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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE
[Illustration: (Frontispiece; the author)]
ACCEPTING
THE UNIVERSE
_ESSAYS IN NATURALISM_
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
[Illustration: (colophon)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
..._And heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went._
THE RUBÁIYÁT
PREFACE
A wheel may have many spokes, but can have but one hub. So I
may say of this volume of mine that there are many themes and
chapter-headings, but there is but one central thought into which
they all converge, and that is that the universe is good, and that
it is our rare good fortune to form a part of it. As this collection
of essays does not aim to be a systematic treatise on any one theme,
but rather a series of sallies, excursions, into the world of
semi-philosophical speculation, there is inevitably much repetition;
there may even be some contradiction. But I have concluded to let
them stand, as I find myself an interested spectator of the workings
of my own mind when, in following different roads, it arrives at
the same truth. As all roads lead to Rome, so in the realm in which
my mind works in this volume, all roads lead to the conclusion that
this is the best possible world, and these people in it are the best
possible people.
The heart of Nature is sound. I feel toward the great Mother somewhat
as a man does who takes out a policy in an insurance company: he
believes the company is solvent and will meet its obligations. I
look upon the universe as solvent and worthy of trust. In other
words this is a book of radical optimism. It might be described as an
attempt to justify the ways of God to man on natural grounds.
My reader need hardly be told that theological grounds do not count
with me. I want nothing less than a faith founded upon a rock,
faith in the constitution of things. The various man-made creeds
are fictitious, like the constellations--Orion, Cassiopeia’s Chair,
the Big Dipper; the only thing real in them is the stars, and the
only thing real in the creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the
Infinite. This abides, though creeds and dogmas change or vanish.
Empedocles says:
“O, wretched he whose care
Is shadowy speculation on the gods.”
But is not speculation better than indifference? Curiosity about the
gods may lead to a better acquaintance with them. I feel that each of
these chapters might be called an altar to the Unknown God.
JOHN BURROUGHS
CONTENTS
I. SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE? 3
II. MANIFOLD NATURE 19
III. EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE 30
IV. THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE 54
V. THE GOOD DEVILS 73
VI. THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE 90
VII. THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST 112
VIII. A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY 134
IX. THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT 138
X. TOOTH AND CLAW 158
XI. MEN AND TREES 173
XII. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 193
XIII. HORIZON LINES:
I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 203
II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS 205
III. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY 207
IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 211
V. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE? 219
VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER 225
VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS 226
VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS 230
IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE 233
X. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE 237
XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE 238
XII. ILLUSIONS 239
XIII. IS NATURE SUICIDAL? 242
XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY 245
XIV. SOUNDINGS:
I. THE GREAT MYSTERY 253
II. THE NATURAL ORDER 257
III. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 261
IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK 265
V. A PERSONAL GOD 266
VI. THE ETERNAL 270
VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY 275
VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE 278
IX. THE INSOLUBLE 280
X. PAYING THE DEBT 282
XI. DEATH 288
XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH 293
XIII. THINKING AND ACTING 296
XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE 304
XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK 309
XV. THE POET OF THE COSMOS 316
_The frontispiece, showing Mr. Burroughs at his woodpile at
Riverby, is from a photograph taken in 1920 by_ Mr. HERBERT
S. ARDELL
ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE
I
SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?
I
It is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the
universe. “Gad, she’d better!” retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself
did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking
up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: “A sad spectacle! If they
be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be na
inhabited, what a waste of space!”
It ought not to be a hard thing to accept the universe, since it
appears to be a fixture, and we have no choice in the matter; but
I have found it worth while to look the gift in the mouth, and
convince myself that it is really worth accepting. It were a pity to
go through life with a suspicion in one’s mind that it might have
been a better universe, and that some wrong has been done us because
we have no freedom of choice in the matter. The thought would add a
tinge of bitterness to all our days. And so, after living more than
four score years in the world, and pondering long and intently upon
the many problems which life and nature present, I have come, like
Margaret Fuller, to accept the universe, have come frankly to accept
that first verdict pronounced upon creation, namely, that it is very
good--good in its sum total up to this astronomic date, whatever
phases it may at times present that lead us to a contrary conclusion.
Not that cold and hunger, war and pestilence, tornadoes and
earthquakes, are good in a positive sense, but that these and kindred
things are vastly overbalanced by the forces and agencies that make
for our well-being,--that “work together for good,”--the sunshine,
the cooling breezes, the fertile soil, the stability of land and sea,
the gentle currents, the equipoise of the forces of the earth, air,
and water, the order and security of our solar system, and, in the
human realm, the good-will and fellowship that are finally bound to
prevail among men and nations.
