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THE OUTLOOK TO NATURE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

The Outlook
to Nature

• AyBY

Ll. H/ BAILEY

NEW AND REVISED EDITION

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
191 1

All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1905, 1911,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published 1905.

New and revised edition published February, 19x1.

XortoooD

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick <fc Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO

/IDs ffatber

WHOSE MORE THAN FOUR-SCORE AND TEN STURDY

YEARS HAVE BEEN LIVED ON THE FARM

— NATURALIST WITHOUT KNOWING IT —

1 dedicate tbte JSoofc

THIS book contains four lectures given in
the Colonial Theatre, Boston, as a part of the
University Course, under the auspices of the
Education Committee of the Twentieth Cen-
tury Club. The lectures were delivered in
January, 1905, although scheduled for a year
earlier. Parts of the fourth lecture once ap-
peared in The Independent.

ITHACA, N. Y.,
MARCH, i, 1905.

These chapters have now been revised, and
the book is re-set ; and the size of the vol-
ume is reduced, for some of the incidental
subjects are treated more fully in the other
books now combined with it to make the Rural

Outlook Set.

L. H. BAILEY.

NOVEMBER 8, 1910.

Vll

THE LECTURES

PAGE

THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE . . . 1—49
The spontaneous — The return to nature — It is
not empty resignation — The out-of-doors —
The youthful life — The near-at-hand.
What Literature can do for Us (10).

The nature-writing — The newspaper — Real
progress moves quietly — The farm is funda-
mental — Nature pictures in literary form —
The great writers — Nature poetry — Industry
is poetic — We need new standards — Persons
still like poetry — The resource of the silences.
The Ways of Approach to Nature (30).

The nature companion — The weather — The
common natural history — The ground — The
heavens — The high places.
The Conclusion of the Whole Matter (49).

II

COUNTRY AND CITY . "-.- . , . 50-96

The proportion of farming people — The open
country is essential — Compounded foods —

PAGE

The Lectures

The city lives on the country — The country
is making progress — Resiliency of the West
— The open country has its own society —
The country school and college — The city gal-
leries and collections — The out-door galleries.

Countryman and City Man (68).
Two points of view — The sub-urban — The
city obligation.

The Garden (74).

The garden room — The spirit of the garden.
The Outlook for the Country (79).

The country home — Millinery architecture —
The need of social association — Reading for
resource — The nature- ward tendency — The
reverential attitude — The point of attack —
The poetical farmer.

We need the Country (91).

We need the example of simple institutions — Not
all the people should live on salary — We need
the out-of-doors.

Ill

THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE . .• . 97-137
Education for " culture " — Education for power
— Application to life — Liberal education —
The humanities.

The School of Affairs (104).
The school of farm affairs.

The Lectures xi

PACK

The New School (117).

The new laboratories — The material of occupa-
tions — Manual training — The new program

— We need equipment in land — The school-
garden — The growing child — The nature-
attitude — The content-work — Self-expression

— The result begins to be seen — The older
subjects — Old phrases — The school of the
future.

IV

EVOLUTION: THE QUEST OF TRUTH . . 138—195
The evolution hypothesis — Point of view of the
discussion — Disproof by assumption — Dis-
proof by misunderstanding — Evolution vs.
transmutation — Evolution in operation.
Evidences of Evolution (151).

The species-bogey — The return to evidence — •
Species-making in practice — The missing link

— The tree of life — The underlying consid-
erations — Direct considerations — The pro-
cesses — Evolution in operation — Geographical
differences — Darwin's conception.

Some Consequences of the Evolution Teaching (169).
The new attitude of mind — The new natural
history — The new application of natural his-
tory — New attitude toward institutions and
affairs — New attitude toward others — New
attitude toward the quest of knowledge.

xii The Lectures

An Evolutionist 's Outlook (178).

It is not a verbal revelation — The search for
God — Heaven — The vast program — The
place of the individual — The truth shall make
us free — Evolution and religion — The pass-
ing of fear and doubt — The outposts.

THE OUTLOOK TO NATURE

I

The Realm of the Commonplace

I SAT at the window of a hotel chamber,
musing at the panorama that comes and
goes in a thousand cities. There were hu-
man beings pouring in and out, up and
down, as if moved by some restless and relent-
less machinery. Most of them were silent and
serious and went quickly on. Some sauntered,
and returned again and again as if looking for
something that they did not expect to find.
Carriages went up and down in endless
pageant. Trolley-cars rushed by, clanging
and grinding as they headlonged into the side
streets. Meretricious automobiles with gor-
gon-eyed drivers whirred into the crowds, scat-

2 Outlook to Nature

taring the street crossers. Men passed with
banners and advertising placards. Women
paraded with streaming headgear and tem-
pestuous gowns. A resplendent trumpeter
rolled by in a tallyho. A hundred other
devices to attract the eye and distract the ear
came out and vanished ; and yet no one
stopped and no one seemed to care. Now
and then a knot of men would form, as some
one fell or as wagons collided ; but the knots
as quickly dissolved, and I knew that they were
made up of the idle, who were amused for the
moment and then floated on hoping for fresh
entertainment. A hurdy-gurdy attracted only
a bevy of scurrying children. A little girl
with armful of newspapers moved in and out
unnoticed.

Suddenly a dog leaped down a flight of steps
and was followed by two little children laugh-
ing and screaming. The dog felt his freedom
and the children were in pursuit. The crowd
stopped; the stern-faced men with high hats
stopped ; the well-dressed women stopped.
Even a cabby pulled up his horse as the chil-

The Commonplace 3

dren dashed on the pavement after the escap-
ing dog. Back and forth the children ran.
On the far side of the street the people halted
and took their hands out of their pockets.
The children caught the dog and bundled it
lovingly into the house ; the crowd applauded,
and dispersed.

Every person seemed to be surprised that
he had stopped. From my height I thought
I could discern the reason for such curious
phenomenon : in all the blare and blazonry
of that tumultuous thoroughfare, this was the
only episode of real spontaneous and exuber-
ant human nature. All else was a kind of
acting, and every person unconsciously recog-
nized that it was so. I thought how rare must
common naturalness be, and how much has it
been driven from our lives !

The spontaneous.

If a person has given any serious thought
to public questions, he has his own contribu-
tion to make as to the causes of present con-
ditions and the means of bettering them ; so

4 Outlook to Nature

I make mine : what is now much needed in the
public temper is such a change of attitude as
will make us to see and appreciate the com-
monplace and the spontaneous, and to have
the desire to maintain and express our youth-
ful enthusiasms. And it is my special part to
try, so far as possible, to open the eyes and
the heart to nature and the common-day con-
dition. My point of view is, of course, that of
the countryman, and no doubt it has the coun-
tryman's bias.

So great has been the extension of knowledge,
and so many the physical appliances that mul-
tiply our capabilities, that we are verily bur-
dened with riches. We are so eager to enter
all the strange and ambitious avenues that we
overlook the soil at our feet.

We live in an age of superlatives, I had
almost said of super-superlatives, so much so
that even the superlatives now begin to pall.
The reach for something new has become so
much a part of our lives that we cease to recog-
nize the fact, and accept novelty as a matter of
course. If we shall fail to satisfy ourselves

The Commonplace 5

with the new, the strange, and the eccentric,
perhaps we shall find ourselves returning to
the old commonplace and the familiar, and
perhaps we shall be able to extract new delights
from them because of the flights we have taken.
Perhaps in their turn the commonplaces will be
again the superlatives, and we shall be content
with the things that come naturally and in due
order. Certain it is that every sensitive soul
feels this longing for something that is ele-
mental in the midst of the voluminous and
intricate, something free and natural that shall
lie close to the heart and really satisfy his best
desires.

The return to nature.

It is not likely that we shall greatly simplify
our outward physical and business affairs.
Probably it is not desirable that we should do
so, for we must maintain our executive effi-
ciency. We have seen a marvelous development
of affairs, expressed in the renovation of a
hundred old occupations and the creation of a
thousand new ones. M ost of these occupations

6 Outlook to Nature

are clear gain to the world, and we may expect
them to endure.

This rise of affairs has emphasized the con-
trasts of business and of home. Machinery
and intricacy belong to affairs ; but a plainer
and directer mental attitude should belong to
our personal and private hours. The effective
simplicity is not the lessening of physical
conveniences and aids, but the absence of
complex desires in eating and dress and enter-
tainment and accessories, and in a native atti-
tude toward life.

Perhaps our greatest specific need is a whole-
some return to nature in our moments of lei-
sure,— all the more important now that the
moments of leisure are so few. This return to
nature is by no means a cure-all for the ills of
civilization, but it is one of the means of restor-
ing the proper balance and proportion in our
lives. It stands for the antithesis of acting and
imitation, for a certain pause and repose, for a
kind of spiritual temper, for the development
of the inner life as contrasted with the exter-
nals.

The Commonplace 7

// is not empty resignation.

Some persons have supposed that the " con-
tentment " of the nature-lover implies unvexed
indifference to the human affairs of the time, and
that therefore it makes for a kind of serene and
weak utopianism ; but to my mind, the outlook
to nature makes for just the reverse of all this.
If nature is the norm, then the necessity for
challenging and amending the abuses that ac-
company civilization becomes baldly apparent
by very contrast. The repose of the nature-
lover and the assiduous exertion of the man of
affairs are complementary, not antithetical,
states of mind.

The recourse to nature affords the very means
of acquiring the incentive and energy for con-
structive work of a high order ; it enforces the
great truth that, in the affairs of men, con-
tinued progress is conditioned upon a generous
discontent and diligent unrest.

The outlook to nature is the outlook to
optimism, for nature is our governing condi-
tion. Men look upward and outward to
nature.

8 Outlook to Nature

The out-of-doors.

By nature, I mean the natural out-of-doors,
— the snow and the rain, the sky, the plants,
the animals, the garden and the orchard, the
running brooks, and every landscape that is
easy of access and undefiled.

Every person desires these things in greater
or lesser degree : this is indicated by the rapidly
spreading suburban movement, by the vacation-
ing in the country, and by the astonishing mul-
tiplication of books about nature. Yet there
are comparatively very few persons who have
any intimate contact with nature, or any con-
crete enjoyment from it, because they lack the
information that enables them to understand
the objects and phenomena.

The youthful life.

Our eager civilization prematurely makes us
mentally old. It may be true that the span
of man's life is increasing, but at twenty we
have the knowledge and the perplexities that
our grandfathers had only at forty. Our chil-
dren may now be older when they are graduated

The Commonplace 9

from school, but the high-school course of to-
day is more complex than was the college course
of fifty years ago. All this has a tendency to
lessen the years of free and joyous youth.

You have only to see the faces of boys
and girls on your city streets, to discover
how old the young have grown to be. In
home and school our methods have been
largely those of repression : this is why the
natural buoyant outburst that I described for a
city thoroughfare challenged such instant atten-
tion and surprise. We need to emphasize the
youthful life ; and a man or woman may have
a youthful mind in an old body.

The near-at-hand.

Therefore, I preach the things that we
ourselves did not make ; for we are all
idolaters, — the things of our hands we
worship. I preach the near-at-hand, how-
ever plain and ordinary, — the cloud and the
sunshine ; the green pastures ; the bird on
its nest and the nest on its bough ; the
rough bark of trees ; the frost on bare thin

io Outlook to Nature

twigs ; the mouse skittering to its burrow ; the
insect seeking its crevice ; the smell of the
ground ; the sweet wind ; the silent stars ;
the leaf that clings to its twig or that falls
when its work is done.

Wisdom flows from these as it can never
flow from libraries and laboratories. " There
be four things," say the Proverbs, " which
are little upon the earth, but they are exceed-
ing wise :

" The ants are a people not strong, yet
they prepare their meat in the summer;

" The conies are but a feeble folk, yet
make they their houses in the rocks ;

" The locusts have no king, yet go they
forth all of them by bands ;

" The spider taketh hold with her hands',
and is in kings' palaces."

WHAT LITERATURE CAN DO FOR Us

Some of us do not enjoy nature because
there is not enough sheer excitement in it.
It has not enough dash and go for this
electric age ; and this is the very reason why

The Commonplace 1 1

we need the solace and resource of nature
so much.

I am led to these remarks on looking over
the lists of Christmas books, and rinding my-
self challenged with the recurrence of the word
"sensation." In the announcement of the
forthcoming number of a magazine, I find
twenty articles, of which at least nineteen are
to be " tragic," " thrilling," " mystery-laden,"
or otherwise worth buying. The twentieth one
I hope to read.

One would think that a piece of writing
is valuable in proportion as it is racy, ex-
citing, startling, astounding, striking, sensa-
tional. In these days of sensational sales,
to have a book sell phenomenally well is
almost a condemnation of it. An article or
book that merely tells a plain story directly
and well is too tame ; so even when we write
of nature we must pick out the unusual,
then magnify and galvanize it. From this
literature the reader goes out to nature and
finds it slow and uninteresting; he must
have a faster pace and a giddier whirl of

12 Outlook to Nature

events. He has little power to entertain
himself; and, his eyes never having been
trained to see what he looks at, he discovers
nothing and the world is void. He may find
temporary relief in some entertainment pro-
vided for him out of hand, as the so-called
news of the newspapers or some witless frip-
pery on the stage.

Yet, unless the poets and philosophers have
misled us, the keenest delights that men have
found have been the still small voices of the
open fields.

The nature writing.

This is a real objection to much of the nature
writing, — the fact that it is unrepresentative
of nature. It exploits the exceptional, and
therefore does not give the reader a truthful
picture of common and average conditions.
This has been true to some extent even of text-
books, — they choose so-called "typical " forms
and structures, forgetting that typical examples
exist only in books for purposes of defini-
tion.

The Commonplace 1 3

The good nature writing, as I conceive of it,
is that which portrays the commonplace so
truthfully and so clearly that the reader forth-
with goes out to see for himself. Some day
we shall care less for the marvelous beasts of
some far-off country than for the mice and
squirrels and birds and woodchucks of our own
fields and for the cattle on our hills.

If I were a naturalist, I should go forthwith to
study the mice and then write of them for all
children ; for, of all untamed animals, what
ones are known to a greater number of chil-
dren ? — and yet what do the children know
except that they have been early taught by
their elders to dislike or even to fear these
entertaining animals ? The embodiment of all
agility, of all quick dispatch, of all neat habits
and of comeliness, of unseen and devious ways,
is the mouse. What other object was ever so
swift and silent and graceful as it slides along
the corners of your room as intangible as a
shadow ! What explorer was ever so success-
ful as it peers into drawers and sniffs in cup-
boards !

14 Outlook to Nature

In my boyhood the field mice were a constant
source of entertainment and mystery. I found
them scuddled in the corn shocks, burrowed in
the dry grass, nesting in the corn-crib. I saw
their faint narrow trails on new-fallen snow,
leading into strange pygmy caverns.

The' newspaper.

Just now I said something of the "news."
It is important that we recur to this subject,
since we are a people of news readers, and
continuous reading strongly, though silently,
influences our outlook to nature and affairs.

Much of what is called news is so unimpor-
tant that it is not worth the while of a person
whose time is of value; but my chief objection
to it, as to some of the nature writing, is that it
is no way representative of human affairs, — if
it were, I suppose it would not be new and
therefore would not be news. It is made up to
a large extent of exceptional and meaningless
episodes and extravagancies.

Yesterday I saw hundreds of persons on cars
and ferries eagerly reading the " news." I

The Commonplace 15

bought a paper resplendent with photography
and colored ink. The first page had eight
articles, seven of which were devoted to cases
of divorce, common rascality and crime, and
unimportant local accidents, all displayed as if
it would advantage a man to read them. Only
one article dealt with public affairs, and this
was hidden underneath small headlines. The
newspaper had no sense of proportion. All the
detail of a divorce case was given with as much
circumstantial minuteness as if it were of equal
importance with a debate in Congress or the
deliberations of the international peace confer-
ence.

As I was about to write these sentences, I
chanced to pick up the following editorial para-
graph from a country newspaper (The Seneca
Falls, N. Y., " Reveille"):

" The sound and wholesome qualities which
make for all that is most prized in life are to be
found in the great masses of the people, and are
scarcely touched by the currents of the time
which make for evil, and with which the news
of the day is necessarily so largely concerned.

1 6 Outlook to Nature

It is not the doings or the ways of the great
bulk of the people — those who quietly earn a
modest living by ordinary industry — that fur-
nish much material either for news or for com-
ment. We take all that for granted, and when
we think of the tendencies of the time, we almost
forget its existence. When a touch of nature
happens to bring into unaccustomed relief the
existence of the homely but sturdy and sterling
virtues of the great American people, their right-
mindedness and true-heartedness, it is well to
draw from the event the lesson that manhood
and merit are after all the things which create
the very best character for our country and
government."

Real progress moves quietly.

We gather from this extract the opinion
that what we call the " slow " and " dull " may,
after all, be the saving strength of a people. In
the hamlets and villages and small country cities,
great problems are working themselves out just
as effectively as in the mighty cities; and although
slowly, or even because slowly, they may be

The Commonplace 17

working out more fundamentally than else-
where. The great mass of mankind is un-
recorded and practically unknown. A few of
us are actors, and we pass with some noise and
flourish across the stage ; but the sources of
events are behind and beyond. I have heard
the saying attributed to a statesman that if the
discussions either at the country four-corners
or in the President's Cabinet were to cease, it
were better to do away with the Cabinet. Public
opinion does not seem to originate to any ex-
tent with the leaders : the leaders are more
likely to catch and voice the crystallizing senti-
ments of the commonplace, originating slowly
and perhaps unconsciously with those who
work first-handed with the forces that make for
prosperity.

It is too bad that all this may not be re-
flected in our common literature.

The farm is fundamental.

We might go even farther than the ham-
let or the town, — to the family unit on the re-
motest farm. This unit is considered by most of

1 8 Outlook to Nature

the other members of the race to be the com-
monplace of the commonplace ; yet, along with
the farming, human problems are being worked
out. There boys and girls are being reared
and even trained, who some day may come to
your cities and distance your own sons and
daughters ; for it is a discouraging fact that, with
all we are doing for schooling, merit and effi-
ciency do not seem to increase in proportion,
and those whom we are in the habit of calling un-
educated may take the highest prizes that the
world has to give.

The farm, in its turn, is being exploited
in our current literature ; and, significantly
enough, much of this literature is of the sensa-
tional order. Of all things to be sensation-
alized, the farm should be the last. The farm
need not be prosaic nor devoid of good intel-
lectual interest ; but its very spirit is that of
constancy.

We should stimulate the ideals in every occu-
pation ; but the ideal should follow closely the
facts and the spirit of the real. We need to
idealize the commonplace, for then we show its

The Commonplace 1 9

possibilities. When we develop the ideals in
farming, we shall add a great resource to our
people.

Nature pictures in literary form.

We need a new literature of nature and
the open country, a literature that shall not be
lifelessly descriptive. We need short, sharp,
quick, direct word- pictures that shall place
the object before us as vividly as the painter
would outline some strong simple figure with
a few bold strokes of his brush ; and it is not
essential to the truth of the picture that a
rhetorical climax be added. It may not be
necessary even to make a " point," but only to
bring the picture before the mind.

Every object and every common labor awaken
some response beyond themselves, and this re-
sponse can be set to words. The man em-
ployed at useful and spontaneous work is a
poetic figure, full of prophecy and of hope.
The cow in the field, the tree against the sky,
the lands newly plowed, the crows flapping
home at night, the man at his work, the woman

2O Outlook to Nature

at her work, the child at its play — these all
are worth the stroke of the artist.

I saw a man walking across the fields, with
spade on his shoulder and dog at his side ; I saw
his firm long stride ; I saw his left arm swing ;
I saw the weeds fall beneath his feet ; I saw the
broad straight path that he left in the grass.
There were brown fields, and woods in the first
tint of autumn. I saw birds ; and in the dis-
tance was the rim of the sky. And beyond him,
I saw the open ditch to which he was returning.

The great writers.

With the nature writers I like to include
some of the authors who do not write specific
natural history topics. If they write from the
out-of-doors, with a keen love of it and a
knowledge of what it comprises, adding to it
touches of good human nature, then they lead
men to the open as effectively as those to whom
we customarily apply the term " nature writer."
The landscape is as important as any object
that it contains, and the human sentiment is
more important than either.

The Commonplace 21

These writers invariably write the common-
place, and touch it into life and meaning. One
of the greatest of these writers, to my thinking,
is Stevenson, — simple, direct, youthful, tender,
and heartsome. His life was with nature ; his
work touches the elemental.

O Stevenson! On far Samoa's tropic shore

You moored your slender bark,

And there in calm secludedness did live

To write the spirit of your gentle soul

And over all the world to pour

The fragrance from the tropic of your heart.

And thence you passed beyond, —

Passed not with the proud acclaim

Of pageant and tempestuous bells

That drown themselves in blank forgetfulness, —

But fell away as falls the wind at eventide ;

And all the trees on all the isles and shores

Bowed their heads in solitude.

Nature poetry.

I like to think that some of our poetry is
also leading us nature-ward in a very practical
way, since it is becoming more personal and
definite, and brings us into closer touch with

22 Outlook to Nature

specific objects and demands greater knowledge
of them. It has been the progress of our atti-
tude toward nature to add the concrete to the
abstract ; and this may be expected to proceed
so far that every object of the environment and
every detail of our lives will be touched with
inspiration. If I cannot catch a note of inspi-
ration from the plainest thing that I touch, then
to that extent my life is empty and devoid of
outlook.

The great voices appealed to the early Greeks,
— the thunder, the roaring wind, the roll of the
waves, the noise of war; but we do not know
that the shape of the leaf, and the call of the
young bird, and the soft gray rain appealed
much to them. The Greek lyrics are mostly
personal or personifying, and lack any intimate
touch with the phases of natural phenomena.
As men have come more and more to know
the near-at-hand and the real in nature, this
knowledge has been interpreted in the poetry;
for poetry always reflects the spirit of the time.
All English poetry illustrates this general tend-
ency ; but what we are in the habit of calling

The Commonplace 23

" nature poetry " is of comparatively recent
growth. It is to be hoped that we shall never
have less nature poetry that expresses the larger
moods ; but we must have more that is specific
as to natural history facts, and which will still
be poetry.

The individual seems sometimes to recapitu-
late the development of the race : as each of us
grows old and conventionalities lose their
meaning and the small voices make a stronger
appeal, we are conscious that we have had
Wordsworth's experience :

"In youth from rock to rock I went,
From hill to hill in discontent,
Of pleasure high and turbulent,

Most pleased when most uneasy ;
But now my own delights I make, —
My thirst from every rill can slake,
And gladly Nature's love partake

Of thee, sweet Daisy ! "

Industry is poetic.

It is often said that as this is a practical
age, with industrialism extending everywhere,

24 Outlook to Nature

therefore poetry must die away. Nothing
could be farther from the truth.

It is true that industrialism is developing at
great pace ; this, in fact, is the glory of our
time, for civilization has entered on a new
epoch. Men's minds are concerned with things
that never concerned them before ; yet, the
resources of the old earth have merely been
touched here and there, and the wealth of
mankind will increase. But all this does not
mean that sentiment is to be crushed or that
the horizon of imagination is to be contracted,
but rather the reverse. It is only by the ex-
ercise of vast imagination that the great con-
quests of our time are being won. The flights
of science and of truth are, after all, the flights
of fancy.

We need new standards.

We need the poetry of the new kind.
Perhaps the day of the formal " sustained "
poem has passed, — with its ambitious disquisi-
tions, long periods, heavy rhetoric, labored
metaphors. It is a question, also, whether

The Commonplace 25

even the sonnet, although highly artistic, is
free and strong enough to express the nature-
feeling of our time ; for this feeling seems to
be more and more impatient of historical forms.
The new nature poetry must be crystal clear,
for we have no time for riddles, even though
they are set in meter and rhyme. It must be
definite, and it must apply.

The best nature poetry will be hopeful, joy-
ous, and modern. At least some of it will deal
with objects, phenomena, and emotions that are
common to common men, that it may become
a part of men's lives. Perhaps this more vital
song will relieve poetry writing of much that is
too theoretical and fine-spun ; and I hope that
it may also divert the current from the petty
lovelorn type of verse-making which exploits
personal love affairs that ought to be too private
and sacred, as they are also too small, for
publication.

This poetry, whether its flight is small or
great, must be born of experience, and must be
intrinsic ; it must be the expression of a full
heart, not the sentiment of a looker-on. The

26 Outlook to Nature

nature poem of wide reach must be the poem
of the man who is free. Such poetry must spring
from the open air ; perhaps it must be set to
words there, — at least outside the city. The
city will have its great poems, but they will
rise out of the city as Venus rose out of the sea.
It seems to me that we have really very
little genuine nature poetry (a subject to which
I shall refer again in my fourth lecture). Our
poets, in spirit or in fact, now write largely
from the city and the study outward, and their
work is bookish. The product is too often the
"cultured" poetry of the literary cult, under
the influence of tradition. It continues to be
burdened with useless metaphor, and it follows
conventional forms of verse and line, as if verse
and line were more than essence. Literary
criticism still looks backward rather than for-
ward, and much of its criterion is not applica-
ble to present-day conditions. We must face
toward the future. Walt Whitman — poet of
the commonplace — has most completely freed
himself from the bondage of literary form ; and
he is only an earnest of what shall come.

The Commonplace 27

It is doubtful whether the great nature poet
will be taught in the formal curricula of the
schools. His spirit and his method will be as
unconfined as the farm lands, the inaccessible
mountains, the great plains, or the open sea.

The old-time short nature poem was wont
only to point a moral, — usually dubious and
far-fetched and factitious, — having little vitality
of its own. It really was not a nature poem,
for the real nature poem is its own moral. The
poems and stories of the Old Testament are
always interesting because they have something
to say, they are direct, not heavy with adjectives
or with rhetoric, and they are moral because
they tell the truth.

Persons still like poetry.

I am constantly surprised at the poems that
busy and practical men know ; and also at the
poetry that many busy men can write. There
is reason to believe that there were never so
many poets in the world as now. Poetry-mak-
ing is not an occupation, but the incidental
spark that strikes off from useful labor; it is

28 Outlook to Nature

the result of full and serious lives. The roll
of machinery is rhythm and rhyme ; the blow-
ing of the wind is music.

It has been my good fortune to have had
many years' experience in the teaching of farm
boys. They are interesting boys, — strong,
virile, courageous. They have had the tre-
mendous advantage of having been let alone,
and of having developed naturally. They
hold their youth. It is my habit to call these
agricultural students together frequently, and,
amongst other exercises, to read them poetry.
Usually at first they are surprised ; they had
not thought of it before ; or they thought
poetry is for girls : but they come again.
They may hide it, but these farm boys are
as full of sentiment as an egg of meat. There
was one fellow who had to support himself and
help members of his family. He was a good
student, but the lines of his life had been hard.
Whenever he called at my office it was to ask
advice about money affairs or to tell me of dif-
ficulties that he feared he could not overcome.
Apparently there was no sentiment in his life,

The Commonplace 29

and no room for it. One evening I read to
the students Matthew Arnold's " Buried Life."
The next day, Jenkins came to my office, en-
tered hesitatingly as if requesting something
that he might not have, and asked whether I
would loan him the poem till he could learn it,
for he could not afford to buy.

If sentiment is necessarily eliminated from
business transactions, it is all the more impor-
tant that it be added to the recreation and the
leisure. The world never needed poetry so
much as now. This thought is forcibly ex-
pressed in Charles Eliot Norton's advice, that
has now been so effectively used by the press :
" Whatever your occupation may be, and how-
ever crowded your hours with affairs, do not
fail to secure at least a few minutes every day
for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of
poetry."

The resource of the silences.

We need now and then to take ourselves
away from men and the crowd and con-
ventionalities, and go into the silence, for

30 Outlook to Nature

the silence is the greatest of teachers. Walt
Whitman expresses this well :

ft When I heard the learn' d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where

he lectured with much applause in the lecture-
room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander' d
off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and
from time to time

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

THE WAYS OF APPROACH TO NATURE

It will be gleaned from what has been
said that we are to consider literature, includ-
ing poetry, to be one of the means of the
enjoyment of nature. It is fundamentally im-
portant, however, that we regard literature only
as a means : it is not nature.

One can never be fully appreciative of this
natural world unless he has technical knowl-

The Commonplace 31

edge of some special part of it. One assuredly
cannot be zoologist, geologist, botanist, and
meteorologist ; but if he has intimate personal
knowledge of one limited part, he has the
key to the whole. The person must have
pursued some branch of natural history for
a time with serious purpose, — the purpose to
discover and to know the subject-matter for
himself. This gives him point of view ; tells
him what to look for ; enables him to look
beneath the surface ; trains his judgment as to
causes and effects ; guides him in distinguish-
ing the essential ; saves him from error.

But before one takes up any serious bit
of study for himself, he must have the wish
to take it up. In every person there is a
latent desire to know something of the en-
closing world, but it is usually ironed out in
the laundering processes of the schools and the
misdirections of the home. In some persons
this native desire is so strong that nothing
extinguishes it : these persons become pro-
fessional investigators and widen the boundaries
of knowledge. Most of us, however, must

32 Outlook to Nature

give our main thought to other matters, and
let the outlook to nature be chiefly a well-
guided affection.

The nature companion.

The best possible introduction to nature is
that afforded by a sympathetic person who
knows some aspect of nature well. You im-
bibe your friend's enthusiasm at the same time
that you learn birds, or plants, or fishes, or the
sculpturing of the fields. By enthusiasm I
mean never exclamation, but that quiet and
persistent zeal that follows a subject to the end
for the love of it, even though it take a month.
This person need not be a professed " scientist,"
unless he is also a good teacher and knows
what is most important in the subject and
most relevant to you. The earlier the child
has such a guide — if arrived at the age of
reason — the more vital and lasting the effect :
even one or two excursions afield may change
the point of view and open the way for new
experiences, although neither the guide nor
the child may be aware of it at the time. The

The Commonplace 33

ideal guide was " Gramp," as James Buckham
knew him (" Country Life in America ") :

"What a man to fish and camp,
What a hand to hunt and tramp
Up and down the woods, was Gramp !

" How he led me, high and low,

Plunging through the brush and snow!
Boy-like, how I loved to go!

*« Oh, the sweet days that we spent
In the forest's pure content!
Oh, the long, still miles we went!

" Keen-eyed Gramp ! How well he knew
Where the biggest berries grew,
Where the witch-like woodcock flew!

" Learned was he in all the lore
Of the wood-wise men of yore —
Subtle knowledge, taught no more.

"Ah, a happy boy was I,
Loving God's free woods and sky,
With dear Gramp to teach me why! "

The weather.

That which is first worth knowing is that
which is nearest at hand. The nearest at hand,

34 Outlook to Nature

in the natural surroundings, is the weather.
Every day of our lives, on land or sea, whether
we will or no, the air and the clouds and the
sky environ us. So variable in this environ-
ment, from morning till evening and from
evening till morning and from season to season,
that we are always conscious of it. It is to the
changes in this environment that we apply the
folk-word " weather," — weather, that is akin
to wind.

No man is efficient who is at cross-purposes
with the main currents of his life ; no man is
content and happy who is out of sympathy with
the environment in which he is born to live :
so the habit of grumbling at the weather is the
most senseless and futile of all expenditures of
human effort. Day by day we complain and
fret at the weather, and when we are done with
it we have — the weather. The same amount
of energy put into wholesome work would have
set civilization far in advance of its present
state. Weather is not a human institution, and
therefore it cannot be " bad." I have seen
bad men, have read bad books, have made bad

The Commonplace 35

lectures, have lived two years about Boston, —
but I have never seen bad weather !

" Bad weather" is mainly the fear of spoiling
one's clothes. Fancy clothing is one of the
greatest obstacles to a knowledge of nature : in
this regard, the farm boy has an immense ad-
vantage. It is a misfortune not to have gone
barefoot in one's youth. A man cannot be a
naturalist in patent-leather shoes. The perfect-
ing of the manufacture of elaborate and fragile
fabrics correlates well with our growing habit of
living indoors. Our clothing is made chiefly
for fair weather; when it becomes worn we use
it for stormy weather, although it may be in no
respect stormy weather clothing. I am always
interested, when abroad with persons, in noting
the various mental attitudes toward wind ; and
it is apparent that most of the displeasure from
the wind arises from fear of disarranging the
coiffure or from the difficulty of controling a
garment.

If our clothes are not made for the weather,
then we have failed to adapt ourselves to our
conditions, and we are in worse state than the

36 Outlook to Nature

beasts of the field. Much of our clothing serves
neither art nor utility. Nothing can be more
prohibitive of an interest in nature than a mil-
linery " hat," even though it be distinguished
for its floriculture, landscape gardening, and
natural history.

Our estimate of weather is perhaps the best
criterion of our outlook on nature and the
world. The first fault that I would correct in
mankind is that of finding fault with the
weather. We should put the child right to-
ward the world in which he is to live. What
would you think of the mariner who goes to
sea only in fair weather ? What have not the
weather and the climate done for the steadiness
and virility of the people of New England ?
And is this influence working as strongly to-
day as in the times when we had learned less
how to escape the weather ? We must believe
in all good physical comfort, — it contributes
to the amount of work that we can accomplish ;
but we have forgotten that it is possible to bear
an open storm with equanimity and comfort.
The person who has never been caught in rain

The Commonplace 37

and enjoyed it has missed a privilege and a
blessing.

Give us the rain and the hail and the snow,
the mist, the crashing thunder, and the cold
biting wind ! Let us be men enough to face
it, and poets enough to enjoy it. In "bad"
weather is the time to go abroad in field and
wood. You are fellow then with bird and
stream and tree ; and you are escaped from the
crowd that is forever crying and clanging at
your heels,

The common natural history.

The first consideration of special study
should be the inhabitants of your yard and
garden : they are yours ; or if they are not
yours, you are not living a right life. Do
you wish to study botany ? There are weeds
in your dooryard or trees on your lawn.
You say that they are not interesting : that
is not their fault.

We have made the mistake all along of
studying only special cases. We seem to have
made up our minds that certain features are

38 Outlook to Nature

interesting and that all other features are not.
It is no mere accident that many persons like
plants and animals but dislike botany and
zoology. It is more important to study plants
than special subjects as exemplified in plants.
Why does the weed grow just there ? Answer
this, and you have put yourself in pertinent
relation with the world out-of-doors.

If one is a farmer, he has the basis for his
natural history in his own possessions, — ani-
mals domestic and wild, plants domestic and
wild, free soil, pastures and lowlands and wood-
lands, crops growing and ripening, the daily
expression of the moving pageant of nature.
Zoological garden and botanical garden are here
at his hand and lying under his title-deed, to
have and to hold as he will. No other man
has such opportunity.

I would also call the attention of the towns-
man to his opportunity. If the range of nature
is not his, he still has the wind and rain, the
street trees, the grass of lawns, the weed in its
crevice, the town-loving birds, the insects, and
I hope that he has his garden. Even the city

The Commonplace 39

has its touch of natural history — for all things
in the end are natural, and we recognize them
if we have had the training of a wholesome
outlook to the commonplace. Timrod's son-
net on the factory smoke is a nature-note:

"I scarcely grieve, O Nature ! at the lot
That pent my life within a city's bounds,
And shut me from thy sweetest sights and sounds.
Perhaps I had not learned, if some lone cot
Had nursed a dreamy childhood, what the mart
Taught me amid its turmoil ; so my youth
Had missed full many a stern but wholesome truth.
Here, too, O Nature ! in this haunt of Art,
Thy power is on me, and I own thy thrall.
There is no unimpressive spot on earth!
The beauty of the stars is over all,
And Day and Darkness visit every hearth.
Clouds do not scorn us : yonder factory's smoke
Looked like a golden mist when morning broke."

The ground.

I would preach the surface of the earth,
because we walk on it.

When a youth, I was told that it was
impossible for me to study geology to any
purpose, because there were no outcroppings

40 Outlook to Nature *

of rocks in my region. So I grew up in
ignorance of the fact that every little part
of the earth's surface has a history, that
there are reasons for sandbanks and for bogs
as well as for stratified rocks. This is but
another illustration of the old book-slavery,
whereby we are confined to certain formal
problems, whether or not these problems
have any relation to our conditions. I
well remember what a great surprise it was
to learn that the sculpturing of the fields
can be understood, and that the reasons for
every bank and swamp and knoll and mud-
hole can be worked out.

There was a field back of the barn that con-
tained hundreds of narrow knolls, averaging
three to four feet high. At one side of every
hummock was a narrow deep pocket that until
midsummer was filled with water. The field was
so rough that it could not be plowed, and so it
was continuously used as a pasture. It was an
Elysian field for a boy. Every pool was a
world of life, with strange creatures and mys-
terious depths, and every knoll was a point of

The Commonplace 41

vantage. Near one edge of the field ran a
rivulet, and beyond the rivulet were great
woods. What was beyond the woods, I could
only surmise. I recall how year by year I
wondered at this field, until it became a sort
of perpetual and compelling mystery, and
somehow it came to be woven as a natural part
of the fabric of my life. To this day I try
once each year to visit this dear old field, even
though it is long since leveled. All the sweep
of my childhood comes back to me unbidden.
The field is still a pasture, and generations of
cows have passed on since then. Yet, as
much as this field meant to me, I do not re-
member to have had any distinct feeling that
there was any cause for the pools and knolls.
My father cut the field from the forest, yet I
do not remember that I ever asked him why
this field was so ; and I never heard any person
express any curiosity about it. We all seemed
to have accepted it, just as we accept the air.
As I think of it now, this field must have been
the parh of a tornado that turned over the
trees ; and long before the settlers came, the

42 Outlook to Nature

prostrate trunks had decayed and a second
forest had grown. Would that I could have
known that simple explanation ! One sentence
would have given me the clew. How the
mystery of the ancient tornado and the rise of
another forest would have conjured a new
world of marvel and discovery !

When I had written this sketch of my pas-
ture field, I called in a little school girl and
read it to her. I wanted to hear her estimate
of it.

" That's a nice story," she said ; " but I
don't want to study such things in school."

" And why not ? " I asked.

" Because they are hard and dry," she said.

Poor child ! She was thinking of her
books ; and I remembered that I also had
written books !

The heavens.

I would preach the sky ; for the sky compels
one to look upward.

When in the open country we are impressed
most with the sense of room and with the sky.

The Commonplace 43

C'ty persons have no sky, but only fragments
of a leaky roof; for the city is one structure
and needs only a cover to make it a single
building. They have no free horizon line,
no including circle laid on the earth, no
welkin. There are no clouds, — only an un-
defined something that portends rain or hides
the sun.

One must have free vision if he is to know
the sky. He must see the clouds sweep across
the firmament, changing and dissolving as they
go. He must look deep into the zenith,
beyond the highest cirrus. We have almost
lost the habit of looking up :

" Look unto the heavens, and see ;
And behold the skies, which are higher than thou. "

Lie on your back in some quiet spot, and
let yourself go out into the endless distances.

Or, if we note the sky, it is chiefly a mid-
day or sunset recognition. Our literature is
rich in sunsets, but relatively poor in sunrises.
Civilization has led us away from the morning,
and at the same time it has led us away from
youthfulness. We have telescoped the day

44 Outlook to Nature

far into the night, and morning is becoming
obsolete. I know that this cannot be helped;
but it can be mentioned.

I have asked person after person whether he
ever saw the sun rise. The large number have
said no ; and most of those who had seen the sun
rise had seen it against their will and remembered
it with a sense of weariness. Here, again, our
farm boy has the advantage : he leads some-
thing like a natural life. I doubt whether a
man can be a poet if he has not known the
sunrise.

The sky is the one part of the environment
that is beyond our reach. We cannot change
it; we cannot despoil it; we cannot paint signs
on it. The sky is forever new and young;
the seasons come out of it ; the winds blow out
of it ; the weather is born from it:

"Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow,
Or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail ? "

The high places.

I preach the mountains, and everything that
is taller than a man.

