I
William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was to
contradict other philosophers. I may add in the same spirit that one of
the fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradict
themselves. I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but I
have little doubt that a critical examination of his works would show
that he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had trouble
to make both ends of his philosophy meet. Any man who seeks to compass
any of the fundamental problems with the little span of his finite mind,
is bound at times to have trouble to make both ends meet. The man of
science seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knows
what is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it. But the philosopher
works with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky if
he is ever aware when both ends fail to meet.
I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well as
a great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theory
of the origin of species through natural selection working upon
fortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that he
could not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of
mere chance. The result of chance man certainly is--is he not?--as are
all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set
going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon
the organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves no
intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not
man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the
material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which
Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories?
I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both ends of his argument did
not quite meet when he contended for the truth of determinism--that
there is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and at the same
time set man apart from the cosmic order, and represented him as working
his will upon it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of his
earlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of living things, as
contrasted with the student of inert matter, the aspect of nature is
reversed. "In living matter, incessant, and so far as we know,
spontaneous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the anomaly, to be
accounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend to no
equilibrium," except the equilibrium of death. This is good vitalistic
doctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between the
matter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atoms
are aggregated. Probably the only difference between a diamond and a
piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an oyster-shell, is the manner
in which the atoms are aggregated; but that the secret of life is in the
peculiar compounding of the atoms or molecules--a spatial arrangement of
them--is a harder proposition. It seems to me also that Haeckel involves
himself in obvious contradictions when he ascribes will, sensation,
inclination, dislike, though of a low order, to the atoms of matter; in
fact, sees them as living beings with souls, and then denies soul, will,
power of choice, and the like to their collective unity in the brain of
man.
A philosopher cannot well afford to assume the air of lofty indifference
that the poet Whitman does when he asks, "Do I contradict myself? Very
well, then, I contradict myself"; but he may take comfort in the thought
that contradictions are often only apparent, and not real, as when two
men standing on opposite sides of the earth seem to oppose each other,
and yet their heads point to the same heavens, and their feet to the
same terrestrial centre. The logic of the earth completely contradicts
the ideas we draw from our experience with other globes, both our
artificial globes and the globes in the forms of the sun and the moon
that we see in the heavens. The earth has only one side, the outside,
which is always the upper side; at the South Pole, as at the North, we
are on the top side. I fancy the whole truth of any of the great
problems, if we could see it, would reconcile all our half-truths, all
the contradictions in our philosophy.
In considering this problem of the mystery of living things, I have had
a good deal of trouble in trying to make my inborn idealism go hand in
hand with my inborn naturalism; but I am not certain that there is any
real break or contradiction between them, only a surface one, and that
deeper down the strata still unite them. Life seems beyond the capacity
of inorganic nature to produce; and yet here is life in its myriad
forms, here is the body and mind of man, and here is the world of
inanimate matter out of which all living beings arise, and into which
they sooner or later return; and we must either introduce a new
principle to account for it all, or else hold to the idea that what is
is natural--a legitimate outcome of the universal laws and processes
that have been operating through all time. This last is the point of
view of the present chapter,--the point of view of naturalism; not
strictly the scientific view which aims to explain all life phenomena in
terms of exact experimental science, but the larger, freer view of the
open-air naturalist and literary philosopher. I cannot get rid of, or
hold in abeyance, my inevitable idealism, if I would; neither can I do
violence to my equally inevitable naturalism, but may I not hope to make
the face of my naturalism beam with the light of the ideal--the light
that never was in the physico-chemical order, and never can be there?