We often hear it said of a man that he was born too early, or too
late, but is it ever true? If he is behind his times, would he not
have been behind at whatever period he had been born? If he is ahead
of his times, is not the same thing true? In the vegetable world the
early flowers and fruit blossoms are often cut off by the frost, but
not so in the world of man. Babies are in order at any time. Is a
poet, or a philosopher, ever born too late? or too early? If Emerson
had been born a century earlier, his heterodoxy would have stood in
his way; but in that case he would not have been a heretic. Whitman
would have had to wait for a hearing at whatever period he was born.
He said he was willing to wait for the growth of the taste for
himself, and it finally came. Emerson's first thin volume called
"Nature" did not sell the first edition of five hundred copies in ten
years, but would it have been different at any other time? A piece of
true literature is not superseded. The fame of man may rise and fall,
but it lasts. Was Watt too early with his steam-engine, or Morse too
early with his telegraph? Or Bell too early with his telephone? Or
Edison with his phonograph or his incandescent light? Or the Wright
brothers with their flying-machine? Or Henry Ford with his motor-car?
Before gasolene was discovered they would have been too early, but
then their inventions would not have materialized.
The world moves, and great men are the springs of progress. But no man
is born too soon or too late.
* * * * *
A fadeless flower is no flower at all. How Nature ever came to produce
one is a wonder. Would not paper flowers do as well?
* * * * *
The most memorable days in our lives are the days when we meet a great
man.
* * * * *
How stealthy and silent a thing is that terrible power which we have
under control in our homes, yet which shakes the heavens in thunder!
It comes and goes as silently as a spirit. In fact, it is nearer a
spirit than anything else known to us. We touch a button and here it
is, like an errand-boy who appears with his cap in his hand and meekly
asks, "What will you have?"
* * * * *
A few days ago I was writing of meteoric men. But are we not all like
meteors that cut across the sky and are quickly swallowed up by the
darkness--some of us leaving a trail that lasts a little longer than
others, but all gone in a breath?
Our great pulpit orator Beecher, how little he left that cold print
does not kill! As a young man I used nearly to run my legs off to get
to Plymouth Church before the doors were closed. Under his
trumpet-like voice I was like a reed bent by the wind, but now when in
a book made up of quotations I see passages from his sermons, they
seem thin and flimsy. Beecher's oratory was all for the ear and not
for the eye and mind. In truth, is the world indebted to the pulpit
for much good literature? Robertson's sermons can be read in the
library, and there are others of the great English divines. But
oratory is action and passion. "Great volumes of animal heat," Emerson
names as one of the qualities of the orator.
The speeches of Wendell Phillips will bear print because his oratory
was of the quiet, conversational kind. Webster's, of course, stand the
test of print, but do Clay's or Calhoun's? In our time oratory, as
such, has about gone out. Rarely now do we hear the eagle scream in
Congress or on the platform. Men aim to speak earnestly and
convincingly, but not oratorically. President Wilson is a very
convincing speaker, but he indulges in no oratory. The one who makes a
great effort to be eloquent always fails. Noise and fury and
over-emphasis are not eloquent. "True eloquence," says Pascal,
"scorns eloquence."
There is no moral law in nature, but there is that out of which the
moral law arose. There is no answer to prayer in the heavens above, or
in the earth beneath, except in so far as the attitude of sincere
prayer is a prophecy of the good it pleads for. Prayer for peace of
mind, for charity, for gratitude, for light, for courage, is answered
in the sincere asking. Prayer for material good is often prayer
against wind and tide, but wind and tide obey those who can rule them.
Our ethical standards injected into world-history lead to confusion
and contradiction. Introduced into the jungle, they would put an end
to life there; introduced into the sea, they would put an end to life
there; the rule that it is more blessed to give than to receive would
put an end to all competitive business. Our ethical standards are
narrow, artificial, and apply only to civilized communities. Nations
have rarely observed them till the present day.
* * * * *
If the world is any better for my having lived in it, it is because I
have pointed the way to a sane and happy life on terms within reach of
all, in my love and joyous acceptance of the works of Nature about me.
