asking such a question we misapprehend the nature of the world; we
are thinking of something made and a maker external to it; we are
trying the universe by the standards of our human experience. The
world was not made, man was not created in any sense paralleled by
our human experience with tangible bodies. The world and all there is
in it is the result of evolution, or an endless process of creation,
an everlasting becoming, in which the nature of things beyond which
we can take no step plays the principal part. A world on any other
terms would not be the world to which we are adjusted, and out of
whose conflicting forces our lives came.
There will be times when the light will blind the eye; other times
when the darkness will heal and restore it; when the heat will burn
the hand, when the food will poison the stomach, when the friend
will weary you, when home is a prison, when books are a bore.
Our relations to things make them good or bad: our momentary and
accidental relations may make the good things bad, but our permanent
natural relations make the good good, the bad bad.
In a world without the gravity which so often crushes us, we could
not walk or lift the hand; without the friction which so often
impedes us, our train and vehicles would not move; without the water
that could so easily drown us, the currents of our bodies would dry
up; without the germs that so often make war upon us, we should soon
cease to be. Both friendly and hostile are the powers that surround
us,--or, rather, is the power that surrounds us, for it is one and
not two,--friendly when we are in the relation to it demanded and
provided for by our constitution, and unfriendly when we are in false
relation to it. To know this true relation from the false is a part
of the discipline of life.
I know this is not the end of the story; there are more questions to
be asked. We want a solution of the last solution, but this can never
come. Final questions return forever to themselves; they baffle us,
constituted as our minds are; they are circles and not lines.
VI
THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE
I
What unthinking people call design in nature is simply the reflection
of our inevitable anthropomorphism. Whatever they can use, they
think was designed for that purpose--the air to breathe, the water
to drink, the soil to plant. It is as if they thought the notch in
the mountains was made for the road to pass over, or the bays and
harbor for the use of cities and shipping. But in inorganic nature
the foot is made to fit the shoe and not the reverse. We are cast in
the mould of the environment. If the black cap of the nuthatch which
comes to the maple-tree in front of my window and feeds on the suet
I place there were a human thinking-cap, the bird would see design
in the regular renewal of that bit of suet; he would say, “Some one
or something puts that there for me”; but he helps himself and asks
no questions. The mystery does not trouble him. Why should not I,
poor mortal, feel the same about these blessings and conveniences
around me of which I hourly partake, and which seem so providential?
Why do not I, with my thinking-cap, infer that some one or something
is thinking about me and my well-being? The mass of mankind does
draw this inference, and it is well for them to do so. But the case
of the bird is different. The bit of suet that I feed on is not so
conspicuously something extra, something added to the tree; it is
a part of the tree; it is inseparable from it. I am compelled, as
it were, to distil it out of the tree, so that instead of being the
act of a special providence, it is the inevitable benefaction of the
general providence of nature. What the old maple holds for me is
maple-sugar, but it was not put there for me; it is there just the
same, whether I want it or not; it is a part of the economy of the
tree; it is a factor in its own growth; the tree is not thinking of
me (pardon the term), but of itself. Of course this does not make my
debt to it, and my grounds for thankfulness, any the less real, but
it takes it out of the category of events such as that which brings
the suet to the nuthatch. The Natural Providence is not intermittent,
it is perennial; but it takes no thought of me or you. It is life
that is flexible and adaptive, and not matter and force. “We do
not,” says Renan, “remark in the universe any sign of deliberate and
thoughtful action. We may affirm that no action of this sort has
existed for millions of centuries.” I think we may affirm more than
that--we may affirm that it never existed. Some vestige of the old
theology still clung to Renan’s mind--there was a day of creation in
which God set the universe going, and then left it to run itself;
the same vestige clung to Darwin’s mind and led him to say that in
the beginning God must have created a few species of animals and
vegetables and then left them to develop and populate the world.