In remote geologic ages, before the advent of man, when the earth’s
crust was less stable, when the air was yet loaded with poisonous
gases, when terrible and monstrous animal forms held high carnival in
the sea and upon the land, it was not in the same sense good--good
for beings constructed as we are now. In future astronomic time, when
the earth’s air and water and warmth shall have disappeared--a time
which science predicts--and all life upon the globe fails, again
it will not be good. But in our geologic, biologic, and astronomic
age, notwithstanding the fact that cold and suffering, war and
pestilence, cyclones and earthquakes, still occur upon the relatively
tiny ball that carries us through the vast sidereal spaces, good is
greatly in the ascendancy. The voyage is not all calm and sunshine,
but it is safe, and the dangers from collision and shipwreck are very
remote. It is a vast and lonely sea over which we are journeying,
no other ships hail us and bid us Godspeed, no messages, wireless
or other, may reach us from other shores, or other seas; forces and
influences do play upon us from all parts of the empyrean, but, so
far as we are aware, no living thing on other spheres takes note of
our going or our coming.
In our practical lives we are compelled to separate good from
evil--the one being that which favors our well-being, and the other
that which antagonizes it; but, viewed as a whole, the universe is
all good; it is an infinite complex of compensations out of which
worlds and systems of worlds, and all which they hold, have emerged,
and are emerging, and will emerge. This is not the language of the
heart or of the emotions--our anthropomorphism cries out against
it--but it is the language of serene, impartial reason. It is good
for us occasionally to get outside the sphere of our personal life
and view things as they are in and of themselves. A great demand
is made upon our faith--faith in the absolute trustworthiness of
human reason, and in the final beneficence of the forces that rule
this universe. Not to solve the mysteries, but to see that they are
insoluble, and to rest content in that conclusion, is the task we set
ourselves here.
Evidently the tide of life is still at the flood on this planet; its
checks and counter-currents arise inevitably in a universe whose
forces are always, and always must be, in unstable equilibrium.
The love of the Eternal for mankind, and for all other forms of
life, is not a parental love--not the love of the mother for her
child, or of the father for his son; it is more like the love which a
general has for his army; he is to lead that army through hardships,
through struggles, through sufferings, and through death, but he is
leading it to victory. Many will perish that others may live; the
battle is being won daily. Evolution has triumphed. It has been a
long and desperate battle, but here we are and we find life sweet.
The antagonistic forces which have been overcome have become sources
of power. The vast army of living forms moving down the geologic
ages has been made strong through the trials and obstacles it has
surmounted, till now we behold it in the fullness of its power with
man at its head.
II
There is a paragraph in Emerson’s Journal on Providence, written when
he was twenty-one, which is as broad and as wise and as heterodox as
anything he ever wrote. The Providence he depicts is the Providence
I see in Nature:
“Providence supports, but does not spoil its children. We are
called sons, not darlings, of the Deity. There is ever good in
store for those who love it; knowledge for those who seek it; and
if we do evil, we suffer the consequences of evil. Throughout the
administration of the world there is the same aspect of stern
kindness; of good against your will; good against your good; ten
thousand channels of active beneficence, but all flowing with the
same regard to general, not particular profit.... And to such an
extent is this great statute policy of God carried, that many, nay,
most, of the great blessings of humanity require cycles of a thousand
years to bring them to their height.”
A remarkable statement to be made in 1824, in New England, and by
a fledgling preacher of the orthodox faith and the descendant of a
long line of orthodox clergymen. It is as broad and as impartial
as science, and yet makes a strong imaginative appeal. Good at the
heart of Nature is the purport of it, not the patent-right good of
the creeds, but good, free to all who love it, a “stern kindness,”
and no partial, personal, vacillating Providence whose ear is open
only to the password of some sect or cult, or organization--“good
against your good,” your copyrighted good, your personal, selfish
good (unless it is in line with equal good to others), the broad,
universal beneficence of Nature which brought us here and keeps
us here, and showers its good upon us as long as we keep in right
relations with it; but which goes its appointed way regardless of the
sore needs of warring nations or the desperate straits of struggling
men. That is the Providence that lasts, that does not change its
mind, that is not indulgent, that does not take sides, that is
without variableness or shadow of turning. Suppose the law of gravity
were changeable, or the law of chemical reactions, or the nature of
fire, or air, or water, or cohesion? Gravity never sleeps nor varies,
yet see bodies rise, see others fall, see the strong master of the
weak, see the waters flow and the ground stay. The laws of fluids are
fixed, but see the variety of their behavior, the forms in which they
crystallize, their solvent power, their stability or instability,
their capacity to absorb or conduct heat--flux and change everywhere
amid fixity and law. Nature is infinitely variable, which opens the
door to all forms of life; her goings and comings are on such a large
scale, like the rains, the dews, the sunlight, that all creatures
get an equal benefit. She sows her seed with such a generous hand
that enough of them are bound to fall upon fertile places. Such as
are very limited in range, like those of the swamp plants, are yet
cast forth upon the wind so liberally that sooner or later some of
them fall upon conditions suitable to them. Nature will cover a whole
township with her wind-sown seeds in order to be sure that she hits
the small swamp in one corner of it.
