Part 18

In midsummer what river-men call "the blossoming of the water" takes place in the Hudson River; the water is full of minute vegetable organisms; they are seasonal and temporary; they are born of the midsummer heats. By and by the water is clear again. Life in the universe seems as seasonal and fugitive as this blossoming of the water. More and more does science hold us to the view of the unity of nature--that the universe of life and matter and force is all natural or all supernatural, it matters little which you call it, but it is not both. One need not go away from his own doorstep to find mysteries enough to last him a lifetime, but he will find them in his own body, in the ground upon which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in the invisible forces that play around him. We may marvel how the delicate color and perfume of the flower could come by way of the root and stalk of the plant, or how the crude mussel could give birth to the rainbow-tinted pearl, or how the precious metals and stones arise from the flux of the baser elements, or how the ugly worm wakes up and finds itself a winged creature of the air; yet we do not invoke the supernatural to account for these things.

It is certain that in the human scale of values the spirituality of man far transcends anything in the animal or physical world, but that even that came by the road of evolution, is, indeed, the flowering of ruder and cruder powers and attributes of the life below us, I cannot for a moment doubt. Call it a transmutation or a metamorphosis, if you will; it is still within the domain of the natural. The spiritual always has its root and genesis in the physical. We do not degrade the spiritual in such a conception; we open our eyes to the spirituality of the physical. And this is what science has always been doing and is doing more and more--making us familiar with marvelous and transcendent powers that hedge us about and enter into every act of our lives. The more we know matter, the more we know mind; the more we know nature, the more we know God; the more familiar we are with the earth forces, the more intimate will be our acquaintance with the celestial forces.

When we speak of the gulf that separates the living from the non-living, are we not thinking of the higher forms of life only? Are we not thinking of the far cry it is from man to inorganic nature? When we get down to the lowest organism, is the gulf so impressive? Under the scrutiny of biologic science the gulf that separates the animal from the vegetable all but vanishes, and the two seem to run together. The chasm between the lowest vegetable forms and unorganized matter is evidently a slight affair. The state of unorganized protoplasm which Haeckel named the Monera, that precedes the development of that architect of life, the cell, can hardly be more than one remove from inert matter. By insensible molecular changes and transformations of energy, the miracle of living matter takes place. We can conceive of life arising only through these minute avenues, or in the invisible, molecular constitution of matter itself. What part the atoms and electrons, and the energy they bear, play in it we shall never know. Even if we ever succeed in bringing the elements together in our laboratories so that there living matter appears, shall we then know the secret of life?

After we have got the spark of life kindled, how are we going to get all the myriad forms of life that swarm upon the earth? How are we going to get man with physics and chemistry alone? How are we going to get this tremendous drama of evolution out of mere protoplasm from the bottom of the old geologic seas? Of course, only by making protoplasm creative, only by conceiving as potential in it all that we behold coming out of it. We imagine it equal to the task we set before it; the task is accomplished; therefore protoplasm was all-sufficient. I am not postulating any extra-mundane power or influence; I am only stating the difficulties which the idealist experiences when he tries to see life in its nature and origin as the scientific mind sees it. Animal life and vegetable life have a common physical basis in protoplasm, and all their different forms are mere aggregations of cells which are constituted alike and behave alike in each, and yet in the one case they give rise to trees, and in the other they give rise to man. Science is powerless to penetrate this mystery, and philosophy can only give its own elastic interpretation. Why consciousness should be born of cell structure in one form of life and not in another, who shall tell us? Why matter in the brain should think, and in the cabbage only grow, is a question.

The naturalist has not the slightest doubt that the mind of man was evolved from some order of animals below him that had less mind, and that the mind of this order was evolved from that of a still lower order, and so on down the scale till we reach a point where the animal and vegetable meet and blend, and the vegetable mind, if we may call it such, passed into the animal, and still downward till the vegetable is evolved from the mineral. If to believe this is to be a monist, then science is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis of the lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, and without any break of the causal sequence. There has been no miracle, except in the sense that all life is a miracle. Of how the organic rose out of the inorganic, we can form no mental image; the intellect cannot bridge the chasm; but that such is the fact, there can be no doubt. There is no solution except that life is latent or potential in matter, but these again are only words that cover a mystery.

I do not see why there may not be some force latent in matter that we may call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, as justifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter. The chemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force. There is no life without chemism, but there is chemism without life.

We have to have a name for the action and reaction of the primary elements upon one another and we call it chemical affinity; we have to have a name for their behavior in building up organic bodies, and we call it vitality or vitalism.

The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new form or kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in action all about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like a dispute about names. But my mind has to form a new conception of these forces to bridge the chasm between the organic and the inorganic; not a quantitative but a qualitative change is demanded, like the change in the animal mind to make it the human mind, an unfolding into a higher plane.

Whether the evolution of the human mind from the animal was by insensible gradations, or by a few sudden leaps, who knows? The animal brain began to increase in size in Tertiary times, and seems to have done so suddenly, but the geologic ages were so long that a change in one hundred thousand years would seem sudden. "The brains of some species increase one hundred per cent." The mammal brain greatly outstripped the reptile brain. Was Nature getting ready for man?

The air begins at once to act chemically upon the blood in the lungs of the newly born, and the gastric juices to act chemically upon the food as soon as there is any in the stomach of the newly born, and breathing and swallowing are both mechanical acts; but what is it that breathes and swallows, and profits by it? a machine?

Maybe the development of life, and its upward tendency toward higher and higher forms, is in some way the result of the ripening of the earth, its long steeping in the sea of sidereal influences. The earth is not alone, it is not like a single apple on a tree; there are many apples on the tree, and there are many trees in the orchard.

THE END

INDEX

Adaptation, 184, 215, 216.

Alpha rays, 60, 199.

Aquosity, 127, 128, 141-143.

Aristotle, 240.

Asphalt lake, 123.

Atoms, different groupings of, 56-60; weighed and counted, 60, 61; indivisibility, 61; the hydrogen atom, 65; chemical affinity, 193-195; photography of, 199, 200; form, 203; atomic energy, 204; qualities and properties of bodies in their keeping, 204; unchanging character, 205, 206; rarity of free atoms, 209; mystery of combination, 210.

Autolysis, 169.

Balfour, Arthur James, on Bergson's "Evolution Creatrice," 15.

Bees, the spirit of the hive, 82.

Benton, Joel, quoted, 70.

Bergson, Henri, 129, 173, 263; on light and the eye, 5; his view of life, 14-16, 27-29, 221, 237, 238; on the need of philosophy, 85, 86; on life on other planets, 87; his method, 109, 110; the key to his "Creative Evolution," 132; on life as a psychic principle, 162; his book as literature, 238.

Beta rays, 61, 199, 201.

Biogenesis, 25. See also Life.

Biophores, 217.

Body, the, elements of, 38, 39; the chemist in, 152, 153; intelligence of, 153, 154; a community of cells, 157, 158; viewed as a machine, 212-214, 224.