savagery, of indifference--we fall short of our proper filial respect
toward her. She is the mother of us all; neither an indulgent mother,
nor a cruel stepmother. In many respects the gifts she has lavished
upon us only make her own poverty the more conspicuous. Where she
got the gift of reason which she has bestowed upon man, together
with the sense of justice and of mercy, the moral consciousness,
the æsthetic perceptions, the capacity for learning her secrets and
mastering her forces, are puzzling questions. We may say that man
achieved these things himself; but who or what made him capable of
achieving them, what made him man, and out of the same elements that
his dog or his horse is made?
Nature does not reason; she has no moral consciousness; she does not
economize her resources; she is not efficient, she is wasteful and
dilatory, and spends with one hand what she saves with the other.
She is blind; her method is the hit-and-miss method of a man who
fights in the dark. She hits her mark, not because she aims at it,
but because she shoots in all directions. She fills the air with her
bullets. She wants to plant in yonder marsh her cat-tail flag, or
her purple loosestrife, and she trusts her seeds to every wind that
blows, and to the foot of every bird that visits her marshes, no
matter which way they are going. And in time her marsh gets planted.
The pollen from her trees and plants drifts in clouds in order that
one minute grain of it may find the pistil that is waiting for it
somewhere in the next wood or field. She trusts her nuts to every
vagabond jay or crow or squirrel that comes along, in hopes that
some of them will be dropped or hidden and thus get planted. She
trims her trees, and thins her forests, or reforests her lands,
in the most roundabout, dilatory, and inefficient manner. No plan,
no system, no economy of effort or of material; and yet she “gets
there,” because she is not limited as to time or resources. She is in
business with unlimited capital and unlimited opportunities; she has
no competitors; her stockholders are all of one mind, and all roads
lead to her markets. The winds, the streams, the rains, the snows,
fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, are all her servitors. She does not
stick for the best end of the bargain, the gain is hers whoever wins.
But behold how she has endowed man to improve upon all her slack
and roundabout methods! She enables him to cheat, and mislead, and
circumvent her. He steals her secrets, he tames her very lightnings,
he forces her hand on a hundred occasions; he turns her rivers, he
levels her hills, he obliterates her marshes, he makes her deserts
bloom as the rose; he measures her atoms and surveys and weighs her
orbs; he reads her history in the rocks, he finds out her ways in
the heavens. He discovers the most completely hidden thing in the
universe, the ether, and he has learned how to use it for his own
purposes; his wireless telegraphy turns it into a news highway; above
the seas, over the mountains, and across continents, it carries his
messages.
In man Nature has evolved the human from the unhuman; she has evolved
justice and mercy from rapine and cruelty; she has evolved the civic
from the domestic, the state from the tribe. She has evolved the
Briton and the Frenchman from rude prehistoric man. She has not yet
got rid of the Hun in the German, but she is fast getting rid of the
German in her overseas Germanic stock. The bleaching process goes on
apace.
Man sees where Nature is blind; he takes a straight cut where
she goes far around. In him she has added reason to her impulse,
conscience to her blind forces, self-denial to her self-indulgence,
the power of choice to her iron necessity. How well she has done by
man, man alone knows. How much he is dependent upon her, he alone
knows; how completely he is a part of her, he alone knows. We may
call man an insurgent in her world, as an English scientist does, but
he is her insurgent; she inspires him to insurrection, and she puts
his weapons in his hands. His cause is her cause, and his victories
are her victories.
Only by personifying Nature in this way, and standing apart from her
and regarding her objectively, can we contrast her methods and her
spirit with our own. The mother she has been to us becomes apparent.
In spite of all her shortcomings and delays and roundabout methods,
here we are, and here we wish to remain.
V
THE GOOD DEVILS
I
This is not an essay on the optimism of a moralist, but on the
optimism of a naturalist.
On the whole and in the long run, as I am never tired of asserting,
Nature is good. The universe has not miscarried. The celestial laws,
as Whitman says, do not need to be worked over and rectified. It is
good to be here, and it must be equally good to go hence. With all
the terrible things in Nature, and all the cruel and wicked things in
history, the world is good; life is good, and the Devil himself plays
a good part.
