Chapter XII: The Naturalist's View of Life 254 (7)

If we look upon life as inherent or potential in the constitution of matter, dependent upon outward physical and chemical conditions for its development, we are accounting for life in terms of matter and motion, and are in the ranks of the materialists. But if we find ourselves unable to set the ultimate particles of matter in action, or so working as to produce the reaction which results in life, without conceiving of some new force or principle operating upon them, then we are in the ranks of the vitalists or idealists. The idealists see the original atoms slumbering there in rock and sea and soil for untold ages, till, moved upon by some unknown factor, they draw together in certain fixed order and numbers, and life is the result. Something seems to put a spell upon them and cause them to behave so differently from the way they behaved before they were drawn into the life circuit.

When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemical origin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we think of the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of their subtle action and interaction all about us--of osmosis, capillarity, radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of the four states of matter,--solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal,--of how little our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feel the need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it.

Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence pervades and is active in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind. But to see it as something foreign to, or separable from, nature is to do violence to our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural order. One star differeth from another star in glory. There are degrees of mystery in the universe. The most mysterious thing in inorganic nature is electricity--that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate particles of matter--unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm, or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of energy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life--that something which clothes itself in such infinitely varied and beautiful as well as unbeautiful forms of matter. We can evoke electricity at will from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life; the biogenetic law is inviolable.

IV

It takes some of the cold iron out of the mechanistic theory of life if we divest it of all our associations with the machine-mad and machine-ridden world in which we live and out of which our material civilization came. The mechanical, the automatic, is the antithesis of the spontaneous and the poetic, and it repels us on that account. We are so made that the artificial systems please us far less than the natural systems. A sailing-ship takes us more than a steamship. It is nearer life, nearer the winged creatures. There is determinism in nature, mechanical forces are everywhere operative, but there are no machines in the proper sense of the word. When we call an organism a living machine we at once take it out of the categories of the merely mechanical and automatic and lift it into a higher order--the vital order.

Professor Le Dantec says we are mechanisms in the third degree, a mechanism of a mechanism of a mechanism. The body is a mechanism by virtue of its anatomy--its framework, its levers, its hinges; it is a mechanism by virtue of its chemical activities; and it is a mechanism by virtue of its colloid states--three kinds of mechanisms in one, and all acting together harmoniously and as a unit--in other words, a super-mechanical combination of activities.

The mechanical conception of life repels us because of its association in our minds with the fabrications of our own hands--the dead metal and wood and the noise and dust of our machine-ridden and machine-produced civilization.

But Nature makes no machines like our own. She uses mechanical principles everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but she does not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest her mechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works of our own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils and aeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differently they impress us from our own application of the same principles! Even in inert matter--in the dews, the rains, the winds, the tides, the snows, the streams,--her mechanics and her chemistry and her hydrostatics and pneumatics, seem much nearer akin to life than our own. We must remember that Nature's machines are not human machines. When we place our machine so that it is driven by the great universal currents,--the wheel in the stream, the sail on the water,--the result is much more pleasing and poetic than when propelled by artificial power. The more machinery we get between ourselves and Nature, the farther off Nature seems. The marvels of crystallization, the beautiful vegetable forms which the frost etches upon the stone flagging of the sidewalk, and upon the window-pane, delight us and we do not reason why. A natural bridge pleases more than one which is the work of an engineer, yet the natural bridge can only stand when it is based upon good engineering principles. I found at the great Colorado Cañon, that the more the monuments of erosion were suggestive of human structures, or engineering and architectural works, the more I was impressed by them. We are pleased when Nature imitates man, and we are pleased when man imitates Nature, and yet we recoil from the thought that life is only applied mechanics and chemistry. But the thought that it is mechanics and chemistry applied by something of which they as such, form no part, some agent or principle which we call vitality, is welcome to us. No machine we have ever made or seen can wind itself up, or has life, no chemical compound from the laboratories ever develops a bit of organic matter, and therefore we are disbelievers in the powers of these things.

