or warmth without cold, or life without death, or development without
struggle. The struggle for life, of which Darwinism makes so much,
is only the struggle of the chick to get out of the shell, or of
the flower to burst its bud, or of the root to penetrate the soil.
It is not the struggle of battle and hate--the justification of war
and usurpation--it is for the most part a beneficent struggle with
the environment, in which the fittest of the individual units of a
species survive, but in which the strong and the feeble, the great
and the small of species alike survive. The lamb survives with the
lion, the wren with the eagle, the Esquimo with the European--all
manner of small and delicate forms survive with the great and robust.
One species of carnivora, or of rodents, or herbivora, does not, as
a rule, exterminate another species. It is true that species prey
upon species, that cats eat mice, that hawks eat smaller birds, and
that man slays and eats the domestic animals. Probably man alone
has exterminated species. But outside of man’s doings all the rest
belongs to Nature’s system of checks and balances, and bears no
analogy to human or inhuman wars and conquests.
Life struggles with matter, the tree struggles with the wind and with
other trees. Man struggles with gravity, cold, wet, heat, and all the
forces that hinder him. The tiniest plant that grows has to force its
root down into the soil; earlier than that it has to burst its shell
or case. The corn struggles to lift itself up after the storm has
beaten it down; effort, effort, everywhere in the organic world. Says
Whitman:
“Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.”
IV
Every few years we have an ice-storm or a snowstorm that breaks down
and disfigures the trees. Some trees suffer much more than others.
The storm goes its way; the laws of physical force prevail; the great
world of mechanical forces is let loose upon the small world of vital
forces; occasionally a tree is so crushed that it never entirely
recovers; but after many years the woods and groves have repaired
the damages and taken on their wonted thrifty appearance. The evil
was only temporary; the world of trees has suffered no permanent
set-back. But had the trees been conscious beings, what a deal of
suffering they would have experienced! An analogous visitation to
human communities entails a heritage of misery, but in time it too
is forgotten and its scars healed. Fire, blood, war, epidemics,
earthquakes, are such visitations, but the race survives them and
reaps good from them.
We say that Nature cares nothing for the individual, but only for
the race or the species. The whole organic world is at war with the
inorganic, and as in human wars the individuals are sacrificed that
the army, the whole, may live; so in the strife and competition of
nature, the separate units fall that the mass may prosper.
It is probably true that in the course of the biological history of
the earth, whole species have been rendered extinct by parasites,
or by changing outward conditions. But this has been the exception,
and not the rule. The chestnut blight now seems to threaten the very
existence of this species of tree in this country, but I think the
chances are that this fungus will meet with some natural check.
In early summer comes the June drop of apples. The trees start with
more fruit than they can carry, and if they are in vigorous health,
they will drop the surplus. It is a striking illustration of Nature’s
methods. The tree does its own thinning. But if not at the top of its
condition, it fails to do this. It takes health and strength simply
to let go; only a living tree drops its fruit or its leaves; only a
growing man drops his outgrown opinions.
If we put ourselves in the place of the dropped apples, we must look
upon our fate as unmixed evil. If we put ourselves in the place of
the tree and of the apples that remain on it, the June drop would
appear an unmixed good--finer fruit, and a healthier, longer-lived
tree results. Nature does not work so much to specific as to
universal ends. The individual may go, but the type must remain. The
ranks may be decimated, but the army and its cause must triumph.
Life in all its forms is a warfare only in the sense that it is a
struggle with its outward conditions, in which, other things being
equal, the strongest force prevails. Small and weak forms prevail
also, because the competing forms are small and weak, or because
at the feast of life there is a place for the small and weak also.
But lion against lion, man against man, mouse against mouse, the
strongest will, in the end, be the victor.
Man’s effort is to save waste, to reduce friction, to take short
cuts, to make smooth the way, to seize the advantage, to economize
time, but the physical forces know none of these things.