I have not tried, as the phrase is, to lead my readers from Nature up
to Nature's God, because I cannot separate the one from the other. If
your heart warms toward the visible creation, and toward your fellow
men, you have the root of the matter in you. The power we call God
does not sustain a mechanical or secondary relation to the universe,
but is vital in it, or one with it. To give this power human
lineaments and attributes, as our fathers did, only limits and
belittles it. And to talk of leading from Nature up to Nature's God is
to miss the God that throbs in every spear of grass and vibrates in
the wing of every insect that hums. The Infinite is immanent in this
universe.
* * * * *
"The faith that truth exists" is the way that William James begins one
of his sentences. Of course truth exists where the mind of man exists.
A new man and there is new truth. Truth, in this sense, is a way of
looking at things that is agreeable, or that gives satisfaction to the
human mind. Truth is not a definite fixed quantity, like the gold or
silver of a country. It is no more a fixed quantity than is beauty. It
is an experience of the human mind. Beauty and truth are what we make
them. We say the world is full of beauty. What we mean is that the
world is full of things that give us the pleasure, or awaken in us the
sentiment which we call by that name.
The broadest truths are born of the broadest minds. Narrow minds are
so named from their narrow views of things.
Pilate's question, "What is Truth?" sets the whole world by the ears.
The question of right and wrong is another thing. Such questions refer
to action and the conduct of our lives. In religion, in politics, in
economics, in sociology, what is truth to one man may be error to
another. We may adopt a course of action because it seems the more
expedient. Debatable questions have two sides to them. In the moral
realm that is true which is agreeable to the largest number of
competent judges. A mind that could see further and deeper might
reverse all our verdicts. To be right on any question in the moral
realm is to be in accord with that which makes for the greatest good
to the greatest number. In our Civil War the South believed itself
right in seceding from the Union; the North, in fighting to preserve
the Union. Both sections now see that the North had the larger right.
The South was sectional, the North national. Each of the great
political parties thinks it has a monopoly of the truth, but the truth
usually lies midway between them. Questions of right and wrong do not
necessarily mean questions of true and false. "There is nothing either
good or bad," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." This may be
good Christian Science doctrine, but it is doubtful philosophy.
* * * * *
Yesterday, as I stood on the hill above Slabsides and looked over the
landscape dotted with farms just greening in the April sun, the
thought struck me afresh that all this soil, all the fertile fields,
all these leagues on leagues of sloping valleys and rolling hills came
from the decay of the rocks, and that the chief agent in bringing
about this decay and degradation was the gentle rain from heaven--that
without the rain through the past geologic ages, the scene I looked
upon would have been only one wild welter of broken or crumpled rocky
strata, not a green thing, not a living thing, should I have seen.
In the Hawaiian Islands one may have proof of this before his eyes. On
one end of the island of Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its
deep valleys and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical verdure,
while on the other end, barely ten miles away, rain never falls, and
the barren, rocky desolation which the scene presents I can never
forget. No rain, no soil; no soil, no life.
We are, therefore, children of the rocks; the rocks are our mother,
and the rains our father.
* * * * *
When the stream of life, through some favoring condition, breaks
through its natural checks and bounds, and inundates and destroys
whole provinces of other forms, as when the locusts, the
forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-worm, the potato beetle,
unduly multiply and devastate fields and forests and the farmer's
crops, what do we witness but Nature's sheer excess and intemperance?
Life as we usually see it is the result of a complex system of checks
and counter-checks. The carnivorous animals are a check on the
herbivorous; the hawks and owls are a check on the birds and fowls;
the cats and weasels are a check on the small rodents, which are very
prolific. The different species of plants and trees are a check upon
one another.
* * * * *
I think the main reason of the abundance of wealth in the country is
that every man, equipped as he is with so many modern scientific
appliances and tools, is multiplied four or five times. He is equal to
that number of men in his capacity to do things as compared with the
men of fifty or seventy years ago. The farmer, with his
mowing-machine, his horse-rake, his automobile, his tractor engine and
gang ploughs or his sulky ploughs, his hay-loader, his corn-planter,
and so on, does the work of many men. Machinery takes the place of
men. Gasolene and kerosene oil give man a great advantage. Dynamite,
too,--what a giant that is in his service! The higher cost of living
does not offset this advantage.