Says Renan, “When a chemist arranges an experiment that is to last
for years, everything which takes place in his retort is regulated by
the laws of absolute unconsciousness; which does not mean that a will
has not intervened at the beginning of the experiment, and that it
will not intervene at the end.” There was no beginning nor will there
be any ending to the experiment of creation; the will is as truly
there in the behavior of the molecules at one time as at another. The
effect of Renan’s priestly training and associations clings to him
like a birthmark.
In discussing these questions our plumb-line does not touch bottom,
because there is no bottom. “In the infinite,” says Renan with deeper
insight, “negations vanish, contradictions are merged”; in other
words, opposites are true. Where I stand on the surface of the sphere
is the center of that surface, but that does not prevent the point
where you stand being the center also. Every point is a center, and
the sky is overhead at one place as at another; opposites are true.
The moral and intellectual worlds present the same contradictions or
limitations--the same relatively of what we call truth.
Nature’s ways--which with me is the same as saying God’s ways--are
so different from ours; “no deliberate and thoughtful action,”
as Renan puts it, no economy of time or material, no short cuts,
no cutting-out of non-essentials, no definite plan, no specific
ends, few straight lines or right angles; her streams loiter and
curve, her forces are unbridled; no loss or gain; her accounts
always balance; the loss at one point, or with one form, is a gain
with some other--all of which is the same as saying that there is
nothing artificial in Nature. All is Natural, all is subject to
the hit-and-miss method. The way Nature trims her trees, plants
her forests, sows her gardens, is typical of the whole process of
the cosmos. God is no better than man because man is a part of
God. From our human point of view he is guilty of our excesses and
shortcomings. Time does not count, pain does not count, waste does
not count. The wonder is that the forests all get planted by this
method, the pines in their places, the spruces in theirs, the oaks
and maples in theirs; and the trees get trimmed in due time, now and
then, it is true, by a very wasteful method. A tree doctor could
save and prolong the lives of many of them. The small fountains and
streams all find their way to larger streams, and these to still
larger, and these to lakes or to the sea, and the drainage system
of the continents works itself out with engineering exactitude.
The decay of the rocks and the formation of the soil come about in
due time, but not in man’s time. In all the grand processes and
transformations of nature the element of time enters on such a scale
as to dwarf all human efforts.
II
When we say of a thing or an event that it was a chance happening,
we do not mean that it was not determined by the laws of matter
and force, but we mean it was not the result of the human will, or
of anything like it; it was not planned or designed by conscious
intelligence. Chance in this sense plays a very large part in
nature and in life. Though the result of irrefragable laws, the
whole non-living world about us shows no purpose or forethought
in our human sense. For instance, we are compelled to regard the
main features of the earth as matters of chance, the distribution
of land and water, of islands and continents, of rivers, lakes,
seas, mountains and plains, valleys and hills, the shapes of the
continents; that there is more land in the northern hemisphere than
in the southern, more land at the South Pole than at the North,
is a matter of chance. The serpentine course of a stream through
an alluvial plain, a stream two yards wide, winding and ox-bowing
precisely as does the Mississippi, is a matter of chance. The whole
geography of a country, in fact, is purely a matter of chance, and
not the result of anything like human forethought. The planets
themselves--that Jupiter is large and Mercury small; that Saturn
has rings; that Jupiter has seven moons; that the Earth has one;
that other planets have none; that some of the planets are in a
condition to sustain life as we know it, for example, Venus, Earth,
and probably Mars; that some revolve in more elliptical orbits than
others; that Mercury and Venus apparently always keep the same side
toward the sun--all these things are matters of chance. It is easy to
say, as did our fathers, that God designed it thus and so, but how
are we to think of an omnipotent and omniscient Being as planning
such wholesale destruction of his own works as occurs in the cosmic
catastrophes which the astronomers now and then witness in the
sidereal universe, or even as occur on the earth, when earthquakes
and volcanoes devastate fair lands or engulf the islands of the sea?