When Emerson in his Journal says, “It is very odd that Nature should
be so unscrupulous. She is no saint,” one wonders just what he means.
Does he expect gravity, or fire, or flood, or wind, or tide to have
scruples? Should the cat have scruples about dining off the mouse
or the bird, or the wolf about making a meal of the lamb? or the
plants and trees have scruples about running their roots into one
another’s preserves, or cutting off one another’s rain or sunshine?
If our cowbird had the human conscience, we should expect her to have
scruples about laying her egg in the nest of another bird and thus
shirking the labors and cares of parenthood, and we should expect
the jays and crows to have scruples about eating up the eggs and
young of their feathered neighbors, if they, too, were endowed with
conscience. But none of them are troubled in this way, for the simple
reason that they are not human beings. They live below the plane of
man’s moral conscience. Chemistry and the elementary forces have no
scruples. Powder or dynamite will blow up its maker as soon as it
will any one else. The rain does not scruple to spoil the farmer’s
hay, or the floods to wash away his house and destroy its inmates.
We are childish when we marvel at the unscrupulousness of Nature.
Emerson often appealed to the nature of things. It is in the nature
of things that they should be what we name unscrupulous; certainly
Nature “is no saint,” and it is well for us that she is not. If we
identify Nature with what we call God, as many do, then I am saying
that it is well for us that the Eternal is “no saint.” I suspect
that if the drama of life which has been enacted upon the globe,
and is still being enacted, had been modeled upon the principle of
sainthood, you and I would not now be here. More’s the pity, you may
say, but there is no pity in Nature.
II
Is Nature then of the Devil? If we choose to name it so,--if we
choose to revert to the conception of an earlier age,--yes, Nature,
as we see her from our limited human point of view, is more or less
of the Devil--half god and half demon, we may say; divine in some of
her manifestations and diabolical in others, divine when she favors
us and diabolical when she is against us. But what we do not so
readily see is that in the long run the Devil is on our side also,
that he is the divine wearing a mask. The Devil is the absence of
something; he is a negative quantity that stimulates the positive and
sets and keeps the currents going. Our breathing is the result of a
perpetual tendency to a vacuum in our lungs; the growth of our bodies
is the result of a coöperation and agreement between the integrating
and disintegrating forces.
We control the Devil and make him our friend when we control most of
the forces of nature--the fire, the wind, the waters, electricity,
magnetism, gravity, chemical affinity, and so on. If our hold
upon them slips, they destroy us. If we are not watchful in our
laboratories, the same chemistry that builds up our bodies will blow
our bodies to atoms. The tornado, the earthquake, the volcano, the
thunderbolt, have all helped to make the earth what we behold it. The
floods have helped, the avalanches have helped, frost and wind and
snow, tropic heat and arctic cold, have helped. These devils are the
hod-carriers that serve the divine mason--the mixers and builders,
the plowers and the planters, the levelers and the engineer. Hence, I
say: “Good Devil, be thou my friend; you give me power, you sharpen
my wits, you make a man of me.”
This is the tangible, physical Devil; the intangible, moral Devil is
not so easily dealt with. It is not so easy to turn the spirit of
crime, intemperance, cruelty, war, superstition, greed, and so on to
our advantage. Yet there also is power going to waste or misdirected.
There is a light under the feet of these things also. Trade, out of
which has come greed, has opened up and humanized the world; war has
often grafted a superior stock upon an inferior.
“It was for Beauty that the world was made.” Emerson quotes this
verse from Ben Jonson and says that it is better than any single line
of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Only the poet is allowed to make such
extravagant statements. We cannot in soberness and truth say that
the world was made for any particular end. It is out of a certain
harmony of the elements that we arose and our sense of beauty was
developed, but the world exists for as many ends as we have power to
conceive. Order, harmony, rhythm, compensation, equilibrium, circles,
spheres, are fundamental in nature. Music, which is beauty to the
ear, hath power over inert matter. In the Mammoth Cave the very rocks
will sing if you speak to them in the right key. How steel filings
on a metal surface will dance and arrange themselves in symmetrical
groups under the influence of musical chords! Harmony is at the heart
of nature, but, in the music of creation, disharmony plays a part
also. The world is not all beautiful unless seen as a whole; all its
discords are harmonized in the curve of the sphere. Emerson’s own
line, “Beauty is its own excuse for being,” is better and truer than
the one he quotes from Ben Jonson.