The condition in Europe at this time is quite different: there the
energies of men have been directed not to the accumulation of wealth,
but to the destruction of wealth. Hence, while the war has enriched
us, it has impoverished Europe.
* * * * *
Why are women given so much more to ornaments and superfluities in
dress and finery than men? In the animal kingdom below man, save in a
few instances, it is the male that wears the showy decorations. The
male birds have the bright plumes; the male sheep have the big horns;
the stag has the antlers; the male lion has the heavy mane; the male
firefly has wings and carries the lamp. With the barnyard fowl the
male has the long spurs and the showy comb and wattles. In the crow
tribe, the male cannot be distinguished from the female, nor among the
fly-catchers, nor among the snipes and plovers. But when we come to
the human species, and especially among the white races, the female
fairly runs riot in ornamentation. If it is not to attract the male,
what is it for? It has been pretty clearly shown that what Darwin
calls "sexual selection" plays no part. Woman wishes to excite the
passion of love. She has an instinct for motherhood; the perpetuity of
the species is at the bottom of it all. Woman knows how to make her
dress alluring, how to make it provocative, how much to reveal, how
much to conceal. A certain voluptuousness is the ambition of all
women; anything but to be skinny and raw-boned. She does not want to
be muscular and flat-chested, nor, on the other hand, to be
over-stout, but she prays for the flowing lines and the plumpness that
belong to youth. A lean man does not repel her, nor a rugged, bony
frame. Woman's garments are of a different texture and on a different
scale than those of man, and much more hampering. Her ruffles and
ribbons and laces all play their part. Her stockings even are a vital
problem, more important than her religion. We do not care where she
worships if her dress is attractive. Emerson reports that a lady said
to him that a sense of being well-dressed at church gave a
satisfaction which religion could not give.
With man the male defends and safeguards the female. True that among
savage tribes he makes a slave of her, but in the white races he will
defend her with his life. She does not take up arms, she does not go
to sea. She does not work in mines, or as a rule engage in the rough
work of the world. In Europe she works in the field, and we have had
farmerettes in this country, but I know of no feminine engineers or
carpenters or stone masons. There have been a few women explorers and
Alpine climbers, and investigators in science, but only a few. The
discovery of radium is chiefly accredited to a woman, and women have a
few valuable inventions to their credit. I saw a valuable and
ingenious machine, in a great automobile factory, that was invented by
a woman. Now that woman has won the franchise in this country, we are
waiting to see if politics will be purified.
The "weaker sex," surely. How much easier do women cry than men! how
much more easily are they scared! And yet, how much more pain they can
endure! And how much more devoted are they to their children!
* * * * *
Why does any extended view from a mountain-top over a broad landscape,
no matter what the features of that landscape, awaken in us the
emotion of the beautiful? Is it because the eye loves a long range, a
broad sweep? Or do we have a sense of victory? The book of the
landscape is now open before us, and we can read it page after page.
All these weary miles where we tramped, and where the distance, as it
were, was in ambush, we now command at a glance. Big views expand the
mind as deep inhalations of air expand the lungs.
Yesterday I stood on the top of Grossmont,[5] probably a thousand feet
above the landscape, and looked out over a wide expanse of what seemed
to be parched, barren country; a few artificial lakes or ponds of
impounded rains, but not a green thing in sight, and yet I was filled
with pleasurable emotion. I lingered and lingered and gazed and gazed.
The eye is freed at such times, like a caged bird, and darts far and
near without hindrance.
[Footnote 5: In San Diego County, California.]
* * * * *
"The wings of time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night."
Thus do we objectify that which has no objective existence, but is
purely a subjective experience. Do we objectify light and sound in the
same way? No. One can conceive of the vibrations in the ether that
give us the sensation of light, and in the air that give us sound.
These vibrations do not depend upon our organs. Time and tide, we say,
wait for no man. Certainly the tide does not, as it has a real
objective existence. But time does not wait or hurry. It neither lags
nor hastens. Yesterday does not exist, nor to-morrow, nor the Now, for
that matter. Before we can say the moment has come, it is gone. The
only change there is is in our states of consciousness. How the hours
lag when we are waiting for a train, and how they hurry when we are
happily employed! Can we draw a line between the past and the present?
Can you find a point in the current of the stream that is stationary?