V

Is gravity or chemical affinity any more real to the mind than vitality? Both are names for mysteries. Something which we call life lifts matter up, in opposition to gravity, into thousands of living forms. The tree lifts potash, silica, and lime up one or two hundred feet into the air; it elbows the soil away from its hole where it enters the ground; its roots split rocks. A giant sequoia lifts tons of solid matter and water up hundreds of feet. So will an explosion of powder or dynamite, but the tree does it slowly and silently by the organizing power of life. The vital is as inscrutably identified with the mechanical and chemical as the soul is identified with the body. They are one while yet they are two.

For purely mechanical things we can find equivalents. Arrest a purely mechanical process, and the machine only rests or rusts; arrest a vital process, and the machine evaporates, disintegrates, myriads of other machines reduce it to its original mineral and gaseous elements. In the organic world we strike a principle that is incalculable in its operation and incommensurable in its results. The physico-chemical forces we can bring to book; we know their orbits, their attractions and repulsions, and just what they will and will not do; we can forecast their movements and foresee their effects. But the vital forces transcend all our mathematics; we cannot anticipate their behavior. Start inert matter in motion and we know pretty nearly what will happen to it; mix the chemical elements together and we can foresee the results; but start processes or reactions we call life, and who can foresee the end? We know the sap will mount in the tree and the tree will be true to its type, but what do we or can we know of what it is that determines its kind and size? We know that in certain plants the leaves will always be opposite each other on the stalk, and that in other plants the leaves will alternate; that certain plants will have conspicuous and others inconspicuous flowers; but how can we know what it is in the cells of the plants that determines these things? We can graft the scion of a sour apple tree upon a sweet, and _vice versa_, and the fruit of the scion will be true to its kind, but no analysis of the scion or of the stock will reveal the secret, as it would in the case of chemical compounds. In inorganic nature we meet with concretions, but not secretions; with crystallization, but not with assimilation and growth from within. Chemistry tells us that the composition of animal bodies is identical with that of vegetable; that there is nothing in one that is not in the other; and yet, behold the difference! a difference beyond the reach of chemistry to explain. Biology can tell us all about these differences and many other things, but it cannot tell us the secret we are looking for,--what it is that fashions from the same elements two bodies so unlike as a tree and a man.

Decay and disintegration in the inorganic world often lead to the production of beautiful forms. In life the reverse is true; the vital forces build up varied and picturesque forms which when pulled down are shapeless and displeasing. The immense layers of sandstone and limestone out of which the wonderful forms that fill the Grand Cañon of the Colorado are carved were laid down in wide uniform sheets; if the waters had deposited their material in the forms which we now see, it would have been a miracle. We marvel and admire as we gaze upon them now; we do more, we have to speculate as to how it was all done by the blind, unintelligent forces. Giant stairways, enormous alcoves, dizzy, highly wrought balustrades, massive vertical walls standing four-square like huge foundations--how did all the unguided erosive forces do it? The secret is in the structure of the rock, in the lines of cleavage, in the unequal hardness, and in the impulsive, irregular, and unequal action of the eroding agents. These agents follow the lines of least resistance; they are active at different times and seasons, and from different directions; they work with infinite slowness; they undermine, they disintegrate, they dislodge, they transport; the hard streaks resist them, the soft streaks invite them; water charged with sand and gravel saws down; the wind, armed with fine sand, rounds off and hollows out; and thus the sculpturing goes on. But after you have reasoned out all these things, you still marvel at the symmetry and the structural beauty of the forms. They look like the handiwork of barbarian gods. They are the handiwork of physical forces which we can see and measure and in a degree control. But what a gulf separates them from the handiwork of the organic forces!

VI

Some things come and some things arise; things that already exist may come, but potential things arise; my friend comes to visit me, the tide comes up the river, the cold or hot wave comes from the west; but the seasons, night and morning, health and disease, and the like, do not come in this sense; they arise. Life does not come to dead matter in this sense; it arises. Day and night are not traveling round the earth, though we view them that way; they arise from the turning of the earth upon its axis. If we could keep up with the flying moments,--that is, with the revolution of the earth,--we could live always at sunrise, or sunset, or at noon, or at any other moment we cared to elect. Love or hate does not come to our hearts; it is born there; the breath does not come to the newborn infant; respiration arises there automatically. See how the life of the infant is involved in that first breath, yet it is not its life; the infant must first be alive before it can breathe. If it is still-born, the respiratory reaction does not take place. We can say, then, that the breath means life, and the life means breath; only we must say the latter first. We can say in the same way that organization means life, and life means organization. Something sets up the organizing process in matter. We may take all the physical elements of life known to us and jumble them together and shake them up to all eternity, and life will not result. A little friction between solid bodies begets heat, a little more and we get fire. But no amount of friction begets life. Heat and life go together, but heat is the secondary factor.

