Accepting the universe

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Accepting The Universe

[Illustration: (Frontispiece; the author)]

Accepting The Universe

_Essays In Naturalism_

By

John Burroughs

[Illustration: (colophon)]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge

Copyright, 1920, By John Burroughs

All Rights Reserved

..._And heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door wherein I went._ THE RUBÁIYÁT

Preface

A wheel may have many spokes, but can have but one hub. So I may say of this volume of mine that there are many themes and chapter-headings, but there is but one central thought into which they all converge, and that is that the universe is good, and that it is our rare good fortune to form a part of it. As this collection of essays does not aim to be a systematic treatise on any one theme, but rather a series of sallies, excursions, into the world of semi-philosophical speculation, there is inevitably much repetition; there may even be some contradiction. But I have concluded to let them stand, as I find myself an interested spectator of the workings of my own mind when, in following different roads, it arrives at the same truth. As all roads lead to Rome, so in the realm in which my mind works in this volume, all roads lead to the conclusion that this is the best possible world, and these people in it are the best possible people.

The heart of Nature is sound. I feel toward the great Mother somewhat as a man does who takes out a policy in an insurance company: he believes the company is solvent and will meet its obligations. I look upon the universe as solvent and worthy of trust. In other words this is a book of radical optimism. It might be described as an attempt to justify the ways of God to man on natural grounds.

My reader need hardly be told that theological grounds do not count with me. I want nothing less than a faith founded upon a rock, faith in the constitution of things. The various man-made creeds are fictitious, like the constellations--Orion, Cassiopeia’s Chair, the Big Dipper; the only thing real in them is the stars, and the only thing real in the creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the Infinite. This abides, though creeds and dogmas change or vanish.

Empedocles says:

“O, wretched he whose care Is shadowy speculation on the gods.”

But is not speculation better than indifference? Curiosity about the gods may lead to a better acquaintance with them. I feel that each of these chapters might be called an altar to the Unknown God.

John Burroughs

Contents

I. Shall We Accept The Universe? 3

II. Manifold Nature 19

III. Each For Its Own Sake 30

IV. The Universal Beneficence 54

V. The Good Devils 73

VI. The Natural Providence 90

VII. The Faith Of A Naturalist 112

VIII. A Fallacy Made In Germany 134

IX. The Price Of Development 138

X. Tooth And Claw 158

XI. Men And Trees 173

XII. The Problem Of Evil 193

XIII. Horizon Lines:

I. The Origin Of Life 203

II. The Living And Non-Living Worlds 205

III. The Organizing Tendency 207

IV. Science And Mysticism 211

V. Is There Design In Nature? 219

VI. Our Impartial Mother 225

VII. Baffling Truths 226

VIII. Sense Contradictions 230

IX. Man A Part Of Nature 233

X. The Fittest To Survive 237

XI. The Power Of Choice 238

XII. Illusions 239

XIII. Is Nature Suicidal? 242

XIV. The Persistence Of Energy 245

XIV. Soundings:

I. The Great Mystery 253

II. The Natural Order 257

III. Logic And Religious Beliefs 261

IV. A Chip From The Old Block 265

V. A Personal God 266

VI. The Eternal 270

VII. An Impartial Deity 275

VIII. Finite And Infinite 278

IX. The Insoluble 280

X. Paying The Debt 282

XI. Death 288

XII. Heaven And Earth 293

XIII. Thinking And Acting 296

XIV. The Tide Of Life 304

XV. Faith Founded Upon A Rock 309

XV. The Poet Of The Cosmos 316

_The frontispiece, showing Mr. Burroughs at his woodpile at Riverby, is from a photograph taken in 1920 by_ Mr. HERBERT S. ARDELL

Accepting The Universe

I

Shall We Accept The Universe?

I

It is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the universe. “Gad, she’d better!” retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: “A sad spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be na inhabited, what a waste of space!”

It ought not to be a hard thing to accept the universe, since it appears to be a fixture, and we have no choice in the matter; but I have found it worth while to look the gift in the mouth, and convince myself that it is really worth accepting. It were a pity to go through life with a suspicion in one’s mind that it might have been a better universe, and that some wrong has been done us because we have no freedom of choice in the matter. The thought would add a tinge of bitterness to all our days. And so, after living more than four score years in the world, and pondering long and intently upon the many problems which life and nature present, I have come, like Margaret Fuller, to accept the universe, have come frankly to accept that first verdict pronounced upon creation, namely, that it is very good--good in its sum total up to this astronomic date, whatever phases it may at times present that lead us to a contrary conclusion.

Not that cold and hunger, war and pestilence, tornadoes and earthquakes, are good in a positive sense, but that these and kindred things are vastly overbalanced by the forces and agencies that make for our well-being,--that “work together for good,”--the sunshine, the cooling breezes, the fertile soil, the stability of land and sea, the gentle currents, the equipoise of the forces of the earth, air, and water, the order and security of our solar system, and, in the human realm, the good-will and fellowship that are finally bound to prevail among men and nations.

In remote geologic ages, before the advent of man, when the earth’s crust was less stable, when the air was yet loaded with poisonous gases, when terrible and monstrous animal forms held high carnival in the sea and upon the land, it was not in the same sense good--good for beings constructed as we are now. In future astronomic time, when the earth’s air and water and warmth shall have disappeared--a time which science predicts--and all life upon the globe fails, again it will not be good. But in our geologic, biologic, and astronomic age, notwithstanding the fact that cold and suffering, war and pestilence, cyclones and earthquakes, still occur upon the relatively tiny ball that carries us through the vast sidereal spaces, good is greatly in the ascendancy. The voyage is not all calm and sunshine, but it is safe, and the dangers from collision and shipwreck are very remote. It is a vast and lonely sea over which we are journeying, no other ships hail us and bid us Godspeed, no messages, wireless or other, may reach us from other shores, or other seas; forces and influences do play upon us from all parts of the empyrean, but, so far as we are aware, no living thing on other spheres takes note of our going or our coming.

In our practical lives we are compelled to separate good from evil--the one being that which favors our well-being, and the other that which antagonizes it; but, viewed as a whole, the universe is all good; it is an infinite complex of compensations out of which worlds and systems of worlds, and all which they hold, have emerged, and are emerging, and will emerge. This is not the language of the heart or of the emotions--our anthropomorphism cries out against it--but it is the language of serene, impartial reason. It is good for us occasionally to get outside the sphere of our personal life and view things as they are in and of themselves. A great demand is made upon our faith--faith in the absolute trustworthiness of human reason, and in the final beneficence of the forces that rule this universe. Not to solve the mysteries, but to see that they are insoluble, and to rest content in that conclusion, is the task we set ourselves here.

Evidently the tide of life is still at the flood on this planet; its checks and counter-currents arise inevitably in a universe whose forces are always, and always must be, in unstable equilibrium.

The love of the Eternal for mankind, and for all other forms of life, is not a parental love--not the love of the mother for her child, or of the father for his son; it is more like the love which a general has for his army; he is to lead that army through hardships, through struggles, through sufferings, and through death, but he is leading it to victory. Many will perish that others may live; the battle is being won daily. Evolution has triumphed. It has been a long and desperate battle, but here we are and we find life sweet. The antagonistic forces which have been overcome have become sources of power. The vast army of living forms moving down the geologic ages has been made strong through the trials and obstacles it has surmounted, till now we behold it in the fullness of its power with man at its head.

II

There is a paragraph in Emerson’s Journal on Providence, written when he was twenty-one, which is as broad and as wise and as heterodox as anything he ever wrote. The Providence he depicts is the Providence I see in Nature:

“Providence supports, but does not spoil its children. We are called sons, not darlings, of the Deity. There is ever good in store for those who love it; knowledge for those who seek it; and if we do evil, we suffer the consequences of evil. Throughout the administration of the world there is the same aspect of stern kindness; of good against your will; good against your good; ten thousand channels of active beneficence, but all flowing with the same regard to general, not particular profit.... And to such an extent is this great statute policy of God carried, that many, nay, most, of the great blessings of humanity require cycles of a thousand years to bring them to their height.”

A remarkable statement to be made in 1824, in New England, and by a fledgling preacher of the orthodox faith and the descendant of a long line of orthodox clergymen. It is as broad and as impartial as science, and yet makes a strong imaginative appeal. Good at the heart of Nature is the purport of it, not the patent-right good of the creeds, but good, free to all who love it, a “stern kindness,” and no partial, personal, vacillating Providence whose ear is open only to the password of some sect or cult, or organization--“good against your good,” your copyrighted good, your personal, selfish good (unless it is in line with equal good to others), the broad, universal beneficence of Nature which brought us here and keeps us here, and showers its good upon us as long as we keep in right relations with it; but which goes its appointed way regardless of the sore needs of warring nations or the desperate straits of struggling men. That is the Providence that lasts, that does not change its mind, that is not indulgent, that does not take sides, that is without variableness or shadow of turning. Suppose the law of gravity were changeable, or the law of chemical reactions, or the nature of fire, or air, or water, or cohesion? Gravity never sleeps nor varies, yet see bodies rise, see others fall, see the strong master of the weak, see the waters flow and the ground stay. The laws of fluids are fixed, but see the variety of their behavior, the forms in which they crystallize, their solvent power, their stability or instability, their capacity to absorb or conduct heat--flux and change everywhere amid fixity and law. Nature is infinitely variable, which opens the door to all forms of life; her goings and comings are on such a large scale, like the rains, the dews, the sunlight, that all creatures get an equal benefit. She sows her seed with such a generous hand that enough of them are bound to fall upon fertile places. Such as are very limited in range, like those of the swamp plants, are yet cast forth upon the wind so liberally that sooner or later some of them fall upon conditions suitable to them. Nature will cover a whole township with her wind-sown seeds in order to be sure that she hits the small swamp in one corner of it.

A stream of energy, not described by the adjective “inexhaustible,” bears the universe along, and all forms of life, man with the rest, take their chances amid its currents and its maelstroms. The good Providence shows itself in the power of adaptation which all forms of life possess. Some forms of sea-weed or sea-grass grow where the waves pound the shore incessantly. How many frail marine creatures are wrecked upon the shore, but how many more are not wrecked! How many ships go down in the sea, but how many more are wafted safely over it!

The Providence in Nature seems intent only on playing the game, irrespective of the stakes, which to us seem so important. Whatever the issue, Nature is the winner. She cannot lose. Her beneficence is wholesale. Her myriad forms of life are constantly passing through “the curtain of fire” of her inorganic forces, and the casualties are great, but the majority get through. The assault goes on and will ever go on. It is like a stream of water that is whole and individual at every point, but fixed and stable at no point. To play the game, to keep the currents going--from the depths of sidereal space to the shallow pool by the roadside; from the rise and fall of nations, to the brief hour of the minute summer insects, the one overarching purpose seems to be to give free rein to life, to play one form against another, to build up and tear down, to gather together and to scatter--no rest, no end, nothing final--rocks decaying to build more rocks, worlds destroyed to build more worlds, nations disintegrating to build more nations, organisms perishing to feed more organisms, life playing into the hands of death everywhere, and death playing into the hands of life, sea and land interchanging, tropic and arctic meeting and mingling, day and night, winter and summer chasing each other over the earth--what a spectacle of change, what a drama never completed! Vast worlds and systems in fiery flux; one little corner of the cosmos teeming with life, vast areas of it, like Saturn and Jupiter, dead and barren through untold millions of years; collisions and disruptions in the heavens, tornadoes and earthquakes and wars and pestilence upon the earth--surely it all sounds worse than it is, for we are all here to see and contemplate the great spectacle; it sounds worse than it is to us because we are a part of the outcome of all these raging and conflicting forces. Whatever has failed, we have succeeded, and the beneficent forces are still coming our way. As I write these lines I see my neighbor and his boys gathering the hay from the meadows and building it into a great stack beside their glutted barns. I see a chipmunk carrying stores to his den, I see butterflies dancing by on painted wings, I see and hear the happy birds, and the August sun beams his best upon all the land.

The greatest of human achievements and the most precious is that of the great creative artist. In words, in color, in sounds, in forms, man comes nearest to emulating the Creative Energy itself. It seems as if the pleasure and the purpose of the Creative Energy were endless invention--to strike out new forms, to vary perpetually the pattern. She presents myriads of forms, myriads of types, inexhaustible variety in air, earth, water, ten thousand ways to achieve the same end, a prodigality of means that bewilders the mind; her aim to produce something new and different, an endless variety of forms that fly, that swim, that creep, in the sea, in the air, on the earth, in the fields, in the woods, on the shore. How many ways Nature has of scattering her seeds, how many types of wings, of hooks, of springs! In some she offers a wage to bird or quadruped in the shape of fruit, others she forcibly attaches to the passer-by. In all times and places there is a riot of invention.

III

Are we not men enough to face things as they are? Must we be cosseted a little? Can we not be weaned from the old theological pap? Can we not rest content in the general beneficence of Nature’s Providence? Must you and I have a special hold upon the great Mother’s apron strings?

I see the Nature Providence going its impartial way. I see drought and flood, heat and cold, war and pestilence, defeat and death, besetting man at all times, in all lands. I see hostile germs in the air he breathes, in the water he drinks, in the soil he tills. I see the elemental forces as indifferent toward him as toward ants and fleas. I see pain and disease and defeat and failure dogging his footsteps. I see the righteous defeated and the ungodly triumphant--this and much more I see; and yet I behold through the immense biological vista behind us the race of man slowly--oh, so slowly!--emerging from its brute or semi-human ancestry into the full estate of man, from blind instinct and savage passion into the light of reason and moral consciousness. I behold the great scheme of evolution unfolding despite all the delays and waste and failures, and the higher forms appearing upon the scene. I see on an immense scale, and as clearly as in a demonstration in a laboratory, that good comes out of evil; that the impartiality of the Nature Providence is best; that we are made strong by what we overcome; that man is man because he is as free to do evil as to do good; that life is as free to develop hostile forms as to develop friendly; that power waits upon him who earns it; that disease, wars, the unloosened, devastating elemental forces, have each and all played their part in developing and hardening man and giving him the heroic fiber. The good would have no tang, no edge, no cutting quality without evil to oppose it. Life would be tasteless or insipid, without pain and struggle and disappointment. Behold what the fiery furnace does for the metals--welding or blending or separating or purifying them, and behold the hell of contending and destructive forces out of which the earth came, and again behold the grinding and eroding forces, the storms and earthquakes and eruptions and disintegrations that have made it the green inhabitable world that now sustains us! No, the universal processes do not need disinfecting; the laws of the winds, the rains, the sunlight do not need rectifying. “I do not want the constellations any nearer,” says Whitman. I do not want the natural Providence any more attentive. The celestial laws are here underfoot and our treading upon them does not obliterate or vulgarize them. Chemistry is incorruptible and immortal, it is the handmaid of God; the yeast works in the elements of our bread of life while we sleep; the stars send their influences, the earth renews itself, the brooding heaven gathers us under its wings, and all is well with us if we have the heroic hearts to see it.

