XIII
HORIZON LINES
I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
In dealing with fundamental questions like the origin of life, how prone our natural philosophers are to assume the existence of that which they set out to prove. Thus Pflügler assumes living protein in the shape of a cyanogen radical, and assumes that this radical possesses a large amount of internal energy, and thus “introduces into the living matter energetic internal motion.” As cyanogen and its compounds arise only in incandescent heat, he concludes that life is derived from fire, that its germ was in the earth when it was still an incandescent ball.
“As soon as oxides can be there,” says Moore, “oxides appear.” “When temperature admits of carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed.” But are oxides and carbonates mere fortuitous compounds—just chance hits? Moore helps himself out by formulating what he calls the “Law of Complexity,” a law that holds throughout all space. But is the law, again, fortuitous? Is it not rather organized intelligence? “Atoms, molecules, colloids, and living organisms arise as a result of the operation of this law.” Allen says, “Life arose at the period when the physical conditions of the earth came to be nearly what they are at present.” Of course. But is not this begging the question? We do not know life apart from these conditions; hence we assume that the conditions beget the life.
What is life anyhow? May we not say that it is a new motion in matter? It does not introduce a new chemistry, or a new physics, but it uses these to new ends. New and unstable compounds arise. Solar energy, says Allen, acting on various carbon and nitrogen compounds, would set up various anabolic and catabolic reactions which resulted in life—life of a very humble and rudimentary form, but life.
Troland gets life from the enzymes, but how does he get his enzymes? He assumes that at some moment in the earth’s history a small amount of a certain autocatalytic enzyme—a self-created enzyme—suddenly appeared at a definite time and place within the yet warm ocean waters which contained in solution various substances reacting very slowly to produce an oily liquid immiscible with water. Troland postulates the auto- or self-catalytic character of the initial enzyme, which is virtually postulating the life-impulse itself.
Osborn, in his work on the “Origin and Evolution of Life,” also virtually starts by assuming that which he sets out to prove. He suggests that the initial step in the origin of life was the coördinating and bringing together of the then primordial elements of water, nitrates, and carbon dioxide, “which so far as we know had never been in combined action before.” Was their coming together a blind, fortuitous affair? Osborn assumes that these elements were gradually bound by a new form of mutual attraction “out of which arose a new form of unity in the cosmos, an organic unity or organism. It was an application of energy new to the cosmos. In fact it was life.” “When the earth had in the course of its physical evolution become adapted as the abode of life, living substances came into being.” By their own independent action, or by what?
In trying to account for happenings on the earth’s surface, we follow the chain of cause and effect. But when we try to explain origins, we are dealing with a chain which has only one end.
Picted, a Swiss scientist, concluded that because all chemical action of the kind which goes on in living things is annihilated at one hundred degrees below zero Centigrade, therefore chemical action and life are one. But chemical action is as old as the earth. Is life as old?
II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS
I fancy I am not alone in having difficulty in uniting the two worlds—the living and the non-living—and in seeing them under the same law. In the one I see something like mind and purpose; every living thing shows something for which we have no name but intelligence. Organization demands an organizing principle. There is purpose in the wings of a bird, the legs of an animal, the fins of a fish, but where is there purpose in the orbs, in the comets, in the meteors? Or, to come down to the earth, where is there purpose in the mountains, in the stratified rocks, in the ocean, or in the air currents?
In a living body there are organs which function; in a non-living, there are parts which act and are acted upon. To see mind in all is the task—to see in gravity, in cohesion, in chemical affinity, in dissolution, anything at work akin to ourselves. We see irrefragable law; we see the sequence of cause and effect; we see the weather system work itself out—evaporation, condensation, precipitation, resulting in clouds, rainfall, springs, streams, lakes, and seas; we see the never-failing succession of the seasons; we see the law of the conservation of force; but do all these things imply the same intelligence, though unconscious, which we see in the sitting bird, or in the growing plant or tree? Is the cosmic order akin to the vital order? Of course mechanics and chemistry are one the universe over; atoms and molecules are atoms and molecules; but where does mind end, and law begin? Or, is it all law, or all mind, according to our point of view? The moral order, which is man’s order, we know has its limits, but I am trying to see if the rational order is coexistent with nature. The unity we seek we may find in the old conception of God, but this saddles all the turmoil and disorder and evil of the world upon an all-wise, all-good Being.
Shall we adopt the idea of a primal mind as distinct from the human mind, as the poets do? I grasp at anything that will help me see that I am akin to the farthest star, in my mind as in my body. I cannot think of a dual or a divided universe. I want to see myself as strung upon the same thread as all the rest of nature.
In organic evolution I see the workings of the creative impulse—or growth, as opposed to mere accretion or accumulation. In the light of the same law does one not see worlds and suns potential in the spiral nebulæ? Science helps us to see the evolution of the chemical elements, or to follow up this defining and differentiating process. Could we fly to the uttermost parts of the heavens, we should find the Cosmic Mind there before us.
III. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY
Is it possible to think of any ingenious contrivance in nature as the result of chance, or of the fortuitous clashing and jostling of the elements? Living things are full of these ingenious contrivances which serve a definite end and keep life going. In the inorganic world there are no such contrivances; there is not the simplest bit of machinery—parts adjusted to parts, and the whole adjusted to some specific end. In all the clashing and jostling of bodies and forces through all the astronomic and geologic ages, not so much as the simplest mechanical device—a coiled spring or a carpenter’s hammer—has been struck out, and never can be. It is true that there are certain static conditions of matter that suggest design—natural bridges, natural obelisks, rude architectural and monumental structures, and human profiles on the rocks; but these are not the result of a constructive process, of a building-up, but the result of degradation: the erosive forces carve them out in obedience to the laws of matter and energy. We easily see how it all came about; and we can guide these forces so that they will repeat the process. But we do not see how the living body, with all its marvelous adjustments and coördinations, came about, and we cannot manipulate matter so as to produce the simplest living thing. Darwinians profess to see in natural selection—which is simply a name for an eliminating or sifting process—the explanation of even man himself. But the elimination of the weaker forms, which has gone on for whole geologic ages—for example, in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado—has not resulted in so much as one perfect, four-square foundation, or one perfect flying arch. Natural selection is not a creative, but a purely mechanical, process. We involuntarily personify it, and think of it as involving will and power of choice; think of it as selecting this and that, as a man does when he weeds his garden or selects his seeds, or breeds his animals. But it is not positive at all. It is negative—a dropping-out process.