When saying that in the music of creation disharmony plays a part
also, I do not mean to imply that this is not also true in human
music. The dissonances are just as much a part of great music as
are the harmonies. What would the operas of Wagner be without the
tremendous dissonances? That is what makes Wagner one of the greatest
in music; he sees things whole, just as Whitman does in his art--sees
that “all are but parts of one stupendous whole,” and that the merely
pretty in music, in poetry, in any art, as in nature, is only one
little phase of it, only an arc of the great circle.
III
What trouble we get into when we identify God with Nature! and what
trouble we get into when we refuse to identify the two! In the first
case we reach the unity that the mind craves, but it is a unity made
up of those antagonisms which revolt us. In the second case it is a
duality that leaves half of the world to the Devil.
We select what we call the divine and stand confused and abashed
before the residue. We must either change our notion about the power
we call God and make it all-inclusive, embracing evil as well as
good, or else we must change our notion about Nature and see no evil
in her. God and Nature are one. If they are two, who or what is the
second?
How can we fail to see that all the shaded part of the picture is
necessary to the picture--that all high lights would not make a
picture, but only a daub; and that all that we call good would not
make a world in which men could live and develop? Life goes on under
conditions more or less antagonistic. The antagonism gives the power;
the friction develops electricity. The vices and crimes and follies
and excesses of society are the riot and overflow of the virtues. The
pride of the rich, the tyranny of power, the lust of gain, the riot
of sensuality, are all a little too much of a good thing--a little
too much heat or light or rain or frost or snow or food or drink.
There can be no perversions till there is something good to pervert,
no counterfeits till there is first the genuine article.
The currents of wild life get out of their banks and we have, for
example, a plague of locusts or moths or forest worms, but the
natural check surely comes. The military spirit of Germany, which
springs from a laudable devotion to the state and to the good of
all, got out of its banks and brought on the World War, but the flood
has subsided and will probably be so dyked that it can never get out
again. It will find its outlet in the arts of peace.
IV
The so-called laws of Nature were not designed and decreed as our
human laws are. There is no great lawgiver. Her laws are a sequence
of events and activities; this sequence has worked itself out through
countless ages. Nothing in the universe was designed in the human
sense: it was not first a thought in some one’s mind, then to become
an act or a contrivance. This concept does not express the mystery of
creation. There is a constant becoming; there was no beginning, there
can be no ending. There is perpetual change and revolution, perpetual
transfer and promotion, but nothing that can be explained in terms
of our human experience and achievement. The world and all it holds
were created as the flower is created in the spring, as the snowflake
is created in the winter, as the cloud is created in the summer sky.
Man was created as the chick is created in the egg. Man has had a
long day of creation; he has been becoming man since the first dawn
of life in the old Palæozoic seas. His horse and his dog have been
becoming what we behold them through all the geologic ages. This
view does not leave the Eternal out of the universe; it puts Him in
it so that He cannot be got out. It makes Him immanent in it at all
points; it makes Nature transcend human reason and human speech. As
long as we think of God as a kind of superman external to nature, we
can deny Him and cut Him out, but when we identify ourselves and all
things else with Him, there is no escaping Him. We ourselves are a
phase or a fraction of Him. When we select or screen out what we name
the good, the fair, the divine, and call that God, what are we to do
with the residue? Call it the Devil? The Devil, too, then is a part
of the Eternal Good. I want no emasculated universe. I want the fiber
and virility and pungency and power and heat and drive which all that
we call bad gives it.
Our mission is to tame and elevate and direct the elements and forces
without weakening them. Thence comes our power. A perfect world would
not be one without sin or suffering or struggle or failure. There
can be no perfect world. But there can be one more and more livable,
more and more in harmony with those laws that promote our well-being.
