II

Evolution is not the final explanation of the universe, but it is

probably the largest generalization of the modern mind. Science has

to start somewhere, and it starts with the universe as it finds it

and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; the evolutionist

seeks to trace the footsteps of creative energy in the world of

animal life. How did God make man? Out of the dust of the earth,

says the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches essentially

the same thing, only he does not abridge the process as the

catechism has abridged it for us; he would fain unfold the whole

long road that man has traveled from the first protozoic cell to the

vast communities of cells that now make up his physical life. He

would show how man has risen on stepping-stones of his dead self.

These stepping-stones have been the animal forms below him. In them

and through them something, some impulse, some force, has mounted

and mounted through all the enormous lapse of geologic time. In

imagination we see the dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling in

a vast number of earlier forms. He has struggled upward through the

invertebrates, through the fish, through the reptile, through the

lower mammals, through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goal

in the man we know.

Darwin was not the author of the theory of evolution, but he made

the theory alive and real to the imagination. He showed us what a

master key it is for unlocking the riddle of the life of the globe.

He launched biological science upon a new career and made it worthy

of its place in the great trilogy of sciences, astronomy, geology,

and biology, of which Tennyson, in his poem "Parnassus," recognized

only the first two. Had Tennyson written his poem in our day he

would undoubtedly have included biology among his "terrible Muses"

that tower above all others, eclipsing the glory of the great poets.

Or is it true that we find it easier to accept the theory of the

evolution of the worlds and suns from nebulous matter than to accept

the theory of the evolution of man from the maze of the lower animal

forms? It is less personal to us. The astronomer has the advantage

of the biologist in one important respect: he can show us in the

heavens now the process of the evolution of worlds actually going

on, but the biologist cannot show us the transformation of one

species into another taking place to-day. We can sound the abysses

of astronomic space easier than we can sound the abysses of geologic

time. The stars and the nebulae we have always with us, but where

are the myriad earlier forms that were the antecedents of the

present animal life of the globe? True, the palaeontologist finds a

more or less disjointed record of them in the stratified rocks and

sees in a measure the course evolution has taken, but he does not

actually see it at work as does the astronomer. More than that, the

forces the astronomer deals with are mechanical and chemical, but

the biologist deals with a new force called life that often reverses

or defies mechanical and chemical forces, but which is yet so

identified and blended with them that we cannot conceive it apart

from them. The stomach does not digest itself, nor gravity hold the

blood in the lower extremities. The tree lifts up its weight of

fluids and solids and holds aloft its fruit and foliage in spite of

gravity; its growing roots split and lift the rocks; mosses and

lichens disintegrate granite; vital energy triumphs over chemical

and mechanical energy.

Biological laws are much more subtle and difficult to trace and

formulate than chemical and mechanical laws. Hence the student of

organic evolution can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certainties

in this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and mechanics.

It is very doubtful if life can ever be explained in terms of these

things. Life works through chemical combinations and affinities, and

yet is it not more than chemistry? It works with and through

mechanical principles and forces, and yet it is evidently more than

mechanics. It is manifested through matter, and yet no analysis of

matter can reveal its secret. It comes and goes while matter stays;

we destroy life, but cannot destroy matter. It is as fugitive as the

wind which fills all sails one minute and is gone the next. It

avails itself of fluids and gases and the laws which govern them,

but fluids and gases do not explain it. It waits upon the rains and

the dews, but it is more than they are; it follows in the footsteps

of the decay and disintegration of the inorganic, and yet it is not

the gift of these things; it transforms the face of the earth, and

yet the earth has been and will be when it was not and when it will

not be. Through his knowledge and his science man performs wonders

every day; he can reduce mountains to powder and seas to dry land,

but he cannot create or start de novo the least throb of life. At

least, he has not yet done so. With all his vast resources of

mechanics and chemistry, and his insight into the mechanism of the

universe, he has not yet made the least particle of inorganic matter

thrill with the mysterious something we call life.

There must have been a time when life was not upon the earth and

there must again come a time when it will not be. It has probably

vanished from the moon and all inferior planets, and it has not yet

come to the superior planets, except maybe to Mars. It must be and

must have always been potential in matter, but this fact leaves the

mystery as profound as ever.

