III
EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE
And the pampered goose was right: all things are just as much for her use as for man’s, while there are reasonable doubts whether things were created for the especial use of either.
Man, like the goose, appropriates what suits him, but is slow to realize the fact that what suits him, or is fitted to his use, depends upon his own powers of adaptation. We can say that he suits it, rather than that it suits him. He has lungs because there is air, and eyes because there are certain vibrations in the ether. In short, nature is the primary fact, and the forms and organs of life the secondary fact.
Goethe said to Eckermann that he followed Kant in looking upon each creature as existing for its own sake. He could not believe, he said, that the cork-trees grow merely that we might stop our bottles, and, he might have added, that rubber-trees grow that we might have rubber overshoes. The lady in a public audience who once asked me what flies are for, evidently thought that God had made a mistake in creating that which annoyed her. I was pleased with a remark of John Muir’s in his Sierra book about the poison-ivy: “Like most other things not apparently useful to man,” he says, “it has few friends, and the blind question, ‘Why was it made?’ goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.” Coming from the mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical doctrine. Muir had evidently forgotten his early training.
It is possible for man to make use of poison-ivy; in fact it is used in medicine; but who shall dare to say that it was made for that? Flies and poison ivy and all other noxious and harmful things are each and all for their own sakes. They were not made in the sense that we make things. They have come to be what we now find them through the action and interaction of a thousand complex influences. Each has found its place in the scheme of living things, and each acts directly or indirectly upon other forms—is of use to them, or the reverse. Ten thousand things are of use to man, and as many more of no use to him, but to measure all things by his standard of utility is childish, or to ask what mosquitoes and rattlesnakes are for, with an implied impeachment of Nature if they are not of service to man, is an idle question. The water and the air are indispensable to life, but these things are older than life. Life is adapted to them, and not they to it.
The body is full of fluids because earth and air are full of water. From our standpoint man is at the head of animate nature, but the rest of creation is no more exclusively for him than for the least of living things. The good of the world is for whatever or whoever can use it. Houseflies are undoubtedly the enemy of the human race; so are mosquitoes, so are venomous snakes, so are many forms of bacteria, and a thousand other things. Our egotism prompts us to ask, “Why is evil in the world, anyhow?” But our evil may be the good of some other creature. Our defeat means the triumph of our enemy. It is through this conflict of good and evil, or of things that are for us with things that are against us, that species are developed and perpetuated.
What kind of a world would it be without what we call evil, without hindrances? To the farmer drought, flood, tornadoes, untimely frosts are evils which he thinks he could well dispense with, but so far as they make a greater struggle necessary, so far as they lead to more self-denial, greater forethought, and so on, they are good in disguise. Hardy, virile characters, like tough timber, in oaks, are developed by unfriendly and opposing forces. Intemperance, greed, cheating, lying, war, are evils in the social and business world; but they teach us the value of their opposites. We react from them. It is a child’s question to ask, for example, “Would the world not have been better had there never been any war?” because, since mankind is what it is, wars are inevitable. The absence of wars, as of intemperance, greed, cheating, implies a different mankind, and a different mankind implies a different system of things.
The problem of evil is the problem of life; no evil, no life. The world is thus made. Nature is not half good and half bad; she is wholly good, or wholly bad, according to our relation to her. Fire and flood are bad when they master us, and good when we master and control them. Great good has come out of war, and great evil. The evil always tends to drop out or be obliterated, as the path of cyclones and earthquakes tend to be overgrown and forgotten. Burned cities often rise from their ashes to new life. The effects of evil are finally obliterated; malignant forces have their day, benignant forces go on forever. The world of life, let me repeat, would not be here were not the balance of the account of good and evil on the side of the good, or if good did not come out of evil.
Life is recuperative; if it falls down, it picks itself up again. If a state is devastated by war, in time the cities and towns are rebuilt, and the ranks of peace and industry refilled, though the growth and civilization of that country may have had a terrible set-back, and the whole progress of the race be retarded. Evil perishes. The terrible World War, set going by Germany, has depleted the wealth, the life, the well-being of the whole European world, but as the scars it made upon the landscape will in time be effaced, so its effect upon the life of the states and communities will fade and be a memory only. Still the evils it entailed are none the less deplorable. Its heritage of hate, of devastated homes, of depleted treasures, will long continue.
