Some of the ancients thought the earth was an animal. It has its hard
and soft parts, its bone and flesh--rock and soil--as the Norse
cosmology pictured it; also its blood, of seas, rivers, and the like.
To a coast-dwelling people, the rhythmic inflow and outflow of the
tides would suggest a huge slow blood-pulsation, or a breathing. And
heat increases with depth, in mine or cave; fire spouts from Etna and
Vesuvius; evidently the earth is hotter inside than at the surface, as
animals are hotter inside than on their skins. Some such animal-notion
was held by Plato, and by some of the later Stoics; though it does not
seem to have been worked out in detail. And the Greek, Indian, or
Egyptian theology which made the earth a goddess and the bride of
Heaven or the sun, is still more indefinite, or is crudely
anthropomorphic and primitive.
Modern approximations have been chiefly in poetry, and are pan-psychic
rather than animistic; as in Pope's _Essay on Man_:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul,
and in Wordsworth's _Tintern Abbey_ where the presence which disturbs
him with the joy of elevated thoughts is felt to be the Spirit which has
its dwelling in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the
living air:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear.
Emerson expresses the same thought in _Pan_ and in much of his
prose--_Nature_, _The Over Soul_, _Self-Reliance_. William James, in
early days before his pluralistic development, thought that an _anima
mundi_ thinking in all of us was a more likely hypothesis than that of
"a lot of individual souls"; and Leibnitz, among other metaphysical
great ones, Spinozistically speaks of "un seul esprit qui est universel
et qui anime tout l'univers". Finally, to quote a modern of the moderns,
we find Mr H. G. Wells finely saying that "between you and me as we set
our minds together, and between us and the rest of mankind, there is
_something_, something real, something that rises through us and is
neither you nor me, that comprehends us, that is thinking here and using
me and you to play against each other in that thinking just as my finger
and thumb play against each other as I hold this pen with which I
write". (_First and Last Things_, p. 67.)
But these various poets and thinkers, while suggesting a soul-side
of the material universe, have not ventured to attribute spirits to
specific lumps of matter such as the planets. Science has banished those
celestial genii. Kepler and Newton substituted for them the "bald and
barren doctrine of gravitation", to the disgust of the theologically
orthodox. It is possible, however, that science did not banish these
planetary spirits, but only prevented us from seeing them, by turning
our eyes in another direction, towards the laws according to which the
material universe works; as if we should become so absorbed in the
chemistry and physics of blood oxidation, digestion, cerebral change,
and the like, as to forget that the human body has a consciousness
associated with it. It may be that we are too materialistic in our
astronomy. Perhaps Lorenzo was right, even about the music of the
spheres; and that our deafness, not their silence, is the reason why
we do not hear it.
The nineteenth century produced a thinker who revived the animistic
idea in an improved form. He elaborated it into a system of philosophy,
welding into it the discoveries of science, and leaving room for any
further advance in that direction. At the same time he showed that his
system was essentially religious, and indeed quite consistent with
Christianity in its best interpretations. But his writings fell almost
dead from the press, for he was before his time. The scientific men were
materialists, and sneered at a system which recognised a spiritual
world; while the orthodox Christians were scared by its evolutionary
method and its acceptance of Darwinism when the latter arrived--for the
philosophy preceded it--and also by the novelty of some of its ideas.
Gustav Theodor Fechner was born on April 19, 1801, at Gross-Saerchen in
what is now Silesia, then under the Elector of Saxony. He studied at
Leipzig, and was appointed professor of Physics at the University there,
in 1834. He conducted several scientific journals, wrote text-books,
translated Biot's _Physics_ (4 vols.) Thenard's _Chemistry_ (6 vols.)
and a work on cerebral pathology; also edited an eight-volume
_Encyclopaedia_ of which he wrote about a third himself, lectured, and
made researches in electro-magnetism which injured his eyesight. His
chief scientific work, _Elements of Psycho-Physics_, was published in
1859, additions being made in 1877 and 1882. "Fechner's Law", the
fundamental law of psychophysics (that sensation varies in the ratio
of the logarithm of impression) is now an internationally current term.