Life is always a vanishing-point, a constant becoming--an unstable something that escapes us while we seem to analyze it. In its nature or essence, it is a metaphysical problem, and not one of physical science. Science cannot grasp it; it evaporates in its crucibles. And science is compelled finally to drive it into an imaginary region--I had almost said, metaphysical region, the region of the invisible, hypothetical atoms of matter. Here in the mysteries of molecular attraction and repulsion, it conceives the secret of life to lie.

"Life is a wave," says Tyndall, but does not one conceive of something, some force or impulse in the wave that is not of the wave? What is it that travels along lifting new water each moment up into waves? It is a physical force communicated usually by the winds. When the wave dies upon the shore, this force is dissipated, not lost, or is turned into heat. Why may we not think of life as a vital force traveling through matter and lifting up into organic life waves in the same way? But not translatable into any other form of energy because not derivable from any other form.

Every species of animal has something about it that is unique and individual and that no chemical or physiological analysis of it will show--probably some mode of motion among its ultimate particles that is peculiar to itself. This prevents cross-breeding among different species and avoids a chaos of animal and vegetable forms. Living tissues and living organs from one species cannot be grafted upon the individuals of another species; the kidney of a cat, for instance, cannot be substituted for that of a dog, although the functions and the anatomy of the two are identical. It is suggested that an element of felineness and an element of canineness adhere in the cells of each, and the two are antagonistic. This specific quality, or selfness, of an animal pervades every drop of its blood, so that the blood relationship of the different forms may be thus tested, where chemistry is incompetent to show agreement or antagonism. The reactions of life are surer and more subtle than those of chemistry. Thus the blood relationship between birds and reptiles is clearly shown, as is the relationship of man and the chimpanzee and the orang-outang. The same general fact holds true in the vegetable world. You cannot graft the apple upon the oak, or the plum upon the elm. It seems as if there were the quality of oakness and the quality of appleness, and they would not mix.

The same thing holds among different chemical compounds. Substances which have precisely the same chemical formulæ (called isomers) have properties as widely apart as alcohol and ether.

If chemistry is powerless to trace the relationship between different forms of life, is it not highly improbable that the secret of life itself is in the keeping of chemistry?

Analytical science has reached the end of its tether when it has resolved a body into its constituent elements. Why or how these elements build up a man in the one case, and a monkey in another, is beyond its province to say. It can deal with all the elements of the living body, vegetable and animal; it can take them apart and isolate them in different bottles; but it cannot put them together again as they were in life. It knows that the human body is built up of a vast multitude of minute cells, that these cells build tissues, that the tissues build organs, that the organs build the body; but the secret of the man, or the dog, or even the flea, is beyond its reach. The secret of biology, that which makes its laws and processes differ so widely from those of geology or astronomy, is a profound mystery. Science can take living tissue and make it grow outside of the body from which it came, but it will only repeat endlessly the first step of life--that of cell-multiplication; it is like a fire that will burn as long as fuel is given it and the ashes are removed; but it is entirely purposeless; it will not build up the organ of which it once formed a part, much less the whole organized body.

The difference between one man and another does not reside in his anatomy or physiology, or in the elements of which the brains and bodies are composed, but in something entirely beyond the reach of experimental science to disclose. The difference is psychological, or, we may say, philosophical, and science is none the wiser for it. The mechanics and the chemistry of a machine are quite sufficient to account for it, plus the man behind it. To the physics and chemistry of a living body, we are compelled to add some intangible, unknowable principle or tendency that physics and chemistry cannot disclose or define. One hesitates to make such a statement lest he do violence to that oneness, that sameness, that pervades the universe.

All trees go to the same soil for their ponderable elements, their ashes, and to the air and the light for their imponderable,--their carbon and their energy,--but what makes the tree, and makes one tree differ from another? Has the career of life upon this globe, the unfolding of the evolutionary process, been accounted for when you have named all the physical and material elements and processes which it involves? We take refuge in the phrase "the nature of things," but the nature of things evidently embraces something not dreamed of in our science.

