The Bible of nature; five lectures delivered before Lake Forest College on the foundation of the late William Bross

LIBRARY

OF THK

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

BIOLOGY „.

LIBRARY Class

G

THE BROSS LIBRARY

VOLUME IV

THE BROSS LECTURES . . 1907

THE BIBLE OF NATUKE

FIVE LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE

LAKE FOREST COLLEGE

ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE

WILLIAM BROSS

BY

J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1908

BIOLOGY

LIBRARY

G

GENERAL

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BT
THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY

Published September, 1908

THE BROSS FOUNDATION

THE Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund
established in 1879 by the late William Bross,
Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois from 1866 to
1870. Desiring some memorial of his son, Na-
thaniel Bross, who died in 1856, Mr. Bross entered
into an agreement with the "Trustees of Lake
Forest University," whereby there was finally
transferred to them the sum of forty thousand dol-
lars, the income of which was to accumulate in
perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the
accumulations of one decade to be spent in the
following decade, for the purpose of stimulating
the best books or treatises "on the connection, re-
lation and mutual bearing of any practical science,
the history of our race, or the facts in any depart-
ment of knowledge, with and upon the Christian
Religion." The object of the donor was to "call
out the best efforts of the highest talent and the ripest
scholarship of the world to illustrate from science,
or from any department of knowledge, and to demon-
strate the divine origin and the authority of the
Christian Scriptures', and, further, to show how
both science and revelation coincide and prove the
existence, the providence, or any or all of the attri-

vi The Bross Foundation

butes of the only living and true God, 'infinite,
eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom,
power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'"

The gift contemplated in the original agreement
of 1879 was finally consummated in 1890. The
first decade of the accumulation of interest having
closed in 1900, the Trustees of the Bross Fund
began at this time to carry out the provisions of the
deed of gift. It was determined to give the gen-
eral title of "The Bross Library" to the series of
books purchased and published with the proceeds
of the Bross Fund. In accordance with the ex-
press wish of the donor, that the "Evidences of
Christianity" of his "very dear friend and teacher,
Mark Hopkins, D.D.," be purchased and "ever
numbered and known as No. 1 of the series,"
the Trustees secured the copyright of this work,
which is now numbered as Volume I of the Bross
Library.

The trust agreement prescribed two methods by
which the production of books and treatises of the
nature contemplated by the donor was to be stimu-
lated:

1. The Trustees were empowered to offer one
or more prizes during each decade, the competi-
tion for which was to be thrown open to "the
scientific men, the Christian philosophers and
historians of all nations." In accordance with
this provision, a prize of $6,000 was offered in

The Bross Foundation vii

1902 for the best book fulfilling the conditions of
the deed of gift, the competing manuscripts to
be presented on or before June 1, 1905. The
prize was awarded to the Reverend James Orr,
D.D., Professor of Apologetics and Systematic
Theology in the United Free Church College,
Glasgow, for his treatise on "The Problem of the
Old Testament," which was published in 1906
as Volume III of the Bross Library. The next
decennial prize will be awarded about 1915, and
will be announced in due time.

2. The Trustees were also empowered to "se-
lect and designate any particular scientific man or
Christian philosopher and the subject on which he
shall write," and to "agree with him as to the sum
he shall receive for the book or treatise to be writ-
ten." Under this provision the Trustees have,
from time to time, invited eminent scholars to de-
liver courses of lectures before Lake Forest Col-
lege, such courses to be subsequently published as
volumes in the Bross Library. The first course of
lectures, on "Obligatory Morality," was delivered
in May, 1903, by the Reverend Francis Landey
Patton, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton
Theological Seminary. The copyright of these
lectures is now the property of the Trustees of the
Bross Fund. The second course of lectures, on
"The Bible: Its Origin and Nature," was deliv-
ered in May, 1904, by the Reverend Marcus

viii The Bross Foundation

Dods, D.D., Professor of Exegetical Theology in
New College, Edinburgh. These lectures were
published in 1905 as Volume II of the Bross Li-
brary. The third course of lectures, on "The
Bible of Nature," was delivered from September
24 to October 3, 1907, by Mr. J. Arthur Thomson,
M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History in the
University of Aberdeen. These lectures are em-
bodied in the present volume.

JOHN SCHOLTE NOLLEN,

President of Lake Forest College.

LAKE FOREST, ILLINOIS,
NOVEMBER, 1907.

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

I. THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

The sense of wonder a human characteristic, though
very varied in expression — It lies at the roots of science
and philosophy, and is one of the footstools of religion —
What are the mainsprings of rational wonder? — The
abundance of power in the world — We cannot think of it
as beginning or as ending — An illustration from Radium
— The power of life is not less wonderful — A water-mite
is relatively more efficient than a steam-engine, and a
fire-fly than a search-light — The constructive and destruc-
tive power of microbes — The abundance of life — Goethe's
expression of this — The wonder of the immensities of
Nature remains in spite of our modern annihilation of
distance — Fraunhofer " approximavit sidera," but there is
still room for wonder — The manifoldness of Nature, an
overflowing form-fountain — Intricacy of things, an ant is
many times more visibly intricate than a locomotive —
"The simplest organism we know is far more complex
than the Constitution of the United States"— Amid all
this multiplicity and intricacy there is a pervading order —
The world is a cosmos, not a curiosity-shop; a universe,
not a multiverse — Most disturbances of the order are of
man's making — "All epidemic diseases could be abolished
in fifty years" — The pervading order is seen in the uni-
versal network of interrelations — Nature is a vast system
of linkages — The web of life — It is true that there is uni-
versal flux — The world is "a changeful process in which
nought endures save the flow of energy and the rational
ix

x Summary of Contents

order which pervades it" — Yet there is persistence amid
change — A species is "a sort of visible fugue wandering
about a central theme" — "The organic world as a whole
is a perpetual flux of changing types," and yet there is a
remarkable stability of type— The drama of animal life,
its inexhaustible marvels — Migrations of birds and eels as
illustrations — Adaptations — "Wherever you tap organic
nature it seems to flow with purpose " — The old special
arguments from design are replaceable by "a wider tele-
ology, based upon the fundamental proposition of evolu-
tion"— Progress the crowning wonder — In Lotze's words,
"There is the unity of an onward advancing melody" —
The omnipresence of beauty in finished and normal things
— Is any one thing more wonderful than another? — Walt
Whitman's doctrine — The wonder of a pebble, a flower in
the wall, an earthworm — The sense of wonder and the
scientific mood — The relations of the practical, emotional,
and scientific moods — The sense of wonder and the re-
sults of science — Kant's famous passage on wonder —
Emerson's "Excelsior."

II. THE HISTORY OF THINGS

The antiquity of things — The age of the Earth must be
reckoned in millions of years — Things have changed with
the times — The nebular or meteoritic hypothesis — The
history of a star — Stages in the history of the Earth —
Sculpturing of scenery — The hand of life upon the Earth
— Age of the Earth — Inorganic evolution — Interpretation
of the past — Scientific interpretation is not in the strict
sense explanation — It is redescription in terms of the sim-
plest possible formulae — William of Occam's razor — But
the common denominator of physical science [Matter,
Energy, Ether] is not self-explanatory — Admittedly, science
starts with a great deal "given" — Development and evolu-

Summary of Contents xi

tion — The story of the Earth is really the story of a develop-
ment, a continuous natural development in which ante-
cedents pass over into their consequents — Recoil from the
scientific position — The scientific outlook is not the only
one permissible and available, but we must not try to look
out of two windows at once — The aim of science as dis-
tinguished from that of philosophy — If the scientific in-
terpretation is sound, the cosmos was already implicit in
the "nebula," there never was any chaos at all, there is
nothing in the end that was not also in the beginning —
We are thus led to add to the scientific interpretation a
philosophical interpretation: "In the beginning was the
Logos."

III. ORGANISMS AND THEIR ORIGIN

The great variety of living creatures — What is charac-
teristic of them all as distinguished from inanimate systems
— Contrast of the quick and the dead — Puzzling phenom-
ena, such as latent life, local life, potential life — The living
organism looked at from the chemist's point of view —
Living matter probably a mixture (obviously no jumble!)
of proteids and other highly complex substances, owing
its virtue to their cooperative interaction — The living or-
ganism looked at from the physicist's point of view — An
engine? A self-stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative,
self-adjusting, self-increasing, self-reproducing engine I —
At present no vital phenomenon can be completely re-
described in physico-chemical terms — The living organism
looked at from the biologist's point of view — It is char-
acterized by its power of growth at the expense of material
quite different from itself, by retaining its integrity in
spite of ceaseless metabolism, by its cyclical development,
by its power of effective response, by its unified behaviour—
The problem of the origin of organisms upon the Earth—

xii Summary of Contents

Does this admit of scientific solution? — Had life a begin-
ning ? — May organisms have come from elsewhere ? May
organisms have been evolved from not-living matter?
"Omne vivum e vivo" an empirical statement of the re-
sults of observation, not a dogma — The trend of evolu-
tionary thinking leads one to favor the idea of abiogenesis
— The difficulties to be faced — We must not exaggerate
the apartness of the animate from the inanimate; nor
depreciate it — Suppose an organism could be made arti-
ficially, what then?

IV. THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANISMS

The general idea of evolution (that the present is the
child of the past and the parent of the future) was first
realized in relation to human affairs — It was thence pro-
jected on Nature — It is a very old idea, perhaps as old as
clear thinking — Darwin and his fellow-workers made the
idea of organic evolution current intellectual coin — Why
do we accept the evolutionary modal interpretation? — It
is not demonstrable like the conservation of energy or like
the gravitation formula — We accept it because it fits the
facts, because no facts contradict it, because it is con-
gruent with our interpretation of other orders of facts —
There is no other scientific modal interpretation — The
validity of the theory of descent — We must not mix up
scientific with transcendental interpretations— The facts of
past history as disclosed by the patience of the palaeon-
tologists— The record in the rocks — Impressions: that
everything is equally perfect, no prentice work; that the
fountain of life is practically inexhaustible, infinite resource ;
that many fine types and races have wholly passed away
without leaving any lineal descendants; that there is in-
dubitable progress, throughout the ages life has been
slowly creeping upward — Factors in Evolution — The raw

Summary of Contents xiii

material of progress furnished by variations and mutations
— De Vries's Evening Primroses — "Modifications" do not
count for much as far as the race is concerned — The
directive factors are included in the terms Selection and
Isolation — A common error as to fortuitousness — The
preciousness of individuality — The importance of struggle
and endeavor — Struggle is more than competitive — Ethical
aspect of organic evolution — Attempt at a correction of the
ultra-Darwinian picture — The struggle for existence is
often an endeavor after well-being, an endeavor for others
as well as self — Darwin on the emotional value of the
evolutionary conception.

V. MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE

Man's zoological position and his distinctive peculiarities
— Closely allied anatomically to the Primates, but dis-
tinctive from heel to chin, from big toe to forehead, above
all in his big brain — His real distinctiveness depends not
on anatomical peculiarities, but on his powers, especially
on his powers of rational discourse, of building up general
ideas, of guiding his conduct by ideals — Does "the all-
pervading similitude of structure" between Man and the
Primate stock imply affiliation? — The scientific answer is
Yes, Man and the Anthropoid apes must have had a com-
mon ancestor — What other interpretations are in the field ?
That man is "the Great Exception" to natural evolution,
that while his body was naturally evolved he received a
specific "spiritual influx" — Summary of the facts used by
Darwin and others in support of the evolutionist inter-
pretation— As in other cases, these are not demonstrative,
but they have a cumulative convincingness — The difficulty
of the problem of the Ascent of Man — We do not know
how he arose, or whence he came, or when he began, or
where it was — His antiquity is certain, but little else — Man

xiv Summary of Contents

as a "Mutation"— Possible factors in the early evolution
of Man — Repugnance to the scientific interpretation,
partly due to misunderstanding, partly aesthetic, partly
ethical — The value of a product is independent of its re-
mote origin — Man is not a masterpiece " accidentally pro-
duced"; Man forms a new departure in the gradual un-
folding of Nature's predestined scheme — The evolutionist
interpretation is not necessarily naturalistic — A comparison
and contrast of animal behavior and human conduct — As
regards animals, we may speak of intelligence, but not of
reason; of words, but not of language; of behavior, but
not of conduct — In what sense, if any, can it be said that
human conduct has evolved from animal behaviour ? — The
cerebral mutation was the Rubicon — Increasing cerebral
complexity made a higher intelligence possible, language
and conscience date from that dawn — Certain raw ma-
terials of conduct in the form of primary impulses were
inherited from pre-human ancestry, but Man, who reasoned,
spoke, and controlled his behaviour in relation to more than
merely perceptual ends, raised these to a higher power —
Huxley's thesis as regards the contrast between human
and cosmic evolution — Reasons for dissenting from Hux-
ley's conclusion — Value of the evolutionary conception of
Man — It clears things up, it suggests effort, it is hope-
inspiring, it makes the whole cosmic process more intel-
ligible—Retrospect on the riddles which our brief survey
has disclosed— They bring us back to the wonder with
which we began— The riddles of things as they are — We
formulate sequences in terms which are not self-explan-
atory— The riddles of the history of things— Riddles as to
origins— The riddle of the death of the Earth— The riddle
of suffering — The philosophical and the scientific outlook
— The limitations of science — Anima animans — Meaning
of the title "The Bible of Nature."

I

THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

The Sense of Wonder. — Perhaps even the most
"profane person" has some secret shrine where
he allows himself at least to wonder. What may
not the object of this wonder be — the grandeur
of the star-strewn sky, the mystery of the moun-
tains, the sea eternally new, the way of the eagle
in the air, the meanest flower that blows, the look
in a child's eyes? Somewhere, sometime, some-
how, every one confesses, "This is too wonderful
for me."

The sense of wonder varies in expression ac-
cording to race and temperament, according to
health and habits, according to its degree of culture
and freedom. Caliban's is different from Ariel's,
and Prospero's from both. But whatever be its
particular expression, the sense of wonder is one
of the saving graces of life, and he who is without
it might as well be dead. It lies at the roots of
both science and philosophy, and it has been in all
ages one of the footstools of religion. When it
dies one of the lights of life goes out. Keeping to
the outer world of nature, let us illustrate what may
be called the mainsprings of rational wonder.
3

4 The Bible of Nature

Abundance of Power. — In ancient days when mas-
tery of the forces of nature was not even dreamed
of, men were almost overwhelmed by their sense
of the abundance of power in the world. Unable
to see much order in this power, unable to utilize
it, they took what came and wondered. Often
personifying the various forces, they brought
thank-offerings when these were benign and sacri-
fices when they were hostile. Short-sighted and
timorous, they paid heavy premiums to experience,
and yet were slow to learn. \It may be, however,
that they excelled us, in whom familiarity has bred
commonplaceness, in their keener sense of the
abundance of power in the world. \ It seems some-
times as if we needed an earthquake, a volcanic
eruption, a tornado, a comet, to re-awaken us to a
sense of the world Swa/us, to the powers that make
our whole solar system travel in space toward an
unknown goal, that keep our earth together and
awhirling round the sun, that sway the tides
and rule the winds, that mould the dew-drop and
build the crystal, that clothe the lily and give us
energy for every movement and every thought
— in short that keep the whole system of things
agoing.

"Trees in their blooming,
Tides in their flowing,
Stars in their circling,
Tremble with song."

The Wonder of the World 5

And one note in that song is Power, which we can-
not think of as beginning or as ending, which never
seems to alter in quantity though it is always chang-
ing its quality, which is not a whit less wonderful
though we say that it is " all electricity " and cer-
tainly not less wonderful if we are able to say

"God on His throne
Is Eldest of poets,
Unto His measures
Moveth the whole."

A Modern Instance. — Let us take a now familiar
instance of this Power. Besides theoretical and
possibly practical results, there has been some emo-
tional gain in the recent startling discoveries which
centre around the word radio-activity. From a
ton of pitch-blende, the investigators extract less
than a grain of radium, which, apart from living
matter, is the most wonderful kind of matter in the
world. Incessantly and without appreciable loss
it pours forth heat and light; its rays penetrate
thick plates of metal, excite phosphorescence in
other bodies, discharge electroscopes from a dis-
tance, and have strange effects on living creatures.
We are told that radium gives off not only recti-
linear darting rays, but also a gaseous emanation
which is radio-active, which precipitates itself as
a "something" on various kinds of bodies and
makes them also radio-active. It decays and be-

6 The Bible of Nature

comes, in part at least, something else — namely,
that rare stuff called Helium, which Sir Norman
Lockyer found many years ago in the Sun, which
also occurs in warm springs and rare minerals.
One kind of radium ray is said to consist of streams
of little bodies, which travel at the rate of 20,000
miles a second, 40,000 times faster than a rifle bul-
let; another kind is said to consist of streams of
little bodies, darting forth at the prodigious rate
of 100,000 miles a second; another kind is said to
consist of pulses in the ether, which can penetrate
a foot of solid iron. In spite of all the energy it
gives off, radium is but slowly used up. It is
possibly being continually formed afresh in the
earth, perhaps from Uranium. A small quantity
diffused in the earth will suffice to compensate for
all the loss of heat by radiation; a fraction of one
per cent, in the sun would compensate for all its
immense loss of heat. Is this not "too wonderful
for us?"

Power of Life. — We do not perhaps think much
about it, but the abundance of power in living
creatures is truly wonderful, just as wonderful as
radium. Call them engines — animate systems
which transform matter and energy — they are
more perfect than our best engines, the perfection
being measured by the relation between the energy
which enters them and the work they do. " Joule
pointed out that not only does an animal much

The Wonder of the World 7

more nearly resemble in its function an electro-
magnetic engine than it resembles a steam-engine,
but also that it is a much more efficient engine;
that is to say, an animal, for the same amount of
potential energy of food or fuel supplied to it — call
it fuel, to compare it with other engines — gives you
a larger amount converted into work than any
engine which we can construct physically." Lang-
ley pointed out that a fire-fly is a much more eco-
nomical light-producer than any human lumi-
niferous device. As a physicist looking at life and
puzzling over its dynamic mystery, Professor Joly
advanced the following interesting and important
proposition: "While the transfer of energy into
any inanimate material system is attended by ef-
fects retardative to the transfer and conducive to
dissipation, the transfer of energy into any ani-
mate material system is attended by effects con-
ducive to the transfer and retardative of dissipa-
tion." From a dynamic point of view it is
wonderful to watch, let us say, a few water-mites
imprisoned in a vessel where the supply of food is
of the smallest. Day after day, week after week, we
see them darting about with extreme rapidity, we
hardly ever catch them napping. They cannot
evade the law of the conservation of energy, but
it certainly seems as if they did.

Or take another entirely different case — the de-
structive power of microbes. It seems certain

8 The Bible of Nature

that some microbes in certain phases can pass
through the most carefully constructed water-filter
and are invisible to the best microscope. We know
that they pass through by the results; we can get
cultures of them out of the water. Yet these in-
visibly minute creatures have so much constructive
power that from one, in a few hours, a million
may result, and so much destructive power that
a small dose of them soon kills an ox.

Abundance of Life. — We need only allude to the
actual abundance of life. The roll-call of animals
includes so many tens of thousands of species that,
so far as our power of realizing the total is con-
cerned, it is hardly affected when we note that
more than half of them are insects. More than
two thousand years ago Aristotle recorded a total
of about 500 animals, but there may be more new
species in a single volume of the Challenger Re-
ports. We speak of the number of stars, yet more
than one family of insects is credited with includ-
ing as many different species as there are stars to
count with the unaided eye on a clear night. And
besides the number of different kinds, think of the
uncountable numbers of individuals.

" But what an endlesse worke have I on hand
To count the sea's abundant progeny
Whose fruitful seede farre passeth those on land,
And also those which wonne in th' azure sky,
How much more eath to tell the starres on hy,

The Wonder of the World 9

Albe they endlesse seem in estimation,

Than to recount the sea's posterity,

So fertile be the floods in generation,

So huge their numbers and so numberless their nation."

The explorers of the Antarctic seas tell us that
from these cold waters it was quite the usual thing
to take from ten to thirty thousand specimens of a
certain crustacean in a single haul. In short, the
naturalist as well as the poet spoke when Goethe
celebrated Nature's wealth: "In floods of life, in a
storm of activity, she moves and works above and
beneath, working and weaving, an endless mo-
tion, birth and death, an infinite ocean, a change-
ful web, a glowing life; she plies at the roaring
loom of time and weaves a living garment for God."

Immensities. — The simple and open mind is al-
ways impressed by the bigness of Nature. Our
ancestors were thrilled by the apparently boundless
and unfathomable sea, by the apparently unending
plains, by the mountains whose tops were lost in
the clouds, by the expanse of the heavens; and
our children happily have still something of the
same impression of the wide, wide world. It is
the impression of immensity — of practical infini-
tude, and it is worth having and keeping. Nowa-
days, of course, we measure everything, and the
wonder tends to fade. Every day we get some
fresh instance of the way in which "Science reaches
forth her arms to feel from world to world, and

10 The Bible of Nature

charms her secret from the latest moon." We
annihilate distance with our deep devices and
make the ether carry our signals. We bring the
moon so near that our maps of it are better than
those of Africa three generations ago. We meas-
ure the distance of the stars; we analyze the chemi-
cal composition of the sun. It is enough to re-
call Fraunhofer's fine epitaph, "Approximavit
sidera."

Thus size and distance are ceasing to impress
us as they impressed our forefathers. We -are be-
coming accustomed to the immensities. Yet we
do well to sit down quietly at times under the
starry heavens, and remember that though light
travels 186,000 miles a second, we might perchance
observe the twinkling of a star that had gone out;
that when we look at a Centauri, which lies some
ten billions of miles nearer to us than any other
known star, we see it, not as it is to-night, but as it
was more than four years ago; that, though our
sun is 93,000,000 of miles away (and no one of us
has any mental picture of what a million is), the
farthest star we can see is a million times farther
off; that for every one of the few thousands (say
8,000) of stars we can see with our unaided eyes
there are thousands unseen (say, a hundred mil-
lions); and that our whole solar system is equiv-
alent in size to no more than a corner of the Milky
Way. In the heavens the navigator sails in a

The Wonder of the World 11

practically infinite ocean; for leagues and leagues
beyond there is always more sea. There is room
for wonder.

Manifoldness. — Another primary impression of
Nature is that of manifoldness. Star differs from
star in glory. Every mountain has its individ-
uality. There are over eighty different kinds of
elements. The number of different minerals is
legion. "All flesh is not the same flesh, but there
is one flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, an-
other of fishes, and another of birds." From one
small island (Great Britain) we have a record of
over four hundred different kinds of birds, each
a very distinctive personality. In the Challenger
Report on Radiolarians, Haeckel deals with about
five thousand different species, all of fascinating
beauty. A single year's volume of the Zoologi-
cal Record may register more new species than
were included in the whole of Linne's "Sys-
tema Naturae." Whether we gather shells on
the shore or collect snow crystals; whether we
study birds or brambles, hydroids or hawkweeds,
we get the -same impression of an overflowing
form-fountain, of prodigal multiplicity, of endless
resources.

Intricacy. — An allied impression, unknown to the
ancients, is that of intricacy. The telescope re-
veals a hundred million heavenly bodies; the micro-
scope reveals another unseen world of the infinitely

12 The Bible of Nature

small, each member of which is nevertheless in-
tricate. One of President D. S. Jordan's epi-
grams is unforgetable, "The simplest organism we
know is far more complex than the Constitution
of the United States." The body of an ant is
many times more visibly intricate than a steam
engine; its brain, as Darwin said, is perhaps the
most marvellous speck of matter in the universe.
Our brain is such a labyrinth of nerve paths that
it takes years to become even superficially familiar
with it. The body of an animal may consist of
millions of unit-areas or cells; each shows a com-
plex foam-like or net-like living matter, including
a nucleus which is a microcosm in itself. Within
each nucleus there are stainable bodies or chromo-
somes, twenty-four of them in each of our body-
cells, and these are built up of smaller microsomes,
and each chromosome is split longitudinally when
the cell divides. And when we pass beyond the
visibly intricate, to the coarse-grainedness which
the physicists find it necessary to postulate in
matter, the intricacy is multiplied beyond all our
powers of picturing. They say that in a tiny
organism no larger than a minute-hand on a dainty
watch there is a molecular intricacy which might
be represented by an Atlantic liner packed with
such watches. Some say that the simplest of all
atoms — an atom of hydrogen — must have a consti-
tution as complex as a constellation, with about

The Wonder of the World 13

800 separate parts. Here again there is room for
some rational wonder.

Pervading Order. — In spite of all this multiplicity
and intricacy, there is a pervading order. The
world is not a curiosity shop, but a Kosmos.
There do not seem to be many big collisions in the
crowded heavens, and there is no hint of fortuity.
The clockwork goes so steadily that the return of
a comet can be predicted to a night. There have
been cataclysms in the history of the Earth, but
they are not more disorderly than the cracking of
the sun-baked clay. There is order in the relations
of the atomic weights of the .chemical elements
(MendeleefFs "Periodic Law"), just as there is
order in the relations of the planets. The wind
bloweth where it listeth, and yet we know, as
Tyndall said, that " the Italian wind, gliding over
the crest of the Matterhorn, is as firmly ruled as
the earth in its orbital revolution round the sun;
and the fall of its vapour into clouds is exactly as
much a matter of necessity as the return of the
seasons."1 Our body is a most intricate engine,
yet how smoothly it works if we give it a chance.
Creatures living naturally may have parasites, but
they hardly ever show any disease. That comes
when man tampers with them or with their sur-
roundings. Natural death is a most orderly phe-
nomenon. And even the disorders which man
'"Fragments of Science."

14 The Bible of Nature

brings about, are, as statistics show, appallingly
orderly in their occurrence. In short, it is not a
multiverse we live in, but a universe. It is not
"all weather."

We cannot deny that there are occurrences
which give us pause in our assertion of pervading
order — but most of these are within the human
realm, and many of them are by no means inevit-
able. Man is extraordinarily callous in the way of
taking risks, and perhaps the terrible tragedy of
much in human life is needed as a spur to incite
us to put an end to it. Most people profess to be
shocked at the wastage of life, often very indis-
criminate, involved in many microbic diseases or
in war, and yet the bulk of us do not really care so
very much — till the wolves attack our own flocks.
If we did care enough, we should soon put a stop
to both infectious diseases and war. A great
authority has said that "all epidemic disease
could be abolished in fifty years." Perhaps this
is too sanguine, perhaps the expert underesti-
mated the social cost of the riddance, but in
any case the declaration cannot be left out of
consideration. It does not take very long to rid a
country of rabies. Why not of other forms of
madness ?

Network of Interrelations. — It is part of this order
that the world is a network of interrelations.
Part is linked to part by sure, though often subtle,

The Wonder of the World 15

bonds, and nude isolation is as rare in nature as a
vacuum. Nature is a vast system of linkages.
Every one knows how Darwin, by showing that
earthworms have made most of the fertile soil of
the world, verified in detail what Gilbert White had
foreseen in 1777: "The most insignificant insects
and reptiles are of much more consequence and
have much more influence in the economy of
nature than the incurious are aware of . . . . Earth-
worms, though in appearance a small and des-
picable link in the chain of Nature, yet, if lost,
would make a lamentable chasm." What we
may call "nutritive chains" connect many forms
of life — higher animals feeding upon lower through
long series, the records of which read like the story
of "The House that Jack Built." The flowering
plants and the higher insects have grown up
throughout long ages together, in alternate influ-
ence and mutual perfecting. Every one knows
Darwin's "cats and clover" story, and it is but a
type. It was Darwin also who removed a ball
of mud from the foot of a bird, and found that
fourscore seeds germinated from it. Not a bird
can fall to the ground without sending a throb
through a wide circle. We can follow the circu-
lation of matter from the mud by the pond-side
till it becomes part of the physical basis of clear
thinking. We can connect the lady's toilet-table
with the African slave-trade, or the demand for

16 The Bible of Nature

well-burnished bicycles with the extermination of
the walrus. As Shelley wrote:

"Nothing in this world is single;
All things by a law Divine
In each other's being mingle!"

Only the working naturalist knows the extent
to which living creatures are interlinked in nature.
There is a solidarity of kinship, but there is also
a solidarity of vital relations. We are familiar
with the correlation of organs in the living body,
tmt there is also a correlation of organisms in the
web of life. The young of the fresh-water mussel
must be nurtured for a time as hangers-on to
fishes; there is a fresh- water fish (the bitterling,
Rhodeus amarus) whose young must be nurtured
for a while inside the gills of the mussel. And
this is but an instance among thousands. We re-
call a remarkable passage of Locke's: "This is
certain, things, however absolute and entire they
seem in themselves, are but retainers to other
parts of nature, for that which they are most taken
notice of by us. Their observable qualities,
actions, and powers are owing to something with-
out them; and there is not so complete and per-
fect a part that we know of nature, which does not
owe the being it has and the excellence of it to its
neighbors; and we must not confine our thoughts
within the surface of any body, but look a great

The Wonder of the World 17

deal farther, to comprehend perfectly those qual-
ities that are in it."

Over a ploughed field in the summer morning
we see the spider-webs in thousands, glistening
with dew-drops, and this is an emblem of the in-
tricacy of the threads in the web of life — to be seen
more and more as our eyes grow clear. Or, is not
the face of nature like the surface of a gentle
stream, where hundreds of dimpling circles touch
and influence one another in an intricate com-
plexity of action and reaction beyond the ken of
the wisest?

Universal Flux. — Another aspect of the world,
which cannot be clearly thought of without a feel-
ing of wonder, was expressed in the old saying of
Heraclitus : Trdvra pel, all things are in flux. The
rain falls; the springs are fed; the streams are filled
and flow to the sea; the mist rises from the deep
and the clouds are formed, which break again on
the mountain-side. The plant captures air,
water, and salts, and with the sun's aid, builds
them up by vital alchemy into complex sub-
stances, incorporating these into itself. The ani-
mal eats the plant and a new incarnation begins.
All flesh is grass. The animal becomes part of
another animal, and the reincarnation continues.
The living thing dies and returns to the earth, the
bundle of life all broken. The microbes of decay
break down the dead, and there is a return to air

18 The Bible of Nature

and water and salts. Nothing is lost, but nothing
is permanent. All things flow. As Huxley said:
"Natural knowledge tends more and more to the
conclusion that ' all the choir of heaven and furni-
ture of the earth* are the transitory forms of par-
cels of cosmic substance wending along the road
of evolution, from nebulous potentiality, through
endless growths of sun and planet and satellite;
through all varieties of matter; through infinite
diversities of life and thought; possibly, through
modes of being of which we neither have a con-
ception, nor are competent to form any, back to the
undefinable latency from which they arose. Thus
the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its im-
permanence. It assumes the aspect not so much
of a permanent entity as of a changeful process,
in which nought endures save the flow of energy,
and the rational order which pervades it."

It may be permissible to quote, from Dr.
J. Theodor Merz, Riickert's beautiful poem,
" Chidher," as a fine expression of the cyclic con-
ception of existence:

"Chidher, the ever youthful, spake:
I passed a city on my way,
A man in a garden fruit did break,
I asked how long the town here lay ?
He spoke, and broke on as before,
'The town stands ever on this shore,
And will thus stand forevermore.'

The Wonder of the World 19

"And when five hundred years were gone
I came the same road as anon;
Then not a mark of town I met.
A shepherd on the flute did play,
The cattle leaf and foliage ate.
I asked how long is the town away?
He spake, and piped on as before,
'One plant is green when the other's o'er,
This is my pasture forevermore.'

"And when five hundred years were gone
I came the same road as anon,
Then did I find with waves a lake,
A man the net cast in the bay,
And when he paused from his heavy take,
I asked since when the lake here lay?
He spake, and laughed my question o'er,
'As long as the waves break as of yore,
One fishes and fishes on this shore.'

"And when five hundred years were gone
I came the same way as anon.
A wooded place I then did see,
And a hermit in a cell did stay;
He felled with an axe a mighty tree.
I asked since when the wood here lay?
He spake: 'The wood's a shelter forevermore
I ever lived upon this floor,
And the trees will grow on as before.'

"And when five hundred years were gone
I came the same way as anon,
But then I found a city filled
With market's clamour shrill and gay.
I asked how long is the city built,

20 The Bible of Nature

Where's wood and sea and shepherd's play?

They pondered not my question o'er,

But cried: 'So was it long before,

And will go on forevermore.'

And when five hundred years are gone

I'll go the same way as anon." 1

Persistence amid Change. — But in spite of all this
ceaseless flux there is steadiness and persistence.
The most familiar instance is the living body,
which is continually changing — in whirlpool-like
fashion — and yet remains very much the same
year in, year out. From one point of view vital
activity is in great part a process of combustion
—often very intense — yet not less remarkable
than the ceaseless change is the retention of in-
tegrity.

1 Quoted from J. T. Merz's " History of European
Thought in the Nineteenth Century," Vol. II, p. 289.

Goethe summed up the Heraclitian doctrine of uni-
versal flux in his well-known poem "Bins und Alles."
"Und umzuschaffen das Geschaffne,
Damit sich's nicht zum Starren waffne,
Wirkt ewiges, lebendiges Thun.
Und was nicht war, nun will es werden,
Zu reinen Sonnen, farbigen Erden,
In keinem Falle darf es ruhn.

Es soil sich regen, schaffend handeln,
Erst sich gestalten, dann verwandeln,
Nur scheinbar steht's Momente still,
Das Ewige regt sich fort in alien;
Denn alles muss in Nichts zerfallen,
Wenn es im Sein beharren will."

The Wonder of the World 21

So, on a larger scale, we see in racial evolution
the twofold aspect of flux and continuity, of change
and persistence, of deviation and inertia, of vari-
ation and hereditary resemblance. Alle Gestalten
sind ahnlich, und keine gleichet der andern. Hux-
ley put the point with his usual vividness: "Flow-
ers are the primers of the morphologist; those who
run may read in them uniformity of type amidst
endless diversity, singleness of plan with complex
multiplicity of detail. As a musician might say:
every natural group of flowering plants is a sort of
visible fugue wandering about a central theme
which is never forsaken, however it may, mo-
mentarily, cease to be apparent." ("Life of
Owen," Vol. II, p. 288.)

In the relatively small group of Alcyonarian
corals, with which we happen to be particularly fa-
miliar, the general plan of structure is exceedingly
simple — polyps give off stolons from which other
polyps arise and the colony is supported by some
sort of skeleton — but the heterogeneity of detail and
of beautiful architectural device beggars description.

Even within the same species we can often get
the same impression of "a sort of visible fugue
wandering about a central theme." Take, for
instance, the beautiful series of three dozen or so
distinct varieties of the common snail, Helix al-
ternata, say, as they are displayed in the Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History. As Mr. Fran-

22 The Bible of Nature

cis Galton puts it: "The organic world as a whole
is a perpetual flux of changing types." And yet
there is a not less remarkable stability of types,
and the great styles of organic architecture are
after all very few.

The Drama of Animal Life. — To the naturalist
there is perennial wonder in the drama of animal
life. The more he knows of animal behavior, the
greater is his wonder. Let us think of this for a
moment.

All around us, except in our cities, we see a
busy animal life, swayed by the twin impulses of
Hunger and Love. There is eager endeavour after
individual well-being, there is not less careful
effort which secures the welfare of the young.
The former varies from a keen and literal struggle
for subsistence to a gay pursuit of aesthetic lux-
uries; the latter rises from physiologically necessary
life-losing and instinctive parental industry to re-
markable heights of what seem to us like deliber-
ate sacrifice and affectionate devotion. The old
question and answer are fundamental, for beast
as well as man:

"Warum treibt sich das Volk so und schreit?
Es will sich erriahren, Kinder zeugen,
Und die nahren so gut es vermag."

On the one hand, we see struggle, — struggle
between mates, between rival suitors, between

The Wonder of the World 23

nearly related fellows, between foes of entirely
diverse nature, between the powers of life and the
merciless forces of the inorganic world.

On the other hand, we see the love of mates,
family affection, mutual aid among kindred, many
quaint partnerships and strange friendships, and
intricate interrelations implying at least some
measure of mutual yielding.

On the one hand, as in a human society or in the
single body, we see a regulated system, the har-
monious working of correlated parts, mutual ad-
justments, and the subordination of the individual
to the whole. On the other hand, we see strug-
gle, friction, anarchy, the natural self-assertive-
ness of the individual or of the individual part
rising against the limitations imposed by environ-
ing circumstances.

We watch the wondrous industry of birds and
bees who work from the dawn until the dusk
brings enforced rest to their brains, which we
know to suffer fatigue as ours do; on the other
hand, we see the parasite's drifting life of ease.
Here locust eats locust, and rat eats rat; there, in
the combat of stags, lover fights with lover till
death conquers both; there, again, a mother ani-
mal loses her life in seeking to save her chil-
dren. At one pole we see simple, brainless crea-
tures pursuing their daily life with what we can
hardly call more than dull sentience; at a higher

24 The Bible of Nature

level we marvel at an instinctive skill whose ex-
pression is unconscious art; finally, we are face to
face with an intelligent behavior which seems at
once a caricature and prototype of our own con-
duct.

Let us recall, for a moment, just one of the
wonders of animal behavior — the wonder of mi-
gration. There is the migration of those birds
that "know no winter in their year," "wild birds
that change their season in the night, and wail
their way from cloud to cloud down the long
wind." What journeys they take — the Arctic Tern
was found by the "Scotia" explorers in the Far
South! How swiftly they fly, how confidently
across the pathless sea, at night, at a great alti-
tude. How strange that the young birds usually
fly away first in the autumn, without waiting for
those who have made the journey before. How
striking the fact — proved for some birds — that
they may return from their winter-quarters to the
garden where they spent the summer.

Or take as another instance of migration the
life-history of the common European eel. It be-
gins its life below the 500 fathom line on the floor
of the deep sea — in that dark, cold, calm, silent,
plantless world; it passes to the surface as a
flattened, transparent larva and lives an open-sea
life for over a year, not eating anything, and grow-
ing rather smaller as it grows older; it becomes a

The Wonder of the World 25

young eel or elver which makes for the shore and
proceeds up the rivers. In .spring or early sum-
mer legions of these elvers pass up stream, obedient
to their instinct to go right ahead as long as the
light lasts. Before reaching such rivers as those
which flow into the Eastern Baltic, the young eels
have had a journey of some 3,000 miles, for all the
North European eels seem to have their cradle in
the Atlantic west of the Faroes, the Hebrides,
Ireland and Spain, where the continental plateau
shelves steeply down into the greater depths.
As the elvers pass up the streams there is, accord-
ing to some, a separation of thef sexes; the males
lag behind; the females go further inland. Then
follows a long period of growth in slow-flowing
reaches of the rivers and in ponds. After some
years there is a return journey to the sea, and, as
far as we know, the individual life ends in giving
origin to new lives. There is never any breeding
in fresh water, and there seems to be no return
from the deep sea.

Adaptations. — One of the most characteristic
features of the animate world is the all-pervading
fitness. It was Romanes who said, " Wherever we
tap organic Nature, it seems to flow with purpose."
We may differ as to our interpretation, but the
fitness of living creatures as regards structure and
habits and interrelations is a fact. How well the
structure of bone is suited to stand strains, how

26 The Bible of Nature

well the bird's skeletal and muscular systems are
adapted for flight, how well the heart is constructed
for its ceaseless work, what a fine instrument the
eye is, how readily the leaf insects escape detection
when they alight on a branch, how effective a con-
trivance is the Venus Fly-trap! But so one might
go on for hours.

To our forefathers, who were dominated by a
static view of the world, the subtle special fitnesses
seen throughout Nature, afforded direct evidence
of the immediate action of a Divine artificer. We
do not hold that view now, partly because it is
rather a crude view, mainly because our view of
Nature is no longer static but kinetic. Even
when the kinetic view was taken, it seemed to
some that Nature was like a troublesome child,
always getting into scrapes and tight places so that
the author of its being might show His skill in extri-
cating it by beautiful contrivance. But we can give
a plausible history of many of these adaptations, we
find them \n varied stages of perfection. There-
fore the argument from design has given place to
a deeper recognition of rationality. The Order of
Nature is such that an increasing evolution of
fitness is possible, there is adaptation in cosmic
evolution as a whole — it leads up to intelligent,
moral persons, adapted to the intellectual and
practical conquest of Nature, adapted to mirror
the reason without in the reason within. Our fore-

The Wonder of the World 27

fathers were impressed by the tactics of Nature,
we are impressed by the strategy.

"There is a wider teleology," Huxley wrote,
"which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution,
but is actually based upon the fundamental
proposition of evolution."

Progress. — The crowning wonder of the world
is that the succession of events spells progress.
What we more or less dimly discern in the long
past is not like the succession of patterns in a
kaleidoscope; it is rather like the sequence of stages
in the individual development of a plant or an
animal, — stages whose meaning is disclosed more
and more fully as the development goes on. It is
not a phantasmagoric procession that the history of
nature reveals, it is a drama. The solid earth is
more differentiated and integrated than a swarm
of meteorites; it is in some sense progress to be-
come fit to be a home of life, a home of creatures
who can feel and understand, who can sometimes
give the earth more significance than it had be-
fore. All through the ages we see life slowly
creeping upward, with many losses, but with
steady gains. Living creatures become nobler,
their life becomes fuller and freer, there is an in-
creasing expression of the Psyche, and in man the
hitherto voiceless Logos — implicit in the pro-
gressive order — becomes at last articulate. As
Lotze has said in his " Microcosmus " : "The

28 The Bible of Nature

series of cosmic periods must be a chain, each link
of which is bound together with every other in the
unity of one plan. ... As we required that each
section of the world's history should present a
harmony of the elements firmly knit together, so
we must now require that the successive order of
these sections shall compose the unity of an on-
ward advancing melody." The unity of an on-
ward advancing melody!

Beauty. — We have not said anything in regard
to the beauty of the world, partly because the
theme is so difficult, and partly because no small
part of the beauty is implied in the order, the in-
tricacy, and the fitness of things. It may be safely
said that every finished and normal living thing is
beautiful — an artistic harmony when in its natural
setting. This suggests the truth of the Platonic
conception that a living creature is harmonious be-
cause it is the realization of a single idea. The
only ugly plants are those which have been de-
formed or discolored by cultivation. The omni-
presence of beauty in finished and normal living
things must have some meaning, and even if it
only mean that something in us responds pleasur-
ably to what nature mints and fashions, that is a
fact of great significance. Beside the remarkable
verse in the Book of Wisdom which says: "Thou
hast ordered all things in measure and num-
ber and weight" — we may rank its correlative,

The Wonder of the World 29

"He has made all things beautiful in their sea-
son."

We lift a tiny shell from the shore, and though
we know that it is simply an "exoskeleton," — a
cuticular secretion of part of the mollusc's skin,
we find it exquisitely fashioned, "a miracle of
design," and we must say the same of every
normal finished organic product in every corner
of creation.

In regard to the beauty of organic structures, it
is perhaps of interest to remember that much of
it — much of the best of it — is quite unseen, except
by the scientific searcher. Much is covered up
by the living tissue, as in the exquisite flinty skele-
ton of the Venus' Flower-Basket; much is hidden
in the darkness of deep waters; much is micro-
scopic. In many cases we can justify the beauty
on utilitarian grounds, thus it may be architectu-
rally effective for resisting strain and stress, or it
may be protective by harmonizing with surround-
ing color; in many other cases it seems to us as if
it were sheer decoration without significance, ex-
cept that it expresses the creature that makes it.

Retrospect. — We have tried to illustrate what
may be called the basis of rational wonder. We
have spoken of the abundance of power, of the im-
mensities, of the manifoldness and intricacy of
things, of the order that pervades the whole, of
the subtle interrelations in the web of life, of the

30 The Bible of Nature

changefulness of everything, of the fitness of liv-
ing creatures, of the progressive trend of things,
and of the beauty which is everywhere.

Wonder and Knowledge. — Thinking of these
wonders arouses two general reflections. The
first of these, we may put in the form of a question.
Is any one thing really more wonderful than an-
other ? Does it not in great part depend on how
much we know about a thing, whether we call it
wonderful or not?

We pick up a pebble from the road and throw it
carelessly away. The geologist picks it up, and
begins to tell us its history, that it is water- worn,
though there is no longer any water near, that it
is part of a disguised raised beach through which
the road has been cut, that it is a piece of jasper
which was fused under great pressure millions of
years ago, that it must have travelled far, swept
down by an ancient river to a now shrunken sea,
and so on. Before he has gone far into his story,
we are interested, our horizon becomes more dis-
tant, and we soon begin to wonder.

We brush aside the common weeds, which we
have seen so often that we have almost ceased to
see them at all — yellow primroses and nothing
more — sometimes, in fact, not so much. But we
take time to look at them, and how beautiful they
become in our eyes, how intricate, how full of indi-
viduality. We take time to study them, with their

The Wonder of the World 31

parts so perfectly correlated and so well adapted
to their surroundings; we learn something of their
relationships and long pedigree, discovering, it
may be, that their race is much older than our
own; we enter the laboratory of the leaf and study
the strange alchemy that goes on there, the raising
of dead raw materials to the level of livingness; we
find that its substances are breaking down and
being built up again — a ceaseless combustion,
"nee tamen consumebatur"; we watch the plant
grow from the invisible to the visible, from one
cell to a million of cells, from apparent simplicity
to obvious complexity; we see the bee come to
visit it, and the quaint give-and-take that occurs;
we see the storing up of treasure for a new gener-
ation, and that generation being born; we watch
the leaf withering and the flower fading, and we
often see the return of all but the seeds to the
level of the not-living once more. Without being
insincere, without being more than awake to the
wonder of the commonplace, may we not say:

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

We lift aside the earthworm which lay adying on
the foot-path, so contemptible that we say "even

32 The Bible of Nature

a worm will turn." But we pause to think of the
part earthworms have played in the history of the
earth, and we recognize that they are the most use-
ful animals. By their burrowing they loosen the
earth, making way for the plant rootlets and the
raindrops; by bruising the soil in their gizzard they
reduce the mineral particles to more useful form;
by burying the surface with stuff brought up from
beneath they were ploughers before the plough,
and by burying leaves they have made a great part
of the vegetable mould over the whole earth.
There may be 50,000 or 500,000 of them in an
acre; they often pass ten tons of soil per acre per
annum through their bodies; and they cover the
surface at the rate of three inches in fifteen years.
We begin to respect them.

We inquire into their structure — their ex-
quisitely sensitive skin, their highly developed
musculature arranged like the hoops and staves
of a barrel, their food canal — an object-lesson in
division of labor, their red blood — so different
from our own, their exquisite kidney-tubes, their
tiny brains and their ventral chain of nerve-centres,
we go into minutiae and we find that it will take
us many months to work out the details of the
nerve-cells or of the complex reproductive system.
The more we know, the more the wonder grows.

We study their habits — their long nocturnal
peregrinations prompted by "love" and hunger,

The Wonder of the World 33

their transport of little stones to protect the en-
trance to the burrows, their deft way of dealing
with leaves difficult to manage. We note that
though eyeless they are very sensitive to light and
persistently avoid it when in good health; that
though earless, they are quickly aware even of the
light tread of a hungry blackbird; that though they
are without anything like a nose, they have a sense
of smell — fine instances, in short, of functions be-
fore organs. We inquire into their relations with
other living creatures, and we find that they have
not a few parasites — even worms within worms —
to most of which, as is usual among animals, they
have so adjusted themselves that nothing detri-
mental happens, while to one kind at least — the
larvae of a fly — they often succumb. We find that
they are persecuted by numerous enemies, such as
centipedes, moles, and birds, and we can then
better understand their extraordinary power of
growing a new tail or even a new head after injury
or breakage. We may possibly discover the eerie
collection of decapitated earthworms which moles
sometimes make as a store of food for winter — de-
capitated, so that they cannot crawl away and yet
remain fresh food, unable even to regrow their
heads while they are waiting to be eaten, for the
regeneration does not occur at a low temperature.
We may inquire into their individual development,
now so well known that we could almost make a

34 The Bible of Nature

kinematograph of the successive stages, and yet
in its essence absolutely beyond our understand-
ing. We may ask about the numerous different
kinds, some dwarfs, some giants, about their dis-
tribution over the face of the earth, about the few
that have gills and thus point to a remote origin
of the burrowing race from aquatic forms. We
can think of the time very long again when the
pioneers left the fresh water and found a new world
underground, how for long they probably enjoyed
ages of peace, how, first, centipedes and long after-
ward moles disturbed their solitudes. In a rather
different sense than was originally meant may we
not say of the worm, "Thou art my brother" ?

We have given three homely illustrations, but the
[point is, that everything is an illustration. ) Every-
thing is equally wonderful if we know enough
about it. It is true that we suffer from the limi-
tations of our senses and of our sympathies, as
well as of our knowledge; he who reads the rocks
may never have seen the stars, and the coleop-
terist whose heart is in the right place as regards
the beetle-world may never have heard the
throstle sing. This is one of the defects of the
quality we are discussing, we become preoccupied
with one kind of wonder, but it is infinitely better
than not having the quality at all. What we are
driving at is, of course, what every nature-poet,
from the Hebrew psalmist to George Meredith,

The Wonder of the World 35

has felt, and perhaps Walt Whitman most keenly
of all — the inextinguishable wonder of the world.

" I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work

of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and the grain of sand,

and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'ceuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of

heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all

machinery,
And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses

any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of

infidels."

This is high doctrine, and who shall attain unto
it? but it is an ideal of rational emotion worth
striving after. There's the same idea more briefly
put in Meredith's famous lines :

"You, of any well that springs,
May unfold the heaven of things."

It need hardly be said that with the growth
of knowledge the precise basis of wonder may
change. Our forefathers wondered at the light-
ning, we wonder at electricity; the child wonders
at the sunbeam dancing about the room, we won-
der at the Rontgen rays ; the simple mind wonders
at the snowflakes, we wonder at the results of the
Great Ice Age.

36 The Bible of Nature

But the moral of all this is obvious. The
wonder of the world is a stimulus to our scien-
tific intelligence, it incites us to discover the "open
Sesame" for hundreds of Aladdin's caves, it makes
us bow in reverence. Moreover, it is most ob-
viously something to enjoy, to delight in more and
more. We do well to recall that line of Gold-
smith's, "His heaven commences ere the world be
past." Do we not need some infusion of the
simple delight in the earth which was expressed
by Matthew Arnold in his " Empedocles on Etna,"
" Is it so small a thing to have enjoy'd the sun ?" ?

The Sense of Wonder and the Scientific Mood. — Our
second general reflection is on the relation between
science and wonder. Is not wonder the offspring
of ignorance? Is not science the sworn foe of
mystery? Do not all wonders disappear in the
light of scientific day?

There are two separate questions here, first,
whether the scientific outlook, which inquires into
natural causes, is in itself antagonistic to the sense
of wonder; and, secondly, whether the results of
scientific analysis have not explained away much
that used to be wonderful in human eyes.

The Three Moods : Practical, Emotional, and Scien-
tific.— We must admit, of course, that the scien-
tific mood is quite different from the emotional
mood, just as it is quite different from the practical
mood. The practical man is concerned with

The Wonder of the World 37

possibilities of action, in obedience to Nature's
primary command, " Be up and doing." The man
of feeling is not concerned with loaves and fishes;
he "hitches his waggon to the stars"; he seeks to
" live on even terms with Time,"

"Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill."

The herbs and the bees, the birds and the beasts,
send tendrils into his heart, claiming and finding
kinship. In a hundred different ways he echoes
Schiller's words:

"O wunderschb'n ist Gottes Erde,
Und schon auf ihr ein Mensch zu sein."

The scientific mood, on the other hand, has for
its main intention to describe the sequences in
nature in the simplest possible formulae, to make
a thought-model of the known world. The sci-
entific man has elected primarily to know, not do.
He does not seek, like the practical man, to realize
the ideal of controlling nature and life, though he
makes this more possible; he seeks rather to ideal-
ize— to conceptualize — the real, or at least those
aspects of reality which are available in his ex-
perience. He would make the world translucent,
not that emotion may catch the glimmer of the
indefinable light that shines through, but for other
reasons — because of his inborn inquisitiveness,

38 The Bible of Nature

because of his dislike of obscurities, because of
his craving for a system — an intellectual system in
which phenomena are at least provisionally unified.

Now, it is surely best to say that the three dom-
inant moods of man — practical, emotional, and
scientific — which correspond metaphorically to
hand, heart, and head, are all equally necessary
and worthy, but that they are most worthy when
they respect one another as equally justifiable out-
looks on nature, and when they are combined, in
some measure at least, in a full human life. A
thoroughly sane life implies a recognition of the
trinity of knowing, feeling, and doing. This
spells health, wholeness, holiness, as Edward
Carpenter has said.

One-sidedness, whether practical, emotional, or
scientific, implies a denial of the trinity of know-
ing, feeling; and doing, a violence to the unity of
life. When any one of the moods becomes so
dominant that the validity of the others is denied,
the results are likely to be tainted with some vice
— some inhumanity, some sentimentalism, some
pedantry.

When the practical mood becomes altogether
dominant, when things get into the saddle and
override ideas and ideals and all good-feeling,
when the multiplication of loaves and fishes be-
comes the only problem of the world, we know
the results to be vicious. The vices of the hyper-

The Wonder of the World 39

trophied practical mood are — belittlement, base-
ness, brutality. To be wholly practical is to grub
for edible roots and see no flowers upon the earth,
no stars overhead. The monstrous practical man
"will have nothing to do with sentiment," though
he prides himself in keeping close to what he calls
"the facts"; he cannot abide "theory," though he
is himself imbued with a quaint Martin Tupper-
ism which gives a false simplicity to the problems
of life; he will live in what he calls "the real
world," and yet he often hugs close to himself the
most unreal of ideals.

Similarly, the hypertrophied emotional mood,
unruled and uncorrelated, uncurbed by science,
unrelated to the practical problems of life, tends to
become morbid, mawkish, mad. What we have
called rational wonder may degenerate into "a
caterwauling about Nature." There may be
overfeeling, just as there may be overdoing. The
disastrous results of feeling without knowledge,
of sympathy without synthesis (in the language
of the learned), of effervescence without activity,
are familiar enough in our own day.

Similarly (must we not confess?) the hyper-
trophied scientific mood has its vices — of over-
knowing, of ranking science first, and life second
(as if science were not, after all, for the evolution
of life), of ignoring good-feeling (as if knowledge
could not be bought at too high a price), of pe-

40 The Bible of Nature

dantry (as if science were merely a "preserve" for
expert intellectual sportsmen, and not also an edu-
cation for the citizen), of maniacal muck-raking
for items of fact (as if facts alone constituted a
science). Yet it is, like the other moods, a natural
and necessary expression of the developing human
spirit, and affords the foundation without which
practice is empirical and soon helpless, without
which emotion becomes sickly and superstitious.

We have recalled this doctrine of the three
moods because it seems to place in proper per-
spective the question whether the scientific out-
look is not prejudicial to the sense of wonder.
The answer, of course, is that while we cannot have
too much science, it is for ordinary men and
women unwholesome to keep continually looking
out at one window, and to keep the shutters on the
others. Even for its own sake, science requires to
be continually moralized and socialized, oriented,
that is to say, in relation to other ideals of human
life than its own immediate one of making a
thought-model of the cosmos. Our science re-
quires to be kept in touch at once with our life and
with our dreams; with our doing and with our
feeling; with our practice and with our poetry.
Synergy and sympathy are needed to complete a
practical synthesis.

Thus, we sympathize with the emotional or ar-
tistic recoil from science, because it is so often dis-

The Wonder of the World 41

proportionately analytic. Science, like a child
pulling a flower to bits, is apt to dissect more than
it reconstructs, and to lose in its analysis the vision
of unity and harmony which the artist has ever
before his eyes. But if the artist has patience, he
will often find that science restores the unity with
more meaning in it than before.

Thus, too, we sympathize with the recoil from
"a botany which teaches that there is no such
thing as a flower," from "a biology which is all
necrology." But have patience and you will find
that the botanist brings the Dryad back into the
tree, and that the necrologist makes the dry bones
live.

We know how Wordsworth recoiled from irrel-
evant irreverent science. He spoke of

"One, all eyes

Philosopher \ a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanise
Upon his mother's grave."

Yet in the preface to "This Lawn a Carpet all
Alive," Wordsworth wrote: "Some are of the
opinion that the habit of analysing, decomposing,
and anatomising is inevitably unfavourable to the
perception of beauty." But "The beauty in form
of a plant or an animal is not made less, but more,
apparent as a whole by more accurate insight into
its constituent properties and powers."

42 The Bible of Nature

Our point just now, however, is rather different.
It is simply that for ordinary men and women one
of the conditions of sanity is an alternation of
moods. Darwin was no ordinary man, yet he
once admitted that it was a rest to lie under the
trees and listen to the birds without bothering his
head about how they came to be thus or thus. The
great embryologist Von Baer once shut himself up
in his study when snow was upon the ground, and
did not come out again until the rye was in har-
vest. He was filled, he tells us, with uncontroll-
able pathos at the sight. "The laws of develop-
ment may be discovered this year or many years
hence — by me or by others — what matters it ? It
is surely folly to sacrifice for this the joy of life
which nothing can replace." Life is not for science,
but science for life. In short, it comes to this, that
there is a time for science, and a time for emotion.
It is a part of man's chief end not only to know
nature, but to enjoy her forever.

The Sense of Wonder and the Results of Science. —
Turning now to the second part of the question,
we have to ask whether the results of science do not
explain away the wonderful. Take the rainbow,
for instance. It made Wordsworth's heart leap
up; when he was a child, when he was a man.

"So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die."

The Wonder of the World 43

But does the modern school-boy's heart leap up ?
His Physiology lessons have taught him to regard
with extreme disfavour any such interference with
the normal function of the vagus nerve; and, be-
sides, his Physics lessons have explained away the
rainbow. One remembers how Keats in his wrath
cursed Newton for his share in robbing mankind
of the wonder of the rainbow. What can one say
except this, that the beauty of the rainbow is the
same to-day as it was in the days of Noah, and
that if we follow up the scientific interpretation
of the rainbow, we come in sight of even greater
wonders. When the half-gods go, the Gods ar-
rive.

We watch the midnight sky flushed with the
quivering Northern Lights — pale green and rose,
crimson and gold — pulsating like the pinions of a
hovering bird, and we wonder. We are at first
saddened by our friend's remark that it is an inter-
esting electro-magnetic phenomenon. But when
we ask for details, and he tells us that corpuscles
projected from the sun and bombarding the earth
are affected by terrestrial magnetism, and travel
in spiral coils toward the poles, till at a certain
distance they exhaust themselves in giving off
cathode rays, and so on, we begin to feel that we
did not well to be sad. As we follow up the sci-
entific unravelling of the mystery of the Aurora
Borealis, we find that the world is even grander

44 The Bible of Nature

than we knew, and we enjoy the Northern Lights
better next time.

We ascend the hill among the woods on an
autumn afternoon, and we look down on a sea of
gold mingled with fire — all the glory of the with-
ering leaves. Our botanical friend tells us of the
breaking up of the green grains into chlorophyll
and xanthophyll, how the latter is affected by the
acidity of the cell-sap, how a special death-pig-
ment, anthocyanin, may make its appearance, and
so on; all the glory seems at first to fade into chem-
istry. But if we question the botanist a little we
find that he has given us more than we have lost.
We see that the hard-worked leaves must die, that
it is better for the tree that they should fall, that
they first surrender everything that they have that
is worth having, till little more than skeleton and
waste is left, that they are transfigured in dying,
becoming for a brief space almost floral, and that
their brilliance is a literal beauty for ashes.

Science is always trying to show us the wheels
that go round, the wheels within wheels, and
though the movement of the hands of the world-
clock is not so mysterious as it used to be in the
days of our childhood and in the days of our fath-
ers, it is certainly more, not less, wonderful. Even
when we are shown that the clock we know sprang
from a simpler clock and that from a simpler still,
the wonder deepens. If we ask Science to tell us

The Wonder of the World 45

of the great clock-maker, she will be quite silent,
for no man by searching can find out God, but if
we ask how it precisely is that the main-springs
work, or why it exactly is that the weights go down,
Science will answer that she does not know. If we
ask Science to tell us why there is a world-clock
or a successor of world-clocks, at all, she will again
be quite silent, for Science takes no stock in pur-
poses; but if we ask how the first clock, from
which all the other clocks are descended, came
into being, Science will answer that she does not
know.

This, then, is the real reason why the results of
science cannot kill wonder, but should always in-
crease it. Minor mysteries disappear, but greater
mysteries stand confessed. Science never seeks
to give ultimate explanations of phenomena, it de-
scribes their appearance in space and their se-
quence in time. The man of scientific mood be-
comes aware of certain fractions of reality that
interest him; he tries to become intimately aware
of these, to make his sensory experience of them
as full as possible; he seeks to arrange them in
ordered series, to detect their interrelations and
likeness of sequence; he tries to reduce them to
simpler terms or to find their common denomi-
nator; and finally , he endeavours to sum them up in
a general formula, often called "a law of nature."

Let us take a concrete case. "The law of gravi-

46 The Bible of Nature

tation is a brief description of how every particle
of matter in the universe is altering its motion with
reference to every other particle. It does not tell
us why particles thus move; it does not tell us why
the earth describes a certain curve round the sun.
It simply resumes, in a few brief words, the rela-
tionships observed between a vast series of phe-
nomena. It economizes thought by stating in
conceptual shorthand that routine of our percep-
tions which forms for us the universe of gravita-
ting matter."1

Conclusion. — We cannot do better than sum up
by quoting Kant's famous passage:

"The world around us opens before our view so mag-
nificent a spectacle of order, variety, beauty, and con-
formity to ends that, whether we pursue our observations
into the infinity of space in the one direction, or into its
illimitable divisions on the other, whether we regard the
world in its greatest or in its least manifestations — even
after we have attained to the highest summit of knowledge
which our weak minds can reach — we find that language
in presence of wonders so inconceivable has lost its force,
and number its power to reckon, nay, even thought fails
to conceive adequately, and our conception of the whole
dissolves into an astonishment without the power of ex-
pression— all the more eloquent that it is dumb.

"Everywhere around us we observe a chain of causes
and effects, of means and ends, of death and birth; and

iKarl Pearson, "The Grammar of Science," revised
edition, 1900, p. 99.

The Wonder of the World 47

as nothing has entered of itself into the condition in which
we find it, we are constantly referred to some other thing,
which itself suggests the same inquiry regarding its cause,
and thus the universe must sink into the abyss of nothing-
ness, unless we admit that, besides this infinite chain of
contingencies, there exists something that is primal and
self-subsistent, something which as the cause of this phe-
nomenal world secures its continuance and preservation."

To speak of the primal and self-subsistent does
not come within the strictly scientific universe of
discourse, but to disclose the wonder of the world
does. And it may be that those who realize this
wonder most are those who follow it farthest and
most fearlessly as it beckons, assured more and
more fully of what is meant by Pascal's words,
"In that thou hast sought me, thou hast already
found me."

Do you ask why we have delayed so long over
what every one admits — the wonder of the world ?
It is because this wonder is Nature's primary
message to us, because the sense of wonder is at
the roots of science and philosophy, because it
has been and will always be one of the footstools
of religion. We do well to mistrust any form of
any one of these — science, philosophy, or religion
— which does not deepen and heighten that won-
der which is a primary attribute of every one who
will be a minister and interpreter of nature. In
all simplicity we must begin, though we need not

48 The Bible of Nature

end with the quality alluded to in Emerson's
child's-poem — " Excelsior."

" Over his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,
And over the moon were the starry studs
That drop from the angels' shoon."

II

THE HISTORY OF THINGS

n

THE HISTORY OF THINGS

The Antiquity of Things. — One of the most ob-
vious results of the study of nature is simply the
conviction that everything has a long history be-
hind it. "Everything," as Bagehot said, "has
become an antiquity." The human race seems
to be several hundreds of thousands of years old,
and yet man is a creature of yesterday compared
with many of his present companions upon the
earth. How long it is since the earth became fit
to be the cradle and home of life we do not know,
but it must be reckoned in millions of years.
One enthusiastic calculator has stated, with al-
most painful precision, that the earth is 861,000,-
000 years old.

Things Change with the Times. — But it is not mere-
ly the length of years that impresses us; it is that
everything — or rather the aspect of everything —
has changed with the times. The present is in a
sense a child of the past, but it is different from its
parent. The earth has passed from phase to
phase; one climate has succeeded another; there
has been a procession of faunas and floras over
the stage; we look back upon a great drama.
51

52 The Bible of Nature

"There rolls the deep where grew the tree;
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There, where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

"The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."

— "In Memariam," CXXII.

Making of the Earth. — The story of the earth is a
long story, retold every year in our schools and
colleges, always becoming clearer and more pict-
uresque as investigation continues. All that we
require to do for our present purpose is to open the
book here and there> to revive our impressions
of the sweep of events.

In the book of the genesis of things there are
no pages grander than those that deal — still some-
what vaguely — with the making of our solar sys-
tem. The Nebular Hypothesis, which we owe
to the genius of Kant and Laplace, is one of the
boldest and most inspiring of all the scientific
guesses at truth, and with sundry emendations
and saving clauses this Nebular Hypothesis is
adhered to by most modern investigators.

"This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides
And eddied into suns, that wheeling, cast
The planets." —Tennyson's "Princess."

The History of Things 53

"The history of a star," Professor R. K. Dun-
can writes, "begins with a nebula. A nebula
is a vast swarm of meteorites colliding together.
The meteorites are cold lumps of matter contain-
ing the chemical elements as we know them on
earth. These meteorites in accordance with their
gravitational attraction seek the centrje of the
swarm, collisions result, heat is evolved, and the
temperature gradually rises."

Owing to the meteoric bombardment, the con-
densing and colliding mass becomes converted
into incandescent gas, probably much simpler
chemically than the original swarm. As the bom-
bardment of meteorites ceases, the gaseous star
begins to cool. Chemically, it retraces its steps,
becoming more complex and heterogeneous again.
It passes through the condition now illustrated
by our sun or by Arcturus, and may eventually
become in itself extinct, like "yon dead world,
the moon."

One of the most attractive forms of the Nebular
Hypothesis is that suggested by Professor Cham-
berlin. Laplace started with a gaseous nebula,
Lockyer and G. H. Darwin start with a swarm of
meteorites, Chamberlin starts with innumerable
small bodies (planetesimals) revolving about a
central gaseous mass. The central mass became
the sun; knots or partial concentrations in the
nebula became the nuclei of the planets; the res-

54 The Bible of Nature

idue of diffuse nebulous matter is added to the
sun or to the planets. The prominent features
of this theory are (1) that it starts from a parent
nebula of a spiral type, like most of those now
existing; (2) that it supposes this nebula to con-
sist of small bodies, like infinitesimally small
planets; and (3) that it does not suppose any
fundamental change in the dynamics of the system
after the nebula was once formed.

Even to-day the work of creation continues, for
stars are being born out of the fire-mist; even to-
night it may be that a new star will be seen taking
her place as a debutante in the splendid cosmic
assembly. Some stars are growing cooler and
more complex, recapitulating the history of our
own earth; others seem to be growing hotter and
less complex, perhaps suggesting what may hap-
pen here also in days to come.

Stages in the History. — The earth, then, probably
had its beginning as one of the rings swirled off
from a great nebular mass, the centre of which
gradually condensed into our sun. It was once
a rapidly rotating molten planet — one of many,
for it may be noted that over five hundred planets
— large and small — are now known, though Hegel
tried to prove that there could not be more than
seven. It probably had a deep atmosphere, part
of which afterward condensed into the waters
that cover the earth. Its molten ocean was pro-

The History of Things 55

foundly disturbed by solar tides, and it was per-
haps a particularly high tide which made the earth
give birth to the moon. This marked the first
critical period in the history of our planet. "At
the eventful time of parturition the earth was ro-
tating, with a period of from two to four hours,
about an axis inclined at some 11° or 12° to the
ecliptic. The time which has elapsed since the
moon occupied a position nine terrestrial radii
distant from the earth is at least fifty-six to fifty-
seven millions of years, but may have been much
more." 1

The moon thus arose as a sort of moult of the
outer envelope of the hot earth. It was charged
with steam and other gases under a pressure of
5,000 pounds to the square inch, but as it receded
from the earth and the pressure continuously dimin-
ished it became "as explosive as a charged bomb,
and steam burst forth from numberless volcanoes."
The moon, in short, was only born to die. " While
the face of the moon might thus have acquired its
existing features, the ejected material might possi-
bly have been shot so far away from its origin as to
have acquired an independent orbit"2 and some
of the meteorites which now descend upon the
earth may be returned portions of the early

1 Prof. W. J. Sollas, Presidential Address, Section C, Brit-
ish Association, 1900. "Nature," September 13, p. 482.
'Prof. W. J. Sollas, loc. cit.

56 The Bible of Nature

envelope, the bulk of which gave rise to the
moon.

Soon after the birth of the moon the earth be-
came consolidated (with a surface temperature of
about 1170° C.) and the moon may have been in-
fluential in determining high-pressure areas and
low-pressure areas over the surface of the crust,
which may have had something to do with prim-
itive depressions and .elevations. This, as Pro-
fessor Sollas says, was the second critical period
in the history of the earth, the stage of the "con-
sistentior status." It may have been forty mil-
lions of years ago, or much more.

When, with continued cooling, the temperature
of the surface fell to 370° C., the steam in the at-
mosphere would begin to liquefy, and this was
the first step in the origin of the oceans. The hot
waters began to be localized in primitive faint de-
pressions, and, acting energetically on the silicates
of the primitive crust, began to be salt. In a man-
ner difficult to understand a distinction was es-
tablished between ocean basins and continental
areas.

Through stages more or less like those hinted
at above the earth has reached its present state.
The vast nucleus or " centrosphere " seems to be
practically solid, the melting point of the metals
and metalloids being raised by the immense
pressure. Outside the central mass there is "a

The History of Things 57

shell of materials bordering upon fusion," which
Sir John Murray calls the "tektosphere." On
this plastic shell there rests the heterogeneous and
wrinkled crust or lithosphere, always slightly
pulsating.

Then followed what may be called the wrinkling
and folding of the earth's crust. If the solid core
slowly contracted, the primitive crust in accommo-
dating itself — through changes in the plastic shell
or tektosphere — to the shrinkage within, would be
buckled, warped, and thrown into ridges. "The
contraction of the interior of the earth, consequent
on its loss of heat, causes the crust to fall upon it
in folds, which rise over the continents and sink
under the oceans, and the flexure of the area of
sedimentation is partly a consequence of this fold-
ing, partly of overloading." l The continents may
be due to contractions of the whole crust, while
mountains may be due to foldings of the outer
layers through tangential stress brought about by
contractions of the deepest layers.2 Here we have
to do with local collapses or dislocations of the
crust and there with great lateral thrusts. As in
pack ice, there may have been unyielding masses,
which had to be piled one upon the other, while
other masses may have been simply overlapped.

1 Sollas, loc. cit.

2 See the epoch-making work of Suess: "Der Antlitz der
Erde" (1897).

58 The Bible of Nature

Not less momentous were the great transgressions
and regressions of the seas.

Sculpturing of Scenery. — Finally, we pass to a
chapter in the earth's history which we can read
with less uncertainty — the more detailed sculptur-
ing and the making of scenery. There have been
violent blows, such as earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions; there have been drastic changes of
climate, such as the Great Ice Age; but most of
the factors which have wrought out the details of
earth-sculpture seem to have been very gentle
chisellings. The solid earth is weathered away
by air and rain, by frost and snow; the waters wear
the stones; the mountain is transplanted piece-
meal to the sea; there is a ceaseless wear and tear
of continents; there is a slow deposition of the
soluble and insoluble results of denudation. As
James Hutton said in his "Theory of the Earth"
(1788), "little causes, long continuing," have
wrought great changes.

The Hand of Life upon the Earth. — Nor can we
overlook the influence of the hand of life upon the
earth. The sea-weeds cling around the shore and
lessen the shock of the breakers. The lichens eat
slowly into the stones, sending their fine threads
beneath the surface as thickly sometimes "as
grass-roots in a meadow-land," so that the skin
of the rock is gradually weathered away. On
the moor the mosses form huge sponges, which

The History of Things 59

mitigate floods, and keep the springs welling and
the streams flowing in days of drought. Many
little plants smooth away the wrinkles on the
earth's — their mother's — face, and adorn her with
jewels. Others have caught and stored the sun-
shine, hidden its power in strange guise in the
earth, and our hearths with their smouldering
peat or glowing coal are warmed by the sunlight
of the summers of thousands or millions of years
ago. The grass, which began to grow in com-
paratively modern (i. e., Tertiary) times, has made
the earth a fit home for flocks and herds, and pro-
tects it like a garment; the forests affect the rain-
fall and temper the climate, besides sheltering
multitudes of living things, to many of whom
every blow of the axe is a death-knell. In fact,
no plant, from bacterium to oak-tree, either lives
or dies to itself, or is without its influence, direct
or indirect, upon the earth. In arguing from the
present rates of earth-weathering to those in past
ages, geologists have not perhaps taken sufficient
account of the degree in which the hand of life,
especially in more modern times, has modified the
extra-animate cosmic operations.

Similarly, as regards animals, the influence of
the hand upon life upon the earth is manifold.
On the one hand we see destructive agencies —
the boring sponges and worms reduce the shells
to sand, the Pholads and other larger borers help to

60 The Bible of Nature

break down the most solid seashore rocks, the
crayfish and their enemies, the water-voles, unite
to make the river-banks collapse, the beavers have
changed the aspect of large tracts of country, and
so on through a long list.

On the other hand we see conservative agen-
cies— the accumulation of enormous quantities
of calcareous and siliceous ooze in the great
abysses of the oceans, the formation of great shell-
beds, the building of coral-reefs. We have al-
ready spoken of the work of earthworms, and when
we add to that all that is done by hundreds of other
subterranean creatures — from burial beetles to
moles — and all that is effected by the microbes of
the soil, we see a new meaning in the phrase "the
living earth."

To sum up,

"They say the solid earth whereon we tread
In tracks of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man."

This in more precise language the astronomers and
geologists tell us, that the earth took form from a
whirling crowd of meteorites; that after a stage of
intense heat it began to cool and consolidate; that
it got its centrosphere, its tektosphere, its litho-
sphere, its hydrosphere, its atmosphere; that as it

The History of Things 61

aged its skin became wrinkled — each wrinkle
marking an event in its life as those on our faces
often do; that it was exquisitely sculptured by
fire and frost, by wind and rain, by river and sea;
that it became fit to be a cradle and home of living
creatures; that the hand of life has been working
upon it for untold ages, forming chalk cliffs and
coral reefs and coal beds; and that, finally, man
has changed the face of continents — often reckless
of results and ruthless of beauty.

There are obvious disadvantages in trying to
outline in a few minutes the history of a hundred
million years or more. The outline can have
none of the picturesqueness of detail which gives
charm and vividness to a well-told story. A brief
outline is apt to suggest that everything has been
cleared up, which is very far from being the case.
Some chapters are extremely obscure and there
are great difficulties in every chapter. Every year,
however, the geologists are learning to read the
history book better, and we have given the sketch
as an essential part of our argument. It is an in-
stance of the slow working of the cosmic mechan-
ism towards a result which is wonderful. We can
discuss it without any complications in regard to
vitalism or psychism. The keynote of geological
history-reading may be found in Button's famous
sentence: "No powers are to be employed that are
not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted

62 The Bible of Nature

except those of which the principle was known,
and no extraordinary events to be alleged to ex-
plain a common appearance."

Age of the Earth. — Before we consider the precise
nature of the scientific interpretation of the past,
let us pause for a moment to look back on the
history objectively. We are impressed by the an-
tiquity of it all. It is well known that at the end
of the eighteenth century, or later, there was,
even among geologists, a widespread belief that
the habitable earth was some 6,000 years old —
a belief arrived at by a peculiar wresting of the
Scriptures. But when James Hutton began to
see "the ruins of an older world in the present
structure of the globe," when William Smith be-
gan to disclose the succession of strata and to tell
the tale of age before age stretching back into a
distant past, when Cuvier and others began to
outline a succession of faunas and floras leading
us back and back to the mist of life's beginnings,
there was a reaction to an opposite extreme, and
many began to think of the earth as a sort of in-
animate Methuselah, "without beginning of days
or end of years."

Slowly, attempts at measurement began. The
geologists tried to measure the thickness of strati-
fied rocks, sometimes estimated at 100,000, some-
times at 265,000 feet; they divided this by the ob-
served rate of denudation and deposition (a foot

The History of Things 63

in a century or a foot in ten centuries), and the
answer varied from twenty-six millions to six
hundred and eighty millions of years. They tried
other methods, such as computing the time re-
quired by the sea to become as salt as it is, and
they reached other results. The biologists also
had their ringer in the pie, and made a modest de-
mand for a slice of time sufficient to account for
the evolution of living creatures, which some sup-
posed would require a hundred million years, and
others more, and others less. In short, both ge-
ologists and biologists drew without stint upon the
bank of time, until the physicists reminded them
that their credit was not quite unlimited. Argu-
ing from the rate of cooling of the earth and sun
and other insecure data, the physicists, notably
Professor Tait and Lord Kelvin, refused to allow
more than ten to twenty millions of years. Under
pressure, the grant was afterwards increased to
forty or even a hundred millions, which showed
how flexible the calculations were. Within the
last few years, however, since the discovery of
radio-activity, since it became known that the
earth is not self-cooling, but self-heating, the
physicists have become willing to grant the ge-
ologists and biologists as much time as they want,
say a thousand million years! All this uncer-
tainty has been mainly due to the insecure data,
which no amount of sound mathematics and ac-

64 The Bible of Nature

curate arithmetic can make up for. The fact is
that the age of the earth is an unsolved problem,
but it must amount to many millions of years.
We have dwelt upon this because in our concep-
tion of nature must be included the datum that
the time required to bring about a result may be
practically unimaginable in its amount. The
span of the longest human life is but a tick of the
geological clock. If genius be an infinite patience,
we see it in the making of the earth. Nature is
never in a hurry. She works "ohne Hast, ohne
Rast."

" One lesson, Nature, let me learn of tfo
One lesson which in every wind is blown,
Of toil unsevered from tranquillity."

Inorganic Evolution. — But what of the material
of the earth throughout its history? There are
perhaps a quarter of a million of quite distinct
kinds of compounds on the earth; these are all
due to diverse combinations of some eighty ele-
ments; and there is no reason to doubt that they
have been gradually made in the course of the
earth's cooling. But have the elements also a
history? It is too soon to say much about in-
organic evolution, but we may recall the known
fact that radium gives rise to helium, and the
probability that uranium gives rise to radium.
There is here a hint of the transmutation or trans-

The History of Things 65

formation of elements. Sir William Crookes, for
instance, has offered suggestions as to the possible
origin of the chemical elements from a formless
primordial stuff or "protyle," wherein all matter
was in the pre-atomic state — potential rather than
actual. He has gone the length of suggesting that
the chemical elements owe their stability to their
being the outcome of a struggle for existence in
which the most stable survived.

Let us take a paragraph from Prof. R. K. Dun-
can's marvellously clear exposition of "The New
Knowledge."1 "It may be true that all bodily
existence is but a manifestation of units of nega-
tive electricity lying embosomed in an omnipresent
ether of which these units are, probably, a con-
ditioned part. Mass comes into existence only as
the negative electron, assuming motion, carries
with it a bound portion of the ether in which it is
bathed; and furthermore this mass depends solely
upon the velocity with which the negative unit
moves. Our negative unit on receiving mass be-
comes a "corpuscle" endowed with the primary
qualities of matter superimposed upon those of
electricity. Corpuscles congregating into groups
or various configurations constitute essentially the
atoms of the chemical elements, locking up in these
configurations super-terrific energies and leaving

'Prof. R. K. Duncan, "The New Knowledge," 1905,
p. 252.

66 The Bible of Nature

but "a slight residual effect" as chemical affinity
or gravitation with which we attempt to carry on
the work of the world. These atoms, congrega-
ting in their turn as nebulae and under the slight
residual force of gravitation, condense into blazing
suns. The suns decay in their temperature and
become ever more and more complex in their
constitution as the atoms lock themselves, develop-
ing up into the molecules of matter to form a world.
We see the molecules growing ever more and more
complex as the world grows colder until we attain
to organic compounds. We see these organic
compounds united to form living beings and we
see these living beings developing into countless
forms, and, after aeons of time, evolving into a
dominant race, which is us."

This rather takes one's breath away, and of
course the clear-headed author's use of the words
"we see" is highly metaphorical. In this case
seeing means believing. An outsider can hardly
refrain from suspecting that the evolutionary
physicists tend to be a little impetuous, perhaps
even metaphysical. Is there not a tendency to
make a demiurge of the ether, which, after all, is
but a necessary hypothesis ? It seems a little un-
certain whether it is "some mysterious form of
non-matter," as is generally believed, or whether
it may not be the lightest and simplest of the ele-
ments, as Mendeleeff suggested. Just as Berkeley

The History of Things 67

resolved "matter" into affections of "Spirit," so
the modern physicists resolve matter into "a mode
of motion," and we cannot think of the origin of
motion any more than we can think of the origin
of spirit. Matter is resolved into molecules, which
are resolved into atoms, which are resolved into
corpuscles surrounded by positive electricity, and
a corpuscle is a moving unit of negative electricity
together with a ' bound " portion of the surround-
ing ether which is its mass. It is impossible foi
ordinary mortals to think of motion apart from
"something" moving, and the only "somethings"
left to us seem to be electricity and ether. It seems
all to end in motion and mystery, which is per-
haps a wholesome result. The common denom-
inator of physical science allows abundant scope
for transcendental interpretation.

"Ins Innre der Natur dringt kein erschaffner Geist."

Interpretation of the Past. — We have given an out-
line of the process of becoming which seems to
have led to the present phase of inanimate Nature.
Let us now consider what we have got.

Starting from processes which go on to-day —
whether these be weathering or star-making —
science seeks to reconstruct the stages in the gene-
sis of the earth. It tries to make a rationally
connected history by showing that particular
sets of conditions lead on to particular sets of

68 The Bible of Nature

results,1 and in so doing it must always argue
from what goes on now to what may have
happened long ago.

Just as Darwin argued from the experience of
breeders in the nineteenth century to what might
have occurred in natural breeding millions of
years ago, so Lyell, before him, argued from proc-
esses of earth sculpture going on under his eyes
to what might have occurred in ancient days when
there was no eye to see. This is the only path of
interpretation available, but it is obviously one
on which we must walk warily. In appreciating
the value of certain factors we must work from the
present backward, but it is possible that the pres-
ent state of affairs may give us, so to speak, a false
start.

Development and Evolution. — It seems a confusion
of thought to speak of the evolution of the earth,
as if it were like the evolution of organisms. We
should rather compare the story of the earth to

1 We have to show that A, B, and C are the antecedent
conditions of D, E, and F; that A, B, and C are all the
antecedents of D, E, and F; that D, E, and F are all the
consequents of A, B, and C. From actual experience we
must give good reason for believing that the sequences we
suppose to have occurred are in line, in principle at least,
with the sequences we study to-day. Obviously, too, the
modal interpretation that we give must be as simple and
generalized as possible. As we soon discover that the
same kind of sequence occurs and has occurred over and
over again, we make a formula for it.

The History of Things 69

the story of an individual development. It is the
same earth all through, just as it is the same or-
ganism all through. In organic evolution, how-
ever, we have to do with races, with a succession
of new forms, arising out of old forms, which either
disappear or continue to exist alongside of their
descendants. We may perhaps speak of the evo-
lution of the chemical elements, of which we know
very little, but we cannot accurately speak of the
evolution of the earth. It is not the survivor
among many earths which arose from the womb
of a Protogsea. It has had a long development,
that is all. This may seem verbal pedantry, and
yet fallacy is apt to arise from confusing con-
tinuous individual development with racial evo-
lution.

In the development of an individual organism
we always start with a more or less rich inheritance
which is the product of a long evolution in previous
ages. We regard the development as a gradual
realization of the "given" potentiality, as a gradual
expression of what is already there. We believe
that in an appropriate environment stage succeeds
stage in an absolutely predetermined fashion.
There is an identity of essential substance through-
out, and the stage of to-day contains that of to-
morrow, and must, in normal conditions, give rise
to it: New properties, new modes of behaviour,
emerge day after day, and although we do not

70 The Bible of Nature

know how the potential becomes actual, we can
watch the process. In an absolutely transparent
egg, like that of the moth Botys hyalinalis, we can
follow the whole visible process with unbroken
continuity — the minting and coining of the cater-
pillar out of the egg, the emergence of obvious
complexity out of apparent simplicity. We can-
not, of course, see the development of the cater-
pillar's instincts any more than we can see the
growth of the chick's mind by any amount of
embryology, but we see what takes place, and it
looks like an automatic autonomous unfolding.
The only way in which we can meet the difficulty
of the emergence of the apparently new is by sup-
posing that the apparently new was potentially
there in the beginning.1 In short, we read back
the consequents into the antecedents. So, in the
development of the earth, we have to do with what
we believe to be a perfectly continuous series of
distributions and re-distributions of matter and
energy in the ambient ether. The meteorites be-
come a nebula, and the nebula becomes a star.
It differentiates and integrates as it cools, and we
try to chronicle stage after stage. We do not sup-

1 Later on we shall have to qualify this by recognizing
that the living organism is in a real sense ' creative,' using
its experience to make thereof something new; but even
this creative power is 'given,' that is to say, inborn.

The History of Things 71

pose that the sum-total of matter and energy in
the whole system of things suffers any loss or
makes any gain. If apparently new properties
arise, we believe that they are old properties in
new guise. We can make apparently very new
things ourselves, such as dynamite, but we know
that the properties of dynamite can be resolved
into the properties of simpler things. Even when
we discover a new thing like Radium, with alto-
gether unexpected properties, we soon follow it up
by discovering radio-activity in many other cases.
It may be, for all we know, an intrinsic property of
matter to emit rays. In any case, we revise our
conception of what is "given," and say that there
is nothing new under the sun. In short, in the
history of the earth, we believe we have to do with
a continuous natural development, in which ante-
cedents pass over into their consequents, and we
feel no need for any cause in the strict sense ex-
cept the first cause which is taken for granted
throughout.

Later on, we shall try to show that this way of
looking at things must be somewhat enlarged
when we come to the emergence of living organisms
upon the earth, when we have to do with autono-
mous agents, when we study intelligent behaviour,
when we face the biggest fact in all science — man,
with his ideas and ideals — a thinking reed, who,
if the universe should crush him, would still be

72 The Bible of Nature

nobler than the universe in knowing that he was
crushed.1

Mechanical Categories Suffice. — If we leave out of
account, in the meantime, life and all results that
can be referred to the hand of life, and consider
the history of the inanimate world, either as re-
gards its great events or in such details as the mak-
ing of a volcanic mountain, the carving of a val-
ley, or the formation of a river-system, we find
that it is possible to give a more or less probable
mechanical account of the various sequences
which may have led up to the results we know and
admire. Thus the history of the Niagara Gorge
and its relation to the Great Lakes, past and pres-
ent, has been worked out — up to a certain degree
of security — in a most beautiful and convincing
manner. From what we know of present physi-
cal and chemical processes we can interpret the
past with considerable precision — with increasing
precision every year. And the general result which
we must bear in mind is that mechanical categories
suffice. In inanimate nature, science sees a sys-

1 " Fences de Pascal/'' Chap. II, x.

"L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la
nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant. II ne faut pas que
I'univers entier s'arme pour 1 'e" eraser. Une vapeur, une
goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand runivers
l'e*craserait, Miomme serai t encore plus noble que ce qui
le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt; et 1'avantage que
I'univers a BUT lui, runivers n'en sait rien."

The History of Things 73

tern whose relations of sequence admit of being re-
stated by means of equations of motion. Whether
we try to interpret the history of the solar system
or the genesis of minerals, the origin of a mountain
chain or of the granite that helps to compose it,
the work of a glacier or the formation of a stalac-
tite, we work with reliable formulae of gravita-
tion, attraction and repulsion, hydrostatics and
thermodynamics, and so on — i. e., with purely
mechanical formulae, and we do not find that they
are insufficient. If we take the known properties
resident in matter and the laws of energy as data,
we can plausibly reconstruct any particular part
of the inanimate world. "Gebt mir Materie/'
Kant said, "und ich will daraus eine Welt
schaffen."

Do Things Make Themselves? — When we con-
sider these two general results, first, that the be-
coming of the earth reads like a story of continu-
ous individual development, as of an egg into a
chick; and, second, that in our redescription of
both the present and the past of any particular
part of inanimate nature the categories of me-
chanics are sufficient, we get a strong impression
that there is much truth in what Kingsley made
Nature say in his immortal "Water-Babies," —
"I make things make themselves."

We look back on the history of inanimate nat-
ure and we see obvious complexity arising out of

74 The Bible of Nature

apparent simplicity — a nebula becomes an intri-
cate earth; we see a higher order emerging out of
a lower — a system of sun and planets is established ;
we see a multitude of parts working together with
the smoothness of a well-made machine; we see
what we call beauty and what, if we had been the
makers of the history, we should certainly have
called progress. It is very wonderful. And yet,
in a certain sense, are we not warranted in saying
that Nature has made herself what she is, i.e.,
that any particular result is the natural prede-
termined predictable outcome of the antecedent
conditions ? Few feel any particular necessity for
invoking the aid of a deus ex machina to account
for the frost-flowers seen on the window-pane on
a winter morning — which, in fairy-like beauty, re-
main for a brief space as external reminiscences of
the evening talk — but each spray of that frosty
pane is molecularly as complex as the Milky Way
seems to our eyes. It has been .said that the unde-
vout astronomer is mad, but Laplace was as
astronomer quite right in saying in answer to
Napoleon's famous question regarding God, that
he had no need of that hypothesis. He was right,
in the first place, because science is a perfectly
definite business of formulating sequences in
terms of sense-experience, and is false to its task
when it obscures its deficiencies by interpolating
formulae of an entirely different order. And he

The History of Things 75

was right, in the second place, because in the sci-
entific interpretation of any particular occurrence
in inanimate nature, we have no reason to believe
that mechanical categories are not quite sufficient.
To conclude, however, that this scientific interpre-
tation is in terms of concepts which are self-ex-
planatory, or that it is the only interpretation, 01
that it is in itself a satisfying human interpreta-
tion, is quite another matter.

Recoil from the Scientific Position. — The scien-
tific conception of the physical universe as a sort
of world-egg developing of itself, capable in
virtue of the properties resident in it of passing
from phase to phase in the course of aeons, like
a machine wound up not only to go but to improve
itself by going, is repugnant to many minds, and
various attempts have been made to wriggle away
from it. Fundamentally, perhaps, this recoil is
due to a misunderstanding of the aim of science,
a failure to see that a descriptive account of oc-
currences is not an explanation of them, and cannot
be put in opposition to other quite incommensu-
rable ways of summing up the history. But let us
consider for a moment how some have tried to put
a brake on the impetuously driven chariot of
science.

(1) It is useful to point out that many of the
riddles of inanimate nature are still unsolved, for
nothing is more prejudicial to progress than giving

76 The Bible of Nature

a false simplicity to facts, or "giving to the ignorant,
as a gospel, in the name of Science, the rough
guesses of yesterday that to-morrow should for-
get."1 He would be a bold man who should say
that he thoroughly understood the tides, not to
speak of the weather, and no astronomer pretends
that he really knows how the worlds were formed.
He thinks that he is on the sure track of knowing,
that is all. How little we know of the possible
origin of the eighty or so different kinds of ele-
ments? But this sort of argumentum ad igno-
rantiam, while healthy enough within limits, can
give no permanent satisfaction. It crumbles when
we read the history of scientific progress in a single
century. The lap of the future is full of scientific
puzzles, but who will pick out those that are in-
soluble, and pin his faith on a gratuitous and really
presumptuous ignorabimusf

(2) Another form of the same kind of argument
is also useful within limits. It consists in point-
ing out that many of the terms currently used in
chemico-physical interpretations of inanimate nat-
ure are not really .simple, but are big with mystery.
What is gravitation, for instance, or what is elec-
tricity, or what is matter itself ? If this argument
means that science starts by postulating some-
thing "given," it is sound; but if it says that gravi-

iW. Bateson, "Materials for the Study of Variation,"
London, 1894.

The History of Things 77

tation or electricity is irreducible, it is illegitimate.
It is faint-hearted and premature to assume that
what is at present irreducible will remain irreduci-
ble, unless some good reason can be given for so
judging. It yields no permanent satisfaction when
we reflect on the past, when we consider the suc-
cess which has attended scientific efforts to reduce
the number of supposed separate entities or pow-
ers. The use of "William of Occam's razor" —
Entia non sunt mvltiplicanda prceter necessi-
tatem — has already had its reward. It has given
us a deeper conviction of the "oneness " of Nature.
We need simply recall how "Caloric" was elim-
inated, yielding to the modern interpretation of
heat "as a mode of motion"; how emanations of
"Light" had to follow, when the undulatory or
the electro-magnetic theory of their nature was
established; how "Force" itself has become a
mere measure of motion; and how even "Matter"
tends to be resolved into units of negative elec-
tricity, carrying with them a bound portion of the
ether in which they are bathed. By all means, let
us have a criticism of the categories of science — •
which is indeed part of the business of a useful
philosophy — but let us avoid the dogmatism of
asserting that the scientific unification of nature
has reached its limits. "God said, 'Let Newton
be/ and there was light," and another Newton may
be born to-morrow.

78 The Bible of Nature

(3) Another line of argument is less easily dealt
with. The scientific position is that natural hap-
penings are due to properties resident in the given
material, whether it be a nebula or a dew-drop.
But do we know all the resident properties ? May
there not be resident properties as yet undiscov-
ered ? May there not be resident properties which
are by their very nature beyond scientific discovery?
The answer to this argument is Experiment. We
can work only with the resident properties that
we know, and if by experiment we get a result
which cannot be accounted for in terms of the
known resident properties, then we must admit
that some resident properties have escaped detec-
tion, and are there though we cannot define them.
As a matter of fact, this commonplace of scien-
tific procedure has often led to the discovery of
previously unknown resident properties. But if
we can give an adequate account of an occurrence
in the laboratory in terms of known resident prop-
erties, we are justified in trying to do the same for
the grandest cosmic phenomena. If we could
convince ourselves, as some have convinced them-
selves, that a sum of money can disappear from
a safe without any opening, we should have to ad-
mit that there are properties resident in matter
that the physicist is unaware of. But who can
say that he knows of any occurrence in inanimate
nature which the known resident properties are

The History of Things 79

obviously incapable of accounting for? If the
letters of a jumbled fount of type or the fragments
of a smashed machine were to rise up and arrange
themselves in working order, we should have to
revise our mechanical categories; but we do not
know of any such phenomena in the ordinary
course of inanimate nature.

It is open to any one to say that there is a spirit
in the nebula and a Psyche in the dew-drop — just
as Haeckel says that there is a permanent soul in
every atom; but if these are supposed to be oper-
ative, the scientific analyst must say that he finds
no need for the hypothesis, since the laws of mo-
tion suffice for him, while, if they are supposed to
be inoperative, the scientific analyst usually ap-
plies William of Occam's razor without remorse.

The form in which this line of thought seems
most attractive is briefly this. When we consider
any particular corner in the inanimate world, say,
the making of the Niagara Falls or the making of
the frost-flowers on the window, we do not re-
quire in our redescription more than mechanical
formulae. But when we consider Nature not in
isolated pieces but as a harmonious whole, when
we recognize the progressive order, the orderly
progress, and the beauty of it all, when we go on
to recognize the probability that the earth has
been the parent of its tenants, then we must read
back into the world-egg with which we start a

80 The Bible of Nature

potentiality of giving rise to all that follows, and
thus the Lowest Common Denominator of Science
becomes the counterpart of the Greatest Common
Measure of Philosophy.1

Nature of Scientific Interpretation. — But the more
immediate answer to the recoil from the scientific
position is to be found by considering what most
modern workers mean by scientific interpretation.

The scientific interpretation of inanimate nat-
ure is always after this pattern: Given a certain
collocation of material particles in certain con-
ditions, the result after a certain time will be so
and so.2

The problem is to redescribe natural hap-
penings in the simplest available terms, namely,
in terms of mechanics in the wide sense. Some
of the terms used are simpler or more irreducible
than others; thus that form of mutual attraction
which we call gravitation is probably more irre-
ducible than what we call chemical affinity.
Some which seemed irreducible in the past have
undergone simplification; thus Heat is no longer
an "element" or an "entity" or a "force"— but

1 To identify them violently, as a recent writer does,
who calls the Ether "the fountain of all Being," "the
hitherto unknown God," seems to us to be a complete
misunderstanding, and as grotesque an anthropomorphism
as any savage is guilty of.

• It need hardly be said that in many cases we have to
write uncertain instead of certain, but let that pass.

The History of Things 81

"a mode of motion." Some which are not re-
ducible at present will probably undergo simpli-
fying analysis in the future, for the physicist may
some day discover the true inwardness of gravita-
tion, and be able to tell us what really happens in
the invisible world when the apple falls in the
orchard. Progress is continuous toward the ideal
of redescribing all the occurrences in inanimate
nature in terms of the laws of motion; one fastness
after another has given up its keys; one riddle
after another has been read; all of which means a
scientific demonstration of the unity of nature.

It is true that the redescriptions which are given
of intricate occurrences do not sound simple; the
more thorough they are, the more do they pass be-
yond the comprehension of the unlearned and
become preserves for the mathematically minded;
even more than in ancient days is it true that the
portal of the scientific academy bears the legend,
"Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here."
But the point is that the assumptions of the me-
chanical interpretation of inanimate nature are
simple, in the sense that the laws of motion are
simple. It comes to this, then, that the birth and
death of worlds, the harmony of the spheres, the
sweep of our whole solar system in space — in short,
the greatest of cosmic phenomena — submit to
being studied by the same exact methods, and to
being redescribed in the same simple terms as the

82 The Bible of Nature

thunderstorm and the dew-drop, the sublime ar-
chitecture of the mountains and the evanescent
beauty of the frost-flowers on the window pane.
It surely shows us that we live in a universe not
a multi verse, if such things be so; the very fact that
the world is scientifically intelligible shows that
there is a rational unity behind it; it surely shows
us that Man is no freak of nature who can hold
the earth in a balance and measure the heavens
in his scale. Strictly speaking, science rede-
scribes and reconstructs by means of symbols— •
conceptual formulae — such as matter, electricity,
ether, gravitation, chemical affinity. There must
be the counterfoils of reality in these, else science
would not work out practically as it does; we could
not trust it and predict by means of it as we do.
But a law of nature is no longer regarded by any
scientific man as a necessity which things have to
obey; it is rather a summary expression of certain
constancies of scientific experience.

Strictly speaking, as regards inanimate nature,
science finds no true causes. It is a mechanical
axiom that what is in the results was also in the
conditions, and what science is continually doing
is to show that one particular collocation of matter
and energy passes into another. Sometimes the
resultant is obviously just the components over
again and no further explanation is needed or
possible; in many cases, however, science has

The History of Things 83

simply to record that the sequence occurs. Ho*w
it exactly occurs is not known. Strictly speaking,
science must always start with a good deal "given,"
which it takes for granted. In the particular case
we have been discussing the something "given"
is the nebula. The scientific conception of this is
that it was like the nebulse we see in the heavens
to-day, a whirling system of meteorites or planet-
esimals. At the same time, if it be true that not
only the inanimate but the animate as well has
grown out of the nebula, then we must read back
into it all the grandeur of all its consequents.
Finally, it must be clearly understood that science
never even asks the irrepressible question, why
has all this become as it has become ?

Thus science recognizes the fundamental mys-
teriousness of things, (1) as regards its Common
Denominator; (2) as regards the chains of se-
quence it chronicles, but does not explain; (3) as
regards the beginning.

As one of our philosophers,1 has said: "Some
people write and talk as if the discovery of the
natural cause of an event meant the withdrawal of
the event from the sphere of divine agency. Ac-
cording to this way of thinking, the gradual suc-
cess of science in reducing all phenomena to nat-
ural law is tantamount to the banishment of God
from the universe. He becomes a hypothesis that
'Prof. A. S. Pringle-Pattison.

84 The Bible of Nature

is not required, or if any room be left for his action,
it must be at some point in the "dark background
and abysm of time" when the orderly system
of the universe is supposed to have been set
agoing.

Now, what is the misunderstanding in the minds
of those who think that there is some opposition or
antithesis between saying that the Earth grew out
of a nebula and saying that God created the world
by the word of His power ? The basal misunder-
standing is a failure to see that the word ultimate
does not occur in the scientific dictionary. For
particular purposes — of formulating and thereby
perhaps working with natural processes — science
pursues certain methods and reaches certain re-
sults. Its outlook is in no way inconsistent with
the emotional outlook, but it seems fairly obvious
that one must not try to make one sentence of the
two statements, "O wunderschon ist Gottes Erde,
und schon auf ihr ein Mensch zu sein," and
" Bodies attract one another with a force propor-
tional directly to the product of their masses and
inversely as the square of their mutual distance."
There is no reason to surrender the philosophical
outlook, with its conviction that " In our life alone
does Nature live"; but we must not mix this up
in any way with an inquiry into radio-activity.

Again, the aim of science is not to explain but
to redescribe in simpler terms, to find a common

The History of Things 85

denominator, but its interpretations are always in
terms of conceptual formulae — such as matter,
energy, ether, gravitation, chemical affinity, and
so on — which are not themselves self-explanatory;
which are in fact only intellectual counters, sym-
bols of the mysterious reality.

Again, science continually tries to refund one
natural phenomenon into another, seeking to
show that given certain conditions A, B, C, cer-
tain results D, E, F will always follow. When
D, E, F are simply A, B, C in a new guise, as
when we get a single resultant force out of sev-
eral components, the scientific interpretation is
complete. When D, E, F are quite different
from A, B, C, as when we get water by combining
hydrogen and oxygen, we know that the conditions
have somehow passed over into the resultants, but
we cannot tell how the result is as it is. This is
true of most scientific interpretations. They do
not deal with causes in the sense in which we speak
of a personal agency as a cause.

Again, science in its historical treatment of
things always starts from something "given,"
which it does not explain, which in the last re-
source it cannot explain. From this something
"given" there seems to be a continuous develop-
ment, and it is therefore believed that this ante-
cedent had in it the potentiality of all that comes
out of it. Thus, if order, progress, harmony,

86 The Bible of Nature

beauty, intelligence, come out of it, they must
somehow have been potentially in it. We may
try to substantiate the original antecedent in ab-
straction from its consequents, we must do so in
pursuing the scientific method. We may try to
think of the nebula as a whirling mass of meteor-
ites, and nothing more; but if the whole solar
system came out of that, we must as philosophers,
if not as scientists, say that "There is nothing in
the End which was not also in the Beginning,"
and if there is Logos at the end, we may be sure
that it was also at the beginning.

With this explanation, is it not possible to return
without repugnance to the scientific position with
its central idea of a continuous natural develop-
ment?

But some one may say, I am not clear in regard
to what you have said regarding science not pre-
tending to give explanations, but this much I
gather, that the picture you leave with us is that
of a world developing of itself. That is so, if you
do not forget to supplement this with the quotation
from Kant with which we closed the previous lec-
ture: "The universe must sink into the abyss of
nothingness, unless we admit that, besides this
infinite chain of contingencies, there exists some-
thing that is primal and self-subsistent, something
which as the cause of this phenomenal world se-
cures its continuance and preservation."

The History of Things 87

What we have been trying to show is, that the
conception of this earth of ours with which Science
works, and works to such purpose — both theoreti-
cal and practical — is the conception of a continu-
ous natural development in which any particular
series of sequences is describable in terms of mat-
ter and motion. But why should the scientific
mind be so afraid of the insinuation of a metaphys-
ical principle? Simply because it is a confusion
of thought that paralyzes intelligence.

What we are driving at has been clearly stated
by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison : 1 "Natural
explanations — i. e., regulated sequences and co-
existences of phenomena — are what every sci-
ence has to seek in its own sphere; and, ac-
cordingly, science justly regards as suspect the
explanation of any phenomena by the immedi-
ate causality of a metaphysical agent. The inter-
jection of such a causality into the empirical con-
nections which she seeks to unravel, she treats as
a form of ignava ratio" "It makes the investi-
gation of causes a very easy task," says Kant, "if
we refer such and such phenomena immediately
to the unsearchable will and counsel of the Su-
preme Wisdom, whereas we ought to investigate
their cause in the general mechanism of nature.
This is to consider the labor of reason as ended,

1 "The New Psychology and Automatism" in Man's
Place in the Cosmos and Other Essays, 2nd edM 1902.

88 The Bible of Nature

when we have merely dispensed with its employ-
ment."

Do we mean, then, that from such a beginning
as a swarm of meteorites, the whole earth with all
its beauty and order has grown? That is what
science seems to suggest. What a poor and inade-
quate beginning, you may say, for such a wonder-
ful result. But has any one a right to say this?
Whence came the swarm of meteorites and all
that they contained, what is electricity, what is the
ether ? What is the reality behind all the counters
whose moves it is permitted to science to formulate
and eventually to predict?

Do we mean that from such a beginning the
whole earth with all its beauty and order has
grown without direction from without ? That is
what science seems to say, that the direction is
from within, that the Kosmos was already in the
Nebula, that there never was any chaos at all, that
there is nothing in the end which was not also in
the beginning. And if you like to add, " In the
beginning was the Logos," science has no word
to say against it.

Lafcadio Hearn tells us that in the house of
any old Japanese family the guest is likely to be
shown some of the heirlooms. . . . " A pretty little
box, perhaps, will be set before you. Opening it
you will see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with
a silk running-cord decked with tiny tassels. . . .

The History of Things 89

You open the bag and see within it another bag,
of a different quality of silk, but very fine. Open
that, and lo! a third, which contains a fourth,
which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth,
which contains a seventh bag, which contains the
strongest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay
that you ever beheld. Yet it is not only curious
but precious; it may be more than a thousand
years old."

Historical natural science has to do with a sim-
ilar process of unwrapping — it removes one silken
envelope after another, trying to unravel the pat-
tern and count the threads — and what is finally
revealed, though it seem to the careless but as hard
clay, is something — if we may say something — so
very old, so very wonderful, that science can give
no name to it.

in

ORGANISMS AND THEIR ORIGIN

Ill

ORGANISMS AND THEIR ORIGIN

The Variety of Living Creatures. — The earth has
come to be tenanted by practically countless hosts
of living creatures, whose ranks are continually
being thinned, and continually being recruited.
There are legions upon legions of species, that
is to say, different kinds of living creatures —
groups of individualities, worthy of a specific
name, because they differ more from the nearest
group than brothers or cousins differ from one an-
other, and because they breed true with their own
kind. What a motley assemblage it is! There
are plants so minute, e. g., the Bacteria, that many
can hang on the point of a needle; there are the
hyssops on the wall and the cedars of Lebanon.
There are animals so minute, e. g., the Trypano-
some of Sleeping Sickness, that we require our best
microscope to see them, and there are the gigantic
Saurians of by-gone ages, and the still surviving
giants like the elephants and the giraffes and the
great whales. The simplest organisms are single
cells — invisible units of living matter; the more
complex are vast cities of cells with millions of
component units. What variety of habitat there
93

94 The Bible of Nature

is; their lines are gone over all the earth. The
explorers find no corner where life has not outrun
them. Nansen found minute living creatures in
ice pools in the Farthest North; the Natural His-
tory of the Antarctic already fills several large vol-
umes. On the earth and under the earth; in all
the waters high and low; on the mountain tops
and in the great abysses of the deep sea; free in
the air and fettered in the penetralia of other
creatures, life abounds. What a long gamut of
activity there is, from the dull sentience of many
of the simplest, which seem sometimes to have no
more than one distinct action or reaction, and
the sleep-life of the higher plants, to the complex
instinctive routine of ants and bees, and the intelli-
gent behavior familiar to us in the big-brained
educable birds and mammals. How difficult it
is to find what is essentially characteristic of them
all as distinguished from the inanimate creation.
But that is what we must now try to do.1

Characteristics of Livingness. — The great oak is
instinct with life in every leaf and twig and root-
let, it is a whirlpool of whirlpools of intensely
active corpuscles, yet it outlives many generations
of men, and stands, like the tree of Igdrasil, as an
emblem of eternal life. What a contrast to the
earth beneath our feet, which we usually call

»See J. Arthur Thomson, "The Science of Life,"
Blackie & Sons, Glasgow, 1899.

Organisms and Their Origin 95

"lifeless." But a flash comes from a passing
cloud, and the oak is dead. Where is our clear
contrast now ? We watch a bird flying overhead :
"it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it,
outraces it." What a contrast to the stone beneath
our feet, which we usually call "inert"! But the
stone is thrown, and the bird falls dead. Where is
our clear contrast now ? A slight blow on the back
of the head, and what we call "life," where is it?
It is extremely difficult to find an absolute criterion
between what once was living and what now is
dead. In many cases, we can obviously say of
the killed creature that its machinery is shattered;
in other cases, we can only say that the wheels have
ceased to go round. A few hours ago the eggs
of that bird were living — intensely living — in her
nest, but the bird is dead and the eggs are growing
cold. Life is slipping away. Take them still
and hatch them in the incubator, and you will soon
see how really living they are. Take them next
day and you might as well take stones. Pro-
fessor Waller says there is an electrical "blaze
reaction" which will infallibly tell us whether the
"vital spark" has gone out in the forsaken egg
or in the wind-blown seed, but we do not know
much about it. The sure test of livingness or
non-livingness is, of course, in results.

Puzzling Phenomena. — The phenomena of "latent
life" are very puzzling, and deserving of far more

96 The Bible of Nature

attention than they have as yet received. The
dried seed may remain alive without detectable
signs of life for several decennia (though not since
the time of Pharaoh, as used to be said). Cer-
tain little threadworms (Anguillulidse) may be
kept dry without any discernible hint of life for
fourteen years, and yet become vigorous again
when put into water. At any time during the four-
teen years this revivification may occur, but not in
the fifteenth year! What is life that it can remain
so long without asserting itself and yet without dy-
ing ? It would be interesting to arrange on a long
inclined plane all the phenomena of anaesthesia,
narcotization, sleep, coma, suspended animation,
fainting, trance, catalepsy, and dying in man; all
the phenomena of death-feigning, animal hypnosis,
paralysis, hibernation, latent life, and dying in ani-
mals. The phenomena of local life are also re-
markable. The excised turtle's heart may go on
beating for many days after the animal has been
made into soup. We speak of shattering the ma-
chine, but a decapitated turtle has been known to
walk about. Living, we say, means a consensus
of all the living parts, and yet a part may be as
good as the whole. In the case of hundreds of
plants, a small fragment carefully nursed will re-
grow the perfect organism, and the same is true of
fairly complex animals, such as sponges and
polyps and worms. From one Turbellarian worm

Organisms and Their Origin 97

cut into twelve pieces, twelve complete worms may
be obtained. We must also recall that the po-
tentiality of the whole life lies in a microscopic
germ-cell, and may be unrealized for years. A
complete inheritance, rich in initiatives, endowed
with the gains of past ages, may be condensed in
a microscopic egg-shell and in a sperm-cell 100,000
times smaller. Moreover, the experimental em-
bryologists have shown us that, unity as the germ-
cell is, a part may be as good as the whole. One
egg may give rise to twins, or triplets, or quadru-
plets, or even to many perfect embryos. From
one-thirty-seventh of the egg of a sea-urchin Prof.
Yves Delage reared an embryo — able to live for
some time. All this, and much more, must be
borne in mind when we think of the character-
istics of livingness.

