Part 5

In stronger language Mr. Pickering says: "The final result, therefore, would be that all bodies would assume the same temperature, there would be no further source of energy; physical phenomena would cease, and the physical universe would be dead. Such, at least, is the present view of this stupendous question."

In explanation of the origin of this energy, and the reason for its loss, Mr. Stewart further says: "It is supposed that these particles originally existed at a great distance from each other, and that, being endowed with force of gravitation, they have gradually come together; while in this process heat has been generated, just as if a stone were dropped from the top of a cliff toward the earth."

Thus the universe would become an equally heated mass, utterly worthless as far as the work of production is concerned, since such production depends on difference of temperature.

In other words, the universe becomes dead matter, wholly incapable of supporting life, and so far as present science gives us any information, must remain forever at rest.

The fact that such a conclusion has been reached should cause us to pause in doubt of the correctness of the data leading thereto. It would be more plausible were it shown how, at the end of the great cycle, there was renewal of the lost energy, and return to the nebulous beginning. Causation moves in cycles, and the most alarming perturbations are balanced by forces operating in other directions, so that the result is the preservation of order. Planets swing wide of their orbits for a million years, getting further and further away, yet the time comes when they return on a pathway carrying them as wide on the other side.

This latest view of the universe by scientific thought, however plausible its argument, or apparently logical its results, is proven by the very logic of those results to be defective.

THE LOGIC OF RESULTS.--It starts with the declaration that matter and force are inseparable, that there can be no matter without force. The nebulous beginning was a storehouse of energy, which has been wasting ever since the first world was formed. This force has been for countless ages dispersing by radiation. It is still wasting, for as it is radiated into space it does not even raise the temperature of the trackless abyss through which it passes. When it is all gone, there will be left the force of gravitation, holding with adamantine grasp the dead residuum of suns and planets; and, strange conclusion to which these premises force us, this residuum must be matter without force.

Here the problem remains unsolved, and a theory which proudly assumes for itself the distinction of being the only true system of nature, which rules God out of the universe, or makes Him an unknown and unknowable quantity, destroys life in nature, and has no means of its restoration except by a miracle. If the universe is a machine which in time will run down and die, all its force being dissipated, does it not follow that in the beginning some superior power united this force with matter? And also, does it not follow that if this dead universe again lives, a superior power must draw back the scattered beams of light, heat, magnetism, and other forces, and re-endow the dead residuum?

Thus this materialistic hypothesis, which boasts arrogantly of its certitude, begins in assumption and ends in a dilemma out of which confession of ignorance and acceptance of miracle only can extricate it.

Creation is not a clock that must be wound up at stated intervals by a foreign power, and any system which does not provide for its restoration as well as destruction, confesses weakness.

THE CHOICE OF CAUSES.--We have this choice: To believe that forces by blind action and reaction have evolved the world from a nebulous fire-cloud and peopled it with sentient and intellectual beings, making of it a perpetual motion, a machine not designed, but the result of infinite failures, perfected by infinite blunders, and sustained by the fortuitous equilibrium of unseeing, unknowing forces; or that back of these forces is an intelligence, planning and willing through their agency. If the latter be accepted, it does not follow that the crude conception of design in nature as the direct work of a personal God must be maintained. At the commencement of the great revival of the study of nature, when the views which have revolutionized scientific thought were beginning to dawn, illy defined and partially understood, they were seized on by a class seeking support to the theological doctrines they felt yielding beneath their feet, and distorted by plausible sophistry into apparent vindication of their dogmas. Of these, Paley became most famous, his illustration of the watch was the most renowned of his arguments. It is misleading, as there is no real likeness between a watch and the mechanism of nature. Yet we do not endorse the complacency of many leading supporters of evolution. Evolution is undoubtedly a true statement of the method of creation. It offers no further explanation and gives no cause. Accepting evolution and following the development of life from the least to the greatest, what do we see but the constant unfoldment of a well defined purpose and plan? Are not the beings of the Silurian and Devonian epoch prophecies of the forms which were evolved out of them? We may call things by new names, and in place of design use "adaptation"; we do not change the relations of things thereby. When we see a bird cleave the air with rapid wings, and observe the wonderful adaptation of bones and muscles and forms of feathers, we may explain it all by evolution, which has made the bird the embodiment of the forces of the air. Have we done more than state the method of growth? What cause have we assigned for the process? We see an interminable series of forms, changing from age to age, becoming more and more complex in their relations, but pressing forward constantly to final production of man as the perfection of the vertebrate type. Evolution describes this process, at every step furnishing evidence of a purpose, achieving its ends through matter, often failing, but through failures at last reaching its object. In this light the imperfection of organs proves nothing against design. The eye of man is instanced as more imperfect than a glass lens. It is as perfect as the organic material out of which it is made permits. That it becomes diseased is from the same necessity of organization.

EVOLUTION.--Evolution is a new name for facts exceedingly old; but its supporters would have its scheme reach through creation to the foundation of things. Advancement with them means only better adaptation in the struggle for existence, the result of accidental fitness which has pushed unorganized protoplasm to man. Matter and its potentialities granted, all else flows in assured course. Difficulties disappear; the riddle of the Sphinx is no longer obscure. The sunlight has fallen on the marble lips, and Memnon has revealed in a single sentence what mortal man has never understood, "The survival of the fittest." The theologian has rested in blissful confidence in the arms of the Creator; now comes the scientist who by easy methods calls the Creator "evolution," and falls as blindly confident into the arms of his new-named God. The likeness is made more complete by the scorn of one equaling the sneer of the other.

It is a new name for the old fact, that the forms of life on this earth are united by common parentage, and have been differentiated by the accumulation of infinite beneficial changes. The struggle for existence has been the center around which these have aggregated. This no careful student will deny. Having granted this, what then? Is anything explained? Have we approached the cause by a single step? Really, has anything been done more than to explain the phenomena of the world with new words and phrases?

Of old it was said the world is a machine with gods or a god at the crank; to-day the god at the crank is the Unknowable, the laws of nature, the potentiality of matter; or in the most recent theory the all-god has appeared in the revival of the god imminent in the universe, which is regarded as an organism, with a god-soul. This is poetic but neither sensible nor scientific. Forever and forever old ideas are washed on the shore of time, out of the wreck of the past, and instead for being relegated to the museum, are galvanized into grimace of life, and branded as new, when they are rapidly disintegrating in every part.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.--The survival of the fittest is a wonderful scheme of the preservation of the best. To illustrate, take the tiger and the deer. Once they herded together, the tiger not being, as now, noted for strength or cunning, nor the deer for caution and fleetness. The dull tiger was able to take as prey the least cautious and weakest of the deer. The fleetest deer propagated, and then only the most cunning tigers were able to procure food, and continue their kind. As their strength and cunning increased, the cautiousness and fleetness of the deer increased in this matched game of life; the two species reacting on each other until we now have the perfected deer and tiger. In both kingdoms of living beings, among all their diverse families and species, this struggle has gone on, and the result is the differentiation from abysmal protoplasmic slime the humming bird on the flower to the leviathan in the deep; the litchen on the rock to man with an intellectual comprehension of unknown breadth. We here have the chronicle of creation, and Froissart was not more garrulous with his exploits of lord and lady than the chroniclers of the changes effected in specific forms "on their way to man."

We hear all that is said, and with a feeling of disappointment, while admitting all, respond that we were promised a cause, and have been given only a method? What stands behind the "struggle for existence?" What is the infinite force of the ceaseless unrest, which throws each wave higher on the tide line, working like a blind giant, hewing out organic forms from protoplasm, and amid infinite failures approximating ever to the perfect, with constant prophecy that that perfection will be attained? The "survival of the fittest" reveals the prodigal method which preserves one of a million germs, casting the others back into the seething crucible for new trials. Can it claim anything more? The laws of nature are grooves in which causes run to effects; but why do they thus move? Calling them by other names will not satisfy. As Newton, when he gave the law of gravitation mathematical form, penetrated not a step toward its cause, so the biologist has not passed the threshold of the domain of life. A recent scientific association sat in silence after a verbose and flippant discussion on protoplasm, when asked by a member what was the difference between living and dead protoplasm? Not one could answer. Life had escaped their observation. Protoplasm dead is no longer protoplasm. The protoplasmic germ impelled by the forces of life, commences its growth, sending out its feeding vessels, and from the beginning copies the paleontological history of the earth, and more completely the biography of its direct ancestors.

When we consider that this invisible fleck bears in its cell or cells the impress of every condition bearing on its progenitors from remotest time, and will express it in all these conditions, it is no longer a phenomenon on which we gaze, but a miracle of creative power, and all that has been written by physiologists since Galen's time as to its cause is as children's prattle. The material side furnishes no adequate explanation. Its coarse methods are not adapted to measure the illusive psyche. The balance weighs not, the scalpel dissects not, the retort holds not the elements of the soul.

Scientific Methods of the Study of Man, and Results.

THE EVOLUTIONIST.--Scientists have different ways of studying man. The evolutionist first develops the form. He says that life began in protoplasm in the unrecorded ages of the past, and step by step, through mollusk, fish, saurian and mammal, has arisen by the "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest," until the mammal by strangely fortuitous chances has become a human being. As the human body is a modified animal form, so the intellect is a modified and developed instinct, the highest and most spiritual conscientiousness being only the result of accumulated experiences of what is for the best. The highest of animals is man, with no barrier between him and them, and subject to the same fate. There is no indication of a guiding intelligence, and if he possess an immortal spirit, so does the mollusk and the fleck of protoplasm.

THE CHEMIST.--The chemist has his method, that of analysis. He takes the vital tissues and resolves them into their elementary parts. He tells us that there is so much hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen in the muscles; so much lime and phosphorus in the bones; so much phosphorus in the nerves, and iron in the blood. He separates these elements in retort or crucible, and weighs them with nicety so that he knows to a thousandth of a grain their proportions. He has made the ultimate analysis, and these are all he can discover. Life is the result of their union; mind the burning of phosphorus in the brain, and as for spirit, it is quite unnecessary to explain the phenomena. The chemist has finished his work, and placed in the museum the results of his analysis. That body perhaps weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. In a large glass jar is the water it contained--clear, crystal water, such as flashes in the sunlight of a rainbow-arching shower, or a dewdrop sparkling on the petals of a lily. There are about eight or ten gallons of it, for the body is three-fourths water. There is a small jar of white powder representing the lime; another, still smaller, the silex; another the phosphorus. There are homeopathic vials containing a trace of sulphur, of iron, magnesia, the potash, the soda, the salts and so on until the vials, great and small, contain more or less of almost every element. Here we have what was once a human being. We have every thing that went to make him, except one, which lacking, these elements are lifeless, and of no more value than water from the brook and earth from its banks: the vital, or psychic principle. Place the contents of all the lesser jars in the greater water jar, shake, dissolve, and manipulate, dead and inert they remain, and will remain so long as thus treated. The chemist in his analysis has made no account of the subtile principle which made these elementary atoms an expression of its purpose. The living form has its origin in the remote past, and its atoms were arranged and brought into union by a vital process which thus began; which must begin in this manner and traverse the same path. Phosphorus may be essential to give activity to the brain, and a given amount of thought may correspond to a fixed amount of phosphorus burned in nerve tissue. What of that? We know that in one of these vials is all the phosphorus that existed in one human being; we may burn it all, and it will give flame, not intelligence. If intelligence comes from its burning, the process must take place in nerve cells organized for the purpose, and that structure must have been planned by superior thought.