Approximations, approximations--that is our success, and never
complete fulfillment! When we say that God is the All, we must have
the courage of our convictions and not flinch at the consequences.
He is all that we call bad as well as all that we call good. What we
call good is _our_ good, and not absolute good. There is no absolute
good any more than there is absolute heat or cold or height or depth.
We work our way through the mazes and contradictions of
things--contradictions from our point of view--as best we can,
eliminating the bad and cleaving unto the good, but the total scheme
of things, the reconciliations and compensations and final results,
we can never grasp. We cannot abate our war upon evil, because we
have our well-being on these terms, but evil is indirectly the father
of good.
V
All religious and ethical systems grow out of our egoism. We plant
ourselves in the middle of the universe and say it is all for us.
We make gods in our own image, we invent a heaven for the good and
a hell for the wicked, and seek to keep down the brute within us
by a system of rewards and punishments. We improve our minds and
souls as we improve the fields; we make them more fair and fertile,
but we do not eliminate Nature; with her own weapons we improve our
relations to her--we promote _our_ good, but we are still Nature’s;
the harvest we reap is still Nature’s. Our improvements upon her are
mere removal of obstructions from the rill that gushes perennially
from her prolific earth. We improve her fruits, her flowers, her
animals--that is, make them more serviceable to us--by means of the
hold we have upon her methods. We add nothing; we utilize what she
has placed within our reach. All of which means that we are Nature’s,
and that our knowing it and thinking of it cannot make the slightest
difference. Our fate is inevitable. There is no escape. Whose else
could we be? We cannot get off the sphere; if we could, we should
still be a part of the All. Our elaborate schemes to appropriate or
propitiate the Eternal, to stand well with Him, to gain heaven and
avoid hell, are devices of cunning Nature to spur us on the road
of development. (How easily one falls into the language of extreme
anthropomorphism!) The beautiful myth of the Garden of Eden and the
fall of man is full of meaning. Surely it was a good devil that put
man in the way of knowing good from evil, and led to his expulsion
from a state of innocent impotence.
Nature’s dealings with man and with the other forms of life are on
the same plan as her dealings with the earth as a whole. The drainage
system of the globe is by no means perfect; there are marshes and
stagnant waters in every country, but how small comparatively the
area they cover! The rains and snows give birth to pure springs in
all lands, which unite to form the creeks, which, again, unite to
form the rivers, which flow into the lakes and seas, giving back to
the great bodies of water what the sun and the winds took from them,
and thus keeping the vital currents of the globe in ceaseless motion.
The same may be said of the weather system of the globe; it is not
perfect everywhere--too much rain here, too much sun there, too hot
in some parts, too cold in others, but on the whole favoring life and
development.
We think we could improve the weather. So we might for our special
purposes at times--when it rains and we have hay down, or a crop to
put in, or a picnic in view; but it is better on the whole that we
adapt ourselves to the weather than that the weather be adapted to
the special needs of each of us. The Lord would be pretty sure to get
mixed up if He tried the latter plan.
A general and not a special Providence is our salvation. Good and
evil mixed make life, as cloud and sun in due proportions make the
best climate.
VI
War is a scourge like fire, the whirlwind, the earthquake, when
viewed in the light of a particular time and people, but good may
come from it after the lapse of ages. It strengthens and consolidates
and develops the heroic virtues. Yet what a legacy of suffering and
death go with it! But to invoke war is like invoking the pestilence,
the tornado, the earthquake. The guilt of the German military staff
in bringing on the World War is of the blackest dye. It may be a
good to man, but it is a terrible evil to men. We cannot afford to
play Providence; we must not play with Jove’s thunderbolts. War
cannot come to any people unless somebody (or some body of men) wills
it, and to will an aggressive war is a crime. No matter if the recent
war puts a final end to war, the gods will not credit us with the
good that flows from our act over and above our purpose and will.
