While I cannot believe that we live in a world of chance, any more
than Darwin could, yet I feel that I am as free from any teleological
taint as he was. The world-old notion of a creator and director,
sitting apart from the universe and shaping and controlling all its
affairs, a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in my mind.
Kings and despots have had their day, both in heaven and on earth. The
universe is a democracy. The Whole directs the Whole. Every particle
plays its own part, and yet the universe is a unit as much as is the
human body, with all its myriad of individual cells, and all its many
separate organs functioning in harmony. And the mind I see in nature
is just as obvious as the mind I see in myself, and subject to the
same imperfections and limitations.
In following Lamarck I am not disturbed by the bogey of teleology, or
the ghost of mysticism. I am persuaded that there is something
immanent in the universe, pervading every atom and molecule in it,
that knows what it wants--a Cosmic Mind or Intelligence that we must
take account of if we would make any headway in trying to understand
the world in which we find ourselves.
When we deny God it is always in behalf of some other god. We are
compelled to recognize something not ourselves from which we proceed,
and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or
will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are
a part of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or the cloud.
Each of us is a fraction of the universal Eternal Intelligence. Is it
unscientific to believe that our own minds have their counterpart or
their origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is our own
intelligence all there is of mind-manifestation in the universe? Where
did we get this divine gift? Did we take all there was of it?
Certainly we did not ourselves invent it. It would require
considerable wit to do that. Mind is immanent in nature, but in man
alone it becomes self-conscious. Wherever there is adaptation of means
to an end, there is mind.
Yet we use the terms "guidance," "predetermination," and so on, at the
risk of being misunderstood. All such terms are charged with the
meaning that our daily lives impart to them and, when applied to the
processes of the Cosmos, are only half-truths. From our experience
with objects and forces in this world, the earth ought to rest upon
something, and that object upon something, and the moon ought to fall
upon the earth, and the earth fall into the sun, and, in fact, the
whole sidereal system ought to collapse. But it does not, and will
not. As nearly as we can put it into words, the whole visible universe
floats in a boundless and fathomless sea of energy; and that is all we
know about it.
If chance brought us here and endowed us with our bodies and our
minds, and keeps us here, and adapts us to the world in which we live,
is not Chance a good enough god for any of us? Or if Natural Selection
did it, or orthogenesis or epigenesis, or any other genesis, have we
not in any of these found a god equal to the occasion? Darwin goes
wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he describes or
characterizes the activities of Nature in terms of our own activities.
Man's selection affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best to
man is not the best to Nature. For instance, she is concerned with
color and form only so far as they have survival value. We are
concerned more with intrinsic values.
"Man," says Darwin, "selects only for his own good; Nature only for
the good of the being which she tends." But Nature's good is of
another order than man's: it is the good of all. Nature aims at a
general good, man at a particular good to himself. Man waters his
garden; Nature sends the rain broadcast upon the just and the unjust,
upon the sea as upon the land. Man directs and controls his planting
and his harvesting along specific lines: he selects his seed and
prepares his soil; Nature has no system in this respect: she trusts
her seeds to the winds and the waters, and to beasts and birds, and
her harvest rarely fails.
Nature's methods, we say, are blind, haphazard; the wind blows where
it listeth, and the seeds fall where the winds and waters carry them;
the frosts blight this section and spare that; the rains flood the
country in the West and the drought burns up the vegetation in the
East. And yet we survive and prosper. Nature averages up well. We see
nothing like purpose or will in her total scheme of things, yet inside
her hit-and-miss methods, her storms and tornadoes and earthquakes and
distempers, we see a fundamental benefaction. If it is not good-will,
it amounts to the same thing. Our fathers saw special providences, but
we see only unchangeable laws. To compare Nature's selection with
man's selection is like arguing from man's art to Nature's art.
