everyday concepts avail us very little; in fact, they set us down
wrong-end up. We look at the moon or the sun and we say, Surely if
we were at the South Pole of either of these bodies, we should be as
truly on the under side of it as the fly is when it alights at the
South Pole of the globe in our study. We should be in a position
opposite to that which we should occupy at the North Pole. That every
point on the surface of a cosmic sphere should be on top, or rather
that there should be no top, and no bottom; that these concepts
should be abolished; that if two inhabited globes should come in
collision, each would seem to the people upon the other to be falling
down out of the heavens upon them; that out in sidereal space not
even the Huns could drop bombs, or send up balloons, because there
would be no up and no down--when we grasp these facts, I say, we are
at the end of our tether; we not only do not know “where we are at,”
but we find there is no “at.” Our minds can deal with the cosmos
only in an abstract or mathematical way. As a concrete fact even our
little earth is too much for us. Not merely too big, it contradicts
all our experience. If we could build a sphere a mile through, or
ten miles or a hundred miles, or ten thousand miles through, could
we stand upon it at the South Pole? When we think of the daily
revolutions of the earth upon its axis, we are compelled to think of
it as turning over, because it brings the sun above us by day and
beneath us by night, and hence the puzzle to the unlettered mind as
to why the lakes and ponds do not all spill out.
Among the heavenly bodies other laws prevail; there is motion without
friction or dissipation of energy; there is no body at rest; there
is no motion in right lines, but only in curved lines; there is no
beginning nor ending; there is only eternal progression; and this is
a condition of things that throws our mental adjustments all out of
gear. The problem of God, the problem of creation, the problem of
future life, throw our mental adjustments out of gear in the same way.
There is order and harmony in our own solar system and doubtless in
countless others in the immensity of space, but the cosmos as a whole
does not seem to present this harmony, as collisions actually occur.
Astronomers tell us that the units of the starry hosts are moving in
all directions and that collisions are inevitable, though at such
vast intervals, owing to the inconceivable spaces, that human time
can take no note of them. A billion of our years, like a billion of
our miles, count for but little in the infinitudes of the universe.
When we try to think that the universe had a creator, that there
was a time when it did not exist, that it was called into being by
a power apart from itself, do we not fall down completely? We can,
of course, think in arbitrary terms; our imaginations are equal to
almost any feat (Lewis Carroll’s was equal to “Alice in Wonderland”;
Dante’s was equal to making the world shudder over his pictures of
the inferno): but the understanding has to have solid ground to go
upon, and where is the solid ground in our idea of creation? We are
off the sphere, alone in space, face to face with the Infinite, and
we have no language in which to express ourselves.
IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE
We habitually think or speak of ourselves as something apart from
Nature, as belonging to some higher order of reality, when, in fact,
we are as much a part of the total scheme of things as are the trees
and the beasts of the field. True, we are separated from them by a
gulf, but the gulf has been bridged, and bridged by Nature, and both
sides are equally her territory.
Nature is the one supreme reality, the sum total of the visible
and invisible bodies and forces that surround us, out of which we
came and of which we form a part. Nature is all things to all men,
because she is the larger fact, and holds an infinite diversity in an
all-embracing unity.
When we come to look upon man in this light, when we see his whole
civilization and all his achievements upon the earth--his science,
his philosophy, his art, his religion, yea, his follies and crimes
and superstitions, his wars and hatreds, as well as his heroism and
devotion--as parts of Nature, as expressions of the same total cosmic
energy as are all things else, we have gained an astronomic point of
view; we see things in orbic completeness.
Nature is all-inclusive. We cannot draw a circle around that circle.
We have so long been wont to solve our riddles by invoking the
supernatural that the habit has become ingrained. We can only do
as Carlyle did, feed our minds with words and fall back upon the
natural-supernatural.
Our attitudes toward Nature differ as widely as do our occupations,
our characters, and our temperaments. There is the direct, practical
attitude of the farmer, the miner, the engineer, the sailor, the
sportsman, the traveler, and the explorer; there is the gay and
holiday attitude of the camper-out and the picnicker; there is the
sympathetic and appreciative attitude of the nature-lover; there is
the imaginative and creative attitude of the artist and the poet;
there is the more or less rapt and mystical attitude of the religious
enthusiast; there is the inquisitive and experimental attitude of the
man of science; and there is the meditative and speculative attitude
of the philosopher.
We almost invariably personify Nature and read our own traits and
limitations into her. We say she is wise or she is foolish; she
is cruel or she is kind; she fails or she succeeds. The early
philosophers said that Nature abhorred a vacuum. Darwin says that
she “tells us in the most emphatic manner that she abhors perpetual
self-fertilization.” There are times when the most rigid man of
science humanizes Nature in this way. We look upon ourselves as
taking liberties with her; we discipline her and train her in the
ways she should go for our good; we pit her forces against one
another. Her flowers, her birds, her sunsets, her rainbows, her
waterfalls, her mountain lakes, her ocean-shores, her midnight skies,
at times move us and lift us above ourselves. On the other hand,
there are times when we frown upon her, or despitefully use her and
call her hard names. When her storms or her frosts or her blights or
her droughts or her insect hordes destroy our crops, or lay waste our
forests or sweep away our buildings or kill our cattle or inundate
our towns and villages, we instinctively look upon her as our enemy,
and, so far as we are able, arm ourselves against her. Emerson
speaks of Nature as that “terrific or beneficent force.” It is both.
Indeed, we may use a stronger adjective and say that at times it is a
malevolent force.
We ascribe all our human qualities and traits to Nature. Indeed, we
can hardly speak of her without personifying her. As we are a part of
her, how can we fail to see our own traits in her? At least, how else
can we interpret her except in terms of our own being? Early man did
this entirely. All the natural forces and appearances took on his own
image, and were for or against him. When we seek to interpret Nature
we still do it in the terms of literature, of poetry. We humanize
her, which means, of course, that we interpret ourselves. Nature
reflects the spirit we bring to her. She is gay, somber, beautiful,
winsome, repellent, wise or foolish, just in the degree in which we
ourselves are capable of these emotions or possess these qualities.
She is terrifying because we have a capacity for terror. She is
soothing when we are in a mood to be soothed. She is sublime only so
far as we have the capacity to experience this emotion.
It is our reactions to Nature that give rise to the qualities we
ascribe to her. The music of the æolian harp is not in the wind; its
origin is the reaction of the harp to the wind, but it is not music
until it reaches the human ear. The colors of the landscape are not
in the rocks and trees and waters, but in the experiences of the eye
when the vibrations of ether which we call light are reflected back
to it from these objects.
We create the world in which we live. I love Nature, but Nature does
not love me. Love is an emotion which rocks and clouds do not feel.
Nature loves me in my fellow beings. The breezes caress me, the
morning refreshes me, the rain on the roof soothes me--that is, when
I am in a mood to be caressed and refreshed and soothed. The main
matter is the part I play in these things. All is directed to me and
you because we are adjusted to all. No more is the kite or the sail
adjusted to the wind, the water-wheel to the falling water, than are
we adjusted to outward Nature. She is the primary and everlasting
fact; we, as living beings, are the secondary and temporary facts.
X. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE
The survival of the fittest does not mean the survival of the best
from the human point of view. The lower orders of humanity are better
fitted to survive than the higher orders--hardier, more prolific,
having a fuller measure of life. The cultivated plants--wheat, corn,
rye, barley, oats--are less fitted to survive than what we call
weeds. The latter can shift for themselves, but the former cannot.
We lament the decay of the native Anglo-Saxon stock in this country,
and the increase of the races from southern Europe and from the
Orient. They stand our pitiless sunlight better than do the
descendants of our Puritan ancestors. From our point of view this
rule of natural selection will not result in a superior race, but in
an inferior; not in better men, but in better animals. Character and
intellect win in those fields where character and intellect tell, but
where muscle and brawn and vitality tell more they fail.