Go into the woods and behold the evil the trees have to contend
with--all typical of the evil we have to contend with--too crowded
in places, one tree crushing another by its fall, specimens on every
hand whose term of life might be lengthened by a little wise surgery;
borers, blight, disease, insect pests, storm, wreckage, thunderbolt
scars, or destruction--evil in a hundred forms besetting every tree,
and sooner or later leaving its mark. A few escape--oaks, maples,
pines, elms--and reach a greater age than the others, but they fail
at last, and when they have rounded out their green century, or ten
centuries, and go down in a gale, or in the stillness of a summer
night, how often younger trees are marred or crushed by their fall!
But come back after many long years, and their places are filled, and
all the scars are healed. The new generation of trees is feeding
upon the accumulations of the old. Evil is turned to good. The
destruction of the cyclone, the ravages of fire, the wreckage of the
ice-storm, are all obliterated and the forest-spirit is rank and full
again.
There is no wholesale exemption from this rule of waste and struggle
in this world, nor probably in any other. We have life on these
terms. The organic world develops under pressure from within and from
without. Rain brings the perils of rain, fire brings the perils of
fire, power brings the perils of power. The great laws go our way,
but they will break us or rend us if we fail to keep step with them.
Unmixed good is a dream; unmixed happiness is a dream; perfection is
a dream; heaven and hell are both dreams of our mixed and struggling
lives, the one the outcome of our aspirations for the good, the other
the outcome of our fear of evil.
The trees in the woods, the plants in the fields encounter hostile
forces the year through; storms crash or overthrow them; visible
and invisible enemies prey upon them; yet are the fields clothed
in verdure and the hills and plains mantled with superb forests.
Nature’s haphazard planting and sowing and her wasteful weeding
and trimming do not result in failure as these methods do with us.
A failure of hers with one form or species results in the success
of some other form. All successes are hers. Allow time enough and
the forest returns in the path of the tornado, but maybe with other
species of trees. The birds and squirrels plant oaks and chestnuts
amid the pines and the winds plant pines amid the oaks and chestnuts.
The robins and the cedar-birds sow the red cedar broadcast over the
landscape, and plant the Virginia creeper and the poison-ivy by
every stub and fence-post. The poison-ivy is a triumph of Nature
as truly as is the grapevine or the morning-glory. All are hers.
Man specializes; he selects this or that, selects the wheat and
rejects the tares; but Nature generalizes; she has the artist’s
disinterestedness; all is good; all are parts of her scheme. She
nourishes the foul-smelling cat-brier as carefully as she does the
rose. Each creature, with man at the head, says, “The world is mine;
it was created for me.” Evidently it was created for all, at least
all forms are at home here. Nature’s system of checks and balances
preserves her working equilibrium. If a species of forest worm
under some exceptionally favoring conditions gets such a start that
it threatens to destroy our beech and maple forests, presently a
parasite, stimulated by this turn in its favor, appears and restores
the balance. For two or three seasons the beech-woods in my native
town were ravaged by some kind of worm or beetle; in midsummer the
sunlight came into them as if the roof had been taken off; later
they swarmed with white millers. But the scourge was suddenly
checked--some parasite, probably a species of ichneumon-fly, was on
hand to curtail the dangerous excess.
I am only trying to say that after we have painted Nature as black
as the case will allow, after we have depicted her as a savage
beast, a devastating storm, a scorching desert, a consuming fire, an
all-engulfing earthquake, or as war, pestilence, famine, we have only
depicted her from our limited human point of view. But even from that
point of view the favoring conditions of life are so many, living
bodies are so adaptive, the lift of the evolutionary impulse is so
unconquerable, the elemental laws and forces are so overwhelmingly on
our side, that our position in the universe is still an enviable one.
“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Slain, I shall nourish
some other form of life, and the books will still balance--not my
books, but the vast ledgers of the Eternal.
In the old times we accounted for creation in the simple terms of the
Hebrew Scriptures--“In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.” We even saw no discrepancy in the tradition that creation
took place in the spring. But when we attempt to account for creation
in the terms of science or naturalism, the problem is far from being
so simple. We have not so tangible a point from which to start. It is
as if we were trying to find the end or the beginning of the circle.
