beget a hardier race.
Moral evil--intemperance, avarice, war, lying, cheating--are on
another plane. They are peculiar to man. Nature below him knows them
not. But as they are against nature, they perpetually tend to correct
themselves. The business world has learned that honesty is the best
policy. Cheating is unpopular because, in the long run, it does not
pay.
The most aggressive and warlike nation upon the globe has at last
got its eyes open to the evils of militarism, and has bought its
emancipation at a heavy price. Tyranny and oppression are finally
doomed by the nature of man. Nature’s ways are roundabout, and often
regardless of cost. The chaos and waste and suffering in Europe
to-day are in keeping with her spendthrift methods. She knows that
the most turbulent and muddy stream will clear itself and quiet down.
The track of the cyclone through the forest will in time entirely
disappear. Evil perishes, the good increases more and more. God is
not so bad as we paint him, and we have no need of a devil. All is
good. Gravity would glue our feet to the ground and we have to defeat
it every time we lift a foot, and yet how could we walk or work
without gravity? The bad, or the evil, dogs one’s footsteps, but it
teaches us circumspection, and to beware of dangerous paths.
How easy to put one’s finger on this or that and say, “Here are
positive evils!”--all diseases, smallpox, infantile paralysis,
influenza, and so on--but they are only remote contingencies, and,
on the whole, most of us find life good. There are good germs and
there are bad germs, but the good vastly predominate. And the bad
germs are only bad from our point of view. Our doors and windows let
in the cold or the heat, as the case may be. We have them on these
conditions. Fruits and grains nourish us, but they may injure us also.
In 1916 my naturalist’s faith prompted me to write thus of the World
War: Two world forces are at death grips in this war. In terms of
government it is autocracy against democracy; in terms of biology it
is the unfit against the fit; in terms of man’s moral nature it is
might against right. Whatever triumph Prussian aggressiveness and
ruthlessness may meet with, they must in time meet with defeat, else
Evolution has miscarried, and its latest and highest product, man’s
moral nature, is, in its survival value, but dust and ashes.
II
There is positive good and there is negative good. We may say of
health that it is a positive good, and of sickness that it is a
negative good, because it reveals to us the conditions of health.
In disease the body is struggling to regain its health--to recover
and retain its normal condition. Its well-being is the result of a
certain balance between contending forces. What we call the hostile
forces appear only as the result of wrong living. The lower animals
have none of our distempers because they live according to nature.
Cattle do not get rheumatism by lying upon the wet, cold ground, nor
pneumonia from exposure to cold and storm. In the freedom of the
fields and woods it is quite certain that they would never become
infected with tuberculosis. I doubt if the wild dog or the wolf ever
have dog distemper, or if wild horses ever have crib-bite. Disease,
as we know it, is a product of civilization.
Death, of course, is not an evil when it comes in the regular
course of nature; it is an evil when it comes prematurely. The
various social evils tend to correct themselves. Moral evils--lying,
cheating, selfishness, uncharitableness--also tend to correct
themselves. Righteousness exalteth a nation because righteousness
has great survival value. The unrighteousness of Germany caused her
final downfall. In an earlier age, when ethical standards were lower,
she might have succeeded in dominating Europe. Our susceptibility to
pain is not an evil inasmuch as it safeguards us against a thousand
dangers. What I would say in a score of ways is that there is no evil
in the human world not of our own making. Plagues and famines are
always the result of human folly or short-sightedness. Filth breeds
disease. Typhoid fever is a filth disease and is preventable. There
is no god to blame for our distempers. Nature’s hands are clean. The
wind is never tempered to the shorn lamb, in spite of the proverb,
but the shorn lamb has not been fleeced by Nature. A heavy snowfall
is an evil in towns and cities, but a good thing for the country.
It enables the meadow mice to girdle the apple-trees, but it is a
coverlid that greatly profits the meadows themselves. It is therefore
good to both mice and meadows.
Our greatest philosopher, William James, had a wide grasp of
fundamental questions, but it seems to me that he did not fully grasp
the problem of evil; he saw the universe as a dual universe, two
principles, good and evil, struggling with each other. He seemed to
look upon good and evil as positive entities in themselves, whereas
naturalism sees in them only names which we give to our experiences
with objects and conditions in this world. What favors us, as I have
so often said, we call good, and what antagonizes we call evil;
but absolute good and absolute evil do not exist, any more than do
absolute up and down; or absolute near and far. The absolute admits
of no degrees, but there are all degrees of good and bad. Some
hostile germs are worse than others, and some friendly germs are
better than others. Again I say, we live in a world of relativity.
Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature,
it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you
prefer.
James was fond of quoting Walt Whitman, but he does not see, as
Whitman did, that there is no evil, or, if there is, that it is
just as necessary as the so-called good. From James’s point of view
Nature is a harlot to whom we owe no allegiance, and another world is
demanded to correct and compensate the failures and disappointments
of this.
Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made the
heaven and the earth, and who on looking upon them said that they
were very good. Here is where the trouble begins--a Creator apart
from the universe who looks upon and approves the work of his hands.
This is the early, childish view of mankind. As Bergson says, when we
apply to the universe our idea of a maker and a thing made, trouble
begins. The universe was not made; it is, and always has been. God is
Nature, and Nature is God. If this is pantheism, then we are in good
company, for Goethe said that as a philosopher he was a pantheist.
Even the atheist has a god of his own. He knows that there is
something back of him greater than he is.
Most persons are pantheists without knowing it. Ask any of the
good orthodox folk what God is, and they will say that He is a
spirit. Ask them where He is, and they will answer, He is here,
there, everywhere, in you and in me. And this is pantheism--all
god--cosmotheism.
“Truly all that we know of good and duty proceeds from Nature; but,
none the less so, all that we know of evil.”
“If there be a divine spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we
know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man,” says James.
But does he not see that this term “divine spirit” is born of man’s
narrowness and partiality; that Nature is all of one stuff, divine
or diabolical, just as we elect? He says that the naturalistic
superstition, the worship of God in nature, has begun to lose its
hold upon the educated mind; that the first step toward getting into
healthy relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against
the God of nature.
Poor James Thomson, the British poet whose pessimism, perhaps, caused
him to commit suicide, whom our James loves to quote, hurled his
scorn at a fiction of his own brain when he wrote:
“Not for all thy power, furled or unfurled,
For all thy temples to thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.”
The whole value of philosophy is to help us to a rational view of the
universe, and when it fails to do this, it falls short of fulfilling
its proper function. The contradictions of which James speaks do not
disturb the naturalist at all. Nature would not be Nature without
these contradictions; they do not disturb the unity of Nature.
Empedocles taught that “there is no real creation or annihilation
in the universal round of things, but an eternal mixing--due to the
two eternal powers, Love and Hate--of one world-stuff in its sum
unalterable and eternal.” And Whitman’s large lines mean the same
thing:
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
XIII
HORIZON LINES
I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
In dealing with fundamental questions like the origin of life, how
prone our natural philosophers are to assume the existence of that
which they set out to prove. Thus Pflügler assumes _living_ protein
in the shape of a cyanogen radical, and assumes that this radical
possesses a large amount of internal energy, and thus “introduces
into the _living_ matter energetic internal motion.” As cyanogen and
its compounds arise only in incandescent heat, he concludes that life
is derived from fire, that its germ was in the earth when it was
still an incandescent ball.
“As soon as oxides can be there,” says Moore, “oxides appear.”
“When temperature admits of carbonates, then carbonates are
forthwith formed.” But are oxides and carbonates mere fortuitous
compounds--just chance hits? Moore helps himself out by formulating
what he calls the “Law of Complexity,” a law that holds throughout
all space. But is the law, again, fortuitous? Is it not rather
organized intelligence? “Atoms, molecules, colloids, and living
organisms arise as a result of the operation of this law.” Allen
says, “Life arose at the period when the physical conditions of the
earth came to be nearly what they are at present.” Of course. But is
not this begging the question? We do not know life apart from these
conditions; hence we assume that the conditions beget the life.
What is life anyhow? May we not say that it is a new motion in
matter? It does not introduce a new chemistry, or a new physics, but
it uses these to new ends. New and unstable compounds arise. Solar
energy, says Allen, acting on various carbon and nitrogen compounds,
would set up various anabolic and catabolic reactions which resulted
in life--life of a very humble and rudimentary form, but life.
Troland gets life from the enzymes, but how does he get his enzymes?
He assumes that at some moment in the earth’s history a small amount
of a certain autocatalytic enzyme--a self-created enzyme--suddenly
appeared at a definite time and place within the yet warm ocean
waters which contained in solution various substances reacting very
slowly to produce an oily liquid immiscible with water. Troland
postulates the auto- or self-catalytic character of the initial
enzyme, which is virtually postulating the life-impulse itself.
Osborn, in his work on the “Origin and Evolution of Life,” also
virtually starts by assuming that which he sets out to prove.
He suggests that the initial step in the origin of life was the
coördinating and bringing together of the then primordial elements
of water, nitrates, and carbon dioxide, “which so far as we know had
never been in combined action before.” Was their coming together
a blind, fortuitous affair? Osborn assumes that these elements
were gradually bound by a _new_ form of mutual attraction “out of
which arose a new form of unity in the cosmos, an organic unity or
organism. It was an application of energy new to the cosmos. In fact
it was life.” “When the earth had in the course of its physical
evolution become adapted as the abode of life, living substances came
into being.” By their own independent action, or by what?
In trying to account for happenings on the earth’s surface, we follow
the chain of cause and effect. But when we try to explain origins, we
are dealing with a chain which has only one end.
Picted, a Swiss scientist, concluded that because all chemical action
of the kind which goes on in living things is annihilated at one
hundred degrees below zero Centigrade, therefore chemical action and
life are one. But chemical action is as old as the earth. Is life as
old?
II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS
I fancy I am not alone in having difficulty in uniting the two
worlds--the living and the non-living--and in seeing them under
the same law. In the one I see something like mind and purpose;
every living thing shows something for which we have no name but
intelligence. Organization demands an organizing principle. There is
purpose in the wings of a bird, the legs of an animal, the fins of a
fish, but where is there purpose in the orbs, in the comets, in the
meteors? Or, to come down to the earth, where is there purpose in
the mountains, in the stratified rocks, in the ocean, or in the air
currents?
In a living body there are organs which function; in a non-living,
there are parts which act and are acted upon. To see mind in all is
the task--to see in gravity, in cohesion, in chemical affinity, in
dissolution, anything at work akin to ourselves. We see irrefragable
law; we see the sequence of cause and effect; we see the weather
system work itself out--evaporation, condensation, precipitation,
resulting in clouds, rainfall, springs, streams, lakes, and seas; we
see the never-failing succession of the seasons; we see the law of
the conservation of force; but do all these things imply the same
intelligence, though unconscious, which we see in the sitting bird,
or in the growing plant or tree? Is the cosmic order akin to the
vital order? Of course mechanics and chemistry are one the universe
over; atoms and molecules are atoms and molecules; but where does
mind end, and law begin? Or, is it all law, or all mind, according
to our point of view? The moral order, which is man’s order, we
know has its limits, but I am trying to see if the rational order
is coexistent with nature. The unity we seek we may find in the old
conception of God, but this saddles all the turmoil and disorder and
evil of the world upon an all-wise, all-good Being.
Shall we adopt the idea of a primal mind as distinct from the human
mind, as the poets do? I grasp at anything that will help me see that
I am akin to the farthest star, in my mind as in my body. I cannot
think of a dual or a divided universe. I want to see myself as strung
upon the same thread as all the rest of nature.
In organic evolution I see the workings of the creative impulse--or
growth, as opposed to mere accretion or accumulation. In the light
of the same law does one not see worlds and suns potential in the
spiral nebulæ? Science helps us to see the evolution of the chemical
elements, or to follow up this defining and differentiating process.
Could we fly to the uttermost parts of the heavens, we should find
the Cosmic Mind there before us.
III. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY
Is it possible to think of any ingenious contrivance in nature as
the result of chance, or of the fortuitous clashing and jostling of
the elements? Living things are full of these ingenious contrivances
which serve a definite end and keep life going. In the inorganic
world there are no such contrivances; there is not the simplest bit
of machinery--parts adjusted to parts, and the whole adjusted to
some specific end. In all the clashing and jostling of bodies and
forces through all the astronomic and geologic ages, not so much as
the simplest mechanical device--a coiled spring or a carpenter’s
hammer--has been struck out, and never can be. It is true that there
are certain static conditions of matter that suggest design--natural
bridges, natural obelisks, rude architectural and monumental
structures, and human profiles on the rocks; but these are not the
result of a constructive process, of a building-up, but the result
of degradation: the erosive forces carve them out in obedience to
the laws of matter and energy. We easily see how it all came about;
and we can guide these forces so that they will repeat the process.
But we do not see how the living body, with all its marvelous
adjustments and coördinations, came about, and we cannot manipulate
matter so as to produce the simplest living thing. Darwinians
profess to see in natural selection--which is simply a name for an
eliminating or sifting process--the explanation of even man himself.
But the elimination of the weaker forms, which has gone on for whole
geologic ages--for example, in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado--has
not resulted in so much as one perfect, four-square foundation, or
one perfect flying arch. Natural selection is not a creative, but a
purely mechanical, process. We involuntarily personify it, and think
of it as involving will and power of choice; think of it as selecting
this and that, as a man does when he weeds his garden or selects his
seeds, or breeds his animals. But it is not positive at all. It is
negative--a dropping-out process.
Chance, or chance selection, works alike in the organic and the
inorganic realms, but it develops no new forms in the inorganic,
because there is no principle of development, no organizing push.
But in organized matter there is, in and behind all this organizing,
a developing principle or tendency; the living force is striving
toward other forms; in other words, development occurs because there
is something to develop. An acorn develops, but a quartz pebble only
changes.
The living body is placed in a world of non-living bodies and forces,
and it takes its chances; it develops only by their aid; if warmth
and moisture are withheld, it ceases to develop; or, if warmth and
moisture are in excess, it ceases to develop; its well-being is
insured when it rides the inorganic forces, and is not ridden by
them. It is subject to the law of chance of the world in which it is
placed, but that law of chance does not explain its origin or its
development as it does that of the non-living forms.