VII

It is reported that a French scientist has discovered the secret of the glow-worm's light. Of course it is a chemical reaction,--what else could it be?--but it is a chemical reaction in a vital process. Our mental and spiritual life--our emotions of art, poetry, religion--are inseparable from physical processes in the brain and the nervous system; but is that their final explanation? The sunlight has little effect on a withered leaf, but see what effect it has upon the green leaf upon the tree! The sunlight is the same, but it falls upon a new force or potency in the chlorophyll of the leaf,--a bit of chemistry there inspired by life,--and the heat of the sun is stored up in the carbon or woody tissues of the plant or tree, to be given out again in our stoves or fireplaces. And behold how much more of the solar heat is stored up in one kind of a tree than in certain other kinds,--how much in the hickory, oak, maple, and how little comparatively in the pine, spruce, linden,--all through the magic of something in the leaf, or shall we say of the spirit of the tree? If the laws of matter and force alone account for the living organism, if we do not have to think of something that organizes, then how do we account for the marvelous diversity of living forms, and their still more marvelous power of adaptation to changed conditions, since the laws of matter and force are the same everywhere? Science can deal only with the mechanism and chemistry of life, not with its essence; that which sets up the new activity in matter that we call vital is beyond its analysis. It is hard to believe that we have told the whole truth about a living body when we have enumerated all its chemical and mechanical activities. It is by such enumeration that we describe a watch, or a steam-engine, or any other piece of machinery. Describe I say, but such description does not account for the watch or tell us its full significance. To do this, we must include the watchmaker, and the world of mind and ideas amid which he lives. Now, in a living machine, the machine and the maker are one. The watch is perpetually self-wound and self-regulated and self-repaired. It is made up of millions of other little watches, the cells, all working together for one common end and ticking out the seconds and minutes of life with unfailing regularity. Unlike the watch we carry in our pockets, if we take it apart so as to stop its ticking, it can never be put together again. It has not merely stopped; it is dead.

The late William Keith Brooks, of Johns Hopkins University, said in opposition to Huxley that he held to the "old-fashioned conviction that living things do in some way, and in some degree, control or condition inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their most notable and distinctive characteristic." And yet, he said, to think of the living world as "anything but natural" is impossible.

VIII

Life seems to beget a new kind of chemistry, the same elements behave so differently when they are drawn into the life circuit from what they did before. Carbon, for instance, enters into hundreds of new compounds in the organic world that are unknown in the inorganic world. I am thus speaking of life as if it were something, some force or agent, that antedates its material manifestations, whereas in the eyes of science there is no separation of the one from the other. In an explosion there is usually something anterior to, or apart from, the explosive compound, that pulls the trigger, or touches the match, or completes the circuit, but in the slow and gentle explosions that keep the life machinery going, we cannot make such a distinction. The spark and the powder are one; the gun primes and fires itself; the battery is perpetually self-charged; the lamp is self-trimmed and self-lit.

Sir Oliver Lodge is apparently so impressed with some such considerations that he spiritualizes life, and makes it some mysterious entity in itself, existing apart from the matter which it animates and uses; not a source of energy but a timer and releaser of energy. Henri Bergson, in his "Creative Evolution," expounds a similar philosophy of life. Life is a current in opposition to matter which it enters into, and organizes into the myriads of living forms.

I confess that it is easier for me to think of life in these terms than in terms of physical science. The view falls in better with our anthropomorphic tendencies. It appeals to the imagination and to our myth-making aptitudes. It gives a dramatic interest to the question. With Bergson we see life struggling with matter, seeking to overcome its obduracy, compromising with it, taking a half-loaf when it cannot get a whole one; we see evolution as the unfolding of a vast drama acted upon the stage of geologic time. Creation becomes a perpetual process, the creative energy an ever-present and familiar fact. Bergson's book is a wonderful addition to the literature of science and of philosophy. The poet, the dreamer, the mystic, in each of us takes heart at Bergson's beautiful philosophy; it seems like a part of life; it goes so well with living things. As James said, it is like the light of the morning and the singing of birds; we glory in seeing the intellect humbled as he humbles it. The concepts of science try our mettle. They do not appeal to our humanity, or to our myth-making tendencies; they appeal to the purely intellectual, impersonal force within us. Though all our gods totter and fall, science goes its way; though our hearts are chilled and our lives are orphaned, science cannot turn aside, or veil its light. It does not temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