Life, then, in all its forms is for its own sake. It is an end in itself. Many things are inimical to us, and we are equally inimical to many things. We lay the whole of Nature under contribution so far as we can, and we curb and defeat her hostile forces so far as we can, but the world was no more made for man than it was made for mice and midges. When we see how irrespective of us the natural forces go their way, that we can ride them and guide them only as we do wild horses—by being quicker and more masterful than they are—when we know that they will tread us down with the same indifference that we tread down the grass and the weeds, the facts should temper and modify our egotism. When we look into the depths of merely our own solar system, and see vast globes like Jupiter and Saturn, so much older and greater than our little earth, and not yet the abode of any form of life, and probably not within millions of years of such a state, how casual and insignificant man seems! How far from being the end and object of creation!
Doubtless there are numberless worlds and whole systems of worlds in the depths of sidereal space upon which life has never appeared, and numberless other worlds and systems upon which it has had its day and gone out forever. Life is but an incident in the total scheme of things.
To ask what this or that is for, with reference to ourselves, and to conclude that some one or something has blundered if it is not of positive use to us, is, let me repeat, to see and to think as a child. We know what the hooks on the burdock and the stick-seed are for, and what the wings on the maple and the ash-seed are for, but do we know what the stings on the nettle, or the spines on the blackberry or on the thorn-apple tree are for? The cattle eat the nettle, the birds eat the berries, and the wild creatures eat the thorn-apple. How could their seeds get sown if the prickles and thorns defended them against wild life? Spines and thorns seem expressive of moods or conditions in Nature, and to be quite independent of use, as we understand the term.
Nature’s ways are so unlike our ways! Her system of economics would soon bring us to bankruptcy. She has no rival, no competitor, no single end in view, no more need to store up wealth than to scatter it. One form gains what another form loses. Humanly speaking, she is always trying to defeat herself. The potato-bug, if left alone, would exterminate the potato and so exterminate itself; the currant-worm would exterminate the currant; the forest worms would exterminate the forests, did not parasites appear and check these ravages. Nature trumps her own trick; she scuttles her own ship; she mines her own defenses; she poisons her own fountains; she sows tares in her own wheat; and yet she wins, because she is the All. The tares are hers, the parasites are hers, the devastating storms and floods are hers, the earthquakes and volcanoes are hers, disease and death are hers, as well as youth and health. The cancer that eats into a man’s vitals—what keeps it going but Nature’s forces and fluids? The bacteria that flourish in our bodies and bring the scourges of typhoid fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, are all hers, and a part of her system of things. A malignant tumor is as much an expression of Providence as is a baby or a flower. Nature cuts the ground from under her own feet; she saws off the limb upon which she is perched, but if she falls, she alights in her own lap.
In walking through a blighted potato-field this morning, I said, “Here is one form of vegetable life destroying another form and bringing loss and discontent to the farmer’s heart.” What purpose in the economy of Nature is served by this blight? Who or what is the gainer? After the minute organisms that prey upon the potato-vines have done their work, they too perish, so that two forms of life are blotted out. What was it all for? Why is this tragedy of one form of life bringing to naught other forms, which we witness on every hand, in vegetable and animal life, and in human history, being constantly enacted? The question, put in this way, is a purely human one; it is applying to the vast scheme of creation purely human standards. We instinctively ask the why and the wherefore of things, and in our practical lives try to avoid letting one hand defeat the other as Nature does in the above incident. We guard one form of life against another hostile form. Our aim is to make things pull together for our own advantage. We seek to check the ravages of the tent caterpillar, the forest worms, the gypsy moth, the potato-beetle, and the invisible enemies that rot our grapes and mar our apples, as well as the germs that sow fatal diseases in our midst. But not so Nature. She does not take sides. As I have said, she has no special and limited aims. The stakes are hers, whoever wins. One condition of the season favors the growth of the potato-vines; another condition favors the development of the fungus that destroys them. Nature is just as much on the side of the rat as on the side of the cat; she arms each to defeat the other, and the fittest survives. She has not given the rabbit strength or ferocity, but she has given her speed and a sleepless eye and great fecundity, and her enemies do not cut her off.
The struggle and competition of life go on everywhere. But life is not all a struggle; it is unity and coöperation as well. The trees of the forest protect one another; one form of life profits by another form.