We speak of being lavish of time and of husbanding time, of improving
time, and so on. We divide it into seconds and minutes, hours and
days, weeks, and months, and years. Civilized man is compelled to do
this; he lives and works by schedule, but it is his states of
consciousness that he divides and measures. "Time is but a stream I go
fishing in," says Thoreau. The stream goes by, but the fish stay. The
river of Time, the tooth of Time--happy comparisons.
"I wasted time and now time wastes me," says Shakespeare. "I have no
time." "You have all there is," replied the old Indian.
If time, like money, could be hoarded up, we could get all our work
done. Is there any time outside of man? The animals take no note of
time.
* * * * *
That is a good saying of Juvenal's, "He who owns the soil, owns up to
the sky." So is this of Virgil's, "Command large fields, but cultivate
small ones."
* * * * *
Can there be any theory or doctrine not connected with our practical
lives so absurd that it will not be accepted as true by many people?
How firmly was a belief in witchcraft held by whole populations for a
generation! My grandfather believed in it, and in spooks and
hobgoblins.
The belief in alchemy still prevails--that the baser metals, by the
aid of the philosopher's stone, can be transmuted into gold and
silver. Quite recently there was a school in a large town in
California for teaching alchemy. As it was a failure, its professor
was involved in litigation with his pupils. I believe the pupils were
chiefly women.
There is a sect in Florida that believe that we live on the inside of
a hollow sphere, instead of on the outside of a revolving globe. I
visited the community with Edison, near Fort Myers, several years ago.
Some of the women were fine-looking. One old lady looked like Martha
Washington, but the men all looked "as if they had a screw loose
somewhere." They believe that the sun and moon and all the starry
hosts of heaven revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All our
astronomy goes by the board. They look upon it as puerile and
contemptible. The founder of the sect had said he would rise from the
dead to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body till the Board
of Health obliged them to bury it.
If any one were seriously to urge that we really walk on our heads
instead of our heels, and cite our baldness as proof, there are
persons who would believe him. It has been urged that flight to the
moon in an aëroplane is possible--the want of air is no hindrance! The
belief in perpetual motion is not yet dead. Many believe that snakes
charm birds. But it has been found that a stuffed snake-skin will
"charm" birds also--the bird is hypnotized by its own fear.
* * * * *
What has become of the hermits?--men and women who preferred to live
alone, holding little or no intercourse with their fellows? In my
youth I knew of several such. There was old Ike Keator, who lived in a
little unpainted house beside the road near the top of the mountain
where we passed over into Batavia Kill. He lived there many years. He
had a rich brother, a farmer in the valley below. Then there was Eri
Gray, who lived to be over one hundred years. He occupied a little
house on the side of a mountain, and lived, it was said, like the pigs
in the pen. Then there was Aunt Deborah Bouton, who lived in a little
house by a lonely road and took care of her little farm and her four
or five cows, winter and summer. Since I have lived here on the Hudson
there was a man who lived alone in an old stone house amid great filth
on the top of the hill above Esopus village.
In my own line of descent there was a Kelley who lived alone in a hut
in the woods, not far from Albany. I myself must have a certain amount
of solitude, but I love to hear the hum of life all about me. I like
to be secluded in a building warmed by the presence of other persons.
* * * * *
When I was a boy on the old farm, the bright, warm, midsummer days
were canopied with the mellow hum of insects. You did not see them or
distinguish any one species, but the whole upper air resounded like a
great harp. It was a very marked feature of midday. But not for fifty
years have I heard that sound. I have pressed younger and sharper ears
into my service, but to no purpose: there are certainly fewer
bumblebees than of old, but not fewer flies or wasps or hornets or
honey bees. What has wrought the change I do not know.
* * * * *
If the movements going on around us in inert matter could be magnified
so as to come within range of our unaided vision, how agitated the
world would seem! The so-called motionless bodies are all vibrating
and shifting their places day and night at all seasons. The rocks are
sliding down the hills or creeping out of their beds, the stone walls
are reeling and toppling, the houses are settling or leaning. All
inert material raised by the hand of man above the earth's surface is
slowly being pulled down to a uniform level. The crust of the earth is
rising or subsiding. The very stars in the constellations are shifting
their places.