The Japanese have great power of survival; they are hardy, prolific
and pushing. The Germans also have great survival power, greater
than the French; they are more prolific, more materialistic, nearer
the brutes; they are not handicapped with much soul. They are
morally blind, but intellectually clever. Their moral blindness and
insensibility have resulted in their downfall. Great Britain leads
the European nations because she is not only hardy and prolific, but
she also has the gift of empire; she builds upon law and order; she
establishes justice and fair play.
In the Darwinian sense the Jews are the fittest to survive of all the
races of man. They are prolific and grasping; they will always get
what belongs to them, and a little more; they are bound to possess
the earth. The only drawback I see is that they do not take kindly to
the soil. Trade alone will not give a nation the supremacy.
XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE
Think how we come into the world, what an important thing it is to
each of us and to the world, and yet how fortuitous and haphazard it
all is, and what precautions are often taken to prevent our coming!
See the deformed, the half-witted, the low-browed, the degenerate,
that come. The great army of the common, the few capable of higher
and finer things. Nature apparently finds her account in one class
the same as in the other, in Pat as well as in Paul, in the inferior
races as well as in the higher.
In our manufacturing affairs we aim to turn out the best article
possible--the best shoe, the best hat, the best gun, the best book;
but Nature makes no such effort in the case of man, though she does
in the case of the lower orders. Probably every individual bird or
bug or four-footed beast in a state of nature is perfect of its
kind, that is, suited to its place in the scheme of organic life. But
how different with man! It is the price he pays for his freedom, his
power of choice. The birds and the beasts have no power of choice,
they are entirely in the hands of Nature. They are all moulded to one
pattern.
The advantage that comes to man from his power of choice is greater
variation, hence greater progress. He crosses or reverses or turns
aside the laws of Nature, or bends them to his will, and for this
privilege he pays the price of idiocy, deformity, and the vast mass
of commonplace humanity. His gain is now and then men of exceptional
ability, geniuses, who lead the race forward. We know that every
improved breed of chicken or sheep or swine will come true, but we
do not know in anything like the same degree of certainty that the
Emersons and the Lincolns and the Tennysons will repeat and continue
the type. Cultivated fruit relapses in the seed, and cultivated
persons often do the same.
On the other hand, rude and ordinary humanity now and then far
transcends itself in its offspring, just as the new and choice apple
or peach or plum has its humble origin in a seedling.
XII. ILLUSIONS
In his “Conduct of Life” Emerson has an essay on “Illusions” in which
he describes the semblance to midnight skies paved with stars which
the guide produces in the Mammoth Cave by hiding himself and throwing
the rays of his torch athwart the ceiling set thick with transparent
rock crystals. The effect is quite startling. For the moment it is
hard to resist the conviction that you are actually looking upon the
cloudless sky at night. But in reality is not the noonday sky just as
much of an illusion, except that there are no mimic stars? The blue
dome overhead is an illusion. There is no dome there. The sky is a
mere apparition. It is not a body or a reality as it seems to be;
it is mere empty space, though it has the effect upon us of a vast
blue dome. How genial and inviting it looks when we see it peeping
through the clouds, and how glorious when we see it swept free from
clouds! Its purity, its serenity, its elevated character, move us to
regard it as the abode of superior beings. The telescope dispels our
illusions; the sky is not a transparent realm, but only an extension
of earthly conditions. Heaven, the abode of the blest, takes its name
from this negation of vacancy. Our notions of a personal God are
similar illusions. God is as real as the sky is, and no more so, even
though in our devout moods we lift our eyes heavenward and identify
him with this comforting illusion.
All our life illusions brood over us. The night is only a shadow--the
negation of light; and yet it plays a part in our lives as real as
that of health or friends or climate, as real, but of another kind.
Time itself is an illusion. The future does not exist nor the past;
yet how are our lives influenced by the memory of the one and our
anticipations of the other!
The world is, indeed, full of illusion. We fancy that luminous
bodies shoot out rays of light such as we appear to see when we look
at them. We see beams and scintillations when we look at the stars
and the sun; but is it not all a trick of the eye? The light from a
luminous body goes out in all directions, not in separated rays, but
as vibrations in the ether. When we throw a stone into a still pool
of water a wave motion is set up which spreads in concentric circles.