Round and round we go, caught in the endless and beginningless
currents of the Creative Energy; no fixity or finality anywhere;
rest and motion, great and small, up and down, heat and cold, good
and evil, near and far, only relative; cause and effect merging and
losing themselves in each other; life and death perpetually playing
into each other’s hands; interior within interior; depth beneath
depth; height above height; the tangible thrilled and vibrating with
the intangible; the material in bonds to the non-material; invisible,
impalpable forces streaming around us and through us; perpetual
change and transformation on every hand; every day a day of creation,
every night a revelation of unspeakable grandeur; suns and systems
forming in the cyclones of stardust; the whole starry host of heaven
flowing like a meadow brook, but where, or whence, who can tell? The
center everywhere, the circumference nowhere; pain and pleasure,
good and evil, inextricably mixed; the fall of man a daily and
hourly occurrence; the redemption of man, the same! Heaven or hell
waiting by every doorstep, boundless, beginningless, unspeakable,
immeasurable--what wonder that we seek a short cut through this
wilderness and appeal to the supernatural?
When I look forth upon the world and see how, regardless of man and
his well-being, the operations of Nature go on--how the winds and
the storms wreck him or destroy him, how the drought or the floods
bring to naught his industries, how not the least force in heaven or
earth turns aside for him, or makes any exception to him; in short,
how all forms of life are perpetually ground between the upper and
the nether millstones of the contending and clashing natural material
forces, I ask myself: “Is there nothing, then, under the sun, or
beyond the sun, that has a stake in our well-being? Is life purely
a game of chance, and is it all luck that we are here in a world so
richly endowed to meet all our requirements?” Serene Reason answers:
“No, it is not luck as in a lottery. It is the good fortune of the
whole. It was inherent in the constitution of the whole, and it
continues because of its adaptability; life is here because it fits
itself into the scheme of things; it is flexible and compromising.”
We find the world good to be in because we are adapted to it, and
not it to us. The vegetable growth upon the rocks where the sea is
forever pounding is a type of life; the waves favor its development.
Life takes advantage of turbulence as well as of quietude, of drought
as well as of floods, of deserts as well as of marshes, of the
sea-bottom as well as of the mountain-tops. Both animal and vegetable
life trim their sails to the forces that beat upon them. The image
of the sail is a good one. Life avails itself of the half-contrary
winds; it captures and imprisons their push in its sails; by yielding
a little, it makes headway in the teeth of the gale; it gives and
takes; without struggle, without opposition, life would not be life.
The sands of the shore do not struggle with the waves, nor the waves
with the sands; the buffeting ends where it began. But trees struggle
with the wind, fish struggle with the flood, man struggles with his
environment; all draw energy from the forces that oppose them. Life
gains as it spends; its waste is an investment. Not so with purely
material bodies. They are like the clock, they must be perpetually
wound from without. A living body is a clock, perpetually self-wound
from within.
The faith and composure of the naturalist or naturist are proof
against the worst that Nature can do. He sees the cosmic forces only;
he sees nothing directly mindful of man, but man himself; he sees the
intelligence and beneficence of the universe flowering in man; he
sees life as a mysterious issue of the warring element; he sees human
consciousness and our sense of right and wrong, of truth and justice,
as arising in the evolutionary sequence, and turning and sitting in
judgment upon all things; he sees that there can be no life without
pain and death; that there can be no harmony without discord; that
opposites go hand in hand; that good and evil are inextricably
mingled; that the sun and blue sky are still there behind the clouds,
unmindful of them; that all is right with the world if we extend our
vision deep enough; that the ways of Nature are the ways of God if we
do not make God in our own image, and make our comfort and well-being
the prime object of Nature. Our comfort and well-being are provided
for in the constitution of the world, but we may say that they are
not guaranteed; they are contingent upon many things, but the chances
are upon our side. He that would save his life shall lose it--lose
it in forgetting that the universe is not a close corporation, or a
patented article, and that it exists for other ends than our own. But
he who can lose his life in the larger life of the whole shall save
it in a deeper, truer sense.