In the curve of the moon’s or of the planets’ disks, all broken or irregular lines of the surface are lost to the eye--the wholeness of the sphere form subordinates and obliterates them all: so all the failures and cross-purposes and disharmonies in nature and life do not suffice to break or mar the vast general beneficence; the flowing universal good is obvious above all.

So long as we think of the Eternal in terms of our experience--of the knowledge of concrete things and beings which life discloses to us--we are involved in contradictions. The ancients visualized their gods and goddesses--Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Juno, and all the others. Shall we do this for the Eternal and endow it with personality? Into what absurdities this leads us! The unspeakable, the unseeable, the unthinkable, the inscrutable, and yet the most obvious fact that life yields to us! Nearer and more vital than our own bodies, than our own parents, and yet eluding our grasp; vehemently denied, passionately accepted, scoffed, praised, feared, worshiped, giving rise to deism, atheism, pantheism, to idolatry, to persecution, to martyrdom, the great Reality in which we live and move and have our being, and yet for that very reason, because it is a part of us, or rather we are a part of it, are we unable to define it or seize it as a reality apart from ourselves. Our denial proves it; just as we use gravity to overcome gravity, so we use God to deny God. Just as pure light is of no color, but split up makes all the colors that we see, so God divided and reflected makes all the half-gods we worship in life. Green and blue and red and orange are not in the objects that reflect them, but are an experience of the eye. We might with our tongues deny the air, but our spoken words prove it. We cannot lift ourselves over the fence by our own waistbands; no more can we by searching find God, because He is not an object that has place and form and limitations. He is the fact of the fact, the life of the life, the soul of the soul, the incomprehensible, the sum of all contradictions, the unit of all diversity; he who knows Him, knows Him not; he who is without Him, is full of Him; turn your back upon Him, then turn your back upon gravity, upon air, upon light. He cannot be seen, but by Him all seeing comes. He cannot be heard, yet by Him all hearing comes. He is not a being, yet apart from Him there is no being--there is no apart from Him. We contradict ourselves when we deny Him; it is ourselves we deny, and equally do we contradict ourselves when we accept Him; it is something apart from ourselves which we accept.

When half-gods go, says Emerson, the gods arrive. But half-gods never go; we can house and entertain no other. What can we do with the Infinite, the Eternal? We can only deal with things in time and space--things that can be numbered and measured. What can we do with the infinitely little, the infinitely great? All our gods are half-gods made in our own image. No surer does the wax take the imprint of the seal than does the Infinite take the imprint of our finite minds. We create a Creator, we rule a Ruler, we invent a heaven and hell; they are laws of our own being, seen externally.

How, then, shall we adjust our lives to the conception of a universal, non-human, non-finite, algebraic God? They adjust themselves. Do your work, deal justly, love rightness, make the most of yourself, cherish the good, the beautiful, the true, practice the Christian and the heathen virtues of soberness, meekness, reverence, charity, unselfishness, justice, mercy, singleness of purpose; obey the commandments, the Golden Rule, imbue your spirit with the wisdom of all ages, for thus is the moral order of the world upheld.

The moral order and the intellectual order go hand in hand. Upon one rests our relation to our fellows, upon the other rests our relation to the cosmos.

We must know, and we must love; we must do, and we must enjoy; we must warm judgment with feeling, and illume conscience with reason.

Admit, if we must, that we are in the grip of a merciless power, that outside of our own kind there is nothing that shows us mercy or consideration, that the Nature of which we form a part goes her own way regardless of us; yet let us keep in mind that the very fact that we are here and find life good is proof that the mercilessness of Nature has not been inconsistent with our permanent well-being. The fact that flowers bloom and fruit and grains ripen, that the sun shines, that the rain falls, that food nourishes us, that love warms us, that evolution has brought us thus far on our way, that our line of descent has survived all the hazards of the geologic ages, all point to the fact that we are on the winning side, that our well-being is secured in the constitution of things. For all the cataclysms and disruptions, the globe has ripened on the great sidereal tree, and has become the fit abode of its myriad forms of life. Though we may be run down and crushed by the great terrestrial forces about us, just as we may be run down and crushed in the street, yet these forces play a part in the activities that sustain us; without them we should not be here to suffer at their hands.

Our life depends from moment to moment upon the air we breathe, yet its winds and tempests may destroy us; it depends from day to day upon the water we drink, yet its floods may sweep us away. We walk and climb and work and move mountains by gravity, and yet gravity may break every bone in our bodies. We spread our sails to the winds and they become our faithful servitors, yet the winds may drive us into the jaws of the breakers. How are our lives bound up and identified with the merciless forces that surround us! Out of the heart of fate comes our freedom; out of the reign of death comes our life; out of the sea of impersonal energy come our personalities; out of the rocks comes the soil that sustains us; out of the fiery nebulæ came the earth with its apple-blossoms and its murmuring streams; out of the earth came man. If the cosmic forces were not merciless, if they did not go their own way, if they made exceptions for you and me, if in them there _were_ variableness and even a shadow of turning, the vast inevitable beneficence of Nature would vanish, and the caprice and uncertainty of man take its place. If the sun were to stand still for Joshua to conquer his enemies, there would be no further need for it to resume its journey. What I am trying to get rid of is the pitying and meddling Providence which our feeble faith and half-knowledge have enthroned above us. We need stronger meat than the old theology affords us. We need to contemplate the ways of a Providence that has not been subsidized; we need encouragement in our attitude of heroic courage and faith toward an impersonal universe; we need to have our petty anthropomorphic views of things shaken up and hung out in the wind to air. The universe is not a schoolroom on the Montessori lines, nor a benevolent institution run on the most modern improved plan. It is a work-a-day field where we learn from hard knocks, and where the harvest, not too sure, waits upon our own right arm.

II

Manifold Nature

Few persons, I fancy, ever spend much time in thinking seriously of this vast, ever-present reality which we call Nature; what our true relations to it are, what its relations are to what we call God, or what God’s relations are to it; whether God and Nature are two or one--God and Nature, or only Nature, or only God.

When we identify Nature with God we are at once in sore straits because Nature has a terrible side to her, but the moment we separate God from Nature we are still more embarrassed. We create a hiatus which we must find something to fill. We must invent a Devil upon whom to saddle the evil that everywhere dogs the footsteps of the good. So we have both a God and a Devil, or two gods, on our hands contending with each other. Even our good friends in the churches talk glibly of the God of Nature, or Nature’s God, little heeding the terrible black depths that lie under their words.

The Nature that the poets sing and that nature-writers exploit is far from being the whole story. When we think of Nature as meaning only birds and flowers and summer breezes and murmuring streams, we have only touched the hem of her garment--a garment that clothes the whole world with the terrific and the destructive, as well as with the beautiful and the beneficent. Yet her fairer forms and gentler influences are undoubtedly the expression of those forces and conditions that go hand in hand with the things that make for our development and well-being.

Probably not till flowers bloomed and birds sang was the earth ripe for man. Not till the bow appeared on the retreating storm-cloud was anything like human life possible. Of savage, elemental Nature, black in tempest and earthquake, hideous in war and pestilence, our poets and nature-students make little, while devout souls seem to experience a cosmic chill when they think of these things.

The majority of persons, I fancy, when they consider seriously the problem, look upon Nature as a sort of connecting link between man and some higher power, neither wholly good nor wholly bad; divine in some aspects, diabolical in others; ministering to our bodies, but hampering and obstructing our souls. They see her a goddess one hour, and a fury the next; destroying life as freely as she gives it; arming one form to devour another; crushing or destroying the fairest as soon as the ugliest; limited in her scope and powers, and not complete in herself, but demanding the existence of something above and beyond herself.

Under the influence of Christianity man has taken himself out of the category of natural things, both in his origin and in his destiny. Such a gulf separates him from all other creatures, and his mastery over them is so complete that he looks upon himself as exceptional, and as belonging to another order. Nature is only his stepmother, and treats him with the harshness and indifference that often characterize that relation.

When Wordsworth declared himself a worshiper of Nature, was he thinking of Nature as a whole, or only of an abridged and expurgated Nature--Nature in her milder and more beneficent aspects? Was it not the Westmoreland Nature of which he was a worshiper?--a sweet rural Nature, with grassy fells and murmuring streams and bird-haunted solitudes? What would have been his emotion in the desert, in the arctic snows, or in the pestilential forests and jungles of the tropics? Very likely, just what the emotion of most of us would be--a feeling that here are the savage and forbidding and hostile aspects of Nature against which we need to be on our guard. That creative eye and ear to which Wordsworth refers is what mainly distinguishes the attitude of the modern poet toward Nature from the ancient. Sympathy is always creative--“thanks to the human heart by which we live.”

The Wordsworthian Nature was of the subjective order; he found it in his own heart, in his dreams by his own fireside, in moments of soul dilation on his Westmoreland hills, when the meanest flowers that blow could bring to him “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

The Nature that to Wordsworth never betrays us, and to Milton was “wise and frugal,” is a humanized, man-made Nature. The Nature we know and wrest our living from, and try to drive sharp bargains with, is of quite a different order. It is no more constant than inconstant, no more wise and frugal than foolish and dissipated; it is not human at all, but unhuman.

When we infuse into it our own idealism, or recreate it in our own image, then we have the Nature of the poets, the Nature that consciously ministers to us and makes the world beautiful for our sake.

When in his first book, “Nature,” Emerson says that the aspect of Nature is devout, like the figure of Jesus when he stands with bended head and hands folded upon the breast, we see what a subjective and humanized Nature, a Nature of his own creation, he is considering. His book is not an interpretation of Nature, but an interpretation of his own soul. It is not Nature which stands in an attitude of devotion with bowed head, but Emerson’s own spirit in the presence of Nature, or of what he reads into Nature. Yet the Emerson soul is a part of Nature--a peculiar manifestation of its qualities and possibilities, developed through centuries of the interaction of man upon man, through culture, books, religion, meditation.

“The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at Nature,” he says, “is in our own eye.” Is it not equally true that the harmony and perfection that we see are in our own eye also? In fact, are not all the qualities and attributes which we ascribe to Nature equally the creation of our own minds? The beauty, the sublimity, the power of Nature are experiences of the beholder. The drudge in the fields does not experience them, but the poet, the thinker, the seer, does. Nature becomes very real to us when we come to deal with her practically, when we seek her for specific ends, when we go to her to get our living. But when we go to her in the spirit of disinterested science, the desert, the volcano, the path of the cyclone, are full of the same old meanings, the playground of the same old elements and forces. Nature is what we make her. In his Journal Emerson for a moment sees Nature as she is: “Nature is a swamp, on whose purlieus we see prismatic dew-drops, but her interiors are terrific.”

Man is the only creature that turns upon Nature and judges her; he turns upon his own body and mind and judges them; he judges the work of his own hands; he is critical toward all things that surround him; he brings this faculty of judgment into the world.

Emerson refers to “the great Nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere.” The earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere in the same sense that it lies in the soft arms of its own grasses and flowers; the atmosphere is an appendage of the earth. If the earth literally lies in anything, it is in the soft arms of the all-pervasive ether. Emerson’s statement is the inevitable poetizing of Nature in which we all indulge. We make soft arms for our thoughts to lie in, and peaceful paths for our feet to walk in, whatever the literal truth may be. This is the way of art, of poetry, of religion. The way of science and of practical life is a different way. The soft arms become hard with purpose, and rest and contemplation give place to intense activity. I would not have the poet change his way; Nature as reflected in his mind soothes and charms us; it takes on hues from that light which never was on sea or land. But we cannot dispense with the way of science, which makes paths and highways for us through the wilderness of impersonal laws and forces that surge and roar around us. One gives us beauty and one gives us power; one brings a weapon to the hand, the other brings solace to the spirit.

When Bryant identifies God with tempests and thunderbolts, with “whirlwinds that uproot the woods and drown the villages,” or with the tidal wave that overwhelms the cities, “with the wrath of the mad, unchained elements”--“tremendous tokens of thy power”--does he make God more lovable or desirable? Well may he say, “From these sterner aspects of thy face, spare me and mine.” By way of contrast let me recall that when an earthquake shook California, John Muir cheered himself and friends by saying it was only Mother Earth trotting her children fondly upon her knee! If we identify God with all of Nature, this wrathful Hebrew Jehovah of Bryant is a legitimate conception. There are times when the aerial forces behave like a raving maniac bent upon the destruction of the world--the insensate powers run amuck upon all living things. This is not the God we habitually love and worship, but it is a God from whom there is no escape. As the result of the inevitable action of the natural irrational or unrational forces, tempests and earthquakes and tidal waves do not disturb us; but as the will and purpose of an Almighty Being, Creator of heaven and earth, they give all pious souls a fearful shake-up. We take refuge in such phrases as “the inscrutable ways of God,” or “the mysteries of Providence,” a Providence whose ways are assuredly “past finding out.”