Yet if the artificial production of life were to happen to-day--if

in some of our laboratories living matter were produced from

non-living, should we not still have to credit the event to some

mysterious potency residing in matter itself? If by a lucky stroke

man were to evoke the organic from the inorganic, be assured he

would not evoke something from nothing, or add anything to the

latent possibilities of the elements with which he works. Does not

the question still remain who or what made this feat possible? One

dare affirm that man cannot create life de novo any more than he can

create matter. He may yet evoke life as he evokes the spark from the

flint and the flame from the match or as he evokes force from the

food he eats. In this latter case he does not create the force; he

liberates it through the vital forces of his body. The spark from

the flint and the flame from the match were called forth by a

mechanical process, but the process was set going by the will which

waits upon the vital process. The body with all its many functions

is a complicated system of mechanical devices and chemical

processes, but that which is back of all and governs all is not

mechanical; the body is a machine plus something else.

The chemist or biologist who shall produce a speck of protoplasm

to-day will have the credit of unlocking a power in inorganic

nature; he will prove by a short cut how immanent the creative

energy or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He will not

have eliminated the creative energy; he will only have disclosed it

and availed himself of it.

We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self-kindled, but we do

not see the activity of the particles of matter that preceded it or

penetrate the secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was

potential there in the very constitution of the elements. We flout

at miracles, and then we disclose an unending miracle in the life

about us.

All the life upon the globe, including man with all his marvelous

powers, surely originated upon the globe, surely arose out of the

non-living and the non-thinking, not by the fiat of some power

external to nature, but through the creative energy inherent in

nature and ever active there. The great physical instrumentality was

heat--without heat the reaction called life could never have taken

place. This fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only

a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the

globe. Without the disintegration of the rocks and the formation of

the soil and the precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly

the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could not have

developed. If we succeed in proving that all these things are of

chemico-mechanical origin, we still want to know who or what

instituted these chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that

govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics is as mysterious as

creation by miracle. We must still have a creator, while we can do

nothing with him nor find any place for him in an endless,

beginningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. We go out

of the same door by which we came in.

When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will when the condition

of heat and moisture has radically changed, and eternal

refrigeration sets in--what then? The potencies of matter will not

have changed and life will reappear and go through its cycle again

on some other sphere.

Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the old sense, but by

miracle in the new scientific sense--by the immanence and ceaseless

activity of the creative energy in the physical world about us--in

the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air currents, and in

the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime,

iron, silex, phosphorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its

laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its affinities, its

likes and dislikes, and life is bound up with all of them. If we

hypothesize the ether to explain certain phenomena, why should we

not hypothesize a vital force to account for other mysteries?

The inorganic passes into the organic as night passes into day.

Where does one end and the other begin? No man can tell. There is no

beginning and no ending of either, and yet night comes and goes and

day comes and goes--a constant becoming and a constant ending. We

are probably in the midday of the life of the globe--life huge and

rank and riotous--the youth of life has passed, life more sedate and

aspiring and spiritual has come. The gigantic has gone or is going,

the huge monsters of the sea and of the land have had their day, man

appears at the end of the series of lesser but more complete forms.

Many intelligent persons who have been rocked in the cradle of the

old creeds still look upon evolution as a godless doctrine and

accuse it of vulgarizing high and sacred things. This state of mind

can only be slowly outgrown by familiarizing ourselves with the

processes of nature or of the creative energy in the world of life

and matter about us; with our own origin in the low fishlike or

apelike creature in the maternal womb; with the development of every

plant, tree, and animal from a microscopic germ; with the unbroken

sequence of natural law; with the waste, the delays, the pains, the

failures on every hand; with the impersonal and the impartial

character of all the physical forces; with the transformations and

metamorphoses that marked the course of animal life; and, above all,

with the thought that evolution is not self-caused or in any true

sense a cause in itself, but the instrument or plan of the power

that works in and through all things. The ways of God in all these

details are past finding out, but science watches the unfolding of a

bud, the development of a grain of wheat, the growth of the human

embryo, the succession of life-forms upon the globe as revealed in

the records of the stratified rocks, or observes in the heavens the

condensation of nebulous matter into suns and systems, and it says

this is one of his ways. Evolution--an endless unfolding and

transformation. "Urge and urge and urge," says Whitman (I love to

repeat this saying; it is so significant), "always the procreant

urge of the world." Always the labor and travail pains of the

universe to bring forth higher forms; always struggle and pain and

failure and death, but always a new birth and an upward reach.