The Commonplace 45

Yet it is to be feared that many persons see
too many mountains and too many great land-
scapes, and that the " seeing " of nature becomes
a business as redundant and wearisome as other
affairs. One who lives on the mountains does
not know how high they are. Let us have one
inspiration that lifts us clear of ourselves:
this is better than to see so many mountains
that we remember only their names.

The best objects that you can see are those
in your own realm ; but your own realm becomes
larger and means more for the sight of some-
thing beyond.

It is worth while to cherish the few objects
and phenomena that have impressed us greatly,
and it is well to recount them often, until they
become part of us. One such phenomenon is
idealized in my own memory. It was the
sight of sunrise on Mt. Shasta, seen from the
southeastern side from a point that was then
untouched by travelers. From this point only
the main dome of the mountain is seen. I had
left the railway train at Upton's and had ridden
on a flat-car over a lumber railroad some eight-

46 Outlook to Nature

een miles to the southeast. From this destina-
tion, I drove far into the great forest, over
volcano dust that floated through the woods
like smoke as it was stirred up by our horses
and wagon-wheels. I was a guest for the night
in one of those luxurious lodges which true
nature-lovers, wishing wholly to escape the
affairs of cities, build in remote and inaccessible
places. The lodge stood on a low promontory,
around three sides of which a deep swift moun-
tain st;eam ran in wild tumult. Giant shafts
of trees, such shafts as one sees only in the
stupendous forests of the far West, shot straight
into the sky from the very cornices of the house.
It is always a marvel to the easterner how shafts
of such extraordinary height could have been
nourished by the very thin and narrow crowns
that they bear. One always wonders, also, at
the great distance the sap-water must carry its
freight of mineral from root to leaf and its
heavier freight from leaf to root.

We were up before the dawn. We made a
pot of coffee, and the horses were ready, — fine
mounts, accustomed to woods trails and hard

The Commonplace 47

slopes. It was hardly light enough to enable
us to pick our way. We were as two pygmies,
so titanic was the forest. The trails led us up
and up, under pitchy boughs becoming fra-
grant, over needle-strewn floors still heavy with
darkness, disclosing glimpses now and then of
gray light showing eastward between the boles.
Suddenly the forest stopped, and we found our-
selves on the crest of a great ridge : and sheer
before us stood the great cone of Shasta, cold
and gray and silent, floating on a sea of dark-
ness from which even the highest tree crowns
did not emerge. Scarcely had we spoken in
the course of our ascent, and now words would
be sacrilege. Almost automatically we dis-
mounted, letting the reins fall over the horses'
necks, and removed our hats. The horses
stood, and dropped their heads. Uncovered,
we sat ourselves on the dry leaves and waited.

It was the morning of the creation. Out of
the pure stuff of nebulae the cone had just been
shaped and flung adrift until a world should be
created on which it might rest. The gray light
grew into white. Wrinkles and features grew

48 Outlook to Nature

into the mountain. Gradually a ruddy light
appeared in the east. Then a flash of red shot
out of the horizon, struck on a point of the sum-
mit, and caught from crag to crag and snow to
snow until the great mass was streaked and
splashed with fire. Slowly the darkness settled
away from its base ; a tree emerged ; a bird
chirped ; and the morning was born !

Now a great nether world began to rise up
out of Chaos. Far hills rose first through roll-
ing billows of mist. Then came wide forests
of conifer. As the panorama arose, the moun-
tain changed from red to gold. The stars had
faded out and left the great mass to itself on
the bosom of the rising world, — the mountain
fully created now and stablished. Spriggy
bushes and little leaves — little green-brown
leaves and tender tufts of herbs — trembled
out of the woods. The illimitable circle of the
world stretched away and away, its edges still
hung in the stuff from which it had just been
fashioned. Then the forest awoke with calls
of birds and the penetrating light, and the crea-
tion was complete.

The Commonplace 49

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER

I have now reviewed some of the elements
of the sympathetic attitude toward nature, and
have tried to show how this outlook means
greater efficiency, hopefulness, and repose.

I have no mind to be iconoclast, to try to
tear down what has been built, or to advise any
man to change his occupation or his walk in
life. That would be impossible to accomplish,
even were it desirable to advise. But even in
the midst of all our eagerness and involvedness,
it is still possible to open the mind toward na-
ture, and it will sweeten and strengthen our
lives. Nature is our environment, and we can-
not escape it if we would. The problem of our
life is not yonder : it is here.

The seeking of truth in fresh fields and for
the love of it, is akin to the enthusiasm of youth.
Men keep young by knowing nature. They
also keep close to the essentials. One of the
New Sayings of Jesus is this: "Raise the stone,
and there thou shalt find me ; cleave the wood,
and there am I."

II

Country and City

A RECENT press dispatch, reporting a
club dinner, asserts that the great uni-
versities of the future are to be in the great cities.
There are no limitations, except physical ones,
to the growth of metropolitan cities ; in these
cities the " universities will develop along special
lines because of their special environment, and
their development will be the best ; " and " the
scholar filled with the impulse of service is
going to seek his home in the dark gray city,
and seek to make it less dark and less gray."
If a country university " wishes to study the
fine arts, she has to divert funds to buy the
objects of study," but the metropolitan uni-
versity can turn to the galleries of the city.

In his address on " A Generation of Cornell,"
President Schurman used the following words :

5°

Country and City 51

" Not the noise and glare and rush of inane
city streets, but the majestic calm and beauty
of the face of nature is the proper place for the
spiritual nurture of young men and maidens
during the few short years devoted to the higher
education. And fortunately there is no branch
of learning or science, no sort of liberal culture,
no species of professional training which cannot
be more advantageously pursued in the country
than in the city. It is not surprising, therefore,
that Mr. Rashdall closed his great work on the
History of Universities with the doubt 'whether
the highest university ideal can be realized with
the fullest perfection even in a single modern
city of the largest type.' '

Although these two strong utterances seem
to be diametrically opposed, they are not at all
surprising. They are the expressions of men
who see great opportunities for useful service.
That they see these opportunities just where
they serve is the very proof that they serve
well.

These antitheses are another illustration of
the fact that the door of opportunity opens

52 Outlook to Nature

wherever men labor with ability and love, and
that one's problems are just where he lives.
Where the great universities of the future are
to be is a matter of small consequence, if only
they render great service to mankind, — for the
universities are to reach out to all the affairs in
which men engage, as well as to instruct those
who come to their doors.

WILL THE CITY DICTATE OUR CIVILIZATION ?

The question I propose now to discuss is
whether civilization is to center only in the
city. No one will dispute the great future that
lies before the city. The imagination cannot
picture it, as cities grow into stupendous aggre-
gations of souls, with labor divided and sub-
divided, and human capabilities multiplied
perhaps a hundredfold. The science of city-
building is in its merest infancy, — men yet
scarcely know what the phrase means. The
human race is yet young. Famine and disease
and war have held it in check ; but these
monsters we shall overcome. Where the earth
now supports one human being, we expect,

Country and City 53

before it die, that it will support hundreds.
The cities will be the world's great nuclei, and,
like all nuclei, they will be complex.

The fundamental resources.

But cities cannot build cities. The country
builds the cities. The cities only handle and
transform what the country produces. There
are three great sources of raw material, — the sea
and the mines and the soil. Some day the
mines will fail ; we shall transmute metals into
metals and the dreams of the old alchemists
will come true. The sea and the soil will re-
main while man lives on the earth. But men
do not live on the sea : they only trade and
travel there. The men who supply the cities
will live outside the cities, in the open country.

The rural people.

The great metropolitan centers, even though
they contain ten millions or fifty millions of
people, probably cannot contain one-half the
population of the earth. There will be cities
of all lesser degrees, and villages, and quiet

54 Outlook to Nature

hamlets, and rural communities, and isolated
farmers, and poets living far out in the center
of the world.

The men in the country are men, living their
lives, with days full of work and of plans and
of progress. They have problems, and these
problems must be solved. These are prob-
lems of honest sustenance for themselves and
those whom they love. The parasitic occupa-
tions are in the city. If the universities are to
help to solve the problems of the " dark gray
city," they must also help to solve the problems
of the free open country. The city is elaborate
and artificial : the country is direct and natural.

The country living is essentially an outlook
to nature, and the farmer is a naturalist. In
proportion as he is a good naturalist he is a
good farmer. The farmer, woodsman, hunter,
explorer, knows more about the things in the
out-of-doors than you can find in any book,
and he knows them so well that he cannot tell
them. It is only those of us who acquire
knowledge recently and freshly that hasten to
publish it. The best naturalists do not write.

Country and City 55

The proportion of farming people.

The farmer has been counted out, or not
counted at all, in much of the estimate of the
world's progress. The educational and social
forces touch him last or not at all, except as
they demand his share for their support. I
sometimes think that, as a race, our real out-
look to nature is to rest largely on the farming
occupation, and therefore that we need to con-
serve this occupation in order to recruit the
native strength of our civilization as well as
to provide a source of material supplies.

No doubt some of you are thinking of the
enormous growth of cities and of the conse-
quent lessening of the rural population, and
draw the conclusion that we are to be a nation
of cities, with agriculture playing a constantly
less and less important part. It is true that
relatively the country population is decreasing.
The farmers are one-third or less of our people.
I expect to see the percentage of rural popula-
tion and of farmers fall still lower. What is
to be the ultimate ratio of farmers to the total
population in any self-sustaining geographical

56 Outlook to Nature

region it is not now possible to determine.
But it is not so important to maintain a ratio
as to see that the persons living on farms have
the very best conditions for success ; they will
then contribute their necessary part to civilization.
It must not be supposed, however, that a
lessening ratio of population means a depreci-
ating agriculture ; in fact it may mean just the
reverse, — that the persons remaining on the
farm are increasing in efficiency. We are now
an exporting nation, the exports of agricultural
products greatly exceeding the imports ; but
most of the southern and many of the western
states are still overwhelmingly rural ; hence
there is still reason and opportunity for persons
to remove from the farms to the city. I am
glad that so many of the farm boys have gone
to the cities, for the cities need them ; yet we
must not suppose that all of them are going to
the city.

The open country is essential.

It has been argued that since agriculture is
concerned in the production of food, it cannot

Country and City 57

be greatly extended, as the rise of civilization
does not cause men to eat more. These argu-
ments rest on the assumption that agriculture
produces only or chiefly food ; but probably
more than half of the agricultural product of
the United States is not food. It is cotton,
flax, hemp, wool, hides, timber, tobacco, dyes,
drugs, flowers, ornamental trees and plants,
horses, pet and fancy stock, and a hundred
other non-edible commodities.

The total food products in the United
States, according to the twelfth census, was
11,837,000,000. The cost of materials used
in the three industries of textile, lumber, and
leather manufactures alone was $1,851,000,000.
If the outlay for subsistence relatively dimin-
ishes as income increases, we must remember
that the amenities and luxuries increase in
intimate ratio with the income ; and the larger
part of these categories come from the farms
and the forests. Mention but four agricultural
articles — wood, paper, leather, cloth — that
enter into our items of building, furniture, and
clothing, and you see at once what civilization

58 Outlook to Nature

owes to the farm beyond what it eats. Presi-
dent Roosevelt has recently said with great
force that the demand for wood is increased
even with all the increase in fire-proof construc-
tion of buildings, because the amount of build-
ing is increased.

Compounded foods.

Perhaps some of you are dreaming of the
days of chemical synthesis, when the laboratory
shall make the foodstuffs and the day of the
farm will be done. That day, however, will
never come. The chemist may synthesize
starch, but he will never make a potato. He
will never make a leaf of lettuce, or a hen's
egg, or an apple with its clean and fragrant
juices, or food for a cow, or a fiber of cotton,
or a flower that has breath from the wind and
color from the sky. He will never make a
seed that will know whether to grow into a
turnip or a cauliflower or a cabbage. He may
make food that will sustain life, but we shall
never be content merely to feed, and, above
all, to feed on tablets, — for it is to be hoped

Country and City 59

that the day of pills and capsules is behind us,
not ahead of us. And even if he should make
the food, the city cannot supply him with the
raw materials wherewith to make it.

The city lives on the country.

The city is dependent, and this dependency
should be recognized in a rapid city-building
age. The country problem is the city man's
problem. No man who is far-sighted can shut
himself up to city or country alone, for what
makes for the ultimate good of one makes also
for the good of the other ; and it is to the city
man's interest to see that the city exerts a salu-
tary influence on the country.

Cut off the traffic in milk and water and
other supplies from the country for twenty-four
hours, and Boston will be in despair. Your
shops and theaters will close ; your trolley-cars
will stop; your children will cry in distress.

Annihilate the cities and the country still
exists ; and I should not much marvel if it
would be a month before some of the country-
men would hear of the phenomenon.

60 Outlook to Nature

The country is making progress.

The country is beginning to make very re-
markable progress. This progress is not ex-
pressed so much in so-called " improvements "
as it is in the city, but it is none the less per-
manent and real. The city is an advertising
organism ; but there are no signs in the country,
unless placed there for city concerns.

The rural progress consists in a really mar-
velous development of machinery ; a still more
marvelous extension of fundamental knowledge
of the principles and practices of good farming ;
in the rise of social and economic organization;
in the spread of sources and means of intelli-
gence.

Resiliency of the West.

Much of this great change has developed in
the West or has been stimulated by the West.
Persons cut loose from traditions when they
left the old homes and roamed over the vast
areas of the new country. There was bigness in
the stretch of the plain, freshness in the forest
and prairie, generousness in the soil.

Country and City 61

Vast areas of virgin land and small amount
of labor called for new and large methods.,
The lands soon paid for themselves, and sur-
plus accumulated. This surplus has been
turned into the home and the school. In
most of the small towns of the prosperous
parts of the West, the school building is the
most imposing structure in the place. Freer
ideas of farming developed, and larger ideas of
the individual farmer and the home life.

These ideals are now reacting on the East.
The East is arousing ; and with the best of its
traditions still preserved, it will again develop
a race of mighty farmers, if, in fact, it has lost
them. The so-called abandonment of farms of
New England and other parts of the East is to
be the salvation of the agriculture, for it means
the abandonment of old ideas and the readjust-
ment of the business into new lines. The great
agriculture will be East as well as West.

The open country has its own society.

Not nearly all of mankind will go to the
cities, and not all of the civilization and the

62 Outlook to Nature

progress of the race will be represented by the
city. Not all the best character-building is to
be in the city or even in the suburbs of the
city. It is the city that breeds or attracts most
of the crime. The country has its own life ;
it will have a better and more hopeful life,
sweet, sane, moderate, and warm-hearted.

There are " homes " maintained for sailors
and soldiers and actors, and others. Where is
the " home " designed for farmers ? Each
farmer builds his own : it is the first thing he
does. The farmer does not think of renting a
house to live in, unless he is a mere tenant.
Let Congress or any legislature propose to
establish a " home " for farmers, and it insults
every farmer in the land. The farm idea is the
home idea. The farmer is practically the only
person who makes his home, lives in it, and
passes it down to his children. Homes go
with land, not with franchises.

The farmer holds his ground, sometimes
even too tenaciously. The struggle may be
hard and the odds against him, but day in and
day out, year in and year out, sun and rain,

Country and City 63

he stands by the plow and works out his own
salvation. I hope that new schools and better
social forces will touch him into quickened
life ; but I hope also that he will always be
conservative, for an enlightened conservatism
is the safeguard of society.

The country school and college.

Moreover, the countryman will not always
go to the city to be taught. It is only recently
that he has gone to the city. Once the coun-
try school and the country church were as good
as any. Cities have grown, and the country
has stood still. It is now time for the tide to
turn. We shall consolidate and centralize our
schools, or otherwise intensify them, and have
as good schools in the country as in the city.
Perhaps they will be better by being smaller
and simpler.

I look for the time when city children will
be sent to the country to school. The farm
boy and the farm girl are not going to the city
to college unless they expect to leave the
farm ; they may not go there even then. The

64 Outlook to Nature

city is not their realm ; and men are to be
taught in their own realms.

We shall have more colleges and universities
rather than fewer ; these institutions will serve
mankind ; they will be where the problems of
mankind are; some will be in metropolitan
cities and some in cities of lesser estate ; some
of them will be rural ; a college will not neces-
sarily be useful in proportion as it is bulky;
methods and ideas associated with colleges will
probably crystallize around new foci, and what
is now considered to be central may some day be
considered as peripheral. Very likely we shall
see again the rise of the individual, unattached,
and isolated teacher, who shall cut himself free
from all cults and systems and take his fol-
lowers directly out to nature.

The city galleries and collections.

The extract that I quoted pleads the value
of collections and galleries. But " collections "
are only incidents in any educational scheme.
We have made the mistake of considering them
to be of first importance.

Country and City 65

We are in the era of making great libraries :
perhaps the time will come when we shall think
more of dispersing books than merely of col-
lecting them. Perhaps it will be better to have
one thousand books with one hundred families
than ten thousand books in one library. The
library should be a home idea as well as a
collection idea.

The old idea of the natural history museum
was for persons to "see." It was largely an
exclamatory institution. It is now supple-
mented by specimens to work with ; and speci-
mens to work with are being related to the
fields where their places are. Dead things
alone are for dead teachers. The museum and
collection idea is necessary, but it is still largely
an exhibition idea.

I brought a live bittern to my house ;
the children left their books to watch it.
The bittern died and I had it stuffed and
put it on the mantel ; the children left the
bittern for the books. I gave the bittern
to the museum ; it was not good enough for
children.

66 Outlook to Nature

The out-door galleries.

Is it not strange that all our art galleries are
indoors ? We get up at ten o'clock in the
morning and call a carriage to drive us to the
gallery to see a picture of a sunrise ! We must
see a picture of a tree before we are aware that
a tree is worth making a picture of. Yet the
world out-of-doors is the real source of art and
the real gallery ; all our best galleries and best
buildings are but adaptations, imitations, and
interpretations.

Collections and galleries by means of which
to teach men ? They are trivial compared with
what I can show you in yonder fields. Col-
lections instruct those who would be instructed ;
we need many more of them : but my fields
have intrinsic uplift and inspiration. The art
gallery and city cannot have real fields, and real
forests, and real animals, and real live-stock, and
real landscape.

Some day we shall construct great pictures
out-of-doors. We shall assemble the houses,
control the architecture, arrange the trees and
the forests, direct the roads and fences, display

Country and City 67

the slopes of the hills, lay out the farms, re-
move every feature that offends a sensitive eye ;
and persons will leave the galleries, with their
limitations and imitations, to go to the country
to see some of the greatest works of art that
man can assemble and produce. These works
will have sweep and breadth and distance.
They will compromise whole countrysides.
Every rain and wind and snow will heighten
their efficiency and their meaning. Many of
the works that we are so fond of indoors will
appear trivial and vain.

Any artist may profit by the remark of Fred-
erick Law Olmsted, then a young man, on visit-
ing Eaton Hall : " What artist, so noble, has
often been my thought, as he, who with far-
reaching conception of beauty and designing
power, sketches the outline, writes the colors,
and directs the shadows of a picture so great
that Nature shall be employed upon it for gen-
erations, before the work he has arranged for
her shall realize his intentions."

Art societies will be formed whose attention
will be given chiefly to art out-of-doors. A

68 Outlook to Nature

new art profession is just now rising, having
for its sphere the real fields under the open
sky. As yet it has no name. Once it was
called landscape gardening, when its efforts
were confined to the constricted areas of gar-
dens and parks. Now it is called landscape
architecture, as in its present stage it has
much to do with buildings and engineering
problems. Soon it will rise beyond all these
arbitrary bounds and take the face of the earth
for its own. Even now, we know that the
regulation of the scenery of mountains is not
too large for its grasp.

COUNTRYMAN AND CITY MAN

I am speaking to city people. This leads
me to say that there are two kinds of country
and of country life, — the country of the city
man and the country of the countryman.
These prospects are wholly unlike, for the
country is seen from opposite points of view,
and with different preconceived ideas.

The city man looks outward to the country :
it is his respite and release. The countryman

Country and City 69

is part of the country : it is his realm and
his support. The city man thinks chiefly
of agreeable features of the country ; he is
interested in its beauty and novelty and in
its contrasts with the city. The countryman
does not think of the features, for all features
are his ; he escapes neither weather nor season,
since he belongs to the country as much as
the trees and fields belong to it.

