The naturalist cannot get away from the natural order, and he sees man,
and all other forms of life, as an integral part of it--the order, which
in inert matter is automatic and fateful, and which in living matter is
prophetic and indeterminate; the course of one down the geologic ages,
seeking only a mechanical repose, being marked by collisions and
disruptions; the other in its course down the biologic ages seeking a
vital and unstable repose, being marked by pain, failure, carnage,
extinction, and ceaseless struggle with the physical order upon which it
depends. Man has taken his chances in the clash of blind matter, and in
the warfare of living forms. He has been the pet of no god, the favorite
of no power on earth or in heaven. He is one of the fruits of the great
cosmic tree, and is subject to the same hazards and failures as the
fruit of all other trees. The frosts may nip him in the bud, the storms
beat him down, foes of earth and air prey upon him, and hostile
influences from all sides impede or mar him. The very forces that
uphold him and furnish him his armory of tools and of power, will
destroy him the moment he is off his guard. He is like the trainer of
wild beasts who, at his peril, for one instant relaxes his mastery over
them. Gravity, electricity, fire, flood, hurricane, will crush or
consume him if his hand is unsteady or his wits tardy. Nature has dealt
with him upon the same terms as with all other forms of life. She has
shown him no favor. The same elements--the same water, air, lime, iron,
sulphur, oxygen, carbon, and so on--make up his body and his brain as
make up theirs, and the same make up theirs as are the constituents of
the insensate rocks, soils, and clouds. The same elements, the same
atoms and molecules, but a different order; the same solar energy, but
working to other ends; the same life principle but lifted to a higher
plane. How can we separate man from the total system of things, setting
him upon one side and them upon another, making the relation of the two
mechanical or accidental? It is only in thought, or in obedience to some
creed or philosophy, that we do it. In life, in action, we unconsciously
recognize ourselves as a part of Nature. Our success and well-being
depend upon the closeness and spontaneousness of the relation.
If all this is interpreted to mean that life, that the mind and soul of
man, are of material origin, science does not shrink from the inference.
Only the inference demands a newer and higher conception of matter--the
conception that Tyndall expressed when he wrote the word with a capital
M, and declared that Matter was "at bottom essentially mystical and
transcendental"; that Goethe expressed when he called matter "the living
garment of God"; and that Whitman expressed when he said that the soul
and the body were one. The materialism of the great seers and prophets
of science who penetrate into the true inwardness of matter, who see
through the veil of its gross obstructive forms and behold it translated
into pure energy, need disturb no one.
In our religious culture we have beggared matter that we might exalt
spirit; we have bankrupted earth that we might enrich heaven; we have
debased the body that we might glorify the soul. But science has changed
all this. Mankind can never again rest in the old crude dualism. The
Devil has had his day, and the terrible Hebrew Jehovah has had his day;
the divinities of this world are now having their day.
The puzzle or the contradiction in the naturalistic view of life appears
when we try to think of a being as a part of Nature, having his genesis
in her material forces, who is yet able to master and direct Nature,
reversing her processes and defeating her ends, opposing his will to her
fatalism, his mercy to her cruelty--in short, a being who thinks,
dreams, aspires, loves truth, justice, goodness, and sits in judgment
upon the very gods he worships. Must he not bring a new force, an alien
power? Can a part be greater than the whole? Can the psychic dominate
the physical out of which it came? Again we have only to enlarge our
conception of the physical--the natural--or make our faith measure up to
the demands of reason. Our reason demands that the natural order be
all-inclusive. Can our faith in the divinity of matter measure up to
this standard? Not till we free ourselves from the inherited prejudices
which have grown up from our everyday struggles with gross matter. We
must follow the guidance of science till we penetrate this husk and see
its real mystical and transcendental character, as Tyndall did.
When we have followed matter from mass to molecule, from molecule to
atom, from atom to electron, and seen it in effect dematerialized,--seen
it in its fourth or ethereal, I had almost said spiritual, state,--when
we have grasped the wonder of radio-activity, and the atomic
transformations that attend it, we shall have a conception of the
potencies and possibilities of matter that robs scientific materialism
of most of its ugliness. Of course, no deductions of science can satisfy
our longings for something kindred to our own spirits in the universe.
But neither our telescopes nor our microscopes reveal such a reality. Is
this longing only the result of our inevitable anthropomorphism, or is
it the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for, the
prophecy of our kinship with the farthest star? Can soul arise out of a
soulless universe?
Though the secret of life is under our feet, yet how strange and
mysterious it seems! It draws our attention away from matter. It arises
among the inorganic elements like a visitant from another sphere. It is
a new thing in the world. Consciousness is a new thing, yet Huxley makes
it one of his trinity of realities--matter, energy, and consciousness.
We are so immersed in these realities that we do not see the divinity
they embody. We call that sacred and divine which is far off and
unattainable. Life and mind are so impossible of explanation in terms of
matter and energy, that it is not to be wondered at that mankind has so
long looked upon their appearance upon this earth as a miraculous event.
But until science opened our eyes we did not know that the celestial and
the terrestrial are one, and that we are already in the heavens among
the stars. When we emancipate ourselves from the bondage of wont and
use, and see with clear vision our relations to the Cosmos, all our
ideas of materialism and spiritualism are made over, and we see how the
two are one; how life and death play into each other's hands, and how
the whole truth of things cannot be compassed by any number of finite
minds.