IX

The evolution of life is, of course, bound up with the evolution of the

world. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higher

and higher forms--forms with larger and larger brains and more and more

complex nerve mechanisms--have appeared.

Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primary

elements--hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and the

like--takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperature

decreases, one after another of the chemical elements makes its

appearance, the simpler elements appearing first, and the more complex

compounds appearing last, all apparently having their origin in some

simple parent element. It appears as if the evolution of life upon the

globe had followed the same law and had waited upon the secular cooling

of the earth.

Does not a man imply a cooler planet and a greater depth and refinement

of soil than a dinosaur? Only after a certain housecleaning and

purification of the elements do higher forms appear; the vast

accumulation of Silurian limestone must have hastened the age of fishes.

The age of reptiles waited for the clearing of the air of the burden of

carbon dioxide. The age of mammals awaited the deepening and the

enrichment of the soil and the stability of the earth's crust. Who knows

upon what physical conditions of the earth's elements the brain of man

was dependent? Its highest development has certainly taken place in a

temperate climate. There can be little doubt that beyond a certain point

the running-down of the earth-temperature will result in a running-down

of life till it finally goes out. Life is confined to a very narrow

range of temperature. If we were to translate degrees into miles and

represent the temperature of the hottest stars, which is put at 30,000

degrees, by a line 30,000 miles long, then the part of the line marking

the limits of life would be approximately three hundred miles.

Life does not appear in a hard, immobile, utterly inert world, but in a

world thrilling with energy and activity, a world of ceaseless

transformations of energy, of radio-activity, of electro-magnetic

currents, of perpetual motion in its ultimate particles, a world whose

heavens are at times hung with rainbows, curtained with tremulous

shifting auroras, and veined and illumined with forked lightnings, a

world of rolling rivers and heaving seas, activity, physical and

chemical, everywhere. On such a world life appeared, bringing no new

element or force, but setting up a new activity in matter, an activity

that tends to check and control the natural tendency to the dissipation

and degradation of energy. The question is, Did it arise through some

transformation of the existing energy, or out of the preëxisting

conditions, or was it supplementary to them, an addition from some

unknown source? Was it a miraculous or a natural event? We shall answer

according to our temperaments.

One sees with his mind's eye this stream of energy, which we name the

material universe, flowing down the endless cycles of time; at a certain

point in its course, a change comes over its surface; what we call life

appears, and assumes many forms; at a point farther along in its course,

life disappears, and the eternal river flows on regardless, till, at

some other point, the same changes take place again. Life is inseparable

from this river of energy, but it is not coextensive with it, either in

time or in space.

In midsummer what river-men call "the blossoming of the water" takes

place in the Hudson River; the water is full of minute vegetable

organisms; they are seasonal and temporary; they are born of the

midsummer heats. By and by the water is clear again. Life in the

universe seems as seasonal and fugitive as this blossoming of the

water. More and more does science hold us to the view of the unity of

nature--that the universe of life and matter and force is all natural or

all supernatural, it matters little which you call it, but it is not

both. One need not go away from his own doorstep to find mysteries

enough to last him a lifetime, but he will find them in his own body, in

the ground upon which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in the

invisible forces that play around him. We may marvel how the delicate

color and perfume of the flower could come by way of the root and stalk

of the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth to the

rainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious metals and stones arise from

the flux of the baser elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and finds

itself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not invoke the

supernatural to account for these things.

It is certain that in the human scale of values the spirituality of man

far transcends anything in the animal or physical world, but that even

that came by the road of evolution, is, indeed, the flowering of ruder

and cruder powers and attributes of the life below us, I cannot for a

moment doubt. Call it a transmutation or a metamorphosis, if you will;

it is still within the domain of the natural. The spiritual always has

its root and genesis in the physical. We do not degrade the spiritual in

such a conception; we open our eyes to the spirituality of the

physical. And this is what science has always been doing and is doing

more and more--making us familiar with marvelous and transcendent powers

that hedge us about and enter into every act of our lives. The more we

know matter, the more we know mind; the more we know nature, the more we

know God; the more familiar we are with the earth forces, the more

intimate will be our acquaintance with the celestial forces.