Hence the scientific conception of the universe repels many people. They are not equal to it. To think of life as involved in the very constitution of matter itself is a much harder proposition than to conceive of it as Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, as an independent reality. The latter view gives the mind something more tangible to lay hold of. Indeed, science gives the mind nothing to take hold of. Does any chemical process give the mind any separate reality to take hold of? Is there a spirit of fire, or of decay, or of disease, or of health?

IX

Behold a man with his wonderful body, and still more wonderful mind; try to think of him as being fathered and mothered by the mere mechanical and chemical forces that we see at work in the rocks and soil underfoot, begotten by chemical affinity or the solar energy working as molecular physic, and mothered by the warmth and moisture, by osmosis and the colloid state--and all through the chance clashings and groupings of the irrational physical forces. Nothing is added to them, nothing guides or inspires them, nothing moves upon the face of the waters, nothing breathes upon the insensate clay. The molecules or corpuscles of the four principal elements--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen--just happened to come together in certain definite numbers, and in a certain definite order, and invented or built up that most marvelous thing in the universe, the cell. The cells put their heads, or bodies, together, and built the tissues, the tissues formed the organs, the organs in convention assembled organized themselves into the body, and behold! a man, a bird, or a tree!--as chance a happening as the juxtaposition of the grains of sand upon the shore, or the shape of the summer clouds in the sky.

Aristotle dwells upon the internal necessity. The teeth of an animal arise from necessity, he says; the animal must have them in order to live. Yet it must have lived before it had them, else how would the necessity arise? If the horns of an animal arise from the same necessity, the changing conditions of its life begat the necessity; its life problem became more and more complicated, till new tools arose to meet new wants. But without some indwelling principle of development and progress, how could the new wants arise? Spencer says this progress is the result of the action and reaction between organisms and their changing environment. But you must first get your organism before the environment can work its effects, and you must have something in the organism that organizes and reacts from the environment. We see the agents he names astronomic, geologic, meteorologic, having their effects upon inanimate objects as well, but they do not start the process of development in them; they change a stone, but do not transform it into an organism. The chemist can take the living body apart as surely as the watchmaker can take a watch apart, but he cannot put the parts together again so that life will reappear, as the watchmaker can restore the time-keeping power of the watch. The watch is a mere mechanical contrivance with parts fitted to parts externally, while the living body is a mechanical and chemical contrivance, with parts blended with parts internally, so to speak, and acting together through sympathy, and not merely by mechanical adjustment. Do we not have to think of some organizing agent embracing and controlling all the parts, and integral in each of them, making a vital bond instead of a mechanical one?

There are degrees of vitality in living things, whereas there are only degrees of complexity and delicacy and efficiency in mechanical contrivances. One watch differs from another in the perfection of its works, but not as two living bodies with precisely similar structure differ from each other in their hold upon life, or in their measure of vitality. No analysis possible to science could show any difference in the chemistry and physics of two persons of whom one would withstand hardships and diseases that would kill the other, or with whom one would have the gift of long life and the other not. Machines differ from one another quantitatively--more or less efficiency; a living body differs from a machine qualitatively--its efficiency is of a different order; its unity is of a different order; its complexity is of a different order; the interdependence of its parts is of a different order. Yet what a parallel there is between a machine and a living body! Both are run by external forces or agents, solar energy in one applied mechanically from without; in the other applied vitally from within; both suffer from the wear and tear of time and from abuse, but one is self-repaired and the other powerless in this respect--two machines with the same treatment running the same number of years, but two men with the same treatment running a very unequal number of years. Machines of the same kind differ in durability, men differ in powers of endurance; a man can "screw up his courage," but a machine has no courage to screw up. Science may be unable to see any difference between vital mechanics, vital chemistry, and the chemics and mechanics of inorganic bodies--its analysis reveals no difference; but that there is a difference as between two different orders, all men see and feel.