Men like Paulsen and Wundt do not hesitate to call Fechner master. His
chief philosophical work is _Zend-Avesta_ (3 vols.) published in 1851,
and rearranged and condensed in _Die Tagesansicht gegenueber der
Nachtansicht_ (1879); but he published also many subsidiary volumes.
Only one of his works has appeared in English--the small volume on
_Life After Death_--and even this had to be brought out by an American
publisher! Yet Fechner is, as Professor William James said, "a
philosopher in the great sense ... little known as yet to English
readers, but destined, I am persuaded, to wield more and more influence
as time goes on". (_A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 135, 149.) The prophecy
is already beginning to come true.
Fechner always begins with the known and indisputable, arguing thence
to the unknown. His method is thus analogical and scientific. It is the
only method that a scientific generation will tolerate. Its results may
be disputed, but so can the results of science. Even mathematics gives
us no certainties, for something must always be taken for granted. In
philosophising by analogy, we do at least keep in close touch with
experience; we do not evaporate the world into an "unearthly ballet of
bloodless categories". And if the analogies point mostly one way, with
only weak ones pointing the other, the result may be at least acceptable
as a working hypothesis, even if not "demonstrable".
Man is a living, thinking, feeling being. He is on the surface of a
nearly spherical body, which he calls the earth, out of which his
material part has arisen. The elements of his body are the same as
those in the earth. His carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen are the
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen of the coal measures, soils,
atmosphere, oceans, of the earth. The calcium carbonate of his bones is
the calcium carbonate of her rocks as seen in cliffs at Flamborough and
Dover. He is bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. Sometimes he calls
her Mother Earth, and involuntarily speaks the truth in jest. In Siberia
the Tartar word for the earth is "Mamma"--a curious fact. Indeed, the
bond between the earth and her children is much closer than in the case
of a human mother and her child; for we remain, all our lives, actually
_part_ of the planet's mass. If our bodies were suddenly annihilated,
the earth's gravitative attraction would be altered, and the whole solar
system would have to readjust itself to the slight diminution. We belong
to the earth. We are a film of cells on her skin. In Piccadilly and the
Bowery (and Throgmorton and Wall Streets?) we are--alas!--an eczematous
patch.
But here it may be objected that man is more than a mere body. Quite
true. Man has experiences of an order different from the material one.
You cannot express joy and sorrow by chemical equations or number
of foot-pounds. Even if there is a material equivalent or necessary
concomitant, of electrical or chemical change in cerebral tissue or
what not, the fact of the non-material experience remains a reality. To
indicate this side of human life, we call it the spiritual side. We say
that man is matter and spirit, body and soul. This is quite justifiable
and right, whether we can define the terms or not. Definition means
explaining a word by means of others that are better known. And as we
cannot get any closer to reality than our own experience, which _is_
reality to us, and as the two words conveniently classify two great
departments of experience, we justifiably say that we are soul and
body. Very well; the body, then, when we die, returns to the earth, from
which indeed it has not been severed, except as being a point at which a
special kind of activity was manifested. What then of the soul? Shall it
not return to the earth-soul, as the body returns to the earth-body?
Man has arisen out of the earth. And can the dead give birth to the
living? Such an idea is self-contradictory. If the Earth has produced
us, it cannot be really a mere dead lump, as nineteenth-century
materialistic science regarded it. It must be alive. The fifteen hundred
millions or so of human beings who live on its surface like microscopic
insects on the body of an elephant, or like epidermis-cells on our
own bodies, constitute in their total weight and size only an almost
infinitesimal proportion of the earth's mass. The earth is 8,000 miles
in diameter; if human beings were so numerous that they could only stand
up, wedged together all over its surface, tropics and poles, land and
water--the latter covers seven-tenths of it--they would only be like a
skin 1/200,000th part of an inch thick, on a globe a yard in diameter.