Our State Commissioner of Education, Dr. Finley, in an agricultural address on “Potatoes and Boys,” showed God coöperating with the farmer in a way that amused me. “The Almighty,” the Commissioner said, “can make, unaided of man, potatoes, but only small potatoes, and of acrid taste. He had to make a primitive man and even teach him to use a hoe, before He, the Omnipotent One, could grow a patch of potatoes.” The wild potato, he implied, like the wild grape, the wild apple, the wild melon, was the work of God before he had man to help him; now, with man’s help, we have all the improved varieties of potatoes and fruits. We have heard a good deal about the coöperation of man with God, and as a concrete example this potato-growing partnership is very interesting. How far from our habitual attitude of mind is the thought that the Higher Powers concern themselves about our potatoes or our turnips or our pumpkin crop, or have any part or lot in it! Emerson in his Journal expresses another view: “One would think that God made fig-trees and dates, grapes and olives, but the Devil made Baldwin apples and pound pears, cherries and whortle berries, Indian corn and Irish potatoes.”

Sir Thomas Browne called Nature the art of God. Viewed in this light we get a new conception of Nature, the artistic conception. We do not ask: Is it good or bad, for us or against us? we are intent on its symbolical or ideal character. Through it God expresses himself as the artist does, be he painter, poet, or musician, through his work, blending the various elements--the light and shade, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative--into a vital, harmonious whole. Creation becomes a picture, or a drama, or a symphony, in which all life plays its part, in which all scenes and conditions, all elemental processes and displays, play their part and unite to make a vast artistic whole. The contradictions in life, the high lights, the deep shadows, the imperfections, the neutral spaces, are but the devices of the artist to enhance the total effect of his work. In ethics and religion we ask of a thing: “Is it good?” In philosophy: “Is it true?” In science: “Is it a fact, and verifiable?” But in art we ask: “Is it beautiful?” or “Is it a real creation?” “Is it one with the vital and flowing currents of the world?”

The artist alone is the creator among men; he is disinterested; he has no purpose but to rival Nature; he subordinates the parts to the whole; he illustrates the divine law of indirections. The bald, literal truth is not for him, but the illusive, the suggestive, the ideal truth. He does not ask what life or Nature are for, or are they good or bad, but he interprets them in terms of the relation of their parts, he reads them in the light of his own soul. He knows there is no picture without shadows, no music without discords, no growth without decay. The artist has “no axe to grind”; to him all is right with the world, however out of joint it may be in our self-seeking lives. Art is synthetic, and puts a soul under the ribs of Death. Science is a straight line, but Art is symbolized by the curve.

To regard Nature, therefore, as the art of God, is to see it complete in itself; all the disharmonies vanish, all our perplexing problems are solved. The earth and the heavens are not for our private good alone, but for all other things. Opposites are blended. Good and bad are relative; heaven and hell are light and shade in the same picture. Our happiness or our misery are secondary; they are the pigments on the painter’s palette. The beauty of Nature is its harmony with our constitution; its terror emphasizes our weakness.

Where does the great artist get his laws of art but from his insight into the spirit and method of Nature? They are reflected in his own heart; the act of creation repeats itself in his own handiwork. The true artist has no secondary aims--not to teach or to preach, nor to praise nor condemn; but to portray, and to show us, through the particular, the road to the universal.

Eckermann reports Goethe as saying to him that “Nature’s intentions are always good”; but if questioned, Goethe would hardly have maintained that the clouds, the winds, the streams, the tides, gravity, cohesion, and so on, have intentions of any sort, much less intentions directed to us or away from us. Even the wisest among us thus make man the aim and object of Nature. We impose our own psychology upon the very rock and trees.

Goethe always read into Nature his own human traits; always when he speaks of her he speaks as an artist and poet. He says to Eckermann that Nature “is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man who is incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to the apt, the pure, the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets. The understanding will not reach her; man must be capable of elevating himself to the highest Reason to come into that contact with the Divinity which manifests in the primitive phenomena which dwell behind them and from which they proceed. The divinity works in the living, not in the dead; in the becoming and changing, not in the become and the fixed. Therefore, reason, with its tendency toward the divine, has only to do with the becoming, the living; but understanding has to do with the become, the already fixed, that it may make use of it.” In this last we see the germ of Bergson’s philosophy. The divinity that dwells behind phenomena, and from which they proceed, is the attempt of the human mind to find the end of that which has no end, the law of causation.

III

Each For Its Own Sake

“Proud man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’ ‘See all for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.”

And the pampered goose was right: all things are just as much for her use as for man’s, while there are reasonable doubts whether things were created for the especial use of either.

Man, like the goose, appropriates what suits him, but is slow to realize the fact that what suits him, or is fitted to his use, depends upon his own powers of adaptation. We can say that he suits it, rather than that it suits him. He has lungs because there is air, and eyes because there are certain vibrations in the ether. In short, nature is the primary fact, and the forms and organs of life the secondary fact.

Goethe said to Eckermann that he followed Kant in looking upon each creature as existing for its own sake. He could not believe, he said, that the cork-trees grow merely that we might stop our bottles, and, he might have added, that rubber-trees grow that we might have rubber overshoes. The lady in a public audience who once asked me what flies are for, evidently thought that God had made a mistake in creating that which annoyed her. I was pleased with a remark of John Muir’s in his Sierra book about the poison-ivy: “Like most other things not apparently useful to man,” he says, “it has few friends, and the blind question, ‘Why was it made?’ goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.” Coming from the mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical doctrine. Muir had evidently forgotten his early training.

It is possible for man to make use of poison-ivy; in fact it is used in medicine; but who shall dare to say that it was made for that? Flies and poison ivy and all other noxious and harmful things are each and all for their own sakes. They were not made in the sense that we make things. They have come to be what we now find them through the action and interaction of a thousand complex influences. Each has found its place in the scheme of living things, and each acts directly or indirectly upon other forms--is of use to them, or the reverse. Ten thousand things are of use to man, and as many more of no use to him, but to measure all things by his standard of utility is childish, or to ask what mosquitoes and rattlesnakes are for, with an implied impeachment of Nature if they are not of service to man, is an idle question. The water and the air are indispensable to life, but these things are older than life. Life is adapted to them, and not they to it.

The body is full of fluids because earth and air are full of water. From our standpoint man is at the head of animate nature, but the rest of creation is no more exclusively for him than for the least of living things. The good of the world is for whatever or whoever can use it. Houseflies are undoubtedly the enemy of the human race; so are mosquitoes, so are venomous snakes, so are many forms of bacteria, and a thousand other things. Our egotism prompts us to ask, “Why is evil in the world, anyhow?” But our evil may be the good of some other creature. Our defeat means the triumph of our enemy. It is through this conflict of good and evil, or of things that are for us with things that are against us, that species are developed and perpetuated.

What kind of a world would it be without what we call evil, without hindrances? To the farmer drought, flood, tornadoes, untimely frosts are evils which he thinks he could well dispense with, but so far as they make a greater struggle necessary, so far as they lead to more self-denial, greater forethought, and so on, they are good in disguise. Hardy, virile characters, like tough timber, in oaks, are developed by unfriendly and opposing forces. Intemperance, greed, cheating, lying, war, are evils in the social and business world; but they teach us the value of their opposites. We react from them. It is a child’s question to ask, for example, “Would the world not have been better had there never been any war?” because, since mankind is what it is, wars are inevitable. The absence of wars, as of intemperance, greed, cheating, implies a different mankind, and a different mankind implies a different system of things.

The problem of evil is the problem of life; no evil, no life. The world is thus made. Nature is not half good and half bad; she is wholly good, or wholly bad, according to our relation to her. Fire and flood are bad when they master us, and good when we master and control them. Great good has come out of war, and great evil. The evil always tends to drop out or be obliterated, as the path of cyclones and earthquakes tend to be overgrown and forgotten. Burned cities often rise from their ashes to new life. The effects of evil are finally obliterated; malignant forces have their day, benignant forces go on forever. The world of life, let me repeat, would not be here were not the balance of the account of good and evil on the side of the good, or if good did not come out of evil.

Life is recuperative; if it falls down, it picks itself up again. If a state is devastated by war, in time the cities and towns are rebuilt, and the ranks of peace and industry refilled, though the growth and civilization of that country may have had a terrible set-back, and the whole progress of the race be retarded. Evil perishes. The terrible World War, set going by Germany, has depleted the wealth, the life, the well-being of the whole European world, but as the scars it made upon the landscape will in time be effaced, so its effect upon the life of the states and communities will fade and be a memory only. Still the evils it entailed are none the less deplorable. Its heritage of hate, of devastated homes, of depleted treasures, will long continue.

Life, then, in all its forms is for its own sake. It is an end in itself. Many things are inimical to us, and we are equally inimical to many things. We lay the whole of Nature under contribution so far as we can, and we curb and defeat her hostile forces so far as we can, but the world was no more made for man than it was made for mice and midges. When we see how irrespective of us the natural forces go their way, that we can ride them and guide them only as we do wild horses--by being quicker and more masterful than they are--when we know that they will tread us down with the same indifference that we tread down the grass and the weeds, the facts should temper and modify our egotism. When we look into the depths of merely our own solar system, and see vast globes like Jupiter and Saturn, so much older and greater than our little earth, and not yet the abode of any form of life, and probably not within millions of years of such a state, how casual and insignificant man seems! How far from being the end and object of creation!

Doubtless there are numberless worlds and whole systems of worlds in the depths of sidereal space upon which life has never appeared, and numberless other worlds and systems upon which it has had its day and gone out forever. Life is but an incident in the total scheme of things.

To ask what this or that is for, with reference to ourselves, and to conclude that some one or something has blundered if it is not of positive use to us, is, let me repeat, to see and to think as a child. We know what the hooks on the burdock and the stick-seed are for, and what the wings on the maple and the ash-seed are for, but do we know what the stings on the nettle, or the spines on the blackberry or on the thorn-apple tree are for? The cattle eat the nettle, the birds eat the berries, and the wild creatures eat the thorn-apple. How could their seeds get sown if the prickles and thorns defended them against wild life? Spines and thorns seem expressive of moods or conditions in Nature, and to be quite independent of use, as we understand the term.

Nature’s ways are so unlike our ways! Her system of economics would soon bring us to bankruptcy. She has no rival, no competitor, no single end in view, no more need to store up wealth than to scatter it. One form gains what another form loses. Humanly speaking, she is always trying to defeat herself. The potato-bug, if left alone, would exterminate the potato and so exterminate itself; the currant-worm would exterminate the currant; the forest worms would exterminate the forests, did not parasites appear and check these ravages. Nature trumps her own trick; she scuttles her own ship; she mines her own defenses; she poisons her own fountains; she sows tares in her own wheat; and yet she wins, because she is the All. The tares are hers, the parasites are hers, the devastating storms and floods are hers, the earthquakes and volcanoes are hers, disease and death are hers, as well as youth and health. The cancer that eats into a man’s vitals--what keeps it going but Nature’s forces and fluids? The bacteria that flourish in our bodies and bring the scourges of typhoid fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, are all hers, and a part of her system of things. A malignant tumor is as much an expression of Providence as is a baby or a flower. Nature cuts the ground from under her own feet; she saws off the limb upon which she is perched, but if she falls, she alights in her own lap.

In walking through a blighted potato-field this morning, I said, “Here is one form of vegetable life destroying another form and bringing loss and discontent to the farmer’s heart.” What purpose in the economy of Nature is served by this blight? Who or what is the gainer? After the minute organisms that prey upon the potato-vines have done their work, they too perish, so that two forms of life are blotted out. What was it all for? Why is this tragedy of one form of life bringing to naught other forms, which we witness on every hand, in vegetable and animal life, and in human history, being constantly enacted? The question, put in this way, is a purely human one; it is applying to the vast scheme of creation purely human standards. We instinctively ask the why and the wherefore of things, and in our practical lives try to avoid letting one hand defeat the other as Nature does in the above incident. We guard one form of life against another hostile form. Our aim is to make things pull together for our own advantage. We seek to check the ravages of the tent caterpillar, the forest worms, the gypsy moth, the potato-beetle, and the invisible enemies that rot our grapes and mar our apples, as well as the germs that sow fatal diseases in our midst. But not so Nature. She does not take sides. As I have said, she has no special and limited aims. The stakes are hers, whoever wins. One condition of the season favors the growth of the potato-vines; another condition favors the development of the fungus that destroys them. Nature is just as much on the side of the rat as on the side of the cat; she arms each to defeat the other, and the fittest survives. She has not given the rabbit strength or ferocity, but she has given her speed and a sleepless eye and great fecundity, and her enemies do not cut her off.

The struggle and competition of life go on everywhere. But life is not all a struggle; it is unity and coöperation as well. The trees of the forest protect one another; one form of life profits by another form.

In the whole drama of organic nature we find waste and prodigality. Our economics are set at naught by the power that works to no special ends, but to all ends, and finds its account in the tumor that eats up the man, as much as in the man himself, in the fungi that destroy the potato crop, or the chestnut-trees, as truly as in these things themselves. Yet behold what specialization and what development has taken place in spite of these cross-purposes, this chaos of conflicting interests! Out of discord has come harmony; out of conflict has come peace; out of death has come life; out of the reptile has come the bird; out of the beast has come man; out of the savage has come the moral conscience; out of the tribe has come the nation; out of tyranny has come democracy. It is the waste, the delays, the pain, the price to be paid, that appall us.

We must regard creation as a whole, as the evolution of worlds and systems, and not concentrate our attention upon man and his ways, or upon the earth--so small a part of our solar system.

Our benevolent institutions are not types of the universe; our idea of fatherhood does not fit the Eternal.

Our fathers had a complete and consistent explanation of the problem of evil that so perplexes us. They invented or postulated two opposing and contending principles in the world--one divine, the other diabolical. One they named God, the other, Satan. Their conception of God would not allow them to saddle all the evil and misery of the world upon him; they had to look for a scapegoat, and they found him in the Devil. One is just as necessary to a consistent cosmogony as the other. If we must have an all-wise, all-merciful, all-powerful, all-loving God--the author of all good and the contemner of all evil--we must also have a god of the opposite type, the great mischief-maker and enemy of human happiness--the author of war, pestilence, famine, disease, and of all that hinders and defeats the reign of the perfect good. Without the conception of the Devil, we are forced to the conclusion, either that God is not omnipotent, or that he is responsible for all the sin and suffering in the world. If you make man this Devil, then who made man?