Science cannot deal with fundamental questions. Only philosophy can do this. Science is only a tool or a key, and it can unlock only certain material problems. It cannot appraise itself. It is not a judge but a witness. Problems of mind, of character, moral, æsthetic, literary, artistic problems, are not its sphere. It counts and weighs and measures and analyzes, it traces relations, but it cannot appraise its own results. Science and religion come in conflict only when the latter seeks to deal with objective facts, and the former seeks to deal with subjective ideas and emotions. On the question of miracle they clash, because religion is then dealing with natural phenomena and challenges science. Philosophy offends science when it puts its own interpretation upon scientific facts. Science displeases literature when it dehumanizes nature and shows us irrefragable laws when we had looked for humanistic divinities.

XI

THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIT

In my youth I once heard the then well-known lecturer Starr King speak on "The Law of Disorder." I have no recollection of the main thought of his discourse, but can see that it might have been upon the order and harmony that finally come out of the disharmonies of nature and of man. The whole universe goes blundering on, but surely arrives. Collisions and dispersions in the heavens above, and failure and destruction among living things on the earth below, yet here we all are in a world good to be in! The proof that it is good to be in is that we are actually here. It is as if the Creator played his right hand against his left--what one loses the other gains.

It has been aptly said that while Darwin's theory of natural selection may account for the survival of the fittest, it does not account for the arrival of the fittest. The arrival of the fittest, sooner or later, seems in some way guaranteed by tendencies that are beyond the hit-and-miss method of natural selection.

When we look back over the course of organic evolution, we see the unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air, devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see the shifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth's crust, the rise of mountains, the engulfing of forests, a vast destruction of life, immense numbers of animal forms becoming extinct through inability to adapt themselves to new conditions, or from other causes. We see creatures, half beast, half bird, or half dragon, half fish; we see the evolutionary process thwarted or delayed apparently by the hardening or fixing of its own forms. We see it groping its way like a blind man, and experimenting with this device and with that, fumbling, awkward, ineffectual, trying magnitude of body and physical strength first, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at the end of Palæozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous, arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab, some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, the production of pain as much a part of the scheme of things as the production of pleasure; the creative impulse feeling its way through the mollusk to the fish, and through the fish to the amphibian and the reptile, through the reptile to the mammal, and through the mammal to the anthropoid apes, and through the apes to man, then through the rude and savage races of man, the long-jawed, small-brained, Pliocene man, hairy and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our own era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, what carnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean by intelligent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clash of forces, the battle to the strong and the race to the fleet.

It is hard to believe that the course of organic evolution would have eventuated in man and the other higher forms of life without some guiding principle; yet it is equally difficult to believe that the course of any guiding intelligence down the ages would have been strewn with so many failures and monstrosities, so much waste and suffering and delay. Man has not been specially favored by one force or element in nature. Behold the enemies that beset him without and within, and that are armed for his destruction! The intelligence that appears to pervade the organic world, and that reaches its conscious expression in the brain of man, is just as manifest in all the forms of animals and plants that are inimical to him, in all his natural enemies,--venomous snakes and beasts of prey, and insect pests,--as in anything else. Nature is as wise and solicitous for rats and mice as for men. In fact, she has endowed many of the lower creatures with physical powers that she has denied him. Evidently man is only one of the cards in her pack; doubtless the highest one, but the game is not played for him alone.

There is no economy of effort or of material in nature as a whole, whatever there may be in special parts. The universe is not run on modern business-efficiency principles. There is no question of time, or of profit, of solvency or insolvency. The profit-and-loss account in the long run always balances. In our astronomic age there are probably vastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal space than there are living suns and planets. But in some earlier period in the cycle of time the reverse may have been true, or it may be true in some future period.