A stream of energy, not described by the adjective “inexhaustible,”
bears the universe along, and all forms of life, man with the rest,
take their chances amid its currents and its maelstroms. The good
Providence shows itself in the power of adaptation which all forms
of life possess. Some forms of sea-weed or sea-grass grow where the
waves pound the shore incessantly. How many frail marine creatures
are wrecked upon the shore, but how many more are not wrecked! How
many ships go down in the sea, but how many more are wafted safely
over it!
The Providence in Nature seems intent only on playing the game,
irrespective of the stakes, which to us seem so important. Whatever
the issue, Nature is the winner. She cannot lose. Her beneficence is
wholesale. Her myriad forms of life are constantly passing through
“the curtain of fire” of her inorganic forces, and the casualties are
great, but the majority get through. The assault goes on and will
ever go on. It is like a stream of water that is whole and individual
at every point, but fixed and stable at no point. To play the game,
to keep the currents going--from the depths of sidereal space to the
shallow pool by the roadside; from the rise and fall of nations, to
the brief hour of the minute summer insects, the one overarching
purpose seems to be to give free rein to life, to play one form
against another, to build up and tear down, to gather together and to
scatter--no rest, no end, nothing final--rocks decaying to build more
rocks, worlds destroyed to build more worlds, nations disintegrating
to build more nations, organisms perishing to feed more organisms,
life playing into the hands of death everywhere, and death playing
into the hands of life, sea and land interchanging, tropic and arctic
meeting and mingling, day and night, winter and summer chasing each
other over the earth--what a spectacle of change, what a drama never
completed! Vast worlds and systems in fiery flux; one little corner
of the cosmos teeming with life, vast areas of it, like Saturn and
Jupiter, dead and barren through untold millions of years; collisions
and disruptions in the heavens, tornadoes and earthquakes and wars
and pestilence upon the earth--surely it all sounds worse than it is,
for we are all here to see and contemplate the great spectacle; it
sounds worse than it is to us because we are a part of the outcome
of all these raging and conflicting forces. Whatever has failed, we
have succeeded, and the beneficent forces are still coming our way.
As I write these lines I see my neighbor and his boys gathering the
hay from the meadows and building it into a great stack beside their
glutted barns. I see a chipmunk carrying stores to his den, I see
butterflies dancing by on painted wings, I see and hear the happy
birds, and the August sun beams his best upon all the land.
The greatest of human achievements and the most precious is that
of the great creative artist. In words, in color, in sounds, in
forms, man comes nearest to emulating the Creative Energy itself.
It seems as if the pleasure and the purpose of the Creative Energy
were endless invention--to strike out new forms, to vary perpetually
the pattern. She presents myriads of forms, myriads of types,
inexhaustible variety in air, earth, water, ten thousand ways to
achieve the same end, a prodigality of means that bewilders the mind;
her aim to produce something new and different, an endless variety
of forms that fly, that swim, that creep, in the sea, in the air,
on the earth, in the fields, in the woods, on the shore. How many
ways Nature has of scattering her seeds, how many types of wings, of
hooks, of springs! In some she offers a wage to bird or quadruped in
the shape of fruit, others she forcibly attaches to the passer-by. In
all times and places there is a riot of invention.
III
Are we not men enough to face things as they are? Must we be cosseted
a little? Can we not be weaned from the old theological pap? Can we
not rest content in the general beneficence of Nature’s Providence?
Must you and I have a special hold upon the great Mother’s apron
strings?
I see the Nature Providence going its impartial way. I see drought
and flood, heat and cold, war and pestilence, defeat and death,
besetting man at all times, in all lands. I see hostile germs in
the air he breathes, in the water he drinks, in the soil he tills.
I see the elemental forces as indifferent toward him as toward
ants and fleas. I see pain and disease and defeat and failure
dogging his footsteps. I see the righteous defeated and the ungodly
triumphant--this and much more I see; and yet I behold through the
immense biological vista behind us the race of man slowly--oh, so
slowly!--emerging from its brute or semi-human ancestry into the
full estate of man, from blind instinct and savage passion into
the light of reason and moral consciousness. I behold the great
scheme of evolution unfolding despite all the delays and waste and
failures, and the higher forms appearing upon the scene. I see
on an immense scale, and as clearly as in a demonstration in a
laboratory, that good comes out of evil; that the impartiality of
the Nature Providence is best; that we are made strong by what we
overcome; that man is man because he is as free to do evil as to do
good; that life is as free to develop hostile forms as to develop
friendly; that power waits upon him who earns it; that disease,
wars, the unloosened, devastating elemental forces, have each and
all played their part in developing and hardening man and giving
him the heroic fiber. The good would have no tang, no edge, no
cutting quality without evil to oppose it. Life would be tasteless
or insipid, without pain and struggle and disappointment. Behold
what the fiery furnace does for the metals--welding or blending or
separating or purifying them, and behold the hell of contending and
destructive forces out of which the earth came, and again behold
the grinding and eroding forces, the storms and earthquakes and
eruptions and disintegrations that have made it the green inhabitable
world that now sustains us! No, the universal processes do not need
disinfecting; the laws of the winds, the rains, the sunlight do not
need rectifying. “I do not want the constellations any nearer,” says
Whitman. I do not want the natural Providence any more attentive. The
celestial laws are here underfoot and our treading upon them does
not obliterate or vulgarize them. Chemistry is incorruptible and
immortal, it is the handmaid of God; the yeast works in the elements
of our bread of life while we sleep; the stars send their influences,
the earth renews itself, the brooding heaven gathers us under its
wings, and all is well with us if we have the heroic hearts to see it.
