Part 25

That Nature is irrational, unhuman, no one can deny, not because she is less, but because she is more; she is above reason, above man. Our reason calls Nature irrational because the reason is a special faculty, and is limited; it takes in the arc, so to speak, but not the full circle. Nature is irrational, not because she is not suffused with mind, but because she does not count the cost, because our economies do not fit her especial scheme. Life is synonymous with intelligence; all organic nature shows the working of the primal mind--the adaptation of means to specific ends, and the steady improvement from lower to higher.

What we think, when trying to render an account to the reason of the enigma of life, often has little relation to what we do, as practical, struggling beings. We are free to think in all directions, free to move in but few. Our thoughts are like the vapors that drift with the winds, or that expand equally in all directions. Our actual lives are like the waters that must flow in definite channels, and turn some wheel or irrigate some tract of land, or quench some creature’s thirst. That naturalism, with minds which take an interest in it, should result in low standards of life, or in any form of disorder or failure, I do not believe. Only clear, strong, truth-loving spirits can accept this explanation of things. Much more mentality is demanded than is demanded by the old conceptions. Hence one has to face the terrible realities and discipline the spirit to accept them. In the old views, in supernaturalism, all this is done for one by the Church and one is a member of a personally conducted party to heaven.

XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE

We cannot find God by thinking. Thinking starts us on an endless quest. We can find neither end nor beginning to the sequence of cause and effect. It is a circle that ends and begins forever in itself. Men find what they call God in action, in experience, because in these practical dealings with the forces of this world they are under the law of cause and effect. They find beginnings and endings, they find an upper and an under side, they find a lower and a higher, a greater and a smaller: but in thought all things are relative. Some wise man has said that if there were no God, we should have to invent one--invent one if we wish to explain the world in the terms of human experience. Thinking turns the world topsy-turvy.

Our religious natures are still Ptolemaic. The heavens still revolve around us. We do not with the eye of the flesh see ourselves in this world as on a sphere--on a celestial body floating in space; we see ourselves as on an endless plain over and under which the heavenly bodies pass. It is only with the eye of the mind that we see things in their true relation and see that there is no up and no down, no under and no over, apart from the earth, and no God who rules as a ruler rules. We do not gain the tremendous facts of astronomy through our everyday experience; our search after scientific truth reveals them to us. Through this inquiry we see the grand voyage we are making among the stars, and see that the heavens are not a realm apart from us, the abode of superior beings, but are our veritable habitat; that our earth is a celestial body among myriads of others, and that when we solemnly lift our eyes heavenward, we are lifting them to other worlds made of the same stuff as our own. Our religious emotions and aspirations lead us to look away from the earth and to imagine finer and fairer realms, but disinterested science does not humor our illusions; it brings us back to earth again, back to the heaven we despise. Hence the trouble the narrow religious nature has with science. It experiences a cold shudder before its revelations and will none of it. It will have beginnings and endings, boundaries and limitations, heavenly and earthly, and will read the impersonal laws of the universe in terms of our personal human needs and relations. It sets up a judge and ruler of creation modeled on our human plan, and then to get out of the dilemma in which it finds itself, with all the sin and misery and injustice of the world which it finds upon its hands, and which omnipotent love and mercy could never tolerate, dopes itself with theological casuistry that seeks to justify the ways of God to man. It is a world-old problem. The only way I see out of it is by purging our minds of the old dogmas and boldly facing the reality as science shows it to us. Religion as the world has so long used the term--that human mixture of fear, reverence, superstition, and selfish desire--has had its day. We may still marvel and love and admire and rejoice, but let us fear and plead and tremble no more. There is nothing to be afraid of worse than ourselves, and nothing to implore and propitiate farther removed from us than the rain and the sunshine. In the end all things work together for our good--not always for the good of to-day, or of to-morrow, or for this man or that man, but for the good of all, for the good which evolution brings in its train. Evolution brings what we call evil also, but evil is a term of our human experience, and the Infinite, the Eternal, knows it not. What is evil to one creature in the struggle for life we have seen to be good to another, and often what our religious fears recoil from, science sees as the beneficent operation of law. In Nature nothing is unclean; her chemistry meets and appropriates all, even when we flee or faint. Our physical well-being forces upon us the conception of the clean and the unclean, but in the processes of the Nature that sustains us both are one.

We are adjustable creatures. We are neither sugar nor salt, neither round nor square, neither iron nor lead; we yield and we resist, we melt and we freeze. We are as adjustable and as adaptive as the leaves of the forest. The firmly woven texture of the leaf, its mobile stem, the flexible branch to which it clings, make it secure against the ordinary vicissitudes to which it is subject.

Man is the most adaptive of all creatures; he is as local as the turtle, and as cosmopolitan as the eagle. All climes, all conditions of wet and dry, of plain and mountain, of sea and shore, of island and continent, are his. His home is the world. Lately he has conquered the air with forces of the earth. Will he yet conquer the ether with forces of the air? Already the ether conveys his messages, but no mechanical contrivance of his can yet lay hands upon it.