Wrestle with the problem as we may, we are impaled on one or the other horn of the dilemma. Our traditional God is more cruel and more indifferent to human suffering than any tyrant that ever gloated over human blood and agony, or else he is fearfully limited in his power for good.

With a Devil at our disposal to whom we can impute the evils of life, the situation clears up, and God emerges, shorn of his omnipotence, it is true, but still the symbol of goodness and love.

In our day the Devil has lost his prestige and is much discredited. As a power in men’s minds his reign is over, and hell, his headquarters, no longer casts its lurid light upon human life.

In an equal measure the old Hebraic conception of God as a much-magnified man, the king and ruler of heaven and earth, with heaven as his throne, has gone out. God is now little more than a name for that tendency or power in the universe which makes for righteousness, and which has brought evolution thus far on its course.

To account for the world as we find it, we are compelled to look upon it as the inevitable result of the clashing and interaction of purely natural forces resulting in both so-called good and evil; that is, in what is favorable to life, and in what is against life. But as life is adaptive and assimilative, it slowly turns the evil into good, of course at the expense of delays and waste and suffering, and thus development becomes possible, and man, after untold millions of years, appears.

When we look forth upon the universe, what do we see? When we look upon the non-living world, we see a mere welter and chaos of material forces--a conflict of chemical and physical principles seeking a stable equilibrium--water running, winds blowing, mountains decaying, stars and systems whirling, suns waning or waxing, nebulæ condensing, vast orbs colliding, and all issuing in a certain order and system under the rule of purely mechanical and mathematical laws. The stellar universe is a vast machine, amenable to the measurements and calculations of the astronomers. The eclipses all occur exactly on time, and the planets revolve in their orbits without the untruth, as Whitman says, of a single second. The disorder and disruptions which occur are inside of vast fundamental laws. Our mountains and seas are shaken by earthquakes, and the earth’s surface is swept by cyclones and the seashores are devastated by tidal waves, yet these things are only phases of the effort toward a fixed equilibrium. The earth’s surface as we now behold it, the distribution of land and water, of mountain and plain, the procession of the seasons, our whole weather system, the friendly and the unfriendly forces, are all the outcome of this clash and stress of the physical forces, which make a paradise of some places and the opposite of others.

When we look upon the living world as revealed in the geologic record, we still see a kind of welter and chaos, but we also see the advent of new principles not entirely subject to mechanical and mathematical laws. Life goes its way and takes liberties with its physical environment. Living bodies change and develop as the non-living do not. The various organic forms “rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves,” and incalculably slow transformations of lower forms into higher take place, but not without appalling delays and waste and suffering. Chemical and mechanical laws are still in full force, but they appear to be in the service of a new principle; an organizing tendency of a new kind is at work in the world; chance and necessity seem to play a less conspicuous part. Yet there is nothing that meets our idea of justice, or mercy, or economy of effort.

For millions upon millions of years the earth swarmed with low, all but brainless creatures. The monsters of sea and land that appeared in the middle period were huge and terrible in body and limb, but very small in capacity of brain. Huge ganglions, or knots of nervous tissue, in different parts of their bodies seem to have served as a substitute for a centralized brain and a complex nervous system. The brontosaurus, seventy feet long, with a body weighing many tons, had a brain not much larger than a man’s double fists. Brains as yet played a very subordinate part in the world. Reptiles and half-reptiles possessed the earth. The age of mammals was as yet only hinted at. But after long geologic ages, mammals came to the front, holding the precious possibility of man, and reptiles were relegated to the rear. The animal brain increased, wit began to get the better of brute force, and the small and feeble ancestors of man appeared in the biological drama. They were like small and timid supernumeraries skulking or hiding on the wings of the stage. Lemurs and monkeys appeared long before there were any signs of the anthropoid apes, and the anthropoid apes were in evidence long before the first rude man appeared.

In all the vast stretch of geologic and biologic time, do we see any evidence of the active existence of the God and the Devil of our fathers? Not unless we identify them with the material forces that then ruled and shaped the world, and these forces, by any other name, are of the same impersonal, impartial, unforgiving character as is disclosed in our dealings with them to-day.

When we turn to the higher forms of organic life, especially to man and his history, what do we see? We still behold the same trial-and-error method, the same cruelty, waste, delays, and suffering that we behold in the lower forms. We see progress, we see the growth of ethical principles, we see man’s increasing mastery over the forces of nature and over himself, but in the competition of races and nations, the race is still to the swift and the battle to the strong. We see a high standard of individual morality contending with a low standard of international morality. We still see civilized nations looking upon treaties as “scraps of paper”; we see them regarding their neighbors as rivals and enemies; we see millions of men that have not the shadow of a grievance against one another, fiercely trying to slay one another, and praying to the same God for victory. We see the nefarious doctrine that physical might makes moral right written in lines of blood and fire across the face of whole kingdoms; we see the legitimate competitions of peace and industry turned into the strife of armed conquest; we see a small and peaceful nation trampled underfoot by a big nation bent upon plunder and conquest; we see hatred toward a kindred nation glorified, and the murder of innocent women and children and other non-combatants adopted as a fixed policy; in fact, we see all the vast resources of science and of modern civilization wedded to the spirit of the Hun, and turned loose in a war for world-dominion. The results of eighteen centuries of Christian culture come off the German nation like a whitewash in this craze and fury of the military spirit; the German people stand revealed as at heart unmitigated barbarians, wonderfully efficient, but wonderfully inhuman. If we appeal to the supernatural to account for things, we certainly need a Devil, if not several of them, to account for the temper of the German mind during the late war. No wonder the good people are losing faith, and are shocked and dismayed at the thought that their all-loving, omnipotent God permits these things.

Down the whole course of history we see no other powers at work than those that are about us. Good is in the ascendancy everywhere, or soon will be; evil dies out; the wicked cease from troubling; the amelioration of mankind goes on; and no God or Devil hinders or favors.

Nature is both God and Devil, and natural law is supreme in the world. The moral consciousness of man,--all our dreams of perfection, of immortality, of the good, the beautiful, the true, all our veneration and our religious aspirations,--this is Nature, too.

Man is a part of the universe; all that we call good in him, and all that we call bad, are a part of the universe. The God he worships is his own shadow cast upon the heavens, and the Devil he fears is his own shadow likewise. The divine is the human, magnified and exalted; the Satanic is the human, magnified and debased.

We find God in Nature by projecting ourselves there; we find him in the course of history by reading our own ideals into human events; we find him in our daily lives by listening to the whisperings of our own inherited and acquired consciences, and by dwelling upon the fatality that rules our lives.

We had nothing to do with our appearance here in this world, or with the form our bodies take, or with our temperaments, and, only in a degree, with our dispositions. Some power other than ourselves brought us here and maintains us here for a period, as it brought here and maintains all other forms of life; but, I repeat, that power is inseparable from the physical and chemical forces, and goes its way whether we prosper or perish. Yet it is more positive than negative, more for us than against us, else we should not be here.

Where does man get his ethical standards? Where does he get his eyes, his ears, his heart? He gets them where he got his life--from natural sources. He gets them whence he got his sense of art, of beauty, of harmony. There are no moral standards in Nature apart from man, but as man is a part of Nature, so are these, and all other standards. So are all religions, arts, literatures, philosophies, heroisms, self-denials, as well as all idolatries, superstitions, sorceries, cruelties, wrongs, failures, a part of Nature.

Is the big-brained man of to-day any less a part of Nature than the low-browed, long-jawed man of Pliocene times?

The humanization of God leads us into many difficulties. If He is a personal being with attributes and emotions like our own, then we are forced to the conclusion that He is no better than we are--that He has our faults as well as our virtues, our cruelty as well as our love. He is a party to all the wrongs and crimes and suffering that darken the earth; He permits wars and pestilence and famine and earthquakes and tornadoes, and all the consuming and agonizing diseases that flesh is heir to. He is an infinite man with infinite powers for good and evil.

In the long drama of animal evolution there has evidently been as much suffering as pleasure, and of the drama of human history the same may be said: pain, failure, delay, injustice, to all of which our humanized God has been a party. No wonder our fathers struggled over the problem of the ways of God to man. As soon as they put themselves in his place, they felt the need of some grounds upon which to justify his dealings with the beings He had created. But they searched, and their descendants still search, in vain. If we see God as a man, no matter how mighty, He is still guilty of what few finite men would be guilty. What men would be guilty of permitting the sin and misery that fill the world at this, or any other, time?

The Nature God neither sends calamities nor wills them--they are an inevitable part of the growth and development of things; they are eddies in the stream of forces. What we call evil is evil only from our point of view; evil is a human word and not the word of the Infinite. If the world were something made by a Maker external to it, then it were pertinent to ask, Why not make it a better world? Why not leave out pain and sin and all other phases of evil? But the world is not something made, and it did not have a Maker, as we use those words. The universe _is_, and always has been, “from everlasting to everlasting,” and man is a part of it, and his life is subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of creation. Man has come into this sense of right and wrong, of justice and mercy, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, as necessary conditions of his development, but those things are not absolute; they pertain to him alone. The physical forces break out of their natural bounds and run riot for a season; the human forces do the same thing and give rise to various excesses. The crimes and misdemeanors of man are exceptional as the outbreaks in nature are exceptional. They relate man to nature and show how the same plan runs through both. A world with storm and the warring and violence of the elements left out would be a radically different world--an impossible world. And a world of man, a Quaker world, is equally impossible.

If some being of infinite wisdom and love had made the world and made man to live in it, we could ask him some embarrassing questions; but, let me repeat, the world was not made, it is only a link in a chain of cosmic events, and it is not for man any more than for any other creature. Each must “work out his own salvation, with fear and trembling.”

Introduce design into nature and you humanize it and get into difficulties at once. It is above design. We have no language in which to speak the ultimate truth, no language in which to describe the character and the doings of the Infinite. The ways of the Infinite are not only past finding out, they are unspeakable by reason of our finite relations to them. We cannot arraign the Nature God. It does not design, nor make, nor govern, nor employ means to ends, as do the man-made gods. It _is_. All things are a part of its infinite complexity. Nature rests forever in itself. It neither fails nor succeeds. In itself it is neither good nor evil, neither divine nor devilish; it is all things to all men, because they are all things to it. It is neither one nor many; it is the Infinite. In these vain attempts to define or describe the indefinable I have no language but that of the finite, no language but that of our limited or circumscribed relation to the world of concrete and fragmentary things. Hence I am constantly like the plains ranger caught by his own lasso, or the angler caught by his own hook.

Emerson said that in trying to define the Eternal we need a language that differs from our everyday speech as much as algebra differs from arithmetic. Outside of the physical organism there is neither pleasure nor pain, good nor bad, light nor dark, sound nor silence, heat nor cold, big nor little, hard nor soft; all these things are but words in which we describe our sensations. When there is no ear, there is no sound, but only motion in the air; when there is no eye, there is no light or color, but only motion in the ether; when there are no nerves, there is no heat or cold, but only motion, more or less, in the molecules of matter. Degrees and differences belong to the region of our finite minds. In trying to define or state the Infinite, we are off the sphere, outside the realm of experience, and our words have no meaning.

It is the circular or orbicular character of creation that baffles us. We cannot fit the sphere into the triangles and parallelograms of the terms of our experience. We cannot square the circle of Infinity. The terms “love,” “anger,” “mercy,” “fatherhood,” do not apply to God any more than “over” or “under,” or “beginning” or “end,” apply to the sphere. In regard to God, the language of science and mathematics is one with the language of worship and ecstasy.

I find I have never been burdened by a sense of my duty to God. My duty to my fellow-men and to myself is plain enough, but the word is not adequate to express any relation I may hold to the Eternal. Do I owe any duty to gravity without which I could not move or lift my hand, or any duty to the sunshine or to the rains and the winds? Instinctively, unconsciously, for the most part we obey the law of gravity, and instinctively we adjust ourselves to all the natural forces, not from a sense of duty, but from a sense of self-preservation. These things are a part of our lives and not something to which we hold only a casual and precarious or external relation. My relation to the Eternal is not that of an inferior to a superior, or of a beneficiary to his benefactor, or of a subject to his king. It is that of the leaf to the branch, of the fruit to the tree, of the babe in the womb to its mother. It is a vital and an inevitable relation. It cannot be broken. It is not a matter of will or choice. We are embosomed in the Eternal Beneficence, whether we desire it or not. Those good persons who go through life looking upon the Eternal as a power external to themselves, saluting him as the soldier salutes his officer, are not as truly religious as they think they are. The old conception of an external God, the supreme ruler of the universe, with whom Moses talked and walked and even saw the hinder parts of, is out of date in our time. Still the overarching thought of the Infinite and the Eternal, in whom we live and move and have our being, must at times awaken in the minds of all of us, and lend dignity and sobriety to our lives.

But the other world fades as this world brightens. Science has made this world so interesting and wonderful, and our minds find such scope in it for the exercise of all their powers, that thoughts of another world are becoming foreign to us. We shall never exhaust the beauties and the wonders and the possibilities of this. To feel at home on this planet, and that it is, with all its drawbacks, the best possible world, I look upon as the supreme felicity of life.

When we look at it in its mere physical and chemical aspects, its play of forces, tangible and intangible, its reservoir of energy, its “journeying of atoms,” its radiating electrons, its magnetic currents, its transmutations and cycles of change, its hidden but potent activities, its streaming auroras, its changing seasons, its myriad forms of life, and a thousand other things--all make it a unique and most desirable habitation.