The total mass of all the living creatures on the earth's surface,
including all animals and all vegetation, is almost inconceivably small,
as compared with the mass of the earth. Is it not a trifle ludicrous to
find some of these little creatures looking down so condescendingly on
the remainder of the planet? Emerson was among the few who have seen the
joke, for in _Hamatreya_ he satirises those who boast of possessing
pieces of the earth:
Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.
And the earth sings:
They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?
A very natural objection to the idea of the earth being full of life
and mind--as my body is full of my life and my mind--is that the
inorganic part of the planet presents no evidence of such. It does
not act as if it were alive and conscious. But this begs the whole
question. If you decide beforehand that all evidence for the existence
of mind must be the sort of phenomena exhibited by the things we call
living, the business is settled, and it is clear that the inorganic
kingdom is without consciousness. There is then no sign of mind
anywhere except in that infinitesimally thin and indeed discontinuous
skin which is made up of living individuals on the earth's surface. But
is it not somewhat presumptuous to dogmatise thus? Why should mind
always manifest itself in the same way? Non-living matter does not show
vital activities, but it does show other activities, quite systematic
and non-chaotic and comprehensible ones. How could "dead" matter have
any activity at all? Even Haeckel postulates a sort of mind in the
atom, and we have heard of "mind-stuff" before, from an equally
determined materialist. Indeed, how can we rationalise the behaviour
of phosphorus in oxygen but by saying that the two elements like each
other so well that they rush to combine whenever possible? If carbon
has great "affinity," showing a tendency to combine with many atoms of
other elements in various complicated ways--at least as regards its
favourite types--it is reasonable to regard it as a much-loving
element--the polygamous Solomon of the elements. If fluorine will
have nothing to do with other substances--except under protest, when
persuaded by Miss Hydrogen, whose gaiety and levity sometimes overcome
its sulkiness, bringing it also into the society of calcium and one or
two other metals--we must say that fluorine is unsociable, morbidly
self-centred, or perhaps mystically disposed, like Thoreau, happy by
his pond, alone. Chemical affinity is the loves of the elements.
Rising to the next grade of complexity above atoms, we find that
molecular movements, visible in the apparently representative Brownian
movements of particles, recall the fidget of a bunch of midges,
and thereby suggest a sort of life. They disobey the second law of
thermodynamics, rising in a lighter liquid, as midges rise in the
tenuous air. Of course no one can deny that in the things we call living
there are phenomena not seen elsewhere, and some of these are quite
probably not understandable at all, in terms of measurement or imagery,
as we can understand the Brownian movements by irregular bombardment of
molecules. We cannot understand the relation between a supposed
brain-change and the corresponding mental fact. The two orders of
being seem disjunctive. Perhaps these things are too close to us to be
understood; perhaps we cannot understand life and consciousness because
we are ourselves alive and conscious--as we cannot lift ourselves by
pulling at our boot tops, and cannot see our own faces because the eyes
that see are _in_ the face that is to be seen. Still the distinction
between life at its lowest and non-life at its highest (crystals?) is
so small that we may yet effect a smooth transition--may somehow see a
continuity which now eludes us. And it seems likely that this will be
effected by an extension of the mind-idea down into the inorganic,
rather than by any explanation of life by physical and chemical
concepts.
Again, on the larger scale, may not cohesion, as well as chemical
affinity, be a sort of affection; in this case a kind of wide social
friendship--the "adhesive love" of Whitman, which is to supersede
"amative love"--as against the fierce and narrow loves of the elements?
A. C. Benson in _Joyous Gard_ (p. 128) quotes a geologist who says:
It is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain
obscure life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their
marvellous cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were
withdrawn, a mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding
sand.
