"Every fragment of visible Nature might, as far as is known, serve as
part in some organism unlike our bodies.... As to that which can, and
that which cannot, play the part of an organism, we know very little. A
sameness greater or less with our own bodies is the basis from which we
conclude to other bodies and souls.... A certain likeness of outward
form, and again some amount of similarity in action, are what we stand on
when we argue to psychical life. But our failure, on the other side, to
discover these symptoms is no sufficient warrant for positive denial. It
is natural in this connection to refer to Fechner's vigorous advocacy."
--F.H. BRADLEY, _Appearance and Reality_
It was with an innate resistance--at least a stubborn prejudice--that
I heard him begin. The earth, of course, was but a bubble of dried fire,
a huge round clod, dead as mutton. How could it be, in any permissible
sense of the word--alive?
Then, gradually, as he talked there among the chimney-pots of old smoky
London, there stole over me this new and disquieting sense of reality--a
strange, vast splendor, too mighty to lie in the mind with comfort.
Laughter fled away, ashamed. A new beauty, as of some amazing dawn,
flashed and broke upon the world. The autumn sky overhead, thick-sown
with its myriad stars, came down close, sifting gold and fire about my
life's dull ways. That desk in the Insurance Office of Cornhill gleamed
beyond as an altar or a possible throne.
The glory of Fechner's immense speculation flamed about us both, majestic
yet divinely simple. Only a dim suggestion of it, of course, lay caught
in the words the Irishman used--words, as I found later, that were a
mixture of Professor James and Dr. Stahl, flavored strongly with Terence
O'Malley--but a suggestion potent enough to have haunted me ever since
and to have instilled meanings of stupendous divinity into all the
commonest things of daily existence. Mountains, seas, wide landscapes,
forests,--all I see now with emotions of wonder, delight, and awe unknown
to me before. Flowers, rain, wind, even a London fog, have come to hold
new meanings.
I never realized before that the mere _size_ of our old planet could
have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere
quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea
of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of
consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on
which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses,
persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly
a "heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world" that
carried them obstructing their perception of its Life.
And Fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer, playing with a huge
poetical conception. Professor of Physics in Leipsic University, he found
time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study electrical science
with the result that his measurements in galvanism are classic to this
day. His philosophical work was more than considerable. "A book on the
atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental
volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider Fechner to
have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these
books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental
æsthetics, in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid
the foundations of a new science," are among his other performances....
"All Leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal German scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning.... His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized
crossroads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children
of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen
in due perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics,
shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the
largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact
a philosopher in the 'great' sense."
"Yes," said O'Malley softly in my ear as we leaned against the chimneys
and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars, "and it was this man's
imagination that had evidently caught old Stahl and bowled him over.
I never fathomed the doctor quite. His critical and imaginative apparatus
got a bit mixed up, I suspect, for one moment he cursed me for asking
'suspicious questions,' and the next sneered sarcastically at me for
boiling over with a sudden inspirational fancy of my own. He never
gave himself away completely, and left me to guess that he made that
Hospital place too hot to hold him. He was a wonderful bird. But every
time I aimed at him I shot wide and hit a cloud. Meantime he peppered
me all over--one minute urging me into closer intimacy with my
Russian--his cosmic being, his _Urmensch_ type--so that he might study
my destruction, and half an hour later doing his utmost apparently to
protect me from him and keep me sane and balanced." His laugh rang
out over the roofs.
"The net result," he added, his face tilted toward the stars as though
he said it to the open sky rather than to me, "was that he pushed me
forwards into the greatest adventure life has ever brought to me. I
believe, I verily believe that sometimes, there were moments of
unconsciousness--semi-consciousness perhaps--when I really did leave my
body--caught away as Moses, or was it Job or Paul?--into a Third Heaven,
where I touched a bit of Reality that fairly made me reel with happiness
and wonder."
"Well, but Fechner--and his great idea?" I brought him back.
He tossed his cigarette down into the back-garden that fringed the
Park, leaning over to watch its zigzag flight of flame.
"Is simply this," he replied, "--'that not alone the earth but the
whole Universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, is everywhere
alive and conscious.' He regards the spiritual as the rule in Nature, not
the exception. The professorial philosophers have no vision. Fechner
towers above them as a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He made
discoveries--whew!!" he whistled, "and such discoveries!"
"To which the scholars and professors of today," I suggested, "would
think reply not even called for?"
"Ah," he laughed, "the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow
outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in
Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being
between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders
of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our
special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their
saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth
as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow
from a tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are
parts of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware
only of our separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic
consciousness are rare. They come with love, sometimes with pain, music
may bring them too, but above all--landscape and the beauty of Nature!
Men are too petty, conceited, egoistic to welcome them, clinging for dear
life to their precious individualities."
He drew breath and then went on: "'Fechner likens our individual
persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul, adding to
her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our
perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge.
When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for
all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'"
"Go on," I exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim
fragments from James that he had since pondered over till they had
become his own, "Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid."
"Yes," he said, "I'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one
thing: and that is--to understand that Fechner does not regard the
Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at all, she is a being
utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in
structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from
any other beings that we know. He merely protests at the presumption of
our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and
consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as
that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to
men in the scale of life--a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A
little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny
brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. D'ye see, now?"
I gasped, I lit a big pipe--and listened. He went on. This time it was
clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned--the one
in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's aim and
scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him."
