floating in the luminiferous ether as in a sea, held in leash by the
sun, and as sensitive to its changes as the poplar leaf to the wind,
vast beyond our power to visualize, yet only a grain of sand on the
shores of the Infinite, an evening or a morning star to the beings on
other planets, if there are such, mottled with shining seas or green
and white continents and canopied with many-hued cloud draperies, and
existing in closest intimacies with the wonders and the potencies of
the sidereal heavens--a veritable fruit on the vast sidereal tree of
life--when we realize all this, and more, can we conceive of a more
desirable or a better-founded and better-furnished world? The voyage
we make upon it may be a long one; if we claim the century of life
which Nature seems to have allotted us on conditions, we shall travel
about thirty-six billions of miles in our annual voyages around the
sun, and how many more millions with the sun around his sun, we know
not. A world made of the common stuff of the universe, a handful of
the dust of the cosmos, yet thrilling with life, producing the race
of man, evolving the brain of Plato, of Aristotle, of Bacon, the soul
of Emerson, of Whitman, the heart of Christ--a heavenly abode surely.
Let us try to make amends for depreciating it, for spurning it, for
surrendering it to the Devil, and for turning from it in search of a
better.
Our religion is at fault, our saints have betrayed us, our
theologians have blackened and defaced our earthly temple, and
swapped it off for cloud mansions in the Land of Nowhere. The heavens
embrace us always; the far-off is here, close at hand; the ground
under your door-stone is a part of the morning star. If we could only
pull ourselves up out of our absorption in trivial affairs, out of
the petty turmoil of our practical lives, and see ourselves and our
world in perspective and as a part of the celestial order, we could
cease to weep and wail over our prosaic existence.
The astronomic view of our world, and the Darwinian view of our lives
must go together. As one came out of the whirling, fiery nebulæ, so
the other came out of the struggling, slowly evolving, biological
world of the unicellular life of the old seas.
Biologic time sets its seal upon one, and cosmic time upon the other.
Dignity and beauty and meaning are given to our lives when we see far
enough and wide enough, when we see the forces that minister to us,
and the natural order of which we form a part.
IV
THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE
That bodies rise in the air does not disprove gravity; on the
contrary, it proves it. The pull of gravity never lets go of the
bullet from the gun; no matter how high or how far it goes, down it
comes, sometime, somewhere.
There is no force when there is nothing to resist force. The force
of the chemical reaction in the gun on the explosion of the powder
is hurled back by the mass and resistance of the gun, and sends the
bullet high or far, but does not for a second break its hold upon
it. Smoke rises because the air falls; clouds float because of the
greater weight of something beneath them. The river flows because its
banks do not.
The goodness of nature is the universal fact, like gravity, and its
evils and enmities and hindrances only prove the law.
The waters of the globe seek their level, seek to reach a haven
of everlasting repose; but behold how that purpose is forever
frustrated, and the currents never cease. It is as if the creeks and
rivers never reached the sea; they are traveling that way forever;
it is as if the great ocean currents and submarine Amazons and
Mississippis were seeking an escape which they never find; their
quest is ever renewed. Nature is Nature because her work is never
complete; her journey is never ended; the fixity and equilibrium
which her elements appear to seek, is ever deferred; life can
appear and go on only in a changing, unstable world, and it is
this flux and mutability of things that bring all our woe, and all
our joy as well. If winds did not blow, and bodies fall, and fire
consume, and floods overpower, if the equilibrium of things were not
perpetually broken,--which opens the door to all our troubles and
disasters,--where should we find the conditions of our life?
Life has appeared in an unstable world, and is conditioned upon this
instability. Fixity means death. It is in the line of organic effort
that living forms appear; it is in an imperfect world that we strive
for the perfection that we never reach. Blessed be the fact that our
capacity for life, for happiness, is always greater than the day
yields. Satiety checks effort.