Chance, or chance selection, works alike in the organic and the inorganic realms, but it develops no new forms in the inorganic, because there is no principle of development, no organizing push. But in organized matter there is, in and behind all this organizing, a developing principle or tendency; the living force is striving toward other forms; in other words, development occurs because there is something to develop. An acorn develops, but a quartz pebble only changes.
The living body is placed in a world of non-living bodies and forces, and it takes its chances; it develops only by their aid; if warmth and moisture are withheld, it ceases to develop; or, if warmth and moisture are in excess, it ceases to develop; its well-being is insured when it rides the inorganic forces, and is not ridden by them. It is subject to the law of chance of the world in which it is placed, but that law of chance does not explain its origin or its development as it does that of the non-living forms.
That it is all the result of design or purpose of an all-wise Being, working his will upon matter, is equally unthinkable. Yet if it is the result of chance, then the world of mind and soul is only a phase of mechanics and chemistry. In that case the head of a Paul or a Homer is no greater wonder than a volcanic bomb, having essentially the same origin. If we regard it as the work of design, we are compelled to saddle all the sin and misery, all the delays and failures and wastes of the geologic ages, upon Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, together with all the famine and pestilence and carnage and miscarriages of history.
For untold millions of years the earth was given up to low, groveling, all but brainless, bestial forms, devouring and devoured; for other untold millions it was the scene of a carnival of terrible dragon-like monsters—in the sea, on the earth, and in the air—a tragedy of monstrous forms enacted upon an unstable stage that rose and sank or was overwhelmed by fire and flood. For other long ages it was the scene of ape-like creatures struggling to be man, living in caves, contending with savage beasts, hirsute, forbidding, living by tooth and claw and muscular strength more than by wit, followed by the long historical period during which man appeared and has fought his way to his present stage of development, through blood and carnage and suffering and misdirected activities, dogged by all the evil and destructive passions, obstructed and thwarted, cut off by plagues and wars, engulfed by earthquakes, devoured by fire and flood, blinded by his own ignorance, consumed by his own evil passions, yet making steady progress toward the position which he now holds in the animal kingdom.
IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM
The bogey of teleology frightens a good many honest scientific minds. To recognize anything akin to intelligence in nature, or to believe that a universal mind is immanent in, or a part of, the cosmos, is looked upon as disloyalty to the scientific spirit.
Lamarck’s idea of an indwelling directing principle in organic evolution discredited him with Darwin, and with the leading biologists since his time. Yet Darwin said he could not look upon the universe as the result of chance. But he faltered before the other alternative—that any will or design lay back of it.
It is unfortunate that these words connote things purely human, and to that extent are likely to lead us astray. But are not all our terms human, even the word “astray” itself? Can we have any other? Emerson says that anything may be affirmed or denied of the Infinite, and that God can be hinted only in signs and symbols. In trying to describe time, we need a new language that differs as much from our ordinary speech as algebra differs from arithmetic. The circle and sphere are the only complete types of Infinity.
In Professor Loeb’s mechanistic conception of life there is no hint of mind or soul; all is matter and force. All the mechanists and energists and materialists unconsciously endow their matter and force with creative power, thus elevating them to the rank of a Deus.
Science knows no mysteries; it knows only insoluble problems and comparatively few of them. But may not one see mysteries in nature without being a mystic? Physical facts may be inexplicable, but we do not call them mysteries. The birth and development of the cell is wonderful, but can we say that it is mysterious? Does not mystery imply something occult and unknowable? Is a biologist or evolutionist to be charged with mysticism because he refuses to admit that the development of species is all a matter of chance? If he believes, for instance, that the horse as we know him was inevitable in that small beast of Eocene times, the eohippus, is he to be charged with a teleological taint? Or if we speak of the predestined course of evolution are we unfaithful to the true scientific spirit? Is not the acorn predestined to become an oak? Does growth imply a mysterious guiding force or principle? The little brown house wren that fusses and chatters here around its box on my porch has come all the way from Central America. Did something guide it? Life is full of this kind of guidance. Not much of nature can be explained by addition and subtraction; not much of it can be explained by mere mechanics, or physics; not much of it can be explained by the doctrine of chance. There are reasons behind reasons. You may give good physiological reasons why the heart beats, why the liver secretes bile, why the digestive processes go on and our food nourishes us, but can you find the mind by dissecting the brain or connect mind with matter?
Mysticism belongs to the sphere of our religious emotions, and when we read natural phenomena through these emotions we are mystical. We cannot say that the course of evolution has been directed, and we cannot say it goes by chance. The changes of the seasons are not directed; the circuit of the waters from the earth, through the sea to the clouds and back to the earth, is not directed; the orbs in their courses are not directed; the sap in the trees, the blood in our veins, are not directed; neither are these things by chance. “An inward perfecting principle” is the divinity that shapes the ends of all organisms.
Many scientific men are so shy of teleology that they tend to the other extreme and land in a world of chance.
Now, if man and all the other forms of life are the result of chance, then Chance is a very good god and should be written with a capital. No matter what we call the power out of which the universe flows, or with which it is identified, it is a veritable Deus.
We cannot affirm that we are the result of chance, nor the result of design, as we use these words in our daily lives. These words apply to parts and fragments of which our lives are made up. They do not help us in dealing with the whole. We share in the life of the universe; we are a part of it, and what keeps it going keeps us going. What set evolution on foot and evolved the organic from the inorganic is the parent of us all. It is not we that are immortal; it is life, and the universe. We pass like shadows, but the sun remains—for a season. We say of a thing, or an event, that it came by chance, when we see no will like unto our own directing it; at the same time we know that the laws of matter and force control everything. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without their immutable decrees. In the same sense the hairs of our heads are numbered.
When we discuss or describe the universe in terms of experience, we are dealing in half-truths. We cannot describe a sphere in terms of angles and right lines; no more can we describe or interpret the All in terms of our own experience.
If it were Chance, or Darwin’s Natural Selection, or orthogenesis, or whatever it was, that brought me and all other forms of life here, that gave me my mind and body, that put my two eyes and my two ears just where they are of most service to me, and my two arms and hands, and my two legs and feet, and all my internal organs, my double circulation, my heart to pump the blood and keep the vital machinery going, my secretions and my excretions, my lungs to lay hold of the air and purify the blood, my liver and kidneys to eliminate the poisons and effete matter, my marvelous digestive system to furnish the fuel that generates the physical power, and, more than all these things, that looked after my germ in the old Cambrian seas and brought it safely down through the hazards of the long road of evolution and developed it and made me a man, and gave me the capacity to contemplate and enjoy this amazing universe—the power or the blind force or the law of chance, I say, that could do all this is god enough for me. I want no other.