In the whole drama of organic nature we find waste and prodigality. Our economics are set at naught by the power that works to no special ends, but to all ends, and finds its account in the tumor that eats up the man, as much as in the man himself, in the fungi that destroy the potato crop, or the chestnut-trees, as truly as in these things themselves. Yet behold what specialization and what development has taken place in spite of these cross-purposes, this chaos of conflicting interests! Out of discord has come harmony; out of conflict has come peace; out of death has come life; out of the reptile has come the bird; out of the beast has come man; out of the savage has come the moral conscience; out of the tribe has come the nation; out of tyranny has come democracy. It is the waste, the delays, the pain, the price to be paid, that appall us.
We must regard creation as a whole, as the evolution of worlds and systems, and not concentrate our attention upon man and his ways, or upon the earth—so small a part of our solar system.
Our benevolent institutions are not types of the universe; our idea of fatherhood does not fit the Eternal.
Our fathers had a complete and consistent explanation of the problem of evil that so perplexes us. They invented or postulated two opposing and contending principles in the world—one divine, the other diabolical. One they named God, the other, Satan. Their conception of God would not allow them to saddle all the evil and misery of the world upon him; they had to look for a scapegoat, and they found him in the Devil. One is just as necessary to a consistent cosmogony as the other. If we must have an all-wise, all-merciful, all-powerful, all-loving God—the author of all good and the contemner of all evil—we must also have a god of the opposite type, the great mischief-maker and enemy of human happiness—the author of war, pestilence, famine, disease, and of all that hinders and defeats the reign of the perfect good. Without the conception of the Devil, we are forced to the conclusion, either that God is not omnipotent, or that he is responsible for all the sin and suffering in the world. If you make man this Devil, then who made man?
Wrestle with the problem as we may, we are impaled on one or the other horn of the dilemma. Our traditional God is more cruel and more indifferent to human suffering than any tyrant that ever gloated over human blood and agony, or else he is fearfully limited in his power for good.
With a Devil at our disposal to whom we can impute the evils of life, the situation clears up, and God emerges, shorn of his omnipotence, it is true, but still the symbol of goodness and love.
In our day the Devil has lost his prestige and is much discredited. As a power in men’s minds his reign is over, and hell, his headquarters, no longer casts its lurid light upon human life.
In an equal measure the old Hebraic conception of God as a much-magnified man, the king and ruler of heaven and earth, with heaven as his throne, has gone out. God is now little more than a name for that tendency or power in the universe which makes for righteousness, and which has brought evolution thus far on its course.
To account for the world as we find it, we are compelled to look upon it as the inevitable result of the clashing and interaction of purely natural forces resulting in both so-called good and evil; that is, in what is favorable to life, and in what is against life. But as life is adaptive and assimilative, it slowly turns the evil into good, of course at the expense of delays and waste and suffering, and thus development becomes possible, and man, after untold millions of years, appears.
When we look forth upon the universe, what do we see? When we look upon the non-living world, we see a mere welter and chaos of material forces—a conflict of chemical and physical principles seeking a stable equilibrium—water running, winds blowing, mountains decaying, stars and systems whirling, suns waning or waxing, nebulæ condensing, vast orbs colliding, and all issuing in a certain order and system under the rule of purely mechanical and mathematical laws. The stellar universe is a vast machine, amenable to the measurements and calculations of the astronomers. The eclipses all occur exactly on time, and the planets revolve in their orbits without the untruth, as Whitman says, of a single second. The disorder and disruptions which occur are inside of vast fundamental laws. Our mountains and seas are shaken by earthquakes, and the earth’s surface is swept by cyclones and the seashores are devastated by tidal waves, yet these things are only phases of the effort toward a fixed equilibrium. The earth’s surface as we now behold it, the distribution of land and water, of mountain and plain, the procession of the seasons, our whole weather system, the friendly and the unfriendly forces, are all the outcome of this clash and stress of the physical forces, which make a paradise of some places and the opposite of others.
When we look upon the living world as revealed in the geologic record, we still see a kind of welter and chaos, but we also see the advent of new principles not entirely subject to mechanical and mathematical laws. Life goes its way and takes liberties with its physical environment. Living bodies change and develop as the non-living do not. The various organic forms “rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves,” and incalculably slow transformations of lower forms into higher take place, but not without appalling delays and waste and suffering. Chemical and mechanical laws are still in full force, but they appear to be in the service of a new principle; an organizing tendency of a new kind is at work in the world; chance and necessity seem to play a less conspicuous part. Yet there is nothing that meets our idea of justice, or mercy, or economy of effort.