There is economy of effort in the individual organism, but not in the organic series, at least from the human point of view. During the biologic ages there have been a vast number of animal forms, great and small, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in his line of descent, and played no part in his evolution. During that carnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestor of man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life was constantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it. That it survived at all in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those early ages, is one of the wonders of time. The drama or tragedy of evolution has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who have played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purpose was the entertainment of some unseen spectator. When we reach human history, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, what futile undertakings!--war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress or bringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men! Those who live in this age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogous to the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men who never saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engage in a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries of science and civilization can give them--a tragedy that darkens the very heavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and good will to men. It is a catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms of geologic time when whole races disappeared and the face of continents was changed. It seems that men in the aggregate, with all their science and religion, are no more exempt from the operation of cosmic laws than are the stocks and stones. Each party to this gigantic struggle declares that he is in it against his will; the fate that rules in the solar system seems to have them all in its grip; the working of forces and tendencies for which no man was responsible seems to have brought it about. Social communities grow in grace and good-fellowship, but governments in their relations to one another, and often in relation to their own subjects, are still barbarous. Men become christianized, but man is still a heathen, the victim of savage instincts. In this struggle one of the most admirable and efficient of nations, and one of the most solicitous for the lives and well-being of its citizens, is suddenly seized with a fury of destruction, hurling its soldiers to death as if they were only the waste of the fields, and trampling down other peoples whose geographic position placed them in their way as if they were merely vermin, throwing international morality to the winds, looking upon treaties as "scraps of paper," regarding themselves as the salt of the earth, the chosen of the Lord, appropriating the Supreme Being as did the colossal egotism of old Israel, and quickly getting down to the basic principle of savage life--that might makes right.

Little wonder that the good people are asking, Have we lost faith? We may or we may not have lost faith, but can we not see that our faith does not give us a key to the problem? Our faith is founded on the old prescientific conception of a universe in which good and evil are struggling with each other, with a Supreme Being aiding and abetting the good. We fail to appreciate that the cosmic laws are no respecters of persons. Emerson says there is no god dare wrong a worm, but worms dare wrong one another, and there is no god dare take sides with either. The tides in the affairs of men are as little subject to human control as the tides of the sea and the air. We may fix the blame of the European war upon this government or upon that, but race antagonisms and geographical position are not matters of choice. An island empire, like England, is bound to be jealous of all rivals upon the sea, because her very life, when nations clash, depends upon her control of it; and an inland empire, like Germany, is bound to grow restless under the pressure of contiguous states of other races. A vast empire, like Russia, is always in danger of falling apart by its own weight. It is fused and consolidated by a turn of events that arouse the patriotic emotions of the whole people and unite them in a common enthusiasm.

The evolution of nations is attended by the same contingencies, the same law of probability, the same law of the survival of the fit, as are organic bodies. I say the survival of the fit; there are degrees of fitness in the scale of life; the fit survive, and the fittest lead and dominate, as did the reptiles in Mesozoic time, and the mammals in Tertiary time. Among the mammals man is dominant because he is the fittest. Nations break up or become extinct when they are no longer fit, or equal to the exigencies of the struggles of life. The Roman Empire would still exist if it had been entirely fit. The causes of its unfitness form a long and intricate problem. Germany of to-day evidently looks upon herself as the dominant nation, the one fittest to survive, and she has committed herself to the desperate struggle of justifying her self-estimate. She tramples down weaker nations as we do the stubble of the fields. She would plough and harrow the world to plant her Prussian _Kultur_. This _Kultur_ is a mighty good product, but we outside of its pale think that French _Kultur_, and English _Kultur_, and American _Kultur_ are good products also, and equally fit to survive. We naturally object to being ploughed under. That Russian _Kultur_ has so far proved itself a vastly inferior product cannot be doubted, but the evolutionary processes will in time bring a finer and higher Russia out of this vast weltering and fermenting mass of humanity. In all these things impersonal laws and forces are at work, and the balance of power, if temporarily disturbed, is bound, sooner or later, to be restored just as it is in the inorganic realm.

Evolution is creative, as Bergson contends. The wonder is that, notwithstanding the indifference of the elemental forces and the blind clashing of opposing tendencies among living forms,--a universe that seems run entirely on the trial-and-error principle,--evolution has gone steadily forward, a certain order and stability has been reached in the world of inert bodies and forces, and myriads of forms of wonderful fitness and beauty have been reached in the organic realm. Just as the water-system and the weather-system of the globe have worked themselves out on the hit-and-miss plan, but not without serious defects,--much too much water and heat at a few places, and much too little at a few others,--so the organic impulse, warred upon by the blind inorganic elements and preyed upon by the forms it gave rise to, has worked itself out and peopled the world as we see it peopled to-day--not with forms altogether admirable and lovely from our point of view, but so from the point of view of the whole. The forests get themselves planted by the go-as-you-please winds and currents, the pines in one place, the spruce, the oaks, the elms, the beeches, in another, all with a certain fitness and system. The waters gather themselves together in great bodies and breathe salubrity and fertility upon the land.