The attitude of the city man is, " Come,
let us go into the fields." The attitude of
the countryman is, " These are the fields ; here
am I." Keats well expresses many city men's
attitude :

t

€t To one who has been long in city pent,

'Tis very sweet to look into the fair

And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,

Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair

Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment ? "

The farmer's attitude may be expressed
somewhat as follows :

70 Outlook to Nature

I hoe and I plow
I plow and I hoe
And the wind drives over the main.

I mow and I plant
I plant and I mow
While the sun burns hot on the plain.

I sow and I reap
I reap and I sow
And I gather the wind with the grain.

I go and I come
I come and I go
In the calm and the storm and the rain.

Two points of view.

Our point of view is determined chiefly
by the means that brings us support : the
city man, even though he lives in the country
and loves it, is supported by the city. He
thinks as the city thinks. He often has a
feeling of pity for the man who must live
always in the country. He is urban-minded.

The countryman has his own peculiar mental
processes and points of view. The city is
little to him except as it buys his products.
His interest in the news columns of the news-

Country and City 71

paper is of a very different order from that of
the city man. He is not a sportsman, — he
seldom hunts for the "sport" of hunting.
You know the genuine countryman when he
comes to town ; but he cares little what you
think of him. He has a deep-seated dislike
of the city. He considers that his is the
original estate ; and it is significant that the
dictionaries recognize the unit word " country-
man " but no corresponding word " cityman."
He is rural-minded.

As the city man's point of view of the
country is essentially a civic idea, it is clearly
outside my province to discuss the larger
relations of it. The city man's country life
is of two kinds, — vacationing and summering
in the country, and the making of homes in
the suburbs. These interests are now well
represented by magazines, but so far the origi-
nal country life is represented only by the
agricultural class periodicals. It is not my
purpose to discuss the vacationing and sum-
mering in the country, for that is largely of
temporary and secondary importance. I am

j2 Outlook to Nature

more interested in the permanent home-mak-
ing force of country life.

The sub-urban.

The home idea is clearly dying out in the cities.
Homes seem to be incompatible -with compact
city life ; consequence is that the serious-minded
middle class is constantly working out and out
toward the suburbs and the adjacent towns, in
the effort to secure the greatest possible prox-
imity to nature consistent with business prudence.
This transfer of domicile at once raises far-
reaching questions. The political philosopher
sees danger because this movement removes a
large class of voters and is likely to leave the
city, or the congested parts of it, in the hands
of politicians. The social philosopher finds a
new breed of citizen developing, — not country-
bred nor city-bred, but suburban-bred, product
of neither extreme. Will this citizen have the
prejudices of either extreme ? And will he be
a more useful social factor because of his inter-
mediate origin?

Country and City 73

The city obligation.

The country is certain to exercise a profound
influence on the city. We now know that the
city, with all its wealth of attractions and its
suggestions of luxury, leaves some of the
highest aspirations unsatisfied. The very in-
tensity of the city demands the country as an
antidote and corrective.

On the other hand, the city is to have a most
marked influence on the country. The coun-
try needs the city. It does not need the city
man so much to teach the countryman farming,
as to touch and elevate the general currents of
all country life. The city man goes to the
country with new and large ideas, active touch
with great affairs, keen business and executive
ability, generosity, altruism, high culture. May
we not hope that he will also always go with
sympathy ? All these traits will arouse the
country from its tendency to complacency and
narrowness. The blend should perhaps pro-
duce the real American. Certainly the city has
a distinct duty to perform toward its contribu-
tory country, to help to build it up rather than

74 Outlook to Nature

to drain it, — a duty as clear-cut and imperative
as any of its customary unselfish and high-
minded efforts in aid of the world's progress ;
and it is gratifying to know that even purely
agricultural questions are now arousing unusual
interest among city people, as one part of the
great volume of human affairs. The problems
of the open country constitute an important
part of the problems of civilization.

THE GARDEN

It is my purpose, however, to speak of the
personal and domestic influences of the country,
rather than of public policies ; and I have just
been speaking of the suburban kind of country
life. You go to the suburbs and the country
in order that you may have more room, less
racket, better health, more freedom, and closer
relations with sun and wind and sky. But
there should be more than a home in the coun-
try,— there should be country in the home.
One room of the home should be an epitome
of the country, as essential as dining-room or
" den."

Country and City 75

By the way, the development of the " den "
as a part of a modern house is most significant :
it is a protest against the "spare room" and all
meaningless conventionality and unnaturalness.

The garden room.

The room of which I am thinking is com-
monly known as a garden. I am not now
considering so much the landscape part of the
place, with its plan of lawn and trees and
borders : this is a part of the general architec-
ture of the establishment, a kind of foundation
on which the builded building rests. The
landscape garden will naturally comport with
the style and "feeling" of the architecture of
the place as a whole, — secluded if the house is
secluded, bold, or homelike. Too often, I
fear, the American yard is likely to resemble
the literature of the period, in being striking,
curious, or wonderful. Often it is of the look-
at-me kind, made to be stared at, as a street
sign, resplendent in its paint, is to be stared at.

It is not the " front yard " or the " spare
room " that gives the real character to the

j6 Outlook to Nature

home. You will see an English country home
of very modest appearance ; you may think it
dull or uninteresting, yet somewhere behind
the house or against the wall you are almost
sure to find a garden, as secluded and as per-
sonal and individual as a library or a study. I
wish that Americans would make gardens even
if there were no hope that people would see
them.

The meaning of home has broadened and
deepened very much within a lifetime. To the
plainest home of the middle class there have
been added a few good pieces of simple and
useful furniture, a little collection of' books
good at least to look at, simple music, pictures
that have some meaning and are not mere wall
decorations : may we not now add a garden ? It
does not matter how small or how large the
garden is. If it is small, it will be condensed
and perhaps we shall appreciate it the more.

The spirit of the garden.

I step from the house, and at once I am re-
leased. I am in a new realm. This realm has

Country and City 77

just been created, and created for me. I give
myself over to the blue vault of the sky; or
if it rain, to first-hand relationship with the
elements, — for can I not touch the drops that
fall from some mysterious height ? I am con-
scious of a quick smell of the soil, something
like the smell of the sea. I hear the call of a
bird or a faint rush of wind, or catch a shadow
that passes and is gone. There is a sudden
sensation of green things tumbled over the
ground. I feel that they are living, growing,
aspiring, sensitive.

Then the details begin to grow up out of
the area, every detail perfect in its way, every
one individual, yet all harmonious. The late
rain compacted the earth; but here are little
grooves and cuts made by tiny rills that ran
down the furrows and around the stems of
the plants, coalescing and growing as they
ran, digging gorges between mountainous clods,
spreading into islanded lakelets, depositing
deltas, and then plunging headlong toward
some far-off sea, — a panorama that needs only
to be magnified to make those systems of

78 Outlook to Nature

rivers and plains and mountains the names
of which I sought so much in my old geog-
raphy days.

Soft green things push up out of the earth,
growing by some sweet alchemy that I cannot
understand but that I can feel. Green leaves
expand to the sun ; buds burst into flowers ;
flowers change to fruits ; the pods burst, and
berries wither and fall ; the seeds drop and are
lost, — yet I know that nature the gardener
will recover them in due season.

Strange plants that I did not want are grow-
ing here and there, and now I find that they
are as good as the rest, for they spring from
the same earth yet are unlike all others, they
struggle for place and light, and they too will
have their day and will die away and in some
mysterious process will come again. Insects
crawl here and there, coming from strange crev-
ices and all of them intent. Earthworms heave
their burrows. All these, too, pass on and die
and will come again. A bird darts in and cap-
tures a flying insect ; a dog trots across the
farther end of the plot ; a cat is hidden under

Country and City 79

the vines by the wall. A toad dozes under a
bench : he will come out to-night.

It is all a drama, intense, complex, ever
moving, always dying, always re-born. I see a
thousand actors moving in and out, always
going, always coming. I am part of the drama;
I break the earth ; I destroy this plant and that,
as if I were the arbiter of life and death. I
sow the seed. I see the tender things come
up and I feel as if I had created something new
and fine, that had not been seen on the earth
before ; and I have a new joy as deep and as
intangible as the joy of religion.

THE OUTLOOK FOR THE COUNTRY

If a careful outlook to nature is much to be
desired, and if farming occupations are the
nature-occupations, then it follows that the con-
dition of farm life is of much concern to every
person who recognizes his responsibilities in the
world.

The country must hold its place in society
through an elevation of its ideals, and this can
come about only by means of education. There

8o Outlook to Nature

is now a shifting of emphasis in agriculture
teaching from the crop to the home. The
burden of teaching has been chiefly to make
the farm more productive. This is fundamental,
and these efforts will not be remitted ; but the
farmer is a man and a citizen as well as a
producer. He must be instructed in matters
pertaining to good schools, good churches,
good roads, good local government, good
politics ; he must be stimulated in citizenship ;
and his intellectual and spiritual horizon
must be broad enough to allow a sympathetic
appreciation of the nature of which he is a
part.

Rural economics and rural sociology are
subjects now announced in college curricula.
Even college people are asking what these
subjects mean, thereby admitting that they have
considered humane subjects to appertain only
to cities and other assembled interests. In the
coming generation, the teacher in social and
economic questions will exert a greater influence
on the elevation of country life than the teacher
of technical agriculture.

Country and City 81

The country home.

The farm home is the most direct and simple
home ; it is least disturbed by passing moods ;
it is nearest nature. It is important to the
nation that it be preserved ; but it is also im-
portant that it be improved.

The first thing I would now do for the farm
home is to put in sanitary water-works, for the
care and comfort of the person. Nothing
would so soon elevate the home ideals.

Then I should try to reorganize the woman's
work, as much as the man's work has been re-
organized in the barns and on the fields.

Next, I should revamp the lay-out of the
home grounds, to make them convenient, neat,
attractive, even artistic.

Then I should want to consider the reading,
— not too many newspapers, but books and
bulletins and some magazines, the reading of
which would increase knowledge and direct the
development of good taste.

Millinery architecture.

Then I should improve the architecture.

82 Outlook to Nature

Buildings are silent teachers ; every hour their
impressions are repeated.

I often wonder how it is possible for human
beings to construct such homely dwelling-places
as they customarily build. Consider the
looks of the buildings that you see, one after
another, along any street : birds and beasts do
far better. The architects are partly to blame
for lack of good taste and good sense in farm
buildings, because they have concerned them-
selves so exclusively with ambitious structures
that common people do not think of common
buildings as having any " architecture." Most
persons do not know that good architecture is
more a matter of proportions than of ornaments
and accessories. For several years I have tried
in vain to find architects to give advice on
ordinary farm buildings. If I found any who
would consider the question, they had in mind
such buildings as only a city farmer could afford
to build. Every building, even though it cost
only five dollars, is either good architecture or
bad architecture. Usually the most expensive
dwellings are the most showy and formless.

Country and City 83

A century ago farmhouses were mostly direct
and tasteful in mass effect. We yet admire
these old well-proportioned buildings, notwith-
standing all their imperfections of plan. Then
came the great development of cities, and with
it the rise of millinery architecture. The
country copied; and we now see the effects, —
narrow-chested gawky buildings standing high
in the air as if land were worth so much a square
foot, with jig-saw cornices, ten-pin gables, and
chicken-legged porches.

The need of social association.

There is education in assembling with one's
fellows. This is why city populations are so
alert. Rural families are scattered. In some
way, the deadening effect of too complete
isolation must be overcome. It will not be
overcome by farmers assembling in hamlets.
The life of the ordinary hamlet is likely to
be of a lower type than the life of separated
farms.

There is every indication that we are coming
to at least a temporary halt in the rural unrest.

84 Outlook to Nature

We shall expect, therefore, that new centers of
social crystallization will develop. Perhaps a
recrudescence of the rural school will make it
again something like a social center. In parts
of New York and New England, the grange
hall is rapidly supplying this necessity. In
some places the church will meet this need ; in
other places, the rural library ; and increas-
ingly will special community halls be erected.

All constructive agencies will make for social
cohesion by arousing a keener desire for it ;
but I doubt whether this cohesion will result in
real village life so much as in the development
of a social farm life.

Reading for resource.

The countryman will always be compara-
tively isolated, but this need not mean that the
country is to be characterized by intellectual
poverty. The farmer needs literature, — litera-
ture that is bright, true, and relevant. Most
of the books that he reads — as also most of
those that his children study — are made for
towns-people.

Country and City 85

Where is the fiction that portrays the farmer
without overdrawing or caricaturing him ?
Where are the candid and interesting farm
sketches ? The farm poems ? The writing
that will do for the farm what has been done
to interest persons in nature ?

A good technical agricultural literature is now
developing, and this is certain to be followed
by a new range of artistic writing. It is aston-
ishing how utterly agricultural experience has
been neglected in literature. Great movements
have come and gone, ideas of wide sweep have
risen and passed away, unconscious experiments
of continental area have been made, industries
have developed and have disappeared, discus-
sions on burning questions have caught from
schoolhouse to schoolhouse, customs have died
out, inventions have been forgotten, systems of
farming have been outlived, books have been
written to be stored in old attics, strong men
have lived and died, and yet all these treasures
of human experience are unknown to the
writers and the historians.

I never look over my shelves of old agricul-

86 Outlook to Nature

tural books that I do not feel sure that some
day an attractive literature will rise out of the
achievements of these neglected rural people.
This literature will have a large significance be-
cause it will utilize genuine material that has
accumulated slowly and naturally and in great
part without conscious purpose, and which,
therefore, lies very close to original feelings
and motives of men.

The nature-ward tendency.

A fundamental offset for isolation is the
development of a keen intellectual and spiritual
interest in the objects and affairs of the country.
The nature-study movement — to use the
phrase in its broadest sense — is now evolving
this insight. A sympathetic knowledge of
nature will in the end be more satisfying than
much of the amusement that the town has
to offer.

This sensitiveness to nature is now develop-
ing very rapidly also in the towns, and many
towns-people are expecting to take up farming
largely to satisfy this desire. I fear that many

Country and City 87

of these persons will be disappointed, not be-
cause they will fail to find the interest in nature
but because they will know nothing about farm-
ing and the practical affairs of the country ; and
no doubt some of them will find the love for
the town to be deeper-seated than they had
been aware.

The farmer himself will develop this nature-
love slowly and non-theoretically, and it will
abide ; at the same time, his occupation will be
developing out of mere laboriousness, and he
will have some strength and opportunity remain-
ing for the enjoyment of his environment. I
am sometimes told, when I make remarks simi-
lar to these, that I am idealizing. I hope that
I am, for if farm life cannot be idealized, it can-
not be recommended ; but I hope that the
ideals are attainable.

The reverential attitude.

The countryman's training, whether in home
or school, should be such as to intensify his
spiritual reactions. There is danger that we
miss the reverential attitude toward life.

88 Outlook to Nature

The reverential attitude is the result of our
feeling toward the materials of life, — toward
the little things and the common things that
meet us hour by hour. One stimulates it in
himself only as he feels that the earth is holy
and that all the things that come out of the
earth are holy. A man may conquer the earth
and yet feel that he has taken no advantage
that does not belong to him because he is a
man, and may hold the highest reverence for
the rights and welfare of everything that exists.
Such an attitude of mind as inclines one
to pause to listen to a bird's song (even
though he may not stop his work), to give
more than a passing glance to a potato plant,
to inhale some deeper draught of the fragrance
of new-plowed land, will produce in him a
sweet seriousness that will stand him in good
stead in stress and strain, and will much rein-
force his spiritual stability.

The point of attack.

If these remarks mean anything, it is that we
need new country institutions developed from

Country and City 89

the country point of view, not merely city and
town institutions transplanted to the country.
City persons who desire to " reform " the coun-
try are very likely to forget all this and to
begin with schemes of social or economic or-
ganization. All schemes must begin with the
individual farmer. The country youth must
not only know more, but he must have a
country mind in the broadest sense.

The poetical farmer.

I am always interested in Thoreau's "poeti-
cal farmer," not because I recommend his kind
of farming, but because of his philosophical
point of view : " Minott is perhaps the most
poetical farmer, the one who most realizes to
me the poetry of the farmer's life, that I know.
He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but
everything as if he loved it. He makes the
most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction
in every part of it. He is not looking forward
to the sale of his crops, but he is paid by the
constant satisfaction which his labor yields him.
He has not too much land to trouble him, too

90 Outlook to Nature

much work to do, no hired man nor boy, but
simply to amuse himself and live. He carts
not so much to raise a large crop as to do his
work well. He knows every pin and nail in
his barn. If any part of it is to be floored, he
lets no hired man rob him of that amusement,
but he goes slowly to the woods, and at his
leisure selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and
hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill ; and so
he knows the history of his barn floor. Farm-
ing is an amusement which has lasted him
longer than gunning or fishing. He is never
in a hurry to get his garden planted, and yet it
is always planted soon enough, and none in the
town is kept so beautifully clean. He always
prophesies a failure of his crops, and yet is
satisfied with what he gets. His barn floor is
fastened down with oak pins, and he prefers
them to iron spikes, which he says will rust
and give way. He handles and amuses him-
self with every ear of his corn crop as much as
a child with its playthings, and so his small
crop goes a great way. He might well cry if
it were carried to market. The seed of weeds

Country and City 91

is no longer in his soil. He loves to walk in
a swamp in windy weather, and hear the wind
groan through the pines. He indulges in no
luxury of food, or dress, or furniture, yet he is
not penurious, but merely simple. If his sister
dies before him, he may have to go to the alms-
house in his old age, yet he is not poor, for he
does not want riches."

WE NEED THE COUNTRY

Therefore I preach the open country, because
it is natural and without affectation.

I preach the plain and frugal living of
plain people. Yesterday the bill of fare
that was put before me at my hotel con-
tained, by actual count, the names of 567
articles. To judge by the names, most of
them were inedible. Ten articles are suffi-
cient, and twenty are luxury.

I preach the steadiness of country life,
its freedom from speculativeness and from
great temptation to evil doing. We need the
example of all simple and direct lives, even if
we lose some of the " polished " manners. We

92 Outlook to Nature

need the freshness and the spontaneity, and
the power to rely on one-self. The day of
homespun is past, and the day of the machine
has come : danger is that the machine and the
formal affairs shall come between us and the
essentials. We are too likely to work by proxy
and through servants.

We need the example of simple institutions.

With the increasing complexities of civi-
lization, it may be impossible to simplify
the machinery of our political life ; yet we
all have the desire to do so, and we feel
that the more direct the institutions the more
efficient and enduring they are. The simple
native institutions have largely determined
the methods and points of view in great
geographical regions ; — the New England
town meeting, with its ideal democracy ; the
southern court-house, with its social strati-
fication ; the central-west schoolhouse, repeat-
ing the democracy of New England but
with a freer individualism ; the arid-west
ditch meeting, repeating again the democracy,

Country and City 93

but made applicable by the urgency of a
single vital problem. It is doubtful whether
a nation of cities could be a democracy.

Not all the people should live on salary.

I think that we need the example and
influence of men who do not live on salary.
One reason why boys leave the farm is
because in other occupations they are offered
wages or salary, and the risk of livelihood
is thereby reduced; but the very lessening
of this risk sacrifices much of a man's
self-reliance, — it loses him his independence,
not only in directly securing the means of
support, but, what is more serious, in his
attitude toward society.

Salary-practice is a concomitant of organi-
zation, and it goes with social stratification.
The man who receives salary exclusively de-
pends on some one else, and his opinions
are controlled, or at least modified, there-
by. Often to a very large extent he loses
his autonomy. There is a general feeling
among salaried men that they must engage in

94 Outlook to Nature

other business in unsalaried hours, not always
so much, I think, because they desire to add
to their income, as to satisfy the longing for
some greater measure of independence.

The farmer is about the only man left who
lives directly on his own efforts, without the aid
of salary, speculation, or the non-intrinsic prof-
its that accrue from trade. There is a tend-
ency to organize agriculture, and thereby to
develop salaries in it ; this tendency is no doubt
to be commended, yet I look with some appre-
hension to the effect that it may have on inde-
pendent effort and opinion.

We need the out-of-doors.

Certainly all our people need the open air
and the example of contact with freedom, and
the practice of good unconventionality.

A matron of a large boarding-school for girls
told me recently that many of the pupils come
to her so thinly clad that she is obliged to keep
her houses too warm for health in order to
make the girls comfortable. This school is
an expensive one and the girls come from well-

Country and City 95

to-do families ; it is not a question of expense :
the matron said that by many mothers it is
not considered " good form " for girls to dress
warm. The girls are clad in gauzy shivery
stuff, and they therefore become hothouse sub-
jects, withdrawing from the cold and discom-
forted by every change of temperature.

We magnify the comfort of living indoors.
We have made the inside of the house so at-
tractive and so suggestive of ease that the
temptation is to go outside as little as pos-
sible, as if the out-of-doors is to be avoided.
We have so many books even about the out-
of-doors that we do not need to go out-of-doors
to learn about it.

Americans are fond of saying that the Euro-
peans have been far behind us in developing
the physical comforts of the home. I also
am proud of this ; but I sometimes wonder
whether this is not due in part to our dread of
the out-of-doors, and whether this very physi-
cal perfection of the house may not still further
emphasize the breach that has grown up be-
tween ourselves and nature. There is, to be

96 Outlook to Nature

sure, a tendency in American house-building
toward an outdoor feeling, but this usually does
not extend beyond the veranda, which is really
built for protection. The sedentary indoor life
has its sure effects, and we try to correct these
effects by means of drugs ; and the American
is known by his nostrums.

A new and strong kind of nativeness is no
doubt developing in the cities ; but we also
need the kind of nativeness and homefulness
that develops in the country. I am always
conscious that there is no soil in the city, but
only dirt ; the ground must be covered until it
is blotted out. When we get away from the
soil we begin to get away from simplicity and
directness.

We all perceive a growing tendency country-
ward, coming in response to a universal soul-
hunger that the strenuous and complex life
does not fully satisfy. Sooner or later, most
men come to feel as did the city schoolboy
who declared that some day he would live in
the real country and would build his house
out-of-doors.

Ill

The School of the Future

THE pupils in a certain school were asked
whether they could define or distinguish
an educated man. After a long pause, one
little girl raised her hand and said that she
surely could tell. " An educated man," the
child said, " is one that does not work."

This homely reply admirably illustrates a
popular conception of education, — that it does
not put one into direct relation with the affairs
of life, as if education and occupation are
incompatible.

Most of us will not accept the child's opinion ;
yet there seems to be a deep-rooted feeling that
a person cannot be really educated by means
of subjects that have a direct application to the
common necessities of living. It was an old
idea that education makes a man accomplished.

H 97

98 Outlook to Nature

It is the new idea that it also makes him
useful; and as all spiritual progress is in-
separably associated with physical welfare, this
new education stands for the completer and
the larger man.

I have always liked the story of the Adiron-
dack guide, who thought Agassiz an educated
man and Lowell an ignorant man, for it is a
forcible expression of the fact that there is more
than one kind of education, — Agassiz knew
the things that appealed to the guide.

Education for "culture"

It is still asserted that some education leads
to " culture." This I have no desire to dis-
pute, but I do not like the inference that other
education does not lead to culture. This
question cannot be closely discussed unless one
defines what he means by "culture." Much
of what passes as culture is very superficial
attainment and may be little more than good
manners. But breadth of view, clear reasoning
power, good judgment, tolerance, high ideals,
sensitiveness to art and nature, devotion to

The School of the Future 99

service, — these are of the greatest value, and
they may be the result of more than one line
of educational effort. The old-time formal
and literary attitude, with facility in a particular
group of academic subjects, is much to be
prized ; but sensitiveness to life is the highest
product of education.

I read recently in a college paper that " the
classics are the source of culture, all culture,
and they always have been " ; and again :
" Greek, once considered the foundation of all
culture, is fast dying out, and -our whole system
of education for the sake of culture and power
is threatened with destruction by the ever-
increasing flood of materialism in scientific
courses, and of practicalism in the professional
courses. The task of stemming this flood has
given rise to the most vital and difficult
problems of the modern university." I wish
that we had more Greek, but I do not admit
that Greek or any other group of subjects is
the sole source of what we ought to know as
" culture," nor that " materialism " is a result
of scientific courses, nor that "practicalism"

I oo Outlook to Nature

is any bar to the highest flights of thought ;
and it is strange that any person in these days
should regard Greek as the one preeminent
source of power. All education should lead to
culture and to power.

Education for power.

How can a man's mind be trained ? It can
be trained by being employed in some definite,
integrating, and consecutive effort. It matters
little what the subject-matter is : if the mind is
employed effectively, it will be able to make a
still more effective effort. Many of the old
subjects train the memory chiefly and their
results are superficial.

" Reasoning power " develops by use. This
power ought to be as effectively used by rea-
soning from problem to solution in biology or
physics or agriculture or engineering as in
formal philosophy and logic. A man can be
trained to think just as accurately by means
even of agricultural subjects as by conventional
subjects, provided the agricultural subjects are
as well systematized and equally well taught.

The School of the Future 101

No one subject can have the monopoly of
learning, unless we wish to restrict education.
The theory of the choice of subjects is now
well established, but we still need to liberalize
the teachers and the schools. The difference
between " technical " and " cultural " education
is essentially one of intention rather than of
subject.

Application to life.

If one subject may be as effective as another
in training the mind, it will naturally be asked
why it is necessary to introduce the new sub-
jects at all, inasmuch as the old are already
well established. The answer is that the mere
" training " of the mind is not the only purpose
of education, but that education should make
the man efficient and useful. It should put
him into sympathy with common affairs and
the questions of the work-a-day world, and it
should give him usable information. Educa-
tion should have a tendency toward something
definite ; for the educated man, if he is to help
and lead the world, must not stand above and

IO2 Outlook to Nature

aloof from mankind. When only Greek-
minded men went to college, it was enough
that Greek was taught ; but now that physics-
minded and physiology-minded and farm-
minded men go to college, engineering and
physiology and agriculture also should be
taught. I do not suppose that there is any
way whereby an examination of the fiber of an
educated man's brain could reveal the means
by which the mind was trained.

Liberal education.

It is a favorite assertion that some education
is " liberal." So far as this word is merely a
name to designate a certain group of subjects,
no one can object ; but if it is the inference that
other subjects are illiberal, then the statement
cannot go unchallenged. The fact is that the
older type of education is likely not to have a
liberalizing effect, because it not only confines
a man's attention to certain efforts that may be
narrow in themselves but often renders him
unsympathetic toward those who have not pur-
sued a similar course, and also toward affairs in

The School of the Future 103

general. I once heard the president of an ex-
cellent literary college say that his institution
" educates men, not farmers and blacksmiths."
Most persons now think that a college may
educate farmers and blacksmiths to be men.

The humanities.

It is most curious that we should ever have
considered the concerns of men to be unworthy
of study until they had become centuries old
and had been more or less imperfectly embalmed
in tradition and literature. The most humaniz-
ing course of study is that which puts the man
into closest sympathy with the activities and
ideals of men in times past and in times present.

We ought to recognize the transcendent
value of human experience as expressed in its
religions, its history, its art, and its literature,
and to make it the nucleating agency in the
educational system ; but it is just as fatal to
the highest scholarship and to the best intel-
lectual and spiritual development to have an
education exclusively in what we are in the
habit of calling the humanities as in what we

IO4 Outlook to Nature

call the sciences and the affairs : either is in-
complete and one-sided, and cannot give a
rounded and rational view of life, or put one
into full sympathy with the achievements of
the race. The humanities often develop the
man unhumanly.

THE SCHOOL OF AFFAIRS

There are two kinds of schools, — the in-
stitutional school, and the school of affairs.
Many an unschooled man has been well trained
in the school of affairs. The untaught farm
boy goes to the city and succeeds because he
has learned certain things in the daily round of
life that are of more value to him than all that
he could learn from the books.

The ideal training would be the addition of
the school work to the real work; but if either
one is to be omitted, it should be the school.
In the old days the school was a supplement
to the home ; now it tends to take the place of
the home. In many cases the child now spends
most of his time in school and in vacationing ;
and there is little opportunity for the develop-

The School of the Future 105

ment of the strong native traits that were so
pronounced in the old days. I would not have
less schooling ; but I would advise that the
school supply what the home and the business
can no longer give. No boy or girl should leave
school without the power to attack a question
in actual affairs or to do a piece of work with
the hands. I do not consider a person lacking
these powers to be well educated, even though
he knows all the books.

The minister came to see me, and I showed
him the garden and the barn. His eye caught
the tool-bench. "What a fortunate man you
are ! " he said. " You can use tools ; I can-
not do a thing with my hands, except to play
golf."

The school of farm affairs.

I shall now speak of some of the ways in
which the school of affairs trains men, develop-
ing qualities and powers that are indispensable
to a right life. I shall choose the case of the
farm boy because I am most familiar with him
and because his relationships are directly with

106 Outlook to Nature

nature, — and the theme of my lectures is the
meaning of the outlook to nature.

In making these statements, I have no desire
to glorify the farm boy or to magnify the ad-
vantages of farm life : I speak of some of the
positive training processes of the farm only
to show that the unschooled man may be in
a very true sense an educated man, and to
enable me thereafter to make some suggestions
for the public schools themselves. Unlovely
traits are often bred on the farm; but these
faults are not necessarily inherent in farm life
and they will be fewer in the future. Nor do I
wish to be understood as implying that the
farm-bred man is to be as indispensable to the
city as he has been in the past. The city is
now finding itself, and is developing strong men
of its own ; but even in the city many of the
strong traits will also be developed in the
school of affairs, for everywhere the business of
life educates the individual.

(i) The farm boy's activities are direct.
He deals with real, actual, essential things,
problems, and events, and develops practical

The School of the Future 107

knowledge and ability. He can "do" things.
City boys are likely to deal with pictures and
models and descriptions, and with made-up ex-
ercises. The farm boy must overcome his
own difficulties for himself. Every day brings
him a hundred of these natural problems. He
tips over with a load of hay ' in the back lot.
Does he go to the village to consult an expert
or to the library to look up references ?

He lives close to the raw materials, deals
first-hand with them, and his methods, although
sometimes primitive, are short and effective.
I am impressed with the indirectness and ex-
pensiveness of much of the work in cities,
— those who do public work especially seem
usually to be killing time, and the methods by
which they are employed seem to a country-
man to be political and circuitous and to involve
a great waste of efficiency.

(2) The farm boy is trained to be indus-
trious. If he turns out to be lazy, he finds no
system of political patronage to float him along.
It is commonly thought by outsiders that the
farm boy's life is hard. It is true that it is

io8 Outlook to Nature

often harder than it need be ; but in general it
is hard only to those who shudder at the
thought of work. Eight-hour men may think
of it as hard. In Chicago, a short time ago, I
was amused to see "laborers" roosting on the
iron fenders in front of labor-bureau offices,
where most entertaining signs were hanging
around them and beneath them offering attrac-
tive work at high wages and with free transpor-
tation ; it was apparent that the men were not
looking for work, but for the job that had the
least work in it.

The farm boy has little opportunity to
choose the easy jobs. He is confronted by the
entire situation, — the series of problems im-
posed by the seasons and the years. The farm-
course is complete in itself and its duties must
all be met, without thought of escape; there-
fore, it is a system of natural discipline.

One of the great questions of the city
is that of idleness, — one cannot see the float-
ing youth on the streets without being im-
pressed with this fact. The school hours
often are reduced to a minimum, the child

The School of the Future 109

has no serviceable employment, and he
drifts ; the farm boy has his chores to do
after school.

I cannot leave this subject without again
denying the common notion that the farm
boy's life is mere drudgery. Much of the
work is laborious, and this it shares with all
work that is productive ; for the easier the
job the L:s it is worth doing. But every
piece of farm work is also an attempt to solve
a problem, and therefore it should have its
intellectual interest. It needs but the inform-
ing of the mind and the quickening of the
imagination to raise any constructive and
creative work above the level of drudgery.
It is not mere dull work to follow the plow
— I have followed it day after day — if one
is conscious of all the myriad forces that are
set at work by the breaking of the furrow ;
and there is always the landscape, the free
fields, the clean soil, the rain, the promise of
the crops. I cannot help wondering why it
is that men will eagerly seek work in the
grease and grime of a noisy factory, but will

no Outlook to Nature

recoil at what they call the dirty work of the
farm. So much are we yet bound by tradition !

(3) The life of the farm boy is varied. The
farmer handles an entire business, not some
small part of a business, and he is therefore able
to lead something like a naturally rounded life.
In an age of minute division of labor, this is
important, for it tends to develop many abilities
rather than to make a man a cog in a wheel.

I often hear it said that the farmer's life
is monotonous. This is true only so far as
it may confine his activities to one locality.
His work does not compare in monotony
with that of the average workingman or the
average business man ; but other men may
have more divertisement provided for them,
— and for this the farmer will have time and
desire when he comes to organize his effort
and to develop a greater sensitiveness to his
surroundings. To a large extent, he must
provide his own diversion.

The farm work itself, while of the same
general kind year by year, is endlessly varied
in its details, and this is the very reason why

The School of the Future 1 1 1

the business is so difficult for the unresource-
ful man.

(4) The farm boy's life is simple. Usually
he has only the essentials. No doubt he has
been confined too closely to the bare necessities ;
but in adding the luxuries we must be careful
not to eliminate the educating power of a mod-
erate and plain life. Superfluities are dissipating
of one's energies, and weakening of the moral
fiber, whereas simplicity is economy, and makes
for straightforwardness and therefore for power.

One's amusements have much to do with his
power, for they force their own example on the
mind and they either divert or conserve one's
energies. And here is where the farm lad has
a great advantage : he is not diverted with too
many side interests by being consumed in
social affairs. He is able to go at his work
with singleness of purpose, and it is no part of
his thinking that he must be forever amused
and entertained.

Too much entertainment is a serious fault
with our time. The things that strike me
most, as a countryman, when I go to the city

112 Outlook to Nature

are the " attractions," — all the gewgaws and
garish lights, and rackets of musical instruments,
and exhibitions of freaks, and the glorious signs,
and the appealing show, and the hosts of per-
sons who make it their business to entertain
those who cannot entertain themselves and to
fleece those who want to be fleeced, and all the
things to buy that nobody ever should want.
And then I marvel at the enormous waste of
human effort, and at the insincerity and indi-
rection ; and I wonder what might be the
state of civilization were half of this energy and
shrewd ingenuity to be applied to effort that
would make for usefulness.

I am aware that all this display is but the
driftwood on a sea that is calm and unruffled
beneath the surface, and that a good part of its
purpose is to attract the visitor ; I know the
sweet and strong lives that are behind the
closed doors ; but the cheap and insincere
street life is a fact, nevertheless, and it is a
natural entertainment- product of the city.

It is always a relief to get back to the unpre-
tentious music and entertainment of the country

The School of the Future 113

folk. There is a sincerity about it that I seem
to miss elsewhere, a kind of native heartiness
and simplicity that satisfies the soul. I always
enjoy the unlabored melody of the singing at
farmers' meetings, with the absence of trills
and effort ; in comparison, the elaborate music
of many of the city churches, with its hired
singers and its instruments, seems not to be
worship so much as performance.

Wi(h all this untutored experience there
come a hardiness and a natural courage that are
not shaken by weather or by common discour-
agements. As civilization provides the means
of rapid locomotion, so it develops the desire
to avoid the natural environment of our lives,
and we fly South in winter to escape the cold,
and North in summer to escape the heat. So
far as this means change for health and recrea-
tion, it may be commendable ; but when it is
a desire merely to escape weather, it tends to
breed weakness and evasion of duty.

(5) The farm effort is steady. It is char-
acterized by perseverance. It is probably
more completely divorced from the gambling

114 Outlook to Nature

instinct than any other occupation, — a fact
well attested by the frequency with which
the farmer of the past generation was " taken
in " by the city sharper. This steadiness
makes for continuous effort when the boy takes
up some other business. The real farmer goes
into farming as a lifework, not as a makeshift,
nor with any idea of ever changing his occupa-
tion.

(6) The farm boy is compelled to be frugal
of his money. The farm is capable of earning
more money than it commonly produces, and
the farmer, being a producer rather than a
trader, does not receive his share of the wealth
that he helps to create ; but I hope the time
will never come when the merit of farm life will
be only its wealth.

The love of ease and of pleasure comes with
much money, and it is growing, and it is also
fatal to the greatest success ; for necessity is the
best of disciplinarians. I know it is now the
fashion to underrate the importance of careful
economy in money; but one cannot be spend-
thrift of money without being spendthrift of

The School of the Future 115

energy. In my teaching experience, I have
always been conscious that the farm boy will
accomplish as much with one dollar as the city
boy will with two dollars, and will make as
good use of himself at the same time.

(7) The farm boy develops slowly and nat-
urally. His youth is long, in a time when our
rapid civilization tends to eliminate youth.
What schooling he gets has time to soak in
and to become a part of him. He comes to
manhood fresh and with something to learn.

He is in the midst of things that are not
forced beyond their time, for trees and birds
and the grass grow naturally and in their seasons.
The constant contact with farm animals develops
a kind of naturalness that can scarcely be ac-
quired in any other way.

(8) He has an honest appetite and an intrepid
digestion. The farm diet no doubt needs cor-
recting, but in spite of its faults the average
farm boy is rugged and unpampered. Later on,
he may suffer from the lack of proper physi-
cal care of himself, but the surroundings them-
selves all make for a resistant physique. At

1 1 6 Outlook to Nature

all events, the farm youth does not want music
and pleasant-tasted trivialities to encourage the
appetite. One does not need music when he
eats ham-and-eggs. Eating is itself sufficient
entertainment if hunger is keen and assimila-
tion good.

(9) If the boy lives on a good farm that is
paid for, he is trained in independence, for the
business and the hours are managed by the
family. There is no extraneous boss. In case
of need, the farm can provide the necessities of
the family.

Many of the strong individual peculiarities
of the farmer are due directly to this independ-
ent life : he does not need to patronize. This
independence, combined with isolation, often
allows very undesirable traits to develop ; but
the general result is the producing of character-
istics that we need to conserve for the good of
the race.

(10) The farm boy is a democrat. Of all
our people, he is probably freest from any
thought of social stratification. He associates
with his fellows on terms of equality. The

The School of the Future 1 1 7

farmer has no servants, but " hired help," and
the help eats at the table. More than this, the
farm boy runs his own errands and waits on
himself; and all men are equal.

(n) The farm boy has a family life. He
is essentially a home boy, not a street boy.
You can fill in the picture.

THE NEW SCHOOL

A prominent school man said to me recently,
" Practically no one goes from the high schools
into the trades." This may be because so few
of our youth go through the high school, or
because high schools are not in direct vibration
with the trades. My friend meant to infer the
latter.

No doubt education should be supremely
natural, and it can be natural only when it
makes use of the forces and objects in the
neighborhood. The principal of an old acad-
emy told me that he was planning to teach
dairying in the school, both as a scholarship
study and as a means of aiding the industry of
the community. I asked him how he could

u8 Outlook to Nature

teach it without a laboratory and apparatus.
" I have the ideal laboratory," he replied, " be-
cause it is an actual enterprise : it is the cream-
ery yonder." I recognized that he was a
prophet.

The new laboratories.

The science-teaching developed the labo-
ratory. Of course it is fundamental, yet the
formal laboratory is not sufficient if we are
to teach also by means of affairs. It is
only a collection of materials with which to
work, — formerly dead things, but now live
things. We cannot teach affairs in collec-
tion-laboratories : we must have actual shops,
actual barns, actual enterprises, actual fields,
actual gardens, — not the materials brought
to the pupil, but the pupil taken to the
materials. Even the farm and the shop
may be made means of education.