The Nature Providence is stern and even cruel in some of its dealings
with us, but not in all, else we should run away from home. It is
genial and friendly in the genial season--in a June meadow, in a
field of ripening grain, in an orchard bending with fruit, in the
cattle on a thousand hills, in the shade of the friendly trees, in
the bubbling springs, in the paths by the green fields and by still
waters, and in ten thousand other aspects of its manifold works.
It is not friendly in the tropical jungles, nor amid the snows and
blizzards of the polar regions, but upon four fifths of the surface
of the globe it may be said to be friendly or neutral. Man is armed
to face its hostile aspects and to turn its very wrath to account.
If God maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, so man maketh the
wrath of God to serve him, as when he subdues and controls Nature’s
destructive forces, tames the lightning and harnesses Niagara. He has
not bound the cyclone yet, nor warmed himself by the volcano, nor
moved mountains from his path with the earthquake, but he may do it
yet. He is fast drawing the fangs of contagious diseases, thus adding
to his length of days.
The Nature Providence working in man and through him has made the
world more fit for man’s abode.
Action and reaction are the steps by which life ascends. Nature acts
upon man and man reacts upon nature. The labor the farmer puts into
the soil comes back to him with interest, and enables him to labor
more. The capital of life grows in that way; action and reaction; up
we go.
“Are God and Nature then at strife?” asks Tennyson, baffled and
unsettled by what he sees about him. There is strife in the living
world, the struggle of existence. In the non-living, there is
collision, disruption, overthrow. The apparent strife between the two
worlds is an effort toward adjustment on the part of the living--to
master and utilize the non-living. The inorganic goes its way under
the leash of physical laws, heedless of the organic. Myriads of
living things are crushed and destroyed by the ruthless onward
flow of the non-living. There is life in the world because life is
plastic and persistent and adaptive, and perpetually escapes from
the blind forces that would destroy it--the winds, the floods, the
frost, the heat, gravity, earthquakes, chemical reactions, and so on.
Every living thing runs the gantlet of the insensate mechanical and
chemical forces. But this is not strife in our human sense; it is the
discipline of nature. No living thing could begin or continue without
these forces which at times are so hostile. Like faithful gardeners
preparing the seed-beds, they prepared the earth for the abode of man
and all other living forms. They made the soil, they bring the rains,
they begat the winds, they prearranged all the conditions of life;
but life itself is a mystery, the great mystery, super-mechanical,
super-chemical, dependent upon these forces, but not begotten by
them. They are its servants.
The struggle in the world of living forms is a condition of
development, growing things are made strong by the force of the
obstacles they overcome.
From our limited human point of view there are phases of creation
that make it look like a game between intelligent contending forces,
or as if one god tried to undo the work of another god, or at
least to mar and hinder his work--some mischievous and malignant
spirit that sows tares amid the wheat, that retards development,
that invents parasites, that produces the malformed, that scatters
the germs of disease. How much at heart Nature seems to have the
production and well-being of offspring, yet what failures there are!
in the human realm the deformed, the monstrous, the idiotic. It seems
as if all things in heaven and earth had a stake in a perfect baby
and in its growth and development. A land swarming with beautiful and
happy children should make the very stars rejoice. Motherhood itself
is a beautiful and divine symbol, yet what perils attend it! In many
cases mother and child sink into the same grave. Then along comes
some malignant spirit and sows the germs of infantile paralysis,
and great numbers of children perish, and still greater numbers are
crippled and deformed for life. What a miscarriage of nature is that!
What a calamity, and unmitigated evil!
When an insect stings a leaf or plant-stalk and the plant forthwith
builds a cradle and nursery for the young of the insect, that is one
form of life using another form; or when a parasitical bird, such as
the European cuckoo, or our cowbird, lays its egg in the nest of
another bird, that is the same thing--life is still triumphant. But
when the germs of a contagious disease--tuberculosis, diphtheria,
scarlet fever--invade the human system and finally result in its
destruction, then dissolution is triumphant; all this delicately
and elaborately organized matter comes to naught. In this we see
the failure of the tendency or impulsion in matter which results
in organization--the mystery and the miracle of vitality, as
Tyndall called it, and the triumph of the contrary impulse or
disorganization, unless we regard the destructive and death-dealing
germs themselves as a triumph of organization, which, from the
scientific point of view, they surely are. Then we have Nature
playing one hand against the other. From our point of view it is like
pulling down a temple and reducing the bricks and stones to dust for
the use of ants. But who shall say that Nature is not just as careful
of the ant as of the man?--which is, of course, a distasteful bit of
news to the man.