Do we expect to see the Natural Providence at work as we see man at work? Nature works from the inside. In the human sphere there is a maker and a thing made. Not so in the universe. Things are in their place without being made. Our concepts of the beginning and the end do not apply to them. The words “chance” and “design” are born of our limited knowledge.
That man or an ant or a leaf or a flower could result from the haphazard jostling together of the molecules of matter, or the units of force, is unthinkable. Could one get an intelligent sentence, or one’s own name, by putting the letters of the printer’s type in a hat and shaking them up till the crack of doom?—an old and trite comparison, but it seems to state the case fairly. And yet, how can a naturalist fall back upon teleology? Is not Nature sufficient unto herself? Must we inject our own little methods and makeshifts into the ways of the Eternal? We might as well try to walk off the sphere as try to compass this problem in the terms of our own experience. The inscrutable, the unthinkable, the unknowable, confront us on all sides.
So far as I can see the Creative Energy in nature has no plan nor end. Plans are the ways of the finite, not of the Infinite. Man alone has plans and ends. The Infinite cannot be defined or interpreted in terms of our human lives. It transcends all speech. To name any one thing as the purpose and end of creation is like naming the end of a sphere, or the direction of a circle. All bodies with which we deal on the earth have an upper and an under side, but the earth itself is all top side; there is no under side, though the orbs in the heavens, to our eye, have a lowest point or bottom side. Every tangible body with which we deal rests upon some other body, but the orbs float in vacuity. The irregular solid bodies with which we deal have three dimensions—length, breadth, and thickness—but, properly speaking, the sphere has none of these; it has only mass.
When we discuss or attempt to describe what we call God, or what I call the Eternal, in terms of man, as the theologians do, something within us rises up and says, No. A magnified man, or a man raised to the nth power, is not God; he is still man. I fancy that with most men the denial of a God means simply this: there is no God who can be described in the terms usually employed. One is an atheist because he cannot accept a God made in man’s image. It belittles the Mystery. Our belief in God is so radical that we reject half-gods. The fatherhood of God means no more than the manhood of God, or the governorship, or the judgeship, of God.
In many respects the manlike God falls below his human prototype, being more cruel than any human being dares to be.
No, we cannot measure the Infinite Mystery with our foot-rule. Boundless space is the negation of space. We can say that there is no space in the sense that we can say that there is no God. There is no motion unless there is something at rest; there is no Infinite Good unless there is Infinite Evil. Hence we have invented a hell to balance heaven, a Devil to offset God.
The universe is a reality, though we cannot define it. Life goes on, though we cannot account for it. Boundless space exists, though words fail us in the attempt to fathom it. The earth has its center, though we do not know whether we should be standing on our heads or our heels were we to reach it. Heavenly bodies do collide, though we cannot visualize the collision. Our language fails us when we come to the ultimate questions.
That this is the best possible world, humanly speaking, I have no doubt, yet sin and misery are on every hand. Sin and misery are terms of our own which simply express some of the conditions of our development. They are like the terms “up” and “down,” “east” and “west,” and “near” and “far”; they are relative. Nature knows no good and no bad; all is good; that is, all favors development. The rivers reach the sea, no matter what the obstacles in the way. The seasons come and go, no matter how delayed.
Nature’s ends, so far as we can name them, are wholesale—to keep the game going, to heap the measure, to play one hand against the other. She is more solicitous about the race than about the individual. The wreck of worlds or suns in sidereal space matters little; there are infinite worlds and suns left. What would really matter would be failure of celestial mechanics. The eclipse of the sun and the moon occurring exactly on time, “without the untruth of a single second,” tells how perfectly the great machine runs. The eclipse itself is an accident, but a harmless one; it is not a necessity in the movements of our system.
If man is the end of things, as we would fain believe, then why was he so long a-coming? Why will he as surely disappear from the earth? Why has he not come to other planets in our system? When he disappears from our solar system, will not the great procession go on just the same without him? No doubt of it. He is only an incident, and maybe an accident—a lucky throw of the dice.
V. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE?
We cannot put to Nature the direct questions we put to ourselves. Namable purposes and designs rule our lives. Not so with the All. I told Father Goodman the other day, much to his bewilderment, that I did not think the air was made for us to breathe, nor the water for us to drink, nor food for us to eat. We breathe and drink and eat because our organization is adjusted to these things. The shoe is made over the last, not the last to fit the shoe. The organization is fitted, or fits itself, to its environment. Nature is first, man is afterwards. Is the notch in the mountain made for the road to go through? Is the land-locked harbor made to protect our shipping? Would it not be as true to say that the wind was made to fill the ship’s sails, as that air was made to fill our lungs? In dealing with this question of design many persons get the cart before the horse.
Of course there is purpose or design in living things in a sense that there is not in the non-living. Every part of a living organization is purposeful. There is purpose in our lungs, our hearts, our kidneys, in short in every part of our bodies. There is purpose in the varnish on leaves, in the down and resin on buds, in the wings and hooks of seeds, in the colors of flowers and of animals, in fact, in everything that makes for the well-being of living things. But not in the same sense is there purpose in the wind, the rain, the snow, the tides, the heat, the cold, the rocks, the soil, the fountains. Animate nature struggles; inanimate nature passively submits. Dead matter forever seeks an equilibrium; living matter forever struggles against an equilibrium. The waters separate the clay and the sand and the pebbles from the soil and deposit each in its own place; but it is not a struggle or an effort; it is mechanical adjustment. It is not an effort for certain liquids to form crystals, or for certain elements to combine with certain other elements and form new compounds, but it is an effort for a tree to resist the wind, to lift up tons of water and minerals against gravity, to force its roots through the soil or grip the rock, and it is an effort for the mother to bear and nurse her young. For anything to live and grow, effort is needful; not commonly a painful effort, but a joyous one.
So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass. There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s moons. The circular forms and orbits of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom question we can never reach and formulate. The earth rests on nothing and floats as lightly as a feather. All matter is probably only a phase of the ether, but the ether defies all proof and all negation.