Nature has no art, no architecture, no music. Her temples, as the
poets tell us, are the woods, her harps the branches of the trees, her
minstrels the birds and insects, her gardens the fields and
waysides--all safe comparisons for purposes of literature, but not for
purposes of science.
Man alone selects, or works by a definite method. Might we not as well
say that Nature ploughs and plants and trims and harvests? We pick out
our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our
purpose. We go straight to our object, with as little delay and waste
as possible. Not so Nature. Her course is always a round-about one.
Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Our choice selection of
rich milkers, prolific poultry, or heavy-fleeced sheep is with her
quickly sacrificed for the qualities of strength and cunning and
speed, as these alone have survival value. Man wants specific results
at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled
only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of
her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome.
What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthropomorphic view of
Nature--Nature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural
Selection is man's selection read into animate nature. We see in
nature what we have to call intelligence--the adaptation of means to
ends. We see purpose in all living things, but not in the same sense
in non-living things. The purpose is not in the light, but in the eye;
in the ear, but not in the sound; in the lungs, and not in the air; in
the stomach, and not in the food; in the various organs of the body,
and not in the forces that surround and act upon it. We cannot say
that the purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun to give
light and warmth, in the sense that we can say it is the purpose of
the eyelid to protect the eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or
of the varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves.
The world was not made for us, but we are here because the world was
made as it is. We are the secondary fact and not the primary. Nature
is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is
from her that we get our ideas of all these things. All parts and
organs of living bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is blind,
but she knows what she wants and she gets it. She is blind, I say,
because she is all eyes, and sees through the buds of her trees and
the rootlets of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her
animals. And, though I believe that the accumulation of variations is
the key to new species, yet this accumulation is not based upon
outward utility but upon an innate tendency to development--the push
of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson names it; not primarily
because the variations are advantages, but because the formation of a
new species is such a slow process, stretches over such a period of
geologic time, that the slight variations from generation to
generation could have no survival value. The primary factor is the
inherent tendency to development. The origin of species is on a scale
of time of enormous magnitude. What takes place among our domestic
animals of a summer day is by no means a safe guide as to what befell
their ancestors in the abysses of geologic time. It is true that
Nature may be read in the little as well as in the big,--_Natura in
minimis existat_,--in the gnat as well as in the elephant; but she
cannot be read in our yearly calendars as she can in the calendars of
the geologic strata. Species go out and species come in; the book of
natural revelation opens and closes at chance places, and rarely do we
get a continuous record--in no other case more clearly than in that of
the horse.
The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene
times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of
four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our
own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time,
one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered. The survival value of
the slight gains in size and strength from millennium to millennium
could have played no part. It was the indwelling necessity toward
development that determined the issue. This assertion does not deliver
us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that
ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little
eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is
potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever
element of mystery may enter into the problem.
In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the fittest. In fields
where strength wins, the strongest are the fittest. In fields where
sense-acuteness wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the
fittest.
When we come to the race of man, the fittest to survive, from our
moral and intellectual point of view, is not always the best. The
lower orders of humanity are usually better fitted to survive than the
higher orders--they are much more prolific and adaptive. The tares are
better fitted to survive than the wheat. Every man's hand is against
the weeds, and every man's hand gives a lift to the corn and the
wheat, but the weeds do not fail. There is nothing like original sin
to keep a man or a plant going. Emerson's gardener was probably better
fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton's butler than Newton himself.
Most naturalists will side with Darwin in rejecting the idea of Asa
Gray, that the stream of variation has been guided by a higher power,
unless they think of the will of this power as inherent in every
molecule of matter; but guidance in the usual theological sense is not
to be thought of; the principle of guidance cannot be separated from
the thing guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley's which he
related to Huxley. A heathen khan in Tartary was visited by a pair of
proselytizing moollahs. The first moollah said, "O Khan, worship my
god. He is so wise that he made all things!" Moollah Number Two said,
"O Khan, worship my god. He is so wise that he makes all things make
themselves!" Number Two won the day.