XI
MEN AND TREES
I do not see that Nature is any more solicitous about the well-being of man than she is, say, about the well-being of trees. She is solicitous about the well-being of all life, so far as the conditions of life favor its development and continuance—men and trees alike. But all have to run the gantlet of some form of hostile forces—the trees one kind, man another. What I mean is that evil in some form waits upon all—hindrances, accidents, defeat, failure, death.
The trees and the forests have their enemies and accidents and set-backs, and men and communities of men have analogous evils. Trees are attacked by worms, blight, tornadoes, lightning, and men are attacked by pestilence, famine, wars, and all manner of diseases. Every tree struggles to stand upright; it is the easiest and only normal position. Men aspire to uprightness of thought and conduct, but a thousand accidental conditions prevent most of them from attaining it. One tree in falling is likely to bring down, or to mutilate, other trees, as the moral or business downfall of a strong man in a community is quite sure to bring evil to many others around him. Trees struggle with one another for moisture and sustenance from the soil, and for a place in the sun, as men do in the community, and the most lucky, or the most fit, survive. Nature plans for a perfect tree as she plans for a perfect man, but both tree and man have to take their chances with hostile forces and conditions amid which their lot falls, so that an absolutely perfect oak or elm or pine is about as rare as a perfect man. Of course Nature has endowed man with mental and spiritual powers which she has not bestowed upon trees. These powers give man an advantage over trees, but not the same advantage over men—his own kind of tree—because his fellows are similarly endowed. His struggle with his own kind is as inevitable as the struggle of trees with their kind, with this advantage in favor of the trees: theirs is always a peaceful competition, it never takes the form of destructive wars. Trees of opposite kinds will draw away from one another; a pine will draw away from a maple or an oak, not, I suppose, because of any natural antagonism, but because it is less mobile and its tender but more rigid branches cannot stand the buffetings of the more mobile and flexible deciduous trees. Pine loves to associate with pine, and spruce with spruce. The spirit, the atmosphere of a pine or a hemlock forest, how different from that of a beech or a maple! Most trees tend to associate themselves together in large bodies, as did primitive man, and civilized man, too, for that matter. The conifers are more clannish than the deciduous trees.
Are not a generation of leaves and a generation of men subject to about the same laws of chance? The baby leaves have their enemies in insects that devour them, in blight that withers them, in frost that cuts them short, and when they are matured, how the winds buffet them (Nature doesn’t temper the wind to the tender leaf), how the gales lash them, how the hail riddles them! If they had powers of thought, what a struggling, agitated, unstable world they would think themselves born into! When a summer tempest strikes a maple- or an oak-tree, the strain and stress of the foliage is almost painful to witness. Yet when the tempest subsides, hardly a leaf is torn or detached, and when autumn comes, the ranks of the vast army of the leaves are but little thinned, and the great majority of leaves ripen and fall to the ground unscathed. They have come through the campaign of life and have experienced many ups and downs, and yet, on the whole, they have each had an active and useful life. The leaf-rollers have made their nests in a few of certain kinds of them, the leaf-cutters have made holes in certain other kinds, the gall insects have made their nurseries at the expense of still other kinds; but all these things amount to a small fraction of the whole. When a plague of forest worms comes and strips the maples or the beeches, or a plague of elm-beetles strips the elms, and the invasion of a foreign deadly fungus kills all the chestnuts, these calamities are paralleled by the plagues that in past times have swept away large numbers of human beings and depopulated whole countries, or by epidemic diseases, such as infantile paralysis, that now and then rage over widespread areas.