Yes, and even in sand-grains there is cohesion of particles, and in
the smallest particles huge numbers of molecules, and again--still
smaller--atoms and electrons. Something elusive yet tremendously potent
is still there, in the sand. It would be rash to call it dead and
mindless. There seems more sense in admitting that there is something
akin to what we know as life and mind in ourselves, permeating the
material universe.
And if--to come back to our own planet--if the earth is a living
organism, there will naturally be distribution of function, as there
is in our own bodies. It would be absurd for the eye to deny life and
perception to ear or skin just because their mode of activity is
different. It is wiser to concede life and mind where-ever there is
action. In the present state of affairs, not only do we get into
difficulties by our rash assumption that there is no mind without
protoplasm (_ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke_, as the old materialist too
boldly said), but we find it impossible to draw the line between living
and non-living. Drops of oil exhibit amoeboid movements, and at the
lower end of life the slime-mass becomes so undifferentiated as to be
very much in a borderland between the two states. Probably non-living
substances gradate into living ones by imperceptible _differentiae_, as
man would be found to gradate back into an anthropoid ape or something
of the kind if we could see all the stages. Nature does not make jumps.
Where she seems to do so, it is only because we cannot see how she
gets from one place to another distant one. But when we scrutinise the
interspace, we see that there is a path. Nature does not jump. She
glides.
It is on this line of thought that the disagreement between the schools
represented by Sir Edward Schaefer and Dr Hans Driesch respectively
may, perhaps, be happily resolved. No doubt each may have to make
concessions. The mechanist must not claim that mind is _only_ an affair
of nitrogenous colloids, for this would be a large assumption built on
a very small foundation; no biologist, however much he knows about
nitrogenous colloids, can in any conceivable sense explain his joy in a
sunset or a symphony by reference to those substances. Physical causes
have physical effects; to say that they cause anything non-physical
(_i.e._ mental) is really talking nonsense. And, on the other hand,
the vitalist must not deny consciousness to non-protoplasmic Nature.
Negations are dangerous. It is extremely risky to say that a Matterhorn
has less spiritual significance--in itself and for the whole, and not
only for us--than a cretin who wanders useless and unbeautiful about its
lower slopes. The activities of the two are different, that is all we
are justified in saying. True, the Matterhorn's are more calculable and
predictable, but that does not prove unconsciousness. Human action also
is predictable to some extent. And the more wise and unified a man
is--the nearer he approximates to ideal perfection--the more accurately
we can predict his response to a given stimulus. We might almost argue,
on these lines, that inorganic matter has a certain superiority; for
it is not capricious. It knows what it wants to do, and does it; or at
least--if this is going too far--it does things, and does them _as if_
it knew very well what it wanted to do. To the same conditions and
stimuli it always responds in the same way, like reflex action in living
beings, and like association in ordinary consciousness. Water always
boils punctually at 100 deg.C., and freezes at 0 deg.C., if the pressure
is 760mm. of mercury. "Canal" always makes me think of Panama and
Mars--though to other people it might suggest Suez, their different
experience having given them other association-couplings. But any one
knowing me well, or knowing any one well, could say almost certainly
what associations "canal" would have--what thought it will evoke. And
the same thing is true, to a less extent, of our actions. If a man hits
Jack Johnson, the latter will probably hit back. Still more certain is
it that no one will hit him unless drunk or insane or in some sort of
very exceptional circumstances. If, on the other hand, somebody hits me,
the outcome is less certain. It will depend to a greater extent on the
result of reflection and judgment--perhaps partly on my estimate of the
other fellow's weight, age, training and science! Yet anyone knowing
me well, and perceiving the main conditions, could predict with fair
approach to accuracy what I should do. Yet I am undoubtedly a conscious
being. Some actions of conscious beings, then, are predictable, if we
know the conditions. Indeed, in the mass, human action is calculable
with precision--witness the various kinds of insurance. Why then
deny consciousness to the Matterhorn, because _all_ its actions are
calculable and predictable? The difference is one of degree, not kind.
