Chapter 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?