When we consider it in its astronomical aspects as a celestial body floating in the luminiferous ether as in a sea, held in leash by the sun, and as sensitive to its changes as the poplar leaf to the wind, vast beyond our power to visualize, yet only a grain of sand on the shores of the Infinite, an evening or a morning star to the beings on other planets, if there are such, mottled with shining seas or green and white continents and canopied with many-hued cloud draperies, and existing in closest intimacies with the wonders and the potencies of the sidereal heavens--a veritable fruit on the vast sidereal tree of life--when we realize all this, and more, can we conceive of a more desirable or a better-founded and better-furnished world? The voyage we make upon it may be a long one; if we claim the century of life which Nature seems to have allotted us on conditions, we shall travel about thirty-six billions of miles in our annual voyages around the sun, and how many more millions with the sun around his sun, we know not. A world made of the common stuff of the universe, a handful of the dust of the cosmos, yet thrilling with life, producing the race of man, evolving the brain of Plato, of Aristotle, of Bacon, the soul of Emerson, of Whitman, the heart of Christ--a heavenly abode surely. Let us try to make amends for depreciating it, for spurning it, for surrendering it to the Devil, and for turning from it in search of a better.

Our religion is at fault, our saints have betrayed us, our theologians have blackened and defaced our earthly temple, and swapped it off for cloud mansions in the Land of Nowhere. The heavens embrace us always; the far-off is here, close at hand; the ground under your door-stone is a part of the morning star. If we could only pull ourselves up out of our absorption in trivial affairs, out of the petty turmoil of our practical lives, and see ourselves and our world in perspective and as a part of the celestial order, we could cease to weep and wail over our prosaic existence.

The astronomic view of our world, and the Darwinian view of our lives must go together. As one came out of the whirling, fiery nebulæ, so the other came out of the struggling, slowly evolving, biological world of the unicellular life of the old seas.

Biologic time sets its seal upon one, and cosmic time upon the other. Dignity and beauty and meaning are given to our lives when we see far enough and wide enough, when we see the forces that minister to us, and the natural order of which we form a part.

IV

The Universal Beneficence

That bodies rise in the air does not disprove gravity; on the contrary, it proves it. The pull of gravity never lets go of the bullet from the gun; no matter how high or how far it goes, down it comes, sometime, somewhere.

There is no force when there is nothing to resist force. The force of the chemical reaction in the gun on the explosion of the powder is hurled back by the mass and resistance of the gun, and sends the bullet high or far, but does not for a second break its hold upon it. Smoke rises because the air falls; clouds float because of the greater weight of something beneath them. The river flows because its banks do not.

The goodness of nature is the universal fact, like gravity, and its evils and enmities and hindrances only prove the law.

The waters of the globe seek their level, seek to reach a haven of everlasting repose; but behold how that purpose is forever frustrated, and the currents never cease. It is as if the creeks and rivers never reached the sea; they are traveling that way forever; it is as if the great ocean currents and submarine Amazons and Mississippis were seeking an escape which they never find; their quest is ever renewed. Nature is Nature because her work is never complete; her journey is never ended; the fixity and equilibrium which her elements appear to seek, is ever deferred; life can appear and go on only in a changing, unstable world, and it is this flux and mutability of things that bring all our woe, and all our joy as well. If winds did not blow, and bodies fall, and fire consume, and floods overpower, if the equilibrium of things were not perpetually broken,--which opens the door to all our troubles and disasters,--where should we find the conditions of our life?

Life has appeared in an unstable world, and is conditioned upon this instability. Fixity means death. It is in the line of organic effort that living forms appear; it is in an imperfect world that we strive for the perfection that we never reach. Blessed be the fact that our capacity for life, for happiness, is always greater than the day yields. Satiety checks effort.

The Nature Providence is stern and even cruel in some of its dealings with us, but not in all, else we should run away from home. It is genial and friendly in the genial season--in a June meadow, in a field of ripening grain, in an orchard bending with fruit, in the cattle on a thousand hills, in the shade of the friendly trees, in the bubbling springs, in the paths by the green fields and by still waters, and in ten thousand other aspects of its manifold works. It is not friendly in the tropical jungles, nor amid the snows and blizzards of the polar regions, but upon four fifths of the surface of the globe it may be said to be friendly or neutral. Man is armed to face its hostile aspects and to turn its very wrath to account. If God maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, so man maketh the wrath of God to serve him, as when he subdues and controls Nature’s destructive forces, tames the lightning and harnesses Niagara. He has not bound the cyclone yet, nor warmed himself by the volcano, nor moved mountains from his path with the earthquake, but he may do it yet. He is fast drawing the fangs of contagious diseases, thus adding to his length of days.

The Nature Providence working in man and through him has made the world more fit for man’s abode.

Action and reaction are the steps by which life ascends. Nature acts upon man and man reacts upon nature. The labor the farmer puts into the soil comes back to him with interest, and enables him to labor more. The capital of life grows in that way; action and reaction; up we go.

“Are God and Nature then at strife?” asks Tennyson, baffled and unsettled by what he sees about him. There is strife in the living world, the struggle of existence. In the non-living, there is collision, disruption, overthrow. The apparent strife between the two worlds is an effort toward adjustment on the part of the living--to master and utilize the non-living. The inorganic goes its way under the leash of physical laws, heedless of the organic. Myriads of living things are crushed and destroyed by the ruthless onward flow of the non-living. There is life in the world because life is plastic and persistent and adaptive, and perpetually escapes from the blind forces that would destroy it--the winds, the floods, the frost, the heat, gravity, earthquakes, chemical reactions, and so on. Every living thing runs the gantlet of the insensate mechanical and chemical forces. But this is not strife in our human sense; it is the discipline of nature. No living thing could begin or continue without these forces which at times are so hostile. Like faithful gardeners preparing the seed-beds, they prepared the earth for the abode of man and all other living forms. They made the soil, they bring the rains, they begat the winds, they prearranged all the conditions of life; but life itself is a mystery, the great mystery, super-mechanical, super-chemical, dependent upon these forces, but not begotten by them. They are its servants.

The struggle in the world of living forms is a condition of development, growing things are made strong by the force of the obstacles they overcome.

From our limited human point of view there are phases of creation that make it look like a game between intelligent contending forces, or as if one god tried to undo the work of another god, or at least to mar and hinder his work--some mischievous and malignant spirit that sows tares amid the wheat, that retards development, that invents parasites, that produces the malformed, that scatters the germs of disease. How much at heart Nature seems to have the production and well-being of offspring, yet what failures there are! in the human realm the deformed, the monstrous, the idiotic. It seems as if all things in heaven and earth had a stake in a perfect baby and in its growth and development. A land swarming with beautiful and happy children should make the very stars rejoice. Motherhood itself is a beautiful and divine symbol, yet what perils attend it! In many cases mother and child sink into the same grave. Then along comes some malignant spirit and sows the germs of infantile paralysis, and great numbers of children perish, and still greater numbers are crippled and deformed for life. What a miscarriage of nature is that! What a calamity, and unmitigated evil!

When an insect stings a leaf or plant-stalk and the plant forthwith builds a cradle and nursery for the young of the insect, that is one form of life using another form; or when a parasitical bird, such as the European cuckoo, or our cowbird, lays its egg in the nest of another bird, that is the same thing--life is still triumphant. But when the germs of a contagious disease--tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever--invade the human system and finally result in its destruction, then dissolution is triumphant; all this delicately and elaborately organized matter comes to naught. In this we see the failure of the tendency or impulsion in matter which results in organization--the mystery and the miracle of vitality, as Tyndall called it, and the triumph of the contrary impulse or disorganization, unless we regard the destructive and death-dealing germs themselves as a triumph of organization, which, from the scientific point of view, they surely are. Then we have Nature playing one hand against the other. From our point of view it is like pulling down a temple and reducing the bricks and stones to dust for the use of ants. But who shall say that Nature is not just as careful of the ant as of the man?--which is, of course, a distasteful bit of news to the man.

When one thinks of the myriads of minute living organisms that pervade and make up his own body, of their struggles and activities, their antagonisms and coöperations, their victories and defeats,--the cells coöperating and building up the organs, the organs coöperating and building up the body, the phagocytes policing the blood and destroying the invading germs, the intestinal flora contending with one another for the possession of the soil, the ferments, the enzymes,--when one thinks of all this and more, and how little aware the man is of all this strife and effort and activity within him,--how he himself, body and mind, is the result of it all,--one has a dim vision of all our strife and effort in this world as a part of the vital movements of a vast system of things, or of a Being that is no more cognizant of our wars and struggles and triumphs than we are of the histories of the little people that keep up the functional integrity of our own systems.

Man can himself make short work of the ants unless he encounters their devouring hosts in a tropical jungle, in which case they may make short work of him. He can often slay with his antiseptics the disease-germs that are destroying him, but not always; the balance of nature is often on their side. Whichever triumphs, Nature wins, because all are parts of her system. The capital invested is hers alone. Man thinks a part of it is his, because he forgets that he too is a part of Nature, and that whatever is his, is hers.

How are we to reconcile the obvious facts of evolution, namely, that throughout the biological ages there has been an impulse in Nature steadily working toward the development of man, with the still more obvious fact that Nature cares no more for the individual man than she does for the individual of any other species? She will drown him, starve him, freeze him, crush him, as quickly as she will any other form of life. Is the account balanced by the fact that she has given him the wit and the power to avoid these calamities in a larger measure than she has given them to any other creature? That is the way the great mystery works. Every creature is exposed to the hazards of its kind, but within its reach are always the benefits and advantages of its kind, and these latter have steadily kept in the lead. The evolutionary impulse toward the horse, toward the dog, toward the bird, has apparently been as jealously guarded and promoted as the impulse toward man. Man in his own conceit is at the head of the animal kingdom, and the whole creation is for him, though there are other animals that surpass him in strength, speed, and endurance. But he alone masters and makes servants of the inorganic forces, and thus rules the world below him.

I set out to say that the beneficent force or Providence that brought us here has had to struggle with the non-beneficent in inert matter, and, at times, with what looks like the deliberately malignant in living matter; micro-organisms everywhere lying in wait for tangible bodies and reducing them back to the original dust out of which they came--the work of one god being held up or wrecked by another god. In the vegetable kingdom are blights and scabs and many forms of fungous diseases; in the animal are hostile bacteria and parasites working without and within. Little wonder our fathers had to invent a Devil, or a hierarchy of good and evil spirits contending with one another, to explain the enigmas of life! But that the good spirits have prevailed over their enemies, that the Natural Providence has been on our side, is, as I have pointed out, proved by the fact that we are actually here, and that life is good to us.

The evil of the world is seen to be ingrained in the nature of things, and it has been a spur to development. All the great human evils have been disciplinary. There is always a surplusage, rarely just enough and no more. The gods of life rarely make a clean, neat job of it; there are needless pains, needless wastes, needless failures, needless delays. The good of war--the fortitude, the self-denial, the heroism--we cannot separate from the evil; the good of avarice or greed--industry, thrift, foresight--we cannot separate from the evil. The wealth-gatherers keep the currents going, they subdue the wilderness, they reclaim the deserts, they develop the earth’s resources, they extend the boundaries of civilization, but the evils that follow in their train are many and great. Yet how are we to have the one without the other? Disease is also a kind of trial by battle; it weeds out the weak, the physically unfit, and hardens and toughens the race.

The Natural Providence does not study economy, it is not in business with rivals and competitors; bankruptcy is not one of its dangers, it can always meet its obligations; all the goods and all the gold and silver in the universe belong to it. Its methods are too vast and complex for our ideas of prudence and economy. We cannot deal with the whole, but only with its parts. There are no lines and boundaries to the sphere, and no well-defined cleavage between the good and the evil in nature and in life. The broad margin of needless misery and waste in the life of a man as of a nation is a part of the inexactitude and indifference that pervades the whole of nature. From the point of view of the Natural Providence it does not matter, the result is sure; but from our point of view--victims of cyclones, earthquakes, wars, famines, pestilence as we are--it matters a great deal. The streams and rivers throughout the land are bearers of many blessings; the evils they bring are minor and are soon forgotten.

The whole living world is so interrelated and interdependent, and hinges so completely upon the non-living, that our analysis and interpretation of it must of necessity be very imperfect. But the creative energy works to no specific ends, or rather it works to all ends. As every point on the surface of the globe is equally on the top at all times, so the whole system of living nature balances on any given object. I saw a book of poems recently, called “The Road to Everywhere”--vague as Nature herself. All her roads are roads to everywhere. They may lead you to your own garden, or to the North Pole, or to the fixed stars, or may end where they began.

Nature is a great traveler, but she never gets away from home; she takes all her possessions along with her, and her course is without direction, and without beginning or end. The most startling contradiction you can make expresses her best. She is the sum of all opposites, the success of all failures, the good of all evil.

When we think we have cut out Nature, we have only substituted another phase; when our balloon mounts in spite of gravity, it is still gravity that makes it mount; when we clear the soil of its natural growth and plant our own crop, Nature is still our gardener; we have only placed other seeds of her own in her hands. When we have improved upon her, we have only prevailed upon her to second our efforts; we get ahead of her by following out the hints she gives us; when we trump her trick, it is with her own cards. When we fancy we assist Nature, as we say that we do with our drugs, it is she who gives the efficiency to the drugs. We may fancy that the sun is in the heavens solely to give light and warmth to the planets, which it surely does, but behold, what a mere fraction of the light and heat of the sun is intercepted by the slender girdle of worlds that surround it! The rays go out equally in all directions, they penetrate all space. The sun, with reference to its light and heat, is at the center of an infinite hollow sphere, and not one millionth part of its rays falls upon the worlds that circle around it. This is typical of Nature’s bounty. The thought and solicitude of the creative energy is directed to me and you personally in the same wholesale way. The planets of our system are lighted and warmed as effectually as if the sun shone for them alone, and man is the beneficiary of the heavens as completely as if indeed the whole creation were directed especially to him. Here is another point: the night and darkness in nature are local and limited; the universe is flooded with light; the black shadows themselves are born of the light. Though astronomers tell us that sidereal space is strewn with dead worlds and extinct suns, give time enough and they will all be quickened and rekindled. Light and life are the positive facts in nature, darkness and death the negative.

When we single out man and fix our attention upon him as the sole end of creation, and judge the whole by his partial standards, man--

“Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law-- Though Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed”--

when we do this, all is confusion and contradiction. Love _is_ “creation’s final law,” but not the love of the mother for her child, or even of the bird for its young, but the love of the eye for the light, of the flower for the sun, the love of the plants for the rain and the dew, the love of man for his kind, and of the dog for his kind. Attraction, affiliation, assimilation--like unto like is the rule of life.

The organism fits itself to its environment; the Providence in Nature enables it to do so. The light is not fitted to the eye; the light creates the eye; the vibrations in the air create the ear. God, or the Eternal, is love because He brooded man into being, and all other forms of life that support man. He made the heavens and the earth for man’s good, by making man a part of them and able to avail himself of their bounty. But when we look forth into the universe, and expect to see something like human care and affection in the operation of the great elemental laws and forces, we are bound to be shocked. It is not there, and well that it is not. A universe run on the principles of human economy, human charity, and partiality would be a failure. It is our human weakness that yearns for this. It is our earthly father that has begotten in us our conception of a heavenly father. But then this very conception and desire is a part of nature--springs from the Eternal, and is in that sense authentic. We cannot separate ourselves from nature, or from the Eternal, any more than we can jump off the planet. It is only the conception of a human or man-made God that men rebel against. Thus comes in the discord that Tennyson sees and feels. He is looking for a human providence in nature. Wisdom, love, mercy, justice, are human attributes. We call them divine, and it is well, but they do not exist outside of man. Man is himself the only God, and he was evolved from nature. The divine and the godlike are therefore in nature; yes, in conjunction with what we call the demoniacal--love twined with enmity, the good a partner with the bad.

“I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath.”

Plagues and famines and wars are fortuitous and not a part of the regular order like health, or growth, or development. They are accidents of nature. The cloud-burst that sends the creek out of its banks is an accident in the same sense; it is an exceptional occurrence. If the fountains of nature were not full enough and permanent enough to stand such drains, or if the tendency in nature to a certain order and moderation were less marked, life would disappear from the globe. Nature’s capital of life is invested in ten thousand enterprises and the risks are many, but if the gains did not exceed the losses, if more seeds did not fall upon fertile places than upon barren, if more babies did not survive than perish, what would become of us? In our human schemes we aim to cut out losses, waste, delays and failure, and arraign the Eternal when it does not follow the same methods. But so far as I can see all that the Eternal aims at in the vast business of the universe is to keep the capital unimpaired and live on the income. The inroads which storms, pestilence, earthquakes make upon it are soon made good and some interest does accrue. Life does advance.

In the course of the biologic ages there has been a great loss in species, apparently without any loss in the development impulse. New species appear as the old disappear. Nature’s investment in mere size and brute strength was doubtless a good one under the conditions, but she gradually changed it and began to lay the emphasis upon size of brain and complexity of nervous system, just as man in his material civilization has passed from the simple to the complex, from the go-cart to the automobile, from the signal fires to telegraph and telephone. The failures and shortcomings of the Eternal, as well as the progress of its work, are analogous to those of man. Indeed, God is no more a god than man is. He evinces the same methods, the same mixture of good and evil, the same progress from the simple to the complex, the same survival of the fittest. We exalt and magnify our little human attributes and name it God; we magnify and intensify our bad traits and call it the Devil. One is as real as the other. Both are real to the imagination of man, but Nature knows them not, except so far as she knows them in and through man.

On a midsummer day, calm, clear, warm, the leaves shining, the grain and grass ripening, the waters sparkling, the birds singing, we see and feel the beneficence of Nature. How good it all is! What a joy to be alive! If the day were to end in a fury of wind and storm, breaking the trees, unroofing the houses, and destroying the crops, we should be seeing the opposite side of Nature, what we call the malevolent side. Fair days now and then have such endings, but they are the exception; living nature survives them and soon forgets them. Their scars may long remain, but they finally disappear. Total nature is overpoweringly on the side of life. But for all this, when we talk about the fatherhood of God, his loving solicitude, we talk in parables. There is not even the shadow of analogy between the wholesale bounty of Nature and the care and providence of a human father. Striding through the universe goes the Eternal, crushed worlds on one hand and worlds being created on the other: no special act of love or mercy or guidance, but a providence like the rains, the sunshine, the seasons.

When we say hard things about Nature--accuse her of cruelty, of savagery, of indifference--we fall short of our proper filial respect toward her. She is the mother of us all; neither an indulgent mother, nor a cruel stepmother. In many respects the gifts she has lavished upon us only make her own poverty the more conspicuous. Where she got the gift of reason which she has bestowed upon man, together with the sense of justice and of mercy, the moral consciousness, the æsthetic perceptions, the capacity for learning her secrets and mastering her forces, are puzzling questions. We may say that man achieved these things himself; but who or what made him capable of achieving them, what made him man, and out of the same elements that his dog or his horse is made?

Nature does not reason; she has no moral consciousness; she does not economize her resources; she is not efficient, she is wasteful and dilatory, and spends with one hand what she saves with the other. She is blind; her method is the hit-and-miss method of a man who fights in the dark. She hits her mark, not because she aims at it, but because she shoots in all directions. She fills the air with her bullets. She wants to plant in yonder marsh her cat-tail flag, or her purple loosestrife, and she trusts her seeds to every wind that blows, and to the foot of every bird that visits her marshes, no matter which way they are going. And in time her marsh gets planted. The pollen from her trees and plants drifts in clouds in order that one minute grain of it may find the pistil that is waiting for it somewhere in the next wood or field. She trusts her nuts to every vagabond jay or crow or squirrel that comes along, in hopes that some of them will be dropped or hidden and thus get planted. She trims her trees, and thins her forests, or reforests her lands, in the most roundabout, dilatory, and inefficient manner. No plan, no system, no economy of effort or of material; and yet she “gets there,” because she is not limited as to time or resources. She is in business with unlimited capital and unlimited opportunities; she has no competitors; her stockholders are all of one mind, and all roads lead to her markets. The winds, the streams, the rains, the snows, fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, are all her servitors. She does not stick for the best end of the bargain, the gain is hers whoever wins.

But behold how she has endowed man to improve upon all her slack and roundabout methods! She enables him to cheat, and mislead, and circumvent her. He steals her secrets, he tames her very lightnings, he forces her hand on a hundred occasions; he turns her rivers, he levels her hills, he obliterates her marshes, he makes her deserts bloom as the rose; he measures her atoms and surveys and weighs her orbs; he reads her history in the rocks, he finds out her ways in the heavens. He discovers the most completely hidden thing in the universe, the ether, and he has learned how to use it for his own purposes; his wireless telegraphy turns it into a news highway; above the seas, over the mountains, and across continents, it carries his messages.

In man Nature has evolved the human from the unhuman; she has evolved justice and mercy from rapine and cruelty; she has evolved the civic from the domestic, the state from the tribe. She has evolved the Briton and the Frenchman from rude prehistoric man. She has not yet got rid of the Hun in the German, but she is fast getting rid of the German in her overseas Germanic stock. The bleaching process goes on apace.

Man sees where Nature is blind; he takes a straight cut where she goes far around. In him she has added reason to her impulse, conscience to her blind forces, self-denial to her self-indulgence, the power of choice to her iron necessity. How well she has done by man, man alone knows. How much he is dependent upon her, he alone knows; how completely he is a part of her, he alone knows. We may call man an insurgent in her world, as an English scientist does, but he is her insurgent; she inspires him to insurrection, and she puts his weapons in his hands. His cause is her cause, and his victories are her victories.

Only by personifying Nature in this way, and standing apart from her and regarding her objectively, can we contrast her methods and her spirit with our own. The mother she has been to us becomes apparent. In spite of all her shortcomings and delays and roundabout methods, here we are, and here we wish to remain.

V

The Good Devils

I

This is not an essay on the optimism of a moralist, but on the optimism of a naturalist.

On the whole and in the long run, as I am never tired of asserting, Nature is good. The universe has not miscarried. The celestial laws, as Whitman says, do not need to be worked over and rectified. It is good to be here, and it must be equally good to go hence. With all the terrible things in Nature, and all the cruel and wicked things in history, the world is good; life is good, and the Devil himself plays a good part.

When Emerson in his Journal says, “It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint,” one wonders just what he means. Does he expect gravity, or fire, or flood, or wind, or tide to have scruples? Should the cat have scruples about dining off the mouse or the bird, or the wolf about making a meal of the lamb? or the plants and trees have scruples about running their roots into one another’s preserves, or cutting off one another’s rain or sunshine? If our cowbird had the human conscience, we should expect her to have scruples about laying her egg in the nest of another bird and thus shirking the labors and cares of parenthood, and we should expect the jays and crows to have scruples about eating up the eggs and young of their feathered neighbors, if they, too, were endowed with conscience. But none of them are troubled in this way, for the simple reason that they are not human beings. They live below the plane of man’s moral conscience. Chemistry and the elementary forces have no scruples. Powder or dynamite will blow up its maker as soon as it will any one else. The rain does not scruple to spoil the farmer’s hay, or the floods to wash away his house and destroy its inmates.

We are childish when we marvel at the unscrupulousness of Nature. Emerson often appealed to the nature of things. It is in the nature of things that they should be what we name unscrupulous; certainly Nature “is no saint,” and it is well for us that she is not. If we identify Nature with what we call God, as many do, then I am saying that it is well for us that the Eternal is “no saint.” I suspect that if the drama of life which has been enacted upon the globe, and is still being enacted, had been modeled upon the principle of sainthood, you and I would not now be here. More’s the pity, you may say, but there is no pity in Nature.

II

Is Nature then of the Devil? If we choose to name it so,--if we choose to revert to the conception of an earlier age,--yes, Nature, as we see her from our limited human point of view, is more or less of the Devil--half god and half demon, we may say; divine in some of her manifestations and diabolical in others, divine when she favors us and diabolical when she is against us. But what we do not so readily see is that in the long run the Devil is on our side also, that he is the divine wearing a mask. The Devil is the absence of something; he is a negative quantity that stimulates the positive and sets and keeps the currents going. Our breathing is the result of a perpetual tendency to a vacuum in our lungs; the growth of our bodies is the result of a coöperation and agreement between the integrating and disintegrating forces.

We control the Devil and make him our friend when we control most of the forces of nature--the fire, the wind, the waters, electricity, magnetism, gravity, chemical affinity, and so on. If our hold upon them slips, they destroy us. If we are not watchful in our laboratories, the same chemistry that builds up our bodies will blow our bodies to atoms. The tornado, the earthquake, the volcano, the thunderbolt, have all helped to make the earth what we behold it. The floods have helped, the avalanches have helped, frost and wind and snow, tropic heat and arctic cold, have helped. These devils are the hod-carriers that serve the divine mason--the mixers and builders, the plowers and the planters, the levelers and the engineer. Hence, I say: “Good Devil, be thou my friend; you give me power, you sharpen my wits, you make a man of me.”

This is the tangible, physical Devil; the intangible, moral Devil is not so easily dealt with. It is not so easy to turn the spirit of crime, intemperance, cruelty, war, superstition, greed, and so on to our advantage. Yet there also is power going to waste or misdirected. There is a light under the feet of these things also. Trade, out of which has come greed, has opened up and humanized the world; war has often grafted a superior stock upon an inferior.

“It was for Beauty that the world was made.” Emerson quotes this verse from Ben Jonson and says that it is better than any single line of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Only the poet is allowed to make such extravagant statements. We cannot in soberness and truth say that the world was made for any particular end. It is out of a certain harmony of the elements that we arose and our sense of beauty was developed, but the world exists for as many ends as we have power to conceive. Order, harmony, rhythm, compensation, equilibrium, circles, spheres, are fundamental in nature. Music, which is beauty to the ear, hath power over inert matter. In the Mammoth Cave the very rocks will sing if you speak to them in the right key. How steel filings on a metal surface will dance and arrange themselves in symmetrical groups under the influence of musical chords! Harmony is at the heart of nature, but, in the music of creation, disharmony plays a part also. The world is not all beautiful unless seen as a whole; all its discords are harmonized in the curve of the sphere. Emerson’s own line, “Beauty is its own excuse for being,” is better and truer than the one he quotes from Ben Jonson.

When saying that in the music of creation disharmony plays a part also, I do not mean to imply that this is not also true in human music. The dissonances are just as much a part of great music as are the harmonies. What would the operas of Wagner be without the tremendous dissonances? That is what makes Wagner one of the greatest in music; he sees things whole, just as Whitman does in his art--sees that “all are but parts of one stupendous whole,” and that the merely pretty in music, in poetry, in any art, as in nature, is only one little phase of it, only an arc of the great circle.

III

What trouble we get into when we identify God with Nature! and what trouble we get into when we refuse to identify the two! In the first case we reach the unity that the mind craves, but it is a unity made up of those antagonisms which revolt us. In the second case it is a duality that leaves half of the world to the Devil.

We select what we call the divine and stand confused and abashed before the residue. We must either change our notion about the power we call God and make it all-inclusive, embracing evil as well as good, or else we must change our notion about Nature and see no evil in her. God and Nature are one. If they are two, who or what is the second?

How can we fail to see that all the shaded part of the picture is necessary to the picture--that all high lights would not make a picture, but only a daub; and that all that we call good would not make a world in which men could live and develop? Life goes on under conditions more or less antagonistic. The antagonism gives the power; the friction develops electricity. The vices and crimes and follies and excesses of society are the riot and overflow of the virtues. The pride of the rich, the tyranny of power, the lust of gain, the riot of sensuality, are all a little too much of a good thing--a little too much heat or light or rain or frost or snow or food or drink. There can be no perversions till there is something good to pervert, no counterfeits till there is first the genuine article.

The currents of wild life get out of their banks and we have, for example, a plague of locusts or moths or forest worms, but the natural check surely comes. The military spirit of Germany, which springs from a laudable devotion to the state and to the good of all, got out of its banks and brought on the World War, but the flood has subsided and will probably be so dyked that it can never get out again. It will find its outlet in the arts of peace.

IV

The so-called laws of Nature were not designed and decreed as our human laws are. There is no great lawgiver. Her laws are a sequence of events and activities; this sequence has worked itself out through countless ages. Nothing in the universe was designed in the human sense: it was not first a thought in some one’s mind, then to become an act or a contrivance. This concept does not express the mystery of creation. There is a constant becoming; there was no beginning, there can be no ending. There is perpetual change and revolution, perpetual transfer and promotion, but nothing that can be explained in terms of our human experience and achievement. The world and all it holds were created as the flower is created in the spring, as the snowflake is created in the winter, as the cloud is created in the summer sky. Man was created as the chick is created in the egg. Man has had a long day of creation; he has been becoming man since the first dawn of life in the old Palæozoic seas. His horse and his dog have been becoming what we behold them through all the geologic ages. This view does not leave the Eternal out of the universe; it puts Him in it so that He cannot be got out. It makes Him immanent in it at all points; it makes Nature transcend human reason and human speech. As long as we think of God as a kind of superman external to nature, we can deny Him and cut Him out, but when we identify ourselves and all things else with Him, there is no escaping Him. We ourselves are a phase or a fraction of Him. When we select or screen out what we name the good, the fair, the divine, and call that God, what are we to do with the residue? Call it the Devil? The Devil, too, then is a part of the Eternal Good. I want no emasculated universe. I want the fiber and virility and pungency and power and heat and drive which all that we call bad gives it.

Our mission is to tame and elevate and direct the elements and forces without weakening them. Thence comes our power. A perfect world would not be one without sin or suffering or struggle or failure. There can be no perfect world. But there can be one more and more livable, more and more in harmony with those laws that promote our well-being. Approximations, approximations--that is our success, and never complete fulfillment! When we say that God is the All, we must have the courage of our convictions and not flinch at the consequences. He is all that we call bad as well as all that we call good. What we call good is _our_ good, and not absolute good. There is no absolute good any more than there is absolute heat or cold or height or depth.

We work our way through the mazes and contradictions of things--contradictions from our point of view--as best we can, eliminating the bad and cleaving unto the good, but the total scheme of things, the reconciliations and compensations and final results, we can never grasp. We cannot abate our war upon evil, because we have our well-being on these terms, but evil is indirectly the father of good.

V

All religious and ethical systems grow out of our egoism. We plant ourselves in the middle of the universe and say it is all for us. We make gods in our own image, we invent a heaven for the good and a hell for the wicked, and seek to keep down the brute within us by a system of rewards and punishments. We improve our minds and souls as we improve the fields; we make them more fair and fertile, but we do not eliminate Nature; with her own weapons we improve our relations to her--we promote _our_ good, but we are still Nature’s; the harvest we reap is still Nature’s. Our improvements upon her are mere removal of obstructions from the rill that gushes perennially from her prolific earth. We improve her fruits, her flowers, her animals--that is, make them more serviceable to us--by means of the hold we have upon her methods. We add nothing; we utilize what she has placed within our reach. All of which means that we are Nature’s, and that our knowing it and thinking of it cannot make the slightest difference. Our fate is inevitable. There is no escape. Whose else could we be? We cannot get off the sphere; if we could, we should still be a part of the All. Our elaborate schemes to appropriate or propitiate the Eternal, to stand well with Him, to gain heaven and avoid hell, are devices of cunning Nature to spur us on the road of development. (How easily one falls into the language of extreme anthropomorphism!) The beautiful myth of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man is full of meaning. Surely it was a good devil that put man in the way of knowing good from evil, and led to his expulsion from a state of innocent impotence.

Nature’s dealings with man and with the other forms of life are on the same plan as her dealings with the earth as a whole. The drainage system of the globe is by no means perfect; there are marshes and stagnant waters in every country, but how small comparatively the area they cover! The rains and snows give birth to pure springs in all lands, which unite to form the creeks, which, again, unite to form the rivers, which flow into the lakes and seas, giving back to the great bodies of water what the sun and the winds took from them, and thus keeping the vital currents of the globe in ceaseless motion. The same may be said of the weather system of the globe; it is not perfect everywhere--too much rain here, too much sun there, too hot in some parts, too cold in others, but on the whole favoring life and development.

We think we could improve the weather. So we might for our special purposes at times--when it rains and we have hay down, or a crop to put in, or a picnic in view; but it is better on the whole that we adapt ourselves to the weather than that the weather be adapted to the special needs of each of us. The Lord would be pretty sure to get mixed up if He tried the latter plan.

A general and not a special Providence is our salvation. Good and evil mixed make life, as cloud and sun in due proportions make the best climate.

VI

War is a scourge like fire, the whirlwind, the earthquake, when viewed in the light of a particular time and people, but good may come from it after the lapse of ages. It strengthens and consolidates and develops the heroic virtues. Yet what a legacy of suffering and death go with it! But to invoke war is like invoking the pestilence, the tornado, the earthquake. The guilt of the German military staff in bringing on the World War is of the blackest dye. It may be a good to man, but it is a terrible evil to men. We cannot afford to play Providence; we must not play with Jove’s thunderbolts. War cannot come to any people unless somebody (or some body of men) wills it, and to will an aggressive war is a crime. No matter if the recent war puts a final end to war, the gods will not credit us with the good that flows from our act over and above our purpose and will.

All the good that comes from war comes from struggle, self-denial, heroism; and all courses of action that develop these traits are substitutes for war. The farm, the mining-camp, engineering, exploration, are substitutes. The best war material is recruited from these fields. The man who can guide the plowshare can wield the sword; the man who can face the grizzly and the lion can face the cannon and the torpedo. War develops no new virtues; it helps rejuvenate the old; obedience, team-work, system, organization and so on are achievements of an industrial age. In history most wrongs are finally righted and the balance is fairly kept, but this is not by the will and purpose of the actors, but by the remedial forces of nature and life.

The guilt falls the same upon the greed and lust of power, even if the gods finally reap a harvest that man’s iniquities have sown. He maketh the wicked to praise Him, but the wicked are to get no credit. Here is where our moral standards diverge from those of the natural universal. Our moral standards apply to us alone; they are special and limited. The gods know them not. The rain falls alike upon the just and upon the unjust. The poet says, “I judge not as the judge judges, but as the sunlight falling around a helpless thing.” This is the voice of the natural universal. When we judge as the judge judges, we condemn strife and war and all such uncharity, we execute or imprison criminals, we found asylums and hospitals and other charitable organizations; when we judge as Nature or the poet judges, we say to the fallen one:

“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.”

The All brings mercy out of cruelty, love out of hatred, life out of death, but man’s orbit is so small that he cannot harmonize these contradictions. The curve of the universal laws does not bring him round till generations have passed. To keep on traveling east till you approach your point of departure from the west, you must have the round globe to travel on. An empire would not avail.

VII

Good and evil are strangely mixed in this world, and probably in all other worlds. What is evil to one creature is often good to another. It is an evil to the vireo or to the warbler when the cowbird lays its egg in the nest of one of these birds, but it is a good to the cowbird. It relieves her of all maternal cares, and provides her young with a devoted nurse and stepmother, but the young warblers or vireos are likely to perish. All parasites live at the expense of some other form of life, and are to that extent evils to these forms; but Nature is just as much interested in one form as in the other; an ill wind to one blows good to another, and thus the balance is kept.

A world without evil would be an impossible world--as impossible as mechanical motion without friction or as sunlight without shadow. The two worlds, the organic and the inorganic, constantly interact. The former draws all its elements and its power from the latter, which is passive to it, and goes its way in the inexorable round of physical laws, irrespective of it. Viewed as a whole, the evils of life inhere in its elements and conditions. Air, water, fire, soil, give us our strength and our growth; they also destroy us if we fail to keep right relations to them. We cannot walk or lift a hand without gravity; and yet, give gravity a chance, and it crushes us, the floods drown us, fire consumes us! Could we have life on any other terms; could God himself annul these conditions?

Hunger is or may become an evil destroying life, but does it not imply the opposite condition of good--food, an appetite, power of assimilation in the organism? Disease is an evil to the living body it attacks, but it does not attack a dead body and it often educates the body to resist disease. It is a war which may leave the victor more capable than he was before.

Robert Ingersoll conceived of an improvement in creation--“make health contagious instead of disease.” But this is to trifle with words. In a certain sense health is contagious. But physical health, like peace of mind, is a condition, and must come from harmony within, while a contagious disease is conveyed by a living micro-organism, and is truly catching, and to change or reverse all this would be to destroy the conditions of life itself. To postulate a world in which two and two would make five, or in which a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points, is to take the road to the insane asylum. Evil is positive only in the sense that shadow or darkness is positive, or that cold is positive. It is a greater or lesser degree of negation.

In society and in the state we seek to curb or to correct or to eliminate Nature’s errors, and in doing so often fall into other errors and cross-purposes. Yet to fight what we call evil, and promote what we call good, is the supreme duty of all men. Physical evil the doctors and natural philosophers warn us against; moral evil, which is a much more intangible thing, our ethical teachers point out to us; mental evil, ignorance, superstition, false judgment, and so on, the schools and colleges help us to avoid; religious evil, economic evil, political evil, all have their safeguards and guides.

Why could not a world have been made in which there was no evil? In asking such a question we misapprehend the nature of the world; we are thinking of something made and a maker external to it; we are trying the universe by the standards of our human experience. The world was not made, man was not created in any sense paralleled by our human experience with tangible bodies. The world and all there is in it is the result of evolution, or an endless process of creation, an everlasting becoming, in which the nature of things beyond which we can take no step plays the principal part. A world on any other terms would not be the world to which we are adjusted, and out of whose conflicting forces our lives came.

There will be times when the light will blind the eye; other times when the darkness will heal and restore it; when the heat will burn the hand, when the food will poison the stomach, when the friend will weary you, when home is a prison, when books are a bore. Our relations to things make them good or bad: our momentary and accidental relations may make the good things bad, but our permanent natural relations make the good good, the bad bad.

In a world without the gravity which so often crushes us, we could not walk or lift the hand; without the friction which so often impedes us, our train and vehicles would not move; without the water that could so easily drown us, the currents of our bodies would dry up; without the germs that so often make war upon us, we should soon cease to be. Both friendly and hostile are the powers that surround us,--or, rather, is the power that surrounds us, for it is one and not two,--friendly when we are in the relation to it demanded and provided for by our constitution, and unfriendly when we are in false relation to it. To know this true relation from the false is a part of the discipline of life.

I know this is not the end of the story; there are more questions to be asked. We want a solution of the last solution, but this can never come. Final questions return forever to themselves; they baffle us, constituted as our minds are; they are circles and not lines.

VI

The Natural Providence

I

What unthinking people call design in nature is simply the reflection of our inevitable anthropomorphism. Whatever they can use, they think was designed for that purpose--the air to breathe, the water to drink, the soil to plant. It is as if they thought the notch in the mountains was made for the road to pass over, or the bays and harbor for the use of cities and shipping. But in inorganic nature the foot is made to fit the shoe and not the reverse. We are cast in the mould of the environment. If the black cap of the nuthatch which comes to the maple-tree in front of my window and feeds on the suet I place there were a human thinking-cap, the bird would see design in the regular renewal of that bit of suet; he would say, “Some one or something puts that there for me”; but he helps himself and asks no questions. The mystery does not trouble him. Why should not I, poor mortal, feel the same about these blessings and conveniences around me of which I hourly partake, and which seem so providential? Why do not I, with my thinking-cap, infer that some one or something is thinking about me and my well-being? The mass of mankind does draw this inference, and it is well for them to do so. But the case of the bird is different. The bit of suet that I feed on is not so conspicuously something extra, something added to the tree; it is a part of the tree; it is inseparable from it. I am compelled, as it were, to distil it out of the tree, so that instead of being the act of a special providence, it is the inevitable benefaction of the general providence of nature. What the old maple holds for me is maple-sugar, but it was not put there for me; it is there just the same, whether I want it or not; it is a part of the economy of the tree; it is a factor in its own growth; the tree is not thinking of me (pardon the term), but of itself. Of course this does not make my debt to it, and my grounds for thankfulness, any the less real, but it takes it out of the category of events such as that which brings the suet to the nuthatch. The Natural Providence is not intermittent, it is perennial; but it takes no thought of me or you. It is life that is flexible and adaptive, and not matter and force. “We do not,” says Renan, “remark in the universe any sign of deliberate and thoughtful action. We may affirm that no action of this sort has existed for millions of centuries.” I think we may affirm more than that--we may affirm that it never existed. Some vestige of the old theology still clung to Renan’s mind--there was a day of creation in which God set the universe going, and then left it to run itself; the same vestige clung to Darwin’s mind and led him to say that in the beginning God must have created a few species of animals and vegetables and then left them to develop and populate the world.

Says Renan, “When a chemist arranges an experiment that is to last for years, everything which takes place in his retort is regulated by the laws of absolute unconsciousness; which does not mean that a will has not intervened at the beginning of the experiment, and that it will not intervene at the end.” There was no beginning nor will there be any ending to the experiment of creation; the will is as truly there in the behavior of the molecules at one time as at another. The effect of Renan’s priestly training and associations clings to him like a birthmark.

In discussing these questions our plumb-line does not touch bottom, because there is no bottom. “In the infinite,” says Renan with deeper insight, “negations vanish, contradictions are merged”; in other words, opposites are true. Where I stand on the surface of the sphere is the center of that surface, but that does not prevent the point where you stand being the center also. Every point is a center, and the sky is overhead at one place as at another; opposites are true.

The moral and intellectual worlds present the same contradictions or limitations--the same relatively of what we call truth.

Nature’s ways--which with me is the same as saying God’s ways--are so different from ours; “no deliberate and thoughtful action,” as Renan puts it, no economy of time or material, no short cuts, no cutting-out of non-essentials, no definite plan, no specific ends, few straight lines or right angles; her streams loiter and curve, her forces are unbridled; no loss or gain; her accounts always balance; the loss at one point, or with one form, is a gain with some other--all of which is the same as saying that there is nothing artificial in Nature. All is Natural, all is subject to the hit-and-miss method. The way Nature trims her trees, plants her forests, sows her gardens, is typical of the whole process of the cosmos. God is no better than man because man is a part of God. From our human point of view he is guilty of our excesses and shortcomings. Time does not count, pain does not count, waste does not count. The wonder is that the forests all get planted by this method, the pines in their places, the spruces in theirs, the oaks and maples in theirs; and the trees get trimmed in due time, now and then, it is true, by a very wasteful method. A tree doctor could save and prolong the lives of many of them. The small fountains and streams all find their way to larger streams, and these to still larger, and these to lakes or to the sea, and the drainage system of the continents works itself out with engineering exactitude. The decay of the rocks and the formation of the soil come about in due time, but not in man’s time. In all the grand processes and transformations of nature the element of time enters on such a scale as to dwarf all human efforts.