And indeed _are_ all its actions predictable? The fact is, they are only
hypothetically so. We say that they would be if we knew enough. But we
might say the same of the actions of a man. The truth is, that if we say
it of either we are arguing dangerously, from our ignorance and not from
our knowledge. It is indeed as risky to say that we could predict the
Matterhorn's actions _in toto_, as to say that we cannot predict the
man's; for we are continually finding that matter does things which we
did not formerly suspect--_e.g._ radio-activity. Clearly, we cannot
predict all the activities of the Matterhorn: many may depend on
undiscovered properties. So it seems that even if some human actions,
such as Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation and Milton's
_Paradise Lost_ and Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy and Raphael's Sistine
Madonna, are strictly unpredictable, it still does not sufficiently
differentiate us from the Matterhorn, which on its part also has its
unpredictabilities.
As to what parts of matter have separate spirits--where the
Snowdon-spirit ends and the Moel Siabod spirit begins, and so on--we
need not trouble much about that. This individualising of parts is
a reasonable supposition, but it is not necessary to press it. Mr
Maurice Hewlett has seen the _genius loci_ of a sunny woodland
landscape translated into human idiom as an opulent Titianesque
beauty (_Lore of Proserpine_), and Manfred sees or feels a spirit of
the Alps; but these are details. The only thing that matters is the
ensoulment of the earth as a whole. No doubt its spirit-part is
divided up somehow, correspondent to its material conformation, as
our spirits are divided from each other. The division, however, is
not a hermetic sealing off. The universe is continuous. Indeed its
parts are inter-penetrative, for every particle influences every
other particle--and a thing cannot act where it is not. Similarly,
human beings are found to have modes of communication other than
those hitherto recognised by orthodox science, and are somehow able
to influence others without regard to distance. We seem to be
connected with each other in the unseen, subliminal, spiritual
region. Our separateness is illusory. So with individualisations of
earth-features. They have individual aspects, both on the physical
and spiritual side; but they are part of the one earth and its one
spirit, as we ourselves are. And that earth-spirit is part of
the universe-spirit or God, as the human spirit is part of the
earth-spirit.
It is perhaps difficult, at first, to think of the earth as having a
life and consciousness of its own, for we are located at little points,
and do not see it whole, nor do we see from the inside. We are like an
eye which looks at the body of which it forms a part, and finds it
difficult to believe in auditory, tactile, olfactory experience; more
difficult still to conceive of pure thought, emotion, will. If the earth
seems a dead lump, however, think of the human brain. It is a mere lump
of whitish filaments, _seen from outside_. But its inner experience is
the rich and infinitely detailed life of a human being. So also may the
inner experience of the earth be incomparably richer than its outer
appearance indicates to our external senses. Objectively, our brains are
part of the earth: subjectively, _we see in ourselves a part of what the
earth sees in itself_.
In thinking of the earth as an organised being, we must guard against
the error of the ancients who called it an animal. It is not an animal.
It is a Being of a higher character than any animal, for it includes
all animals and all human beings, comprising in its spirit all their
spiritual activities, and having its own activities as well. We are to
it, as our blood-corpuscles are to us; and to think of the earth-spirit
as being like our spirits would be equivalent to a blood-corpuscle
thinking of its containing body as another corpuscle, only bigger.
Whereas the truth is that a man has feelings and cognitions and
purposes, and performs acts, which the corpuscles cannot in the least
comprehend. (Somewhat similarly, a drop cannot have waves, or a small
celestial body an atmosphere; the lower cannot have what the higher has,
nor can it understand it.) The corpuscle may know or believe that its
conscience or intuition is a sort of leakage down to it, of the mind or
will of its greater self (the voice of its God), and that in so far as
it does its duty according to its lights it is assisting the purposes
of that higher Being of which it forms a part; and this faith is its
highest wisdom. So with us. Human duty, done sincerely according to our
lights, is furthering the purposes of the higher Being in whom we live
and move. This faith is our highest wisdom concerning our relation to
the earth-spirit. We see, then, that there is a good deal of sense in
faith and intuition. They are rationally justified. By them we are dimly
in touch with the over-soul on our inner side: not _really_ dimly, for
the connection is close and real, but dimly to our normal consciousness.
