_Contrasts which are not Contrasts_
On the earth it was spring: and the excitement of it drove
underground. Our sprouting seed was caught up in this frenzy of
living, expanded itself, and pushed downwards and upwards in a double
movement, under cover of that odd buckler, the pileorhiza. The light
attracted it; but at the same time it plunged deeper into the night,
for there it found hidden sympathies, and encouragements which made
it fierce and greedy. It grew enormously, draining to itself the
scattered nourishment about it. If other existences were starved
thereby, so much the worse for them.
Not long ago our plant was a humble seed, ready to beg its tiny life
from each powerful menacing blade of grass. To-day it was a
successful bully, drinking up all the ichor of its patch of soil: and
such conduct is the general rule, even with us men. When we are weak
and know it, we are timid crawling things, hating all powers since
they seem directed against us: but let us gain a little strength, and
we grow proportionately rude, beating down the weaker. So true is it
that evolution in nature is only a re-direction of energy. The Eye
which controls the universe really seems to have foreseen and planned
everything; and things which appear unjust or horrible to us may
appear so only because we do not know the full logic of their
existence.
It is pleasant to imagine what happens deep down in that secret
mansion of the lower earth. The press of life can be no less there
than on the face of the ground. Yet we call it a mystery, and rank
it with all that is beyond our sense, with that class of event which
even our imaginations fail to visualize precisely. If only we could
see the sequoia root with our eyes, or had some yet unexpressed means
with which to analyse or share its likes and dislikes, watch its
battles, follow its sorrows, its joys! Why were we not endowed with
some special sense able to feel the satisfied tremor of the growing
root when it made contact with kindly elements in the blank night?
From some distance, somewhere deep under the ground, a trickle of
water sent it refreshing vibrations, like a call. How did our plant
discover the presence of this distant and friendly liquid? Did it
experience that familiar feeling of cool freshness which we men have
near water, which we would have felt in its place? Yet the plant had
no skin like ours, nor nerves, nor sense of smell. It is a mystery
how it should have known things, and how it guessed where lay the
foodstuffs it needed, and by what resources beyond our knowledge it
perceived their existence. It never missed its aim, though it had to
reach out, twist, even ramify, to get at these food-elements, and
absorb them. In nature there are hundreds of such instincts, and
senses, and faculties, besides the feelings, or nerves, or other
appurtenances of the flesh of which we are made. In life there are
thousands of unknown energies, of secret perceptions, of
indescribable vibrations, which we never feel, and shall never know
while we are what we are....
Yes, outside it was spring-time. Its light and heat bathed all the
surface of the ground, instilling into the under-soil a whole range
of influences to affect some of the thousands of embryos which there
come to life, by stages which we cannot follow, and of most of which
we never become aware. Creation is so leisurely and so retiring that
it makes little impression on us. It is destruction which is the
striking thing, because it is quick and clear and violent. An
instant destroys a thing which we have long seen living and
developing. A tree many hundreds of years old is crashed down in a
minute by lightning; in a few days a forest fire will destroy a
forest which has existed for thousands of years; and this wanton
annihilation instils in us a great terror, together with an
unintelligent belief in the goddess of destruction, that savage and
formidable power which seems to rule the world, and fills us with
devout awe: she seems so mighty and so bold and ruthless that we
think her the sole goddess of life.
Such an idea comes to us because of the limited range of our
knowledge and perceptions, our only criteria of judgment. In such
conditions naturally it is the visible and tangible world which makes
most effect on us. Yet we should remind ourselves that if a being
under our eyes passes in a second from life to death, yet in that
same instant millions of similar beings are being created by the
mysterious courses of organic nature: just as while lightning is
striking and consuming a giant of the forest in one burning moment,
simultaneously millions of such trees are germinating in the fruitful
heat of mother-earth, beyond our sphere of control. We should note
that in all ways and at all times creation has the numerical
superiority over destruction, whether it concerns men or animals or
plants. In truth we have no reason to complain that our senses have
been reduced to such bare limits. How palpitant life would be for us
if new faculties superadded to our old gave us to see the invisible,
to understand the occult, to apprehend like plants, to feel in
vibrations like light, to flow abroad like seas and contemplate the
bounds of space.
Let it be enough if we record, without seeking to explain it by
finding a parallel in our equipment, how singularly efficient our
plant was in insinuating its roots where it would. With the aid of
its pileorhiza it passed not merely through crumbling soil, but
through stony strata, plaster, and wood. Another mystery, this, how
so soft a substance could penetrate hard bodies, which we burst
through only by means of a great effort of strength, using tools yet
harder. The sequoia root, dipping downward in one direction,
thrusting upward in another, without external aid split obstacles
against which we have to employ iron and stone: and at last one fine
morning its first shoot pierced the top layer of soil to salute the
sun.
At this second the plant was, to our eyes, at last born. We commonly
pass over its hardest battles, those conditioned by the circumstances
of its origin. In reality it was while yet beneath the ground that
the little sequoia tree experienced the mother-care of those kindly
shades without which it could not have come to life: but few of us
take note of that. We so commonly put the effect before the cause
and the success before the effort. Yet our little plant went down as
much as it went up, with roots very like its crests, though the one
struck upward towards the sun, and the other struck downward through
the night.
I would say that this inexplicable symmetry is one of the laws which
govern the seen, and probably also the unseen, world. Ideas, beings,
things, phenomena of all kinds exhibit to us much the same
beginnings, similar developments, and parallel endings. This fact we
can grasp only piecemeal, not in its whole; but it is clear that
always there is an analogy between extremes. We know that
plant-roots are like their heads. Dawn and twilight (opposed limits
of a natural event) are like one another: the same pallid colours,
the same freshness, the same effect of unambitious calm. Sunrise and
sunset, respectively the appearance and the disappearance of our
day-star, glare at us with a like extravagance of noisy red. Old age
and childhood, the two poles of human life, resemble one another in
their feebleness and weak vitality. Our great joys are silent as our
great sorrows; and the ecstasy of love is not far from the frenzy of
hate. Nature is re-born in spring-tide, and falls sadly asleep when
autumn closes: and yet these two seasons are very like--showers of
rain and gusty winds, shot across with the same weak rays of yellow
light.
We find this odd likeness of contrasts not merely in visible nature
and in life, but also in the most subtle abstractions of the
spiritual world. We expect a great happiness as anxiously as a great
misfortune, and when we do things our first conception, and the
memory which follows it, trace in our minds the same sort of hazy
contour in fleeting neutral tint. The nescience of our birth is like
our death's.
Oh! we know very well _how_ some of these resemblances are
caused--thanks to the action of the simple laws of physical
nature--but our spirit fails when we ask _why_ these analogies should
appear with so strange and universal a regularity.