Part 17

The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all these things as the lay mind cannot be, used to the searching laboratory methods, and familiar with the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, dealing with the wonders of chemical compounds, and the forces that lurk in molecules and atoms, seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution of the earth, only the operation of mechanical and chemical principles; seeing the irrefragable law of the correlation and the conservation of forces; tracing consciousness and all our changes in mental states to changes in the brain substance; drilled in methods of proof by experimentation; knowing that the same number of ultimate atoms may be so combined or married as to produce compounds that differ as radically as alcohol and ether,--conversant with all these things, and more, I say,--the strictly scientific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the mechanistic conception of all life phenomena.

Science traces the chain of cause and effect everywhere and finds no break. It follows down animal life till it merges in the vegetable, though it cannot put its finger or its microscope on the point where one ends and the other begins. It finds forms that partake of the characteristics of both. It is reasonable to expect that the vegetable merges into the mineral by the same insensible degrees, and that the one becomes the other without any real discontinuity. The change, if we may call it such, probably takes place in the interior world of matter among the primordial atoms, where only the imagination can penetrate. In that sleep of the ultimate corpuscle, what dreams may come, what miracles may be wrought, what transformations take place! When I try to think of life as a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mystic dance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people taking hold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing all sorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's throats, or occupying one another's bodies, thrilled and vibrating at an inconceivable rate.

The theological solution of this problem of life fails more and more to satisfy thinking men of to-day. Living things are natural phenomena, and we feel that they must in some way be an outcome of the natural order. Science is more and more familiarizing our minds with the idea that the universe is a universe, a oneness; that its laws are continuous. We follow the chemistry of it to the farthest stars and there is no serious break or exception; it is all of one stuff. We follow the mechanics of it into the same abysmal depths, and there are no breaks or exceptions. The biology of it we cannot follow beyond our own little corner of the universe; indeed, we have no proof that there is any biology anywhere else. But if there is, it must be similar to our own. There is only one kind of electricity (though two phases of it), only one kind of light and heat, one kind of chemical affinity, in the universe; and hence only one kind of life. Looked at in its relation to the whole, life appears like a transient phenomenon of matter. I will not say accidental; it seems inseparably bound up with the cosmic processes, but, I may say, fugitive, superficial, circumscribed. Life comes and goes; it penetrates but a little way into the earth; it is confined to a certain range of temperature. Beyond a certain degree of cold, on the one hand, it does not appear; and beyond a certain degree of heat, on the other, it is cut off. Without water or moisture, it ceases; and without air, it is not. It has evidently disappeared from the moon, and probably from the inferior planets, and it is doubtful if it has yet appeared on any of the superior planets, save Mars.

Life comes to matter as the flowers come in the spring,--when the time is ripe for it,--and it disappears when the time is over-ripe. Man appears in due course and has his little day upon the earth, but that day must as surely come to an end. Yet can we conceive of the end of the physical order? the end of gravity? or of cohesion? The air may disappear, the water may disappear, combustion may cease; but oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon will continue somewhere.

Science is the redeemer of the physical world. It opens our eyes to its true inwardness, and purges it of the coarse and brutal qualities with which, in our practical lives, it is associated. It has its inner world of activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint. This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled and vibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitely rapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant and automatic--what a revelation it all is! what a glimpse into "Nature's infinite book of secrecy"!

Our senses reveal to us but one kind of motion--mass motion--the change of place of visible bodies. But there is another motion in all matter which our senses do not reveal to us as motion--molecular vibration, or the thrill of the atoms. At the heart of the most massive rock this whirl of the atoms or corpuscles is going on. If our ears were fine enough to hear it, probably every rock and granite monument would sing, as did Memnon, when the sun shone upon it. This molecular vibration is revealed to us as heat, light, sound, electricity. Heat is only a mode of this invisible motion of the particles of matter. Mass motion is quickly converted into this molecular motion when two bodies strike each other. May not life itself be the outcome of a peculiar whirl of the ultimate atoms of matter?

Says Professor Gotch, as quoted by J. Arthur Thomson in his "Introduction to Science": "To the thought of a scientific mind the universe with all its suns and worlds is throughout one seething welter of modes of motion, playing in space, playing in ether, playing in all existing matter, playing in all living things, playing, therefore, in ourselves." Physical science, as Professor Thomson says, leads us from our static way of looking at things to the dynamic way. It teaches us to regard the atom, not as a fixed and motionless structure, like the bricks in a wall, but as a centre of ever-moving energy; it sees the whole universe is in a state of perpetual flux, a flowing stream of creative energy out of which life arises as one of the manifestations of this energy.

When we have learned all that science can tell us about the earth, is it not more rather than less wonderful? When we know all it can tell us about the heavens above, or about the sea, or about our own bodies, or about a flower, or a bird, or a tree, or a cloud, are they less beautiful and wonderful? The mysteries of generation, of inheritance, of cell life, are rather enhanced by science.

When the man of science seeks to understand and explain the world in which we live, he guards himself against seeing double, or seeing two worlds instead of one, as our unscientific fathers did--an immaterial or spiritual world surrounding and interpenetrating the physical world, or the supernatural enveloping and directing the natural. He sees but one world, and that a world complete in itself; surrounded, it is true, by invisible forces, and holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; a vastly more complex and wonderful world than our fathers ever dreamed of; a fruit, as it were, of the great sidereal tree, bound by natal bonds to myriads of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead or behind them in its ripening, but still complete in itself, needing no miracle to explain it, no spirits or demons to account for its processes, not even its vital processes.

In the light of what he knows of the past history of the earth, the man of science sees with his mind's eye the successive changes that have taken place in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent matter rolling through space; he sees the crust cooling and hardening; he sees the waters appear, the air and the soil appear, he sees the clouds begin to form and the rain to fall, he sees living things appear in the waters, then upon the land, and in the air; he sees the two forms of life arise, the vegetable and the animal, the latter standing upon the former; he sees more and more complex forms of both vegetable and animal arise and cover the earth. They all appear in the course of the geologic ages on the surface of the earth; they arise out of it; they are a part of it; they come naturally; no hand reaches down from heaven and places them there; they are not an addendum; they are not a sudden creation; they are an evolution; they were potential in the earth before they arose out of it. The earth ripened, her crust mellowed, and thickened, her airs softened and cleared, her waters were purified, and in due time her finer fruits were evolved, and, last of all, man arose. It was all one process. There was no miracle, no first day of creation; all were days of creation. Brooded by the sun, the earth hatched her offspring; the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life was in the earth herself; her womb was fertile from the first. All that we call the spiritual, the divine, the celestial, were hers, because man is hers. Our religions and our philosophies and our literatures are hers; man is a part of the whole system of things; he is not an alien, nor an accident, nor an interloper; he is here as the rains, the dews, the flowers, the rocks, the soil, the trees, are here. He appeared when the time was ripe, and he will disappear when the time is over-ripe. He is of the same stuff as the ground he walks upon; there is no better stuff in the heavens above him, nor in the depths below him, than sticks to his own ribs. The celestial and the terrestrial forces unite and work together in him, as in all other creatures. We cannot magnify man without magnifying the universe of which he is a part; and we cannot belittle it without belittling him.

Now we can turn all this about and look upon it as mankind looked upon it in the prescientific ages, and as so many persons still look upon it, and think of it all as the work of external and higher powers. We can think of the earth as the footstool of some god, or the sport of some demon; we can people the earth and the air with innumerable spirits, high and low; we can think of life as something apart from matter. But science will not, cannot follow us; it cannot discredit the world it has disclosed--I had almost said, the world it has created. Science has made us at home in the universe. It has visited the farthest stars with its telescope and spectroscope, and finds we are all akin. It has sounded the depths of matter with its analysis, and it finds nothing alien to our own bodies. It sees motion everywhere, motion within motion, transformation, metamorphosis everywhere, energy everywhere, currents and counter-currents everywhere, ceaseless change everywhere; it finds nothing in the heavens more spiritual, more mysterious, more celestial, more godlike, than it finds upon this earth. This does not imply that evolution may not have progressed farther upon other worlds, and given rise to a higher order of intelligences than here; it only implies that creation is one, and that the same forces, the same elements and possibilities, exist everywhere.

VII

Give free rein to our anthropomorphic tendencies, and we fill the world with spirits, good and bad--bad in war, famine, pestilence, disease; good in all the events and fortunes that favor us. Early man did this on all occasions; he read his own hopes and fears and passions into all the operations of nature. Our fathers did it in many things; good people of our own time do it in exceptional instances, and credit any good fortune to Providence. Men high in the intellectual and philosophical world, still invoke something antithetical to matter, to account for the appearance of life on the planet.