The connection _via_ intellect is an external, round-about affair,
necessary and useful, but different. We need to cultivate both. This is
the essence of the philosophy of Bergson. There is more than one way of
receiving truth. Science is apt to overlook the intuitional way.
On this conscience-side or moral aspect, the Fechnerian idea is
particularly fruitful and illuminating. The analogy of our own mind is
once more the key--the mirror wherewith to view the greater landscape,
the village wherefrom to draw inferences about nations. In childhood,
the world is, as James said, a big, blooming, buzzing confusion:
sensations pour in quite unconnected; the baby sees the moon, and
stretches out an arm to grab it, thus learning that it is not grabable.
It is only gradually that the child learns to associate sounds with
sights; to know what sounds indicate its mother's presence or proximity,
and what sounds its father's. Gradually, individual experiences get
linked up and harmonised. Then other disjointednesses arise. Foolish
impulses war against better judgment and parents' advice, and the
youth's mind is "torn", as we say, very aptly describing the feeling.
Growing older and wiser, his mind becomes more unified and consequently
more calm. His powers are marshalled and directed consciously at a
goal or goals. Wayward impulses are reined in. We feel that poise and
strength and wisdom are attained: never perfectly and ideally, but at
least to a considerable degree, as compared with the earlier state.
So with the earth-spirit. Being far greater than the human
subsidiary spirits, it is longer in coming to maturity. Its elements
are still largely at loggerheads with each other. The nations war
against each other, and universal peace seems a long time in coming.
But steadily, steadily works the earth-spirit, and the nations almost
unconsciously--like somnambulists--carry out its will. They are working,
consciously or unconsciously, towards universal at-one-ment. A League of
Nations has arisen, and the Federation of the World is in sight. Union
is the political watch-word. Labour is combining throughout the world.
East is learning from West, and West from East. China sends her
students to Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Harvard, and welcomes Western
methods. India repays our civilising with the poems of Tagore. In trade,
thousands of small businesses are unified in a few great combines,
preparing for some sort of Socialism. Finance spreads its world-wide
network. Science is becoming international. The frontiers are melting;
coalescence, unity, harmony are being achieved. The earth-spirit is
reconciling its warring elements. When it succeeds in the complete
reconciliation; when the era of universal peace and brotherhood shall
dawn; when it reaches its huge equivalent of the ripe, calm, contented
wisdom of human age--ah, then will come a state of things which we can
but dimly prefigure. But it will come. The age of gold is in the future,
not the past. It is our duty and our privilege to hasten the coming of
this millennium. And even this is not the end. We cannot conceive the
things that shall be. Eye hath not seen, or ear heard. Enough for us to
know the tendency, and to trust ourselves to it, actively co-operating.
Before beginning, and without an end,
As space eternal, and as surety sure,
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good,
Only its laws endure.
This is its touch upon the blossomed rose,
The fashion of its hand shaped lotus-leaves;
In dark soil and the silence of the seeds
The robe of Spring it weaves.
It maketh and unmaketh, mending all;
What it hath wrought is better than had been;
Slow grows the splendid pattern that it plans,
Its wistful hands between.
This is its work upon the things ye see:
The unseen things are more; men's hearts and minds,
The thoughts of peoples and their ways and wills,
Those, too, the great Law binds.
--Sir Edwin Arnold, _Light of Asia_.
Is it asked: "Who is the Law-giver, and to what end is the Law?" The
question is foolish. Parts cannot know wholes, and the whole does not
want parts to be anything but what they obviously are. Each fits into
its place, and can do useful work there. Let it keep to tasks "of a size
with its capacity"--as a Kempis says--and leave the rest. "What doth the
Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk
humbly with thy God?"