I
I take the title of this paper from those great lines in Whitman
beginning--
"Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me"--
in which he launches in vivid imaginative form the whole doctrine of
evolution some years before Darwin had published his epoch-making
work on the "Origin of Species."
"I see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I know I was even
there."
I do not know that Whitman had any concrete belief in the truth of
the animal origin of man. He read as picture and parable that which
the man of science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt the
great truth of evolution, but he saw it as written in his own heart
and not in the great stone book of the earth, and he saw it written
large. He felt its cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the whole
scheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all that lives, and
had a vivid personal sense of his debt to the past, not only of
human history, but also to the past of the earth and the spheres.
And he felt this as a poet and not as a man of science.
The theory of evolution as applied to the whole universe and its
inevitable corollary, the animal origin of man, is now well
established in most of the leading minds of the world, but it is
still rejected by many timid and sensitive souls, and it will be a
long time before it becomes universally accepted.
Doubtless one source of the trouble we have in accepting the theory
comes from the fact that our minds have not been used to such
thoughts; in the mind of the race they are a new thing: they are not
in the literature nor in the philosophy nor in the sacred books in
which our minds have been nurtured; they are of yesterday; they came
to us raw and unhallowed by the usage of ages; more than that, they
savor of the materialism of all modern science, which is so
distasteful to our finer ideals and religious sensibilities. In
fact, these ideas are strangers of an alien race in our intellectual
household, and we look upon them coldly and distrustfully. But
probably to our children, or to our children's children, they will
wear quite a different countenance; they will have become an
accepted part of the great family of ideas of the race.
Another hindrance is the dullness and opacity of our own minds. We
are slow to wake up to a sense of the divinity that hedges us about.
The great office of science has been to show us this universe as
much more wonderful and divine than we have been wont to believe;
shot through and through with celestial laws and forces; matter,
indeed, but matter informed with spirit and intelligence; the
creative energy inherent and active in the ground underfoot not less
than in the stars and nebulae overhead.
We look for the divine afar off. We gaze upon the beauty and purity
of the heavenly bodies without thinking that we are also in the
heavens. We must open our minds to the stupendous fact that God is
immanent in his universe and that it is literally and exactly true,
as we were taught long ago, that, during every moment of our lives,
in Him we live and move and have our being.
Moreover, we are staggered by the element of vast time that is
implied in the history of development. Were it not for the records
in the rocks, we could not believe it at all. All the grand
movements and processes of nature are quite beyond our ken. In the
heavens only the astronomer with his prisms and telescopes traces
them; only the geologist and palaeontologist read their history in
the earth's crust. The soil we cultivate was once solid rock, but
not in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes, do we see the
transformation of the rocks into soil. Nations may rise and fall,
and the rocks they looked upon and the soil they tilled remain
practically unchanged. Geologists talk about the ancient continents
that have passed away. What an abyss of time such things open! They
talk about the birth of a mountain or the decay of a mountain as we
talk of the birth and death of a man, but in doing so they reckon
with periods of time for which we have no standards of measurement.
They walk and talk with the Eternal. To us the mountains seem as
fixed as the stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orion
some millions of years hence, and he will have been torn limb from
limb. The combination of stars that forms that striking
constellation and all other constellations is temporary as the
grouping of the clouds. The rise of man from the lower orders
implies a scale of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to us
because it belongs to a category of facts that transcends our
experience and the experience of the race as the interstellar spaces
transcend our earthly measurements.
We now gaze upon the order below us across an impassable gulf, but
that gulf we have crossed and without any supernatural means of
transportation. We may say it has been bridged or filled with the
humble ancestral forms that carried forward the precious
evolutionary impulse of the vertebrate series till it culminated in
man. All vestiges of that living bridge are now gone, and the legend
of our crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biological
evolution has gone hand in hand with geological evolution, and both
are on a scale of time of which our hour-glass of the centuries
gives us but a faint hint. Our notions of time are not formed on the
pattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic processes, or the
evolutionary processes; they are formed on the pattern of our own
brief span of life. In a few cases in the familiar life about us we
see the evolutionary process abridged, and transformations like
those of unrecorded time take place before our eyes, as when the
tadpole becomes the frog or the grub becomes the butterfly. These
rapid changes are analogous to those which in the depths of geologic
time have evolved the bird from the fish or the reptile, or the seal
and the manatee from a fourfooted land animal. Our common bluebird
has long been recognized as a descendant of the thrush family; this
origin is evident in the speckled breast of the young birds and in
the voices of the mature birds. I have heard a bluebird with an
unmistakable thrush note. The transformation has doubtless been so
slow that an analogous change taking place in any of the bird forms
of our own time would entirely escape observation. The bluebird may
have been as long in getting his blue coat as man has been in
getting his upright position.