In the curve of the moon’s or of the planets’ disks, all broken or
irregular lines of the surface are lost to the eye--the wholeness of
the sphere form subordinates and obliterates them all: so all the
failures and cross-purposes and disharmonies in nature and life do
not suffice to break or mar the vast general beneficence; the flowing
universal good is obvious above all.
So long as we think of the Eternal in terms of our experience--of
the knowledge of concrete things and beings which life discloses to
us--we are involved in contradictions. The ancients visualized their
gods and goddesses--Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Juno, and all the others.
Shall we do this for the Eternal and endow it with personality? Into
what absurdities this leads us! The unspeakable, the unseeable, the
unthinkable, the inscrutable, and yet the most obvious fact that life
yields to us! Nearer and more vital than our own bodies, than our own
parents, and yet eluding our grasp; vehemently denied, passionately
accepted, scoffed, praised, feared, worshiped, giving rise to deism,
atheism, pantheism, to idolatry, to persecution, to martyrdom, the
great Reality in which we live and move and have our being, and yet
for that very reason, because it is a part of us, or rather we are
a part of it, are we unable to define it or seize it as a reality
apart from ourselves. Our denial proves it; just as we use gravity
to overcome gravity, so we use God to deny God. Just as pure light
is of no color, but split up makes all the colors that we see, so
God divided and reflected makes all the half-gods we worship in
life. Green and blue and red and orange are not in the objects that
reflect them, but are an experience of the eye. We might with our
tongues deny the air, but our spoken words prove it. We cannot lift
ourselves over the fence by our own waistbands; no more can we by
searching find God, because He is not an object that has place and
form and limitations. He is the fact of the fact, the life of the
life, the soul of the soul, the incomprehensible, the sum of all
contradictions, the unit of all diversity; he who knows Him, knows
Him not; he who is without Him, is full of Him; turn your back upon
Him, then turn your back upon gravity, upon air, upon light. He
cannot be seen, but by Him all seeing comes. He cannot be heard, yet
by Him all hearing comes. He is not a being, yet apart from Him there
is no being--there is no apart from Him. We contradict ourselves when
we deny Him; it is ourselves we deny, and equally do we contradict
ourselves when we accept Him; it is something apart from ourselves
which we accept.
When half-gods go, says Emerson, the gods arrive. But half-gods
never go; we can house and entertain no other. What can we do with
the Infinite, the Eternal? We can only deal with things in time
and space--things that can be numbered and measured. What can we
do with the infinitely little, the infinitely great? All our gods
are half-gods made in our own image. No surer does the wax take the
imprint of the seal than does the Infinite take the imprint of our
finite minds. We create a Creator, we rule a Ruler, we invent a
heaven and hell; they are laws of our own being, seen externally.
How, then, shall we adjust our lives to the conception of a
universal, non-human, non-finite, algebraic God? They adjust
themselves. Do your work, deal justly, love rightness, make the most
of yourself, cherish the good, the beautiful, the true, practice the
Christian and the heathen virtues of soberness, meekness, reverence,
charity, unselfishness, justice, mercy, singleness of purpose; obey
the commandments, the Golden Rule, imbue your spirit with the wisdom
of all ages, for thus is the moral order of the world upheld.
The moral order and the intellectual order go hand in hand. Upon one
rests our relation to our fellows, upon the other rests our relation
to the cosmos.
We must know, and we must love; we must do, and we must enjoy; we
must warm judgment with feeling, and illume conscience with reason.
Admit, if we must, that we are in the grip of a merciless power,
that outside of our own kind there is nothing that shows us mercy
or consideration, that the Nature of which we form a part goes her
own way regardless of us; yet let us keep in mind that the very fact
that we are here and find life good is proof that the mercilessness
of Nature has not been inconsistent with our permanent well-being.
The fact that flowers bloom and fruit and grains ripen, that the
sun shines, that the rain falls, that food nourishes us, that love
warms us, that evolution has brought us thus far on our way, that
our line of descent has survived all the hazards of the geologic
ages, all point to the fact that we are on the winning side, that
our well-being is secured in the constitution of things. For all
the cataclysms and disruptions, the globe has ripened on the great
sidereal tree, and has become the fit abode of its myriad forms of
life. Though we may be run down and crushed by the great terrestrial
forces about us, just as we may be run down and crushed in the
street, yet these forces play a part in the activities that sustain
us; without them we should not be here to suffer at their hands.