VIII
A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY
During the Great War the question was asked, “Do the inexorable laws
of evolution apply to human beings as they apply to the lower animals
and to plants?” Most assuredly they do, but with a difference. Man
is as certainly one of the results of the evolutionary process as is
the horse or the dog, the tree or the plant. We are as certain of
his animal origin as we can well be of anything in the biological
history of the globe. But the inference which has so often been
drawn from this fact--namely, that man’s development involves the
same factors, and is along parallel lines--is a fallacy. That the
supremacy of might, which has ruled, and still rules in nature below
man, justifies the rule of might in human communities in our day, is
an invention of perverted human ambition.
As Nature rules by the law of might, and as man is a part of Nature,
why is he not under the same rule? The answer is that man is an
exceptional creature; that while he is a part of the animal kingdom,
he is a new kind of animal; and while he is the outcome of evolution,
like the rest, new factors which are not operative in the orders
below him have played a leading part in his later development.
These factors are his reason, which gives him a sense of the true
and the false, and his conscience, which gives him a sense of right
and wrong. These faculties subordinate the rule of might to the
rule of right. They have resulted in the establishment of standards
of conduct for individuals, for communities, and for organized
governments that do not exist among the lower animal orders, and only
in a very limited sense in the lower human orders.
There is no question of right and wrong among the plants of the
field, or the trees of the forest, or the birds of the air, or the
beasts of the earth--only the question of power to survive; might in
the sense of power of adaptation settles the question.
Since the dawn of history man’s moral and intellectual faculties have
come more and more to the fore, the moral standards always lagging
a little behind the intellectual and the æsthetic standards. Among
nearly all the more advanced ancient races the concepts of justice,
of mercy, and of fair dealing were dull and sluggish in comparison
with their intellectual acumen and their artistic achievements. The
Greeks would lie and steal and set on foot piratical expeditions
against their neighbors, while yet they produced such men as
Aristotle and Plato, and such artists as Phidias and Praxiteles.
In our day the whole civilized world was shocked and alarmed by
the moral lapse of a great people ranking among the highest in
intelligence and material efficiency, suddenly preaching and
practicing the doctrine of might over right which prevails in the
orders below man. The German philosophers brazenly justified their
nation’s course in their aggressive war, with all its attendant
horrors, by an appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the struggle for
existence, and the consequent survival of the fittest, doctrines
which play such a prominent part in biological evolution. The nation
suddenly slumped into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral
Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over the prospect of the
rich plunder and the orgies of wine and lust that awaited him in new
fields of conquest. It was a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity
veil her face and weep tears of blood.
All that was noble and precious in international relations; standards
of conduct that it had taken long generations to achieve; the peace
and good-will of the world; coöperation in scientific fields, and in
endeavors toward human betterment--all went by the board before the
Teutonic debauch of greed and lust for blood and conquest.
Seriously to discuss in our day the question of the rule of might
over right--that force is the arbiter of justice in human relations,
except when it is invoked to chastise the offender--seems a waste
of time. On how low a plane must a people live whose leaders appeal
to the way of the tiger with his prey, or of the boa constrictor
with his victim, in establishing relations with other peoples! This
ferocious appeal of kaiserism to predatory nature--to “Nature red in
tooth and claw”--in order to set itself right before the conscience
of mankind, is as fatuous as it is fallacious. If we could reckon
without the sense of right and wrong, which has a survival value as
real as any form of physical might or power of adaptation, especially
with the later civilized nations (except Germany), a different face
would be put upon the question. But we cannot. The floodtide of world
democracy and humanity is setting too strongly in that direction,
and we can only hope and pray that misguided Germany may in the new
generation be caught up and borne forward to new greatness and world
usefulness, on the bosom of the same tide.
