Give free rein to our anthropomorphic tendencies, and we fill the world
with spirits, good and bad--bad in war, famine, pestilence, disease;
good in all the events and fortunes that favor us. Early man did this on
all occasions; he read his own hopes and fears and passions into all the
operations of nature. Our fathers did it in many things; good people of
our own time do it in exceptional instances, and credit any good fortune
to Providence. Men high in the intellectual and philosophical world,
still invoke something antithetical to matter, to account for the
appearance of life on the planet.
It may be justly urged that the effect upon our habits of thought of the
long ages during which this process has been going on, leading us to
differentiate matter and spirit and look upon them as two opposite
entities, hindering or contending with each other,--one heavenly, the
other earthly, one everlasting, the other perishable, one the supreme
good, the other the seat and parent of all that is evil,--the cumulative
effect of this habit of thought in the race-mind is, I say, not easily
changed or overcome. We still think, and probably many of us always will
think, of spirit as something alien to matter, something mystical,
transcendental, and not of this world. We look upon matter as gross,
obstructive, and the enemy of the spirit. We do not know how we are
going to get along without it, but we solace ourselves with the thought
that by and by, in some other, non-material world, we shall get along
without it, and experience a great expansion of life by reason of our
emancipation from it. Our practical life upon this planet is more or
less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; of
its true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change and
transformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell us
nothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed in
radio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, they
tell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could not
see or live at all, they tell us nothing. In fact we live and move and
have our being in a complex of forces and tendencies of which, even by
the aid of science, we but see as through a glass darkly. Of the
effluence of things, the emanations from the minds and bodies of our
friends, and from other living forms about us, from the heavens above
and from the earth below, our daily lives tell us nothing, any more than
our eyes tell us of the invisible rays in the sun's spectrum, or than
our ears tell us of the murmurs of the life-currents in growing things.
Science alone unveils the hidden wonders and sleepless activities of the
world forces that play through us and about us. It alone brings the
heavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds. It
alone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendly
powers wait upon him day and night. It alone shows him the glories and
the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar
infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar
ground--we cannot get away from home.
There is always an activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See
the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody
those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the
limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and
forming flint or chert nodules; or see them in the process of
petrifaction slowly building up a tree of chalcedony or onyx in place of
a tree of wood, repeating every cell, every knot, every worm-hole--dead
matter copying exactly a form of living matter; or see the phenomenon of
crystallization everywhere; see the solution of salt mimicking, as
Tyndall says, the architecture of Egypt, building up miniature
pyramids, terrace upon terrace, from base to apex, forming a series of
steps like those up which the traveler in Egypt is dragged by his
guides! We can fancy, if we like, these infinitesimal structures built
by an invisible population which swarms among the constituent molecules,
controlled and coerced by some invisible matter, says Tyndall. This
might be called literature, or poetry, or religion, but it would not be
science; science says that these salt pyramids are the result of the
play of attraction and repulsion among the salt molecules themselves;
that they are self-poised and self-quarried; it goes further than that
and says that the quality we call saltness is the result of a certain
definite arrangement of their ultimate atoms of matter; that the
qualities of things as they affect our senses--hardness, softness,
sweetness, bitterness--are the result of molecular motion and
combination among the ultimate atoms. All these things seem on the
threshold of life, waiting in the antechamber, as it were; to-morrow
they will be life, or, as Tyndall says, "Incipient life, as it were,
manifests itself throughout the whole of what is called inorganic
nature."