Why should such a Being design a desert, or invent a tornado, or
ordain that some portion of the earth’s surface should have almost
perpetual rain and another portion almost perpetual drought? In
Hawaii I saw islands that were green and fertile on one end from
daily showers, while the other end, ten miles away, was a rough
barren rock, from the entire absence of showers. Were the trade winds
designed to bring the vapors of the sea to the tropic lands?
In following this line of thought we, of course, soon get where no
step can be taken. Is the universe itself a chance happening? Such
a proposition is unthinkable, because something out of nothing is
unthinkable. Our experience in this world develops our conceptions of
time and space, and to set bounds to either is an impossible task. We
say the cosmos must always have existed, and there we stop. We have
no faculties to deal with the great ultimate problems.
We are no better off when we turn to the world of living things. Here
we see design, particular means adapted to specific ends. Shall we
say that a bird or a bee or a flower is a chance happening, as is the
rainbow or the sunset cloud or a pearl or a precious stone? Is man
himself a chance happening? Here we are stuck and cannot lift our
feet. The mystery and the miracle of vitality, as Tyndall called it,
is before us. Here is the long, hard road of evolution, the push and
the unfolding of life through countless ages, something more than
the mechanical and the accidental, though these have played a part;
something less than specific plan and purpose, though we seem to
catch dim outlines of these.
Spontaneous variations, original adaptations, a never-failing primal
push toward higher and more complex forms--how can we, how shall we,
read the riddle of it all? How shall we account for man on purely
naturalistic grounds?
The consistent exponent of variation cannot go into partnership with
supernaturalism. Grant that the organic split off from the inorganic
by insensible degrees, yet we are bound to ask what made it split
off at all?--and how it was that the first unicellular life contained
the promise and the potency of all the life of to-day? Such questions
take us into deep waters where our plummet-line finds no bottom. It
suits my reason better to say there is no solution than to accept a
solution which itself needs solution, and still leaves us where we
began.
The adjustment of non-living bodies to each other seems a simple
matter, but in considering the adaptations of living bodies to one
another, and to their environment, we are confronted with a much
harder problem. Life is an active principle, not in the sense that
gravity and chemical reactions are active principles, but in a
quite different sense. Gravity and chemical reactions are always
the same, inflexible and uncompromising; but life is ever variable
and adaptive; it will take half a loaf if it cannot get a whole
one. Gravity answers yea and nay. Life says, “Probably; we will see
about it; we will try again to-morrow.” The oak-leaf will become an
oak-ball to accommodate an insect that wants a cradle and a nursery
for its young; it will develop one kind of a nursery for one insect
and another kind for a different insect.
III
As far as I have got, or ever hope to get, toward solving the problem
of the universe is to see clearly that it is insoluble. One can
arrive only at negative conclusions; he comes to see that the problem
cannot be dealt with in terms of our human experience and knowledge.
But what other terms have we? Our knowledge does not qualify us in
any degree to deal with the Infinite. The sphere has no handle to
take hold of, and the Infinite baffles the mind in the same way.
Measured by our human standards, it is a series of contradictions.
The method of Nature is a haphazard method, yet behold the final
order and completeness! How many of her seeds she trusts to the winds
and the waters, and her fertilizing pollens and germs also! And the
winds and the waters do her errands, with many failures, of course,
but they hit the mark often enough to serve her purpose. She provides
lavishly enough to afford her failures.
When we venture upon the winds and the waters with our crafts, we aim
to control them, and we reach our havens only when we do control them.
What is there in the method of Nature that answers to the human
will in such matters? Nothing that I can see; yet her boats and her
balloons reach their havens--not all of them, but enough of them
for her purpose. Yet when we apply the word “purpose” or “design”
to Nature, to the Infinite, we are describing her in terms of the
finite, and thus fall into contradictions. Still, the wings and
balloons and hooks and springs in the vegetable world are for a
specific purpose--to scatter the seed far from the parent plant.
