Time and Change Part 11

In the tendency to variation--in form, size, disposition, power, fertility--man differs from all other animals. In the same race, in the same family, we find infinitely varied types. Among the wild creatures all the individuals of a species are practically alike. We can hardly tell one fox, or one marmot, or one chipmunk, or one crow, or one hawk, or one black duck from another of the same species. Of course there are slight individual differences, but they are hardly distinguishable. Among the insects, one bee, one beetle, one ant, one b.u.t.terfly seems the exact copy of every other individual of its kind. The law of variation seems practically annulled in the insect world.

It is the wide and free range of this law in the human species that has undoubtedly led to the great progress of the race. There has been no dead level--no democracy of talent--no equality of gifts, but only equality of opportunity. Men differ from one another in their mental endowments, capacities, and dispositions vastly more than do any other creatures upon the earth. This difference makes man's chances of progress so much the greater; he has so many more stakes in the game. If one type of talent fails, another type may win; if the lymphatic temperament is not a success, try the sanguine or the bilious; blue eyes and black eyes and brown eyes will win more triumphs than blue or black or brown alone. Arms or legs extra long, sight or hearing extra sharp, wit extra keen, judgment extra sure--all these things open doors to more progress. Variation gives natural selection a chance to take hold, and where the struggle for life is the most severe the changes will be the most rapid and the most radical. Without the pressure of the environment natural selection would not select. The tendency to physical variation in man is probably no greater than in other creatures, but his tendency to mental variation is enormous. He varies daily from mediocrity to genius, hence the enormous range of his chances of progress. From the first variation that started him on his way in his line of descent, variation must have been more and more active till he varied in the direction of reason, long before the dawn of history, since which time his progress has been by rapid strides--and more and more rapid till we see his leaps forward in recent times. The race owes its rapid progress to its exceptional men, its men of genius and power, and these have often been like sports or the sudden result of mutations--a man like Lincoln springing from the humblest parentage. No such extreme variations are seen in any of the lower orders. Indeed, in one's lifetime one sees but very slight variation in any of the wild or domestic creatures, less in the wild than in the domestic because they are less under the influence of that most variable of animals, man. And man's variations are mainly mental and not physical. The higher we go in the scale of powers, the greater the variation and hence the more rapid the evolution.

Probably man's body has not changed radically in vast cycles of time, but his mind has developed enormously since the dawn of history.

IV

Biologists are coming more and more to recognize some unknown factor in evolution, probably some unknowable factor. The four factors of Osborn--heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection--play upon and modify endlessly the new form when it is started, but what about the original start? Whence comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary send-off? What or who set the whole grand process going?

Bergson sees an internal psychological principle of development, hence the name of his book, "Creative Evolution." Osborn uses the word "directed." Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited to their purpose from the start; they do not have to be fitted to their place by natural selection. Huxley uses the word "predestined"--all the life of the globe and all the starry hosts of heaven are working out in boundless s.p.a.ce and in endless time "their predestined course of evolution." Darwin must have had in mind the same mysterious something when he said that man had risen to the very summit of the animal scale, but not through his own exertions.

Not by his own will or exertion, surely, any more than the embryo in its mother's womb develops into the full-grown child by its own exertion or than our temperaments and complexions and statures are matters of our own wills and choice. Something greater than man and before him, to which he sustains the relation that the unborn child sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought of his origin and development.

The great evolutionists have been very cautious about seeking to go behind evolution and name the Primal Cause. In such an attempt science would at once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley were reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated as men of science to put themselves in a position where no step could be taken.

Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic time into the dawn of history, and science gropes about like a man feeling his way in the dark or, at most, by the aid now and then of a dim flash of light, to trace the path he has come. He has surely arrived, and we are, I believe, safe in saying he has come by the way of the lower orders; but the precise forms through which he has come, the houses in which he has tarried by the way, and all the adventures and vicissitudes that befell him on the journey--can we ever hope to know these things? In any case, man has his antecedents; life has its antecedents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent cause, which again has its antecedent. We can thus traverse the chain of causation only to find it is an endless chain; the separate links we can examine, but the first link or the last we see, by the very nature of things, and the laws of our own minds, must forever elude us. Science cannot admit of a break in the chain of causation, cannot admit that miracles or the supernatural in the old sense, as external and arbitrary interference with the natural order, can play or ever have played any part in this universe. Yet science has to postulate a First Cause when it knows, or metaphysics knows for it, that with the Infinite there can be no first and no last, no beginning and no ending, only endless succession.

To science man is not a fallen creature, but a many times risen creature and all the good of the universe centres in him. The mind that pervades all nature and is active in plant and animal alike first comes to know itself and regard itself and achieve intellectual appreciation in man. While all nature below man is wise only to its own ends and goes its appointed way as void of self-consciousness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows, the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom and turns upon itself and upon the universe the power of objective thought; it alone achieves understanding.