Our life depends from moment to moment upon the air we breathe, yet
its winds and tempests may destroy us; it depends from day to day
upon the water we drink, yet its floods may sweep us away. We walk
and climb and work and move mountains by gravity, and yet gravity may
break every bone in our bodies. We spread our sails to the winds and
they become our faithful servitors, yet the winds may drive us into
the jaws of the breakers. How are our lives bound up and identified
with the merciless forces that surround us! Out of the heart of fate
comes our freedom; out of the reign of death comes our life; out of
the sea of impersonal energy come our personalities; out of the rocks
comes the soil that sustains us; out of the fiery nebulæ came the
earth with its apple-blossoms and its murmuring streams; out of the
earth came man. If the cosmic forces were not merciless, if they did
not go their own way, if they made exceptions for you and me, if in
them there _were_ variableness and even a shadow of turning, the vast
inevitable beneficence of Nature would vanish, and the caprice and
uncertainty of man take its place. If the sun were to stand still for
Joshua to conquer his enemies, there would be no further need for it
to resume its journey. What I am trying to get rid of is the pitying
and meddling Providence which our feeble faith and half-knowledge
have enthroned above us. We need stronger meat than the old theology
affords us. We need to contemplate the ways of a Providence that has
not been subsidized; we need encouragement in our attitude of heroic
courage and faith toward an impersonal universe; we need to have
our petty anthropomorphic views of things shaken up and hung out in
the wind to air. The universe is not a schoolroom on the Montessori
lines, nor a benevolent institution run on the most modern improved
plan. It is a work-a-day field where we learn from hard knocks, and
where the harvest, not too sure, waits upon our own right arm.
II
MANIFOLD NATURE
Few persons, I fancy, ever spend much time in thinking seriously of
this vast, ever-present reality which we call Nature; what our true
relations to it are, what its relations are to what we call God, or
what God’s relations are to it; whether God and Nature are two or
one--God and Nature, or only Nature, or only God.
When we identify Nature with God we are at once in sore straits
because Nature has a terrible side to her, but the moment we separate
God from Nature we are still more embarrassed. We create a hiatus
which we must find something to fill. We must invent a Devil upon
whom to saddle the evil that everywhere dogs the footsteps of the
good. So we have both a God and a Devil, or two gods, on our hands
contending with each other. Even our good friends in the churches
talk glibly of the God of Nature, or Nature’s God, little heeding the
terrible black depths that lie under their words.
The Nature that the poets sing and that nature-writers exploit is
far from being the whole story. When we think of Nature as meaning
only birds and flowers and summer breezes and murmuring streams, we
have only touched the hem of her garment--a garment that clothes
the whole world with the terrific and the destructive, as well as
with the beautiful and the beneficent. Yet her fairer forms and
gentler influences are undoubtedly the expression of those forces and
conditions that go hand in hand with the things that make for our
development and well-being.
Probably not till flowers bloomed and birds sang was the earth ripe
for man. Not till the bow appeared on the retreating storm-cloud
was anything like human life possible. Of savage, elemental Nature,
black in tempest and earthquake, hideous in war and pestilence, our
poets and nature-students make little, while devout souls seem to
experience a cosmic chill when they think of these things.
The majority of persons, I fancy, when they consider seriously the
problem, look upon Nature as a sort of connecting link between man
and some higher power, neither wholly good nor wholly bad; divine
in some aspects, diabolical in others; ministering to our bodies,
but hampering and obstructing our souls. They see her a goddess one
hour, and a fury the next; destroying life as freely as she gives it;
arming one form to devour another; crushing or destroying the fairest
as soon as the ugliest; limited in her scope and powers, and not
complete in herself, but demanding the existence of something above
and beyond herself.
Under the influence of Christianity man has taken himself out of the
category of natural things, both in his origin and in his destiny.
Such a gulf separates him from all other creatures, and his mastery
over them is so complete that he looks upon himself as exceptional,
and as belonging to another order. Nature is only his stepmother,
and treats him with the harshness and indifference that often
characterize that relation.
When Wordsworth declared himself a worshiper of Nature, was he
thinking of Nature as a whole, or only of an abridged and expurgated
Nature--Nature in her milder and more beneficent aspects? Was it not
the Westmoreland Nature of which he was a worshiper?--a sweet rural
Nature, with grassy fells and murmuring streams and bird-haunted
solitudes? What would have been his emotion in the desert, in the
arctic snows, or in the pestilential forests and jungles of the
tropics? Very likely, just what the emotion of most of us would be--a
feeling that here are the savage and forbidding and hostile aspects
of Nature against which we need to be on our guard. That creative eye
and ear to which Wordsworth refers is what mainly distinguishes the
attitude of the modern poet toward Nature from the ancient. Sympathy
is always creative--“thanks to the human heart by which we live.”
