Where, then, shall we look for the key to this mysterious thing we call
life? Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vital
force--that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves us
floundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, what
answer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It is
not in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower." The four
principal elements--oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon--say, "It is
not in us, because we are from all eternity, and life is not; we form
only its physical basis." Warmth and moisture say, "It is not in us; we
are only its faithful nurses and handmaidens." The sun says: "It is not
in me; I shine on dead worlds as well. I but quicken life after it is
planted." The stars say, "It is not in us; we have seen life come and go
among myriads of worlds for untold ages." No questioning of the heavens
above nor of the earth below can reveal to us the secret we are in quest
of.
I can fancy brute matter saying to life: "You tarry with me at your
peril. You will always be on the firing-line of my blind, contending
forces; they will respect you not; you must take your chances amid my
flying missiles. My forces go their eternal round without variableness
or shadow of turning, and woe to you if you cross their courses. You
may bring all your gods with you--gods of love, mercy, gentleness,
altruism; but I know them not. Your prayers will fall upon ears of
stone, your appealing gesture upon eyes of stone, your cries for mercy
upon hearts of stone. I shall be neither your enemy nor your friend. I
shall be utterly indifferent to you. My floods will drown you, my winds
wreck you, my fires burn you, my quicksands suck you down, and not know
what they are doing. My earth is a theatre of storms and cyclones, of
avalanches and earthquakes, of lightnings and cloudbursts; wrecks and
ruins strew my course. All my elements and forces are at your service;
all my fluids and gases and solids; my stars in their courses will fight
on your side, if you put and keep yourself in right relations to them.
My atoms and electrons will build your houses, my lightning do your
errands, my winds sail your ships, on the same terms. You cannot live
without my air and my water and my warmth; but each of them is a source
of power that will crush or engulf or devour you before it will turn one
hair's-breadth from its course. Your trees will be uprooted by my
tornadoes, your fair fields will be laid waste by floods or fires; my
mountains will fall on your delicate forms and utterly crush and bury
them; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy whole
tribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust of
my earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropical
growths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of the
myriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; through
immense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces will
drive on like the ploughshare that buries every flower and grass-blade
and tiny creature in its path. My winds are life-giving breezes to-day,
and the besom of destruction to-morrow; my rains will moisten and
nourish you one day, and wash you into the gulf the next; my earthquakes
will bury your cities as if they were ant-hills. So you must take your
chances, but the chances are on your side. I am not all tempest, or
flood, or fire, or earthquake. Your career will be a warfare, but you
will win more battles than you will lose. But remember, you are nothing
to me, while I am everything to you. I have nothing to lose or gain,
while you have everything to gain. Without my soils and moisture and
warmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you can
do or be nothing; without my sunshine you perish; but you have these
things on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution on
condition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologic
ages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm. When you fail, or are crushed
or swallowed by my remorseless forces, do not blame my gods, or your
own; there is no blame, there is only the price to be paid: the hazards
of invading the closed circle of my unseeing forces."
In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature
deals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los
Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It had
been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated--her
wild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic ages
made visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animal
bones. There was nearly as much bone as pitch. The fate of the unlucky
flies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been the
fate of the victims that had perished here. How many wild creatures had
turned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they felt
themselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch! In like
manner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in flood
and fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpitying
heavens! There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apart
from our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows one
pitying glance upon us. Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of a
long line of hostile forces, and escapes by dint of fleetness of foot,
or agility in dodging, or else by toughness of fibre.
Yet here we are; here is love and charity and mercy and intelligence;
the fair face of childhood, the beautiful face of youth, the clear,
strong face of manhood and womanhood, and the calm, benign face of old
age, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, but
seeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart of
Nature. Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playing
into the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of the
inorganic, at strife with it, hourly crushed by it, yet sustained and
kept going by its aid.