Looking into the laws and processes of the common nature about us
for clues to the origin of man is not unlike looking into the
records of the phonograph for the secret of the music which that
wonderful instrument voices for us. Something, some active principle
or agent, has to invoke the music that slumbers or is latent in
these lines.
In like manner some principle or force that we do not see is active
in the ground underfoot and in the forms of life about us which is
the final secret of the origin of man and of all other creatures.
This something is the evolutionary impulse, this innate aspiration
of living matter to reach higher and higher forms. "Urge and urge,"
says Whitman, "always the procreant urge of the world." It is in
Emerson's worm "striving to be man." This "striving" pervades
organic nature. Whence its origin science does not assume to say.
[Footnote: This passage was written long before I had read Bergson's
Creative Evolution, as were several others of the same import in
this volume.]
Then the difference in kind between the mind of man and that of the
lower orders makes evolution a doubly hard problem.
Look over the globe and see what a gulf separates man from all other
creatures. All the other animals seem akin--as if the product of the
same workman. Man, in contrast, seems like an introduction from some
other sphere or the outcome of quite other psychological laws; his
dominion over them all is so complete and universal. Without their
specialization of structure or powers, he yet masters them all and
uses them; without their powers of speed, he yet outstrips them;
without their strength of tusk and limb, he yet subdues them;
without their inerrant instinct, he yet outwits them; without their
keenness of eye, ear, and nose, he yet wins in the chase; without
their special adaptation to environment, he survives when they
perish. A man is marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if
he were a being of another sphere. He looks into their eyes and they
into his, and no recognition passes; and yet we have to believe that
he and they are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their stem
forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in the abyss of biologic
time.
The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our powers of belief and
our faith in the divinity that lurks underfoot far more than did the
special creation myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy when
you have the omnipotent being to begin with, but creation through
evolution is a kind of cosmic or biologic legerdemain that baffles
and bewilders us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge and
experience and all the flights of our philosophy that we stand
speechless before it. It opens a gulf that the imagination cannot
clear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opens
up abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but a
day; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, failure that
palls the imagination. It challenges our faith in the immanency and
in the ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the
creative energy down from its celestial abode and clothes it with
the flesh and blood of animal life. It may chill and shock us; it
shows us that we are of the earth earthy; yea, that we are of the
animal beastly; it presses us down in matter; it puts out the lights
to which we have so long turned as lighting our origin; the words
"sacred," "divine," "holy," and "celestial," as applied to our
origin and development, we have no longer any use for, nor for any
words or ideas that set us apart from the rest of creation--above it
in our origin or apart from it in our relations. The atmosphere of
mystery and miracle and sanctity that our religious training has
thrown around our introduction upon this planet and around our
relations and destiny science dispels. Our language and many of our
ideas and habits of thought date back to pre-scientific times--when
there were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly, separated by a
gulf. Now we know that the two worlds are one, that they are
inseparably blended; that the celestial and the terrestrial are
under the same law; that we can never be any more in the heavens
than we are here and now, nor any nearer the final sources of life
and power; that the divine is underfoot as well as overhead; that we
are part and parcel of the physical universe, and take our chances
in the cosmic processes the same as the rest, and draw upon the same
fund of animal life that the other creatures do. We are identified
with the worm underfoot no less than with the stars overhead. We are
not degraded by such a thought, but the whole of creation is lifted
up. Our minds and bodies are not less divine, but all things are
more divine. We have to gird up our loins and try to summon strength
to see this tremendous universe as it is, alive and divine to the
last particle and embosomed in the Infinite.