The Wordsworthian Nature was of the subjective order; he found it
in his own heart, in his dreams by his own fireside, in moments of
soul dilation on his Westmoreland hills, when the meanest flowers
that blow could bring to him “thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears.”
The Nature that to Wordsworth never betrays us, and to Milton was
“wise and frugal,” is a humanized, man-made Nature. The Nature we
know and wrest our living from, and try to drive sharp bargains
with, is of quite a different order. It is no more constant than
inconstant, no more wise and frugal than foolish and dissipated; it
is not human at all, but unhuman.
When we infuse into it our own idealism, or recreate it in our
own image, then we have the Nature of the poets, the Nature that
consciously ministers to us and makes the world beautiful for our
sake.
When in his first book, “Nature,” Emerson says that the aspect of
Nature is devout, like the figure of Jesus when he stands with bended
head and hands folded upon the breast, we see what a subjective and
humanized Nature, a Nature of his own creation, he is considering.
His book is not an interpretation of Nature, but an interpretation
of his own soul. It is not Nature which stands in an attitude of
devotion with bowed head, but Emerson’s own spirit in the presence
of Nature, or of what he reads into Nature. Yet the Emerson soul
is a part of Nature--a peculiar manifestation of its qualities and
possibilities, developed through centuries of the interaction of man
upon man, through culture, books, religion, meditation.
“The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at Nature,” he says,
“is in our own eye.” Is it not equally true that the harmony and
perfection that we see are in our own eye also? In fact, are not
all the qualities and attributes which we ascribe to Nature equally
the creation of our own minds? The beauty, the sublimity, the power
of Nature are experiences of the beholder. The drudge in the fields
does not experience them, but the poet, the thinker, the seer,
does. Nature becomes very real to us when we come to deal with her
practically, when we seek her for specific ends, when we go to her to
get our living. But when we go to her in the spirit of disinterested
science, the desert, the volcano, the path of the cyclone, are full
of the same old meanings, the playground of the same old elements
and forces. Nature is what we make her. In his Journal Emerson for a
moment sees Nature as she is: “Nature is a swamp, on whose purlieus
we see prismatic dew-drops, but her interiors are terrific.”
Man is the only creature that turns upon Nature and judges her; he
turns upon his own body and mind and judges them; he judges the work
of his own hands; he is critical toward all things that surround him;
he brings this faculty of judgment into the world.
Emerson refers to “the great Nature in which we rest as the earth
lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere.” The earth lies in the soft
arms of the atmosphere in the same sense that it lies in the soft
arms of its own grasses and flowers; the atmosphere is an appendage
of the earth. If the earth literally lies in anything, it is in the
soft arms of the all-pervasive ether. Emerson’s statement is the
inevitable poetizing of Nature in which we all indulge. We make soft
arms for our thoughts to lie in, and peaceful paths for our feet to
walk in, whatever the literal truth may be. This is the way of art,
of poetry, of religion. The way of science and of practical life is
a different way. The soft arms become hard with purpose, and rest
and contemplation give place to intense activity. I would not have
the poet change his way; Nature as reflected in his mind soothes and
charms us; it takes on hues from that light which never was on sea
or land. But we cannot dispense with the way of science, which makes
paths and highways for us through the wilderness of impersonal laws
and forces that surge and roar around us. One gives us beauty and one
gives us power; one brings a weapon to the hand, the other brings
solace to the spirit.
When Bryant identifies God with tempests and thunderbolts, with
“whirlwinds that uproot the woods and drown the villages,” or with
the tidal wave that overwhelms the cities, “with the wrath of the
mad, unchained elements”--“tremendous tokens of thy power”--does
he make God more lovable or desirable? Well may he say, “From
these sterner aspects of thy face, spare me and mine.” By way of
contrast let me recall that when an earthquake shook California,
John Muir cheered himself and friends by saying it was only Mother
Earth trotting her children fondly upon her knee! If we identify
God with all of Nature, this wrathful Hebrew Jehovah of Bryant is a
legitimate conception. There are times when the aerial forces behave
like a raving maniac bent upon the destruction of the world--the
insensate powers run amuck upon all living things. This is not the
God we habitually love and worship, but it is a God from whom there
is no escape. As the result of the inevitable action of the natural
irrational or unrational forces, tempests and earthquakes and tidal
waves do not disturb us; but as the will and purpose of an Almighty
Being, Creator of heaven and earth, they give all pious souls a
fearful shake-up. We take refuge in such phrases as “the inscrutable
ways of God,” or “the mysteries of Providence,” a Providence whose
ways are assuredly “past finding out.”
