of design, as we use these words in our daily lives. These words
apply to parts and fragments of which our lives are made up. They
do not help us in dealing with the whole. We share in the life of
the universe; we are a part of it, and what keeps it going keeps us
going. What set evolution on foot and evolved the organic from the
inorganic is the parent of us all. It is not we that are immortal;
it is life, and the universe. We pass like shadows, but the sun
remains--for a season. We say of a thing, or an event, that it came
by chance, when we see no will like unto our own directing it; at
the same time we know that the laws of matter and force control
everything. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without their immutable
decrees. In the same sense the hairs of our heads are numbered.
When we discuss or describe the universe in terms of experience, we
are dealing in half-truths. We cannot describe a sphere in terms of
angles and right lines; no more can we describe or interpret the All
in terms of our own experience.
If it were Chance, or Darwin’s Natural Selection, or orthogenesis, or
whatever it was, that brought me and all other forms of life here,
that gave me my mind and body, that put my two eyes and my two ears
just where they are of most service to me, and my two arms and hands,
and my two legs and feet, and all my internal organs, my double
circulation, my heart to pump the blood and keep the vital machinery
going, my secretions and my excretions, my lungs to lay hold of the
air and purify the blood, my liver and kidneys to eliminate the
poisons and effete matter, my marvelous digestive system to furnish
the fuel that generates the physical power, and, more than all
these things, that looked after my germ in the old Cambrian seas
and brought it safely down through the hazards of the long road
of evolution and developed it and made me a man, and gave me the
capacity to contemplate and enjoy this amazing universe--the power or
the blind force or the law of chance, I say, that could do all this
is god enough for me. I want no other.
Do we expect to see the Natural Providence at work as we see man at
work? Nature works from the inside. In the human sphere there is a
maker and a thing made. Not so in the universe. Things are in their
place without being made. Our concepts of the beginning and the end
do not apply to them. The words “chance” and “design” are born of our
limited knowledge.
That man or an ant or a leaf or a flower could result from the
haphazard jostling together of the molecules of matter, or the units
of force, is unthinkable. Could one get an intelligent sentence, or
one’s own name, by putting the letters of the printer’s type in a
hat and shaking them up till the crack of doom?--an old and trite
comparison, but it seems to state the case fairly. And yet, how can
a naturalist fall back upon teleology? Is not Nature sufficient unto
herself? Must we inject our own little methods and makeshifts into
the ways of the Eternal? We might as well try to walk off the sphere
as try to compass this problem in the terms of our own experience.
The inscrutable, the unthinkable, the unknowable, confront us on all
sides.
So far as I can see the Creative Energy in nature has no plan nor
end. Plans are the ways of the finite, not of the Infinite. Man alone
has plans and ends. The Infinite cannot be defined or interpreted in
terms of our human lives. It transcends all speech. To name any one
thing as the purpose and end of creation is like naming the end of a
sphere, or the direction of a circle. All bodies with which we deal
on the earth have an upper and an under side, but the earth itself is
all top side; there is no under side, though the orbs in the heavens,
to our eye, have a lowest point or bottom side. Every tangible body
with which we deal rests upon some other body, but the orbs float in
vacuity. The irregular solid bodies with which we deal have three
dimensions--length, breadth, and thickness--but, properly speaking,
the sphere has none of these; it has only mass.
When we discuss or attempt to describe what we call God, or what I
call the Eternal, in terms of man, as the theologians do, something
within us rises up and says, No. A magnified man, or a man raised
to the _n_th power, is not God; he is still man. I fancy that with
most men the denial of a God means simply this: there is no God who
can be described in the terms usually employed. One is an atheist
because he cannot accept a God made in man’s image. It belittles the
Mystery. Our belief in God is so radical that we reject half-gods.
The fatherhood of God means no more than the manhood of God, or the
governorship, or the judgeship, of God.
In many respects the manlike God falls below his human prototype,
being more cruel than any human being dares to be.
No, we cannot measure the Infinite Mystery with our foot-rule.
Boundless space is the negation of space. We can say that there is
no space in the sense that we can say that there is no God. There is
no motion unless there is something at rest; there is no Infinite
Good unless there is Infinite Evil. Hence we have invented a hell to
balance heaven, a Devil to offset God.
The universe is a reality, though we cannot define it. Life goes
on, though we cannot account for it. Boundless space exists, though
words fail us in the attempt to fathom it. The earth has its center,
though we do not know whether we should be standing on our heads or
our heels were we to reach it. Heavenly bodies do collide, though we
cannot visualize the collision. Our language fails us when we come to
the ultimate questions.