For millions upon millions of years the earth swarmed with low, all but brainless creatures. The monsters of sea and land that appeared in the middle period were huge and terrible in body and limb, but very small in capacity of brain. Huge ganglions, or knots of nervous tissue, in different parts of their bodies seem to have served as a substitute for a centralized brain and a complex nervous system. The brontosaurus, seventy feet long, with a body weighing many tons, had a brain not much larger than a man’s double fists. Brains as yet played a very subordinate part in the world. Reptiles and half-reptiles possessed the earth. The age of mammals was as yet only hinted at. But after long geologic ages, mammals came to the front, holding the precious possibility of man, and reptiles were relegated to the rear. The animal brain increased, wit began to get the better of brute force, and the small and feeble ancestors of man appeared in the biological drama. They were like small and timid supernumeraries skulking or hiding on the wings of the stage. Lemurs and monkeys appeared long before there were any signs of the anthropoid apes, and the anthropoid apes were in evidence long before the first rude man appeared.
In all the vast stretch of geologic and biologic time, do we see any evidence of the active existence of the God and the Devil of our fathers? Not unless we identify them with the material forces that then ruled and shaped the world, and these forces, by any other name, are of the same impersonal, impartial, unforgiving character as is disclosed in our dealings with them to-day.
When we turn to the higher forms of organic life, especially to man and his history, what do we see? We still behold the same trial-and-error method, the same cruelty, waste, delays, and suffering that we behold in the lower forms. We see progress, we see the growth of ethical principles, we see man’s increasing mastery over the forces of nature and over himself, but in the competition of races and nations, the race is still to the swift and the battle to the strong. We see a high standard of individual morality contending with a low standard of international morality. We still see civilized nations looking upon treaties as “scraps of paper”; we see them regarding their neighbors as rivals and enemies; we see millions of men that have not the shadow of a grievance against one another, fiercely trying to slay one another, and praying to the same God for victory. We see the nefarious doctrine that physical might makes moral right written in lines of blood and fire across the face of whole kingdoms; we see the legitimate competitions of peace and industry turned into the strife of armed conquest; we see a small and peaceful nation trampled underfoot by a big nation bent upon plunder and conquest; we see hatred toward a kindred nation glorified, and the murder of innocent women and children and other non-combatants adopted as a fixed policy; in fact, we see all the vast resources of science and of modern civilization wedded to the spirit of the Hun, and turned loose in a war for world-dominion. The results of eighteen centuries of Christian culture come off the German nation like a whitewash in this craze and fury of the military spirit; the German people stand revealed as at heart unmitigated barbarians, wonderfully efficient, but wonderfully inhuman. If we appeal to the supernatural to account for things, we certainly need a Devil, if not several of them, to account for the temper of the German mind during the late war. No wonder the good people are losing faith, and are shocked and dismayed at the thought that their all-loving, omnipotent God permits these things.
Down the whole course of history we see no other powers at work than those that are about us. Good is in the ascendancy everywhere, or soon will be; evil dies out; the wicked cease from troubling; the amelioration of mankind goes on; and no God or Devil hinders or favors.
Nature is both God and Devil, and natural law is supreme in the world. The moral consciousness of man,—all our dreams of perfection, of immortality, of the good, the beautiful, the true, all our veneration and our religious aspirations,—this is Nature, too.
Man is a part of the universe; all that we call good in him, and all that we call bad, are a part of the universe. The God he worships is his own shadow cast upon the heavens, and the Devil he fears is his own shadow likewise. The divine is the human, magnified and exalted; the Satanic is the human, magnified and debased.
We find God in Nature by projecting ourselves there; we find him in the course of history by reading our own ideals into human events; we find him in our daily lives by listening to the whisperings of our own inherited and acquired consciences, and by dwelling upon the fatality that rules our lives.
We had nothing to do with our appearance here in this world, or with the form our bodies take, or with our temperaments, and, only in a degree, with our dispositions. Some power other than ourselves brought us here and maintains us here for a period, as it brought here and maintains all other forms of life; but, I repeat, that power is inseparable from the physical and chemical forces, and goes its way whether we prosper or perish. Yet it is more positive than negative, more for us than against us, else we should not be here.