If we could see the molecular and chemical changes and transformations
that are going on around us, another world of instability would be
revealed to us. Here we should see real miracles. We should see the
odorless gases unite to form water. We should see the building of
crystals, catalysis, and the movements of unstable compounds.
* * * * *
Think of what Nature does with varying degrees of temperature--solids,
fluids, gases. From the bottom to the top of the universe means simply
more or less heat. It seems like a misuse of words to say that iron
freezes at a high temperature, that a bar of red-hot or white-hot iron
is frozen. Water freezes at a high temperature, the air freezes at a
vastly lower. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at a very low
temperature. Hydrogen becomes a liquid at 252° below zero centigrade,
and a solid at 264°. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 210° below
zero centigrade.
In a world of absolute zero everything would be as solid as the rocks,
all life, all chemical reactions would cease. All forms of water are
the result of more or less heat. The circuit of the waters from the
earth to the clouds and back again, which keeps all the machinery of
life a-going, is the work of varying degrees of temperature. The Gulf
Stream, which plays such a part in the climate of Europe, is the
result of the heat in the Gulf of Mexico. The glacial periods which
have so modified the surface of the earth in the past were the result
of temperature changes.
* * * * *
How habitually we speak of beauty as a positive thing, just as we do
of truth! whereas what we call beauty is only an emotional experience
of our own minds, just as light and heat are sensations of our bodies.
There is no light where there is no eye, and no sound where there is
no ear. One is a vibration in the ether, and the other a vibration in
the air. The vibrations are positive. We do not all see beauty in the
same things. One man is unmoved where another is thrilled. We say the
world is full of beauty, when we mean that it is full of objects that
excite this emotion in our minds.
We speak of truth as if it, too, were a positive thing, and as if
there were a fixed quantity of it in the world, as there is of gold or
silver, or diamonds. Truth, again, is an intellectual emotion of the
human mind. One man's truth is another man's falsehood--moral and
æsthetic truth, I mean. Objective truth (mathematics and science) must
be the same to all men.
A certain mode of motion in the molecules of matter gives us the
sensation of heat, but heat is not a thing, an entity in itself, any
more than cold is. Yet to our senses one seems just as positive as the
other.
New truth means a new man. There are as many kinds of truth as there
are human experiences and temperaments.
* * * * *
How adaptive is animal life! It adds a new touch of interest to the
forbidding cactus to know that the cactus wren builds her nest between
its leaves. The spines probably serve to protect the bird from her
enemies. But are they not also a menace to her and to her young? But
this "procreant cradle" of a bird in the arms of the fanged desert
growth softens its aspect a little.
* * * * *
The tree of forbidden fruit--the Tree of Knowledge--how copiously has
mankind eaten of it during these latter generations!--and the chaotic
state of the world to-day is the result. We have been forcing Nature's
hand on a tremendous scale. We have gained more knowledge and power
than we can legitimately use. We are drunk with the sense of power. We
challenge the very gods. The rapid increase of inventions and the
harnessing of the powers of Nature have set all nations to
manufacturing vastly more goods than they can use and they all become
competitors for world markets, and rivalries and jealousies spring up,
and the seeds of war are planted. The rapid growth of towns and cities
is one of the results. The sobering and humanizing influence of the
country and the farm are less and less in evidence; the excitement,
the excesses, the intoxication of the cities are more and more. The
follies and extravagances of wealth lead to the insolence and
rebellion of the poor. Material power! Drunk with this power, the
world is running amuck to-day. We have got rid of kings and despots
and autocratic governments; now if we could only keep sober and make
democracy safe and enjoyable! Too much science has brought us to
grief. Behold what Chemistry has done to put imperial power in our
hands during the last decade!
* * * * *
The grand movements of history and of mankind are like the movements
of nature, under the same law, elemental, regardless of waste and ruin
and delays--not the result of human will or design, but of forces we
wot not of. They are of the same order as floods, tornadoes,
earthquakes, a release of human forces that have slumbered. The chaos
of Europe to-day shows the play of such elemental forces, unorganized,
at cross-purposes, antagonistic, fighting it out in the attempt to
find an equilibrium. The pain, the suffering, the waste, the delays,
do not trouble the gods at all. Since man is a part of nature, why
should not masses of men be ruled by natural law? The human will
reaches but a little way.