How quickly we get where no step can be taken! We cannot step off the planet, though we may step off from every object on its surface. There is no heat in sunlight till it reaches the earth; heat is an experience of our bodies, and beings on the remotest planets, if there are any, may and must receive adequate heat, and beings on Mercury and Venus no more. Terrestrial physics and celestial physics must be the same, and yet celestial mechanics find no place on the surface of our planet. The laws of the cosmos bring to naught our mundane conceptions. Where are up and down, east and west, over and under, out in sidereal space? We balk at perpetual motion, yet in the heavens, and in the interior of matter, behold perpetual motion! Behold motion without friction and energy without waste or dissipation! On the earth every visible body rests on some other body, everything has a beginning and an end, but where is the beginning or the ending of the cosmos? Where, then, in this quest do we touch bottom? Nowhere. There is no bottom. Only measurable, finite things have bottoms and bounds. The immeasurable, the Infinite, is over us and under us, and our lives are like sparks against the night. But, just as we live in the heavens and do not know it, so we live and move and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off; it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from it as from gravity.
We are not like beings who have moved into a house, made and furnished and provisioned in anticipation of our coming. We are creatures born in a house, or amid an environment to which we must slowly and more or less painfully fit ourselves. We are the consequent, not the antecedent. In a different world we should have been differently constituted. In a bigger world no doubt our bodies would have been bigger and our strength greater; with less or with more oxygen in the air, no doubt our lungs would have been different. With less light no doubt our eyes would have been larger, and with more light they would probably have been smaller. We do not feel the pressure of the atmosphere, but make the pressure more or less, and we are at once disturbed. The deep-sea fishes fairly explode when brought to the surface, and no doubt the surface fishes would be crushed in the deep sea bottoms. Just as we adjust our flying machines to the tenuity of the air, and our oversea and undersea boats to the density and weight of the water, so Nature adjusts her organisms to their environment.
Man avails himself of all possible aids. His voluntary conquests of nature are many and are constantly increasing, but his involuntary dependencies upon her are many also. He did not launch himself into this world, and he did not give his body, with all its wonderful organs and powers, the shape it has, or elect to breathe or see or hear or breed or eat or sleep. Something else determined all these things for him. What is that something else? Our fathers called it God; we call it Nature, because we live in a scientific and not in a theological age. We are pantheistic and not theistic. Our gods are everywhere, in everything created. Our minds are no longer hampered by the idea of a maker and a thing made, a ruler or a governor and a thing ruled or governed. The unity of Nature and God is a conception fostered by science. We are compelled to adjust our minds to the idea of a causeless universe, to a universe without beginning and without ending, without a maker or a designer.
Our conception of cause and effect, or beginning and ending, applies only on the surface of the earth; where currents and counter-currents, action and reaction and interaction, are in perpetual see-saw; where every body rests upon some other body, and every cause has its antecedent cause; where we can live only by dealing with parts and fragments, and by separating one thing from another. The astronomic laws and conditions, or our conceptions of them, are thrown into confusion the moment we try to apply them in our practical mundane lives. In vain we try to abolish friction and achieve perpetual motion, but the heavenly bodies move without friction, and move forever and ever. Motion is the prime condition of the universe. It is the condition or necessity we are under in this world, on the surface of this planet, that sets us on the quest of final causes and gives rise to our conceptions of the made and the maker, the good and the bad, the end and the beginning. We cannot say that we are watched over by the gods—our personification of the universal mind that pervades nature—nor that we are not watched over by them, because that were to use the language of our surface existence. All we can say is that we are a part of the cosmos, fragments of the total scheme of things, and share its laws and conditions, and that the more perfectly we adjust the nature within us to the nature without us, the better we fare. With the Infinite there is no time and no space, only an everlasting here, an everlasting now.
Yet how can puny man interpret the universe or say aught of it in terms of his mundane experiences?
VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER
The laws and processes of Nature which to us are so beneficent, and which seem made for our especial benefit, were in full operation before life as we know it had become established. In fact, the fatherhood and motherhood of Nature are all thoughts of our own, inventions of our necessities. The paternity of gravitation and the maternity of frost and snow are in no respect different. We are the chance children—chance from our limited point of view—of an impersonal, unhuman, universal mother. We may say, humanly speaking, that Nature takes forethought of her children, but not afterthought. She provides that they shall actually appear in due time in this universe of conflicting and struggling forces, then lets them shift for themselves. They are born on the firing-line, in the field of perpetual war, and none escape unscathed. Indeed, they are moulded and adjusted and equipped by the very conditions in which the peril of their destruction lies. Gravity crushes them, and gravity gives them their powers. Fire consumes them, and water drowns them, and yet out of these things they came.
It is as if some god had planned the universe as a vast plant for the production of the myriad forms of life, each in its own place and season. In our little corner of it at a given hour of the great geologic clock one form appears, or many forms; at another hour other forms emerge, till man himself emerges as the culmination of a long line of lowly forms, many vestiges of which still cling to him. But the world is no more for man than for the mice and vermin that pester him. It is for all.
The mystery back of all—what shall we say of it? And the good and the evil that are so inextricably blended with it—what of them?
VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS
The grand movements of Nature, both in the heavens and in the earth, are on such a scale of time and distance that without the aid of science we could get little or no hint of them. Immeasurably slow and slight they are, according to our standards. The stars are fixed points in the sky to our unaided vision. Throughout the whole historic period they have shown little or no change in their relative positions, though they are moving in varying directions at the rate of many miles a second. Come back in a thousand years and there is no change; in thirty or forty thousand years, and changes of place might be barely perceptible to an unaided eye. Not till hundreds of thousands of years would Orion, or the Big Dipper, have become noticeably distorted, and probably not till millions of years would the heavens present combinations of stars forming new constellations. The Pole Star will after millions of years probably drift far from its present position, and the Milky Way be found in another part of the heavens. When viewed from the extreme points in space one hundred and eighty millions of miles apart which the earth’s orbit around the sun gives us, the fixed stars remain fixed, they show little or no parallax. To touch but the skirts of the Infinite exhausts our powers.
The geological changes upon the surface of this earth—mere mustard-seed in space that it is—are on such a scale of time that only an unfaltering scientific faith can take them in. The mountains and the valleys seem eternal, but to the eye of the geologist they are as flitting as the summer clouds. Look upon a Catskill landscape with its long, flowing mountain-lines curving over summits three or four thousand feet high, and its deep, broad, cradle-like valleys checkered with fertile farms and homesteads, and try to think of it as all the work of the slow and gentle rains and snows—geologic time stroking them almost as gently as a mother caresses her baby. Tried by human standards we live in a stable universe; change stops with the hills and the stars; but, tried by geologic and astronomic standards, it is as unsubstantial as the snows of winter or the dews of summer. Perpetual flux and transition mark even the stars in their courses. Astronomers calculate the weight of the earth in terms of its own tons, something like six sextillion tons, but in and of itself it weighs nothing; its weight is the pull of some other body, in itself pound balances pound; it is only by detachment from it that bodies have weight. As we approach the center, a pound would be less and less; halfway down it would weigh eight ounces only; at the center weight would disappear, the pull of matter on all sides would be equal, there would no longer be up or down. Gravitation is not a demon at the center of the earth, pulling all things toward him; it is a force in every atom, pulling and being pulled in every direction. Seek the center of the pulling, and all power vanishes.