Our State Commissioner of Education, Dr. Finley, in an agricultural
address on “Potatoes and Boys,” showed God coöperating with the
farmer in a way that amused me. “The Almighty,” the Commissioner
said, “can make, unaided of man, potatoes, but only small potatoes,
and of acrid taste. He had to make a primitive man and even teach
him to use a hoe, before He, the Omnipotent One, could grow a patch
of potatoes.” The wild potato, he implied, like the wild grape, the
wild apple, the wild melon, was the work of God before he had man to
help him; now, with man’s help, we have all the improved varieties of
potatoes and fruits. We have heard a good deal about the coöperation
of man with God, and as a concrete example this potato-growing
partnership is very interesting. How far from our habitual attitude
of mind is the thought that the Higher Powers concern themselves
about our potatoes or our turnips or our pumpkin crop, or have any
part or lot in it! Emerson in his Journal expresses another view:
“One would think that God made fig-trees and dates, grapes and
olives, but the Devil made Baldwin apples and pound pears, cherries
and whortle berries, Indian corn and Irish potatoes.”
Sir Thomas Browne called Nature the art of God. Viewed in this light
we get a new conception of Nature, the artistic conception. We do not
ask: Is it good or bad, for us or against us? we are intent on its
symbolical or ideal character. Through it God expresses himself as
the artist does, be he painter, poet, or musician, through his work,
blending the various elements--the light and shade, the good and the
bad, the positive and the negative--into a vital, harmonious whole.
Creation becomes a picture, or a drama, or a symphony, in which
all life plays its part, in which all scenes and conditions, all
elemental processes and displays, play their part and unite to make
a vast artistic whole. The contradictions in life, the high lights,
the deep shadows, the imperfections, the neutral spaces, are but the
devices of the artist to enhance the total effect of his work. In
ethics and religion we ask of a thing: “Is it good?” In philosophy:
“Is it true?” In science: “Is it a fact, and verifiable?” But in art
we ask: “Is it beautiful?” or “Is it a real creation?” “Is it one
with the vital and flowing currents of the world?”
The artist alone is the creator among men; he is disinterested; he
has no purpose but to rival Nature; he subordinates the parts to
the whole; he illustrates the divine law of indirections. The bald,
literal truth is not for him, but the illusive, the suggestive, the
ideal truth. He does not ask what life or Nature are for, or are they
good or bad, but he interprets them in terms of the relation of their
parts, he reads them in the light of his own soul. He knows there
is no picture without shadows, no music without discords, no growth
without decay. The artist has “no axe to grind”; to him all is right
with the world, however out of joint it may be in our self-seeking
lives. Art is synthetic, and puts a soul under the ribs of Death.
Science is a straight line, but Art is symbolized by the curve.
To regard Nature, therefore, as the art of God, is to see it complete
in itself; all the disharmonies vanish, all our perplexing problems
are solved. The earth and the heavens are not for our private good
alone, but for all other things. Opposites are blended. Good and
bad are relative; heaven and hell are light and shade in the same
picture. Our happiness or our misery are secondary; they are the
pigments on the painter’s palette. The beauty of Nature is its
harmony with our constitution; its terror emphasizes our weakness.
Where does the great artist get his laws of art but from his insight
into the spirit and method of Nature? They are reflected in his own
heart; the act of creation repeats itself in his own handiwork. The
true artist has no secondary aims--not to teach or to preach, nor
to praise nor condemn; but to portray, and to show us, through the
particular, the road to the universal.
Eckermann reports Goethe as saying to him that “Nature’s intentions
are always good”; but if questioned, Goethe would hardly have
maintained that the clouds, the winds, the streams, the tides,
gravity, cohesion, and so on, have intentions of any sort, much less
intentions directed to us or away from us. Even the wisest among
us thus make man the aim and object of Nature. We impose our own
psychology upon the very rock and trees.
Goethe always read into Nature his own human traits; always when he
speaks of her he speaks as an artist and poet. He says to Eckermann
that Nature “is always true, always serious, always severe; she is
always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The
man who is incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to
the apt, the pure, the true, does she resign herself and reveal her
secrets. The understanding will not reach her; man must be capable
of elevating himself to the highest Reason to come into that contact
with the Divinity which manifests in the primitive phenomena which
dwell behind them and from which they proceed. The divinity works
in the living, not in the dead; in the becoming and changing, not
in the become and the fixed. Therefore, reason, with its tendency
toward the divine, has only to do with the becoming, the living; but
understanding has to do with the become, the already fixed, that
it may make use of it.” In this last we see the germ of Bergson’s
philosophy. The divinity that dwells behind phenomena, and from which
they proceed, is the attempt of the human mind to find the end of
that which has no end, the law of causation.
III
EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE
“Proud man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’
‘See all for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.”
And the pampered goose was right: all things are just as much for her
use as for man’s, while there are reasonable doubts whether things
were created for the especial use of either.
Man, like the goose, appropriates what suits him, but is slow to
realize the fact that what suits him, or is fitted to his use,
depends upon his own powers of adaptation. We can say that he suits
it, rather than that it suits him. He has lungs because there is air,
and eyes because there are certain vibrations in the ether. In short,
nature is the primary fact, and the forms and organs of life the
secondary fact.