Go and sit down in our mixed beech, maple, birch, and oak woods and witness the varying fortunes of the trees. How many of them have had misfortunes of one kind or another! How few, if any, have reached their ideal! How many are diseased or dying at the top or decaying at the root! Some have been mutilated by the fall of other trees. Youth and age meet and mingle. Some trees in their teens, as it were, are very thrifty; others are old and decrepit. In fact, the fortunes of the individual trees are much like those of men and women in a human community—struggle, competition, defeat, decay, and death on all sides. All, or nearly all, the evils that afflict men have their counterpart in the evils that afflict the trees of the forest. When some species of forest worm threatens the destruction of our beech or maple forests some other form of insect-life steps in and puts an end to their increase, and the plague vanishes. The gypsy and the brown-tailed moths which have so ravished the groves and forests of the Eastern States will doubtless in time be held in check by their natural enemies. The plague of tent caterpillars that got such headway in New York State that it threatened to become a public calamity was effectually checked by the cold and rain of the May of 1917. Not one tent caterpillar have I seen during the past three years. The plague of currant-worms was checked in the same way. Sooner or later any excess is sure to be corrected. But so far as we can see, such things as the chestnut blight and hickory blight must rage like a fire till they have spent themselves and there are no more chestnut- or hickory-trees to be destroyed. Throughout the course of the biological history of the globe, both plants and animals have dropped out in some such way, and new forms come in—come in through the slow action of the evolutionary impulse.
The Providence I see at work in the case of the trees does not differ at all from the Providence I see at work in the case of men. It is one and the same, and that one is as I have so often said, wholesale, indiscriminating, regardless of individuals, regardless of waste, delays, pain, suffering, failure, yet insuring success on a universal scale, the scale of centuries and geologic periods. Our standards of time compared with Nature’s standards are like our interplanetary spaces compared with the inconceivable abysses of the sidereal heavens—minutes compared to centuries. Our little family of planets moves round the fireside of our little sun—a small chimney-corner in the vast out-of-doors of astronomic space, where suns and systems and whole universes of worlds drift like bubbles on the sea. Give Nature time enough, and the world of to-day, or of any day, becomes an entire stranger to you. Orion will no longer stalk across the winter skies, the pole-star will no longer guide your ships, if, indeed, there remains any ocean for your ships to sail upon.
The Natural Providence is not concerned about you and me. In comparison it is concerned only about our race, and not lastingly concerned about that, since races, too, shall go.
As I sit here under an old heavy-topped apple-tree on a hot midsummer day, a yellow leaf lets go its hold upon the branch over my head and comes softly down upon the open book I am reading. It is a perfect leaf, but it has had its day. The huge family of leaves of which it was a member are still rank and green and active in sustaining the life of the tree, but this one has dropped out of the leafy ranks. There are a few small dark spots upon it, which, I see with my pocket glass, are fungus growths, or else some germ disease of apple-tree leaves, perhaps, like pneumonia, or diphtheria, or tuberculosis among men. One leaf out of ten thousand has fallen. Was Fate cruel to it? From the point of view of the leaf, yes—could a leaf have a point of view; from the point of view of Nature, no. The tree has leaves enough left to manufacture the needed chlorophyl, and that satisfies the law. If all the leaves were blighted, or were swept off by insect enemies, or stripped by hail and storm, that were a calamity to the tree. But one leaf, though all the myriad forces of Nature went to its production, though it is a marvel of delicate structure and function, though the sun’s rays have beaten upon it and used it, and been kind to it, though evolution worked for untold ages to bring its kind to perfection—what matters it? It will go back into the soil and the air from which it came, and contribute its mite to another crop of leaves, and maybe it has rendered the molecules of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed more ready and willing to enter into other living combinations. And the fungus germs that have preyed upon it, they, too, have had their period of activity, and have justified themselves. Nature thus pits one form against another, and her great drama of life and death goes on. Are her stakes more in the one than in the other, since she favors both? Yes, she has more at stake in health than in disease. If disease always triumphed, all life would go out. Of course, in the sum total of things, the life of this old tree counts for but little, but if it failed to bear apples, its chief end would be defeated. Evil is limited; it is a minor counter-current, but it is just as real as the good; it is a phase of the good; we have evil because we first have good. Both are relative terms. We are prone to speak of good and evil as if they were something absolute, like gravity or chemical affinity. But are they any more absolute than heat and cold, or than big and little? What pleases us, and is conducive to our well-being, we call good, and its opposite we call evil. We are not to make our wants and dislikes, our pleasures and our pain, the measure of the universe, as we do mathematics and physics. We can think of things in terms of art and literature, of beauty or ugliness, or in terms of morality and religion, or we may think of them in terms of science and of exact knowledge. When we say they are good or bad, we are thinking of them in terms of morals or of religion; when we say they are beautiful or ugly, we are describing them in terms of æsthetics; when we say they are true or false, real or delusive, we are talking of them in terms of science.