The globe is on such a scale of size with reference to our lives and powers that by no effort of the imagination can we adjust ourselves to the contradictions presented. It is not by experience, nor by living and acting, that we know it as a sphere, but by thinking and speculating. Even if we travel round it, we get no other impression than that it is an endless plain. We find no under side; it is all top side. The practical inferences we draw from looking at the moon are all contradicted by our experiences here. The lower limb of the moon is not lower, as we should find if we were to go there, and the under side of the earth is also the upper side.
Our astronomy is sound, but our actual life gives us no clue to its truths. Only when we turn philosophers do we know the tremendous voyage we are making, and then we only know it abstractly. We never can know it concretely. The swift turning of the planet under our feet, and its enormous speed in its orbit around the sun, are not revealed to our sense as motion, but as changes from night to day and from one season to another. Slow, soft, still, the moon and the sun rise and drift across the heavens, and the impassive earth seems like a ship becalmed. No hint at all of the more than rifle-bullet speed through space. It is all too big for us. The celestial machine is no machine at all to our senses, but its vast movements go on as gently and as easily as the falling of the dew or the blooming of the flowers, and almost as unconsciously to us as the circulation of the blood in our hearts.
We are in the heavens and are a part of the great astronomical whirl and procession, and know it not. It is symbolical of our lives generally. We do not realize that we are a part of Nature till we begin to think about it. Our lives proceed as if we were two—man and Nature—two great antagonistic or contrary facts, but the two are one; there is only Nature. We can draw circle within circle, and circle around circle, but we cannot circumscribe Nature. That is the fact over all.
As struggling human beings we diverge from one another, oppose one another, defeat one another. All our differences and antagonisms arise from our need of action and of living. The lesson of the sphere is hard to learn, hard to state. Our powers of detachment are hardly equal to it. Our lives are rounded by the great astronomic curves. The contradictions which the intellect reveals, the unthinkable mysteries that surround us, the heavens over us, the earth under us always—the relativity of all things—thus does thought set us adrift on a shoreless sea.
VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS
Bergson says that we are in trouble the moment we think of a creator and a thing created; in other words, the moment we apply to the universe as a whole the concepts which our practical lives yield us. The only alternative I see is to think of the universe as uncreated, which, I confess, does not make the problem much easier. I try to help myself out by saying that our concepts are formed in a world in which we deal with parts and fragments, lines and angles on the surface of a sphere, and not with the sphere as a whole. Our senses do not reveal the earth to us as a globe, but as a boundless plain with no under side; we find no limits, and if we continue our search long enough, we come back to the place from which we set out, but from the opposite direction.
When we try to think in terms of spheres and solar systems, our everyday concepts avail us very little; in fact, they set us down wrong-end up. We look at the moon or the sun and we say, Surely if we were at the South Pole of either of these bodies, we should be as truly on the under side of it as the fly is when it alights at the South Pole of the globe in our study. We should be in a position opposite to that which we should occupy at the North Pole. That every point on the surface of a cosmic sphere should be on top, or rather that there should be no top, and no bottom; that these concepts should be abolished; that if two inhabited globes should come in collision, each would seem to the people upon the other to be falling down out of the heavens upon them; that out in sidereal space not even the Huns could drop bombs, or send up balloons, because there would be no up and no down—when we grasp these facts, I say, we are at the end of our tether; we not only do not know “where we are at,” but we find there is no “at.” Our minds can deal with the cosmos only in an abstract or mathematical way. As a concrete fact even our little earth is too much for us. Not merely too big, it contradicts all our experience. If we could build a sphere a mile through, or ten miles or a hundred miles, or ten thousand miles through, could we stand upon it at the South Pole? When we think of the daily revolutions of the earth upon its axis, we are compelled to think of it as turning over, because it brings the sun above us by day and beneath us by night, and hence the puzzle to the unlettered mind as to why the lakes and ponds do not all spill out.
Among the heavenly bodies other laws prevail; there is motion without friction or dissipation of energy; there is no body at rest; there is no motion in right lines, but only in curved lines; there is no beginning nor ending; there is only eternal progression; and this is a condition of things that throws our mental adjustments all out of gear. The problem of God, the problem of creation, the problem of future life, throw our mental adjustments out of gear in the same way.
There is order and harmony in our own solar system and doubtless in countless others in the immensity of space, but the cosmos as a whole does not seem to present this harmony, as collisions actually occur. Astronomers tell us that the units of the starry hosts are moving in all directions and that collisions are inevitable, though at such vast intervals, owing to the inconceivable spaces, that human time can take no note of them. A billion of our years, like a billion of our miles, count for but little in the infinitudes of the universe.
When we try to think that the universe had a creator, that there was a time when it did not exist, that it was called into being by a power apart from itself, do we not fall down completely? We can, of course, think in arbitrary terms; our imaginations are equal to almost any feat (Lewis Carroll’s was equal to “Alice in Wonderland”; Dante’s was equal to making the world shudder over his pictures of the inferno): but the understanding has to have solid ground to go upon, and where is the solid ground in our idea of creation? We are off the sphere, alone in space, face to face with the Infinite, and we have no language in which to express ourselves.
IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE
We habitually think or speak of ourselves as something apart from Nature, as belonging to some higher order of reality, when, in fact, we are as much a part of the total scheme of things as are the trees and the beasts of the field. True, we are separated from them by a gulf, but the gulf has been bridged, and bridged by Nature, and both sides are equally her territory.
Nature is the one supreme reality, the sum total of the visible and invisible bodies and forces that surround us, out of which we came and of which we form a part. Nature is all things to all men, because she is the larger fact, and holds an infinite diversity in an all-embracing unity.
When we come to look upon man in this light, when we see his whole civilization and all his achievements upon the earth—his science, his philosophy, his art, his religion, yea, his follies and crimes and superstitions, his wars and hatreds, as well as his heroism and devotion—as parts of Nature, as expressions of the same total cosmic energy as are all things else, we have gained an astronomic point of view; we see things in orbic completeness.