Let me again say that by the Natural Providence I mean the general beneficence of Nature, the blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating, inevitable beneficence which brought us here and keeps us here, and makes it good for us to be alive, despite the vicissitudes and the occasional apparently lesser phases of malevolence to which we are subject. The changing seasons, the fertile soils, the rains, the dews, the snows, the blue skies, the green earth, the flowing streams, the gentle winds, in fact all the conditions that make life possible and permanent, are expressions of this beneficence. The whole movement of evolution, with all its dark and forbidding phases, is an expression of it. Allow time enough and the turbid stream flows itself clear, and the stream of evolution is fast losing, has lost, most of its terrible and repellent features. At its flood, in earlier geologic times, one may say that its waters were charged with the elements of huge, uncouth, and terrible forms which have been mostly eliminated; the current has cleared and purified as it advanced; the dragons and monsters have nearly disappeared; the reptiles have receded and left the fowl and birds; the saurians are gone, and in their stead we have the more comely and useful forms of mammalian life. From our human point of view--and we can have no other--creation has refined. The tide of life is still like a river that has its noisome and unlovely margins, but how has it cleared and sweetened since Permian and Jurassic times! The scale of animal life has changed, less bone and muscle and more nerve and brains, less emphasis laid upon size and more upon wit. Only in the insect world are the dragons and monsters, and the carnival of blood and slaughter, repeated. In the shade of a summer tree, or in a clover-field, one may see minute creatures pursuing or devouring one another which, if enough times magnified, would rival any of the dragons of the prime.

XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK

Probably that overwhelming calamity, the World War, set more good people adrift upon the sea of religious doubt and skepticism than all the accumulated evils of the past ten centuries. Men were everywhere outspoken in their want of faith in the Providence in which they had so long trusted. I heard of an English clergyman who declared that if the Germans won in the war he would never open his Bible again. Another English parson, with the thought of the war weighing upon him, published a volume of discourses which he called “The Justification of God.” But judging from my own experiences with the book, the lay mind will find the grounds for justification as hard a riddle to read as the original one.

Only a faith founded upon the rock of natural law can weather such a storm as the world passed through in the Great War, but unfortunately such a faith is possible to comparatively few--the faith that the universe is radically good and beneficent, and that the evils of life grow upon the same tree with the good, and that the fruits called evil bear only a small proportion to those called good. Persons who do not read the book of nature as a whole, who do not try their faith by the records of the rocks and the everlasting stars, who are oblivious to the great law of evolution which has worked out the salvation of man and of all living things, through good and ill report, through delays and sufferings and agonies incalculable, but the issues of which have been unfailing, who do not see the natural universal order working in the fiery ordeal through which all nations during the historic period have passed, who have not learned that the calamities of men and of peoples are not the result of the wrath of some offended divinity, but the ups and downs in the long, hard road of human development, and that, in the nature of things, justice is meted out to all men--if not in a day, then in a year, or in a thousand years; if not to the individual, then to his family, or to his race--those who take no account of all these things soon lose their reckoning in times like ours.

Every good deed, every noble thought, counts in the counsels of the Eternal. Every bad deed, every ignoble thought, counts also. But the stream tends to purify itself; the world is thus made; evil is real, but short-lived; the remedial forces of life and nature burn it up or convert it into good. Our fertile landscapes are the result of the wear and tear of geologic ages; fire, flood, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, have all had a share in shaping them. Decay and death have fed the sources of life. Our own history as a people and the history of the European countries exhibit a like contrast and mingling of good and evil. We are too personal in our estimates, too limited in our perspectives; thoughts of our own comforts and private aims are too much with us. We must give Providence the advantage of a wiser perspective.

The thoughtful mind, capable of viewing these things on a bigger scale, does not need a world calamity to reveal the unsatisfactory character of the reigning gods. The daily course of events does that. Infantile paralysis, for example, with its long train of the crippled, unoffending children, or a man being slowly eaten up with cancer, or a mother losing her life in trying to save her child from flood and fire, and scores of other similar things, show what a thin veneer our theology puts upon ugly facts.

Our ecclesiastical faith must be housed in churches and kept warm by vestments. The moment we take it out into the open and expose it to unroofed and unwarmed universal nature, it is bound to suffer from the cosmic chill. For my part, I do not have to take my faith in out of the wet and the cold. It is an open-air faith, an all-the-year-round faith; neither killing frosts nor killing heats disturb it; not tornadoes nor earthquakes nor wars nor pestilence nor famine make me doubt for one moment that the universe is sound and good. The forces which brought us here and provided so lavishly for our sustenance and enjoyment; that gave us our bodies and our minds; that endowed us with such powers; that surrounded us with such beauty and sublimity; that brought us safely through the long and hazardous journey of evolution; that gave us the summer sun, the midnight skies, and the revolving seasons; that gave human love and fellowship and coöperation, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood, and the sense of justice and mercy, are beneficent and permanent forces. They are directed to me personally because they are directed to all that live; they are the cause of the living, the essence and the sum of all life of the globe. I do not mind if you call them terrestrial forces; the terrestrial and the celestial are one. I do not mind if you call them material forces; the material and the spiritual are inseparable. I do not mind if you call this view the infidelity (or atheism) of science; science, too, is divine; all knowledge is knowledge of God.