This sere and prematurely ripened leaf appeals to my literary and imaginative faculties through its beauty and its symbolic character; it appeals to my understanding, my love of accurate knowledge, by reason of the blight that caused its fall.
Our going out of the world seems equally fortuitous and haphazard in infancy, youth, middle life, old age; before we have fairly lived, or after life has lost its value, or in the height of our powers, or in the decrepitude of old age: which shall it be?
The naturist sees all life as a whole. Man is not an exception, but part of the total scheme. The life principle is the same in him as in all else below him—the principle that organizes matter into countless new forms; that crosses and uses the mechanical and chemical forces, and begets numberless new compounds; that develops organs and functions, and separates the living world so sharply from the non-living. In the weed, the tree, and in man, the principle is the same. What has set up this organizing power and so impressed it that it goes on from lower to higher forms, and unfolds the whole drama of evolution through the geologic ages, is the mystery of mysteries. To solve this mystery, mankind invented God and acts of creation. But a God apart from Nature is to me unthinkable, and science finds no beginning of anything. It finds change, transformation, only. When or where did man begin? Where does the circle begin? Self-beginning—who can think of that? Can we think of a stick with only one end? We can think of a motion as beginning and ending, but not of substance as beginning and ending. When the metabolism of the body ceases, death comes. Do we think of life, or the organizing principle, as then leaving the body? It ceases, but does it leave the body in any other sense than that the flame leaves the candle when it is blown out? And is this any different in the case of man than it is in the case of a tree or a dog? We postulate what we call a soul in man, which we deny to all other forms of life—an independent entity which separates from the body and lives after it. But we run into difficulties the moment we do so. In the biologic history of man, when and where did the soul appear? Did the men of the old Stone Age, of whom Professor Osborn writes so graphically and convincingly, have it? Did the Piltdown man, the Neanderthal man, the Java man of Dubois, have it? Did our ancestral forms still lower down have it? Do babies have it? Do idiots and half-witted persons have it?
All we can claim for man above the lower orders is higher intelligence, greater brain power, the power of reflection, and the logical process. His dog has perceptive intelligence, but not reflective; animals act from inherited impulse; man from impulse, thought, ideation. Man’s instinctive impulses are guided or restrained by thought; his emotions—anger, love—wait upon thought; his migratory instinct waits as that of the lower animals does not. But when this extra power began, who can say? It had no beginning, it dawned by insensible degrees, as do all things in Nature. We have only to heighten our conception of Nature and matter to see the difficulties vanish—and the stigma of materialism loses its terrors.
In these later centuries mankind has steadily grown bolder and bolder in dealing with its deities and its devils. A few heroic spirits have always questioned the truth of the popular creeds, but in our day a very large majority question or even deny them. Fear of the wrath above or the wrath below has fled. Men are fast coming to see that devotion to the truth is the essence of true religion, and that the worst form of irreligion is the acceptance of creeds and forms without examining them, or upon the sole authority of some book or sect. The truth-loving man is the God-loving man. We no longer talk of God-fearing men—this negative attitude has given place to the positive attitude of love and enjoyment. The wrath of God no longer makes us tremble. The swift and sure vengeance of violated law, both in the physical world without us and the physiological world within us, we understand and appreciate, but the fury and revenge of the offended gods no longer disturb our dreams. Nature has no mercy, is no respecter of persons, is one to the just and the unjust. Only the moral nature of man knows right from wrong; only the reason of man knows truth from falsehood. When or how man got this moral and intellectual nature is a question upon which men themselves will never agree. Did it come from without or from within—through evolution or revelation? The naturalist or naturist is bound to believe that it came from within through the long process of evolution. Whatever favored man’s development became a biological law and had survival value. Without some degree of right conduct and fair dealing—some degree of perception of the true and the false—the race of man could never have attained its present high position in the scale of animate nature. Through some inherent impulse or tendency in matter, man arose out of the earth, climbing through the many lowly forms to his full estate of a rational being. It has been a long and toilsome and painful journey. But here we are, and when we look back through the geologic vistas we are incredulous that we came that road. We incline to the short cut through the Garden. But the study of the ways of Nature as we see them in all living things opens our eyes to the truth of evolution. Of course the great puzzle and mystery is, Who or what stamped upon matter this organizing and developing impulse and caused the first unicellular life in the old Azoic or Palæozoic seas to branch and grow and increase in complexity till it gave birth to all the myriad living forms, high and low, that now fill the earth? But here again I am using the language of half-truth—the language of our experience, which makes us think of some external agent as stamping an impulse upon matter. If we say the impulse was always there, that it is inseparable from matter and the laws of matter, just as creation is without beginning and end, center or circumference, we come no nearer speaking the unspeakable. But it seems to me we do, in a measure, satisfy the reason; we make it see or realize its own limitations; reason guides reason.