A certain order and reasonableness emerges from the chaos and cross-purposes. There are harmony and coöperation among the elemental forces, as well as strife and antagonism. Life gets on, for all groping and blundering. There is the inherent variability of living forms to begin with--the primordial push toward the development from within which, so far as we can see, is not fortuitous, but predestined; and there is the stream of influences from without, constantly playing upon and modifying the organism and taken advantage of by it.

The essence of life is in adaptability; it goes into partnership with the forces and conditions that surround it. It is this trait which leads the teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environment when its fitness is a foregone conclusion. Shall we praise the fitness of the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the winds for filling our sails? If we cannot say explicitly, without speaking from our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in the evolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that the struggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universe and that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebula itself.

XII

THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE

I

William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was to contradict other philosophers. I may add in the same spirit that one of the fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradict themselves. I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but I have little doubt that a critical examination of his works would show that he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had trouble to make both ends of his philosophy meet. Any man who seeks to compass any of the fundamental problems with the little span of his finite mind, is bound at times to have trouble to make both ends meet. The man of science seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knows what is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it. But the philosopher works with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky if he is ever aware when both ends fail to meet.

I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well as a great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theory of the origin of species through natural selection working upon fortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that he could not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of mere chance. The result of chance man certainly is--is he not?--as are all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon the organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves no intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories?

I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both ends of his argument did not quite meet when he contended for the truth of determinism--that there is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and at the same time set man apart from the cosmic order, and represented him as working his will upon it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of his earlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of living things, as contrasted with the student of inert matter, the aspect of nature is reversed. "In living matter, incessant, and so far as we know, spontaneous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the anomaly, to be accounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium," except the equilibrium of death. This is good vitalistic doctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between the matter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atoms are aggregated. Probably the only difference between a diamond and a piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an oyster-shell, is the manner in which the atoms are aggregated; but that the secret of life is in the peculiar compounding of the atoms or molecules--a spatial arrangement of them--is a harder proposition. It seems to me also that Haeckel involves himself in obvious contradictions when he ascribes will, sensation, inclination, dislike, though of a low order, to the atoms of matter; in fact, sees them as living beings with souls, and then denies soul, will, power of choice, and the like to their collective unity in the brain of man.

A philosopher cannot well afford to assume the air of lofty indifference that the poet Whitman does when he asks, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself"; but he may take comfort in the thought that contradictions are often only apparent, and not real, as when two men standing on opposite sides of the earth seem to oppose each other, and yet their heads point to the same heavens, and their feet to the same terrestrial centre. The logic of the earth completely contradicts the ideas we draw from our experience with other globes, both our artificial globes and the globes in the forms of the sun and the moon that we see in the heavens. The earth has only one side, the outside, which is always the upper side; at the South Pole, as at the North, we are on the top side. I fancy the whole truth of any of the great problems, if we could see it, would reconcile all our half-truths, all the contradictions in our philosophy.

In considering this problem of the mystery of living things, I have had a good deal of trouble in trying to make my inborn idealism go hand in hand with my inborn naturalism; but I am not certain that there is any real break or contradiction between them, only a surface one, and that deeper down the strata still unite them. Life seems beyond the capacity of inorganic nature to produce; and yet here is life in its myriad forms, here is the body and mind of man, and here is the world of inanimate matter out of which all living beings arise, and into which they sooner or later return; and we must either introduce a new principle to account for it all, or else hold to the idea that what is is natural--a legitimate outcome of the universal laws and processes that have been operating through all time. This last is the point of view of the present chapter,--the point of view of naturalism; not strictly the scientific view which aims to explain all life phenomena in terms of exact experimental science, but the larger, freer view of the open-air naturalist and literary philosopher. I cannot get rid of, or hold in abeyance, my inevitable idealism, if I would; neither can I do violence to my equally inevitable naturalism, but may I not hope to make the face of my naturalism beam with the light of the ideal--the light that never was in the physico-chemical order, and never can be there?

II