I have never taken shelter in any form of ecclesiasticism. I have never tried to clothe myself in the delusive garments of a superstitious age. I have never pinned my faith to a man-made God, however venerable. I have inured my mind to the open air of the universe, to things as they are, to the dealings of a Power that exacts an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; a power that deals on the square. Those apparent outlaws of the heavens, the comets, do not disturb the naturist; sidereal space strewn with dead worlds and burnt-out suns do not disturb him; the spectacle of the great planets rolling through space void of life for untold millions of years, does not disturb him; and if life should never come to them, and should ultimately disappear from the earth, he would not lose faith; he could behold Europe drenched with the blood of a needless, wicked war and not lose faith; he could see civilization retarded and the unjust cause triumph, and still know that the Creative Energy has our good at heart and always will have it.

The demand of our day is for a scientific religion--an attitude of mind toward creation begotten by knowledge, in which fear, personal hopes, individual good, and the so-called “other world,” play little part. Virtuous actions, upright conduct, heroic character, the practice of the Golden Rule, are seen to be their own reward, and the security of the future is in well-doing and well-being in the present. This is not religion in the old ecclesiastical sense, but in the new scientific sense; a religion that moves us to fight vice, crime, war, intemperance, for self-preservation and in brotherly love, and not in obedience to theological dogma or the command of a God; a religion that opens our eyes to the wonder and beauty of the world, and that makes us at home in this world. The old religion is a tree that has borne its fruit. It is dying at the top; it is feeble at the root. It no longer touches men’s lives as of old. The great things that are done to-day are not done in the name of religion, but in the name of science, of humanity, of civilization. The brotherhood that has force and meaning is no longer a sectarian brotherhood; it is larger than all the churches combined.

The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world. He experiences no miracles; he sees the cosmic energy as no respecter of persons; he sees the rains falling alike upon the just and the unjust; he sees the vast, impartial, undiscriminating movements of Nature all about him; he learns that the land cannot sustain life without the fertilizing rains, yet he beholds the clouds pouring out their bounty into the sea just as freely as upon the land; he beholds the inorganic crushing the organic all about him, and yet he knows that the latter is nothing without the former.

If God and the universal cosmic forces are one, how surely is God on both sides in all struggles, all causes, all wars, righteous and unrighteous! We behold warring nations praying to the same God for victory; we see this same God now apparently favoring one side, now the other, and we are bewildered. Our theology takes us beyond soundings. But the naturist is not bewildered; he can read the riddle and reconcile the contradictions. Napoleon (if it was Napoleon) was right when he said that God was on the side of the heaviest artillery--the more power, the more God.

This may be a hard, chilling gospel; it is like going naked into the storm; but how can we deny it? Can we refuse to face it?

THE POET OF THE COSMOS

The world has had but one poet of the cosmos, and that was Whitman. His mind, his sympathies, sweep through a wider orbit than those of any other. I am bold enough to say frankly that I look upon him as the greatest personality--not the greatest intellect, but the most symbolical man, the greatest incarnation of mind, heart, and soul, fused and fired by the poetic spirit--that has appeared in the world during the Christian era.

In his lines called “Kosmos” he describes himself:

“Who includes diversity, and is Nature, Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also, Who has not look’d forth from the windows, the eyes, for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover, Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the esthetic, or intellectual, Who, having consider’d the body, finds all its organs and parts good, Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body, understands by subtle analogies all other theories, The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States; Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons, Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.”

Let me say at once that, whatever else “Leaves of Grass” may be, it is not poetry as the world uses that term. It is an inspired utterance, but it does not fall under any of the usual classifications of poetry. Lovers of Whitman no more go to him for poetry than they go to the ocean for the pretty shells and pebbles on the beach. They go to him for contact with his spirit; to be braced and refreshed by his attitude toward life and the universe; for his robust faith, his world-wide sympathies, for the breadth of his outlook, and the wisdom of his utterances.

Whitman is first and last a seer and a philosopher, but his philosophy is incarnated in a man; it is fluid and alive; it breathes and talks, and loves and breeds; it nurses the sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals; it makes him the friend and brother of all types of humanity, of the outcast woman not less than of the man or woman of perfect blood:

“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you. Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you. * * * * * “Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid, You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, For none more than you are the present and the past, For none more than you is immortality.”

My studies of nature and of the universe help me to understand Whitman much more than does my reading of literature itself.

Whitman is rapt and thrilled when he looks up to the midnight sky. His very style is orbicular and concentric. The scientific aspects of astronomy do not engage him for a moment, any more than they did the old Hebrew prophets; his science becomes human emotion. He is the human soul matching itself against the starry hosts, coping with them and absorbing them: