The Breath of Life Part 12

Science is the redeemer of the physical world. It opens our eyes to its true inwardness, and purges it of the coa.r.s.e and brutal qualities with which, in our practical lives, it is a.s.sociated. 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--ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sive 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. Ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.

VI

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 ma.s.s of incandescent matter rolling through s.p.a.ce; 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 G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 G.o.dlike, 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 pa.s.sions 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 ant.i.thetical 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 ent.i.ties, 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 c.u.mulative 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 emanc.i.p.ation from it. Our practical life upon this planet is more or less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coa.r.s.ely; 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tuent 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 a.n.a.logy 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 ma.s.s 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 trespa.s.ses 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 coordinates 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-a.n.a.lysis 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-G.o.ds go, the G.o.ds 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 G.o.d enchants," or we may speak of it, as Goethe did, as "the living garment of G.o.d"; 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.

IX

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 acc.u.mulation 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 a.s.sumes 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 trans.m.u.tation 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 G.o.d; the more familiar we are with the earth forces, the more intimate will be our acquaintance with the celestial forces.

X

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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tuted 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, pa.s.sed 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 quant.i.tative 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