But the vibrations called “light,” considered as a whole, assume the
form of a sphere; they go from the luminous body to every point of
a hollow sphere. We see a star as a bright point in the sky, but if
the universe were full of eyes, every eye could see that star; its
light goes to every point of the hollow sphere of Infinity. But no
more than does the light of the candle in your hand, or the lamp on
your table go to Infinity, if unobstructed. Stars which cannot be
seen by the most powerful telescope must yet radiate their light into
infinite space. Is that light lost? Modern science seems to hold to
the view that in the ether of space no rays of light can ever be
lost. What becomes of them? It is certain that a wavelet in a lake
can be lost if the lake is large enough. It soon dies out. It becomes
dissipated. Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered or
turned into heat or light or electricity, and the waves that break
and die upon the beach, no matter how cold they are, give up their
energy as heat. They must raise the temperature some fraction of a
degree.
XIII. IS NATURE SUICIDAL?
Emerson never committed himself to a belief in immortality as usually
understood--continued existence in another world; but he was always
on the lookout for hints and suggestions to spur his lagging faith on
the subject. He read Martial and praised his literary faculty. He is
the true writer, he said, a chemical and not a mechanical mixture:
“Martial suggests again, as every purely literary book does, the
immortality. We see we are wiser than we were: we are older. Can
Nature afford to lose such improvements? Is Nature a suicide?” The
same questions I have heard Whitman ask, questions asked probably by
thoughtful men in all ages.
But are not such questions prompted by our own petty economies? We
must save what we have gained. Not so Nature. Gain and loss with her
are one. All is hers. She has infinite time, and infinite abundance.
How can she afford so many dead worlds and burnt-out suns scattered
throughout sidereal space, like boulders in a New England field? How
can she afford to wait millions of years before life comes to the
superior planets, if it ever comes? What economy is that which strews
the way of evolution with untold numbers of extinct species? What
economy is that which makes one species prey upon another?--which
undoes with one hand what she achieves with the other? Nature was
millions of years in bringing man out of the earth,--the end and
flower of her whole scheme from our point of view,--and probably
in far less time he will have disappeared from the earth. How can
she afford it? “Is Nature suicidal?” She certainly is, tried by
our standards. Not that she is less than we, but so inconceivably
more. She plays the game for her own amusement. She evaporates the
rivers and the seas, confident that the water will come back again.
She keeps the currents going; the ebb and flow never cease. Night
and day, life and death, go hand in hand. Her “improvements” are
improvements for a day, an hour, a moment--like snowflakes on the
river--“a moment white, then gone forever.” They are crystals that
perish, flowers that fall. Nature knows no exhaustion; she can repeat
the process continuously. Only the unlimited is inexhaustible. The
infinite goes on forever. Our economics pale in the face of Nature’s
prodigalities. A race like the Greeks perishes, and Nature’s treasury
is still full. Every spring in our climate the marvel of leaf and
flower is repeated in the plants and forests, and every fall the work
is undone. The great, the noble, the heroic, youth, age, manhood,
womanhood, fail and disappear, and still the game goes on. The rivers
drain the hills and mountains, and still they never run dry. Spring
and summer do not exhaust the fertility of Nature. The rivers carry
the soil into the sea, but they do not carry it off the globe. We
cannot defertilize the earth. What the seas lose, the clouds gain;
what the clouds lose, the earth gains; what the hills lose, the sea
gains; and so the circle is complete.
Nature has her own economies that answer to our own. In the use of
means to an end, as in the living world, there must be economy of
time, of space, of power; there must be adjustments, compensations,
and so on. In the tropics vegetation takes its time. No hurry; the
heat does not fail. In the temperate zone there is less time, and
the pace of vegetation is faster. In the frigid zone it is faster
still, the time is brief; there is no prodigality of leaf and stalk
and flower; hurry up is the cry. The stalk is short, the flowering is
brief, the goal is the seed which must be matured. In our climate,
if a plant gets a later start, or is cut down and compelled to bloom
again,--for example, the burdock,--how it hastens, how it pushes out
its seed-vessels from the main stalk! The late fall dandelions do not
indulge in long stalks; they bloom close to the ground and develop
their down-seed balloons or parachutes at once. In the Far North the
willow and birch are mere running vines, but they achieve fruit.