All the good that comes from war comes from struggle, self-denial,
heroism; and all courses of action that develop these traits are
substitutes for war. The farm, the mining-camp, engineering,
exploration, are substitutes. The best war material is recruited
from these fields. The man who can guide the plowshare can wield
the sword; the man who can face the grizzly and the lion can face
the cannon and the torpedo. War develops no new virtues; it helps
rejuvenate the old; obedience, team-work, system, organization and
so on are achievements of an industrial age. In history most wrongs
are finally righted and the balance is fairly kept, but this is not
by the will and purpose of the actors, but by the remedial forces of
nature and life.
The guilt falls the same upon the greed and lust of power, even if
the gods finally reap a harvest that man’s iniquities have sown. He
maketh the wicked to praise Him, but the wicked are to get no credit.
Here is where our moral standards diverge from those of the natural
universal. Our moral standards apply to us alone; they are special
and limited. The gods know them not. The rain falls alike upon the
just and upon the unjust. The poet says, “I judge not as the judge
judges, but as the sunlight falling around a helpless thing.” This
is the voice of the natural universal. When we judge as the judge
judges, we condemn strife and war and all such uncharity, we execute
or imprison criminals, we found asylums and hospitals and other
charitable organizations; when we judge as Nature or the poet judges,
we say to the fallen one:
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves
to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and
rustle for you.”
The All brings mercy out of cruelty, love out of hatred, life out of
death, but man’s orbit is so small that he cannot harmonize these
contradictions. The curve of the universal laws does not bring him
round till generations have passed. To keep on traveling east till
you approach your point of departure from the west, you must have the
round globe to travel on. An empire would not avail.
VII
Good and evil are strangely mixed in this world, and probably in all
other worlds. What is evil to one creature is often good to another.
It is an evil to the vireo or to the warbler when the cowbird lays
its egg in the nest of one of these birds, but it is a good to the
cowbird. It relieves her of all maternal cares, and provides her
young with a devoted nurse and stepmother, but the young warblers or
vireos are likely to perish. All parasites live at the expense of
some other form of life, and are to that extent evils to these forms;
but Nature is just as much interested in one form as in the other; an
ill wind to one blows good to another, and thus the balance is kept.
A world without evil would be an impossible world--as impossible as
mechanical motion without friction or as sunlight without shadow. The
two worlds, the organic and the inorganic, constantly interact. The
former draws all its elements and its power from the latter, which is
passive to it, and goes its way in the inexorable round of physical
laws, irrespective of it. Viewed as a whole, the evils of life
inhere in its elements and conditions. Air, water, fire, soil, give
us our strength and our growth; they also destroy us if we fail to
keep right relations to them. We cannot walk or lift a hand without
gravity; and yet, give gravity a chance, and it crushes us, the
floods drown us, fire consumes us! Could we have life on any other
terms; could God himself annul these conditions?
Hunger is or may become an evil destroying life, but does it not
imply the opposite condition of good--food, an appetite, power of
assimilation in the organism? Disease is an evil to the living body
it attacks, but it does not attack a dead body and it often educates
the body to resist disease. It is a war which may leave the victor
more capable than he was before.
Robert Ingersoll conceived of an improvement in creation--“make
health contagious instead of disease.” But this is to trifle with
words. In a certain sense health is contagious. But physical
health, like peace of mind, is a condition, and must come from
harmony within, while a contagious disease is conveyed by a living
micro-organism, and is truly catching, and to change or reverse all
this would be to destroy the conditions of life itself. To postulate
a world in which two and two would make five, or in which a straight
line is not the shortest distance between two points, is to take the
road to the insane asylum. Evil is positive only in the sense that
shadow or darkness is positive, or that cold is positive. It is a
greater or lesser degree of negation.
In society and in the state we seek to curb or to correct or to
eliminate Nature’s errors, and in doing so often fall into other
errors and cross-purposes. Yet to fight what we call evil, and
promote what we call good, is the supreme duty of all men. Physical
evil the doctors and natural philosophers warn us against; moral
evil, which is a much more intangible thing, our ethical teachers
point out to us; mental evil, ignorance, superstition, false
judgment, and so on, the schools and colleges help us to avoid;
religious evil, economic evil, political evil, all have their
safeguards and guides.