Nature is all-inclusive. We cannot draw a circle around that circle. We have so long been wont to solve our riddles by invoking the supernatural that the habit has become ingrained. We can only do as Carlyle did, feed our minds with words and fall back upon the natural-supernatural.
Our attitudes toward Nature differ as widely as do our occupations, our characters, and our temperaments. There is the direct, practical attitude of the farmer, the miner, the engineer, the sailor, the sportsman, the traveler, and the explorer; there is the gay and holiday attitude of the camper-out and the picnicker; there is the sympathetic and appreciative attitude of the nature-lover; there is the imaginative and creative attitude of the artist and the poet; there is the more or less rapt and mystical attitude of the religious enthusiast; there is the inquisitive and experimental attitude of the man of science; and there is the meditative and speculative attitude of the philosopher.
We almost invariably personify Nature and read our own traits and limitations into her. We say she is wise or she is foolish; she is cruel or she is kind; she fails or she succeeds. The early philosophers said that Nature abhorred a vacuum. Darwin says that she “tells us in the most emphatic manner that she abhors perpetual self-fertilization.” There are times when the most rigid man of science humanizes Nature in this way. We look upon ourselves as taking liberties with her; we discipline her and train her in the ways she should go for our good; we pit her forces against one another. Her flowers, her birds, her sunsets, her rainbows, her waterfalls, her mountain lakes, her ocean-shores, her midnight skies, at times move us and lift us above ourselves. On the other hand, there are times when we frown upon her, or despitefully use her and call her hard names. When her storms or her frosts or her blights or her droughts or her insect hordes destroy our crops, or lay waste our forests or sweep away our buildings or kill our cattle or inundate our towns and villages, we instinctively look upon her as our enemy, and, so far as we are able, arm ourselves against her. Emerson speaks of Nature as that “terrific or beneficent force.” It is both. Indeed, we may use a stronger adjective and say that at times it is a malevolent force.
We ascribe all our human qualities and traits to Nature. Indeed, we can hardly speak of her without personifying her. As we are a part of her, how can we fail to see our own traits in her? At least, how else can we interpret her except in terms of our own being? Early man did this entirely. All the natural forces and appearances took on his own image, and were for or against him. When we seek to interpret Nature we still do it in the terms of literature, of poetry. We humanize her, which means, of course, that we interpret ourselves. Nature reflects the spirit we bring to her. She is gay, somber, beautiful, winsome, repellent, wise or foolish, just in the degree in which we ourselves are capable of these emotions or possess these qualities. She is terrifying because we have a capacity for terror. She is soothing when we are in a mood to be soothed. She is sublime only so far as we have the capacity to experience this emotion.
It is our reactions to Nature that give rise to the qualities we ascribe to her. The music of the æolian harp is not in the wind; its origin is the reaction of the harp to the wind, but it is not music until it reaches the human ear. The colors of the landscape are not in the rocks and trees and waters, but in the experiences of the eye when the vibrations of ether which we call light are reflected back to it from these objects.
We create the world in which we live. I love Nature, but Nature does not love me. Love is an emotion which rocks and clouds do not feel. Nature loves me in my fellow beings. The breezes caress me, the morning refreshes me, the rain on the roof soothes me—that is, when I am in a mood to be caressed and refreshed and soothed. The main matter is the part I play in these things. All is directed to me and you because we are adjusted to all. No more is the kite or the sail adjusted to the wind, the water-wheel to the falling water, than are we adjusted to outward Nature. She is the primary and everlasting fact; we, as living beings, are the secondary and temporary facts.
X. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE
The survival of the fittest does not mean the survival of the best from the human point of view. The lower orders of humanity are better fitted to survive than the higher orders—hardier, more prolific, having a fuller measure of life. The cultivated plants—wheat, corn, rye, barley, oats—are less fitted to survive than what we call weeds. The latter can shift for themselves, but the former cannot.
We lament the decay of the native Anglo-Saxon stock in this country, and the increase of the races from southern Europe and from the Orient. They stand our pitiless sunlight better than do the descendants of our Puritan ancestors. From our point of view this rule of natural selection will not result in a superior race, but in an inferior; not in better men, but in better animals. Character and intellect win in those fields where character and intellect tell, but where muscle and brawn and vitality tell more they fail.
The Japanese have great power of survival; they are hardy, prolific and pushing. The Germans also have great survival power, greater than the French; they are more prolific, more materialistic, nearer the brutes; they are not handicapped with much soul. They are morally blind, but intellectually clever. Their moral blindness and insensibility have resulted in their downfall. Great Britain leads the European nations because she is not only hardy and prolific, but she also has the gift of empire; she builds upon law and order; she establishes justice and fair play.
In the Darwinian sense the Jews are the fittest to survive of all the races of man. They are prolific and grasping; they will always get what belongs to them, and a little more; they are bound to possess the earth. The only drawback I see is that they do not take kindly to the soil. Trade alone will not give a nation the supremacy.
XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE
Think how we come into the world, what an important thing it is to each of us and to the world, and yet how fortuitous and haphazard it all is, and what precautions are often taken to prevent our coming!
See the deformed, the half-witted, the low-browed, the degenerate, that come. The great army of the common, the few capable of higher and finer things. Nature apparently finds her account in one class the same as in the other, in Pat as well as in Paul, in the inferior races as well as in the higher.
In our manufacturing affairs we aim to turn out the best article possible—the best shoe, the best hat, the best gun, the best book; but Nature makes no such effort in the case of man, though she does in the case of the lower orders. Probably every individual bird or bug or four-footed beast in a state of nature is perfect of its kind, that is, suited to its place in the scheme of organic life. But how different with man! It is the price he pays for his freedom, his power of choice. The birds and the beasts have no power of choice, they are entirely in the hands of Nature. They are all moulded to one pattern.
The advantage that comes to man from his power of choice is greater variation, hence greater progress. He crosses or reverses or turns aside the laws of Nature, or bends them to his will, and for this privilege he pays the price of idiocy, deformity, and the vast mass of commonplace humanity. His gain is now and then men of exceptional ability, geniuses, who lead the race forward. We know that every improved breed of chicken or sheep or swine will come true, but we do not know in anything like the same degree of certainty that the Emersons and the Lincolns and the Tennysons will repeat and continue the type. Cultivated fruit relapses in the seed, and cultivated persons often do the same.
On the other hand, rude and ordinary humanity now and then far transcends itself in its offspring, just as the new and choice apple or peach or plum has its humble origin in a seedling.