Every part and organ and movement of a living body serves a purpose
to that organism. The mountain lily looks straight up to the sky; the
meadow lily looks down to the earth; undoubtedly each flower finds
its advantage in its own attitude, but what that advantage is, I know
not. If Nature planned and invented as man does, she would attain
to mere unity and simplicity. It is her blind, prodigal, haphazard
methods that result in her endless diversity. When she got a good
wing for the seed of a tree, such as that of the maple, she would,
if merely efficient, give this to the seeds of other similar trees;
but she gives a different wing to the ash, to the linden, to the elm,
the pine, and the hemlock, while to some she gives no wings at all.
The nut-bearing trees, such as the oaks, the beeches, the walnuts,
and the hickories, have no wings, except such as are afforded them
by the birds and beasts that feed upon them and carry them away.
And here again Nature has a purpose in the edible nut which tempts
some creatures to carry it away. If all the nuts were devoured, the
whole tribe of nut-bearing trees would in time be exterminated, and
Nature’s end defeated. But in a world of conflicting forces like
ours, chance plays an important part; many of the nuts get scattered,
and not all devoured. The hoarding-up propensities of certain birds
and squirrels result in the planting of many oaks and chestnuts and
beeches.
The inherent tendency to variation in organic life, together with
Nature’s hit-and-miss method, account for her endless variety on the
same plane, as it were, as that of her many devices for disseminating
her seeds. One plan of hook or barb serves as well as another,--that
of bidens as well as that of hound’s-tongue,--yet each has a pattern
of its own. The same may be said of the leaves of the trees: their
function is to expose the juices of the tree to the chemical action
of light and air; yet behold what an endless variety in their shape,
size, and structure! This is the way of the Infinite--to multiply
endlessly, to give a free rein to the physical forces and let them
struggle with one another for the stable equilibrium to which they
never, as a whole, attain; to give the same free rein to the organic
forces and let their various forms struggle with one another for the
unstable equilibrium which is the secret of their life.
The many contingencies that wait upon the circuit of the physical
forces and determine the various forms of organic matter--rocks,
sand, soil, gravel, mountain, plain--all shifting and changing
endlessly--wait upon the circuit of the organic forces and turn the
life-impulse into myriad channels, and people the earth with myriads
of living forms, each accidental from our limited point of view,
while all are determined by irrefragable laws. The contradictions in
such statements are obvious and are inevitable when the finite tries
to measure or describe the ways of the Infinite.
The waters of the globe are forever seeking the repose of a dead
level, but when they attain it, if they ever do, the world will be
dead. Behold what a career they have in their circuit from the sea
to the clouds and back to the earth in the ministering rains, and
then to the sea again through the streams and rivers! The mantling
snow with its exquisite crystals, the grinding and transporting
glaciers, the placid or plowing and turbulent rivers, the sparkling
and refreshing streams, the cooling and renewing dews, the softening
and protecting vapors, wait upon this circuit of the waters through
the agency of the sun, from the sea, through the sky and land, back
to the sea again. Yes, and all the myriad forms of life also. This
circuit of the waters drives and sustains all the vital machinery of
the globe.
Why and how the sun and the rain bring the rose and the violet, the
peach and the plum, the wheat and the rye, and the boys and the
girls, out of the same elements and conditions that they bring the
thistles and the tares, the thorn and the scrub, the fang and the
sting, the monkey and the reptile, is the insoluble mystery.
If Nature aspires toward what we call the good in man, does she not
equally aspire toward what we call the bad in thorns and weeds and
reptiles? May we not say that good is our good, and bad is our bad,
and that there is, and can be, no absolute good and no absolute bad,
any more than there can be an absolute up or an absolute down?