The economy of living nature is the basis of our economy; we improve
upon it, we take a short cut, we save time and save power. We trim
our trees, we remove obstructions, we fertilize, we graft, we sow
and plant. Nature is prodigal of her spawn and pollen to offset the
element of chance that enters into the action of the winds and the
waves.
The wild creatures have their instinctive economies and ways of
getting on in the world. They prepare for the winter; they provide
for their young; they practice the arts of concealment; they are
wise for their own good; they do not commit suicide. The plants have
their economies, and the insects have theirs, but when we talk of
the economy of Nature, we are beyond soundings. Nature cannot spend
more than she earns; her ledgers always balance; her capital cannot
be impaired. There is no waste, in our sense, in the universe. Can
you destroy magnetism by pulverizing the magnet? Would electricity be
quenched if no storm-cloud ever again appeared in the sky?
XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY
Is it not reassuring to know that we cannot get out of the
universe--that whatever is real about us cannot be destroyed, but can
only suffer change? All the elements that enter into my body must
persist; they always have persisted through all the vicissitudes of
astronomic and geologic time. We are as sure of that as we are sure
of anything, and we are sure that they will continue in some form
to exist. We believe it without proof. Our scientific faith carries
us over this gulf--our faith in the oneness and integrity of the
universe. Is there anything real, in the same sense, in what we call
our minds or souls? Huxley was convinced that consciousness was as
real as matter and energy, and must persist like them--persist in
other persons who follow us; but how about our individual selves?
And how about consciousness when the race of man becomes extinct?
We can only take refuge in the thought that consciousness will
dawn and continue in other worlds through all time, or rather
endless time, since the all of a thing implies limits. Equally to
make consciousness coeval with matter and energy, we must think
of it as having existed in other worlds throughout an endless and
beginningless past. But my consciousness and your consciousness
are bound up with certain combinations of matter which we know are
unstable--in fact, are the result, in a sense, of their instability,
their ceaseless change.
In the final change, which we call death, what happens to
consciousness? When we try to think of it in terms of our actual
experience with tangible bodies, we think of it as gone out,
non-existent, as truly so as is the flame of the candle when we blow
it out, or as is the star form of the snowflake when it is melted.
Does it help us any to think of the soul, or consciousness, in terms
of the imponderable bodies--light, electricity, radio-activity?
Do all these wireless messages that go forth into the air, go on
forever? Do these impulses reach the farthest stars, and still
persist? Do our thoughts persist upon the ether? Here, in this room,
here in this air that you may inclose with your two hands, are
vibrating wireless messages from far and near, though we are not
able to detect them. Here also the ether may be tremulous with the
thoughts of our friends on the other side of the globe, yes, and with
the thoughts of our friends who have ceased to live, as we know life.
The ether of space may still be vibrating with the thoughts of Plato
and Aristotle, of Moses and Solomon.
Do we impress ourselves momentarily upon the ether around us,
and is this what the mediums and the clairvoyants recover? Is
the persistence of our thoughts upon the ether the secret of the
mind-reader’s art, and of all the marvelous things disclosed by
psychic research? Is this the only immortality, the immortality of
the endless persistence of vibrations from our brains? Or must we
think of our personalities as disembodied and drifting about as
separate entities in the great Nowhere?
Though a dreamer and an idealist, I am only truly interested in a
natural explanation of things--an explanation that is in harmony with
our experiences in this world. The so-called supernatural explanation
does not interest me at all. We cannot grasp it and bring it to the
test of reason and experience. It is like a bridge with one or more
spans missing--only faith can carry us over, and faith that has
nothing to stand upon cannot really carry us over. It travels in a
circle, and leaves us where it found us.