XII. ILLUSIONS
In his “Conduct of Life” Emerson has an essay on “Illusions” in which he describes the semblance to midnight skies paved with stars which the guide produces in the Mammoth Cave by hiding himself and throwing the rays of his torch athwart the ceiling set thick with transparent rock crystals. The effect is quite startling. For the moment it is hard to resist the conviction that you are actually looking upon the cloudless sky at night. But in reality is not the noonday sky just as much of an illusion, except that there are no mimic stars? The blue dome overhead is an illusion. There is no dome there. The sky is a mere apparition. It is not a body or a reality as it seems to be; it is mere empty space, though it has the effect upon us of a vast blue dome. How genial and inviting it looks when we see it peeping through the clouds, and how glorious when we see it swept free from clouds! Its purity, its serenity, its elevated character, move us to regard it as the abode of superior beings. The telescope dispels our illusions; the sky is not a transparent realm, but only an extension of earthly conditions. Heaven, the abode of the blest, takes its name from this negation of vacancy. Our notions of a personal God are similar illusions. God is as real as the sky is, and no more so, even though in our devout moods we lift our eyes heavenward and identify him with this comforting illusion.
All our life illusions brood over us. The night is only a shadow—the negation of light; and yet it plays a part in our lives as real as that of health or friends or climate, as real, but of another kind.
Time itself is an illusion. The future does not exist nor the past; yet how are our lives influenced by the memory of the one and our anticipations of the other!
The world is, indeed, full of illusion. We fancy that luminous bodies shoot out rays of light such as we appear to see when we look at them. We see beams and scintillations when we look at the stars and the sun; but is it not all a trick of the eye? The light from a luminous body goes out in all directions, not in separated rays, but as vibrations in the ether. When we throw a stone into a still pool of water a wave motion is set up which spreads in concentric circles. But the vibrations called “light,” considered as a whole, assume the form of a sphere; they go from the luminous body to every point of a hollow sphere. We see a star as a bright point in the sky, but if the universe were full of eyes, every eye could see that star; its light goes to every point of the hollow sphere of Infinity. But no more than does the light of the candle in your hand, or the lamp on your table go to Infinity, if unobstructed. Stars which cannot be seen by the most powerful telescope must yet radiate their light into infinite space. Is that light lost? Modern science seems to hold to the view that in the ether of space no rays of light can ever be lost. What becomes of them? It is certain that a wavelet in a lake can be lost if the lake is large enough. It soon dies out. It becomes dissipated. Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered or turned into heat or light or electricity, and the waves that break and die upon the beach, no matter how cold they are, give up their energy as heat. They must raise the temperature some fraction of a degree.
XIII. IS NATURE SUICIDAL?
Emerson never committed himself to a belief in immortality as usually understood—continued existence in another world; but he was always on the lookout for hints and suggestions to spur his lagging faith on the subject. He read Martial and praised his literary faculty. He is the true writer, he said, a chemical and not a mechanical mixture: “Martial suggests again, as every purely literary book does, the immortality. We see we are wiser than we were: we are older. Can Nature afford to lose such improvements? Is Nature a suicide?” The same questions I have heard Whitman ask, questions asked probably by thoughtful men in all ages.
But are not such questions prompted by our own petty economies? We must save what we have gained. Not so Nature. Gain and loss with her are one. All is hers. She has infinite time, and infinite abundance. How can she afford so many dead worlds and burnt-out suns scattered throughout sidereal space, like boulders in a New England field? How can she afford to wait millions of years before life comes to the superior planets, if it ever comes? What economy is that which strews the way of evolution with untold numbers of extinct species? What economy is that which makes one species prey upon another?—which undoes with one hand what she achieves with the other? Nature was millions of years in bringing man out of the earth,—the end and flower of her whole scheme from our point of view,—and probably in far less time he will have disappeared from the earth. How can she afford it? “Is Nature suicidal?” She certainly is, tried by our standards. Not that she is less than we, but so inconceivably more. She plays the game for her own amusement. She evaporates the rivers and the seas, confident that the water will come back again. She keeps the currents going; the ebb and flow never cease. Night and day, life and death, go hand in hand. Her “improvements” are improvements for a day, an hour, a moment—like snowflakes on the river—“a moment white, then gone forever.” They are crystals that perish, flowers that fall. Nature knows no exhaustion; she can repeat the process continuously. Only the unlimited is inexhaustible. The infinite goes on forever. Our economics pale in the face of Nature’s prodigalities. A race like the Greeks perishes, and Nature’s treasury is still full. Every spring in our climate the marvel of leaf and flower is repeated in the plants and forests, and every fall the work is undone. The great, the noble, the heroic, youth, age, manhood, womanhood, fail and disappear, and still the game goes on. The rivers drain the hills and mountains, and still they never run dry. Spring and summer do not exhaust the fertility of Nature. The rivers carry the soil into the sea, but they do not carry it off the globe. We cannot defertilize the earth. What the seas lose, the clouds gain; what the clouds lose, the earth gains; what the hills lose, the sea gains; and so the circle is complete.
Nature has her own economies that answer to our own. In the use of means to an end, as in the living world, there must be economy of time, of space, of power; there must be adjustments, compensations, and so on. In the tropics vegetation takes its time. No hurry; the heat does not fail. In the temperate zone there is less time, and the pace of vegetation is faster. In the frigid zone it is faster still, the time is brief; there is no prodigality of leaf and stalk and flower; hurry up is the cry. The stalk is short, the flowering is brief, the goal is the seed which must be matured. In our climate, if a plant gets a later start, or is cut down and compelled to bloom again,—for example, the burdock,—how it hastens, how it pushes out its seed-vessels from the main stalk! The late fall dandelions do not indulge in long stalks; they bloom close to the ground and develop their down-seed balloons or parachutes at once. In the Far North the willow and birch are mere running vines, but they achieve fruit.
The economy of living nature is the basis of our economy; we improve upon it, we take a short cut, we save time and save power. We trim our trees, we remove obstructions, we fertilize, we graft, we sow and plant. Nature is prodigal of her spawn and pollen to offset the element of chance that enters into the action of the winds and the waves.
The wild creatures have their instinctive economies and ways of getting on in the world. They prepare for the winter; they provide for their young; they practice the arts of concealment; they are wise for their own good; they do not commit suicide. The plants have their economies, and the insects have theirs, but when we talk of the economy of Nature, we are beyond soundings. Nature cannot spend more than she earns; her ledgers always balance; her capital cannot be impaired. There is no waste, in our sense, in the universe. Can you destroy magnetism by pulverizing the magnet? Would electricity be quenched if no storm-cloud ever again appeared in the sky?
XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY
Is it not reassuring to know that we cannot get out of the universe—that whatever is real about us cannot be destroyed, but can only suffer change? All the elements that enter into my body must persist; they always have persisted through all the vicissitudes of astronomic and geologic time. We are as sure of that as we are sure of anything, and we are sure that they will continue in some form to exist. We believe it without proof. Our scientific faith carries us over this gulf—our faith in the oneness and integrity of the universe. Is there anything real, in the same sense, in what we call our minds or souls? Huxley was convinced that consciousness was as real as matter and energy, and must persist like them—persist in other persons who follow us; but how about our individual selves? And how about consciousness when the race of man becomes extinct? We can only take refuge in the thought that consciousness will dawn and continue in other worlds through all time, or rather endless time, since the all of a thing implies limits. Equally to make consciousness coeval with matter and energy, we must think of it as having existed in other worlds throughout an endless and beginningless past. But my consciousness and your consciousness are bound up with certain combinations of matter which we know are unstable—in fact, are the result, in a sense, of their instability, their ceaseless change.
In the final change, which we call death, what happens to consciousness? When we try to think of it in terms of our actual experience with tangible bodies, we think of it as gone out, non-existent, as truly so as is the flame of the candle when we blow it out, or as is the star form of the snowflake when it is melted. Does it help us any to think of the soul, or consciousness, in terms of the imponderable bodies—light, electricity, radio-activity? Do all these wireless messages that go forth into the air, go on forever? Do these impulses reach the farthest stars, and still persist? Do our thoughts persist upon the ether? Here, in this room, here in this air that you may inclose with your two hands, are vibrating wireless messages from far and near, though we are not able to detect them. Here also the ether may be tremulous with the thoughts of our friends on the other side of the globe, yes, and with the thoughts of our friends who have ceased to live, as we know life. The ether of space may still be vibrating with the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, of Moses and Solomon.
Do we impress ourselves momentarily upon the ether around us, and is this what the mediums and the clairvoyants recover? Is the persistence of our thoughts upon the ether the secret of the mind-reader’s art, and of all the marvelous things disclosed by psychic research? Is this the only immortality, the immortality of the endless persistence of vibrations from our brains? Or must we think of our personalities as disembodied and drifting about as separate entities in the great Nowhere?
Though a dreamer and an idealist, I am only truly interested in a natural explanation of things—an explanation that is in harmony with our experiences in this world. The so-called supernatural explanation does not interest me at all. We cannot grasp it and bring it to the test of reason and experience. It is like a bridge with one or more spans missing—only faith can carry us over, and faith that has nothing to stand upon cannot really carry us over. It travels in a circle, and leaves us where it found us.
Energy is certainly one of the realities of the cosmos, though we may not be able to form a concept of it as we do of matter. We cannot visualize it. We know it only through its effects upon tangible bodies. Why may there not be a principle of life or vitality as real as is energy—another form of energy which we can know only through its effects upon matter; inseparably bound up with matter as energy is; not with all matter, but with a limited amount of matter, as is magnetism—a peculiar form of force or energy, dependent for its manifestations upon well-defined conditions and reaching its highest manifestations in the mind or consciousness of man. Spirit, as we name it, is only a word which stands for no verifiable reality—something separable from matter and independent of it. What victims we are of words! When we get a name for a thing we are persuaded the thing exists. The vital process is inseparable from the physical processes; it supplements or controls them, but is more than they are. Life is not a spirit, but a form of energy potential in matter, and developed and active when the conditions are right. A living body is moved by a new force just as truly as a piece of magnetized steel is moved by a new force, or as truly as a new force streams through the telegraph-wires—a transformation of other forces, and behaving in a new way, and producing new results. There is nothing new under the sun; all are made of one stuff; but there are endless transformations and permutations of this one stuff, and one of them is the phenomenon of life, or vitality.
Electricity is not matter, but it is the most unmistakable and ubiquitous form of energy known to us. The human mind is a phenomenon of matter; how related to the electro-magnetic world we know not, but undoubtedly in some way bound up with it.
To discuss the soul or attempt to interpret it in terms of these mundane forces will, of course, offend the so-called spiritualists. So long have we been taught to look upon the soul as belonging to another world, another order of things from that of the body. Whitman says that soul and body are one, and leaves his puzzled reader to solve the riddle as best he can. Heaven and earth are one in the same sense—there is nothing alien or irreconcilable between them. The flower and its stalk, the perfume and the root, are one in the same sense. The mind resides in the gray matter of the brain, and depends upon the food we eat as truly as does the body.
When we discuss these questions in terms of our religious training we reach far different conclusions, or, rather, we start with far different conclusions; but how can we relate these conclusions to the concrete facts as we know them?
There is enough that is verifiable in clairvoyance and mind-reading and mental healing to convince us that we are immersed in a world of subtle forces that ordinarily we wot not of; that in some way a process of give and take between us and these things is constantly going on, and that our relation to them is at least one form or suggestion of our immortality. We are a part of the wave of energy that sweeps through the cosmos, as truly as the drops of the sea hold and convey the tidal impulse. We know, or think we know, the sources of this tidal impulse, but the attraction between earth and moon and sun is reciprocal—a give-and-take process—and is only a phase of the sum total (if the Infinite can be said to have a sum total) of the energy of the cosmos.
The magnet and magnetism are one. If you melt or pulverize the magnet, you dissipate, but do not destroy the magnetism. The clouds come and go; now we see them, and then there is only blue sky where they were. Change, but not destruction. When the thunder-cloud disperses, where are its terrible bolts? Withdrawn, probably, or redistributed into the inmost recesses of matter or of the ether. The energy of the human brain and body cannot be destroyed by death, only changed. If consciousness is a force, then it, too, must persist. It seems, in some way, the equivalent of the force of the body, at least one of its phenomena. But is it anything more than the analogue of the light which the electric spark emits, and which is light only to the eye? Consciousness is such only to itself; it cannot be seen or felt or known by other consciousnesses. What we know about the consciousnesses of others, we know through our own.
In the presence of the death of our friends no doubt this is a cheerless and depressing kind of philosophy, but in the pursuit of truth, if we are sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness will be measured by the extent to which we put all these things behind us. Heroic self-denial finds a field here as well as in the struggles of life. We do not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter how welcome they are. “All’s right with the world.” The laws of life and death are as they should be. The laws of matter and force are as they should be; and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good. I have had life on those terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos.