Part 5

Where does the great artist get his laws of art but from his insight into the spirit and method of Nature? They are reflected in his own heart; the act of creation repeats itself in his own handiwork. The true artist has no secondary aims--not to teach or to preach, nor to praise nor condemn; but to portray, and to show us, through the particular, the road to the universal.

Eckermann reports Goethe as saying to him that “Nature’s intentions are always good”; but if questioned, Goethe would hardly have maintained that the clouds, the winds, the streams, the tides, gravity, cohesion, and so on, have intentions of any sort, much less intentions directed to us or away from us. Even the wisest among us thus make man the aim and object of Nature. We impose our own psychology upon the very rock and trees.

Goethe always read into Nature his own human traits; always when he speaks of her he speaks as an artist and poet. He says to Eckermann that Nature “is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man who is incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to the apt, the pure, the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets. The understanding will not reach her; man must be capable of elevating himself to the highest Reason to come into that contact with the Divinity which manifests in the primitive phenomena which dwell behind them and from which they proceed. The divinity works in the living, not in the dead; in the becoming and changing, not in the become and the fixed. Therefore, reason, with its tendency toward the divine, has only to do with the becoming, the living; but understanding has to do with the become, the already fixed, that it may make use of it.” In this last we see the germ of Bergson’s philosophy. The divinity that dwells behind phenomena, and from which they proceed, is the attempt of the human mind to find the end of that which has no end, the law of causation.

III

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

“Proud man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’ ‘See all for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.”

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.