It may be justly urged that the effect upon our habits of thought of the long ages during which this process has been going on, leading us to differentiate matter and spirit and look upon them as two opposite entities, hindering or contending with each other,--one heavenly, the other earthly, one everlasting, the other perishable, one the supreme good, the other the seat and parent of all that is evil,--the cumulative effect of this habit of thought in the race-mind is, I say, not easily changed or overcome. We still think, and probably many of us always will think, of spirit as something alien to matter, something mystical, transcendental, and not of this world. We look upon matter as gross, obstructive, and the enemy of the spirit. We do not know how we are going to get along without it, but we solace ourselves with the thought that by and by, in some other, non-material world, we shall get along without it, and experience a great expansion of life by reason of our emancipation from it. Our practical life upon this planet is more or less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; of its true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change and transformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell us nothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed in radio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, they tell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could not see or live at all, they tell us nothing. In fact we live and move and have our being in a complex of forces and tendencies of which, even by the aid of science, we but see as through a glass darkly. Of the effluence of things, the emanations from the minds and bodies of our friends, and from other living forms about us, from the heavens above and from the earth below, our daily lives tell us nothing, any more than our eyes tell us of the invisible rays in the sun's spectrum, or than our ears tell us of the murmurs of the life-currents in growing things. Science alone unveils the hidden wonders and sleepless activities of the world forces that play through us and about us. It alone brings the heavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds. It alone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendly powers wait upon him day and night. It alone shows him the glories and the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar ground--we cannot get away from home.

There is always an activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and forming flint or chert nodules; or see them in the process of petrifaction slowly building up a tree of chalcedony or onyx in place of a tree of wood, repeating every cell, every knot, every worm-hole--dead matter copying exactly a form of living matter; or see the phenomenon of crystallization everywhere; see the solution of salt mimicking, as Tyndall says, the architecture of Egypt, building up miniature pyramids, terrace upon terrace, from base to apex, forming a series of steps like those up which the traveler in Egypt is dragged by his guides! We can fancy, if we like, these infinitesimal structures built by an invisible population which swarms among the constituent molecules, controlled and coerced by some invisible matter, says Tyndall. This might be called literature, or poetry, or religion, but it would not be science; science says that these salt pyramids are the result of the play of attraction and repulsion among the salt molecules themselves; that they are self-poised and self-quarried; it goes further than that and says that the quality we call saltness is the result of a certain definite arrangement of their ultimate atoms of matter; that the qualities of things as they affect our senses--hardness, softness, sweetness, bitterness--are the result of molecular motion and combination among the ultimate atoms. All these things seem on the threshold of life, waiting in the antechamber, as it were; to-morrow they will be life, or, as Tyndall says, "Incipient life, as it were, manifests itself throughout the whole of what is called inorganic nature."

VIII

The question of the nature and origin of life is a kind of perpetual motion question in biology. Life without antecedent life, so far as human experience goes, is an impossibility, and motion without previous motion, is equally impossible. Yet, while science shows us that this last is true among ponderable bodies where friction occurs, it is not true among the finer particles of matter, where friction does not exist. Here perpetual or spontaneous motion is the rule. The motions of the molecules of gases and liquids, and their vibrations in solids, are beyond the reach of our unaided senses, yet they are unceasing. By analogy we may infer that while living bodies, as we know them, do not and cannot originate spontaneously, yet the movement that we call life may and probably does take place spontaneously in the ultimate particles of matter. But can atomic energy be translated into the motion of ponderable bodies, or mass energy? In like manner can, or does, this potential life of the world of atoms and electrons give rise to organized living beings?

This distrust of the physical forces, or our disbelief in their ability to give rise to life, is like a survival in us of the Calvinistic creed of our fathers. The world of inert matter is dead in trespasses and sin and must be born again before it can enter the kingdom of the organic. We must supplement the natural forces with the spiritual, or the supernatural, to get life. The common or carnal nature, like the natural man, must be converted, breathed upon by the non-natural or divine, before it can rise to the plane of life--the doctrine of Paul carried into the processes of nature.

The scientific mind sees in nature an infinitely complex mechanism directed to no special human ends, but working towards universal ends. It sees in the human body an infinite number of cell units building up tissues and organs,--muscles, nerves, bones, cartilage,--a living machine of infinite complexity; but what shapes and cooerdinates the parts, how the cells arose, how consciousness arose, how the mind is related to the body, how or why the body acts as a unit--on these questions science can throw no light. With all its mastery of the laws of heredity, of cytology, and of embryology, it cannot tell why a man is a man, and a dog is a dog. No cell-analysis will give the secret; no chemical conjuring with the elements will reveal why in the one case they build up a head of cabbage, and in the other a head of Plato.

It must be admitted that the scientific conception of the universe robs us of something--it is hard to say just what--that we do not willingly part with; yet who can divest himself of this conception? And the scientific conception of the nature of life, hard and unfamiliar as it may seem in its mere terms, is difficult to get away from. Life must arise through the play and transformations of matter and energy that are taking place all around us; though it seems a long and impossible road from mere chemistry to the body and soul of man. But if life, with all that has come out of it, did not come by way of matter and energy, by what way did it come? Must we have recourse to the so-called supernatural?--as Emerson's line puts it,--

"When half-gods go, the gods arrive."

When our traditional conception of matter as essentially vulgar and obstructive and the enemy of the spirit gives place to the new scientific conception of it as at bottom electrical and all-potent, we may find the poet's great line come true, and that for a thing to be natural, is to be divine. For my own part, I do not see how we can get intelligence out of matter unless we postulate intelligence in matter. Any system of philosophy that sees in the organic world only a fortuitous concourse of chemical atoms, repels me, though the contradiction here implied is not easily cleared up. The theory of life as a chemical reaction and nothing more does not interest me, but I am attracted by that conception of life which, while binding it to the material order, sees in the organic more than the physics and chemistry of the inorganic--call it whatever name you will--vitalism, idealism, or dualism.

In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theodore Parker did, of the universe as a "handful of dust which God enchants," or we may speak of it, as Goethe did, as "the living garment of God"; but as men of science we can see it only as a vast complex of forces, out of which man has arisen, and of which he forms a part. We are not to forget that we are a part of it, and that the more we magnify ourselves, the more we magnify it; that its glory is our glory, and our glory its glory, because we are its children. In some way utterly beyond the reach of science to explain, or of philosophy to confirm, we have come out of it, and all we are or can be, is, or has been, potential in it.

The evolution of life is, of course, bound up with the evolution of the world. As the globe has ripened and matured, life has matured; higher and higher forms--forms with larger and larger brains and more and more complex nerve mechanisms--have appeared.

Physicists teach us that the evolution of the primary elements--hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and the like--takes place in a solar body as the body cools. As temperature decreases, one after another of the chemical elements makes its appearance, the simpler elements appearing first, and the more complex compounds appearing last, all apparently having their origin in some simple parent element. It appears as if the evolution of life upon the globe had followed the same law and had waited upon the secular cooling of the earth.

Does not a man imply a cooler planet and a greater depth and refinement of soil than a dinosaur? Only after a certain housecleaning and purification of the elements do higher forms appear; the vast accumulation of Silurian limestone must have hastened the age of fishes. The age of reptiles waited for the clearing of the air of the burden of carbon dioxide. The age of mammals awaited the deepening and the enrichment of the soil and the stability of the earth's crust. Who knows upon what physical conditions of the earth's elements the brain of man was dependent? Its highest development has certainly taken place in a temperate climate. There can be little doubt that beyond a certain point the running-down of the earth-temperature will result in a running-down of life till it finally goes out. Life is confined to a very narrow range of temperature. If we were to translate degrees into miles and represent the temperature of the hottest stars, which is put at 30,000 degrees, by a line 30,000 miles long, then the part of the line marking the limits of life would be approximately three hundred miles.

Life does not appear in a hard, immobile, utterly inert world, but in a world thrilling with energy and activity, a world of ceaseless transformations of energy, of radio-activity, of electro-magnetic currents, of perpetual motion in its ultimate particles, a world whose heavens are at times hung with rainbows, curtained with tremulous shifting auroras, and veined and illumined with forked lightnings, a world of rolling rivers and heaving seas, activity, physical and chemical, everywhere. On such a world life appeared, bringing no new element or force, but setting up a new activity in matter, an activity that tends to check and control the natural tendency to the dissipation and degradation of energy. The question is, Did it arise through some transformation of the existing energy, or out of the preexisting conditions, or was it supplementary to them, an addition from some unknown source? Was it a miraculous or a natural event? We shall answer according to our temperaments.

One sees with his mind's eye this stream of energy, which we name the material universe, flowing down the endless cycles of time; at a certain point in its course, a change comes over its surface; what we call life appears, and assumes many forms; at a point farther along in its course, life disappears, and the eternal river flows on regardless, till, at some other point, the same changes take place again. Life is inseparable from this river of energy, but it is not coextensive with it, either in time or in space.