Where does man get his ethical standards? Where does he get his eyes, his ears, his heart? He gets them where he got his life—from natural sources. He gets them whence he got his sense of art, of beauty, of harmony. There are no moral standards in Nature apart from man, but as man is a part of Nature, so are these, and all other standards. So are all religions, arts, literatures, philosophies, heroisms, self-denials, as well as all idolatries, superstitions, sorceries, cruelties, wrongs, failures, a part of Nature.
Is the big-brained man of to-day any less a part of Nature than the low-browed, long-jawed man of Pliocene times?
The humanization of God leads us into many difficulties. If He is a personal being with attributes and emotions like our own, then we are forced to the conclusion that He is no better than we are—that He has our faults as well as our virtues, our cruelty as well as our love. He is a party to all the wrongs and crimes and suffering that darken the earth; He permits wars and pestilence and famine and earthquakes and tornadoes, and all the consuming and agonizing diseases that flesh is heir to. He is an infinite man with infinite powers for good and evil.
In the long drama of animal evolution there has evidently been as much suffering as pleasure, and of the drama of human history the same may be said: pain, failure, delay, injustice, to all of which our humanized God has been a party. No wonder our fathers struggled over the problem of the ways of God to man. As soon as they put themselves in his place, they felt the need of some grounds upon which to justify his dealings with the beings He had created. But they searched, and their descendants still search, in vain. If we see God as a man, no matter how mighty, He is still guilty of what few finite men would be guilty. What men would be guilty of permitting the sin and misery that fill the world at this, or any other, time?
The Nature God neither sends calamities nor wills them—they are an inevitable part of the growth and development of things; they are eddies in the stream of forces. What we call evil is evil only from our point of view; evil is a human word and not the word of the Infinite. If the world were something made by a Maker external to it, then it were pertinent to ask, Why not make it a better world? Why not leave out pain and sin and all other phases of evil? But the world is not something made, and it did not have a Maker, as we use those words. The universe is, and always has been, “from everlasting to everlasting,” and man is a part of it, and his life is subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of creation. Man has come into this sense of right and wrong, of justice and mercy, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, as necessary conditions of his development, but those things are not absolute; they pertain to him alone. The physical forces break out of their natural bounds and run riot for a season; the human forces do the same thing and give rise to various excesses. The crimes and misdemeanors of man are exceptional as the outbreaks in nature are exceptional. They relate man to nature and show how the same plan runs through both. A world with storm and the warring and violence of the elements left out would be a radically different world—an impossible world. And a world of man, a Quaker world, is equally impossible.
If some being of infinite wisdom and love had made the world and made man to live in it, we could ask him some embarrassing questions; but, let me repeat, the world was not made, it is only a link in a chain of cosmic events, and it is not for man any more than for any other creature. Each must “work out his own salvation, with fear and trembling.”
Introduce design into nature and you humanize it and get into difficulties at once. It is above design. We have no language in which to speak the ultimate truth, no language in which to describe the character and the doings of the Infinite. The ways of the Infinite are not only past finding out, they are unspeakable by reason of our finite relations to them. We cannot arraign the Nature God. It does not design, nor make, nor govern, nor employ means to ends, as do the man-made gods. It is. All things are a part of its infinite complexity. Nature rests forever in itself. It neither fails nor succeeds. In itself it is neither good nor evil, neither divine nor devilish; it is all things to all men, because they are all things to it. It is neither one nor many; it is the Infinite. In these vain attempts to define or describe the indefinable I have no language but that of the finite, no language but that of our limited or circumscribed relation to the world of concrete and fragmentary things. Hence I am constantly like the plains ranger caught by his own lasso, or the angler caught by his own hook.
Emerson said that in trying to define the Eternal we need a language that differs from our everyday speech as much as algebra differs from arithmetic. Outside of the physical organism there is neither pleasure nor pain, good nor bad, light nor dark, sound nor silence, heat nor cold, big nor little, hard nor soft; all these things are but words in which we describe our sensations. When there is no ear, there is no sound, but only motion in the air; when there is no eye, there is no light or color, but only motion in the ether; when there are no nerves, there is no heat or cold, but only motion, more or less, in the molecules of matter. Degrees and differences belong to the region of our finite minds. In trying to define or state the Infinite, we are off the sphere, outside the realm of experience, and our words have no meaning.