The infinite knows neither time nor space, neither extension nor duration; it knows only the here and the now. It does not wait for time to pass or for eternity to begin. Eternity is now. Man, and all that has arisen out of him, is a part of universal nature. Are we not held to the sphere? Can we disturb it in its orbit? Can we banish one atom from it or add one atom to it? We are a fragment of it, its laws pervade our minds, and we cannot get away from the necessity of putting our thoughts and emotions in the terms of our experience as dwellers upon this astronomic globe. We may fancy that we get away from it in moments of abstract thought, but we do not; we do not get away from ourselves any more than we can outrun our shadow. We can let our imaginations course with the spheres that circle through the abysmal depths of space, but we can put our emotions only in the words that we have invented to describe our experiences in this little three-dimensional corner of creation. If our terms were formed from our experiences amid the spheres, we might be able to give some hint of the Infinite. We might learn how to describe our sensations when emancipated from the standards and limitations of the world in which we live.
Conventionally religious persons shrink from having their spiritual life discussed in terms of psychology, because psychology smacks of science and science acts like a blight upon religion. It dispels mystery and lets the light of day—the garish, irreligious day—into the twilight or the darkness of religious emotion. We do not want our relation to the spiritual world explained in terms of our common knowledge—such is our hankering after the unknown, the mysterious, the transcendent.
One side of our nature fears the Infinite, and we experience a chill when the methods of this world obtrude themselves there. We have convinced ourselves that the part of our inner life which we call the soul is something more sacred and mysterious and nearer to the Infinite than our ordinary faculties. What victims we are of words! What is the value of this feeling, and how did it arise? Our appreciation of the beautiful, in art and nature, is equally extra and transcends our practical faculties. Man’s belief in another world—an ideal world of the absolute good—is, of course, the result of his strong reaction from the pain, the struggle, the incompleteness of this world. Evolution is a hard road to travel. Being born is evidently not a pleasant experience for the baby, and in this world man is constantly struggling through new experiences into a higher and larger life. His measure of happiness is never full and he looks for compensation in another and better world. He does not see that there can be no better world—that pain and struggle and disappointment are necessary for his development, and that to long for a state in which these things do not exist is like the stream longing for a dead equilibrium. All power and all growth come from a break in the repose of the physical forces. There is no power in a uniform temperature, nor in water at a dead level. Mechanical power comes down an incline, vital power is a lift on an up-grade—all growing things struggle upward; the vegetable and animal world lift the earth elements up against gravity into an unstable equilibrium. Mechanical things run down the scale toward a stable equilibrium.
Our life goes on by virtue of some principle or force in matter that tends constantly to break up the stable into the unstable, to force the elements into new chemical combinations. Our machines dissipate energy in doing work; the living body conserves energy in the same process. It grows strong by the obstacles it overcomes, up to the limits of its powers. The clock runs down, the energy we put into it in winding it up is dissipated; but the growth of a living body is a winding-up process, a drawing-in and a storing-up process. In the wood and coal we burn is stored up the heat of the sun. In burning them and driving machinery by means of the heat developed, the energy is dissipated. In manual labor the human body dissipates energy also, and it is the same solar energy that the engine dissipates, and it does it in the same mechanical way; and it is constantly replenished from without through the food consumed. But the human or living engine stokes itself. It is a clock that winds itself up, a gun that loads and points itself. Because the living body in its final analysis turns out to be a machine as absolutely dependent upon mechanical and chemical principles as any other machine, there are those who see no radical difference between the mechanical and the vital.