That it is all the result of design or purpose of an all-wise Being,
working his will upon matter, is equally unthinkable. Yet if it
is the result of chance, then the world of mind and soul is only
a phase of mechanics and chemistry. In that case the head of a
Paul or a Homer is no greater wonder than a volcanic bomb, having
essentially the same origin. If we regard it as the work of design,
we are compelled to saddle all the sin and misery, all the delays and
failures and wastes of the geologic ages, upon Infinite Wisdom and
Goodness, together with all the famine and pestilence and carnage and
miscarriages of history.
For untold millions of years the earth was given up to low,
groveling, all but brainless, bestial forms, devouring and devoured;
for other untold millions it was the scene of a carnival of terrible
dragon-like monsters--in the sea, on the earth, and in the air--a
tragedy of monstrous forms enacted upon an unstable stage that rose
and sank or was overwhelmed by fire and flood. For other long ages
it was the scene of ape-like creatures struggling to be man, living
in caves, contending with savage beasts, hirsute, forbidding, living
by tooth and claw and muscular strength more than by wit, followed
by the long historical period during which man appeared and has
fought his way to his present stage of development, through blood
and carnage and suffering and misdirected activities, dogged by all
the evil and destructive passions, obstructed and thwarted, cut
off by plagues and wars, engulfed by earthquakes, devoured by fire
and flood, blinded by his own ignorance, consumed by his own evil
passions, yet making steady progress toward the position which he now
holds in the animal kingdom.
IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM
The bogey of teleology frightens a good many honest scientific minds.
To recognize anything akin to intelligence in nature, or to believe
that a universal mind is immanent in, or a part of, the cosmos, is
looked upon as disloyalty to the scientific spirit.
Lamarck’s idea of an indwelling directing principle in organic
evolution discredited him with Darwin, and with the leading
biologists since his time. Yet Darwin said he could not look upon the
universe as the result of chance. But he faltered before the other
alternative--that any will or design lay back of it.
It is unfortunate that these words connote things purely human, and
to that extent are likely to lead us astray. But are not all our
terms human, even the word “astray” itself? Can we have any other?
Emerson says that anything may be affirmed or denied of the Infinite,
and that God can be hinted only in signs and symbols. In trying to
describe time, we need a new language that differs as much from our
ordinary speech as algebra differs from arithmetic. The circle and
sphere are the only complete types of Infinity.
In Professor Loeb’s mechanistic conception of life there is no hint
of mind or soul; all is matter and force. All the mechanists and
energists and materialists unconsciously endow their matter and force
with creative power, thus elevating them to the rank of a _Deus_.
Science knows no mysteries; it knows only insoluble problems and
comparatively few of them. But may not one see mysteries in nature
without being a mystic? Physical facts may be inexplicable, but we
do not call them mysteries. The birth and development of the cell is
wonderful, but can we say that it is mysterious? Does not mystery
imply something occult and unknowable? Is a biologist or evolutionist
to be charged with mysticism because he refuses to admit that the
development of species is all a matter of chance? If he believes,
for instance, that the horse as we know him was inevitable in that
small beast of Eocene times, the eohippus, is he to be charged with
a teleological taint? Or if we speak of the predestined course of
evolution are we unfaithful to the true scientific spirit? Is not the
acorn predestined to become an oak? Does growth imply a mysterious
guiding force or principle? The little brown house wren that fusses
and chatters here around its box on my porch has come all the way
from Central America. Did something guide it? Life is full of this
kind of guidance. Not much of nature can be explained by addition and
subtraction; not much of it can be explained by mere mechanics, or
physics; not much of it can be explained by the doctrine of chance.
There are reasons behind reasons. You may give good physiological
reasons why the heart beats, why the liver secretes bile, why the
digestive processes go on and our food nourishes us, but can you find
the mind by dissecting the brain or connect mind with matter?
Mysticism belongs to the sphere of our religious emotions, and when
we read natural phenomena through these emotions we are mystical.
We cannot say that the course of evolution has been directed, and
we cannot say it goes by chance. The changes of the seasons are not
directed; the circuit of the waters from the earth, through the sea
to the clouds and back to the earth, is not directed; the orbs in
their courses are not directed; the sap in the trees, the blood in
our veins, are not directed; neither are these things by chance. “An
inward perfecting principle” is the divinity that shapes the ends of
all organisms.
Many scientific men are so shy of teleology that they tend to the
other extreme and land in a world of chance.
Now, if man and all the other forms of life are the result of chance,
then Chance is a very good god and should be written with a capital.
No matter what we call the power out of which the universe flows, or
with which it is identified, it is a veritable _Deus_.