Strike out the element of time and we see evolution as the great

prestidigitator of the biologic ages. The creative energy

manipulates a fish and it turns into a reptile; it covers a mollusk

as with a vapor and behold, a backboned creature instead! Now we see

a little creature no larger than a fox and when we look again,

behold the horse; a wolf or some kindred animal is plunged into the

water, and behold, the seal! Some small creature of the lemur kind

is covered with a capacious hand, and we look again, and behold man!

We have only to minimize time and minimize space to see the

impossible happening all about us or to see the Mosaic account of

creation repeated; we have only the clay and water to begin with,

when, presto! behold what we have now! We see the rocks covered with

verdure, the mountains vanishing into plains, the valleys changing

into hills or the plains changing into mountains, tropic lands

covered with ice and snow.

Lord Salisbury thought he had discredited natural selection, which

is one of the feet upon which evolution goes, when he charged that

no one had ever seen it at work. We have not seen it at work because

our little span of life is too short. Only the palaeontologist

traces in the records of the rocks the footsteps of this god of

change. And rarely if ever does he find a continuous and complete

record--only a footprint here and there, but he sees the direction

in which they are going and many of the places where the traveler

tarried. The palaeontologist, that detective of the rocks, works up

his case with the same thoroughness and caution and the same power

of observation as does the detective in human affairs and with a

greater sweep of scientific imagination.

An agent of evolution is the influence of the environment, but who

sees the environment set its stamp upon animal life? After many

generations we may see the accumulated results. In a few instances

the results are rapid. Thus sheep lose their wool in tropical

climates and a northern fur-bearing animal its fur. The well-being

of the animal demands this change, and demands it quickly. Fish lose

their sense of sight in underground streams; this loss is not so

vital and it comes about much more slowly. A tropical climate sets

its stamp upon the complexion and character of man, but this again

is a slow process, as the same stress of necessity does not exist.

In the tendency to variation--in form, size, disposition, power,

fertility--man differs from all other animals. In the same race, in

the same family, we find infinitely varied types. Among the wild

creatures all the individuals of a species are practically alike. We

can hardly tell one fox, or one marmot, or one chipmunk, or one

crow, or one hawk, or one black duck from another of the same

species. Of course there are slight individual differences, but they

are hardly distinguishable. Among the insects, one bee, one beetle,

one ant, one butterfly seems the exact copy of every other

individual of its kind. The law of variation seems practically

annulled in the insect world.

It is the wide and free range of this law in the human species that

has undoubtedly led to the great progress of the race. There has

been no dead level--no democracy of talent--no equality of gifts,

but only equality of opportunity. Men differ from one another in

their mental endowments, capacities, and dispositions vastly more

than do any other creatures upon the earth. This difference makes

man's chances of progress so much the greater; he has so many more

stakes in the game. If one type of talent fails, another type may

win; if the lymphatic temperament is not a success, try the sanguine

or the bilious; blue eyes and black eyes and brown eyes will win

more triumphs than blue or black or brown alone. Arms or legs extra

long, sight or hearing extra sharp, wit extra keen, judgment extra

sure--all these things open doors to more progress. Variation gives

natural selection a chance to take hold, and where the struggle for

life is the most severe the changes will be the most rapid and the

most radical. Without the pressure of the environment natural

selection would not select. The tendency to physical variation in

man is probably no greater than in other creatures, but his tendency

to mental variation is enormous. He varies daily from mediocrity to

genius, hence the enormous range of his chances of progress. From

the first variation that started him on his way in his line of

descent, variation must have been more and more active till he

varied in the direction of reason, long before the dawn of history,

since which time his progress has been by rapid strides--and more

and more rapid till we see his leaps forward in recent times. The

race owes its rapid progress to its exceptional men, its men of

genius and power, and these have often been like sports or the

sudden result of mutations--a man like Lincoln springing from the

humblest parentage. No such extreme variations are seen in any of

the lower orders. Indeed, in one's lifetime one sees but very slight

variation in any of the wild or domestic creatures, less in the wild

than in the domestic because they are less under the influence of

that most variable of animals, man. And man's variations are mainly

mental and not physical. The higher we go in the scale of powers,

the greater the variation and hence the more rapid the evolution.

Probably man's body has not changed radically in vast cycles of

time, but his mind has developed enormously since the dawn of

history.