IX
THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT
I
The biological law of the supremacy of the strong over the weak, of
the fit over the less fit, which prevails throughout the world of
living things, gives us pause when it is applied to human history
and to the relations of man with man. Yet it is true that the price
of development is the struggle for life. The road of evolution is an
uphill road. When struggle ceases, progress ceases, and evolution
becomes devolution. Our strength is the strength of the obstacles we
overcome. The living machine, contrary to the non-living, gains power
from the friction it begets.
When we open the book of the biological history of the globe, we
find, to begin with, no force but that which we call brute force,
no justice but power, no crime but weakness, no law but the law of
battle. The victory is to the strong and the race to the swift. And
it is well. It is on this plan, as I have so often said, that the
life of the globe has come to what we behold it. Man has come to his
present estate, the trees in the forest, the grasses and flowers of
the field, the birds in the air, the fishes in the sea, have each
and all attained their present stage of development through the
operation of this law of natural competition, and the survival of
the fittest. Though marked by what we call cruelty and injustice,
in the totality of its operations it is a beneficent law. If it
were not so, how could the world of living things have attained its
present development? If it were a malevolent law, would not life
have suffered shipwreck long ago? The world of living things and of
non-living still merits the primal approval--“Behold, it is very
good!” Not your good, nor my good, but a general good, the good of
all. Nature’s scheme, if we may say she has a scheme, embraces the
totality of things, and that the totality of things is good who but
a born pessimist, a radically negative nature, can deny? Mixed good
undoubtedly it is, but is there, or can there be, any other good in
the universe? Good forever freeing itself from the non-good, or from
the fetters of evil--good to eat, to drink, to behold, to live by, to
die by--good for the body, good for the mind, good for the soul, good
in time, and good in eternity?
From solar systems to atoms and molecules, the greater bodies, the
greater forces, prevail over the lesser, and yet flowers bloom, and
life is sweet, sweet for the minor forms as well as for the major.
Inert matter knows only the laws of force. In the world of living
matter, up to a certain point, the same rule prevails. In the fields
and woods the more vigorous plants and trees run out the less
vigorous. In the dryer meadows in my section of the Catskills the
orange hawkweed completely crowds out the meadow grasses; it plants
itself on every square inch of the surface, and every four or five
years the farmer has to intervene with his plow to turn the battle in
favor of the grass again. In the gardens, unless the gardener take a
hand in the game, the weeds choke down or smother all his vegetables.
The weeds are rank with original sin and they easily supplant our
pampered and cultivated cereals and legumes.
In the animal world there are few exceptions to the rule of the
supremacy of power. There is no question of right or wrong, of mercy
or cruelty. It is not cruel or unjust for the bird to catch the
insect, or for the cat to catch the bird, or for the lion to devour
the lamb, or for the big fishes to eat up the little fishes. It is
the rule of nature, and never a question of right or wrong.
Biological laws are as remorseless as physical laws. The course of
animal evolution through the geologic ages is everywhere marked by
the triumph of new and superior forms over the old and inferior
forms. Among the lower races of man, our remote savage ancestors,
might ruled. The strong and prolific tribes supplanted those that
were less so, and, among the nations, up to our own day, the rule of
natural competition, or survival of the fittest, has held full sway.
Those nations which are dominant are so by virtue of their superior
qualities, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not a question of
might except in so far as this question is linked with the question
of moral and intellectual superiority.
Is there, then, no such thing as equity, justice, fair play in the
world? Shall I seize my neighbor’s farm and despoil him of his goods
and chattels because I am stronger than he? Shall one state invade
and despoil another, or seize its territory, because it is stronger
and considers itself more fit to survive?
The rule of might, as I have said, prevails throughout the world
of matter and of life below man, and long prevailed in pre-human
and human history. But the old law of nature has been limited and
qualified by a new law which has come into the world and which is
just as truly a biological law in its application to man as was the
old law of might. I refer to the law of man’s moral nature, the
source of right, justice, mercy. The progress of the race and of
the nations is coming more and more to depend upon the observance
of this law. Without it there is no organization, no coöperation,
no commerce, no government. Without it anarchy would rule, and our
civilization would crumble and society disintegrate.