When one thinks of the myriads of minute living organisms that
pervade and make up his own body, of their struggles and activities,
their antagonisms and coöperations, their victories and defeats,--the
cells coöperating and building up the organs, the organs coöperating
and building up the body, the phagocytes policing the blood and
destroying the invading germs, the intestinal flora contending
with one another for the possession of the soil, the ferments,
the enzymes,--when one thinks of all this and more, and how little
aware the man is of all this strife and effort and activity within
him,--how he himself, body and mind, is the result of it all,--one
has a dim vision of all our strife and effort in this world as a part
of the vital movements of a vast system of things, or of a Being that
is no more cognizant of our wars and struggles and triumphs than we
are of the histories of the little people that keep up the functional
integrity of our own systems.
Man can himself make short work of the ants unless he encounters
their devouring hosts in a tropical jungle, in which case they may
make short work of him. He can often slay with his antiseptics the
disease-germs that are destroying him, but not always; the balance
of nature is often on their side. Whichever triumphs, Nature wins,
because all are parts of her system. The capital invested is hers
alone. Man thinks a part of it is his, because he forgets that he too
is a part of Nature, and that whatever is his, is hers.
How are we to reconcile the obvious facts of evolution, namely, that
throughout the biological ages there has been an impulse in Nature
steadily working toward the development of man, with the still more
obvious fact that Nature cares no more for the individual man than
she does for the individual of any other species? She will drown
him, starve him, freeze him, crush him, as quickly as she will any
other form of life. Is the account balanced by the fact that she
has given him the wit and the power to avoid these calamities in a
larger measure than she has given them to any other creature? That
is the way the great mystery works. Every creature is exposed to the
hazards of its kind, but within its reach are always the benefits
and advantages of its kind, and these latter have steadily kept in
the lead. The evolutionary impulse toward the horse, toward the
dog, toward the bird, has apparently been as jealously guarded and
promoted as the impulse toward man. Man in his own conceit is at the
head of the animal kingdom, and the whole creation is for him, though
there are other animals that surpass him in strength, speed, and
endurance. But he alone masters and makes servants of the inorganic
forces, and thus rules the world below him.
I set out to say that the beneficent force or Providence that brought
us here has had to struggle with the non-beneficent in inert matter,
and, at times, with what looks like the deliberately malignant in
living matter; micro-organisms everywhere lying in wait for tangible
bodies and reducing them back to the original dust out of which they
came--the work of one god being held up or wrecked by another god. In
the vegetable kingdom are blights and scabs and many forms of fungous
diseases; in the animal are hostile bacteria and parasites working
without and within. Little wonder our fathers had to invent a Devil,
or a hierarchy of good and evil spirits contending with one another,
to explain the enigmas of life! But that the good spirits have
prevailed over their enemies, that the Natural Providence has been on
our side, is, as I have pointed out, proved by the fact that we are
actually here, and that life is good to us.
The evil of the world is seen to be ingrained in the nature of
things, and it has been a spur to development. All the great human
evils have been disciplinary. There is always a surplusage, rarely
just enough and no more. The gods of life rarely make a clean, neat
job of it; there are needless pains, needless wastes, needless
failures, needless delays. The good of war--the fortitude, the
self-denial, the heroism--we cannot separate from the evil; the good
of avarice or greed--industry, thrift, foresight--we cannot separate
from the evil. The wealth-gatherers keep the currents going, they
subdue the wilderness, they reclaim the deserts, they develop the
earth’s resources, they extend the boundaries of civilization, but
the evils that follow in their train are many and great. Yet how are
we to have the one without the other? Disease is also a kind of trial
by battle; it weeds out the weak, the physically unfit, and hardens
and toughens the race.
The Natural Providence does not study economy, it is not in business
with rivals and competitors; bankruptcy is not one of its dangers,
it can always meet its obligations; all the goods and all the gold
and silver in the universe belong to it. Its methods are too vast
and complex for our ideas of prudence and economy. We cannot deal
with the whole, but only with its parts. There are no lines and
boundaries to the sphere, and no well-defined cleavage between the
good and the evil in nature and in life. The broad margin of needless
misery and waste in the life of a man as of a nation is a part of
the inexactitude and indifference that pervades the whole of nature.
From the point of view of the Natural Providence it does not matter,
the result is sure; but from our point of view--victims of cyclones,
earthquakes, wars, famines, pestilence as we are--it matters a great
deal. The streams and rivers throughout the land are bearers of many
blessings; the evils they bring are minor and are soon forgotten.
The whole living world is so interrelated and interdependent, and
hinges so completely upon the non-living, that our analysis and
interpretation of it must of necessity be very imperfect. But the
creative energy works to no specific ends, or rather it works to all
ends. As every point on the surface of the globe is equally on the
top at all times, so the whole system of living nature balances on
any given object. I saw a book of poems recently, called “The Road
to Everywhere”--vague as Nature herself. All her roads are roads to
everywhere. They may lead you to your own garden, or to the North
Pole, or to the fixed stars, or may end where they began.
Nature is a great traveler, but she never gets away from home;
she takes all her possessions along with her, and her course is
without direction, and without beginning or end. The most startling
contradiction you can make expresses her best. She is the sum of all
opposites, the success of all failures, the good of all evil.
When we think we have cut out Nature, we have only substituted
another phase; when our balloon mounts in spite of gravity, it is
still gravity that makes it mount; when we clear the soil of its
natural growth and plant our own crop, Nature is still our gardener;
we have only placed other seeds of her own in her hands. When we
have improved upon her, we have only prevailed upon her to second
our efforts; we get ahead of her by following out the hints she
gives us; when we trump her trick, it is with her own cards. When we
fancy we assist Nature, as we say that we do with our drugs, it is
she who gives the efficiency to the drugs. We may fancy that the sun
is in the heavens solely to give light and warmth to the planets,
which it surely does, but behold, what a mere fraction of the light
and heat of the sun is intercepted by the slender girdle of worlds
that surround it! The rays go out equally in all directions, they
penetrate all space. The sun, with reference to its light and heat,
is at the center of an infinite hollow sphere, and not one millionth
part of its rays falls upon the worlds that circle around it. This
is typical of Nature’s bounty. The thought and solicitude of the
creative energy is directed to me and you personally in the same
wholesale way. The planets of our system are lighted and warmed
as effectually as if the sun shone for them alone, and man is the
beneficiary of the heavens as completely as if indeed the whole
creation were directed especially to him. Here is another point: the
night and darkness in nature are local and limited; the universe is
flooded with light; the black shadows themselves are born of the
light. Though astronomers tell us that sidereal space is strewn with
dead worlds and extinct suns, give time enough and they will all be
quickened and rekindled. Light and life are the positive facts in
nature, darkness and death the negative.
When we single out man and fix our attention upon him as the sole end
of creation, and judge the whole by his partial standards, man--
“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law--
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed”--
when we do this, all is confusion and contradiction. Love _is_
“creation’s final law,” but not the love of the mother for her
child, or even of the bird for its young, but the love of the eye for
the light, of the flower for the sun, the love of the plants for the
rain and the dew, the love of man for his kind, and of the dog for
his kind. Attraction, affiliation, assimilation--like unto like is
the rule of life.