" Object lessons " are excellent means of
developing observation, but the " objects "
are largely make-believe or are taken out
of their natural place and thereby lose much

The School of the Future 1 1 9

of their meaning. The new " nature-study "
tries to place the pupil with the objects
and phenomena as they occur in nature ;
and so far as it does this, it is funda-
mental and will be abiding. The persistency
with which nature-study is treated as if it were
object-teaching or mere laboratory-teaching
shows how difficult it is to extend the sphere
of the school beyond the school-house.

The material of occupations.

The general elementary schools cannot
teach trades, occupations, or professions ; but
they can use the materials of trades and
occupations as one of the aids to scholar-
ship, and while doing so they may give
such a " set " toward the occupations as
will attract all youth and will at the same
time make them more efficient in their own
behalf and also in behalf of civilization.

In an agricultural community, for example,
all the farms of the neighborhood will
afford training in the elements of failure
and success. There is no reason why the

I2O Outlook to Nature

pupils should not know why and how a
man succeeds with his orchard or dairy or
factory, as well as to have the cyclopedia in-
formation about the names of capes and moun-
tains, dates, and the like ; and why should not
every good farmer explain his operations to the
pupils ?

Such work, if well done, would vitalize
the school and lift it clean out of the ruts
of tradition and custom. It would make a
wholly new enterprise of the school, render-
ing it as broad and significant as the com-
munity itself, not an exotic effort for some
reason dropped down in the neighborhood.
When the public schools begin to touch experi-
ence and pursuits in a perfectly frank and
natural way, we may hope that persons who
have money to give for education will bestow
some of it on elementary and country schools,
where it will reach the very springs of life.

Manual-training.

It will be seen that all this is a much larger
idea than customary manual-training alone.

The School of the Future 1 2 1

Good as manual-training is, it still should lead
from the make-believe into something that ar-
ticulates directly with the lives of the pupils
and the needs of the community.

The new education.

All this constitutes the new " industrial edu-
cation,"— an education that uses native objects
and affairs as means of training in scholarship,
setting the youth right toward life, making
him to feel that schooling is as natural as any
other part of his life, that he cannot afford to
neglect it any more than he can neglect the
learning of a business or occupation, that the
home and school and daily work are only dif-
ferent phases of his normal life, and that
common duties may be made worthy of his
ideals. It is the active as distinguished from
the sit-still method.

Unfortunately, the term " industrial educa-
tion " is ordinarily understood to mean direct
training for the trades ; therefore it would be a
great gain to a clear understanding of the sub-
ject if some other term could be used. The

122 Outlook to Nature

term nature-study will not answer the purpose,
for this is commonly understood to cover what
we know as " nature," not including industries
and affairs. In my own mind, the term nature-
study is large enough for this, for I think of
" nature," in this relation, as expressing that
method of education whereby the pupil is edu-
cated at first in the terms of the world he lives
in ; but the term has been so long used with an-
other signification that it cannot be pressed into
service for the larger and fuller idea. I wish we
might say " natural education," but this is in-
definite and would always be disputed. For the
time being, therefore, I see no better term than
industrial education, with the reservation that it
mean much more than commercial education,
or than manual and technical skill for use in
the arts and trades.

I have no complaint to make of the schools,
but rather all praise to give. They are in the
process of evolution. They have come down
from the college and university, and are still
essentially exotic ; but a new intention will
gradually redirect them.

The School of the Future 123

The country school.

There certainly will come a day
As men become simple and wise,
When schools will put their books away
Till they train the hands and the eyes ;
Then the school from its heart will say
In love of the winds and the skies :

I teach

The earth and soil
To them that toil,
The hill and fen
To common men

That live just here ;

The plants that grow,
The winds that blow,
The streams that run
In rain and sun

Throughout the year ;

The shop and mart,
The craft and art,
The men to-day,
The part they play

In humble sphere;

124 Outlook to Nature

And then I lead
Thro' wood and mead
By bench and rod
Out unto God

With love and cheer.
I teach.

THE WAYS AND MEANS

It may be agreed that this industrial kind of
schooling is desirable, but it will be asked how
it is to be brought about, — where are the
schools in which it can be taught, and where
are the teachers who can teach it?

These questions are asked me again and
again, as if they raised difficulties that are insur-
mountable. But I have never felt that these
difficulties are of primary importance. The
essential point is to convince the public of the
necessity of the new kind of education:
the means will work themselves out just as they
have in all other enterprises. The demand
for teachers will develop slowly, and with the
demand teachers will begin to prepare them-
selves; and as soon as the demand becomes
well established, special facilities for training

The School of the Future 125

the teachers will arise. It would be reversing
all laws of natural development if teachers
should be trained before the need of them had
become concrete; and therefore I do not wish
to set up straw men or to pre-judge the obstacles.

The present overcrowded program.

I am ' constantly told, also, that the schools
are already overcrowded, and that new subjects
cannot be added. This shows a lack of com-
prehension as to what the coming education is:
it is not to be merely "added to" present
" courses of study," but it is in time to reorgan-
ize courses of study and even to change the
point of view on education. It is to make a
new kind of school, with new methods of work,
new programs, and the formal book work is to
be only a part of the system. The redirected
school will have its own scheme and method.

The difficulty at present is that we are trying
to push in additional things without giving way
with any of the old; we are trying to engraft
the new educational ideas on the old stock. In
time the old method will go, an indigenous

126 Outlook to Nature

system will take its place, and the child will be
allowed to develop freely and naturally, without
overworking.

We need equipment in land.

If we are to evolve a mode of nature-edu-
cation, we must control a good piece of land.
It is pitiful to see how small and scant are the
bits of earth that surround our schoolhouses.

Even in the open country there is the same
stint of land, — still another illustration of the
lack of any vital connection between the school
and the life of the community. Often it seems
as if the country schoolhouse were placed with
reference to economizing the cost of land, —
land that, if sold, might bring as much as thirty
or fifty dollars an acre !

I once taught a district school that was set
on an island of hard ground in a swamp ; and
again one that stood on the side of a sand hill.
I know of country school grounds that are
scarcely larger than the building, and lying
directly against the highway at that, as bare as
the moon, and in a place that would not be

The School of the Future 1 27

given to any other important building. In
many a country school the only playground is
the public highway, and sometimes that is unfit
for even highway uses at many times of the
year.

A site that is not good enough for a country
home is surely not good enough for a good coun-
try school, and the school ground should be at
least as large as the home ground. I should put
one acre of land as the lowest limit for a country
school. This ground should be the park for the
neighborhood, with an attractively planted col-
lection of trees and shrubs, and this collection
should be more useful to the school than is
the mere apparatus to be used indoors. It is
amazing how we have deprived our children
of room, even when there is room to spare,
and how completely we have committed our-
selves to the idea that schooling is an affair of
the inside of a building.

The school-garden.

This brings me to the school-garden, to an
outdoor area where the children may work

128 Outlook to Nature

with actual problems. Such an area will be
an essential part of school equipment. It
will be an additional room or laboratory,
not maintained primarily to teach the children
gardening but to be utilized for educational
purposes.

The school-garden will do much to place the
school in proper relation to its natural problems
and will be an intermediate stage between the
schoolhouse and the larger environment of the
neighborhood.

Various kinds of extension gardening will
soon be important agencies in civic and educa-
tional work : they will furnish occupation for
the unemployed; utilize waste lands; afford
health-giving employment at hospitals; add
interest to parks ; augment the beauty of
the city or town ; encourage thrift and tidi-
ness in homegrounds ; increase the efficiency
of schools.

The last category is the one that most inter-
ests us at this moment ; therefore I will state
some of the specific ways in which the school-
garden may be expected to forward school

The School of the Future 129

work. It supplants or, at least, supplements
mere book training; presents real problems,
with many interacting influences, affording a
base for the study of all nature, thereby de-
veloping the creative faculties and encouraging
natural enthusiasm ; puts the child into touch
and sympathy with its own realm ; develops
manual dexterity ; begets regard for labor ;
conduces to health ; expands the moral instincts
by making a truthful and intimate presentation
of natural phenomena and affairs ; trains in
accuracy and directness of observation ; stimu-
lates the love of nature ; appeals to the art-
sense ; kindles interest in ownership •, teaches
garden-craft ; evolves civic pride ; sometimes
affords a means of earning money ; brings
teacher and pupil into closer personal touch ;
works against vandalism ; aids discipline by al-
lowing natural exuberance to work off; arouses
spontaneous interest in the school on the part
of both pupils and parents ; sets ideals for the
home, thereby establishing one more bond of
connection between the school and the com-
munity.

130 Outlook to Nature

The growing child.

The child is educated by the very process of
living and growing up. Every object that ap-
peals to his senses, every circumstance that
arouses his emotion or stimulates his imagi-
nation, contributes to the process. The school
should aid in directing all these educational
forces, that they may produce the most be-
neficent results. The play must be organized
educationally. The school has fallen short of
its opportunities by confining itself too closely
to a certain line of conventional effort.

In the nature realm, these ideas as to the in-
fluence of the environment are well expressed
in Walt Whitman's poem, beginning

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain

part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white
and red clover, and the song of the phcebe-bird,

The School of the Future 1 3 1

And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter,
and the mare's foal and the cow's calf,

And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the
pond-side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there,
and the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all be-
came part of him."

The nature-attitude.

It may be said that although I admit the
educational merit of affairs and industries,
I nevertheless place the main emphasis on
the study of nature. This, of course, is true.
How much of this attitude is the result of per-
sonal inclination, I cannot know; but I pur-
posely put the emphasis here because nature is
the necessary condition of our lives, and on the
nature-basis we may build the superstructure.

The content-work.

The school effort may be roughly thrown
into two categories, — the content-work and
the expression-work. The content-work is the
subject-matter. It is the acquisition-work, the

132 Outlook to Nature

result of contact with objects and phases of
objects. The child becomes his own inves-
tigator, unless he is asked to investigate
beyond his own range, when he becomes an
imitator. The content-work is the first and
primary work.

Self-expression.

The expression-work is the result of the
content-work ; yet the old schools taught a
child to express himself before he had anything
to express ; and herein lies the explanation of
much of the educational inefficiency of the old
regime, and also its failure to put the child into
real touch with itself and its surroundings.

The means of expression with which we have
most to do in elementary schools are speaking,
reading, writing, drawing, number. These are
not so much subjects to be taught, as results
to be secured from the acquiring of experience
with subject-matter. The industrial education
will put the child into the way of acquiring
original knowledge at least as early as it asks
him formally to express himself.

The School of the Future 133

The result begins to be seen.

I have now tried to express my conviction
that a natural and direct kind of education is
slowly developing in our midst, and that the
process is founded on the normal human life
of the time. It is slowly shaping the common
activities into educational form, and making
them the means of sound mental discipline ;
and this is the only way whereby education
can be carried to the mass of the people.

It will make the people efficient; and it will
eventually obliterate pernicious distinction be-
tween the hand-worker and the remainder of
mankind, and will make for both individual
and corporate honesty.

The world is full of those who want to do so-
called "mental work," — clerks, bookkeepers,
counter-jumpers, and office servants of all kinds,
often driven to do work for the merest pittance ;
and yet we have difficulty in rinding skilled and
independent artisans, although the work of the
expert artisan is of the higher grade. The
people themselves seem always to have believed
in the educational value of the common activi-

1 34 Outlook to Nature

ties. The difficulty has been to overcome the
prejudices of the pedagogues.

The older subjects.

There is no reason why this new applicable
education should in any way antagonize or even
restrict the studies in language, history, litera-
ture, and philosophy, for these subjects are as
important as others; in fact, they add some-
thing to the depth, fullness, and repose of life
that is much needed in these intense days ;
and, moreover, these subjects are themselves
the final expressions of the very common-day
activities that we wish now to introduce, and
therefore they will become a natural part of a
continuous educational process. But they will
not dictate the means and methods at the be-
ginning of the educational process : they are
the flower, not the seed.

Old phrases.

Nor is it to be feared that this active educa-
tion will lead to "materialism." This fear is
only a bogey-man. Materials are the conditions

The School of the Future 135

of existence, and are not only high in themselves
but are the bases of what we call the higher
aspects of our existence ; and the better the
knowledge of the material, the bolder and freer
should be the apprehension of the immaterial.

Over against this newer humanistic education
are often set such phrases as " education for
manhood," " education for ideals," " education
for citizenship " ; but this distinction is only
academic. It is no doubt true that we have
made mistakes — and are still making mistakes
— in beginning occupational education too
early and with too complete exclusion of non-
technical subjects ; but industrial education, so
far as it applies to the public schools, is not
professional education ; and industrial and even
professional education can be so managed as to
train broadly for manhood and for citizenship,
and the effect of all education that is worthy
the name is to develop the ideals in the subjects
that are touched.

It is high time that the formal and academic
distinction between the old and the new educa-
tion be obliterated and forgotten.

136 Outlook to Nature

The school of the future.

There's a farm on the hillside,

A mill on the river ;

There's a store on the highway,

A mine on the mountain ;

There's a shop on the lowland,

A ship on the ocean.

There's a man with his reaper,
A man with his dinner;

There's a man with his shovel,
A man with his measure ;

There's a man with his tool -box,
A man with his canvas.

There's a home with its comfort,

A street with its goers ;

There's a club with its actors,

A hall with its speakers ;
There's a church with its people,

A school with its learners.

These all are God's agents.
Relentless and ceaseless
In workshop and homespun
They weave the Great Fabric.
They are builders of nations,
They are makers of Heaven.

The School of the Future 137

As the race in its progress,
So the child in its nurture
And the flight of the poet
Come up out of Labor.
Constructive, creative,
Will the method of nature
Of life and its content
Make the School of the Future.

IV

Evolution : The Quest of Truth

AT a recent Bible League Convention the
hypothesis of evolution was again re-
futed.

Most of us had been led to think that the
old contention between the theory of evolution
and theology had worn itself out, and that the
theory was to be allowed to stand or to fall on
its own evidence. We had supposed that the
theory is accepted as a working hypothesis by
all naturalists and by most publicists. We
had been further of the opinion that these
adherents, representing all possible points of
view and being honest seekers of truth, would
quickly withdraw their support in case the
hypothesis were found to be untenable — in

138

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 139

short, that the burden of disproving the organic
evolution hypothesis no longer rests on the
theologians.

It would seem as if many people assume that
there is a wicked cabal of evolutionists that
hang together for the purpose of foisting their
schemes on the public; but everyone ought
now to know that evolutionists are themselves
the most critical of every phase and item of the
hypothesis, seeking always how they may prove
and disprove and thereby discover the ultimate
truth. Such antagonists seem to have no con-
ception of the enormous literature of evolution,
or of the multitudes of investigations by some
of the most careful and conscientious workers
in the world, or that our present evolution con-
ceptions are the results of sharp conflict of
opinion and long years of discussion and not of
any agreement to agree. The ease with which
this stupendous body of research is thrown
aside by one stroke of persons whose arguments
show that they are not within sight of the sub-
ject is cause only for amusement so far as the
discussion touches evolution; but it may be

140 Outlook to Nature

worth while in any case to consider its bearing
on our outlook to nature.

The evolution hypothesis.

The hypothesis of organic evolution is sup-
posed to be an explanation or interpretation
of well-observed facts and phenomena. It is
well worth our while, therefore, very briefly to
inquire what is the nature of the foundations on
which these newest refutations rest. If the
evolution theory is to collapse, or even if it
is to fall into disrepute, our outlook is to
undergo a radical change ; and the subject be-
comes of far greater importance than to the-
ology alone.

The general effect of the rise of the evolu-
tion theories is the endeavor to see things as
they are, and then to interpret them without
fear or bias or prejudice. Evolution stands
for the quest of truth as distinguished from
adherence to dogma. It affirms that the origin
of the forms of life is a natural phenomenon
and is governed by law. Evolution has set
the face directly toward truth regardless of the

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 141

consequences; and the outlook to truth in
what we call the natural world is the outlook
to courage, to the future, and to hope.

•
Point of view of the discussion.

I have no desire to put myself in the attitude
of appearing to come to the rescue of evolution,
nor of considering such criticisms as I have
mentioned as a menace to that hypothesis.
The hypothesis needs no advocates. Nor is
it my purpose to make an attempt to expound
the bearings of the evolution philosophy on
ethics or religion, except as such discussion
bears on our attitude toward the natural world
in which we live.

Therefore, I use some of the criticisms and
refutations merely as texts, and not that I may
refute them, nor correct them, nor criticize any
person. They are representative of nearly all
attacks on evolution. Such general attacks
are no longer frequent and they by no means
represent the attitude of the clergy: in this
discussion I have chiefly in mind a certain large
class of the laity. Many persons accept the hy-

142 Outlook to Nature

pothesis of evolution merely as a concession to
the times.

Disproof by assumption.

Questions as to statements of fact being
omitted, objections to the criticisms to which I
refer are chiefly of two categories. The first
and perhaps the most pertinent observation
that such statements suggest is that the attacks
are made by persons who are not themselves
familiar either with the subject-matter of the
organic evolution hypothesis or with the nat-
ural-history point of view, and that their pur-
pose is not so much to discover facts of
evolution as to bolster dogmas and traditional
beliefs. Now, if the dogmas and beliefs are
true and are worth the while, they will stand.
They will be their own proofs. It is only
falsity that needs to be bolstered.

This class of refutations is usually founded
on assumption, not on reason or investigation.
It is an outlook to "belief," not to nature;
and yet evolution is a process of nature. Let
me read :

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 143

"Following out an observation that in the
embryonic state man passes through the dif-
ferent stages of worm, fish, reptile, and quad-
ruped, the evolutionist has argued that the
human race has accordingly been evolved from
the worm, fish, reptile, and quadruped. This
certainly is a momentous induction from
limited data, indeed from almost no data at
all.

" If we may speak with perfect plainness, an
inexcusable blunder is committed by the evo-
lutionists by reason of overlooking, or what is
worse, by reason of a misinterpretation and
false application of, the prophetic element in
nature. That is, the Creator is a prophet and
his method is to anticipate by type, pattern,
or prophecy what may be expected in his sub-
sequent creations. For illustration, the fins of
fishes, the wings and feet of birds, and the fore
and hind feet of brutes, created before man, are
prophetic of the arms and feet of man. So,
too, the lower forms of life, the worm, fish,
and reptile, furnish hints of what the higher and
later forms are to be."

144 Outlook to Nature

An appeal to prophecy and belief is not de-
monstrable, for it does not rest on evidence.
Therefore it is not debatable, and is outside
the realm of science, and beyond the reach of
truth. Finding facts that must be accepted, it
attempts to account for them by a wholly gra-
tuitous assumption, and an assumption cannot
be disproved. If a man assumes that snow is
black, there is no use in trying to convince him
that it is white.

Disproof by misunderstanding.

My second observation is that such ref-
utations misunderstand and misinterpret what
evolution is. For example, they confound evo-
lution and Darwinism ; but every writer now
should know that Darwinism, or " natural
selection," is only one of the means of ex-
plaining how evolution may have taken place.
Many of our best evolutionists do not think
that Darwinism is an adequate explanation. In
fact, Darwin himself did not contend that it is
the sole method of evolution : he stated ob-
jections to it; and this is most significant,

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 45

because it is ideal illustration of the fact that
the naturalist seeks first for truth, whatever
effect the truth may have on his theories.

The hypothesis of organic evolution merely
supposes that one form of life may give rise to
another form, and that the animals and plants
now inhabiting the earth are ascended from
earlier kinds. In the main, the hypothesis
explains the facts as we see them ; and there
is no other hypothesis, founded on observation
and scientific interpretation, that does account
for them. Whether the present form of the
hypothesis will stand the final judgment of
mankind is of little consequence : it is the
most reasonable hypothesis yet propounded ;
and, what is more to our purpose, it opens
the whole subject to investigation. Just how
and why this evolution has come about are
questions of dispute, but this dispute will in
time bring us to a solution.

It is probable that no one agency is respon-
sible for the entire evolution ; and it is possible
that all explanations, resting on scientific evi-
dence, are responsible in some degree. Every

146 Outlook to Nature

working evolutionist has his own conception
of the methods, which only proves that he
sees with his own eyes and thinks with his
own head, and that his only goal is to find a
true explanation.