"Ages ago the earth was called an animal," I ventured. "We all know
that."
"But Fechner," he replied, "insists that a planet is a higher class of
being than either man or animal--'a being whose enormous size requires an
altogether different plan of life.'"
"An inhabitant of the ether--?"
"You've hit it," he replied eagerly. "Every element has its own living
denizens. Ether, then, also has hers--the globes. 'The ocean of ether,
whose waves are light, has also her denizens--higher by as much as
their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings,
moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the
half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull
of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. Any
imagination, you know," he added, "can play with the idea. It is old as
the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually true."
"This superiority, though?" I queried. "I should have guessed their
stage of development lower than ours, rather than higher."
"Different," he answered, "different. That's the point."
"Ah!" I watched a shooting star dive across our thick, wet atmosphere,
and caught myself wondering whether the flash and heat of that hurrying
little visitor produced any reaction in this Collective Consciousness
of the huge Body whereon we perched and chattered, and upon which
later it would fall in finest dust.
"It is by insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances,"
rushed on the excited O'Malley, "that he makes the picture of the earth's
life so concrete. Think a moment. For instance, our animal organization
comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to and fro, of stretching
our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect."
"Defect!" I cried. "But we're so proud of it!"
'"What are our legs,'" he laughed, "'but crutches, by means of which,
with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
ourselves? The Earth is no such cripple; why should she who already
possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs
analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach
for? Of a neck with no head to carry? Of eyes or nose, when she finds
her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of
all her animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their
noses to smell the flowers she grows?'"
"We are literally a part of her, then--projections of her immense life,
as it were--one of the projections, at least?"
"Exactly. And just as we are ourselves a part of the earth," he
continued, taking up my thought at once, "so are our organs her organs.
'She is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent--all that we see
and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.'" He stood up beside
me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees and paths
of the Park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked
and talked together in the cool of the evening. His enthusiasm grew as
the idea of this German's towering imagination possessed him.
"'She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface,
and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes
up into her higher and more general conscious life.'"
He leaned over the parapet and drew me to his side. I stared with him
at the reflection of London town in the sky, thinking of the glow and
heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic strivings of
its millions for success--money, power, fame, a few, here and there, for
spiritual success. The roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night
in ugly thunder to our ears. I thought of the other cities of the world;
of its villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild
creatures in forest, plain, and mountain...
"All this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!" I
murmured.
"All this," he replied softly, as the sound of the Band beyond the
Serpentine floated over to us on our roof; "--the separate little
consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of
men, animals, flowers, insects--everything." He again opened his arms to
the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew glistened on
the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow moon
rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on
the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted
them--subconsciously.
"And all our subconscious sensations are also hers," he added, catching
my thought again; "our dreams but half divined, our aspirations half
confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and our--prayers."
At the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two minds joined, each
knowing the currents of the other's thought, and both caught up, gathered
ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a Consciousness far
bigger than either. It was like a momentary, specific proof of what
he urged--a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it
was amazingly uplifting.
"Every form of life, then, is of importance," I heard myself thinking,
or saying, for I hardly knew which. "The tiniest efforts of value--even
the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile."
"Even the failures," he whispered, "--the moments when we do not trust
her."
We stood for some moments in silence. Presently, with a hand upon my
shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the chimney-stack.
"And there are some of us," he said gently, yet with a voice that held
the trembling of an immense joy, "who know a more intimate relationship
with their great Mother than the rest, perhaps. By the so-called Love
of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of
course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close
to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty
soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material
gain--to that 'unrest which men miscall delight,'--primitive children of
her potent youth ... offspring of pure passion ... each individual
conscious of her weight and drive behind him--" His words faded away into
a whisper that became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought
somehow continued itself in my own mind.
"The simple life," I said in a low tone; "the Call of the Wild, raised
to its highest power?"
But he changed my sentence a little.
"The call," he answered, without turning to look at me, speaking it
into the night about us, "the call to childhood, the true, pure, vital
childhood of the Earth--the Golden Age--before men tasted of the Tree and
knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb lay down together
and a little child could lead them. A time and state, that is, of which
such phrases can be symbolical."
"And of which there may be here and there some fearful exquisite
survival?" I suggested, remembering Stahl's words.
His eyes shone with the fire of his passion. "Of which on that little
tourist steamer I found one!"
The wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across the arid wastes
of Bayswater and the North-West. It also came from the mountains and
gardens of this lost Arcadia, vanished for most beyond recovery....
"The Hebrew poets called it Before the Fall," he went on, "and later
poets the Golden Age; today it shines through phrases like the Land of
Heart's Desire, the Promised Land, Paradise, and what not; while the
minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their
deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not
blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways
of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form
is the reality and riot the inner thought...."
The hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men floated to us from the
pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the opening of Sloane
Street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors, and
pedestrians. The two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in
their brains reeled out of sight. A big policeman followed slowly. The
night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly--the stream
of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where
they sought to lose themselves--to forget the pressure of the bars that
held them--to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities,
and touch some fringe of happiness! All so sure they knew the way--yet
hurrying really in the wrong direction--outwards instead of inwards;
afraid to be--simple....
We moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither of us found
anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder indoors
again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he
temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O'Malley begged
me to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We
sat by the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more
worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart.