are prone to speak of man's emergence from the lower orders as if
it were a simple thing, almost like the going from one country into
another. But try to think what it means; try to think of the slow
transformation, of the long, toilsome road even from the halfway
house of our simian ancestors. If we do not give him the benefit of
the sudden mutation theory of the origin of species, then think of
the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which a tailed,
apelike arboreal animal was transformed into a hairless, tailless,
erect, tool-using, fire-using, speech-forming animal. We see in our
own day in the case of the African negro, that centuries of our
Northern climate have hardly any appreciable effect toward making a
white man of him; nor, on the other hand, has exposure to the
tropical sun had much more effect in making a negro of the white
man. Probably it would take ten thousand years or more of these
conditions to bleach the pigments out of the one skin and put them
in the other. There is convincing proof from painting and figures
found in Egypt that neither the African negro nor the Egyptian has
changed in features in five thousand years.
The most marvelous thing about man's evolution is the inborn upward
impulse in some one low organism that rested not till it reached its
goal in him. The mollusk remains, but some impulse went out from the
mollusk that begat the fish. The fish remains, but some impulse went
out from the fish that begat the amphibian. The amphibian remains,
but some impulse went out from the amphibian that begat the reptile.
The reptile remains, but some impulse went out from the reptile that
begat the mammal; and so on up to man. Man must have had a specific
line of descent. One golden thread must connect him with the lowest
forms of life. And the wonder is that this golden thread was never
snapped or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of the
geologic ages. But I suppose it is just as great a wonder that the
line of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or the dog, or the bird,
was not snapped or lost. Some impulse or tendency was latent or
potential in the first unicellular life that rested not till it
eventuated in each of these higher forms. Did any terrestrial or
celestial calamity endanger the line of descent of any of the higher
creatures? Was any form cut off in the world-wide crustal
disturbances of the earth at the end of palaeozoic and mesozoic
time, when so many forms of animal life appear to have been wiped
out, that might in time have given birth to a kind unlike or
superior to any now upon the earth? Species after species have
become extinct, whole orders and families have gone out, often
rather suddenly. Why we know not. Why the line of man's descent was
not cut off, who knows? It is a vain speculation. There can be
little doubt that in early Tertiary times our ancestor was a small,
feeble mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the marsupial kind,
powerless before the great carnivorous mammals of that time, and
probably escaping them by his greater agility, perhaps by his
arboreal habits. The ancestor of the horse was also a small creature
at that time, not larger than a fox. It was not cut off; the line of
descent seems complete to the horse of our day. Small beginnings
seem to be the rule in all provinces of life. There is little doubt
that the great animals of our day--the elephant, the whale, the
lion,--all had their start in small forms. Many of these small forms
have been found. But a complete series of any of the animal forms
that eventuated in any of the dominant species is yet wanting. It is
quite certain that the huge, the gigantic, the monstrous in animal,
as in vegetable life, lies far behind us. Is it not quite certain
that evolution in the life of the globe has run its course, and that
it will not again bring forth reptiles or mammals of the terrible
proportions of those of past geologic ages? nor ferns, nor mosses,
nor as gigantic trees as those of Carboniferous times? Probably the
redwoods of the Far West, the gigantic sequoias, are the last race
of gigantic trees. The tide of life of the globe is undoubtedly at
the full. The flood has no doubt been checked many times. The
glacial periods, of which there seem to have been several in
different parts of the earth, and in different geological periods,
no doubt checked it when it occurred. But the tide as a whole must
have steadily risen, because the progression from lower to higher
forms has gone steadily forward. The lower forms have come along;
Nature has left nothing behind. The radiates, the articulates, the
mollusca, are still with us, but in the midst of these the higher
and higher forms have been constantly appearing. The great
biological tree has got its growth. Many branches and twigs have
died and dropped off, and many more will do so, are doing so before
our eyes, but I cannot help doubting that any new branches of
importance are yet to appear--any new families or orders of birds,
or fishes, or reptiles, or mammals. The horse, the stag, the sheep,
the dog, the cat, as we know them, are doubtless the end of the
series. One arrives at this conclusion upon general principles. Life
as a whole must run its course or reach its high-water mark, the
same as life in its particular phases. Man has arrived and has
universal dominion; all things are put under his feet. The destiny
of life upon the globe is henceforth largely in his hands. Not even
he can avert the final cosmic catastrophe which physicists foresee,
and which, according to Professor Lowell, the beings upon Mars are
now struggling to ward off.
Man has taken his chances in the clash of forces of the physical
universe. No favor has been shown him, or is shown him to-day, and
yet he has come to his estate. He has never been coddled; fire,
water, frost, gravity, hunger, death, have made and still make no
exceptions in his favor. He is on a level with all other animals in
this respect. He has his life and well-being on the same terms as do
the fowls of the air and the beasts of the fields.
Archbishop Whately thought that primitive man could never have
raised himself to a higher condition without external aid--some
"elementary instruction to enable his faculties to begin their
work." He must have had a boost. Well, the boost was forthcoming,
but it was not from without, but from within, through this principle
of development, this upward striving that was innate from the first
in certain forms of life and of which Whately had no conception. It
was the conception of his time that creation was like a watch made
and wound up by some power external to itself.
The physical evolution of man, as I have said, is no doubt complete.
He will never have wings, or more legs, or longer arms, or a bigger
brain. The wings and the extra legs and the keener sense he has left
behind him. His development henceforth must be in the mental and
spiritual. He is bound to have more and more dominion over Nature,
and see more and more clearly his own relation to her. He will in
time completely subdue and possess the earth. Yes, and probably
exhaust her? But he will see in time that he is squandering his
inheritance and will mend his ways. He will conserve in the future
as he has wasted in the past. He will learn to conserve his own
health. He will banish disease; he will stamp out all the plagues
and scourges, through his scientific knowledge; he will double or
treble the length of life. Man has undoubtedly passed through and
finished certain phases of his emotional and mental development. He
will never again be the religious enthusiast and fanatic he has been
in the past; he has not worshiped his last, but he has worshiped his
best. He will build no more cathedrals; he will burn no more martyrs
at the stake. His religion as such is on the wane. But his
humanitarianism is a rising tide. He is becoming less and less a
savage, revolts more and more at the sight of blood and suffering.
The highly religious ages were ages of blood and persecution. Man's
tenderness for man has vastly increased. The sense of the sacredness
of human life has increased as his faith in his gods has declined.
He has grown more human as he has grown less superstitious. Science
has atrophied his faith, but it has softened his heart. His fear of
Nature has given place to love. Man never loved as he does now. He
has withdrawn his gaze from heaven and fixed it upon the earth. As
his interest in other worlds has diminished, his interest in this
has increased. As the angels have departed, the children have come
in.
When the nations, too, cease to be savage and selfish, and become
altruistic, then the new birth of humanity will actually have
occurred. As an artist and a creator of beautiful forms, man has
also had his day; he loved the beautiful, the artistic, or the
ornamental long before he loved the true and the just. He was proud
before he was kind; he was chivalrous before he was decent; he was
tattooed before he was washed; he was painted before he was clothed;
he built temples before he built a home; he sacrificed to his gods
before he helped his neighbor; he was heroic before he was
self-denying; he was devout before he was charitable. We are losing
the savage virtues and vanities and growing in the grace of all the
humanities, and this process will doubtless go on, with many
interruptions and setbacks of course, till the kingdom of love is at
last fairly established upon the earth.