I
When for the third or fourth time during the spring or summer I take my
hoe and go out and cut off the heads of the lusty burdocks that send out
their broad leaves along the edge of my garden or lawn, I often ask
myself, "What is this thing that is so hard to scotch here in the
grass?" I decapitate it time after time and yet it forthwith gets itself
another head. We call it burdock, but what is burdock, and why does it
not change into yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is so
constant and so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will be
lying in wait here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itself
to every skirt or bushy tail or furry or woolly coat that comes along,
in order to get free transportation to other lawns and gardens, to green
fields and pastures new?
It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does it
differ from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturn
the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay
smashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if
I am not on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs
before the season is passed.
Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing;
yet modern physical science tells me that the burdock is only another
kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of the
mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us
in dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement of
its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock or into a cabbage,
into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.
I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a
force exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon
the moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairs
itself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running
can never be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activities
to mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something
that chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that avails
itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my
anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of
looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They
cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But what
is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It sounds
at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding
does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature."
This is the anthropomorphism of science.
If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am
I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a
name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion,
osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain
special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own
minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.
We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical
forces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder
that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the
like--"living inorganics," and looking upon them as acting by "living
force as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves
at touch." But living force is what we are trying to differentiate from
mechanical force, and what do we gain by confounding the two? We can
only look upon a living body as a machine by forming new conceptions of
a machine--a machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction of
terms.
A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends in
chopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of activity
on the same level. There is no question but that the food consumed is
the source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the energy is
muscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental or
spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we speak of
physical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect that we
call mental force, though how the one can result in the other is past
understanding. The law of the correlation and conservation of energy
requires that what goes into the body as physical force must come out in
some form of physical force--heat, light, electricity, and so forth.
Science cannot trace force into the mental realm and connect it with our
states of consciousness. It loses track of it so completely that men
like Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer pause before it as an inscrutable
mystery, while John Fiske helps himself out with the conception of the
soul as quite independent of the body, standing related to it as the
musician is related to his instrument. This idea is the key to Fiske's
proof of the immortality of the soul. Finding himself face to face with
an insoluble mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the chasm, by
this extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, as we know it, is
inseparably bound up with physical conditions, it seems to me that a
more rational explanation of the phenomenon of mentality is the
conception that the physical force and substance that we use up in a
mental effort or emotional experience gives rise, through some unknown
kind of molecular activity, to something which is analogous to the
electric current in a live wire, and which traverses the nerves and
results in our changing states of consciousness. This is the mechanistic
explanation of mind, consciousness, etc., but it is the only one, or
kind of one, that lends itself to scientific interpretation. Life,
spirit, consciousness, may be a mode of motion as distinct from all
other modes of motion, such as heat, light, electricity, as these are
distinct from each other.
When we speak of force of mind, force of character, we of course speak
in parables, since the force here alluded to is an experience of our own
minds entirely and would not suffice to move the finest dust-particle in
the air.
There could be no vegetable or animal life without the sunbeam, yet when
we have explained or accounted for the growth of a tree in terms of the
chemistry and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure to
ourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry,
that uses it and profits by it? After this mysterious something has
ceased to operate, or play its part, the chemistry of the sunbeam is no
longer effective, and the tree is dead.
Without the vibrations that we call light, there would have been no eye.
But, as Bergson happily says, it is not light passively received that
makes the eye; it is light meeting an indwelling need in the organism,
which amounts to an active creative principle, that begets the eye. With
fish in underground waters this need does not arise; hence they have no
sight. Fins and wings and legs are developed to meet some end of the
organism, but if the organism were not charged with an expansive or
developing force or impulse, would those needs arise?
Why should the vertebrate series have risen through the fish, the
reptile, the mammal, to man, unless the manward impulse was inherent in
the first vertebrate; something that struggled, that pushed on and up
from the more simple to the more complex forms? Why did not unicellular
life always remain unicellular? Could not the environment have acted
upon it endlessly without causing it to change toward higher and more
complex forms, had there not been some indwelling aboriginal tendency
toward these forms? How could natural selection, or any other process of
selection, work upon species to modify them, if there were not something
in species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, new forms, in fact some
active principle that is modifiable?
Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Why
has it risen? Why did it not keep on the same level, and go through the
cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higher
forms? Because, it may be replied, it was life, and not mere matter and
motion--something that lifts matter and motion to a new plane.
Under the influence of the life impulse, the old routine of matter--from
compound to compound, from solid to fluid, from fluid to gaseous, from
rock to soil, the cycle always ending where it began--is broken into,
and cycles of a new order are instituted. From the stable equilibrium
which dead matter is always seeking, the same matter in the vital
circuit is always seeking the state of unstable equilibrium, or rather
is forever passing between the two, and evolving the myriad forms of
life in the passage. It is hard to think of the process as the work of
the physical and chemical forces of inorganic nature, without
supplementing them with a new and different force.
The forces of life are constructive forces, and they are operative in a
world of destructive or disintegrating forces which oppose them and
which they overcome. The physical and chemical forces of dead matter are
at war with the forces of life, till life overcomes and uses them.
The mechanical forces go on repeating or dividing through the same
cycles forever and ever, seeking a stable condition, but the vital force
is inventive and creative and constantly breaks the repose that organic
nature seeks to impose upon it.
External forces may modify a body, but they cannot develop it unless
there is something in the body waiting to be developed, craving
development, as it were. The warmth and moisture in the soil act alike
upon the grains of sand and upon the seed-germs; the germ changes into
something else, the sand does not. These agents liberate a force in the
germ that is not in the grain of sand. The warmth of the brooding fowl
does not spend itself upon mere passive, inert matter (unless there is a
china egg in the nest), but upon matter straining upon its leash, and in
a state of expectancy. We do not know how the activity of the molecules
of the egg differs from the activity of the molecules of the pebble,
under the influence of warmth, but we know there must be a difference
between the interior movements of organized and unorganized matter.
Life lifts inert matter up into a thousand varied and beautiful forms
and holds it there for a season,--holds it against gravity and chemical
affinity, though you may say, if you please, not without their aid,--and
then in due course lets go of it, or abandons it, and lets it fall back
into the great sea of the inorganic. Its constant tendency is to fall
back; indeed, in animal life it does fall back every moment; it rises on
the one hand, serves its purpose of life, and falls back on the other.
In going through the cycle of life the mineral elements experience some
change that chemical analysis does not disclose--they are the more
readily absorbed again by life. It is as if the elements had profited
in some way under the tutelage of life. Their experience has been a
unique and exceptional one. Only a small fraction of the sum total of
the inert matter of the globe can have this experience. It must first go
through the vegetable cycle before it can be taken up by the animal. The
only things we can take directly from the inorganic world are water and
air; and the function of water is largely a mechanical one, and the
function of air a chemical one.
I think of the vital as flowing out of the physical, just as the
psychical flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animal
life flow out of the lower. It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes,
and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to
inert matter; but the germ and start of each is in the series below it.
The living came out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical
origin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannot
explain. The butterfly comes out of the grub, man came out of the brute,
but, as Darwin says, "not by his own efforts," any more than the child
becomes the man by its own efforts.
The push of life, of the evolutionary process, is back of all and in
all. We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is immanent
in matter, and this gives the mind something to take hold of.