Our antagonist cites theories that have been
abandoned or modified as proofs of deca-
dence of belief in evolution : but in fact
they are the very proofs of its vitality ; they
are so many stepping-stones in the search for
truth. The evolutionist has no age-long
dogma. Persons do not seem to realize
that nowhere is there so great discussion of
theories attempting to explain evolution as
amongst evolutionists themselves : but there
is little antagonism to the hypothesis that
evolution is a method of creation.

The antagonist further evidences his lack
of conception of what evolution really is by
an entire misapprehension of the significance
of some of the facts that he cites. I choose
the following, from among other statements,
merely as an illustration of a method of dis-
proof, or evidence of" collapse":

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 47

" And upon enlarging the field of investiga-
tion the evolutionist is confronted with still
more serious grounds for embarrassment, for
there is not only no universal law of improve-
ment, or elaboration, on which his theory
largely depends, but on the other hand in
scores of instances, there is among things
having life a pronounced deterioration of parts
and functions.

" When, therefore, the evolutionist in support
of his theory says there is in the kingdom of
living things a universal law of constant develop-
ment and improvement, he most certainly is
not telling the truth ; and for one to build
theories upon such false assumptions is clearly
a gross violation of the scientific spirit and
method."

What the evolutionist means by progress
is not necessarily an increasing complexity and
an addition of new parts or attributes in every
organism, but rather a progressing or continu-
ing modification. The loss of characters is
just as much a process of evolution as the
acquiring of characters, for it may just as

148 Outlook to Nature

effectively adapt the organism to its condi-
tions. The loss of legs in the serpents, for
example, is one of the clearest proofs of evolu-
tion or modification, even though we may
think of it as retrogressive ; for the rudiments
of legs may be found in some cases, and the
limb-bearing genealogy is traceable. The gen-
eral movement of evolution has been toward
greater differentiation and complexity, and, in
our human phrase, we sometimes speak of
this as " improvement " ; but any modifica-
tion that better relates an organism to its en-
vironment is improvement for that organism,
whether the modification is the winning of
new characters or the loss of characters once
gained.

Evolution vs. transmutation.

A great hindrance to a belief in organic
evolution is the careless use of the word " trans-
mutation," which connotes that one species
" turns into another species." The transmuta-
tion theory is really opposed to the evolution
theory, for the latter theory supposes that one

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 149

species may spring off from another species or
rise out of variations from it, the parent species
usually retaining its identity.

Most of the groups of animals and plants
that are definite enough to be readily described
as species have probably practically completed
their general evolution ; they may not be able,
even, to give rise to other marked forms. The
world now contains species representing various
grades in the process of evolution ; but it is to
be supposed, since the earth is now relatively
stable and densely inhabited, that the progress
of the creation is at present comparatively
small.

Evolution in operation.

The opponents of the evolution philosophy
are always asking that the evolutionist show'
them the process in operation ; and at the same
time they are very likely to beg the question
by affirming that animals and plants are not
now changing. This latter position is strongly
maintained by the antagonist whom I have
been quoting :

150 Outlook to Nature

" Beginning with what is called f the primor-
dial zone ' which covers the earliest stage of
biological history and coming down to more
recent times there will be found, as a matter of
fact, multitudes of species that have shown no
improvement since their creation. The algae
or seaweeds, that appeared in the distant Silu-
rian deposit, millions of years ago, were no less
perfect than those of the same class found in
our modern seas. The oak, birch, hazel, and
Scotch fir, easily traced back at least to the ice
age, have remained in all these thousands of
years without the slightest improvement.

" And, too, in the animal kingdom the same
discoveries are made ; the insects that built the
first coral reefs of Florida, in the three hundred
centuries of their existence show no improve-
ment."

It is not true that evolutionists hold that all
animals and plants are now in process of active
evolution. Some forms are essentially matured,
some have passed their zenith and are in pro-
cess of extinction, some are long since lost,
others are just now in the stage of marked de-

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 151

parture. Some of them may remain for cen-
turies without important change.

But I object to the above quotation because
of its method or outlook — it is again the
method of dogma and not of search for scien-
tific truth. Every instance must be explained
on its own evidence, if it is to come within the
realm of genuine quest. No one knows
whether " the oak, birch, hazel and Scotch fir
have remained in all these thousands of years
without the slightest improvement," or whether
the coral polyp has remained the same dur-
ing t ree hundred centuries. Because we can
match individual fossils with organisms existing
to-day, it does not follow that the two are iden-
tical in structure, function, or longevity ; and
even if it did, this fact would constitute no
disproof of evolution. There are positive in-
stances enough to make us believe that evolu-
tion takes place.

EVIDENCES OF EVOLUTION

We can see abundant evidences of the con-
tinuing process of evolution if we know what

152 Outlook to Nature

to look for and are willing to believe what
we see.

At one time I planted roots of wild straw-
berries that were received from Oregon. I
gave them a warm and pleasant knoll in the
back yard and they grew and thrived. I had
photographed the plants before they were set,
and had taken botanical specimens from them.
I made similar records of the plants after they
became established in their new quarters, and
at the end of two years I found that the dis-
tinguishing ancestral marks had disappeared,
and I had a new type of plant. This discovery
so delighted me that I told my friend of it, and
said I believed that I had really produced a
new species. The friend, however, at once
became serious and said that such a remark is
heresy and that I should straightway look to
my conscience. This staggered me, for I had
not thought of it before as a question of ethics
or even of philosophy, but only as a ques-
tion of fact ; and I was astonished, as I now
thought of it, to find how sinful a simple fact
may be.

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 153

I returned to the strawberries on the knoll,
where they lay so innocently in the sun ; and
were it not for my friend's suggestion and for
the bees fighting in the blossoms, I should
have seen no morals in them. It became evi-
dent, however, upon reflection, that I had made
a grievous fault in my terminology : I had used
the word "species"; if I had said "kind,"
there had been no offense.

The species bogey.

It is about this technical word " species " that
the battles of evolutionists and theologians
have raged for the last quarter-century and
more.

The ancients did not know this species-con-
ception, because they knew and cared so little
for the external creation that they gave small
thought to the kinds of animals and plants.
But with the restoration of knowledge, nature
came to be more and more intrinsic to man,
and persons began to wonder whence and why
organisms came. With the attempt to describe
or to inventory natural objects, there arose the

154 Outlook to Nature

conception of the " species " as something fun-
damental, a real entity or originally created
thing. There was little attempt or desire to
look at the external world broadly and to dis-
cover its method and meaning. The mind
rested on the objects, and naturally exalted them
and their direct progeny into units in the crea-
tion. As there was no knowledge of whence
and how these units came, they were conceived
to be the direct and immediate handiwork of
the Creator ; and there was therefore no occa-
sion for speculation or inquiry.

This human formula of species-units was
projected into the Scripture record, as if that
record read, " Let the earth bring forth species
of grass," and "species of winged fowl." The
idea of the finished and completed species-
product became indelibly associated with theo-
logical teaching, and was — and, in fact, is —
a genuine dogma. If this species-dogma had
not become so intimately associated with theo-
logical and biological beliefs, the hypothesis
of evolution, when it finally came into the
world, would have had few combatants.

Evolution : The Quest of Truth T 5 5

But are there not species, after all ? Surely
there are the red maple and the sugar maple,
the rose and the cabbage, the horse and the
dog. True enough ; but we now conceive
these to be the products of evolution, the result
of the creation, not the beginning of it. The
great Linraeus's definition is typical of the older
mind : " We reckon as many species as there
were forms created in the beginning." That is,
there are as many trees in a garden as had
been placed there. When, however, we are no
longer justified in assuming origins, we must
base our conclusions on evidence. We shall
then count how many trees there are in the
garden, and we may find more or fewer than
were placed there in the beginning.

The return to evidence.

But I must not forget my strawberry. A
hundred and fifty years ago a strange straw-
berry made its appearance in the gardens of
Europe. Some persons said that it came from
South America, and others that it came from
North America : but nobody knew its history.

156 Outlook to Nature

Botanists considered it to be a good species,
and it was named Fragaria grandiflora. This
Fragaria grandiflora is known to have been the
parent of our common garden strawberries ; yet
the botanies have been discreetly silent as to
the nativity of the plant. Now, the evidence
shows, so far as I could interpret it, that my
little strawberry, taken from the woods of
Oregon, varied into Fragaria grandiflora in two
years. In Oregon it is known to botanists as
Fragaria Chiloensis (for it grows in South
America as well, and was named from Chilean
specimens). If Fragaria grandiflora was a
" good species " before my experiment, it was
equally good afterward, and, as measured by
the actual practice of botanists, a new species
had arisen from an old one.

When I showed a botanist my results, he
said that the very fact that I had been a witness
of this transformation is proof that the two
plants are not true species. I replied that I
was sorry that I had not closed my eyes when
passing the patch, and I also suggested that his
species were founded upon ignorance of their

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 157

origins ; but he insisted, although himself an
evolutionist, that my having caught the plant
in the act was enough to outcast the form which
had had the presumption to appear. My ethical
friend had shown me the sinfulness of my little
fact, and now the scientist had told me that ob-
servation is heresy ; but the strawberry thrived.
It does not matter to the strawberry or to
me whether it gave rise to a new " species "
or not. It was a new form or a new kind ;
and this simple experiment enabled me, as I
verily believed, to reconstruct the genealogy
of the garden strawberry. It is apparently a
modification of the Chilean strawberry, intro-
duced into Europe by Captain Frezier about
1712. The unnoticed modification of this
strawberry, under cultivation, had added one
more species to the infinitude of species ; but
my accidental discovery that the species was ap-
parently the result of modification has stricken
that species from the lists ; and thenceforth the
backslider, if mentioned at all in reputable sys-
tematic botanies, must be only a variety or form
of Fragaria Chiloensis. And what has occurred

158 Outlook to Nature

in the strawberry has occurred with many other
plants under cultivation.

Species-making in practice.

All this means that species may not, in prac-
tice, be founded on essential or intrinsic charac-
ters, but that the word is applied to any group
of animals or plants which is so distinct from
other groups that a name may be given it for
convenience' sake. The name makes it possible
for us to write and talk about the objects, but
the name, as used at present, has no other
value.

And it indicates how personal a thing a
species is, how much it is a matter of judgment
of the man who makes it. Regel thinks that
there are but two species of grapes in the north-
ern hemisphere, whereas Munson contends that
there are twenty-five species in the United
States alone. Now, the grapes are the same
whether seen by Regel or Munson ; but Regel
is not Munson. In other words, species may
be matters of opinion, rather than matters of
fact.

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 159

Many garden plants and most domestic ani-
mals are further removed from their parental
stems than the strawberry is, but history often
supplies the connecting evidence and enables
us to identify the offspring with the ancestry.
But when history is silent, we may be able
only to guess what the original form may have
been, or we may say that the parental species is
extinct. It is probable that very few of the
original forms of our domestic plants are actu-
ally extinct, but the evolution has been so great
that we can no longer trace it.

It is most significant that of very many of
the common and long domesticated plants we
do not positively know the wild originals. Of
such plants are apple, peach, apricot, almond,
orange, lemon, wheat, rye, barley, bean, wine-
grape, Indian corn, cotton, flax, sugar-cane,
tobacco, sweet potato, banana, pumpkin and
squash, and many more. And who knows
what was the ancestral form of the ox, sheep,
cat, and dog ?

I must not be understood as saying that
there are no distinct types in nature, or that it

160 Outlook to Nature

is an error to talk about species, or that there
are always intermediate forms. My argument
is that species are not original entities or starting-
points but that the groups which, for conven-
ience, we name as species, are the present-time
results of a long process of modification.
Eventually, we may limit and refine our defini-
tion of species and we may find a real physio-
logical basis ; but of course I now have in mind
the practice of the present day.

The missing links.

Those types which are most pronounced and
distinct are usually those in which evolution or
change is most nearly completed; and those
old types that are unique are the ones in which
has probably begun the slow decline that ends
in extinction. The mastodon has perished,
and his tribe is disappearing ; the giant conifers
of other ages are represented in the isolated
groves of sequoias (there were giants in those
days !) ; the tulip tree or whitewood, the sassa-
fras, the ginkgo, the scouring-rushes are now a
broken and ragged army slowly but surely

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 6 1

marching to their doom. As the numbers
become less and less, as the changing environ-
ments and the inexorable grasp of time lop off
the aberrant and sportive forms, these patriarchs
become reduced to a single racial stem and, like
the one remnant of a decaying family, perish at
last into oblivion. What was once a chain be-
comes a series of detached and broken links ;
and the lost and missing links comprise the
proof that there was a chain.

The tree of life.

Evolution is not a line : it is a genealogy.
It is a tree of numberless branches, each branch
forking again and again. The tip of one
branch grows faster than its twin and thereby
leaves the other behind ; so that we now have
the examples of many of the succeeding stages
of development. It is not unlikely that some-
thing very like the first forms of life still exists
on the earth. The present groups of animals
and plants are the tips of the branches in the
multifid tree of creation.

It is evident, then, that the missing links

1 62 Outlook to Nature

lie behind, not between. The genealogy is the
missing link ; and in many cases it is traceable.
There are still many unfortunate persons who
think that evolutionists teach that man came
directly from the monkey. It is not strange
that we sometimes think so. The truth is, no
doubt, that the two came off a common stem in
ages past, and that they now represent the tips
of the branches of a letter Y; but I like to
think that the human branch is a little longer
than the monkey branch.

Two underlying considerations.

There are two general reasons for believing
that there must be evolution : The fact that
there must be struggle for existence because
the earth is not big enough to contain all the
possible offspring of the plants and animals
living upon it at any given time ; and the fact
that there have been mighty physical changes
in the earth, changes which, in many cases, are
not yet completed. Consequently, organisms
must either have changed to meet the new
conditions, or have perished. It is impossible

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 163

to conceive of a perfectly stable and stationary
creation. If all offspring were to be precisely
like their parents, competition would soon be-
come inconceivably more intense.

Direct considerations.

Objective evidences of organic evolution
may be ranged as following:

The testimony of paleontology, or the
torn and broken pages of the book of life
preserved to us in the rocks.

The evidence of embryology.

The evidence of comparative anatomy and
physiology.

Resemblances of types — or genealogies —
which allow objects to be classified.

The evidence of successive increase in com-
plexity and differentiation, or the growth of
"the tree of life."

The great fact of adaptation to environment.

The vagaries of distribution, which are
best explained by the evolution hypothesis.

The fact of variation, and the frequency
of intergradient forms.

164 Outlook to Nature

The observed behavior of plants and ani-
mals under domestication.

The processes.

While these various categories of facts and
evidence force the conclusion that there
has been and is evolution, they are not ex-
planations of its process. The philosophy
of the mechanism of evolution has been the
subject of the past-century inquiries, headed
by Lamarck and Darwin ; and in follow-
ing the details of this speculative natural
history one obtains the clearest and most
personal conception of the continuing creation.

Evolution in operation.

But there is really little dispute among
biologists as to the fact of evolution The
controversy turns on the means of evolu-
tion— the processes by which it has come
about. Yet the reader asks to see the pro-
cess actually going on. I wish he could have
seen my strawberries ; but, then, he would
not have believed his eyes if he had seen.

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 165

Of course, the lifetime of a man is a
short span in which to catch and to observe
the movement of creation ; but if my doubt-
ing reader will come with me into the
fields, I will show him the process going
forward. He will see it in the many inter-
mediate and local differences in animals and
plants. Here a plant grows stronger and
there weaker, here erect and there decum-
bent, here it is small-leaved and there large-
leaved, and so on through all grades of
unlikenesses and combinations of unlikenesses.

Naturalists are now divided as to whether
common differences grow into relatively
permanent or specific differences, but there
is no doubting the fact of variation or
fluctuating changes ; and if species are the
results of " mutations " or jumps, these
mutations are only one kind of variation or
difference.

There are numerous groups in which
evolution is evident to the close observer.
These are the groups that are perplexing
to the systematist. They refuse to fall into

1 66 Outlook to Nature

any scheme of classification, and rebel at
the paragraphing into distinct categories (or
species) to which, in an age of formalism,
the organic creation, like the Scriptures, was
subjected. Among common plants, some of
these groups are the asters, brambles,
golden-rods, cucurbitaceous plants, straw-
berries, grapes, plums and their kin, and
many of the sunflower-like groups.

Geographical differences.

Some of the best illustrations of the separat-
ing of two or more species from a parent stock
are afforded by so-called geographical species.
A certain species of wild grape extends from
the humid climate of the Atlantic seaboard to
the arid country of Texas. It was first made
known from eastern specimens and was named
Vitis aestivalis. Later on, Texan specimens
were described as Vitis Linsecomii. In these
extremes the two grapes are perfectly well dis-
tinguished and have every merit to be ranked
as distinct species. In the intermediate country,
however, they merge and are indistinguishable.

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 167

Therefore, for purposes of description and
classification, one must be regarded as a variety
of the other. If, however, a mountain chain
or an ocean separated the two geographical
regions, and thereby blotted out the inter-
mediates, there could be no hesitation in
awarding specific rank to each.

This case is typical of the progress of creation:
each geographical area has plants and animals
peculiar to it, and in proportion as an area is
disjoined and unlike others are its living forms
peculiar and distinct. Many American plants
are very like those of Europe, but the Atlantic
Ocean so completely eliminates the possibility
of intermediates that botanists regard the plants
as geographical species. Thus we have another
illustration of the fact that species may be de-
fined not alone by intrinsic characters, but by
personalities, and often in terms of mountains,
plains, and oceans.

Darwin's conception.

It may interest you to have Darwin's view,
as expressed in the concluding paragraph of his

1 68 Outlook to Nature

" Origin of Species " : " It is interesting to
contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the
bushes, with various insects flitting about, and
with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed
forms, so different from each other, and de-
pendent upon each other in so complex a
manner, have all been produced by laws acting
around us. These laws, taken in the largest
sense, being Growth and Reproduction ; In-
heritance, which is almost implied by reproduc-
tion ; Variability from the indirect and direct
action of the conditions of life, and from use
and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to
lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence
to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of
Character and the Extinction of less-improved
forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from
famine and death, the most exalted object which
we are capable of conceiving, namely, the pro-
duction of the higher animals, directly follows.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its
several powers, having been originally breathed

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 169

by the Creator into a few forms or into one ;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity, from so
simple a beginning, endless forms most beauti-
ful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved."

I have now indicated, in a most sketchy way,
a few of the evidences of evolution. I have
chosen to speak of only the most familiar
cases, because they are seldom mentioned in
contemporary writings, and because they seem
to me to be among the best proofs of evolution.
We have been looking so far into the past,
have searched so diligently for great facts, have
so urgently desired to see the missing links,
and have so confounded ourselves with philoso-
phy, that we have forgotten to go out and see
the creation going on about us.

Having taken this brief survey, we may now
consider some of the consequences of the

170 Outlook to Nature

evolution teaching on the common outlook to
life.

The new attitude of mind.

Nothing is more apparent than that the evo-
lution type of mind is itself an evolution. It
has evolved slowly. The evolution conception
was certainly present with the Greeks. In
an indefinite way, it began to modify men's
opinions long before it finally expressed itself
concretely in the works of the great modern
naturalists. Its great teachers have been in
advance of their time.

The opinions held by men are so many
epochs in the enlarging capacities of the mind.
These opinions show as clear a progress of evo-
lution as do the changing structures of bones
or the modifications of functions. The opposi-
tion to evolution is itself a stage in the process
of evolution.

The new natural history.

In the natural history domain we are rapidly
emancipating ourselves from the book dogma

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 171

of " species." This is well attested by the
recent theories of De Vries; for the very
essence of his contention is that differences be-
tween organisms must be measured by their
qualities, not by their names.

In the popular realm it is attested by the
great attention that we are giving to individual
animals as personalities rather than to species
and groups. We are asked to consider the
habits and history of one individual crow, for
example, and we may name him Silver Spot
rather than Corvus Americanus. The Bur-
roughs-Long controversy, aside from its inci-
dents and its disputes as to matters of fact,
raises the deeper question as to how far particu-
lar animals have strong individual traits that
are not common to the species as a whole.

In fiction and narrative, this question ex-
presses itself in the making of an animal the
"hero" of the story, as in "Black Beauty"
and " The Call of the Wild."