Goethe said to Eckermann that he followed Kant in looking upon each
creature as existing for its own sake. He could not believe, he said,
that the cork-trees grow merely that we might stop our bottles, and,
he might have added, that rubber-trees grow that we might have rubber
overshoes. The lady in a public audience who once asked me what flies
are for, evidently thought that God had made a mistake in creating
that which annoyed her. I was pleased with a remark of John Muir’s
in his Sierra book about the poison-ivy: “Like most other things
not apparently useful to man,” he says, “it has few friends, and the
blind question, ‘Why was it made?’ goes on and on with never a guess
that first of all it might have been made for itself.” Coming from
the mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical doctrine. Muir
had evidently forgotten his early training.
It is possible for man to make use of poison-ivy; in fact it is used
in medicine; but who shall dare to say that it was made for that?
Flies and poison ivy and all other noxious and harmful things are
each and all for their own sakes. They were not made in the sense
that we make things. They have come to be what we now find them
through the action and interaction of a thousand complex influences.
Each has found its place in the scheme of living things, and each
acts directly or indirectly upon other forms--is of use to them,
or the reverse. Ten thousand things are of use to man, and as many
more of no use to him, but to measure all things by his standard of
utility is childish, or to ask what mosquitoes and rattlesnakes are
for, with an implied impeachment of Nature if they are not of service
to man, is an idle question. The water and the air are indispensable
to life, but these things are older than life. Life is adapted to
them, and not they to it.
The body is full of fluids because earth and air are full of water.
From our standpoint man is at the head of animate nature, but the
rest of creation is no more exclusively for him than for the least
of living things. The good of the world is for whatever or whoever
can use it. Houseflies are undoubtedly the enemy of the human race;
so are mosquitoes, so are venomous snakes, so are many forms of
bacteria, and a thousand other things. Our egotism prompts us to ask,
“Why is evil in the world, anyhow?” But our evil may be the good of
some other creature. Our defeat means the triumph of our enemy. It
is through this conflict of good and evil, or of things that are for
us with things that are against us, that species are developed and
perpetuated.
What kind of a world would it be without what we call evil, without
hindrances? To the farmer drought, flood, tornadoes, untimely frosts
are evils which he thinks he could well dispense with, but so far
as they make a greater struggle necessary, so far as they lead to
more self-denial, greater forethought, and so on, they are good in
disguise. Hardy, virile characters, like tough timber, in oaks, are
developed by unfriendly and opposing forces. Intemperance, greed,
cheating, lying, war, are evils in the social and business world;
but they teach us the value of their opposites. We react from them.
It is a child’s question to ask, for example, “Would the world not
have been better had there never been any war?” because, since
mankind is what it is, wars are inevitable. The absence of wars, as
of intemperance, greed, cheating, implies a different mankind, and a
different mankind implies a different system of things.
The problem of evil is the problem of life; no evil, no life. The
world is thus made. Nature is not half good and half bad; she is
wholly good, or wholly bad, according to our relation to her. Fire
and flood are bad when they master us, and good when we master and
control them. Great good has come out of war, and great evil. The
evil always tends to drop out or be obliterated, as the path of
cyclones and earthquakes tend to be overgrown and forgotten. Burned
cities often rise from their ashes to new life. The effects of evil
are finally obliterated; malignant forces have their day, benignant
forces go on forever. The world of life, let me repeat, would not be
here were not the balance of the account of good and evil on the side
of the good, or if good did not come out of evil.
Life is recuperative; if it falls down, it picks itself up again.
If a state is devastated by war, in time the cities and towns are
rebuilt, and the ranks of peace and industry refilled, though the
growth and civilization of that country may have had a terrible
set-back, and the whole progress of the race be retarded. Evil
perishes. The terrible World War, set going by Germany, has depleted
the wealth, the life, the well-being of the whole European world, but
as the scars it made upon the landscape will in time be effaced,
so its effect upon the life of the states and communities will fade
and be a memory only. Still the evils it entailed are none the less
deplorable. Its heritage of hate, of devastated homes, of depleted
treasures, will long continue.
Life, then, in all its forms is for its own sake. It is an end in
itself. Many things are inimical to us, and we are equally inimical
to many things. We lay the whole of Nature under contribution so far
as we can, and we curb and defeat her hostile forces so far as we
can, but the world was no more made for man than it was made for mice
and midges. When we see how irrespective of us the natural forces go
their way, that we can ride them and guide them only as we do wild
horses--by being quicker and more masterful than they are--when we
know that they will tread us down with the same indifference that
we tread down the grass and the weeds, the facts should temper and
modify our egotism. When we look into the depths of merely our own
solar system, and see vast globes like Jupiter and Saturn, so much
older and greater than our little earth, and not yet the abode of any
form of life, and probably not within millions of years of such a
state, how casual and insignificant man seems! How far from being the
end and object of creation!
Doubtless there are numberless worlds and whole systems of worlds in
the depths of sidereal space upon which life has never appeared, and
numberless other worlds and systems upon which it has had its day
and gone out forever. Life is but an incident in the total scheme of
things.