X

When we speak of the gulf that separates the living from the non-living,

are we not thinking of the higher forms of life only? Are we not

thinking of the far cry it is from man to inorganic nature? When we get

down to the lowest organism, is the gulf so impressive? Under the

scrutiny of biologic science the gulf that separates the animal from the

vegetable all but vanishes, and the two seem to run together. The chasm

between the lowest vegetable forms and unorganized matter is evidently a

slight affair. The state of unorganized protoplasm which Haeckel named

the Monera, that precedes the development of that architect of life, the

cell, can hardly be more than one remove from inert matter. By

insensible molecular changes and transformations of energy, the miracle

of living matter takes place. We can conceive of life arising only

through these minute avenues, or in the invisible, molecular

constitution of matter itself. What part the atoms and electrons, and

the energy they bear, play in it we shall never know. Even if we ever

succeed in bringing the elements together in our laboratories so that

there living matter appears, shall we then know the secret of life?

After we have got the spark of life kindled, how are we going to get all

the myriad forms of life that swarm upon the earth? How are we going to

get man with physics and chemistry alone? How are we going to get this

tremendous drama of evolution out of mere protoplasm from the bottom of

the old geologic seas? Of course, only by making protoplasm creative,

only by conceiving as potential in it all that we behold coming out of

it. We imagine it equal to the task we set before it; the task is

accomplished; therefore protoplasm was all-sufficient. I am not

postulating any extra-mundane power or influence; I am only stating the

difficulties which the idealist experiences when he tries to see life in

its nature and origin as the scientific mind sees it. Animal life and

vegetable life have a common physical basis in protoplasm, and all their

different forms are mere aggregations of cells which are constituted

alike and behave alike in each, and yet in the one case they give rise

to trees, and in the other they give rise to man. Science is powerless

to penetrate this mystery, and philosophy can only give its own elastic

interpretation. Why consciousness should be born of cell structure in

one form of life and not in another, who shall tell us? Why matter in

the brain should think, and in the cabbage only grow, is a question.

The naturalist has not the slightest doubt that the mind of man was

evolved from some order of animals below him that had less mind, and

that the mind of this order was evolved from that of a still lower

order, and so on down the scale till we reach a point where the animal

and vegetable meet and blend, and the vegetable mind, if we may call it

such, passed into the animal, and still downward till the vegetable is

evolved from the mineral. If to believe this is to be a monist, then

science is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis of

the lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, and

without any break of the causal sequence. There has been no miracle,

except in the sense that all life is a miracle. Of how the organic rose

out of the inorganic, we can form no mental image; the intellect cannot

bridge the chasm; but that such is the fact, there can be no doubt.

There is no solution except that life is latent or potential in matter,

but these again are only words that cover a mystery.

I do not see why there may not be some force latent in matter that we

may call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, as

justifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter. The

chemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force. There is

no life without chemism, but there is chemism without life.

We have to have a name for the action and reaction of the primary

elements upon one another and we call it chemical affinity; we have to

have a name for their behavior in building up organic bodies, and we

call it vitality or vitalism.

The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new form

or kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in action

all about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like a

dispute about names. But my mind has to form a new conception of these

forces to bridge the chasm between the organic and the inorganic; not a

quantitative but a qualitative change is demanded, like the change in

the animal mind to make it the human mind, an unfolding into a higher

plane.

Whether the evolution of the human mind from the animal was by

insensible gradations, or by a few sudden leaps, who knows? The animal

brain began to increase in size in Tertiary times, and seems to have

done so suddenly, but the geologic ages were so long that a change in

one hundred thousand years would seem sudden. "The brains of some

species increase one hundred per cent." The mammal brain greatly

outstripped the reptile brain. Was Nature getting ready for man?

The air begins at once to act chemically upon the blood in the lungs of

the newly born, and the gastric juices to act chemically upon the food

as soon as there is any in the stomach of the newly born, and breathing

and swallowing are both mechanical acts; but what is it that breathes

and swallows, and profits by it? a machine?

Maybe the development of life, and its upward tendency toward higher and

higher forms, is in some way the result of the ripening of the earth,

its long steeping in the sea of sidereal influences. The earth is not

alone, it is not like a single apple on a tree; there are many apples on

the tree, and there are many trees in the orchard.