The organism fits itself to its environment; the Providence in Nature
enables it to do so. The light is not fitted to the eye; the light
creates the eye; the vibrations in the air create the ear. God, or
the Eternal, is love because He brooded man into being, and all other
forms of life that support man. He made the heavens and the earth for
man’s good, by making man a part of them and able to avail himself of
their bounty. But when we look forth into the universe, and expect to
see something like human care and affection in the operation of the
great elemental laws and forces, we are bound to be shocked. It is
not there, and well that it is not. A universe run on the principles
of human economy, human charity, and partiality would be a failure.
It is our human weakness that yearns for this. It is our earthly
father that has begotten in us our conception of a heavenly father.
But then this very conception and desire is a part of nature--springs
from the Eternal, and is in that sense authentic. We cannot separate
ourselves from nature, or from the Eternal, any more than we can jump
off the planet. It is only the conception of a human or man-made God
that men rebel against. Thus comes in the discord that Tennyson sees
and feels. He is looking for a human providence in nature. Wisdom,
love, mercy, justice, are human attributes. We call them divine, and
it is well, but they do not exist outside of man. Man is himself the
only God, and he was evolved from nature. The divine and the godlike
are therefore in nature; yes, in conjunction with what we call the
demoniacal--love twined with enmity, the good a partner with the bad.
“I bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath.”
Plagues and famines and wars are fortuitous and not a part of the
regular order like health, or growth, or development. They are
accidents of nature. The cloud-burst that sends the creek out of
its banks is an accident in the same sense; it is an exceptional
occurrence. If the fountains of nature were not full enough and
permanent enough to stand such drains, or if the tendency in nature
to a certain order and moderation were less marked, life would
disappear from the globe. Nature’s capital of life is invested in ten
thousand enterprises and the risks are many, but if the gains did not
exceed the losses, if more seeds did not fall upon fertile places
than upon barren, if more babies did not survive than perish, what
would become of us? In our human schemes we aim to cut out losses,
waste, delays and failure, and arraign the Eternal when it does
not follow the same methods. But so far as I can see all that the
Eternal aims at in the vast business of the universe is to keep the
capital unimpaired and live on the income. The inroads which storms,
pestilence, earthquakes make upon it are soon made good and some
interest does accrue. Life does advance.
In the course of the biologic ages there has been a great loss in
species, apparently without any loss in the development impulse. New
species appear as the old disappear. Nature’s investment in mere size
and brute strength was doubtless a good one under the conditions, but
she gradually changed it and began to lay the emphasis upon size of
brain and complexity of nervous system, just as man in his material
civilization has passed from the simple to the complex, from the
go-cart to the automobile, from the signal fires to telegraph and
telephone. The failures and shortcomings of the Eternal, as well as
the progress of its work, are analogous to those of man. Indeed, God
is no more a god than man is. He evinces the same methods, the same
mixture of good and evil, the same progress from the simple to the
complex, the same survival of the fittest. We exalt and magnify our
little human attributes and name it God; we magnify and intensify our
bad traits and call it the Devil. One is as real as the other. Both
are real to the imagination of man, but Nature knows them not, except
so far as she knows them in and through man.
On a midsummer day, calm, clear, warm, the leaves shining, the grain
and grass ripening, the waters sparkling, the birds singing, we see
and feel the beneficence of Nature. How good it all is! What a joy
to be alive! If the day were to end in a fury of wind and storm,
breaking the trees, unroofing the houses, and destroying the crops,
we should be seeing the opposite side of Nature, what we call the
malevolent side. Fair days now and then have such endings, but they
are the exception; living nature survives them and soon forgets
them. Their scars may long remain, but they finally disappear. Total
nature is overpoweringly on the side of life. But for all this, when
we talk about the fatherhood of God, his loving solicitude, we talk
in parables. There is not even the shadow of analogy between the
wholesale bounty of Nature and the care and providence of a human
father. Striding through the universe goes the Eternal, crushed
worlds on one hand and worlds being created on the other: no special
act of love or mercy or guidance, but a providence like the rains,
the sunshine, the seasons.