II

When we say of a thing or an event that it was a chance happening, we do not mean that it was not determined by the laws of matter and force, but we mean it was not the result of the human will, or of anything like it; it was not planned or designed by conscious intelligence. Chance in this sense plays a very large part in nature and in life. Though the result of irrefragable laws, the whole non-living world about us shows no purpose or forethought in our human sense. For instance, we are compelled to regard the main features of the earth as matters of chance, the distribution of land and water, of islands and continents, of rivers, lakes, seas, mountains and plains, valleys and hills, the shapes of the continents; that there is more land in the northern hemisphere than in the southern, more land at the South Pole than at the North, is a matter of chance. The serpentine course of a stream through an alluvial plain, a stream two yards wide, winding and ox-bowing precisely as does the Mississippi, is a matter of chance. The whole geography of a country, in fact, is purely a matter of chance, and not the result of anything like human forethought. The planets themselves--that Jupiter is large and Mercury small; that Saturn has rings; that Jupiter has seven moons; that the Earth has one; that other planets have none; that some of the planets are in a condition to sustain life as we know it, for example, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars; that some revolve in more elliptical orbits than others; that Mercury and Venus apparently always keep the same side toward the sun--all these things are matters of chance. It is easy to say, as did our fathers, that God designed it thus and so, but how are we to think of an omnipotent and omniscient Being as planning such wholesale destruction of his own works as occurs in the cosmic catastrophes which the astronomers now and then witness in the sidereal universe, or even as occur on the earth, when earthquakes and volcanoes devastate fair lands or engulf the islands of the sea? Why should such a Being design a desert, or invent a tornado, or ordain that some portion of the earth’s surface should have almost perpetual rain and another portion almost perpetual drought? In Hawaii I saw islands that were green and fertile on one end from daily showers, while the other end, ten miles away, was a rough barren rock, from the entire absence of showers. Were the trade winds designed to bring the vapors of the sea to the tropic lands?

In following this line of thought we, of course, soon get where no step can be taken. Is the universe itself a chance happening? Such a proposition is unthinkable, because something out of nothing is unthinkable. Our experience in this world develops our conceptions of time and space, and to set bounds to either is an impossible task. We say the cosmos must always have existed, and there we stop. We have no faculties to deal with the great ultimate problems.

We are no better off when we turn to the world of living things. Here we see design, particular means adapted to specific ends. Shall we say that a bird or a bee or a flower is a chance happening, as is the rainbow or the sunset cloud or a pearl or a precious stone? Is man himself a chance happening? Here we are stuck and cannot lift our feet. The mystery and the miracle of vitality, as Tyndall called it, is before us. Here is the long, hard road of evolution, the push and the unfolding of life through countless ages, something more than the mechanical and the accidental, though these have played a part; something less than specific plan and purpose, though we seem to catch dim outlines of these.

Spontaneous variations, original adaptations, a never-failing primal push toward higher and more complex forms--how can we, how shall we, read the riddle of it all? How shall we account for man on purely naturalistic grounds?

The consistent exponent of variation cannot go into partnership with supernaturalism. Grant that the organic split off from the inorganic by insensible degrees, yet we are bound to ask what made it split off at all?--and how it was that the first unicellular life contained the promise and the potency of all the life of to-day? Such questions take us into deep waters where our plummet-line finds no bottom. It suits my reason better to say there is no solution than to accept a solution which itself needs solution, and still leaves us where we began.

The adjustment of non-living bodies to each other seems a simple matter, but in considering the adaptations of living bodies to one another, and to their environment, we are confronted with a much harder problem. Life is an active principle, not in the sense that gravity and chemical reactions are active principles, but in a quite different sense. Gravity and chemical reactions are always the same, inflexible and uncompromising; but life is ever variable and adaptive; it will take half a loaf if it cannot get a whole one. Gravity answers yea and nay. Life says, “Probably; we will see about it; we will try again to-morrow.” The oak-leaf will become an oak-ball to accommodate an insect that wants a cradle and a nursery for its young; it will develop one kind of a nursery for one insect and another kind for a different insect.

III

As far as I have got, or ever hope to get, toward solving the problem of the universe is to see clearly that it is insoluble. One can arrive only at negative conclusions; he comes to see that the problem cannot be dealt with in terms of our human experience and knowledge. But what other terms have we? Our knowledge does not qualify us in any degree to deal with the Infinite. The sphere has no handle to take hold of, and the Infinite baffles the mind in the same way. Measured by our human standards, it is a series of contradictions. The method of Nature is a haphazard method, yet behold the final order and completeness! How many of her seeds she trusts to the winds and the waters, and her fertilizing pollens and germs also! And the winds and the waters do her errands, with many failures, of course, but they hit the mark often enough to serve her purpose. She provides lavishly enough to afford her failures.

When we venture upon the winds and the waters with our crafts, we aim to control them, and we reach our havens only when we do control them.

What is there in the method of Nature that answers to the human will in such matters? Nothing that I can see; yet her boats and her balloons reach their havens--not all of them, but enough of them for her purpose. Yet when we apply the word “purpose” or “design” to Nature, to the Infinite, we are describing her in terms of the finite, and thus fall into contradictions. Still, the wings and balloons and hooks and springs in the vegetable world are for a specific purpose--to scatter the seed far from the parent plant. Every part and organ and movement of a living body serves a purpose to that organism. The mountain lily looks straight up to the sky; the meadow lily looks down to the earth; undoubtedly each flower finds its advantage in its own attitude, but what that advantage is, I know not. If Nature planned and invented as man does, she would attain to mere unity and simplicity. It is her blind, prodigal, haphazard methods that result in her endless diversity. When she got a good wing for the seed of a tree, such as that of the maple, she would, if merely efficient, give this to the seeds of other similar trees; but she gives a different wing to the ash, to the linden, to the elm, the pine, and the hemlock, while to some she gives no wings at all. The nut-bearing trees, such as the oaks, the beeches, the walnuts, and the hickories, have no wings, except such as are afforded them by the birds and beasts that feed upon them and carry them away. And here again Nature has a purpose in the edible nut which tempts some creatures to carry it away. If all the nuts were devoured, the whole tribe of nut-bearing trees would in time be exterminated, and Nature’s end defeated. But in a world of conflicting forces like ours, chance plays an important part; many of the nuts get scattered, and not all devoured. The hoarding-up propensities of certain birds and squirrels result in the planting of many oaks and chestnuts and beeches.

The inherent tendency to variation in organic life, together with Nature’s hit-and-miss method, account for her endless variety on the same plane, as it were, as that of her many devices for disseminating her seeds. One plan of hook or barb serves as well as another,--that of bidens as well as that of hound’s-tongue,--yet each has a pattern of its own. The same may be said of the leaves of the trees: their function is to expose the juices of the tree to the chemical action of light and air; yet behold what an endless variety in their shape, size, and structure! This is the way of the Infinite--to multiply endlessly, to give a free rein to the physical forces and let them struggle with one another for the stable equilibrium to which they never, as a whole, attain; to give the same free rein to the organic forces and let their various forms struggle with one another for the unstable equilibrium which is the secret of their life.

The many contingencies that wait upon the circuit of the physical forces and determine the various forms of organic matter--rocks, sand, soil, gravel, mountain, plain--all shifting and changing endlessly--wait upon the circuit of the organic forces and turn the life-impulse into myriad channels, and people the earth with myriads of living forms, each accidental from our limited point of view, while all are determined by irrefragable laws. The contradictions in such statements are obvious and are inevitable when the finite tries to measure or describe the ways of the Infinite.

The waters of the globe are forever seeking the repose of a dead level, but when they attain it, if they ever do, the world will be dead. Behold what a career they have in their circuit from the sea to the clouds and back to the earth in the ministering rains, and then to the sea again through the streams and rivers! The mantling snow with its exquisite crystals, the grinding and transporting glaciers, the placid or plowing and turbulent rivers, the sparkling and refreshing streams, the cooling and renewing dews, the softening and protecting vapors, wait upon this circuit of the waters through the agency of the sun, from the sea, through the sky and land, back to the sea again. Yes, and all the myriad forms of life also. This circuit of the waters drives and sustains all the vital machinery of the globe.

Why and how the sun and the rain bring the rose and the violet, the peach and the plum, the wheat and the rye, and the boys and the girls, out of the same elements and conditions that they bring the thistles and the tares, the thorn and the scrub, the fang and the sting, the monkey and the reptile, is the insoluble mystery.

If Nature aspires toward what we call the good in man, does she not equally aspire toward what we call the bad in thorns and weeds and reptiles? May we not say that good is our good, and bad is our bad, and that there is, and can be, no absolute good and no absolute bad, any more than there can be an absolute up or an absolute down?

How haphazard, how fortuitous and uncalculated is all this business of the multiplication of the human race! What freaks, what failures, what monstrosities, what empty vessels, what deformed limbs, what defective brains, what perverted instincts! It is as if in the counsels of the Eternal it had been decided to set going an evolutionary impulse that should inevitably result in man, and then leave him to fail or flourish just as the ten thousand contingencies of the maelstrom of conflicting earth forces should decide, so that whether a man become a cripple or an athlete, a fool or a philosopher, a satyr or a god, is largely a matter of chance. Yet the human brain has steadily grown in size, human mastery over nature has steadily increased, and chance has, upon the whole, brought more good to man than evil. Optimism is a final trait of the Eternal.

And the taking-off of man, how haphazard, how fortuitous it all is! His years shall be threescore and ten; but how few, comparatively, reach that age, how few live out half their days! Disease, accident, stupidity, superstition, cut him off at all ages--in infancy, in childhood, in youth, in manhood; his whole life is a part of the flux and uncertainty of things. No god watches over him aside from himself and his kind, no atom or molecule is partial to him, gravity crushes him, fire burns him, the floods drown him as readily as they do vipers and vermin. He takes his chances, he gains, and he loses, but Nature treats him with the same impartiality that she treats the rest of her creatures. He runs the same gantlet of the hostile physical forces, he pays the same price for his development; but his greater capacity for development--to whom or what does he owe that? If we follow Darwin we shall say natural selection, and natural selection is just as good a god as any other. No matter what we call it, if it brought man to the head of creation and put all things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough for anybody. At the heart of it there is still a mystery we cannot grasp. The ways of Nature about us are no less divine because they are near and familiar. The illusion of the rare and the remote, science dispels. Of course we are still trying to describe the Infinite in terms of the finite.

IV

We are so attached to our kind, and so dependent upon them, that most persons feel homeless and orphaned in a universe where no suggestion of sympathy and interest akin to our own comes to us from the great void. A providence of impersonal forces, the broadcast, indiscriminate benefits of nature, kind deeds where no thought of kindness is, well-being as the result of immutable law--all such ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured ourselves to them. We love to fancy that we see friendly hands and hear friendly voices in nature. It is easy to make ourselves believe that the rains, the warmth, the fruitful seasons, are sent by some Being for our especial benefit. The thought that we are adapted to nature and not nature made or modified to suit us, is distasteful to us. It rubs us the wrong way. We have long been taught to believe that there is air because we have lungs, and water because we need it to drink, and light because we need it to see. Science takes this conceit out of us. The light begat the eye, and the air begat the lungs.

In the universe, as science reveals it to us, sensitive souls experience the cosmic chill; in the universe as our inevitable anthropomorphism shapes it for us, we experience the human glow. The same anthropomorphism has in the past peopled the woods and fields and streams and winds with good and evil spirits, and filled the world with cruel and debasing superstitions; but in our day we have got rid of all of this; we have abolished all gods but one. This one we still fear, and bow down before, and seek to propitiate--not with offerings and sacrifices, but with good Sunday clothes and creeds and pew-rents and praise and incense and surplices and ceremonies. What Brocken shadows our intense personalism casts upon nature! We see the gigantic outlines of our own forms, and mistake them for a veritable god. But as we ourselves are a part of nature, so this humanizing tendency of ours is also a part of nature, a part of human nature--not valid and independent, like the chemical and physical forces, but as valid and real as our dreams, our ideas, our aspirations. All the gods and divinities and spirits with which man has peopled the heavens and the earth are a part of Nature as she manifests herself in our subjective selves. So there we are, on a trail that ends where it began. We condemn one phase of nature through another phase of nature that is active in our own minds. How shall we escape this self-contradiction? As we check or control the gravity without us by the power of the gravity in our own bodies, so our intelligence must sit in judgment on phases of the same Universal Intelligence manifested in outward nature.

It is this recognition of an intelligence in nature akin to our own that gives rise to our anthropomorphism. We recognize in the living world about us the use of specific means to specific ends, and this we call intelligence. It differs from our own in that it is not selective and intensive in the same way. It does not take short cuts; it does not aim at human efficiency; it does not cut out waste and delay and pain. It is the method of trial and error. It hits its mark because it hits all marks. Species succeed because the tide that bears them on is a universal tide. It is not a river, but an ocean current. Nature progresses, but not as man does by discarding one form and adapting a higher. She discards nothing; she keeps all her old forms and ways and out of them evolves the higher; she keeps the fish’s fin, while she perfects the bird’s wing; she preserves the invertebrate, while she fashions the vertebrate; she achieves man, while she preserves the monkey. She gropes her way like a blind man, but she arrives because all goals are hers. Perceptive intelligence she has given in varying degrees to all creatures, but reasoning intelligence she has given to man alone. I say “given,” after our human manner of speaking, when I mean “achieve.” There is no giving in Nature--there is effort and development. There is interchange and interaction, but no free gifts. Things are bought with a price. T