To call the ingredients of these bottles a human being would be like calling a pile of brick, mortar and lumber a house, except the comparison fails in the house being built by outside forces, while the living being must be organized from within. No mixing of the contents of these bottles and jars can evolve life, or even the smallest speck of protoplasm.

THE ANATOMIST.--The third scheme is that of the anatomist, who with keen-edged scalpel bends over the body after life has gone out of it, and traces the course of arteries and veins, the form and location of nerves, the attachment of muscular fibers, and in connection with the physiologist defines the functions of each separate organ. An exquisitely fashioned machine it is, wonderfully and fearfully made, growing up from an invisible germ. After anatomist and physiologist have finished, and on their dissecting table only a mass of rubbish remains, they triumphantly point to it and exclaim: "See! We have settled the question of spirit! There can be nothing beyond this organism. We have determined how every cell and fiber of it are put together, and the functions they perform. No where is there an indication of any thing superior or transcending this material form. Here is where the food is digested; here it is assimilated; here this secretion is made; here excretion of poisonous matter takes place; here in the brain, in these gray cells, thought arises. Ah! it is a wonderful complex machine."

Indeed it is, and what has become of the power which moved it? You have a strange machine, unlike all others, for it is, according to your ideas, an engine to make steam, instead of to be moved by it; a mill to make a waterfall, instead of to be run by falling water. What is the difference between a dead man and a living one? Incomprehensibly great, and yet the dead man to the chemist, the anatomist, the biologist, is identically the same as the living. That unknown element, life, escapes the crucible, the retort, the scalpel, the microscope, and the conclusions of those who take it not into consideration are the vague conjecturing of children, who have gained but a half knowledge of the subjects that excite their attention.

Yet science proudly claims the knowledge of all things possible to know. It has searched into the foundations of the earth and ascended the starry dome of infinitude; it grasps the inconceivably small and the inconceivably great; it delves in the hard stratum of facts, and sports in the most sublime theories. It gives the laws of the dancing motes, and those which guide the movements of stellar worlds; the sullen forces of the elements and the subtile agencies which sustain living beings.

WHAT IS BEYOND THE STRIFE FOR EXISTENCE?--What, O Science, is there beyond the grave which shuts down with adamantine wall between this life and the future?

The answer comes: Beyond? There is nothing. Do not dream, but know the reality. What becomes of its music after the instrument is destroyed? Where is the hum of the bee after the insect has passed on its busy wings? Where is the light in the lamp after the oil is burned? Where is the heat of the grate after the coal has burned? Given the conditions and you have music, heat and light. When these conditions perish you have nothing. As the impinging of oxygen against carbon in the flame produces light and heat, so the combination of elements in the nerves and brain produces the phenomena of life and intelligence. As the liver secretes bile, so the brain produces thought. Destroy the brain and mind disappears, as the music when the instrument is broken.

Look you and see the strife for existence. See you the myriads of human beings who have perished. The world is one vast charnel house, its material being worked over and over again in endless cycle. Tooth and claw to rend and tear; arrow, club, spear, sword, and gun to kill; the weak to fall, the strong and brutal to triumph, to multiply, and advance by the slaughter of its own weaker members. The atom you can not see with unaided eye devours and is devoured, and ascending to man, he is by turns the slayer and the slain.

There's not an atom of the earth's thick crust, Of earth or rock, or metals' hardened rust, But has a myriad times been charged with life, And mingled in the vortex of its strife; And every grain has been a battle-field Where murder boldly rushed with sword and shield. Turn back the rocky pages of earth's lore, And every page is written o'er and o'er With wanton waste. The weak are for the strong, And Might is victor, whether right or wrong. Enameled armor and tesselated scale, With conic tooth that broke the flinty mail; The shell protecting and the jaw which ground The shell to dust, there side by side are found; The fin that sped the weak from danger's path, The stronger fin that sped the captor's wrath; A charnel house where, locked in endless strife, Cycle the balanced forces, Death and Life.