Part 17

Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its methods are a kind of Schrecklichkeit in the animal world. It is the incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.

X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE

We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk, irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object with as little waste and delay as possible.

Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.

Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are necessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness of eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.

Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?

Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He wants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better quality or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She pits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tails you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.

XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE

We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling up and pulling down--aggregating and accumulating, and separating and disintegrating.

It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Cañon and in the Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of them in the Grand Cañon! It looks as though titanic architects and sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the material it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one end of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new series of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Cañons may be carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of the mountains are only ordinary workmen.

RUMINATIONS

I. MAN A PART OF NATURE

This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.

It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own purposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--are still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the hammer because he greatly outweighs it.

II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH

Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of the body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus, magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed. Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds of our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists after he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?

We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character, personality, mentality--do not these escape your analysis? and are they not also real?

III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE

Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him his susceptibility to beauty.

It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor, and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it. We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.

The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.

All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.

The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to reach one's hands for the moon.

IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES

The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are, in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.

The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth inspires them.

V. THE COSMIC HARMONY

The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man produces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that will give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends; and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough, would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are the exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolution reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the orderly development of life.