That this is the best possible world, humanly speaking, I have no
doubt, yet sin and misery are on every hand. Sin and misery are
terms of our own which simply express some of the conditions of our
development. They are like the terms “up” and “down,” “east” and
“west,” and “near” and “far”; they are relative. Nature knows no good
and no bad; all is good; that is, all favors development. The rivers
reach the sea, no matter what the obstacles in the way. The seasons
come and go, no matter how delayed.
Nature’s ends, so far as we can name them, are wholesale--to keep the
game going, to heap the measure, to play one hand against the other.
She is more solicitous about the race than about the individual. The
wreck of worlds or suns in sidereal space matters little; there are
infinite worlds and suns left. What would really matter would be
failure of celestial mechanics. The eclipse of the sun and the moon
occurring exactly on time, “without the untruth of a single second,”
tells how perfectly the great machine runs. The eclipse itself is an
accident, but a harmless one; it is not a necessity in the movements
of our system.
If man is the end of things, as we would fain believe, then why
was he so long a-coming? Why will he as surely disappear from the
earth? Why has he not come to other planets in our system? When he
disappears from our solar system, will not the great procession go
on just the same without him? No doubt of it. He is only an incident,
and maybe an accident--a lucky throw of the dice.
V. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE?
We cannot put to Nature the direct questions we put to ourselves.
Namable purposes and designs rule our lives. Not so with the All. I
told Father Goodman the other day, much to his bewilderment, that I
did not think the air was made for us to breathe, nor the water for
us to drink, nor food for us to eat. We breathe and drink and eat
because our organization is adjusted to these things. The shoe is
made over the last, not the last to fit the shoe. The organization
is fitted, or fits itself, to its environment. Nature is first, man
is afterwards. Is the notch in the mountain made for the road to go
through? Is the land-locked harbor made to protect our shipping?
Would it not be as true to say that the wind was made to fill the
ship’s sails, as that air was made to fill our lungs? In dealing with
this question of design many persons get the cart before the horse.
Of course there is purpose or design in living things in a sense that
there is not in the non-living. Every part of a living organization
is purposeful. There is purpose in our lungs, our hearts, our
kidneys, in short in every part of our bodies. There is purpose in
the varnish on leaves, in the down and resin on buds, in the wings
and hooks of seeds, in the colors of flowers and of animals, in
fact, in everything that makes for the well-being of living things.
But not in the same sense is there purpose in the wind, the rain,
the snow, the tides, the heat, the cold, the rocks, the soil, the
fountains. Animate nature struggles; inanimate nature passively
submits. Dead matter forever seeks an equilibrium; living matter
forever struggles against an equilibrium. The waters separate the
clay and the sand and the pebbles from the soil and deposit each
in its own place; but it is not a struggle or an effort; it is
mechanical adjustment. It is not an effort for certain liquids to
form crystals, or for certain elements to combine with certain other
elements and form new compounds, but it is an effort for a tree
to resist the wind, to lift up tons of water and minerals against
gravity, to force its roots through the soil or grip the rock, and it
is an effort for the mother to bear and nurse her young. For anything
to live and grow, effort is needful; not commonly a painful effort,
but a joyous one.
So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what
part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as
a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think
not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass.
There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The
distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of
design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or
Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s moons. The circular forms and orbits
of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force
that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of
the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands
on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom
question we can never reach and formulate. The earth rests on nothing
and floats as lightly as a feather. All matter is probably only a
phase of the ether, but the ether defies all proof and all negation.
How quickly we get where no step can be taken! We cannot step off
the planet, though we may step off from every object on its surface.
There is no heat in sunlight till it reaches the earth; heat is an
experience of our bodies, and beings on the remotest planets, if
there are any, may and must receive adequate heat, and beings on
Mercury and Venus no more. Terrestrial physics and celestial physics
must be the same, and yet celestial mechanics find no place on the
surface of our planet. The laws of the cosmos bring to naught our
mundane conceptions. Where are up and down, east and west, over
and under, out in sidereal space? We balk at perpetual motion, yet
in the heavens, and in the interior of matter, behold perpetual
motion! Behold motion without friction and energy without waste or
dissipation! On the earth every visible body rests on some other
body, everything has a beginning and an end, but where is the
beginning or the ending of the cosmos? Where, then, in this quest do
we touch bottom? Nowhere. There is no bottom. Only measurable, finite
things have bottoms and bounds. The immeasurable, the Infinite, is
over us and under us, and our lives are like sparks against the
night. But, just as we live in the heavens and do not know it, so we
live and move and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off;
it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from it as from
gravity.
We are not like beings who have moved into a house, made and
furnished and provisioned in anticipation of our coming. We are
creatures born in a house, or amid an environment to which we
must slowly and more or less painfully fit ourselves. We are the
consequent, not the antecedent. In a different world we should have
been differently constituted. In a bigger world no doubt our bodies
would have been bigger and our strength greater; with less or with
more oxygen in the air, no doubt our lungs would have been different.
With less light no doubt our eyes would have been larger, and with
more light they would probably have been smaller. We do not feel
the pressure of the atmosphere, but make the pressure more or less,
and we are at once disturbed. The deep-sea fishes fairly explode
when brought to the surface, and no doubt the surface fishes would
be crushed in the deep sea bottoms. Just as we adjust our flying
machines to the tenuity of the air, and our oversea and undersea
boats to the density and weight of the water, so Nature adjusts her
organisms to their environment.
Man avails himself of all possible aids. His voluntary conquests of
nature are many and are constantly increasing, but his involuntary
dependencies upon her are many also. He did not launch himself into
this world, and he did not give his body, with all its wonderful
organs and powers, the shape it has, or elect to breathe or see or
hear or breed or eat or sleep. Something else determined all these
things for him. What is that something else? Our fathers called it
God; we call it Nature, because we live in a scientific and not in a
theological age. We are pantheistic and not theistic. Our gods are
everywhere, in everything created. Our minds are no longer hampered
by the idea of a maker and a thing made, a ruler or a governor and a
thing ruled or governed. The unity of Nature and God is a conception
fostered by science. We are compelled to adjust our minds to the idea
of a causeless universe, to a universe without beginning and without
ending, without a maker or a designer.
Our conception of cause and effect, or beginning and ending,
applies only on the surface of the earth; where currents and
counter-currents, action and reaction and interaction, are in
perpetual see-saw; where every body rests upon some other body, and
every cause has its antecedent cause; where we can live only by
dealing with parts and fragments, and by separating one thing from
another. The astronomic laws and conditions, or our conceptions of
them, are thrown into confusion the moment we try to apply them in
our practical mundane lives. In vain we try to abolish friction
and achieve perpetual motion, but the heavenly bodies move without
friction, and move forever and ever. Motion is the prime condition
of the universe. It is the condition or necessity we are under in
this world, on the surface of this planet, that sets us on the
quest of final causes and gives rise to our conceptions of the made
and the maker, the good and the bad, the end and the beginning. We
cannot say that we are watched over by the gods--our personification
of the universal mind that pervades nature--nor that we are not
watched over by them, because that were to use the language of our
surface existence. All we can say is that we are a part of the
cosmos, fragments of the total scheme of things, and share its laws
and conditions, and that the more perfectly we adjust the nature
within us to the nature without us, the better we fare. With the
Infinite there is no time and no space, only an everlasting here, an
everlasting now.
Yet how can puny man interpret the universe or say aught of it in
terms of his mundane experiences?
VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER
The laws and processes of Nature which to us are so beneficent, and
which seem made for our especial benefit, were in full operation
before life as we know it had become established. In fact, the
fatherhood and motherhood of Nature are all thoughts of our own,
inventions of our necessities. The paternity of gravitation and the
maternity of frost and snow are in no respect different. We are
the chance children--chance from our limited point of view--of an
impersonal, unhuman, universal mother. We may say, humanly speaking,
that Nature takes forethought of her children, but not afterthought.
She provides that they shall actually appear in due time in this
universe of conflicting and struggling forces, then lets them shift
for themselves. They are born on the firing-line, in the field of
perpetual war, and none escape unscathed. Indeed, they are moulded
and adjusted and equipped by the very conditions in which the peril
of their destruction lies. Gravity crushes them, and gravity gives
them their powers. Fire consumes them, and water drowns them, and yet
out of these things they came.
It is as if some god had planned the universe as a vast plant for
the production of the myriad forms of life, each in its own place
and season. In our little corner of it at a given hour of the great
geologic clock one form appears, or many forms; at another hour
other forms emerge, till man himself emerges as the culmination of a
long line of lowly forms, many vestiges of which still cling to him.
But the world is no more for man than for the mice and vermin that
pester him. It is for all.
The mystery back of all--what shall we say of it? And the good and
the evil that are so inextricably blended with it--what of them?
VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS
The grand movements of Nature, both in the heavens and in the earth,
are on such a scale of time and distance that without the aid of
science we could get little or no hint of them. Immeasurably slow
and slight they are, according to our standards. The stars are
fixed points in the sky to our unaided vision. Throughout the whole
historic period they have shown little or no change in their relative
positions, though they are moving in varying directions at the rate
of many miles a second. Come back in a thousand years and there is
no change; in thirty or forty thousand years, and changes of place
might be barely perceptible to an unaided eye. Not till hundreds
of thousands of years would Orion, or the Big Dipper, have become
noticeably distorted, and probably not till millions of years would
the heavens present combinations of stars forming new constellations.
The Pole Star will after millions of years probably drift far from
its present position, and the Milky Way be found in another part of
the heavens. When viewed from the extreme points in space one hundred
and eighty millions of miles apart which the earth’s orbit around the
sun gives us, the fixed stars remain fixed, they show little or no
parallax. To touch but the skirts of the Infinite exhausts our powers.
The geological changes upon the surface of this earth--mere
mustard-seed in space that it is--are on such a scale of time that
only an unfaltering scientific faith can take them in. The mountains
and the valleys seem eternal, but to the eye of the geologist they
are as flitting as the summer clouds. Look upon a Catskill landscape
with its long, flowing mountain-lines curving over summits three or
four thousand feet high, and its deep, broad, cradle-like valleys
checkered with fertile farms and homesteads, and try to think of it
as all the work of the slow and gentle rains and snows--geologic
time stroking them almost as gently as a mother caresses her baby.
Tried by human standards we live in a stable universe; change stops
with the hills and the stars; but, tried by geologic and astronomic
standards, it is as unsubstantial as the snows of winter or the dews
of summer. Perpetual flux and transition mark even the stars in their
courses. Astronomers calculate the weight of the earth in terms of
its own tons, something like six sextillion tons, but in and of
itself it weighs nothing; its weight is the pull of some other body,
in itself pound balances pound; it is only by detachment from it
that bodies have weight. As we approach the center, a pound would
be less and less; halfway down it would weigh eight ounces only; at
the center weight would disappear, the pull of matter on all sides
would be equal, there would no longer be up or down. Gravitation is
not a demon at the center of the earth, pulling all things toward
him; it is a force in every atom, pulling and being pulled in every
direction. Seek the center of the pulling, and all power vanishes.
The globe is on such a scale of size with reference to our lives and
powers that by no effort of the imagination can we adjust ourselves
to the contradictions presented. It is not by experience, nor by
living and acting, that we know it as a sphere, but by thinking and
speculating. Even if we travel round it, we get no other impression
than that it is an endless plain. We find no under side; it is all
top side. The practical inferences we draw from looking at the moon
are all contradicted by our experiences here. The lower limb of the
moon is not lower, as we should find if we were to go there, and the
under side of the earth is also the upper side.
Our astronomy is sound, but our actual life gives us no clue to its
truths. Only when we turn philosophers do we know the tremendous
voyage we are making, and then we only know it abstractly. We never
can know it concretely. The swift turning of the planet under our
feet, and its enormous speed in its orbit around the sun, are not
revealed to our sense as motion, but as changes from night to day
and from one season to another. Slow, soft, still, the moon and the
sun rise and drift across the heavens, and the impassive earth seems
like a ship becalmed. No hint at all of the more than rifle-bullet
speed through space. It is all too big for us. The celestial machine
is no machine at all to our senses, but its vast movements go on as
gently and as easily as the falling of the dew or the blooming of the
flowers, and almost as unconsciously to us as the circulation of the
blood in our hearts.
We are in the heavens and are a part of the great astronomical whirl
and procession, and know it not. It is symbolical of our lives
generally. We do not realize that we are a part of Nature till we
begin to think about it. Our lives proceed as if we were two--man
and Nature--two great antagonistic or contrary facts, but the two
are one; there is only Nature. We can draw circle within circle, and
circle around circle, but we cannot circumscribe Nature. That is the
fact over all.
As struggling human beings we diverge from one another, oppose one
another, defeat one another. All our differences and antagonisms
arise from our need of action and of living. The lesson of the sphere
is hard to learn, hard to state. Our powers of detachment are hardly
equal to it. Our lives are rounded by the great astronomic curves.
The contradictions which the intellect reveals, the unthinkable
mysteries that surround us, the heavens over us, the earth under us
always--the relativity of all things--thus does thought set us adrift
on a shoreless sea.
VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS
Bergson says that we are in trouble the moment we think of a creator
and a thing created; in other words, the moment we apply to the
universe as a whole the concepts which our practical lives yield us.
The only alternative I see is to think of the universe as uncreated,
which, I confess, does not make the problem much easier. I try to
help myself out by saying that our concepts are formed in a world
in which we deal with parts and fragments, lines and angles on the
surface of a sphere, and not with the sphere as a whole. Our senses
do not reveal the earth to us as a globe, but as a boundless plain
with no under side; we find no limits, and if we continue our search
long enough, we come back to the place from which we set out, but
from the opposite direction.