How haphazard, how fortuitous and uncalculated is all this business
of the multiplication of the human race! What freaks, what failures,
what monstrosities, what empty vessels, what deformed limbs,
what defective brains, what perverted instincts! It is as if in
the counsels of the Eternal it had been decided to set going an
evolutionary impulse that should inevitably result in man, and then
leave him to fail or flourish just as the ten thousand contingencies
of the maelstrom of conflicting earth forces should decide, so
that whether a man become a cripple or an athlete, a fool or a
philosopher, a satyr or a god, is largely a matter of chance. Yet the
human brain has steadily grown in size, human mastery over nature has
steadily increased, and chance has, upon the whole, brought more good
to man than evil. Optimism is a final trait of the Eternal.
And the taking-off of man, how haphazard, how fortuitous it all is!
His years shall be threescore and ten; but how few, comparatively,
reach that age, how few live out half their days! Disease, accident,
stupidity, superstition, cut him off at all ages--in infancy, in
childhood, in youth, in manhood; his whole life is a part of the
flux and uncertainty of things. No god watches over him aside from
himself and his kind, no atom or molecule is partial to him, gravity
crushes him, fire burns him, the floods drown him as readily as
they do vipers and vermin. He takes his chances, he gains, and he
loses, but Nature treats him with the same impartiality that she
treats the rest of her creatures. He runs the same gantlet of the
hostile physical forces, he pays the same price for his development;
but his greater capacity for development--to whom or what does he
owe that? If we follow Darwin we shall say natural selection, and
natural selection is just as good a god as any other. No matter what
we call it, if it brought man to the head of creation and put all
things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough for anybody.
At the heart of it there is still a mystery we cannot grasp. The
ways of Nature about us are no less divine because they are near and
familiar. The illusion of the rare and the remote, science dispels.
Of course we are still trying to describe the Infinite in terms of
the finite.
IV
We are so attached to our kind, and so dependent upon them, that
most persons feel homeless and orphaned in a universe where no
suggestion of sympathy and interest akin to our own comes to us from
the great void. A providence of impersonal forces, the broadcast,
indiscriminate benefits of nature, kind deeds where no thought of
kindness is, well-being as the result of immutable law--all such
ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured ourselves to them.
We love to fancy that we see friendly hands and hear friendly voices
in nature. It is easy to make ourselves believe that the rains, the
warmth, the fruitful seasons, are sent by some Being for our especial
benefit. The thought that we are adapted to nature and not nature
made or modified to suit us, is distasteful to us. It rubs us the
wrong way. We have long been taught to believe that there is air
because we have lungs, and water because we need it to drink, and
light because we need it to see. Science takes this conceit out of
us. The light begat the eye, and the air begat the lungs.
In the universe, as science reveals it to us, sensitive souls
experience the cosmic chill; in the universe as our inevitable
anthropomorphism shapes it for us, we experience the human glow. The
same anthropomorphism has in the past peopled the woods and fields
and streams and winds with good and evil spirits, and filled the
world with cruel and debasing superstitions; but in our day we have
got rid of all of this; we have abolished all gods but one. This one
we still fear, and bow down before, and seek to propitiate--not with
offerings and sacrifices, but with good Sunday clothes and creeds
and pew-rents and praise and incense and surplices and ceremonies.
What Brocken shadows our intense personalism casts upon nature!
We see the gigantic outlines of our own forms, and mistake them
for a veritable god. But as we ourselves are a part of nature, so
this humanizing tendency of ours is also a part of nature, a part
of human nature--not valid and independent, like the chemical and
physical forces, but as valid and real as our dreams, our ideas,
our aspirations. All the gods and divinities and spirits with which
man has peopled the heavens and the earth are a part of Nature as
she manifests herself in our subjective selves. So there we are, on
a trail that ends where it began. We condemn one phase of nature
through another phase of nature that is active in our own minds. How
shall we escape this self-contradiction? As we check or control the
gravity without us by the power of the gravity in our own bodies, so
our intelligence must sit in judgment on phases of the same Universal
Intelligence manifested in outward nature.