It is the circular or orbicular character of creation that baffles us. We cannot fit the sphere into the triangles and parallelograms of the terms of our experience. We cannot square the circle of Infinity. The terms “love,” “anger,” “mercy,” “fatherhood,” do not apply to God any more than “over” or “under,” or “beginning” or “end,” apply to the sphere. In regard to God, the language of science and mathematics is one with the language of worship and ecstasy.
I find I have never been burdened by a sense of my duty to God. My duty to my fellow-men and to myself is plain enough, but the word is not adequate to express any relation I may hold to the Eternal. Do I owe any duty to gravity without which I could not move or lift my hand, or any duty to the sunshine or to the rains and the winds? Instinctively, unconsciously, for the most part we obey the law of gravity, and instinctively we adjust ourselves to all the natural forces, not from a sense of duty, but from a sense of self-preservation. These things are a part of our lives and not something to which we hold only a casual and precarious or external relation. My relation to the Eternal is not that of an inferior to a superior, or of a beneficiary to his benefactor, or of a subject to his king. It is that of the leaf to the branch, of the fruit to the tree, of the babe in the womb to its mother. It is a vital and an inevitable relation. It cannot be broken. It is not a matter of will or choice. We are embosomed in the Eternal Beneficence, whether we desire it or not. Those good persons who go through life looking upon the Eternal as a power external to themselves, saluting him as the soldier salutes his officer, are not as truly religious as they think they are. The old conception of an external God, the supreme ruler of the universe, with whom Moses talked and walked and even saw the hinder parts of, is out of date in our time. Still the overarching thought of the Infinite and the Eternal, in whom we live and move and have our being, must at times awaken in the minds of all of us, and lend dignity and sobriety to our lives.
But the other world fades as this world brightens. Science has made this world so interesting and wonderful, and our minds find such scope in it for the exercise of all their powers, that thoughts of another world are becoming foreign to us. We shall never exhaust the beauties and the wonders and the possibilities of this. To feel at home on this planet, and that it is, with all its drawbacks, the best possible world, I look upon as the supreme felicity of life.
When we look at it in its mere physical and chemical aspects, its play of forces, tangible and intangible, its reservoir of energy, its “journeying of atoms,” its radiating electrons, its magnetic currents, its transmutations and cycles of change, its hidden but potent activities, its streaming auroras, its changing seasons, its myriad forms of life, and a thousand other things—all make it a unique and most desirable habitation.
When we consider it in its astronomical aspects as a celestial body floating in the luminiferous ether as in a sea, held in leash by the sun, and as sensitive to its changes as the poplar leaf to the wind, vast beyond our power to visualize, yet only a grain of sand on the shores of the Infinite, an evening or a morning star to the beings on other planets, if there are such, mottled with shining seas or green and white continents and canopied with many-hued cloud draperies, and existing in closest intimacies with the wonders and the potencies of the sidereal heavens—a veritable fruit on the vast sidereal tree of life—when we realize all this, and more, can we conceive of a more desirable or a better-founded and better-furnished world? The voyage we make upon it may be a long one; if we claim the century of life which Nature seems to have allotted us on conditions, we shall travel about thirty-six billions of miles in our annual voyages around the sun, and how many more millions with the sun around his sun, we know not. A world made of the common stuff of the universe, a handful of the dust of the cosmos, yet thrilling with life, producing the race of man, evolving the brain of Plato, of Aristotle, of Bacon, the soul of Emerson, of Whitman, the heart of Christ—a heavenly abode surely. Let us try to make amends for depreciating it, for spurning it, for surrendering it to the Devil, and for turning from it in search of a better.
Our religion is at fault, our saints have betrayed us, our theologians have blackened and defaced our earthly temple, and swapped it off for cloud mansions in the Land of Nowhere. The heavens embrace us always; the far-off is here, close at hand; the ground under your door-stone is a part of the morning star. If we could only pull ourselves up out of our absorption in trivial affairs, out of the petty turmoil of our practical lives, and see ourselves and our world in perspective and as a part of the celestial order, we could cease to weep and wail over our prosaic existence.
The astronomic view of our world, and the Darwinian view of our lives must go together. As one came out of the whirling, fiery nebulæ, so the other came out of the struggling, slowly evolving, biological world of the unicellular life of the old seas.
Biologic time sets its seal upon one, and cosmic time upon the other. Dignity and beauty and meaning are given to our lives when we see far enough and wide enough, when we see the forces that minister to us, and the natural order of which we form a part.