These latter modes represent the natural way
of knowing the out-of-doors. This is the way
that the boy and the hunter know it. The

IJ2 Outlook to Nature

boy knows what the squirrel does day by day,
— where it lives, when it goes and comes, what
it eats, what it says. He knows the fields and
the woods and the fishing-hole, without know-
ing that he knows them. If we could have the
intimate unconscious boy kind of knowledge
put into books, it would almost make a new
natural history. It would give us the life-story
of the animal or the plant the whole year
round. Such an author would give us the
animal squirrel, not the species squirrel. This
kind of knowledge is not yet in books to any
great extent. Consult your authorities, and see
how little explicit knowledge you find in them.
One reason why the nature-studies are so
difficult to establish is because there are almost
no books to serve as guides to the intimate and
particular life histories. We need a new type
of monographs, written directly from the field,
without reference to the museums or to the
kind of information that we have read about.
These will contain the least possible contamina-
tion of the author and the greatest possible
content of crow or frog.

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 173

The new application of natural history.

The study of evolution gives us comparable
knowledge. We learn the route by which we
have come, and we secure new light on hygiene
and disease as well as on structure, new mean-
ings on sex and on breeding ; and all these must
mark departures in the discussion of social and
moral questions. As man is part of the evolu-
tion, so do we begin to see his problems in a
biological aspect and to study them in the light
of their origin and tendencies.

New attitude toward institutions and affairs.

The evolution point of view has modified
teaching and the school. It has enforced the
importance of the natural order, and of original
and personal experience. With the great mul-
tiplication of human interests, the school has
become overburdened and complex. We shall
return to simplicity ; and the child will begin
with his environment and himself, rather
than with the universe and some one else.
This point of view is working itself into the

1/4 Outlook to Nature

methods of our schools ; but we have not yet
learned what may be omitted from courses of
study.

Evolution has modified or even reversed our
attitude toward history, philosophy, and insti-
tutionalism. We now consider all questions
from the point of view of their origin, develop-
ment, and destiny. All activities are becoming
scientific.

The inroads of evolution are most marked
in those fields that are most dominated by
dogma and tradition ; and this is why its con-
flict with theology has been so long-continued
and so intense. But it is emancipating religion,
as it has emancipated all else. Even theology
must be scientific : it is the theory of religion,
and religion, if it is vital, must grow and change
in its expression as new conditions arise.
Least of all, can religion afford to seem to be
afraid of the truth, whether in the natural
science sphere or any other sphere. Dogmas,
beliefs, and theories are only temporary and
partial means of expressing our conceptions; as
our conceptions enlarge, the dogmas expand or

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 175

break. Truth only is divine : dogmas and be-
liefs are human.

New attitude toward others.

Evolution is the point of view of otherism
and altruism.

It was the old idea that the earth is the center
of the universe : this geocentric doctrine Coper-
nicus disproved. It was the old idea that all
things exist merely to please man: this homino-
centric doctrine Darwin disproved.

Every animal and plant lives for itself and
apparently as completely as if man had never
existed. The recognition of this fact is one of
the first steps toward a real regard for the rights
of others, and consequently toward elimination
of selfishness. Yet we still seem to think that
every animal and plant was created for some
purpose other than for itself, and we are always
asking what every organism is " for."

New attitude toward the quest of knowledge.

There is no longer any necessity to fear to
accept what we see, and what we have good

176 Outlook to Nature

rational reason to believe does exist or has ex-
isted. We have set out with the determina-
tion to discover the origin and meaning of the
world in which we live ; and evidence is rapidly
accumulating.

As yet, we have only a few fragments here
and there upon which to construct any general
theory of cosmogony, and, therefore, of life
and destiny. Yet there is every reason to be-
lieve in the consecutive uniformity of action of
great primal, underlying agencies. The frag-
mentary phenomena which we are able to ob-
serve are parts in some great system. The
philosopher should therefore be able, from a
study of even fragmentary knowledge, to con-
struct a retrospect and to make a prophecy.
Science gives us prevision.

If we conclude that the sun will rise to-
morrow because it rose to-day and yesterday,
we may then fairly assume that the evolution
plan of creation will be as true to-morrow as it
is to-day ; and if it is the plan of creation to-
day and yesterday, we assume that it was the
plan in the beginning. We are willing to be-

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 77

lieve that all the organic world has come from
one starting point, and that every living thing
is the result of the ever-continuous modifica-
tion of the life-stem.

We are willing to believe more than this, so
far as the evidence may take us ; to believe, in
short, that the visible universe has taken its
present form as the result of physical forces of
which, in their lesser expressions, we may have
common knowledge. Worlds, like men, grow
old and die. The marks of senility may even
now be apparent in this earth of ours, which
seems to us so young. With the receding and
absorption of the waters, great areas have be-
come deserts — perhaps the beginning of that
great decline which must end in death. The
moon seems to have run its span of life, and
there is evidence that Mars is now far advanced
upon that arid course which leads its inhabit-
ants onward to extinction. It is conceivable
that the planets will fall again into a central
mass and thence again shoot forth to begin a
new creation. We do not know whether this
cosmos that we see is the first or the millionth !

178 Outlook to Nature

Oh Mars ! Sister in the stellar void —
Thy course far run upon the great abyss —
Send us thy message !
What hast thou learned in thy great life,
What hopes are thine, what doubts removed,
What dost thou see beyond the veil,
What meaneth life and death ?

AN EVOLUTIONIST'S OUTLOOK

If one holds such views as these, you want
to know his attitude toward God and religion.
I do not assume to contradict any man's theory
of life, and do not desire to impress my own
opinions on any mind. Neither have I any
suggestions to make as to conduct or to what
is conventionally known as " character " ; every
man must work out his own life : and as he
thinketh, so is he.

// is not a verbal revelation.

Now, as I think of it, there are two consid-
erations that lie at the bottom of this whole
matter. In the first place, even if my straw-
berry did originate another species, truth and
love and mercy have not changed. In the

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 79

second place, I have no reason to deny God
to-day because I misunderstood him yesterday.
The means and methods of creation are not
a part of revelation. The Scriptures have quite
another theme. Only the general course and
sequence of the creation are outlined ; and it is
marvelous that the most advanced teaching of
evolution should so fully confirm the sequence
of Genesis. I find nothing in Scripture to
make me disbelieve evolution, Man has in-
terjected his own conceptions of the means of
creation into the Mosaic symbolism, and has
thrown them into his creed ; and if that creed
must now be overthrown, the fault is man's,
not God's.

The search for God.

But where is God, in all this great and
evolving scheme of creation ? I answer that he
is where he always was. Nothing that man
can do can make the creation any the less true
or untrue ; and what a man thinks he saw in
a strawberry plant need not lessen his faith in
a creator any more than it shakes his faith in a

180 Outlook to Nature

creation. Strictly speaking, evolution does not
attempt to explain creation, but only the prog-
ress of the creation. Whatever its form, it
begins where Genesis begins — " In the begin-
ning, God."

It will afford me much satisfaction to say
that some of the attempts of the theological
apologist to find a place for God in the
evolution scheme are the merest quibbles, — I
have in mind a debate in which I once engaged.
He turns the leaves of Darwin or Huxley and
as often as he finds the word " plan " postulates
a planner, and if he finds " design " afHrms a
designer. Now the fact is that these words
are borrowed from common language to express
ideas for which no plain technical words exist.
The naturalist uses the word " plan " to desig-
nate a type of structure, or a marked tendency
in any group, and "design" to indicate the
idea of a proximate or immediate interference
of the creator. Neither word has reference to
purposiveness. It would be as true to say
that when a naturalist uses the word "type,"
he thereby postulates a type-setter.

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 8 1

There is another method of search for God
in the creation, which we should consider in
passing. Being no longer able to see the
special interjection of a divine hand in the
making of species, the seeker desires to find
him in the variations or mutations from which
species arise. This supposes that variation is
definite and designed, and that it is the special
work of the hand of the Creator. Of course
there is no satisfaction in any such makeshift
as this, for, as there is no necessary difference
between what men call species and what men
call varieties, we may as well assume or deny
special creation in one as in the other.

Driven from this position, these persons
next fall back upon the origin of life — for life
certainly must have been specially created. It
is true that we do not know whence and how it
came. Now, to me, it does not matter whether
life was specially created or whether it was first
the result of chemical recompounding, or of
other so-called " natural" forces. If it is
the result of natural forces, then I want to
know it, and I should dearly like to see it

1 82 Outlook to Nature

making ; and I should thank God if he allowed
me so close a view of his methods.

We are not to search for God here and there,
as if we were afraid he would elude us, but we
are to see him everywhere ; and we must be
willing and ready to see nature as it is. Truth
is the standard, and no creed or dogma should
close our eyes to the facts and the beauty of
the external world.

It is to be expected that our conception of
God will enlarge as our horizon enlarges. This
conception is of course anthropomorphic, —
founded on human attributes. Evolution im-
plies that God is not outside nature, but in na-
ture. He is immanent, not absent.

Nature must ever be our recourse ; its facts
and its voices must be heeded ; one may well
exclaim with Wordsworth :

«« Great God ! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn j
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 183

Heaven.

A woman who knew my evolution beliefs
once asked me where heaven is. There seemed
to her to be no place left for it in the cosmos of
the evolutionist.

I could only answer that I never expect to
be able to discover heaven with a telescope.
Perhaps heaven is much nearer than we think.
Do we expect to locate a scene of which the
very plan and elements are so far beyond
human cognizance that they cannot be revealed
to us ?

This is a type of difficulty that perplexes
many persons. They dwell upon the physical
symbolisms of faith and creed, as if the things
of the spirit must be measured by time and
space and materials.

One has but to reflect upon the varied pic-
tures that we have of heaven to discern that
Scripture and experience reveal only the fact
of heaven, not the vision of it. To the In-
dian, it is the happy hunting ground ; to the
weary, a home of rest ; for the wandering dis-
ciples, a house of many mansions ; to those liv-

184 Outlook to Nature

ing under the Roman influence, an eternal city ;
to the inhabitants of desert-bordered Palestine, a
scene where waters fail not ; to John, banished
on Patmos, a place where there is no more
sea. If we have only symbols of the other
world, how futile to ask where Elysium is !

The 'vast program.

To me, the entire evolution scheme is a pro-
gram or design ; and the fact that we have only
now been able to apprehend this scheme is all
the more proof that it is divine.

But creation cannot be a true design or
scheme if special interference in particulars is
necessary to carry it forward. Likewise, a
scheme that applies to some groups and not to
all, or in which special creations are now and then
invoked, is disjunctive and discursive, unable to
support itself, and therefore unworthy a divine
hand. A powerful reason for ascribing the
entire creation to an almighty hand is the very
fact that it has within itself the power of unfold-
ing and developing throughout space and time
— the fact, indeed, that it is an evolution.

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 185

Considered as a methodological question,
the hypothesis of evolution is either true or
not true. It cannot be half true and be evolu-
tion. I see design in it because it postulates
uniformity of force and action. The idea of
special creation postulates change of purpose
or at least incompleteness of design. It in-
fers capriciousness. Much of the creation is
meaningless unless we conceive all its parts
to have organic connection. The idea of
a creator interfering in his creation, and con-
stantly reinforcing and mending it, is typi-
cally human, suggested by the workshop, and
is unworthy of a creator. The creator is not
a mechanic.

If the cosmos is a design, it must follow,
of course, that there is design in its parts ;
but the design in the parts is the unfolding
of the law of design, not special interference
in particulars.

The place of the individual.

To the individual, the evolution conception
enforces the importance of the person as dis-

1 86 Outlook to Nature

tinguished from the mass. It stands for the
voluntary life. Each organism has its own
work to do, its own struggles to overcome,
its own perplexities to solve ; and it can be
itself only when it is master for itself. Each
organism is a part in a fabric, but each helps
in its own way in the general movement
toward destiny ; and it cannot escape the bur-
den of its own part unless it die.

When intelligence has appeared, the organism
rises above its circumstances in a measure, and
it may have a choice of alternatives ; but it
cannot choose to cease to play its part in
the progress of life.

Man is a part of the evolution record ; he
is partaker in the process, not a passive looker-
on. He is democrat amongst democrats, not
autocrat created of some different and cleaner
stuff. What supremacy he has is what he
wins. The pride of effort and accomplish-
ment is better than the pride of origin. Effort
works out of us the selfishness and arrogance.
There was need of the rise of some hypothesis
of altruism and tolerance, for nothing could have

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 187

been more self-centered than the old creeds
that elected ourselves to be saved and others
to be doomed. Salvation is not the highest
goal of religion : gradually the emphasis is
being transferred from salvation to service.

The truth shall make us free.

The evolution philosophies have changed
our point of view not only toward what we call
nature, but toward all problems of life and des-
tiny. They demand that we be willing to free
ourselves from every bondage of doctrine and
dogma, from traditions and superstitions, from
" authority " and prejudgments, and that we
regard every subject the human mind can grasp
as proper for unhindered inquiry.

The biological speculations are emancipating
us. This emancipation is not yet complete ;
for few of us are yet willing to believe whatever
may be true, or to commit ourselves unre-
servedly to a quest of the truth as evidence and
reason may direct us. This new outlook opens
the cosmos for observation and for study.

These vast studies are taking us back to the

1 88 Outlook to Nature

facts. They teach us to accept the evidence of
experience and the objective demonstrations of
natural science, and to build on them our philoso-
phy of life, rather than to try to make experience
and evidence match a system of metaphysics.

Evolution and religion.

It is said that evolution gives us no new
faith for that which it destroys. Evolution is
not a faith ; it only releases us. It destroys
no faith, except as doctrines are shattered if
they do not match with experience or seem
reasonable in the light of our expanding knowl-
edge. It tends to strip the practice of religion
of its non-essentials.

The organic evolution hypothesis is but one
of the results or expressions of the study of
science, and probably it is not the boldest ex-
pression that the world will see. Natural
science stands indisputably for truth in its own
realm, and, therefore, makes for truth in all
realms. It stands for absolute honesty and
frankness, and for the accumulating of evi-
dence. It stands for the fair, open, and

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 189

convincible mind. Its whole tendency is to-
ward higher ideals, and it is this idealism that
is thrusting old forms aside in order that it
may find the precious crystal of Truth.

Just now it seems as if we were left some-
what adrift in our faiths ; but this is because
we have not yet been able to readjust and re-
state our religious outlook. Religious experi-
ence is undergoing a new birth, but we shall
not cut loose from the past. We shall keep
all that is divine. We shall formulate a new
theology that will be more helpful than the old.

It is asserted that the modern evolution
studies tend to decrease church-going. I do
not think this is because these studies antago-
nize religion ; but the man who comes fresh
from a study of objects and phenomena often
finds the service and the sermon so contrary to
what he observes is the course of nature that
they fail to hold his interest. They may seem
to him narrow and inadequate and verbal, and
therefore the church may depress rather than
stimulate him.

On the other hand the layman, immersed in

190 Outlook to Nature

his investigations or affairs and expending his
energies in them, may be little aware of the
progressive attitude of the church as a whole,
of its full acceptance of the results of scientific
research, its growing spirit of freedom from
the non-essentials on which men differ, the new
leadership that it has acquired, and the great
share that it is contributing to the constructive
movements of the time. The tendency is for
men to determine where they agree rather than
where they differ, and to cooperate in a large
way for the public good.

We are less and less interested in theories of
religion as guides to action. Every heresy
trial seems to emphasize the importance that
is attached to "beliefs " rather than to essentials.
The world cares less for what a man passively
"believes" than for what he is and what he
accomplishes.

The world needs fine, bold, constructive,
spiritual work, something that appeals to
the forceful, creative energies of able, active
men. This, in fact, is the very tendency
in spiritual work to-day ; and it is for this

Evolution : The Quest of Truth 1 9 1

reason that we are to expect a strong revival
of religious feeling. The world never needed
great spiritual leaders more than now, —
perhaps never so much as now, when old
formulas are falling apart, when industrialism
is rising with enormous rapidity, when wealth
is increasing and is placed at the disposal of
altruistic enterprises, and when we begin to
realize the brotherhood of man. Perhaps the
day of much preaching is passing ; but the day
of the pastor and the minister is coming.

If we are to have naturalness in teaching and
literature and science, surely we should have
it in religion. I think that we have over-
emphasized the supernatural element. Religion
is as natural and as normal as other human
activities and aspirations. It is itself an evolu-
tion.

Just how we shall formulate the evolution-
idea into religion, only the future can tell ;
but I see no reason for apprehension or doubt.
It is evident that the evolution teaching is
helping to place religion on a rational and
scientific basis. I think that every minister

192 Outlook to Nature

should be a naturalist, — using the word in its
large and etymological sense.

The passing of fear and doubt.

Religions are founded more or less on the
philosophy of fear, or have been much domi-
nated by it. The forces of nature are beyond us
and about us, — the flood, the fire, the rain, the
lightning, the earthquake, the pestilence. We
appeal to supreme beings to protect us and to
provide a way of escape, and we make sacrifices,
ask for propitiation, and beg for mercy. We
are set over against the great awful universe in
which we live.

But if man is in very truth a real part of
nature and has come up through what we call
the natural processes (but they are divine pro-
cesses, nevertheless), then he feels and respects
his brotherhood with nature, adapts himself
hopefully to his conditions (since it is useless
to adapt himself unhopefully), and he fears not.
We are learning how to control the forces of
nature, and we are beginning to feel the courage
that comes from mastery. We shall then look

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 193

for the end of fatalism and of mere hopeless
resignation. The devils are vanishing.

Our nature poetry is tinctured with the phi-
losophy of fear and of dread. Or much of it is
mere praise and exaltation of nature. Very
little of it catches the spirit of the real fellow-
ship of man and nature, — that creation-spirit
which will come from the full understanding of
our origin and our relative place in the cosmos.
We have much that we call nature poetry, but
most of it will not be nature poetry in the time
to come.

We are to pass the Age of Doubt. We are
caring less for " belief" and therefore there is
less reason for "doubt," — for "doubt" is the
complement of " belief" and originates because
we cannot believe the belief. The verities of
religion lie deeper than beliefs or dogmas or
formulas. We shall cease to bolster and rein-
force faith by artificial and arbitrary means.
Freedom and simplicity are requisite to great
religious growth.

Faith will be direct and free, as natural as
the trust of the child, as native to us as the

1 94 Outlook to Nature

sunshine and the air. We are coming to a
religion of joy and activity, full of high
spirituality, of great trust in nature, of hope
in man, and of direct dependence on the
Almighty.

The outposts.

The evolution-conception of the universe,
therefore, bids us come and stand on a high
place. It magnifies individual effort, kindles
the inner light of conscience in distinction from
authority, lessens belief in mere wonders, stim-
ulates the reason, and emancipates the man.
It asks us to lay aside prejudice and small dog-
matisms. It impels us to a new and great
reverence for the Power which has set in mo-
tion that stupendous enterprise which unfolds
itself without a break or change of purpose,
setting the stars in their courses and molding
the strawberry into its new environments, los-
ing no detail in its mighty swing and running on
to destiny in ages hence of which we cannot yet
perceive the meaning. It bids us put ourselves
in line with the movement of the ages, to throw

Evolution: The Quest of Truth 195

aside all mental reservations and oppositions
to truth, and to do our little, with sympathy
and inspiration, to forward the creation.

All beliefs, all doctrines, all creeds are mine.
I want only the truth and the privilege to live
in the great good world. Truth, and the quest
of truth, are always safe. It is not my part to
be anxious about destiny or about the universe.
If my tiny opinions are outgrown, I shall wait,
in patience and in hope.

There is grateful release in letting the uni-
verse take care of itself. The universe is in
better hands than mine. In these matters, I
will substitute trust for faith. If I cannot re-
move the dandelions from the lawn, then I will
love the dandelions. Where once were weeds
are now golden coins, bees reveling in color,
and the spring sunshine kissing the blossoms
with lips of dew. It is so sweet and restful
that I abide in peace.

Passengers on the cosmic sea
We know not whence nor whither :
'Tis happiness enough to be
In tune with wind and weather.

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