In our studies of life and of the universe as soon as we begin to bridge chasms by an appeal to the miraculous, or to the extra-natural powers, we are traitors to the scientific spirit which we seek to serve. There are many things that science cannot explain.

Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate explanation of anything. It can do little more than tell us of the action, the interaction, and the reaction of things, but of the things themselves, their origin and ultimate nature, or the source of the laws that govern them, what does it or what can it know?

Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits the earth after countless generations of animals and plants, and the beneficent forces of wind and rain, air and sky, have in the course of millions of years prepared it for him. His body has been built for him through the lives and struggles of the countless beings who are in the line of his long descent; his mind is equally an acc.u.mulated inheritance of the mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and unthinking animals that went before him. In the forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriads of times to make ready the soil that nurses and sustains him to-day.

He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and saurians and mastodons that have roamed over the earth. Indeed, what is there or has there been in the universe that he is not indebted to? The remotest star that s.h.i.+nes has sent a ray that has entered into his life. All things are under his feet, and the keys of the heavens are in his hands.

V

One would fain arrive at some concrete belief or image of his line of descent in geologic time as he does in the historic period. But how hard it is to do so! Can we form any mental picture of the actual animal forms that the manward impulse has traveled through?

With all the light that palaeontology throws upon the animal life of the past, can we see where amid the revel of these bizarre forms our ancestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile in the slime of the jungle or in the waters of the Mesozoic world? What was he like or what akin to? What mark or sign was there upon him at that time of the future that was before him? Can we see him as a fish in the old Devonian seas or lakes? Was he a big fish or a little fish? The primitive fishes were mostly of the shark kind. Is there any connection between that fact and the human sharks of to-day? Much less can one picture to one's self what his ancestor was like in the age of the invertebrates, amid the trilobites, etc., of the earlier Palaeozoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than that, back to unicellular life and to original protoplasm, and finally back to fiery nebulous matter. What can we make of it all by way of concrete conception of what actually took place--of the visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms in whose safekeeping our heritage lay? Nothing. We are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths, and the darkness is so thick we can cut it.

We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure to ourselves the line of descent of any of the animal forms of to-day. How did they escape the world-wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Or did the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and never become bankrupt, no matter what special lines or forms failed?

The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene times and the anthropoid apes in the Miocene, probably five millions of years ago.

The form which may have been in our line of descent, the Dryopithecus, later appears to have become extinct. Did our fate hang upon the success of any of these forms? The monkeys and anthropoid apes appeared at the same time in different countries.

Nature seems to have been making preliminary studies of man in these various forms, but when and where she hit upon the form that she perfected in man, who knows?

The horse appears to have been evolved in North America, true cattle in Asia, elephants in Africa. Can we narrow their line of descent down to a single pair for each? Many forms allied to the horse appeared in Europe and Asia in Miocene times. We find monkeys in different parts of the world in the same geologic horizons; did they all have a common origin?

Life's apprentices.h.i.+p has been a long one. The earlier forms of vertebrate life were very large; later they became very small.

Nature seems to have experimented with bulk, as if she thought size would win in the race. Hence those huge uncouth forms among the reptiles and early mammals. The scheme did not work well; bulk was not the thing, after all. Most of the gigantic forms became extinct.

Then she tried smaller and more agile forms with larger brains--less flesh and more wit. On this line Nature continued to work till she produced her masterpiece in man--a rather feeble and nearly weaponless animal, but with an intangible armory of weapons and tools in his brain that enables him to put all creatures under his feet.

XII

THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST

I

Bergson, the new French philosopher, thinks we all had a narrow escape, back in geologic time, of having our eggs spoiled before they were hatched, or, rather, rendered incapable of hatching by too thick a sh.e.l.l. This was owing to the voracity of the early organisms. As they became more and more mobile, they began to take on thick armors and breastplates and sh.e.l.ls and calcareous skins to protect themselves from one another. This tendency resulted, he thinks, in the arrest of the entire animal world in its evolution toward higher and higher forms. These sh.e.l.ls and armors begat a kind of torpor and immobility which has continued down to our day with the echinoderms and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebrates escaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and I are here without imprisoning sh.e.l.ls on our backs; but how or why did we escape?

Bergson does not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance? Was there ever a time when the stream of life tended to harden and become fixed in its own forms like a stream of cooling lava, or has the innate plasticity of life been easily equal to its own ends? True, the clam remains a clam, and the starfish remains a starfish; some other forms have carried the evolutionary impulse forward till it flowered in man. Was this impulse ever really checked or endangered?

Was the golden secret ever intrusted to the keeping of any single form? and, had that form been cut off, would the earth have been still without its man? These are puzzling questions.

Thus, when we have come to look upon life and nature in the light of evolution, what vistas are opened to us where before were only blank walls! The geologic ages take on a new interest to us. We know that in some form we were even there. The systems of sedimentary rocks which the geologist portrays, piled one upon the other to a depth of fifty miles or more, seem like the stairway by which we have ascended, taking on some new and more developed form at each rise.

What we were at the first step in Cambrian times only the Lord knows, but whatever we were, we crept up or floated up to the next rise. In the Silurian seas we may have been a trilobite for aught we know; at any rate, we were the outcome of the life impulse that begat the trilobites, but our fate was not bound up with theirs, as their race came to an end in those early geologic ages, and our stem form did not. Whether or not we were a fish in the Devonian seas, there is little doubt that we had gills, because we have the gill slits yet in our early foetal life, and it is quite certain that in some way we owe our backbones to the fishes.

When the rocks that form my native Catskills were being laid down in the Devonian waters, I fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimming about somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and up I climbed across the sandstone steps, across the limestone, the conglomerate, the slate, up into Carboniferous times. The upper and nether millstones of the "millstone grit" did not crush me, neither did the floods and the convulsions of Carboniferous times that buried the vast vegetable growths that resulted in our coal measures engulf or destroy me. About that time probably, I emerged from the water and became an amphibian, and maybe got my five fingers and five toes on each side.

Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life at the end of Palaeozoic time cut off my line of descent. The monstrous reptiles of the succeeding or Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one of which was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the river's edge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do not seem to have endangered the golden thread by which our fate hung. Still "I mount and mount." The stairs by which I climb were rent by earthquakes and volcanoes, the strata were squeezed up and overturned and folded in the great mountain-chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Coast Range were born; the earth-throes must have been tremendous at times; yet I escaped it all. The huge and fearful mammals of the third or Tertiary period pa.s.sed me by unharmed. Eruptions and cataclysms, the sinking of the land, the inundations of the sea, world-wide deformations of the earth's crust, fire and ice and floods, monsters of the deep and dragons of the land and the air have beset my course from the first, and yet here I am, here we all are, and apparently none the worse for the appalling dangers we have pa.s.sed through.

Evolution thus makes the world over for us. It shows us in what a complex web of vital and far-reaching relations we stand. It gives us an outlook upon the past that is startling, and in some ways forbidding, yet one that ought to be stimulating and inspiring. If we look back with a shudder we should look forward with a thrill. If the past is terrible, the future is in the same degree cheering and inviting. If we came out of those lowly and groveling forms, to what heights of being may we not be carried by the impetus that brought us thus far? In fact, to what heights has it already carried us!

II

That the hazards of the past, to many forms of life, at least, have been real and no myth, is evident from the vast number of forms that have been cut off and become extinct; various causes, now hard to decipher, have worked together to the end, such as changed geographical conditions, changes of climate, affecting the food-supply, extreme specialization, like that of the sabre-toothed tiger whose petrified remains have been found in various parts of this continent, and who apparently was finally handicapped by his huge dental sabre. Probably many more species of animals have become extinct than have survived, but none of these could have been in the line of man's descent, else the human race would not have been here.

If the Eocene progenitor of the horse, the little four-toed eohippus, had been cut off, would not the world have been horseless to-day? The horse in America became extinct, from some cause only conjectural, many tens of thousands of years ago. Had the same fate befallen the horse in Europe and Asia, it seems probable that our civilization would have been far less advanced to-day than it is.

The fate of every species of mammal in our time seems to have been in the keeping of a single form in early Tertiary times. The end of the Cretaceous or chalk period saw the extinction of the giant reptiles both of sea and of land, at the same time that it saw the appearance of a great many species of small and inconspicuous mammals, among which doubtless were our own humble forebears.

Extreme specialization in any direction may narrow an animal's chances of survival; they have but one chance in the game of life, whereas an animal with a more generalized organization has many chances. Man is one of the most generalized of animals; no special tools, no special weapons--his hand many tools and weapons in one.

Hence he is the most adaptable of animals; all climes, all foods, all places are his; he is master of the land, of the sea, of the air.

Animal life is often curiously interdependent. I asked our guide in the Adirondacks if there were any ravens there. "Not nearly as many as there used to be," he said, and his explanation of their disappearance seems thoroughly scientific; it was that the wolves and the panthers kept them in meat, and now that these animals had disappeared, the ravens had little to feed upon. If the moose were compelled to graze from off the ground, like a sheep or a cow, the species would probably soon become extinct. Osborn thinks it probable that the huge beast called t.i.tanothere finally became extinct early in Tertiary times owing to the form of its teeth, which were of such a type that they could not change to meet a change in the flora upon which the creature fed. Of course we shall never know what narrow escapes our race had from extinction in the remote past; some forms have ended in a blind alley, like the sea-urchin and the oyster. Arthropoda have continued to evolve and have reached their high-water mark of intelligence in bees and ants. The vertebrates went forward and have culminated in man.

Bergson thinks that in the vertebrates intelligence has been developed at the expense of instinct, and that in the invertebrates instinct has been perfected at the expense of intelligence.

Are we not compelled to adopt what is called the monophyletic hypothesis, that is, that our line of descent started from one pair, male and female, somewhere in the vast stretch of geologic or biologic time, and to reason that, had that pair been out of the race, we should not have appeared?

Can we narrow life to a single point, a single cell, in the past?