IV

But I am not preaching much of a gospel, am I? Only the gospel of

contentment, of appreciation, of heeding simple near-by things--a

gospel the burden of which still is love, but love that goes hand in

hand with understanding.

There is so much in Nature that is lovely and lovable, and so much

that gives us pause. But here it is, and here we are, and we must

make the most of it. If the ways of the Eternal as revealed in his

works are past finding out, we must still unflinchingly face what

our reason reveals to us. "Red in tooth and claw." Nature does not

preach; she enforces, she executes. All her answers are yea, yea, or

nay, nay. Of the virtues and beatitudes of which the gospel of

Christ makes so much--meekness, forgiveness, self-denial, charity,

love, holiness--she knows nothing. Put yourself in her way, and she

crushes you; she burns you, freezes you, stings you, bites you, or

devours you.

Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did not favor meekness

or sobriety or gentleness or forgiveness or charity, because the

great Nature students and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up and

confound me. Certainly it favors seriousness, truthfulness, and

simplicity of life; or, are only the serious and single-minded drawn

to the study of Nature? I doubt very much if it favors devoutness or

holiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the church, or any

form of religious enthusiasm. Devoutness and holiness come of an

attitude toward the universe that is in many ways incompatible with

that implied by the pursuit of natural science. The joy of the

Nature student like Darwin or any great naturalist is to know, to

find out the reason of things and the meaning of things, to trace

the footsteps of the creative energy; while the religious devotee is

intent only upon losing himself in infinite being. True, there have

been devout naturalists and men of science; but their devoutness did

not date from their Nature studies, but from their training, or from

the times in which they lived. Theology and science, it must be

said, will not mingle much better than oil and water, and your

devout scientist and devout Nature student lives in two separate

compartments of his being at different times. Intercourse with

Nature--I mean intellectual intercourse, not merely the emotional

intercourse of the sailor or explorer or farmer--tends to beget a

habit of mind the farthest possible removed from the myth-making,

the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing habit and temper. In all

matters relating to the visible, concrete universe it substitutes

broad daylight for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; it

overthrows superstition with fact; it blights credulity with the

frost of skepticism. I say frost of skepticism advisedly. Skepticism

is a much more healthful and robust habit of mind than the limp,

pale-blooded, non-resisting habit that we call credulity.

In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with things at first

hand, and you get a rule, a standard, that serves you through life.

You are dealing with primal sanities, primal honesties, primal

attraction; you are touching at least the hem of the garment with

which the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes out from it to you.

It must be added that you are dealing with primal cruelty, primal

blindness, primal wastefulness, also. Nature works with reference to

no measure of time, no bounds of space, and no limits of material.

Her economies are not our economies. She is prodigal, she is

careless, she is indifferent; yet nothing is lost. What she lavishes

with one hand, she gathers in with the other. She is blind, yet she

hits the mark because she shoots in all directions. Her germs fill

the air; the winds and the tides are her couriers. When you think

you have defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her laws

that you reach your end.

We make ready our garden in a season, and plant our seeds and hoe

our crops by some sort of system. Can any one tell how many hundreds

of millions of years Nature has been making ready her garden and

planting her seeds?

There can be little doubt, I think, but that intercourse with Nature

and a knowledge of her ways tends to simplicity of life. We come

more and more to see through the follies and vanities of the world

and to appreciate the real values. We load ourselves up with so many

false burdens, our complex civilization breeds in us so many false

or artificial wants, that we become separated from the real sources

of our strength and health as by a gulf.

For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reduce

my baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in love

with simple things and simple folk--a small house, a hut in the

woods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor of great houses,

elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose upon me.

They fix the attention upon false values, they set up a false

standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of

character and thought. A man needs a good roof over his head winter

and summer, and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The

more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he will get, and

the longer he will live.

How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does take the conceit out

of us! How we dwindle to mere specks and our little lives to the

span of a moment in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the

interstellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband our time! A year,

a month, a day, an hour may mean so much to us. Behold the infinite

leisure of Nature!

A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what matters it to the

Eternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be billions of years older than the

earth. They are evidently yet passing through that condition of

cloud and vapor and heat that the earth passed through untold aeons

ago, and they will not reach the stage of life till aeons to come.

But what matters it? Only man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinite

time. When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless long have

been a dead world. It may continue a dead world for aeons longer

before it is melted up in the eternal crucible and recast, and set

on its career of life again.

Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they are revealed in the

physical universe certainly tends to keep a man sane and sober and

safeguards him against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds

and indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away from Nature, or

only studying her through religious fears and superstitions, what a

mess a large body of mankind in all ages have made of it! Think of

the obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which has so often

taken possession of whole communities, as if a world that has been

an eternity in forming could end in a day, or on the striking of the

clock! It is not many years since a college professor published a

book figuring out, from some old historical documents and

predictions, just the year in which the great mundane show would

break up. When I was a small boy at school in the early forties,

during the Millerite excitement about the approaching end of all

mundane things, I remember, on the day when the momentous event was

expected to take place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into

a great state of alarm and agitation by a thundercloud that let down

a curtain of rain, blotting out the mountain on the opposite side of

the valley. "There it comes!" they said, and their tears flowed

copiously. I remember that I did not share their fears, but watched

the cloud, curious as to what the end of the world would be like. I

cannot brag, as Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around the

corner to see the world blow up. I am quite sure my curiosity would

get the better of me and that I should go, even at this late day. Or

think of the more harmless obsession of many good people about the

second coming of Christ, or about the resurrection of the physical

body when the last trumpet shall sound. A little natural knowledge

ought to be fatal to all such notions. Natural knowledge shows us

how transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlasting

the world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be other

aeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone.

Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sure

antidote to all our petty anthropomorphic views of the universe.

V

I was struck by this passage in one of the recently published

letters of Saint-Gaudens: "The principal thought in my life is that

we are on a planet going no one knows where, probably to something

higher (on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that, whatever it

is, the passage is terribly sad and tragic, and to bear up at times

against what seems to be the Great Power that is over us, the

practice of love, charity, and courage are the great things."

The "Great Power" that is over us does seem unmindful of us as

individuals, if it does not seem positively against us, as

Saint-Gaudens seemed to think it was.

Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our ways. Our standards of

prudence, of economy, of usefulness, of waste, of delay, of

failure--how far off they seem from the scale upon which the

universe is managed or deports itself! If the earth should be blown

to pieces to-day, and all life instantly blotted out, would it not

be just like what we know of the cosmic prodigality and

indifference? Such appalling disregard of all human motives and ends

bewilders us.

Of all the planets of our system probably only two or three are in a

condition to sustain life. Mercury, the youngest of them all, is

doubtless a dead world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace

temperature on the other. But what matters it? Whose loss or gain is

it? Life seems only an incident in the universe, evidently not an

end. It appears or it does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay?

The asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet between Mars and

Jupiter. Some force which no adjective can describe or qualify blew

it into fragments, and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge

rocks making their useless rounds in the light of the sun forever

and ever. What matters it to the prodigal All? Bodies larger than

our sun collide in the depths of space before our eyes with results

so terrific that words cannot even hint them. The last of these

collisions--of this "wreck of matter and crush of worlds"--reported

itself to our planet in February, 1901, when a star of the twelfth

magnitude suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude and

then slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the independent

existence of two enormous celestial bodies. They apparently ended in

dust that whirled away in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by

the winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn leaves. It

would be quite in keeping with the observed ways of the Eternal, if

these bodies had had worlds in their train, teeming with life, which

met the same fate as the central colliding bodies.

Does not force as we know it in this world go its own way with the

same disregard of the precious thing we call life? Such long and

patient preparations for it,--apparently the whole stellar system in

labor pains to bring it forth,--and yet held so cheaply and

indifferently in the end! The small insect that just now alighted in

front of my jack-plane as I was dressing a timber, and was reduced

to a faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the fate of man

before the unregarding and unswerving terrestrial and celestial

forces. The great wheels go round just the same whether they are

crushing the man or crushing the corn for his bread. It is all one

to the Eternal. Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are for us or against us

indifferently. And yet the earth is here, garlanded with the seasons

and riding in the celestial currents like a ship in calm summer

seas, and man is here with all things under his feet. All is well in

our corner of the universe. The great mill has made meal of our

grist and not of the miller. We have taken our chances and have won.

More has been for us than against us. During the little segment of

time that man has been upon the earth, only one great calamity that

might be called cosmical has befallen it. The ice age of one or two

hundred thousand years was such a calamity. But man survived it. The

spring came again, and life, the traveler, picked itself up and made

a new start. But if he had not survived it, if nothing had survived

it, the great procession would have gone on just the same; the gods

would have been just as well pleased.

The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet. This is the

order of nature. No matter for the rest, for the weak, the slow, the

unlucky, so that the fight is won, so that the race of man

continues. You and I may fail and fall before our time; the end may

be a tragedy or a comedy. What matters it? Only some one must

succeed, will succeed.

We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of forces, the

influences that made for life have been in the ascendant. This

conflict of forces has been a part of the process of our

development. We have been ground out as between an upper and a

nether millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have actually

arrived, and are all the better for the grinding--all those who have

survived. But, alas for those whose lives went out in the crush!

Maybe they often broke the force of the blow for us.

Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound,

measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees

with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws. And in the end

is not this best? Could the universe be run as a charity or a

benevolent institution, or as a poor-house of the most approved

pattern? Without this merciless justice, this irrefragable law,

where should we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel; but

rocks are hard too, yet they form the foundations of the hills.

Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and he

pays the price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in the

vast social and civic organizations that were impossible without

these things.

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this planet will end, as

all other forms of life will end. But the potential man will

continue and does continue on other spheres. One cannot think of one

part of the universe as producing man, and no other part as capable

of it. The universe is all of a piece so far as its material

constituents are concerned; that we know. Can there be any doubt

that it is all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangible

forces and capabilities are concerned? Can we believe that the earth

is an alien and a stranger in the universe? that it has no near kin?

that there is no tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the other

planets and systems? Are the planets not all of one family, sitting

around the same central source of warmth and life? And is not our

system a member of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a still

larger, all bound together by ties of consanguinity? Size is

nothing, space is nothing. The worlds are only red corpuscles in the

arteries of the infinite. If man has not yet appeared on the other

planets, he will in time appear, and when he has disappeared from

this globe, he will still continue elsewhere.

I do not say that he is the end and aim of creation; it would be

logical, I think, to expect a still higher form. Man has been man

but a little while comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty-

four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and he will be gone;

less than another geologic day like the past, and no doubt all life

from the earth will be gone. What then? The game will be played over

and over again in other worlds, without approaching any nearer the

final end than we are now. There is no final end, as there was no

absolute beginning, and can be none with the infinite.