I conclude that it is equally up-grade from the vital or physiological to the psychical. How the two connect we can never know, but that the thinking man dissipates energy there is no doubt. The body and the soul are one in a way past our finding out. When we discuss these things in terms of metaphysics, we launch upon a boundless sea and reach no real port.
When we project ourselves into Nature out of which we came, or when we see ourselves there objectively,—our virtues, our aspirations, our vices, and our wickedness,—we sow the seeds of our religion. We grow a crop of gods and of devils, and heaven and hell become fixed realities to us. So do we make the world in which we live, and it in turn makes us. So does the divine in us keep pace with the divine we see in Nature. So does the beauty of our own characters grow as we see beauty in the character of others. So do our love, faith, hope, charity, develop and augment as we see these things in the world about us. The universe is thus constituted, and that is all we can say about it.
That right, human right, in the end and on a large scale, prevails, I believe to be true; the right that in long periods of time means, or rather secures, the well-being of the race—the greatest good to the greatest number.
In discussing the final problems of the universe, we are attempting to describe the Infinite in terms of the finite—an impossible task. We think and speak of God as a person, because our experience gives us no other terms in which to conceive Him except in terms of personality. He sees, hears, plans, governs, creates, loves, suffers, is angry, we say,—in fact, has all human attributes and characteristics vastly magnified. He is an omnipotent and omnipresent man. He is the creator and organizer and director of the universe, and hence is responsible for everything in it, the evil as well as the good. Our attitude toward Him is that of a subject toward his sovereign, or toward a supreme judge. We must praise, exalt, supplicate, propitiate Him. There is lying upon my table a recent volume of sermons by an English divine called “The Justification of God”—his justification in the face of the terrible World War which he might have prevented. Thus, just as soon as we conceive of God in terms of our human nature, these baffling problems thrust themselves upon us. We must seek some grounds upon which we can excuse or vindicate or justify this supreme man for permitting the terrible happenings which darken the world. As this is not an easy task, men say in their hearts, and often with their lips: “There is no God.” Better no God than a being who would permit the sin and suffering we see daily all about us, and that history reveals to us.
The only alternative I see is to conceive of God in terms of universal Nature—a nature God in whom we really live and move and have our being, with whom our relation is as intimate and constant as that of the babe in its mother’s womb, or the apple upon the bough. This is the God that science and reason reveal to us—the God we touch with our hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and from whom there is no escape—a God whom we serve and please by works and not by words, whose worship is deeds, and whose justification is in adjusting ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves of his bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting to everlasting. Of course in the light of the old theology this is no God at all. It was to emancipate us from the rule of this God that the old conceptions of a being above and far removed from Nature were formulated. Nature is carnal and unholy. Our theory compels us to say to matter and the laws of matter, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” We struggle and suffer in this debasing world for a season, and then escape from it to a higher and better one. In all the dark, prescientific ages during our own era—dark in regard to man’s real relation to the universe in which he finds himself, but often luminous with flashes of insight into the nature of man himself—these conceptions ruled man’s religious aspirations. In our own times they still largely rule in various modified forms. The old theological dogmas are more or less discredited, but a religion founded upon science makes little headway with the average man. We are shaping our practical lives—our business, our social, our economical relations, more and more according to scientific deductions. We seek more and more a scientific or naturalistic basis for our rules of conduct, for our altruism, for our charitable organizations, for our whole ethical system. Any principle that squares with natural law is indeed founded upon a rock. The stars in their courses fight for the cause that is founded upon natural right, which in human relations does not mean the right of the strong to trample upon the weak, but the right of all to their full measure of free development.
Right and wrong are, of course, finite terms, and apply only in the human sphere. Universal Nature, as it appears among non-living bodies and forces, knows neither right nor wrong; it knows only might. As it appears among the orders below man, it knows neither right nor wrong. Physics and chemistry have no consciousness; neither have beasts or bacteria; but man has, and this fact will in time determine the whole course of human history. Naturalism makes for righteousness, or right-mindedness, as surely as it makes for health and longevity.