Although no one is wise enough to tell com-
pletely what is meant by the simple word alive,
there may be utility in trying to state some of the
characteristic features of living organisms.

From the Chemist's Point of View. — Looking at
organisms from the chemist's point of view, we see
that the physical basis of life invariably includes
those carbon-compounds known as proteids,
which are among the most complex kinds of mat-
ter in the world. The component elements of
living creatures are just the common elements
found in their surroundings, but the make-up of

98 The Bible of Nature

the organic compounds is very intricate. Thus
the elements which enter into the composition of
a proteid are Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitro-
gen, and Sulphur, but the chemical formula of
the proteid known as white of egg is C^H^-
N52O6aS2. The living body contains such a mix-
ture of these complex compounds that we cannot
put our finger on any one kind of stuff and say:
This is protoplasm or living matter and nought
else. It may be that there is an essentially im-
portant kind of substance which acts like a ferment
on the complex cellular materials brought within its
sphere of influence, but it is more probable that
there is no one substance which should be called
protoplasm. It seems likely that living matter is
a mixture (certainly no jumble!) of proteids and
other highly complex substances, owing its virtue
to their cooperative interaction, just as the secret
of a firm's success may depend not on any one
partner by himself, but on their combination of
talents.

Although we cannot analyze living matter, nor
thoroughly interpret all the changes of mate-
rial implied in living, we can trace some of the
chains of chemical sequence. We can follow the
food through various transformations till it be-
comes part and parcel of the living body; we can
catch the waste products formed during activity —
the ashes of the living fire — we know that there is

Organisms and Their Origin 99

a twofold process of building up and breaking
down, of winding up and running down, of con-
struction and disruption, and we know much in
regard to important processes of fermentation that
go on — much more, indeed, than we understand.
We are in the position of visitors to some great
manufactory who are permitted to see the raw
materials passing in, some stages in their trans-
formation, and the finished products passing out,
but who are not allowed entrance to the "secret
room" where the gist of the business is hidden.
When more is known in regard to the chemistry
of the living body, it may be possible to bring the
changes into better line with those which occur
in inorganic things and in the laboratory with or-
ganic things, but meanwhile we cannot redescribe
the activity of the living creature in terms of chemi-
cal formulae,1 unless we throw away the child with

i It is sometimes asserted by careless writers that the
progress of physiology in the last half-century has made it
possible to redescribe vital phenomena in terms of physics
and chemistry.

"To me," says Bunge, a physiologist of undeniable
standing, " the history of physiology teaches the exact op-
posite. I think the more thoroughly and conscientiously
we endeavor to study biological problems, the more are
we convinced that even those processes which we have
already regarded as explicable by chemical and physical
laws, are in reality infinitely more complex, and at present
defy any attempt at a mechanical explanation."

Dr. J. S. Haldane goes even further: " If we. look back
at the phenomena which are capable of being stated, or

100 The Bible of Nature

the bath, as the Germans say, and ignore the most
salient fact, that all the manifold processes are
somehow correlated and centralized in a unified
behavior and in purpose-like agency. Even the
simplest organism is a higher unity than a whirl-
pool or a nebula in being a creative individuality.
From the Physicist's Point of View. — From the
physicist's point of view, the living organism re-
sembles, as we have already said, some wonder-
ful kind of engine. It is a material system adapted
to transform matter and energy, but it differs from
any man-made machine in its greater efficiency,
and in this, that the transfer of energy into it is
attended with effects conducive to further transfer
and retardative of dissipation, and in this, that it
is a self-stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative,
self-adjusting, self-increasing, self-reproducing en-
gine. A linotype type-setting machine, for in-
explained in physico-chemical terms, we see at once that
there is nothing in them characteristic of life. . . . We
are now far more definitely aware of the obstacles to any
advance in this (physico-chemical) direction, and there is
not the slightest indication that they will be removed, but
rather that with further increase of knowledge, and more
refined methods of physical and chemical investigation,
they will only appear more and more difficult to sur-
mount." These two quotations illustrate the modern
vitalist position, in its critical, non-constructive aspect at
least. See Essay by J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick
Geddes in "Ideals of Science and Faith," edited by J. E.
Hand; Allen, London, 1905, p. 333 (pp. 49-80).

Organisms and Their Origin 101

stance, is a most marvellous contrivance, but, after
all, it does not grow from a piece of iron, though
there is not much more in it, and it does not give
rise to other linotype machines. In many ways,
however, the living creature is like a machine, and
when we think of the resemblances we should
always remember that a machine is hardly a fair
sample of the inorganic world, since in addition
to the forces of the inorganic world it has inside of
it a human thought. It is a materialized human
idea, just as a picture is.

The time may come — who shall say — when we
shall see the phenomena of organic life in better
line with those of the inanimate world, but at
present it is idle to deny that the activities of living
creatures are things apart. Certain physical phe-
nomena of surface-tension, of diffusion, of elastic-
ity, of hydrostatics, of thermodynamics, of elec-
tricity, are detected, but not even the simplest vital
activity can be completely redescribed in terms of
physical formulae. Even the passage of digested
food from the alimentary canal to the blood-vessels
is more than ordinary physical osmosis; it is modi-
fied by the fact that the cells are living. When we
add up the components revealed by chemical and
physical analysis, they do not amount to the whole
resultant.

From the Biologist's Point of View. — (a) Growth.
Leaving the chemical and physical standpoint, we

102 The Bible of Nature

note from the biologist's point of view that the liv-
ing organism grows after a fashion all its own, not
as a rolling snowball grows by mere accretion, but
by a unifying incorporation; not even as a crystal
grows, at the expense of dissolved material chem-
ically the same as itself, but at the expense of ma-
terial quite different from itself. The grass grows
at the expense of air, water, and salts, which, with
the sun's aid, it lifts into the circle of life; and at the
expense of the grass — after a period of maternal
gastric education — the foal grows into a horse. It
should be remembered, however, that the growth
of crystals and the growth of certain minerals is no
mere increase in bulk, but is, like organic growth,
an integration, and results in forms of often star-
tling beauty.

(6) Cyclical Development. Another familiar
characteristic of living things is their cyclical de-
velopment. From a microscopic egg-cell a seed
develops, from the seed a seedling, from the seed-
ling a beanstalk. " By insensible steps, the plant
builds itself up into a large and various fabric of
root, stem, leaves, flowers, and fruit, every one
moulded within and without in accordance with
an extremely complex, but, at the same time,
minutely defined pattern. In each of these com-
plicated structures, as in their smallest constitu-
ents, there is an immanent energy, which, in
harmony with that resident in all the others, in-

Organisms and Their Origin 103

cessantly works toward the maintenance of the
whole and efficient performance of the part it has
to play in the economy of nature. But no sooner
has the edifice, reared with such exact elaboration,
attained completeness, than it begins to crumble.
By degrees, the plant withers and disappears from
view, leaving behind more or few apparently inert
and simple bodies, just like the bean from which
it sprang; and like it endowed with the potentiality
of giving rise to a similar cycle of manifestations." *
It is a "Sisyphsean process, in the course of which
the living and growing plant passes from the rela-
tive simplicity and latent potentiality of the seed
to the full epiphany of a highly differentiated type,
thence to fall back to simplicity and potentiality."5
So it is among animals. The microscopic germ-
cell divides and redivides, differentiates and inte-
grates into an embryo, the embryo may become
a larva, which undergoes metamorphosis and be-
comes adolescent, or the embryo may steadily grow
into a miniature of the mature organism. Sooner
or later, in any case, the adolescent becomes the
adult. But when this ascent from a vita minima
at the beginning has reached the vita maxima of
the full-grown organism, there begins to be a re-
versal of the process. A limit of growth is reached,
reproduction occurs, and reproduction is often the

1 Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics," 1893.

2 Huxley, loc. tit.

104 The Bible of Nature

beginning of death. The wear and tear of daily
life is not perfectly compensated for, physiological
arrears accumulate, the creature gets into debt,
and there is a quick or slow descent to the vita
minima of senescence, ending in natural death, if
violent death has not previously intervened. We
can make curves representative of the various kinds
of life-history, some with a very rapid ascent and
a slow descent, some with a slow ascent and a very
rapid descent, some with a long period of maturity,
some, as of the May-flies, with an almost abrupt
apex. But always there is the same general phe-
nomenon of cyclical development. For the life
of the organism is very different from the path of a
rocket in the air, returning spent to the level whence
it rose, very different from the course of the drops
of water in a fountain, which rise to the summit,
sparkle a moment in the sunlight, and sink again
to earth. The fact of reproduction makes an
essential difference. In all but the simplest or-
ganisms, part of the growing germ gives rise to the
body, but part remains unaltered and forms the
germ-cells for another generation. The body
perishes, but the germ-cells live on. Individual
organisms are pendants that fall off an immortal
lineage of germ-cells. Huxley compared the state
of affairs to what might occur if a strawberry plant
had an endlessly growing "sucker" or stolon, root-
ing here and there, and forming transient straw-

Organisms and Their Origin 105

berry plants, but itself always pushing on, un-
dying.

Of all vital phenomena, except those of evolu-
tion itself, and those wrapped up with intelligence,
the processes of individual development are the
most impressive in relation to the question of mech-
anistic and vitalistic interpretation.1 The physi-
ology of development is still in its infancy, and we
shall doubtless be able in the future to understand
better how one stage leads to another, but at pres-
ent the whole process, so obviously continuous, is
mysterious and baffling. We cannot picture how
the hereditary qualities — maternal, paternal, and
ancestral — lie in potentia in the microscopic fertil-
ized egg-cell; we know very little regarding the
stimulus that sets the process agoing, though Pro-
fessor Loeb's striking experiments on artificial
parthenogenesis are beginning to throw some light
on the problem; we do not understand the orderly,
correlated, regulated succession of events which
leads from apparent simplicity to obvious com-
plexity. We do not wonder at Sir Thomas
Browne writing in his "Religio Medici": "Those
strange and mystical transmigrations that I have
observed in silk-worms turned my philosophy
into divinity. There is in these works of nature,
which seem to puzzle reason, something divine;

iSee Hans Driesch, "The Science and Philosophy of the
Organism," London, 1908.

106 The Bible of Nature

and hath more in it than the eye of a common
spectator doth discover." We do not wonder at
Dr. Hans Driesch, one of the foremost and cer-
tainly the most philosophical of experimental em-
bryologists, entitling one of his books, "The Soul
as a Factor in Nature."

(c) Effective Response. Furthermore, the living
organism is characterized by its power of effective
response. There is response also in the inanimate,
the bar of iron responds to heat, its particles have
a quicker motion, and it expands; it responds like-
wise to the moist air and rusts, turning into oxide
of iron. The barrel of gunpowder certainly re-
sponds to the spark, it explodes, destroying itself
as gunpowder in so doing. But the responses of
the living creature in normal surroundings are
effective, they are self-preservative, they usually
make for betterment. There is wastage, of course ;
there can be no activity without that; but the or-
ganism has a remarkable power of retaining its
integrity, for days or years. We throw a piece of
potassium on the basin of water, and it rushes
about fizzing and flaring like a thing possessed,
but in a minute all its activity is over. It goes out.
On the other hand, we watch the movements of the
whirligig beetle on the pool; it darts like a little
water-sprite here, there, and everywhere over the
surface, but, unlike the potassium pill, it does not
go out. When it is tired, it takes a rest, and so it

Organisms and Their Origin 107

goes on for weeks and months, and, if it gets big
rests, for years. When its energies flag, it feeds,
and recuperates itself. When danger threatens,
it seeks its hiding-place. Its life is full of effective
responses, and not the least important or marvel-
lous is the power of taking a rest.

(d) Unified Behavior. This naturally leads on
to a recognition of the general fact that the living
creature has a unified activity, which is usually
worthy of being called behavior. In his "Cray-
fish"— one of the best introductions to the study of
zoology — Huxley compared the organism to a
whirlpool, such as one may see below the Niagara
Falls, which is always changing and yet always re-
maining the same. Amid ceaseless flux it retains
a remarkable sameness. And truly, the living
organism is like a whirlpool — a system within a
system; streams of matter and energy are continu-
ally passing in and as continually passing out; and
yet the unity persists. But the comparison does
not sufficiently bring out what is so essentially
characteristic of the organism, that all its changes
are correlated in such a way that persistent unified
behavior is in most cases possible.

Our familiarity with plant organisms may raise
a difficulty, for their whole life seems rounded with
a sleep. Plants are continually converting the
kinetic energy of the sunlight into the potential
energy of complex stored products, while animals

108 The Bible of Nature

characteristically change potential energy into
kinetic energy in locomotion and external work.
Plants show a relative preponderance of construc-
tive, upbuilding processes, and are hampered by
the abundance of their riches. From another
point of view, they are inhibited by their own in-
ternal waste-products, and slumber like hibernat-
ing animals, or like a fire too carefully banked up,
half-smothered in its own ashes. But we prob-
ably under-appreciate the vegetative life. Al-
though the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin,
they are intensely active internally. Although
plants do not walk about, many of them swim
about. Young shoots move round in leisurely
circles; the rootlets twist away from sharp edges,
and on a piece of smoked glass they may be got
to keep a diary of their daily movements; twining
stems and tendrils bend and bow to the different
points of the compass as they climb; leaves rise
and sink, flowers open and close with the growing
and waning light of day. In a large number of
plants undeniable sense-organs are now known.
Tendrils twine around the lightest threads, the
leaves of the sensitive plant respond to a gentle
touch, the tentacles of the sundew, the hairs of the
fly-trap, the stamens of the rock-rose, the stigma
of the musk, compare well with the sensitive and
motile organs of many animals. They have some
power, too, of profiting by experience. It is not

Organisms and Their Origin 109

unjustifiable to speak of the Venus Fly-trap as
having a short memory.

We used to think, as many still think, of the ac-
tivities of the simplest animals or Protozoa, in a
somewhat dull way, translating them all into mere
reflexes or tropisms. And no doubt there are re^
flexes or tropisms, and this mode of interpretation
must be pushed as far as it will go. But not
further. For the careful work of Jennings, for
instance, has shown us that these humble creatures
sometimes exhibit what may be called the first
hints of mind, at any rate, a pursuance of the meth-
od of trial and error. There is a selective be-
havior, such as we are ourselves continually ex-
hibiting. The meaning of the term selective
behavior may be illustrated by the story of a dog
which was asked to carry a walking-stick with a
crooked handle through a fence with close up-
right bars. It took the stick by the middle and
jammed ; it tried again, but began at the wrong end
of the stick and jammed again. Finally, it gripped
the handle in its mouth and ran triumphantly
through. Similarly, Darwin found that the earth-
worms dealt in an effective way with the bifoliar
spurs of the Scotch fir, and even with strange leaves
of which they could have had no experience.
Similarly, Jennings has found that some infuso-
rians try one reaction after another, and select the
one which is fit.

110 The Bible of Nature

There seems a great deal to be said for the view
that many of the activities in animals which we
call mere reflexes, are, as it were, the degraded
stages of activities which were to begin with self-
determined or purposive — profitably degraded, for
the agent thus becomes freer to solve new prob-
lems. In so saying, however, we need not re-
turn to the old and probably quite erroneous
theory that "instincts" arose from "lapsed in-
telligence," which is a separate question. In any
case we may agree that even simple actions of
simple creatures illustrate what we must call uni-
fied behavior, which is effective and adaptive, di-
rected by the creature itself. Even spermatozoa
always swim against the stream. A self-acting,
self-regulating, self-adjusting, self-preserving ma-
chine is no longer a machine. As a unity the or-
ganism lives, as a unity it develops, as a unity it
evolves.

We may refer here to the important discussion
of the whole subject of organisms and their evo-
lution, which is given by Professor Bergson in his
illuminating book, "L'Evolution Creatrice." He
points out that one of the reasons why we boggle
so much over the puzzle of life is that our intelli-
gence is most at home among mechanical things —
solids and their movements. It was trained in this
school long before there was any philosophical
biology. The organism bursts the categories of

Organisms and Their Origin 111

"mechanical causality" and the like which we try
to force upon it.

Our own mental experience, which we know
best, means continual change; from day to day we
ripe and ripe; we are continually recreating our-
selves, artists of our own life. So the organism
has true experience and history, which a stone
never has; there is persistence in spite of ceaseless
change; there is a continual registration of the re-
sults of time, and there is continual creation. The
organism's creativeness is incalculable, unpredict-
able; it uses time so as to profit by experience; it is
continually making itself afresh. In its essential
features it thus transcends mechanical description.

Origin of Organisms upon the Earth. — No one
doubts that at some uncertain, but inconceivably
distant date, living creatures appeared upon the
earth, which had previously been tenantless.
During the early phases of the earth's history,
before it cooled and consolidated, the conditions
were quite impossible for such organisms as we
know, and there is no use talking about any other.
The question is: What was the manner of the be-
coming of living creatures upon the earth; and
the answer is that we do not know. Our inquiry
might close at this point, were it not that a num-
ber of less truthful answers have been given, were
it not that a discussion of the subject may enable
us to bring into greater prominence the essential

112 The Bible of Nature

insignia of livingness. Some apprehension or
appreciation of these always colors our picture of
Nature, though the dominant tone always depends
on what we make of man himself. Let us first
take a brief historical survey. Perhaps it is well to
speak of the problem as the origin of living organ-
isms, rather than of life. Life is an ambiguous
and mysterious term. We do not know what life
in its essence really implies. We may be begging
the question in asking how " life" began. Life may
be a particular mode of motion as old as other
modes of motion — such as heat or elasticity or
matter. Or "life" may be in its essence insepa-
rable from what we call "spirit." Therefore, to
inquire into the origin of life may be like inquiring
into the origin of motion or the origin of conscious-
ness. But it is still too soon to say so.

Various Suggestions. — The first possible answer
is that living organisms began after a fashion
which we can never form any scientific conception
of, that the origin of life is for science a quite in-
soluble problem. This answer saves a lot of
trouble, but the objection to it is that it is prema-
turely dogmatic, closing the door on legitimate
scientific inquiry.

Secondly, Preyer and others have suggested
that germs of life, confessedly unlike any we now
know, may have existed from the beginning even
in nebulous masses. It was not, indeed, the pro-

Organisms and Their Origin 113

toplasm we know that was encradled in the fire-
mist; it was a kind of movement, a particular dance
of corpuscles, different in its measures from in-
organic dances. But there does not seem much
utility in discussing a hypothetical kind of organ-
ism which could live in nebulae; our conception
of organic life must be based on the organisms
we know. It is interesting, however, to note that
Preyer strongly opposed the view that organic sub-
stance could arise or could have arisen from in-
organic substance; the reverse supposition seemed
to him more tenable.

As a corollary of the second answer we may
notice the view that organisms came to the earth
from elsewhere.

As far back as 1865, H. E. Richter started the
idea that germs of life are continually being thrown
off from the heavenly bodies, and that some of
these found lodgment on the earth, when it was
ready for them. For him, as for Preyer, it was
impossible to think of life beginning; his dictum
was, Omne vivum ab ceternitate e cellida. To
Helmholtz (1884) and to Sir William Thomson
(Lord Kelvin) the same idea occurred, that germs
of life may have come to the earth embosomed
in meteorites. "I cannot contend," Helmholtz
said, " against one who would regard this hypoth-
esis as highly or wholly improbable. But it
appears to me to be a wholly correct scientific pro-

114 The Bible of Nature

cedure, when all our endeavors to produce organ-
isms out of lifeless substance are thwarted, to
question whether, after all, life has ever arisen,
whether it may not be even as old as matter, and
whether its germs, passed from one world to an-
other, may not have developed where they found
favorable soil. . . . The true alternative is evident:
organic life has either begun to exist at some one
time, or has existed from eternity." On the other
hand, we may note that the word " eternal" is
somewhat irrelevant in scientific discourse, that
the notion of such complex substances as proteids
(essentially involved in every organism we know)
being primitive, is quite against the tenor of mod-
ern theories of inorganic evolution; and that,
though we cannot deny the possibility, it is difficult
to conceive of anything like the protoplasm we
know surviving transport in a meteorite through
the intense cold in space and through intense heat
when passing through our atmosphere. The
milder form of the hypothesis associated with the
name of Lord Kelvin was simply one of transport;
he wisely said nothing about "eternal cells" or
any such thing; he simply shifted the responsi-
bility of the problem of the origin of living organ-
isms off the shoulders of our planet.

Spontaneous Generation. — Apart from the aban-
donment of the problem as scientifically insoluble
— apart, that is to say, from the view that living

Organisms and Their Origin 115

creatures began to be in some way which we can-
not hope to formulate in terms of the scientific
"universe of discourse," we have the suggestions
(a) that the physical basis of life is as old as the
cosmos, and (6) that germs of organisms may have
come from elsewhere to our earth. There is but
one other possible view, namely, that what we call
living evolved in Nature's laboratory from what
we call not-living — a view to which the trend of
evolutionist thinking certainly attracts us. There
are few living biologists1 who doubt the present
universality of the induction from all sufficiently
careful experiment and observation — omne vivum
e vivo; but it is quite another thing to say that
abiogenesis may not have occurred in the past or
may not occur in the future. The dictum omne
vivum e vivo is a statement of empirical fact; it is
not a dogmatic closing of the question.

It is perhaps useful, at this stage, to remember
that the idea of the origin of the living from the
not living is very old, and has persisted for at least
twenty centuries. A belief in spontaneous gen-
eration was held at dates as widely separated as
are suggested by the names of Aristotle, Augustine,
Lucretius, Luther, Francis Bacon, and Harvey.

1 Dr. Bastian is practically alone in believing that creat-
ures like Infusorians and Amcebse (highly complex indi-
vidualities in their own way) can now arise from not-
living material.

116 The Bible of Nature

The belief rested on misinterpretations not un-
natural at times when microbes were unknown, or
when the life-histories of common parasites were
very dimly discerned, or when no one dreamed
of the minuteness and ready transportability of
the germs of even worms. It was supposed that
thistles arose de novo from the dust, that bees
sprang from dead oxen, that frogs were engendered
from the mud.

But though many thoughtful biologists, such as
Huxley and Spencer, Nageli and Haeckel, have
accepted the hypothesis that living organisms of
a very simple sort were originally evolved from
not-living material, they have done so rather in
their faith in a continuous natural evolution, than
from any apprehension of the possible sequences
which might lead up to such a remarkable result.
The hypothesis of abiogenesis may be suggested
on a priori grounds, but few have ventured to
offer any concrete indication of how the process
might conceivably come about. To postulate
abiogenesis as if it were a matter of course betrays
an extraordinarily easy-going scientific mood.

Some Concrete Suggestions. — One of the few con-
crete suggestions is due to the physiologist Pfluger
(1875), whose views are clearly summarized in
Verworn's "General Physiology." Pfluger sug-
gested that it is the cyanogen radical (CN) which
gives the " living" proteid molecule its character-

Organisms and Their Origin 117

istic properties of self-decomposition and recon-
struction. He indicated the similarities between
cyanic acid (HCNO) — a product of the oxidation
of cyanogen — and proteid material, which is ad-
mitted to be an essential part, at least, of all living
matter. "This similarity is so great," he said,
"that I might term cyanic acid a half-living mole-
cule." As cyanogen and its compounds arise in
an incandescent heat when the necessary nitrog-
enous compounds are present, they may have
been formed when the earth was still an incan-
descent ball. "If now we consider the immeasu-
rably long time during which the cooling of the
earth's surface dragged itself slowly along, cyan-
ogen and the compounds that contain cyano-
gen- and hydrocarbon-substances had time and
opportunity to indulge extensively in their great
tendency toward transformation and polymeriza-
tion, and to pass over with the aid of oxygen, and
later of water and salts, into that self-destructive
proteid, living matter."1

Verworn adopts and elaborates this suggestion:
Compounds of cyanogen were formed while the
earth was still incandescent; with their property
of ready decomposition they were forced into cor-
relation with various other compounds likewise
due to the great heat; when water was precipitated

J Quoted by Verworn, "General Physiology" (1899),
p. 307.

118 The Bible of Nature

as liquid upon the earth these compounds entered
into chemical relations with the water and its
dissolved salts and gases, and thus originated ex-
tremely labile, very simple, undifferentiated living
substance.

Professor E. Ray Lankester, in his article,
"Protozoa," in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
makes the suggestion, "that a vast amount of al-
buminoids and other such compounds had been
brought into existence by those processes which
culminated in the development of the first proto-
plasm, and it seems therefore likely enough that
the first protoplasm fed upon these antecedent
steps in its own evolution."

Dr. H. Charlton Bastian suggests, in regard to
the first origin of living matter upon the earth, that
the nitrate of ammonia which is known to be pro-
duced in the air during thunder-storms, and is dis-
covered in the thunder-shower, may have played
an important part in the mixture of ingredients
from which the hypothetical natural synthesis of
living matter was effected.

Mr. J. Butler Burke postulates original vital
units or "bio-elements," which " may have existed
throughout the universe for an almost indefinite
time," which are probably "elements possessing
many of the chemical properties of carbon and the
radio-active properties of the more unstable ele-
ments," and which, by interacting on otherwise

Organisms and Their Origin 119

present carbon-compounds, probably gave rise
to cellular life as we know it to-day.

By allowing quantities of radium salt to act on
sterilized bouillon, Mr. J. Butler Burke obtained
transient little bodies which he called " radiobes,"
which seemed to him on the border-line between
the animate and the inanimate. Mr. Burke did
not claim, however, to have effected " spontaneous
generation." To expect to make a full-blown
bacillus at the present day, he says, would not be
less absurd than to try to manufacture a man.
He admitted that his "radiobes," which are solu-
ble in water, are "altogether outside the beaten
track of living things," though he maintained that
they have n — 1 of the n properties of the living or-
ganism. "That little more and how much it is,
That little less and what worlds away." It should
be remembered, too, that this investigator postu-
lates a potential vitality, and indeed spirituality, in
all matter. Matter, he says, is ultimately mind-
stuff, and the atoms are nothing more than ideas.

Difficulty of the Problem. — It must be admitted
that, in spite of these and other concrete sugges-
tions, we are still far from being able to imagine
how living matter could arise from not-living
matter. But we must remember that many things
happen which we do not understand. Two sub-
stances combine to form a new substance with
quite different properties, which are doubtless due

120 The Bible of Nature

to what the component parts have contributed,
though we do not know how. At the same time
in postulating possible processes which may have
occurred long ago in Nature's laboratory, it is al-
ways desirable that we should be able to back
these up with evidence of analogous processes now
occurring in Nature — the usual mode of argument
in evolutionist discourse — but these analogues are
not forthcoming at present. It is usual to refer
to the achievements of the synthetic chemist, who
can now manufacture artificially such natural
organic products as urea, alcohol, grape sugar,
indigo, oxalic acid, tartaric acid, salicylic acid,
and caffeine. But four facts should be borne in
mind: (1) the directive agency of the intelligent
chemist is an essential factor in these syntheses;

(2) no one supposes that a living organism makes
its organic compounds in the way in which many
of these can be made in the chemical laboratory;

(3) no one has yet come near the artificial synthe-
sis of proteids, which are the most characteristic
substances in living matter; and (4) there is a great
gap between making organic matter and making
an organism. When Kekule spoke of looking for-
ward to the time when we shall " build up the for-
mative elements of living organisms " in the labo-
ratory, he probably had the distinction between the
organism and its several component substances
quite clearly in mind.

Organisms and Their Origin 121

We are in the habit of comparing what man can
do in the way of evolving domesticated animals
and cultivated plants with what we believe Nature
has done in the distant past. Why, then, should
we not argue from what the intelligent chemist can
do in the way of evolving carbon-compounds to
what Nature may have done before there was any-
thing animate? There is this difference, among
others, in the two cases, that in the former we can
actually observe the operation of natural selection
which in Nature takes the place of the breeder,
while we are at a loss to suggest what, in Na-
ture's as yet very hypothetical laboratory of
chemical synthesis, could take the place of the
directive chemist.

Thus Professor F. R. Japp, following Pasteur,
pointed out in a memorable British Association
address that natural organic compounds are
" optically active" (a characteristic property which
cannot be here discussed), that artificially prepared
organic compounds are primarily "optically in-
active," that by a selective process the intelligent
operator can obtain the former from the latter,
but ... it is difficult to conceive of any mechan-
ism in nature which could effect this. "No
fortuitous concourse of atoms, even with all eter-
nity for them to clash and combine in, could com-
pass this feat of the formation of the first optically
active organic compound." "The chance syn-

122 The Bible of Nature

thesis of the simplest optically active compound
from inorganic materials is absolutely incon-
ceivable."

Not content, however, with indicating the diffi-
culty which the believer in abiogenesis has here
to face, Professor Japp went on to say — perhaps,
in so doing, leaving the rigidly scientific position :
"I see no escape from the conclusion that, at the
moment when life first arose, a directive force came
into play — a force of precisely the same character
as that which enables the intelligent operator, by
the exercise of his will, to select out one crystallized
enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric opposite."
After prolonged discussion, and in view of various
suggestions of possible origins, he wrote : " Although
I no longer venture to speak of the inconceivability
of any mechanical explanation of the production
of single optically active compounds asymmetric al-
ways in the same sense, I am as convinced as ever
of the enormous improbability of any such produc-
tion under chance conditions."

Apart, then, from the fact that the synthesis of
proteids seems still far off, apart also from the
fact that there is a great gap between a drop of
proteid and the simplest organism, we have per-
haps said enough to show that the hypothesis of
abiogenesis is not to be held with an easy mind, at-
tracted as we may be to it by the general evolu-
tionist argument.

Organisms and Their Origin 123

Apartness of Living Creatures. — In thinking over
this difficult question there are two cautions which
should be borne in mind. We must not exag-
gerate the apartness of the animate from the in-
animate, nor must we depreciate it. On the one
hand, we must recognize that modern progress in
chemistry and physics, has given us a much more
"vital" conception of what has been libelled as
"dead matter"; we must not belittle the powers of
growth and regrowth which we observe in crystals,
the series of form-changes through which many
inorganic things, even drops of water, may pass;
the behavior of ferments; the intricate internal ac-
tivity of even the dust. When we consider, too,
such phenomena as "latent life," and "local life,"
and the relatively great simplicity of many forms
and kinds of life, we do not find it easy to discover
absolute, universal, and invariable criteria to dis-
tinguish between animate and inanimate systems,
or between the quick and the dead. To some
extent, also, the artificial synthesis of complex or-
ganic compounds, and the ingenious construction
of "artificial cells" which closely mimic the struc-
ture of living cells, though no one supposes that
they are in the faintest degree "alive," serve to
lessen the gap which seems at first so wide.

There is certainly some interest in the artificial
foam-cells of Quincke and Biitschli, in Dubois'
"vacuolids" or "eobes," in Butler Burke's "radi-

124 The Bible of Nature

obes," in Sir William Ramsay's Helium cells, in
Lehmann's liquid crystals, and in the wonderful
crystallization phenomena described by von
Schron. One of the latest of the courageous es-
says bearing on experimental biogenesis (M. Kuck-
uck's "Losung des Problems der Urzeugung,"
1907), points out that if we add Barium chloride,
or a salt of Radium, or a salt of Nuclein, to a gela-
tiner peptone - asparagin - glycerine -sea- water mix-
ture, we may get little corpuscles which feed, grow,
segment, move, and, in fact, do most things except
live.

It is gratuitous to suppose that experiments
along these lines may not help us to get on the track
of Nature's synthesis, or that they may not have
important practical results. It should be re-
membered too that while we have no experimental
reason for saying that we can make an organism
artificially, we have no experimental reason for
saying that we cannot. We have no way of proving
the impossibility of an occurrence that is not a con-
tradiction in terms.

On the other hand, it is the verdict of common
sense and exact science alike that living creatures
stand apart from inanimate systems. In the in-
animate world we find order, but no self-adjusting
adaptation; response to stimulus, but no effective
self-preservative response; struggle but no strug-
gle for existence; change but no creative agency.

Organisms and Their Origin 125

The living creature feeds and grows; it undergoes
ceaseless change, yet has a marvellous power of re-
taining its integrity; it is not merely a self-stoking,
self-repairing engine, but a self-reproducing en-
gine; it has a self-regulative development; it gives
effective response to external stimuli; it profits by
experience; it uses time; it coordinates its activ-
ities into unified behavior, it may be into intelligent
deeds and rational conduct. Allowing for the
gradual realization of potentialities in the course
of evolution, we cannot but feel that if the living
emerged from the not-living, then our appreciation
of not-living matter must be greatly enhanced.
As a matter of fact, however, we cannot at present
redescribe any vital behavior in terms of physical
and chemical categories, and the secret of the or-
ganism has to be admitted as such whether we ad-
vance to a vitalistic statement of it or not. In
vitalistic doctrine we must distinguish two posi-
tions, first, the negative statement, which seems at
present safe, that no vital activity can be com-
pletely redescribed in terms of physics and chem-
istry, and second, the positive statement, which is
open to various objections, that there is in the
living creature some "vital principle" or "En-
telechy."

If an Organism Could be Made Artificially, What
Then? — Finally, let us suppose that some bold ex-
perimenter in the borderland between chemistry

126 The Bible of Nature

and biology, a man like Professor Jacques Loeb,
is successful this year or next year in making, not
merely a corpuscle of proteid, but a little living
thing, by some ingenious synthesis. What then ?
(a) It is quite likely that the steps leading to
this hypothetical achievement might be as unlike
those which, on the hypothesis of abiogenesis, once
occurred in Nature's laboratory, as the artificial
synthesis of, say, oxalic acid is unlike what takes
place in the sorrel in the wood. (6) At present
we cannot assert that the laws of the movements
of organic corpuscles can be deduced from the
laws of motion of not-living corpuscles — continu-
ous as we may believe cosmic evolution to have
been — and the artificial production of a living
creature would not enable us to make this asser-
tion. What simplification of descriptive formulae
the future has in store for us no one can predict.
We may have to simplify the conceptual formulae
which we use in describing animate behavior, and
we may have to modify the conceptual formulae
which we use in describing inanimate sequences,
but at present the two sets of formulae remain dis-
tinct, and they would so remain even if a little liv-
ing creature were manufactured to-morrow, (c) If
we discovered a method of artificially producing
an organism, as Loeb has discovered a method
of inducing an egg to develop without fertilization,
it would render the hypothesis of abiogenesis more

Organisms and Their Origin 127

credible. We would then know, what no natural-
ist at present knows, however strongly he may be-
lieve it, that what we call not-living has in it the
potentiality of giving origin to what we call living.
But the hypothetical discovery would in no way
affect the dignity and value of living creatures, or
of our own life. The whole world would be more
continuous and vital, (d) If it came about that
we were able to bring materials and energies to-
gether in such a way that living creatures of a sim-
ple sort resulted, we should still have to remember
that we had acted as directive agents in the syn-
thesis, (e) Finally, if the experiment succeeded,
we should not have arrived at any explanation of
life. We should be able to say that, 'given certain
antecedent conditions, certain consequences en-
sue, but we should still be unable to answer the
question how or why. We should have a genetic
description of an occurrence, but no explanation
of it. For that is what science never supplies.1

In conclusion, to o^uote Principal Lloyd Morgan,
"Those who would concentrate the mystery of ex-
istence on the pin-point of thev genesis of proto-

1 The intellectual outcome of the long-drawn-out discus-
sion on the origin of living organisms is certainly disap-
pointing, but it is interesting to notice that it has been
richly rewarded in practice. It has led to discoveries in
the preservation and improvement of food, to an entirely
new view of parasites, to the use of antiseptics, and to the
cure of many diseases.

128 The Bible of Nature

plasm, do violence alike to philosophy and to re-
ligion. Those who would single out from among
the multitudinous differentiations of an evolving
universe this alone for special interposition, would
seem to do little honor to the Divinity they profess
to serve. Theodore Parker gave expression to a
broader and more reverent theology when he said :
"The universe, broad and deep and high, is a
handful of dust which God enchants. He is the
mysterious magic which possesses," not proto-
plasm merely, but "the world."

This is all very well, some one may say, but are
you not at least leading us to look with some favor
on what is a materialistic view of life ? If this be
the impression left, then our statement has failed
of its purpose. Materialism is the theory that
there is nothing real in the universe except redis-
tributions of matter and energy in the ether. To
which it may be answered — first, that matter,
energy, ether, are simply conceptual formulae of
science, corresponding to a reality which we can-
not get at, but which we get nearest when we know
it in ourselves as thought; and secondly, that no
juggling with these concepts can possibly account
for even the materialistic philosophy.

"There can be little doubt," Huxley said, "that
the further science advances, the more extensively
and consistently will all the phenomena be repre-
sented by materialistic formulae and symbols."

Organisms and Their Origin 129

"But the man of science, who, forgetting the
limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these
formulae and symbols into what is commonly un-
derstood by materialism, seems to me to place him-
self on a level with the mathematician who should
mistake the x's and y's with which he works his
problems for real entities; and with this further
disadvantage as compared with the mathematician
that the blunders of the latter are of no practical
consequence, while the errors of systematic ma-
terialism may paralyze the energies and destroy
the beauty of life."

As Prof. Karl Pearson puts it in his " Grammar
of Science": "The problem of whether life is or
is not a mechanism, is not a question of whether
the same things, 'matter' and 'force/ are or are
not at the back of organic and inorganic phe-
nomena— of what is at the back of either class of
sense-impressions we know absolutely nothing —
but of whether the conceptual shorthand of the
physicist, this ideal world of ether, atom, and
molecule, will or will not also suffice to describe
the biologist's perceptions."

Those who may be inclined to dissent from the
view that Science deals merely with "counters;"
which are representative of reality, may be re-
minded that even in the psychical realm we do the
same. Thus Berkeley affirms over and over again
that no idea can be formed of a soul or spirit.

130 The Bible of Nature

"The words will, send, spirit, do not stand for
different ideas, or in truth, for any idea at all, but
for something which is very different from ideas,
and which, being an agent, cannot be like unto or
represented by any idea whatever." And similarly,
to go to the other pole, namely, scientific psychology,
we find one of its ablest exponents, Professor Miin-
sterberg, admitting that it "is not an expression
of reality, but a complicated transformation of
it, worked out for special logical purposes in
the service of our life." (" Psychology and Life,"
1899.)

Fundamental Mysteriousness of Nature. — Let us
put the matter in another way by asking whether
Science has any contribution to make toward a
recognition of the spirituality of Nature. At first,
of course, Science draws in its horns and says NO.
That is not its metier. But it is better than its
word, for it discloses Rationality, Order, Unity,
Progress; and that is great gain. It also recog-
nizes the fundamental mysteriousness of Nature,
and that in three ways. There is mysteriousness in
the common denominator — say, Matter, Energy,
Ether — to which it seeks to reduce things. There
is mysteriousness in the sequences it discloses,
when the resultant consequences are new as
compared with their component antecedents.
There is mysteriousness in the beginnings from
which it starts in its genetic descriptions; they do

Organisms and Their Origin 131

not suggest what is to come out of them any more
than an egg suggests a bird.

Fortuitousness. — The general trend of evolution-
ary thinking and speculation inclines us to enter-
tain the belief that the living may have emerged
from the not-living in ages long since past. If so,
we may be sure that it did not emerge by chance,
but was as rigorously predetermined as the origin
of the solar system from a swarm of meteorites.
Lord Kelvin made himself responsible for the
statement, that while "fortuitous concourse of
atoms" is not an inappropriate description of the
formation of a crystal, it is utterly absurd in re-
spect to the coming into existence, or the growth,
or the continuation, of the molecular combinations
presented in the bodies of living things.1 One
agrees with the latter part of the statement, but one
finds it difficult to entertain the first. What does
a "fortuitous concourse of atoms" mean, unless
simply a concourse whose antecedent conditions
are unknown to us? It cannot mean a chaotic
state of things, if it gives rise to one of the most
beautiful of cosmic units — a crystal.

In Conclusion. — If we see any good reason for

1 Which, he went on to say, compel us to conclude that
there is scientific reason for believing in the existence of a
creative and directive power. See Professor Ray Lankes-
ter's Letter to the Times, May 17, 1903, and his "King-
dom of Man," 1907, p. 62.

132 The Bible of Nature

believing in the erstwhile origin of the living from
the not-living, we give a greater continuity to the
course of events, and we must again read some-
thing into the common denominator of science —
Matter, Energy, and the Ether. We have already
read into this, Wonder and Mystery, Harmony and
Order, and we must now read into it — Progress
and, from a philosophical standpoint, Purpose.
Unless Increase of Complexity and Integration,
Harmony and Beauty, be considered Ends justi-
fying themselves, we cannot read the Riddle of the
Earth considered by itself. If, however, the dust
of the earth did naturally give rise to living creat-
ures, if they are in a real sense her children, then
we understand better all the groaning and travail-
ing, and what seemed only a development becomes
an evolution.

IV

THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANISMS

IV
THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANISMS

The General Idea of Evolution. — In human affairs
what seems to the careless to be quite novel is often
revealed to the careful student as the natural out-
come of processes which have their origin in an-
tiquity. We see the gradual growth of social
organizations, the natural transition from one es-
tablished order of things to another slightly differ-
ent position of temporary equilibrium, the trans-
formation of one institution into another, and —
apart from any philosophy of history — we sum up
what we observe in the general concept of social
evolution. It was, indeed, in relation to human
affairs that the evolution-formula first became a
useful organon, and it is an oft-told tale how it
was gradually applied to the heavens above and
to the earth beneath and to animate nature in
general.1 Thence, improved by the using, the
formula has returned for reapplication to human
history. Now. although there are noteworthy
differences between the making of the solar sys-
tem, the differentiation of the earth, the evolution

1 See the author's "Progress of Science."
135

136 The Bible of Nature

of living creatures, and the history of societary
forms, all cases have this in common, that a process
of Becoming leads to a new phase of Being. The
study of evolution is a study of Werden and Ver-
gehen and Weiter-Werden. The general idea of
evolution is, that the present is the child of the
past and the parent of the future.

The evolution-idea is probably as old as clear
thinking, which we may date from the (unknown)
time when man discovered the year — with its
marvellous object-lesson of recurrent sequences —
and realized that his race had a history. Whatever
may have been its origin, the idea — that the pres-
ent is the child of a simpler past and the parent of
a more complex future — was familiar to several
of the ancient Greek philosophers, as it was to
Hume and Kant; it fired the imagination of Lu-
cretius and linked him to another poet of evolution
— Goethe; it persisted, like a latent germ, through
the centuries of other than scientific preoccupa-
tion; it was made actual by the pioneers of mod-
ern aetiology — men like Buffon, Lamarck, Eras-
mus Darwin, Treviranus, and Etienne Geoffroy
St. Hilaire — and it became current intellectual
coin when Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace,
Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, and Huxley, with
united but varied achievements, won the convic-
tion of the majority of thoughtful men. Since
this achievement the fact of organic-evolution has

The Evolution of Organisms 137

been taken for granted, and there has been a con-
centration of inquiry on the originative and di-
rective factors in the mysterious process of organic
becoming.1

Stated concretely, the general doctrine of de-
scent or organic evolution suggests, as we all know,
that the plants and animals now around us are the
results of natural processes working throughout
the ages, that the forms we see are the lineal de-
scendants of ancestors on the whole somewhat
simpler, that these are descended from yet simpler
forms, and so on backward, till we lose our clue
in the unknown — but doubtless momentous — vital
events of pre-Cambrian ages, or, in other words,
in the thick mist of life's beginnings.

Why do we accept this modal interpretation?
The view that things have always been as they are
is demonstrably false; the theory of successive
cataclysms and subsequent recommencements is
hardly thinkable; the only available scientific
formulation is the theory of descent. We accept
it because it fits the facts we know, because no
facts contradict it, because it is congruent with our
interpretation of other orders of facts. We can-
not verify it as we can verify the indestructibility
of matter, the conservation of energy, or the for-
mula of gravitation, but we do know that there is a

1 See the author's " Study of Animal Life " and " The
Science of Life."

138 The Bible of Nature

certain amount of evolution going on under our
eyes, and that not confined to Mr. Burbank's
garden or the breeders' pens. We extend the idea
to the past and find that it works well.

Every one knows how Darwin with sublime
patience accumulated evidence of evolution (a)
from the distribution of animals in space; (6) from
their successive appearance in time; (c) from
actual changes observed in domestication, culti-
vation, and in nature; (d) from facts of anatomical
structure, such as homologous and vestigial or-
gans, and (e) from the abbreviated recapitulation
of the past which seems to occur in individual de-
velopment. But magistral as his work was, it did
not, and could not, demonstrate the doctrine of de-
scent; it simply gave what one may call a cumula-
tive justification by showing how well the formula
fitted a vast series of facts. Thus the phrase " evi-
dences of evolution," except as applied to what we
actually see going on, is not altogether appropriate.
Every differentiation and every adaptation of struct-
ure or of function may be interpreted as a product,
and may thus become "an evidence of evolution."

Validity of Scientific Interpretation. — It is necessary
at this point to interpolate a general considera-
tion. The Theory of Descent tacitly makes the
assumption — the basal hope of all biology — that
it is not only legitimate but promiseful to try to in-
terpret scientifically the history of life upon the

The Evolution of Organisms 139

earth. If any one has good reason for believing
that the long process of Becoming, which has
eventually led to ourselves and our complex ani-
mate surroundings, is altogether too mysterious or
too marvellous to admit of successful treatment by
ordinary scientific methods, then he denies at the
outset the validity of the evolution formula. There
is no use going further. Here is the parting of
the ways, and there is no via media. The facts
of history as the rocks reveal them will remain, but
the book is shut for science. The order of Nature
remains, but it is no longer the order of scientific
intelligibility.

If any one decides on a priori grounds that there
is no hopefulness in attempting a scientific anal-
ysis of the confessedly vast and perplexing prob-
lem of genesis, then let him remain poet or artist,
philosopher or theologian. There is no sense in
niggling criticism if the scientific method is pre-
judged as invalid.

On the other hand, if the scientific attempt at
formulating the steps in genesis is legitimate, and
if it has made good progress, considering its youth,
then let us rigidly exclude from our science all other
than scientific interpretations; let us cease to juggle
with words by attempting a mongrel mixture of
scientific and transcendental formulation; let us
stop trying to eke out demonstrable factors by as-
suming in the same breath alongside of these,

140 The Bible of Nature

"ultra-scientific causes," "spiritual influxes,"
et hoc (jenus omne; let us cease writing or reading
books with titles like " God or Natural Selection,"
whose initial false antinomy is sufficient index of
their misunderstanding. Not, of course, that we
are objecting for a moment to any metaphysical
or theological interpretations whatsoever; we are
simply stating the commonplace that it is unprofit-
able to try to talk two languages at once, that we
cannot with sanity have scientific formulae mixed
up with transcendental formulae in one sentence;
and that to place these against one another is to
oppose incommensurables and to display an ig-
norance of what the aim of science is. The great
French physiologist Claude Bernard has written,
" I am persuaded that the day will come when the
physiologist, the poet, and the philosopher will
speak the same language and will understand one
another." 1 We feel sure about the second part
of this prophecy, that there will be mutual under-
standing; but we cannot even hope for the day
when physiologist, poet, and philosopher will
speak the same language.

The Actual History as Disclosed by the Palaeontol-
ogists.— Returning to the actual history of the
forms of life — and of course the succession of

1 " Je suis persuade* qu'un jour viendra ou le physiologiste,
le poete, et le philosophe parleront la meme langle et
s'entendront tous."

The Evolution of Organisms 141

events remains whether we are scientific evolu-
tionists or not — we find that the patience of the
palaeontologists has been gradually disclosing a
majestic pageant, an age-long, ever-changing pro-
cession of faunas and floras across the stage of the
earth. If we had a series of instantaneous daily
photographs of all that has taken place since life
began to be, a complete pictorial history of the
past would be possible, and evolution would be
verified. If even complete remains of past ages
had been safely buried in great treasure houses,
such as Frederic Harrison has proposed should
henceforth be made for the enlightenment of pos-
terity, then palaeontology would be an easier busi-
ness than it is. Then a genealogical tree connect-
ing the Protist and Man would be possible, and we
should have under our eyes what is now but a
dream — a complete record of the past. As it is,
we have to eke out our palaeontology with hints
from comparative anatomy and comparative em-
bryology, which require to be used very carefully.
The fossil-containing rocks have often been com-
pared to a library, with the oldest books on the
lowest shelves, but what a library! Spoilt by fire
by water, by earthquake, by decay, here half a
shelf awanting and there a series of volumes with
most disappointing gaps; pages out of books;
words missing in sentences, and the vowels awant-
ing like the points in Hebrew. We are troubled

142 The Bible of Nature

also by palimpsests, one record on the top of
another.

We cannot wonder at "the imperfection of the
geological record," when we remember how young
palaeontology is, how young, for that matter, man
is — his whole history but a tick of the geological
clock; how many areas are still unexplored; how
much ground — being covered by sea — must re-
main unknown. We cannot wonder that the ma-
terials of the history are scrappy when we under-
stand that only hard organisms or hard parts are
likely to be preserved, that only certain kinds of
rocks are suitable tombs, and that many rocks have
been unmade and remade many times over. As
we walk along the shore and study the jetsam, we
see how quickly many of the sea's memoranda
are obliterated. The wonder really b that the
record is as complete as it is, that from " the strange
graveyards of the buried past" we can learn so
much about the life that once was.

It is impossible to read even a little about the
study of fossils without a thrill of admiration for
the patience and insight of the biological archae-
ologist. He tells us of fossil jellyfishes and of the
young stages of Graptolites; he makes from frag-
mentary specimens a vivid reconstruction of a prim-
itive Vertebrate not much over an inch in length;
he makes the great dragons of the prime disport
themselves before us; he counts the cuttlefish shells

The Evolution of Organisms 143

in an Ichthyosaurus stomach and the embryos
within the mother; he discovers ancient general-
ized types, like Phenacodus, uniting widely sepa-
rate modern orders; he binds birds to reptiles
(through the Deinosaurs) and flowering to flower*
less plants (through the Pteridosperms) ; he tracks
the transformations of the Ammonites, and works
out the pedigree of the horse and the elephant.

General Impressions. — Looking back on the his-
tory which the palaeontologists have with infinite
patience disclosed, we cannot but be impressed
by some general facts.

First of all, it is noteworthy that, as Whit-
man said, "everything is equally perfect." When
we look at a series of human inventions, such as the
historical gallery of microscopes at the Paris Ex-
position, or a chronological series of bicycles or
locomotives, we feel at once that the early stages
are crude and clumsy, showing the prentice hand.
But this cannot be said of Nature's series. There
is no crudity, no suggestion of the half-finished,
about the early Graptolites, or Trilobites, about
the Ammonites and Nautili, about the Ganoid
fishes or the ancient Saurians.

Secondly, no one can think over the evolu-
tion of plants and animals without feeling that the
fountain of life is practically inexhaustible. All
idea of limitation or economy is irrelevant. There
is a suggestion of infinite resource. We seem to be

144 The Bible of Natwe

in the presence of a great artist who litters his
studio floor with priceless sketches. There is no
suggestion of pursuing a direct path to some goal.
Nature is full of elaborate circuitousness; there are
numerous culs-de-sac. If we are to know God
through His works, this must enter into our knowl-
edge. We can understand what Tennyson meant
when he said, lingering over the crowded life in
the brook, "What an imagination God has."

Thirdly, it is undeniable that, in the course of
the ages, many types have quite died out, leaving
no lineal descendants at all. We visit ancient half-
buried cities now the abode of bats and owls, or
majestic deserted shrines still sublime in their lone-
liness, and there comes over us a feeling of awe
with the thought that our race is so old that we
can sometimes hardly tell what manner of men
thronged the now silent streets, or worshipped in
these empty shrines. But how is this feeling in-
creased when we come to study the remains of
races which have been wholly erased from the roll
of life — lost races whose lineage has come abso-
lutely to an end!

As Gaudry has said : " A host of creatures have
vanished; the most powerful, the most fertile have
not been spared. There is a sadness in the spec-
tacle of so many inexplicable losses." He was re-
ferring, of course, not to extinct species, which are
represented to-day by living descendants, but to

The Evolution of Organisms 145

what we must call extinct types or lost races, such
as the Graptolites and Trilobites, the Eurypterids
and Pterodactyls. It is true that nothing is ever
really lost in this economical world. No scien-
tific student of what is called the circulation of
matter can have failed to recognize the deep truth
in the reincarnation of Buddha. The grass be-
comes the sheep, the sheep the tiger, the tiger
grass again. Atoms that compose part of us may
have formed part of a Deinosaur. "The dust of
Csesar, dead and turned to clay, may stop a hole
to keep the wind away." Yet the physicists' con-
solation is wan and cold. The fact remains that
those particular combinations of elements which
we call lost races — those particular smiles of cre-
ative genius — have disappeared as such forever.

In most cases, as far as we can judge, the end
came slowly, and not by catastrophes. Races
waned and died out; they were not suddenly ex-
tinguished. Another striking fact is that while
evidences of senescence have been detected in some
of the last representatives of dwindling races, there
are many cases where a full stop seems to have been
put to the history of a stock while it was yet in its
prime. Nor is there any reason to think of an
elimination of weaklings. As Gaudry says : " While
insignificant creatures persist, the primes of the
animal world vanish — without return." The
Ammonites ceased at the time of their finest de-

146 The Bible of Nature

velopment; the sea-serpents and the monstrous
terrestrial dragons were no weaklings when death
gathered them; the flying reptiles, small dur-
ing the Jurassic, attain large dimensions by the
end of the Cretaceous, and then — pass away
forever.

We cannot do much more than guess as to the
conditions of the extinction of races. Sometimes,
perhaps, there were changes of environment, to
meet which the plasticity of the creatures was in-
sufficient; sometimes, perhaps, the struggle for ex-
istence was to the death, as it may have been
between cuttlefishes and trilobites, between Ich-
thyosaurs and Belemnites; sometimes, perhaps,
there were constitutional defects, brought about
by over-specialization or the like, such as Lu-
cretius thought of when he pictured races going
down to destruction, "hampered all in their own
death-bringing shackles."

Sluggish sedentary creatures, walled within their
castles of indolence, may have become, as it were,
smothered in these. This is suggested by the ex-
treme calcification of certain extinct types like
the Cystoids and Blastoids. Others again, like the
flying dragons, have perhaps lived too quickly
for their constitutions, life's fitful fever proving
too much for them. There seems, also, to be a
risk involved in being gigantic or in being very
highly specialized. As Marsh says, the Iguanodon

The Evolution of Organisms 147

might have had for epitaph, "I and my race died
of over-specialization."

The facts at any rate remain, and they must
enter into our picture — our conception — of Nature.
The idea of waste of beauty or fineness of structure
is quite irrelevant.

"'So careful of the type/ but no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'a thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go/"

However we may try to explain it — which
science never seeks to do — in relation to our often
very anthropomorphic concepts of End and
Purpose — the fact remains that Nature is, as we
have said, continually painting out her picture,
continually breaking her mould.

This, perhaps, was the meaning of that strange
stanza in Emerson's "Song of Nature" :

"Twice I have moulded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand;
Made one of day, and one of night
And one of the salt sea-sand."

Perhaps we should infer that a thing of beauty,
a smile of creative genius, is sufficient end in
itself.1

1 Speaking of lost races, warrants us in saying a word on
a subject which is always near the heart of the lover of liv-
ing creatures — we refer to the present-day extinction of

148 The Bible of Nature

The strange facts as to the entire passing away
of animal races, like the parallel facts in regard to
particular human races, cannot fail to raise, and
ought to raise, a question as to the endurance of
our own modern races. It sends a chill to patri-
otic hearts to think of any human race passing
wholly away, and yet such things have been. So
far as a race goes on accumulating organic debts

types. Long ago life was like a great army always losing
from its ranks, but yet always gaining new recruits. Now
it seems as if it only loses. This may be partly due to the
fact that careful scientific records extend over a very short
time, but it is also due to our gross carelessness of life.
We can breed a little, but we cannot any longer domesti-
cate. There is some success with Bacteria, for we are
breeding new species, and we are apparently learning to
tame old ones. But the present point is our carelessness
in elimination. On one occasion, some thirty years ago, no
fewer than one hundred and four African elephants were
destroyed in one great battue — a dismal butchery, which
for obvious reasons will never occur again. The story of
the American bison is familiar. The great baleen whale is
verging on extinction; the quagga has probably gone; the
great white rhinoceros — the largest terrestrial mammal
after the elephant — is almost gone; the giraffe is fading
away, and so on through a dismal list. Mr. Martin's Cas-
torologia: the book of the beaver, might be described as
the funeral oration on a dying race. The tale of disap-
pearing birds is heart-rending, and here we may quote a
paragraph from one of our most picturesque naturalists,
Mr. C. T. Hudson. After describing the American ostrich
or Rhea — notable for its fleetness, " great staying powers,
and beautiful strategy when hunted," and for its strange
habit of " running with one wing raised vertically, like a

The Evolution of Organisms 149

" %

(beside which national debts are trifling) and
mortgaging in the direst sense future generations,
so surely is it doomed to disappear, and justly —
"in the gathering blackness of the frown of God."
Or the other hand, we may strengthen our hands
in the assurance that no race is likely to be lost in

great sail — a veritable ship of the wilderness," Mr. Hud-
son writes as follows:

" Rhea-hunting, the 'wild mirth of the desert/ which
the native horseman has known for the last three centuries,
is now passing away, for the Rhea's fleetness can no longer
avail him. He may scorn the horse and his rider, what
time he lifts himself up, but the cowardly murderous
methods of science, and a systematiciwar of extermination,
have left him no chance. And with the Rhea go the fla-
mingo, antique and splendid, and the swans in their
bridal plumage and the rufous tinamou — sweet and
mournful melodist of the eventide; and the noble crested
screamer, that clarion-voiced watch-bird of the night in
the wilderness. These, and the other large avians, to-
gether with the finest of the mammalians, will shortly be
lost to the pampas as utterly as the great bustard is to
England, and as the wild turkey and bison and many other
species will shortly be lost to North America. Like immor-
tal flowers they have drifted down to us on the ocean of
time, and their strangeness and beauty bring to our
imaginations a dream and a picture of that unknown
world immeasurably far removed."

What can be done to stop this? We should abstain
from all products which mean the extinction of fine types;
we should try to appreciate what is being lost in their
aesthetic, scientific, and economic aspects; we should raise
a prejudice against ruthless sport; and at the worst we
should try to secure the conservation of tracts of country
in which the waning life may be preserved.

150 The Bible of Nature

which it is the loyal endeavor of each pair to
leave after them not their worse, but their bet-
tered selves.

Fourthly, the most important impression we
get is that of the gradual ascent of life. As the
ages passed, higher and higher1 animals are seen.
Fishes were on the scene before Amphibians,
Reptiles before Birds.

All theory apart, in the course of the ages life
has been slowly creeping upward, finding finer
and finer expression, and not along one line only,
but along many lines. It is not among backboned
animals only that we find the creature reaching
toward a greater fulness of life, a greater richness
of experience, and an increased freedom from the
grip of the environment. Notably there is along
many lines an increasing complexity of nervous
system, and a correlated liberation of the Psyche.

1 This is not an anthropomorphic impression. We do
not mean by "higher" merely liker man; we use the two-
fold standard of differentiation and integration. Differ-
entiation is the structural side of division of labor, it
means increased complexity and specialization of parts.
Integration means the consolidation, harmonizing, and
regulation of the body into a more and more perfect unity.
Thus just as a modern locomotive is a finer product than
Stephenson's "Puffing Billy," in being much more differ-
entiated and integrated, so the bird is a much higher ani-
mal than the earthworm. That we do not mean liker man
is obvious when we say that the grass is a much higher
plant than the seaweed. It is much more differentiated
and integrated, but it is not any nearer man.

The Evolution of Organisms 151

Let me quote a paragraph — freely translated from
Gaudry:

"The organic world as a whole has made progress.
Suppose a voyager on the oceans of ages; in the Cam-
brian times his barque meets trilobites, but no fishes; he
nears the shore, and there is the silence of death. After
long voyaging he finds himself at the end of the Primary
era; fishes have replaced trilobites, and on land there is
no longer silence. Here is the tramp and cry of reptiles
who prophesy the advent of warm-blooded vertebrates.
The traveller sails from age to age, and reaches the middle
of the Secondary era. Charmingly beautiful ammonites
play around his vessel, legions of belemnites mingle with
them; ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and teleosaurs follow his
track. He goes ashore, and the giant deinosaurs resting
on their tails open their huge arms; pterodactyls and
other dragons swoop aloft; the first bird tries its wings,
and some small mammals show face timidly. Nature,
marvellous in the Primary ages, has become yet more
marvellous; it has made progress. If our traveller be not
fatigued with his long wanderings, he will find in the
Tertiary ages the first monkeys and horses, and a thou-
sand other mammals. Later on he will find himself — the
man — artist and poet — minister and interpreter of nature
— the man who thinks and prays. Truly, the history of
the world as a whole is the history of a progressive evolu-
tion. Where will this solution lead us?"

Looking back again at the more than plausibly
worked-out history of backboned animals, we see
that the evolution is marked by a progressive differ-
entiation of the nervous system, and that the use
made of this is to adapt the organism more per-

152 The Bible of Nature

fectly to its environment, and in the higher forms
to adapt the environment to the organism. Surely
one legitimate deduction — so obvious that many
miss it — is just this, that the primary use of our
highly evolved nervous system is not to enable us
to construct philosophies, but to empower us to
adapt ourselves more perfectly to the inexorables,
"moulding the exile to his fate," and to empower
us to reach a greater mastery of Nature, to enter
into our Kingdom, and to win a firmer control of
life. We are all too apt to take an unnecessarily
academic view of our destiny.

What do we mean by "entering into our King-
dom"? We mean that, having gone so far, we
must go further in our mastery of natural powers,
in our utilization of natural resources, in our revolt
against natural selection. Eutopias we want, a
replacing of slums by garden cities, a sweeping
away of the disfigurements with which we have
half-spoiled beautiful places, landscape-gardening
on a large scale, instead of the accumulation of ash-
heaps. Eutechnics we want, healthful, pleasur-
able function well distributed, and an ending to
occupations which mean miserable lives and un-
timely deaths. Eugenics we want, an improve-
ment of the human breed, an active pride of
race, an enlightened conscience as to marrying
and having children, and a more evolutionary
education. How much more we want and must

The Evolution of Organisms 153

have! We have only begun to enter upon our
Kingdom.1

Factors in Evolution. — When we pass from the
modal formula of organic evolution to consider
how the process works, we pass from clearness to
perplexing uncertainty. Huxley's saying, " If the
Darwinian hypothesis (of Natural Selection) were
swept away, evolution would still stand where it
was," has puzzled some, but it obviously means
that while all research strengthens our confidence
in the general idea of organic evolution, we are
very uncertain as to the actual mechanism. The
fact of evolution forces itself upon us; the factors
elude us. There can be no dogmatism. The
consistent evolutionist knows that he and his in-
terpretation, like the world which he studies, are
within the sweep of the evolution process, have
been evolved, and are still evolving. He never
claims finality of interpretation, for that would
be self-contradiction.

Variations: The Raw Materials of Progress. — The
first great question concerns what may be called
the raw materials of progress — the origin and
nature of those organic changes or variations on
which the possibility of evolution depends. Dar-
win started from the broad fact that variability
exists, illustrating it chiefly from domesticated
animals and cultivated plants; he postulated an
1 See Sir E. Ray Lankester's "Kingdom of Man," 1907.

154 The Bible of Nature

abundant crop of organic changes, toward tares
and toward wheat, and he showed how a process
of thinning and singling, sifting and winnowing,
would operate upon the ever-growing, ever-chang-
ing crop, so that the result was progress.

But all science begins with measurement, and
the great step in advance that has been made of
recent years is in the dry and tedious, but peremp-
torily necessary task of accurately recording the
variations that do actually occur. Life is so
abundant and so Protean that biologists have
tended to draw upon the variability account as if
there was no limit to it, scarce waiting to see wheth-
er their cheques were honored. Without being
biologists, simply as clear thinkers, we must feel
the unsatisfactoriness of merely postulating vari-
ability to meet the demands of particular problems.
In ordinary evolutionist discourse, as Mr. Bate-
son justly points out, there has been continual
use of the argument, " If such and such a vari-
ation then took place and was favorable," then
. . . , a mode of talk which we would ridicule in
Paley or Butler, but which we in our inconsistency
still tolerate in ourselves. It is obviously our busi-
ness to be able to say, "such and such variations
do occur in Nature, therefore. ..." But we
are now changing all tkis. The very title — " Bio-
metrika " — of a new journal is a sign of the times.
In hoc signo labvramus. The recording and sta-

The Evolution of Organisms 155

tistical registration of organic changes that actually
occur is rapidly helping us out of the slough of
vagueness, in which, to the physicist's contempt,
biology has so long floundered. It is too soon to
sum up the results of recent studies on variation,
but some facts are clear.

(1) Variability is even greater than Darwin sup-
posed, and is not less among creatures living in a
state of nature than among those domesticated or
cultivated forms on which the great master con-
centrated his attention. Whenever we settle down
to measure, to identify, to describe, we find that
specific diagnoses are average statements, that spe-
cific characters require a curve of frequency for
their expression, that the living creature is usu-
ally a Proteus. It is true that there are long-lived,
non-plastic, conservative types, built, as it were,
not for a day, but for all time, like Lingula, and
perhaps a score of other well-known organisms,
where no visible variability (of hard parts, at
least) can be proved even in a million years. But
to judge from these as to the march of evolution is
like estimating the rush of a river from the eddies
of a sheltered pool.

(2) It has become possible to distinguish be-
tween minute fluctuations, which seem to be of
general occurrence, in which the offspring has a
little more or a little less of a given character than
its parents had, and discontinuous variations or

156 The Bible of Nature

mutations, in which something new emerges sud-
denly without gradual stages and with no small
degree of perfectness. Using Galton's simile we
can picture a polyhedron oscillating or rocking
on one of its faces, this would be fluctuation;
we can picture it rolling over to a position of
equilibrium on another face, this would be
mutation.

Though there is some truth in Lamarck's saying
that "Nature is never brusque," and though we
may justifiably disbelieve entirely in grotesque
" Jack-in-the-Box " phenomena, such as Bastian's
" Heterogenesis " (e. g., the origin of a large infu-
sorian by the transformation of a Rotifer's egg),
which would make Nature magical and irrational,
we now know, through the work of Mr. Bateson
and others, that discontinuous variations are not
rarities. In particular we know through the beau-
tiful work of De Vries on " Evening Primroses and
Other Plants," that organisms may give rise to
offspring which are distinctively new, and that
these are mutations come to stay. Such words as
"freaks" and "sports" are not very happy, but
they suggest the idea of what Mr. Galton calls
"transilient" variations — the fact that organic
structure may pass with seeming abruptness from
one position of organic equilibrium to another.
We have, in short, to deal with a Proteus who
leaps as well as creeps.

The Evolution of Organisms 157

De Vries' Evening Primroses — Let us recall, for a
moment, the case of the Evening Primrose (Oeno-
thera lamarckiana), which Professor Hugo De
Vries found as an escape in a potato-field at Hil-
versum in Holland. Its chief interest was its
changefulness; it was, so to speak, frolicking in its
freedom; it was in a variable mood. Almost all its
organs were varying — as if swayed by a restless
tide of life. It showed minute fluctuations from
generation to generation; it showed extraordinary
freaks such as fasciation and pitcher-forming; it
showed hesitancy as to how long it meant to live,
for while the majority were biennial, many were
annual, and a few were triennial; best of all, it
showed what could hardly be otherwise described
than as new species in the making. From this
stock, De Vries obtained in a short time half a
dozen or more distinct varieties or elementary
species, breeding true generation after genera-
tion. In short, he was fortunate enough to have
found a plant in process of rapid evolution. It is
rash to generalize as yet, but other cases of muta-
tion are now being studied, and it may be that in
many instances "new varieties are produced from
existing forms by sudden leaps." If there are
many such cases, the aspect of the evolution
theory will have to be changed; we shall attach
less importance to the accumulation of minute
fluctuations, and we shall not have to lay such

158 The Bible of Nature

a heavy burden on the shoulders of natural se-
lection.

The Organism is a Unity. — (3) It is also becoming
more and more evident that the living creature
varies, in many cases, as a unity. If there is more
of one character, there may be less of another; one
change brings another in its train. As Darwin
pointed out, there is a "correlation of variation."
We see one part varying and we can plausibly say
that its changes in a given direction are useful and
life-preserving, but meanwhile there may be in the
train of this observable variation another which is
destined to be of far greater import. Another
aspect of the same idea, illustrated for instance
by the authors of " The Evolution of Sex," ' is that
changes apparently confined to minute and super-
ficial parts may be, as it were, the correlated out-
crop of deeper physiological variations of the whole
system or of a large part of the system. As Pro-
fessor Ray Lankester says,2 "We should, perhaps,
more generally conceive of variation as not so much
the accomplishment and presentation of one little
mark or difference in weight, length, or color, as the
expression of a tendency to vary in a given tissue or
organ in a particular way. Thus we are prepared

1 P. Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, " The Evolution of
Sex," " Contemporary Science Series," Revised Edition,
1901.

2 "The Kingdom of Man," 1907, p. 132.

The Evolution of Organisms 159

for the rapid extension and dominance of the varia-
tion if once it is favored by selective breeeding."
Modifications. — Besides variations which spring
from within — emerging from the penetralia of the
germ-cells, where lies the fountain of all lasting
organic change — there are modifications superin-
duced from without. They may be defined as
changes wrought in the body of an individual dur-
ing its lifetime, as the direct result of changes in
function and environment, which so transcend the
limits of organic elasticity that they persist after
the inducing conditions have ceased to operate.
The peculiarities in our finger prints are variations,
but the callosities on our hands are modifications.
The inborn peculiarity of our facial physiognomy
is a variation, but sunburning which lasts for years
is a modification. These modifications or ac-
quired characters are often of great personal im-
portance and they may also serve as temporary
shields or screens for incipient inborn variations
in the same direction, but they have not been
proved to be of direct importance in the evolution
of races, since there is no convincing evidence that
they can be transmitted as such or in any represen-
tative degreee. In short, organic progress is
primarily due to changes in heritable Nature, not
to changes in Nurture.1

1 See J. Arthur Thomson, "Heredity " Murray, London.
1908.

160 The Bible of Nature

Causes of Variations. — As to the causes of varia-
tions and mutations we know very little. We
must still repeat Darwin's words, "Our ignorance
of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one
case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any
reason why this or that part has varied." It is
probable that variability is, like growth, a primary
quality of living things, and that "breeding true"
has arisen secondarily as a restriction. The re-
lation of genetic continuity between successive
generations is an economical arrangement which
secures relative constancy amid continual flux.
In spite of this, however, the Proteus continually
asserts itself. There may be, for all we know, a
process of growing and varying inherent in the
germ-plasm, requiring only an occasional envi-
ronmental stimulus to keep it agoing. We must
remember that the germ-plasm, though marvel-
lously stable in its general architecture, has the
instability involved in great complexity. Sur-
rounding it there is the very complex, very varia-
ble, nutritive environment of the body. In the
processes of maturation there is an extraordinarily
elaborate shuffling of the cards which we call
chromosomes. In fertilization, at the beginning
oi almost every new life, we see the making of a
living mosaic of parental and ancestral contribu-
tions, and there is abundant opportunity for new
permutations and combinations.

The Evolution of Organisms 161

Directive Factors in Evolution. — We must pass now
to the directive factors which operate upon the raw
material afforded by variability. The only di-
rective factors we know of are included in the
terms Selection and Isolation. These are the
twin directive genii.

Selection. — The theory of Natural Selection,
which Darwin and Wallace first expounded, is
very familiar, and admits of brief statement.
Variability is a fact of life. The members of a
family or of a species are not born alike; some have
qualities which give them an advantage, both as
to "hunger" and as to *' love"; others are relatively
handicapped. But a struggle for existence is also
a fact, being necessitated especially by the
abundance of life and by the changefulness of the
environment. Two parents usually produce many
more than two children, and the population thus
tends to outrun the means of subsistence; more-
over, living creatures are at the best only relatively
well adapted to the conditions of their life, which
are changeful. As the result of this struggle for
existence, there is discriminate elimination, the
relatively less fit being eliminated before they
reproduce. "Of fifty seeds, she often brings
but one to bear." The relatively fitter tend to
survive and to reproduce, handing on their ad-
vantages to their progeny. If advantageous vari-
ations are transmitted, if variations in the same

162 The Bible of Nature

direction crop up generation after generation, if
there is gradual augmentation of the amount of
the profitable peculiarity (through the pairing of
similar variants or otherwise), and if the discrim-
inate selection continues consistently, then the
process will necessarily work toward the estab-
lishment of new adaptations.

Given a sufficient crop of variations and suffi-
cient time, what may a process of selection not
effect?

Conditions of Progress through Selection. — There
are two conditions, however; first, that some of the
variations continually occurring are in the direc-
tion of fitness, and secondly, that the process of
elimination, for elimination it comes to, is a dis-
criminate process. Neither of these conditions
is to be lightly passed over. The occurrence of
variations in a profitable direction is often a great
puzzle, which has led some to take refuge in verb-
alisms, " inherent tendencies to perfection/' and
the like. Especially when the new departure is
not merely quantitative, but qualitatively novel,
and exhibited suddenly, is the puzzle great. We
have a Mutation Theory, but 'no theory of muta-
tions. Natural Selection, as some one says, ex-
plains the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival
of the fittest. As usual, it is a question of the
beginnings which gives us pause. And as to the
second point, we must be clear that indiscrimi-

The Evolution of Organisms 163

nate elimination does not count for much in nat-
ure^ methods. We see the men in the fields thin-
ning or singling turnips. With rapid strokes of
the hoe they kill nine and leave a tenth, giving it
elbow room, and liberating it from too intense
competition. But they do not pause to select out
the most vigorous young turnip plant; this would
be discriminate selection, which we are familiar
with in the more intensive cultivation of the garden.
On the whole, the process of thinning turnips is in-
discriminate elimination, though, of course> one
knows that the survivors are left at regular distances,
and so forth. The point is that while this thinning
is profitable for the surviving individuals, it does
not directly help the race, it does not make for the
evolution of superior turnips. So it is in Nature's
thinning and singling; it is only consistent discrim-
inate elimination that counts for much.

One hundred and thirty-six English sparrows
in America were worsted by a severe storm and
were brought benumbed into a laboratory. Sev=
enty-two revived, sixty-four perished. Professor
Rumpus made a careful comparison of the elim-
inated and the survivors with the result of showing
that the birds which perished because of the storm
were deficient as regards certain qualities in which
those that survived were stronger. In other words,
this storm, at least, was an agent in discriminate
elimination.

164 The Bible of Nature

Struggle for Existence. — In thinking of the proc-
ess of Natural Selection, it is of real importance
to recognize, with Darwin, that the phrase "strug-
gle for existence" is used "in a wide and meta-
phorical sense," including much more than an
internecine scramble for the necessaries of life —
including indeed all endeavours for preservation
and welfare, not only of the individual, but of the
offspring as well. The struggle expresses itself
not merely in an elbowing and jostling around the
platter, but at every point where the effectiveness
of response which the creature makes to the stimuli
playing upon it, is of critical moment. It is much
more than a long-drawn-out series of family quar-
rels ending in more room and food for a few sur-
viving members; it may often be more justly de-
scribed as an endeavour after well-being. And
what may have been primarily self-regarding im-
pulses become replaced by others which are dis-
tinctively species-maintaining, the self failing to
find realization apart from its family and its
kindred.

We may gain some clearness when we notice
that struggle is manifold.

(1) It may be between near kin as when a tad-
pole eats its brother tadpole, or when the em-
bryos in the dog-whelk's capsule on the shore play
the same game, and illustrate cannibalism in the
cradle, or when locust devours locust, and rat kills

The Evolution of Organisms 165

rat. Under this category we have to include the
struggles of rival males, as among stags, and the
strange struggles of the sexes, as in spiders.

(2) It may be between organisms not nearly
related, as between carnivores and herbivores,
between plants and snails.

(3) It may be between organisms and the inani-
mate environment, as between birds and the win-
ter— a form of struggle entirely non-competitive.

Or, again, we may distinguish different forms
of the struggle according to what is achieved by it
— survival from immediate death, a longer life, a
more comfortable life, a larger family, a more suc-
cessful family, and so on.

In regard to the process of elimination, we must
carefully notice that it does not necessarily mean
that those eliminated come at once to a violent
end, as when locust devours locust, or the cold deci-
mates the birds in a single night; it often means
simply that the less fit die before the average time,
or are less successful than their neighbors in rear-
ing progeny. But whether the eliminative process
be quick or slow, gentle or severe, competitive or
environmental the result is the same, that the
relatively more fit tend to survive. We need not
waste time in combating the absurd misunder-
standing that fittest means best or highest accord-
ing to any evolutionary standard; it only means
fittest relatively to given conditions. The tape-

166 The Bible of Nature

worm is not exactly what one would call a noble
animal, but after it gets settled down in its host
it is remarkably well adapted to its own peculiar
conditions of material well-being. The golden
eagle is a much finer creature than, say, the mi-
crobe of grouse disease; but, as things are, the
chances of the golden eagle's survival in Britain
are much less than those of the grouse-microbe.

There are some naturalists who will not accept
the interpretation of the struggle for existence
which has been outlined above, which seems on the
whole consistent with Darwin's. Thus Professor
Ray Lankester writes, it seems to us unwarrant-
ably, "In Nature's struggle for existence, death,
immediate obliteration, is the fate of the van-
quished." "The struggle between species is by
no means universal, but in fact very rare. The
preying of one species on another is a moderated
affair of balance and adjustment which may be
described rather as an accommodation than a
struggle." " The * struggle for existence,' to which
Darwin assigned importance, is not a struggle be-
tween species, but one between closely similar
members of the same species." ("The Kingdom
of Man," 1907.) As a matter of fact, Darwin
assigned importance to many different forms of
the struggle for existence. Even when we take
his paragraph headed, "Struggle for life most se-
vere between individuals and variations of the

The Evolution of Organisms 167

same species; often severe between species of the
same genus," we find only five illustrations, and
these are not altogether convincing.

Isolation. — Besides selection we can discern an-
other directive factor — what we call Isolation.
One of the early competent critics of Darwin's
theory of Natural Selection, Professor Fleming
Jenkins, emphasized the difficulty that variations
of small amount and sparse occurrence would tend
to be swamped out by intercrossing. In artificial
selection, the breeder takes measures to prevent
this by removing unsuitable forms and by delib-
erately pairing similar and suitable mates; but
what in Nature corresponds to the breeder ? There
are several ways of meeting this criticism, but the
one that concerns us at present is the theory of
isolation, worked out by the late Dr. Romanes, by
Mr. Gulick, and others. Attention is directed to
the great variety of ways in which, in the course of
nature, the range of intercrossing is restricted —
for instance, by geographical barriers, by differ-
ences of habit, by likes and dislikes, which re-
sult in assortive mating, by reproductive vari-
ations which cause mutual sterility between two
sections of a species living on a common area,
and so on. According to Romanes, "without
isolation, or the prevention of free intercrossing,
organic evolution is in no case possible." It has
to be confessed, however, that the body of facts

168 The Bible of Nature

in illustration of this thesis is still unsatisfactorily
small, though it is interesting to note that each
valley in the Sandwich Islands seems to have its
own particular species of snail, just as almost
every mammal has its own peculiar parasites.

An interesting corollary to the theory of isola-
tion has been pointed out by Professor Cossar
Ewart. Breeding within a narrow range often
occurs in nature as the result of geographical or
other barriers. In artificial conditions, this in-
breeding often results in the development of what
is called prepotency. This means that certain
forms have an unusual power of transmitting their
peculiarities, even when mated with dissimilar
forms. In other words, certain variations have a
strong power of hereditary persistence. There-
fore, wherever through inbreeding (which im-
plies isolation) prepotency has developed, there is
no difficulty in understanding that even a small
idiosyncrasy may come to stay. Reibmayr has
developed the interesting thesis that in the evolu-
tion of a successful human stock there must be an
alternation of long periods of inbreeding, in which
characters are fixed and prepotency developed, and
periods of outbreeding, in which fresh blood is intro-
duced and the possibility of new departures secured.

General Retrospect. — Nature, Goethe said, is a
book whose every page is full of import, and that
is particularly true of the pages of the history of the

The Evolution of Organisms 169

animate world. Here the general trend of things has
been progressive. How important if we can spell
out the mechanism of progress ! In this connection
we venture to submit some general considerations.

A Common Error as to Fortuitousness. — Many have
recoiled from a theory of evolution which seemed
to rely so much on happy chances and on the oc-
casionally apt ending of a chapter of accidents.
What have we to say to this ?

It is in part a misunderstanding of words.
When an evolutionist speaks of "fortuitous varia-
tions," he means that he is ignorant of their ante-
cedent conditions. Fluctuating variations can be
arranged so as to form a curve — the curve of the
frequency of error — the curve which we get when
we plot out measured results depending on a num-
ber of variable conditions. But the mere fact that
we can make the curve shows a certain orderliness
of distribution. Chance is a most orderly phe-
nomenon. Furthermore, there is often marked
defmiteness in continuous variation, it accumulates
generation after generation, one organ increases,
another dwindles. Furthermore, it is by no
means certain that any big step has been made by
the accumulation of minute fluctuations; it is prob-
able that discontinuous variations or mutations
have counted for much, and they are no more ac-
cidental than sudden growth is. Furthermore,
while there have been catastrophes in the course of

170 The Bible of Nature

nature, the only kind of elimination that counts in
evolution is discriminate elimination, and what is
discriminable cannot be fortuitous.

There seems to be nothing but misunderstand-
ing in the allegation that the evolutionist interpre-
tation relies on fortuitousness. If a cone falls from
the fir tree under which we are sitting and kills
a spider creeping on the ground, we say that it is
quite fortuitous that cone and spider happen to
come together at the same time in the same place.
But progress in Nature does not depend on this
sort of phenomenon. The elimination that counts
is discriminate elimination.

But are not the variations that count fortuitous ?
It is difficult to see much meaning in the term ex-
cept that we are very ignorant of the antecedent
conditions. Whether we believe that discon-
tinuous mutations are of most moment, or that the
fluctuations Darwin relied on are more important,
whether we believe that variation is due to the
stimulus of the variable body on the complex germ-
plasm or to a germinal struggle of hereditary items,
there is no good reason for calling them fortuitous.
We must get away from the wooden way of think-
ing of variations as if they were so many coins
which the organism took out of its pockets and
staked in the game of life. Variations are always
expressions of the creature's individuality, of its
creative genius; they correspond to the poet's

The Evolution of Organisms 171

fancies and the philosopher's hypotheses; they
represent organic imagination.

Preciousness of Individuality. — An evolutionary
lesson which he who runs may read concerns the
preciousness of individuality. Variations supply
the raw material of progress, and variations spell
individuality. This is one of the biological com-
monplaces which in human affairs we persistently
ignore. In the educational mill — whether of
school or of college — and in our inexorable social
criticism, how systematically we pick off the buds
of individuality — idiosyncrasies and crankiness we
say — spoiling how many flowers. It is said that
we do this to prevent failures and criminals, but are
we very successful in this prevention ? How many
of both do we make by repressing individuality?

Importance of Struggle and Endeavour. — If there is
one thing that the story of organic evolution
teaches us more than another, it is the necessity
of struggle or of endeavour. Everywhere she pro-
nounces judgment on slackness, on the unlit lamp
and the ungirt loin. Meredith writes of Nature's
sifting:

"Behold the life of ease, it drifts,
The sharpened life commands its course;
She winnows, winnows roughly, sifts
To dip her chosen in her source.
Contention is the vital force
Whence pluck they brain, her prize of gifts."

172 The Bible of Nature

More than Competitive Struggle.— At the same time,
we libel nature's method if we picture it as com-
parable to that of a gladiatorial show with its un-
compromising cry Fa? victis; if we say that her
only word is ruthless self-assertion, every one for
himself and extinction take the hindmost; if we
see only a thrusting aside and treading down of
competitors.

Tennyson, who held such a clear mirror to
Nature, writes:

" For Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can

heal,
The may-fly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd

by the strike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder
and prey."

But this is only one side of the picture.

It appears to us that the facts of mutual aid, of
social life, of kin-sympathy and of parental care
suffice to show that Huxley was in error in saying
that "the cosmic process has no sort of relation
to moral ends." This is so important that we
must consider the matter more fully.

Ethical Aspect of Organic Evolution. — For untold
ages the drama of organic evolution has been in
progress, cast succeeding cast without any one
having a real grasp of the plot. In comparatively
recent times man, though busy on the stage, has
become a calm spectator. Is it not significant of

The Evolution of Organisms 173

his critical spirit that he has come to doubt whether
the great drama is a moral spectacle ?

Darwin painted a picture of nature which has
impressed itself now on two generations of stu-
dents. Every competent judge recognizes its
strength and insight, but it is anti-Darwinian to call
it finished or perfect. The most prominent fea-
tures which it brought out were — that flux of form
which we call variation, the tendency of the river
of life to overflow its banks, the ceaseless struggle
for existence, the discriminate elimination which
results, and the subtle interrelations and adapta-
tions of the web of life. It is with the struggle for
existence that we have now especially to deal.

Darwin pointed out that the phrase "struggle
for existence" was to be taken in a wide and meta-
phorical sense, and he has a number of very inter-
esting saving clauses. But the general perspective
of his picture is clear, and leaves us with the im-
pression of a sombre, more or less sanguinary,
ceaseless struggle. We remember that the work
of Malthus influenced Darwin (as it also influ-
enced Wallace and Spencer); we may go further
and recognize some truth in Geddes' thesis that
science is a social phenomenon, and that the Dar-
winian conception was in part an unconscious pro-
jection on nature of the competitive conditions and
competitive creed of the early industrial age. A
reproduction of the picture has never the subtlety

174 The Bible of Nature

of the original, and the reproductions of the Dar-
winian picture are often rather hard and ugly
prints. Nature is represented as a continuous
Waterloo, as an endless gladiatorial show, as a
dismal cockpit. And popularizers apart, leaders
of thought like Huxley, have strengthened this
impression, which is, to say the least, one-sided.

Attempt at a Correction of the Ultra-Darwinian
Picture. — Let us make a curve of the ascent of
Vertebrates from water to dry land, and mark the
position of the leading types according to the de-
gree of their brain-development (which is gener-
ally a reliable index of structural progress). As
the curve ascends, we find that the plummet of
marital affection, the intensity of parental care,
the expression of the gentler emotions, are all on the
increase. The natural conditions in which each
is said to be for himself, are evidently not antago-
nistic to the evolution of other-regarding behaviour.

The non-gregarious mammals are outnumbered
by those that are social ; the most secure, successful,
and highly gifted birds are probably the rooks, the
cranes, and the parrots — also among the most gre-
garious; the monkeys — most of which are a feeble
folk — are strong in their sociality. It is not then
to self-assertiveness alone that Nature gives her
sanction of survival.

When we take a survey of the course of organic
nature we see hunger — self-assertion — competi-

The Evolution of Organisms 175

tion — a nutritive struggle of variable intensity.
But organisms are also reproductive, they have
species-regarding activities, altruistic impulses.
The careful brooding mother-bird is de facto al-
truistic. Hence, in part, a reproductive struggle,
in which love may be stronger than hunger — a
reproductive factor in evolution which is not wholly
concerned with self-gratification, but with self-
sacrifice as well.

The important points are (1) that many of the
big lifts in animal evolution, such as the origin of
multicellular organisms or the origin of the mam-
malian type, imply the success of variations which
cannot be regarded as of immediate individual
advantage; (2) in the process of selection the pre-
mium on teeth and claws, or beaks and talons, is no
greater than that on "the milk of animal kind-
ness" and the warmth of the maternal heart;
(3) the struggle for existence is often a quiet en-
deavour after well being. There is much gregari-
ousness, there are many peaceful solutions of
difficulty, there is frequent combination for de-
fence and attack, there is a strong feeling of kin-
ship, there is frequent cooperation and mutual
aid. The world, Diderot says, is the abode of the
strong; but it is also the home of the loving.1

1 We do not quote Nietzsche as an authority, but it is
interesting that one who preached the gospel of the
strong, and regarded the real thing in Nature as the

176 The Bible of Nature

Just as in the individual body we recognize the
cooperation of organs as well as the struggle of
parts, so in the great world of organisms we must
recognize not only competition but cooperation,
not only struggle but mutual aid, if we would draw
any sane conclusion as to the ethical import of the
great drama. As against Huxley's conclusion
that the course of organic evolution — through
"a materialized logical process" — has no ethical
suggestion except that man must try to go on the
opposite tack, it is interesting to place Geddes1
conclusion that "Nature is a materialized ethical
process," meaning by this mainly that some of the
greatest steps in organic progress are interpretable
as subordinations of the nutritive and self-regarding
to the reproductive and species-regarding activities.

We must, of course, be careful not to pass from
one anthropomorphism to another. We must be
careful not to read the man into the beast, still less
into the plant. Many animals exhibit self-sacri-
fice in the sense that they exert themselves often
to their own detriment on behalf of their young,
but this is not done out of a sense of duty any more

"Will to Rule," should have — most impudently, of course
— described Darwin as "one of those mediocre English-
men who have coarsened the mind of Europe," "an intel-
lectual plebeian, like all his nation," and should have called
the struggle for existence "an incredibly one-sided doc-
trine," as a description of the normal aspect of life in
nature,

The Evolution of Organisms 177

than in the case of a human mother. In many
cases, among insects, the mothers never see the
young for which they labour. The mother mam-
mal has no prevision of the welfare of the species,
no control of her behaviour in reference to an ideal
standard. Good she is, but not moral. None
the less, there is objective self-sacrifice, and there
is so much of it and of kindred phenomena that
we must in accuracy correct the picture of Nature
"all red in tooth and claw with ravine."

It is also evident that all the other-regarding
activities pay, and are the subjects of selective di-
rection. The selection-formula which applies to
the swiftness of the fox and the correlate swiftness
of the hare, applies also to the patient brooding
of birds and the carefulness of the mammalian
mother. Yet it seems absurd to deny that these
mothers love their children, or to assert that phys-
ical motives saturate their behaviour. Is there not
then some shifting of the theory's centre of gravity
when we expressly allow that love pays? The
whole law and gospel of Nature is not to be
summed up as "Upstairs on your neighbour's
shoulders, living or dead, each for himself in the
scrimmage and elimination take the hindmost."
On a priori grounds it seems unlikely that struggle
is the only word Nature has to say to man, or
that what we recognize as one of the great laws
of moral development — self-realization in self-

178 The Bible of Nature

sacrifice — should have no far-off counterpart in
the rest of creation. We have hinted at a posteri-
ori reasons for the belief that in this sense there
are spiritual laws in the natural world, but what
we have said must be followed up by reference
to such contributions to the subject as Kropotkin's
"Mutual Aid."

It may perhaps be objected that parasitism is a
frequent phenomenon among animals, and has
Nature's sanction of survival and success. The
parasites are indeed legion; they attain conditions
of "complete material well-being"; in spite of the
enormous odds against them, involved in their
usually intricate life-histories, full of hazardous
vicissitudes, they hold their own. Fit for certain
conditions, they survive, and survive uncommonly
well. All this is true, but it is equally true that para-
sites are stamped with the stigmata of degeneracy.

The reason why we are so much concerned with
getting away from an ultra-Darwinian picture of
Nature is not merely because it seems to us inac-
curate, but because the libellous conception pro-
jected from human society upon Nature has been
brought back again to society as a guide and
sanction of human conduct, even as an ethical and
political ideal.

"The conception of the struggle for existence,
it has been said, comes back to the explanation of
human society with all the added force of its tri-

The Evolution of Organisms 179

umph in the solution of the greatest question with
which natural science has hitherto successfully
dealt."

Let be, they say, let nature alone, let them fight
it out. Through struggle all progress has come,
contention is the world's vital force, " the survival
of the fittest," don't you know, in the struggle for
existence. Let be, let be. The law of nature is
every one for himself; there is a Hobbesian war
of each against all; all creatures are Ishmaelites;
and are not the results fair to see ?

Even if this were so, it is difficult to see why man,
conscious of all, and in a sense above all, should
fold his hands and say that Nature's method is good
enough for him. As a matter of fact, Huxley's note-
worthy thesis was that ethical progress for man
depends upon his combating the cosmic process,
pitting his microcosm against the macrocosm.

What we have been trying to show, however,
is that Nature has more to say than "Every one
for himself." There has been a selection of the
other-regarding, of the self-sacrificing, of the
gentle, of the loving.

If we wish to draw any ethical deduction from
the course of organic evolution, we must have all
the facts before us. We must not make idols of
phrases, or rest content with partial pictures,
or with projecting our social creed on Nature; we
must go to Nature itself. When we do so, we

180 The Bible of Nature

find indeed that there is often competition to the
death, much pain and suffering, very intense strug-
gle for food and foothold. We may echo Darwin's
sad words that the world is "too full of misery."
We may say with Huxley that suffering, "this
baleful product of evolution, increases in quantity
and in intensity with advancing grades of animal
organization until it attains its highest level in
man." But this is not all. We see the success of
self-sacrifice, the rewards of love, the stability of
societies, and no end of joie de vivre. We find
that the phrase struggle for existence has indeed
to be used in a wide and metaphorical sense, that
it is descriptive of the course of nature in which
the multiplication of organisms and the natural
limitations put to their desires for food, foothold,
comfort and mates, bring about a state of affairs
in which a premium is put on advantageous vari-
ations of whatever kind, and in which an elimina-
tion more rapid than natural death, or a lessening
of the normal number and success of the family,
handicaps those which are relatively unfit.

It seems important that we should try to make
up our minds whether Huxley's picture of the
course of animate nature is adequate. Must we
not recognize that progress depends on much more
than a squabble around the platter; that the strug-
gle for existence is far more than an internecine
struggle at the margin of subsistence, that it in-

The Evolution of Organisms 181

eludes all the multitudinous efforts for self and
others between the poles of love and hunger; that
self-sacrifice and love are factors in evolution as
well as self-assertion and death; that existence for
many an animal means the well-being of a socially-
bound or kin-bound creature in a social environ-
ment; that egoism is not satisfied until it becomes
altruistic ?

Emotional Value of the Evolutionary Picture. —
Finally, as to the aesthetic value of the evolution-
ary picture, let us recall Darwin's well-known
words: "To my mind it accords better with what
we know of the laws impressed on matter by the
Creator, that the production and extinction of the
past and present inhabitants of the world should
have been due to secondary causes, like those de-
termining the birth and death of an individual.
When I view all beings, not as special creations,
but as lineal descendants of some few beings who
lived before the first bed of the Silurian was de-
posited, they seem to me to become ennobled."

"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its
several powers having been originally breathed by
the Creator into a few forms or into one, and that
while this planet has gone cycling on, according to
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been and are being evolved."

V
MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE

V

MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE

Man's Zoological Position and His Distinctive Pe-
culiarities.— Science speaks with no uncertain voice
regarding man's position among other living
creatures. Zoologically regarded, Man belongs
to a special family in that order of Mammals which
we call Primates, which includes marmosets,
American Monkeys, Old World Monkeys, and
Anthropoid Apes. Of his structural resemblance
to the Anthropoid Apes in particular there is not a
shadow of doubt. It is long since Sir Richard
Owen, who was conservative on the subject, ad-
mitted the "all-pervading similitude of structure."
On the other hand, man is a very distinctive type.
He alone, after his infancy is past, walks thorough-
ly erect. His head is weighted with a heavy brain,
but it does not droop forward. With his upright
attitude, his command of vocal mechanism is per-
haps in part connected. He plants the soles of his
feet flat on the ground and he has a better heel than
the monkeys have. Comparing his head with that
of the anthropoid apes, we notice the bigger fore-
head, the less protrusive face, the smaller cheek-
bones and eye-brow ridges, the absence of cranial
185

186 The Bible of Nature

crests, the early disappearance of the junction be-
tween premaxilla and maxilla, the well-marked
chin, the more uniform teeth forming an uninter-
rupted horseshoe-shaped series without prominent
canines, and above all the massive brain which
may be three times the weight of a gorilla's. There
is no need to go into details, which have been
authoritatively stated so often. The point is, that
while man is distinctive from his heel to his chin,
from his big toe to his forehead, there is, as far as
structure is concerned, much less difference be-
tween man and gorilla than there is between
gorilla and marmoset. Every one now admits that
the distinctiveness of man from his nearest allies
depends not on anatomical peculiarities, important
as they are, but on his powers, especially on his
powers of rational discourse, of building up gen-
eral ideas, and of guiding his conduct by ideals.
Some other creatures have words, but man alone
has language — the power of expressing a judg-
ment— which is Logos. Many other creatures
have intelligence, which we can give a plausible
account of in terms of perceptual inference, but
man seems to stand alone in having reason or the
power of conceptual inference. Many other
creatures exhibit intelligent behaviour, which in a
few cases may be controlled with reference to an
objective end, as when the beavers dig a canal
through an island in the river; but, so far as we

Man's Place in Nature 187

know, it is only in man that behaviour rises into
ethical conduct. Many animals are delightfully
good, but only man is moral.

Does Resemblance Mean Relationship ? — But ad-
mitting that man, distinctive as he is, must be re-
garded as anatomically akin to the anthropoid
apes, is it necessary to go further and admit that
the homologies spell blood-relationship? Does
the "all-pervading similitude" imply affiliation?
Has there been an ascent of Man from a Simian
stock? The practically unanimous scientific an-
swer is " Yes." Before considering this answer, let
us ask what other interpretations are in the field.

It has been suggested that Man is "The Great
Exception," that while all other creatures have had
a natural evolution, Man was specially created,
that is to say, that he arose in a manner beyond
the ken of science. If this answer thoroughly
satisfies any one and is really useful to him, he
should stick to it. It is not for science to say that
it is impossible, for the only kind of impossibility
which science has to protest against is a contra-
diction in terms. The strength of the position
that Man is the great exception, with a peculiarly
supernatural origin, lies positively in the fact that
Man at his best is a very wonderful creature, and
that even at his worst he is considerably different
from an animal. It is also strengthened negatively
by the fact that Man's origin is wrapped in ob-

188 The Bible of Nature

scurity, and that the provisional hypothetical his-
tory, which zoologists and anthropologists have
tried to construct, leaves much to be desired. On
the other hand, the drawbacks to the theory are,
that it dogmatically sets a limit to the unravelling
power of science, that it insinuates a dualism into
our scientific conception of history, and that it
leaves us with the puzzle of the "all-pervading
similitude" between Man and the anthropoids.
In trying to save Man's dignity, it makes him a
conundrum.

A somewhat subtler view, which finds favour
with many, suggests that while Man as an animal
organism was evolved, he received in addition to
his natural inheritance a special supernatural en-
dowment. As an organism he sprang from the
very dust, but he also received a breath of divine
life which nature could not give, which nature can-
not take away. " There is surely," said Sir
Thomas Browne, "a piece of divinity in us; some-
thing that was before the elements, and owes no
homage unto the sun." According to Dr. Alfred
Russel Wallace, the doyen of evolutionists, the
Nestor of the Darwinian camp, the facts of Man's
higher nature compel us to postulate a special
"spiritual influx," comparable to that which inter-
vened when living organisms first appeared and
when consciousness began. If any one finds this
view thoroughly satisfactory and really useful, he

Man's Place in Nature 189

should stick to it. From our point of view it seems
premature and unnecessary. It abandons the
scientific mode of procedure while the inquiry is
still young, and the idea of spiritual influxes inter-
vening now and again to help natural evolution
over difficult stiles suggests that we have to do
with two worlds and not with only one.

Ascent of Man. — But let us now turn to the
scientific outlook. The arguments by which Dar-
win and others have sought to show that Man
arose from an ancestral type common to him and
to the higher apes, are logically the same as those
used to substantiate the general doctrine of de-
scent— that the present is the child of the past and
the parent of the future. The " Descent of Man "
is an expansion of a chapter in the "Origin of
Species." The arguments may be briefly sum-
marized :

(1) Physiological. — The bodily life of Man is
very like that of his presumed allies. Men and
monkeys are subject to similar diseases. Various
human traits of gesture and expression are paral-
leled among the brutes. Friedenthal's curious
physiological method of demonstrating blood-
relationship by similarity in the blood reactions
holds good.

(2) Morphological. — The structure of Man is
very like that of the anthropoid apes. He is dis-
tinctive, but none of his anatomical distinctions,

190 The Bible of Nature

except that of a large and heavy brain, are very
momentous. There are about eighty vestigial
structures in his muscular, skeletal, and other sys-
tems— a large museum of relics which he carries
about with him, enigmatical except in the light of
the past.

(3) Historical. — Certainties in regard to re-
mains of primitive man are few, but some of the
early skulls are nearer the Simian type than those
normal to-day. Connecting links are missing,
but fragments like those of Pithecanthropus are
suggestive if not convincing. Sometimes, more-
over, an abnormal type is born which seems to
hark back in some of its features to a pre-human
stage. And again we find in Man's individual de-
velopment stages which may be interpreted as in
a general way recapitulative of presumed ancestral
history.

It goes almost without saying that we cannot re-
gard these evidences of Man's pedigree as demon-
strative. The evidences of evolution never are.
We accept the doctrine of descent because it is
our only scientific modal interpretation of the past,
because it makes both past and present luminous
and coherent, because all the facts point to it as a
rational formula, and because we know of nothing
that can be said to contradict it. If the doctrine
of descent is true for other organisms, it is likely
to be true for Man as well.

Man's Place in Nature 191

The Difficulty of the Problem of the Ascent of Man. —
It must be admitted that the problem remains full
of difficulties. We do not know how Man arose,
or whence he came, or when he began, or where
his first home was; in short we are in a deplorable
state of ignorance on the whole subject. But con-
sider for a little each of these points, taking them
in reverse order.

The Garden of Eden is not yet known to geog-
raphers. We have only speculations as to the
cradle of the human race. We may venture on
negative statements, such as that it could not have
been in the New World, but the fewer positive
statements we make, the better.

As to the antiquity of the human race, it is cer-
tain that men lived in Europe at a time when mam-
moth and rhinoceros, hysena and lion, frequented
these parts. From the situations in which palaeo-
lithic implements have been found, it is inferred
that these must have dropped from their makers'
hands at least 150,000 years ago. And these im-
plements were not the work of novices; in their
well-finished form they compare favourably with
some of the results of twentieth-century handi-
craft. But ever so much older than those palseo-
liths are the eoliths. They probably take us back
to 300,000 years ago.

Another line of argument is this. It is certain
that Man could not have arisen from any of the

192 The Bible of Nature

existing anthropoid apes; it is a vulgar error to sup-
pose that scientific interpreters ever made any such
suggestion. It is likely, however, that Man arose
from an ancestral stock common to the anthro-
poid apes and to him. It therefore seems justi-
fiable to date the antiquity of the human race not
later than the time when the anthropoid apes are
known to have been established as a distinct
family. This takes us back to Miocene ages,
and that means many hundreds of thousands of
years ago.

Is there not something extraordinarily impres-
sive in this antiquity of our race, all the more im-
pressive when we see that it is lost against the
background of the immensely greater antiquity of
the animal world, just as that is lost against the
unthinkable antiquity of the earth ? To those who
are always in a hurry for results, as they put their
shoulders to the wheel of the cumbrous wagon
of our civilization, is there not some lesson simply
in the time the past journey has taken? As
Lowell said, we must "Learn by each discovery
how to wait."

Man as a Mutation. — As to the actual origin of
Man, we can only say that facts point to his natural
evolution from an ancestral stock common to him
and to the anthropoid apes. He probably arose
by a mutation, that is to say, by a discontinuous
variation of considerable magnitude. From the

Man's Place in Nature 193

researches of De Vries, Bateson, and others, we
know that discontinuous (or as Galton called them
"transilient") variations often occur. They rep-
resent sudden and brusque emergences of new
constitutional patterns, and they often show great
stability, i. e., they tend to breed true. The birth
of a genius gives us a hint of what a mutation may
mean, but, unfortunately, geniuses do not usually
beget geniuses. They do not breed true like
De Vries' evening primroses! In suggesting that
Man arose as a mutation, we do not mean, of
course, that he sprang suddenly to the height of
his dignity. It was perhaps more like what we see
every day in the growth of a child. Probably his
origin was like that of life itself, a great step was
suddenly taken, but it was a long time before it
began to tell. It may seem to some that there is
not much to choose between a theory of Man's
origin by a hypothetical mutation, which one
would not understand even if one knew it had oc-
curred, and a theory of Man's origin by special cre-
ation in which one does not believe. But the point
is really, whether we do or do not regard Man as
a natural and predetermined product of the ante-
cedent order of nature.

Possible Factors in the Evolution of Man. — In re-
gard to the conditions of Man's emergence as an
anthropoid genius, we can only speculate. From
what we know of men and monkeys, it seems likely

194 The Bible of Nature

that, in the struggle of primitive man, wits were
of more avail than strength. His bodily frame-
work admitted of little more perfecting, and evo-
lution "ever climbing after some ideal good" be-
gan, metaphorically speaking, to experiment with
the brain. Sir E. Ray Lankester has called atten-
tion to the interesting fact that in the early
Miocene times there was great increase in brain-
growth in several animal types, perhaps for the
same reason, that anatomical differentiation of the
rest of the system could not profitably go much
further. One of the first types to shoot ahead in
brain-development was the elephant, which was
already sagacious in Eocene times.

Now the possession of a big brain seems to
mean great " educability," i.e., power of storing
and profiting by experience.1 And man's enor-
mous brain, which does not seem to have increased
greatly in bulk since Palaeolithic times, marked a
new departure. It removed him head and shoul-
ders above the rest of creation, enabling him to
pit himself against Nature in a degree impossible
to less endowed organisms. It raised him, to his

1 "The power of building up appropriate cerebral
mechanism in response to individual experience, or what
may be called 'educability,' is the quality which charac-
terizes the larger cerebrum, and is that which has led to its
selection, survival, and further increase in volume."
E. Ray Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man" (London,
1907).

Man's Place in Nature 195

own risk, from under the inexorable sway of Nat-
ural Selection.

When the habits of walking erect, of using
sticks and stones, of building shelters, of living in
families, began — and they have begun among
monkeys — it is likely that wits would grow apace.
The prolonged gestation would perhaps help the
development of the brain and the prolonged in-
fancy, characteristic of human offspring, would
help the growth of gentleness. But even more
important is the fact that among monkeys there are
distinct societies. Families combine for protec-
tion, and the combination favours the development
of emotional and intellectual strength. Nothing
seems more certain, especially in the light of recent
investigations, than that our mind is a social prod-
uct. "Man did not make society; society made
Man."

It behooves us to be extremely careful in speak-
ing of the factors in early human evolution. We
know so little. " In the case of mankind," Hux-
ley wrote, "the self-assertion, the unscrupulous
seizing upon all that can be grasped, the tenacious
holding of all that can be kept, which constitute
the essence of the struggle for existence, have an-
swered. For his successful progress, as far as
the savage state, man has been largely indebted
to those qualities which he shares with the ape and
the tiger; his exceptional physical organization,

196 The Bible of Nature

his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity, and his
imitativeness, his ruthless and ferocious destruc-
tiveness when his anger is roused by opposition."
There is doubtless some truth in this, but it under-
appreciates what is also a plain fact of life that the
success of the Mammalian type depends in great
part on maternal care, that as Henry Drummond
said, the " struggle for the life of others" is as
important as the struggle for personal subsistence.
Repugnance to the Scientific Interpretation. — Many
who are not unwilling to admit that there is a
certain grandeur in the doctrine of descent as
applied to plants and animals, express a strong
repugnance to the whole idea of the Descent of
Man. It may be useful to inquire into this re-
pugnance, which is expressed by many clear-
headed and noble-minded men and women. To
some extent, it is due to misunderstanding. Peo-
ple run off with the mistaken idea that evolution-
ists try to prove that the chimpanzee is their second
cousin or something of that sort; or they fancy
that Man, according to biology, is no more than a
freak, a strangely fortunate ending of a chapter of
accidents. Or the reasons for the repugnance may
have an aesthetic basis, since some people dislike
anything in the nature of embryos, preferring to
picture their ancestors always with gray hairs.
They will not look on the rock whence they were
hewn or into the pit whence they were digged.

Man's Place in Nature 197

This is a question of taste, and cannot be argued
about. To most naturalists development is the
most beautiful thing in the world, and the Hebrew
psalmist was not averse to reminding himself how
his members were fashioned when as yet there was
none of them. More serious, however, is the idea
that if Darwin's Descent of Man be true, then Man
loses dignity, sanctity, and ethical value. In the
first place, perhaps, it should be noted that the
scientific interpretation discloses man as a pre-
determined masterpiece of nature, as a creature
whose making meant ages of patience, whose birth
came about after long travail. Is there loss of
dignity and sanctity in this? And again, the
more Man is seen as of a piece with nature, as her
finest flower, the more meaning does nature come
to have for him. She becomes indeed his Alma
Mater.

A simple consideration, which is always use-
ful, is that the value of any product is independent
of its far-off origin. Our appreciation of things
is usually based on what they are, and on what
they seem likely to become; it is not affected by
their remote pedigree. A bird is not less a bird
because the avian stock arose from among the
reptiles. It is true, of course, that breeding
counts, but that is quite another matter; immediate
ancestry is always important because the indi-
vidual inheritance is a living mosaic of parental

198 The Bible of Nature

and ancestral contributions. But when a great
step in evolution has been taken — such as the
origin of Vertebrates, or of any of the great classes
of Vertebrates — Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, or
Mammals — our estimate of the advance made is
not affected by our knowledge of the origin. To
depreciate man because he had non-human an-
cestors is like judging a statue by the quarry. Is
it a poor genealogy that the naturalists give man ?
But man may always say " Je suis un ancetre"

Perhaps the deepest repugnance is due to the
misunderstanding to which we have already al-
luded, that according to science Man was a happy
accident. But whatever careless writers may have
said, this is not the scientific view. Take a sen-
tence rather from one of the foremost exponents —
Professor E. Ray Lankester: "Man is held to be
a part of Nature, a product of the definite and
orderly evolution which is universal; a being re-
sulting from and driven by the one great nexus
of mechanism which we call Nature." This may
not be the whole truth about Man, but here at any
rate there is no suggestion of fortuity. Again he
writes, " Man forms a new departure in the grad-
ual unfolding of Nature's predestined scheme."
Mr. Balfour writes in the "Foundations of Belief"
(p. 75): "An irrational universe which acciden-
tally turns out a few reasoning animals at one
corner of it, as a rich man may experiment at one

Man's Place in Nature 199

end of his park with some curious " sport" acci-
dentally produced among his flocks and herds, is
a Universe which we might well despise, if we did
not ourselves share its degradation." This is
hard hitting; but the rational Universe which ad-
mits of scientific formulation, does not turn out
its masterpieces accidentally.

It is not necessary to enter into a discussion of
Naturalism1 which is a particular scientific phi-
losophy with a name that one cannot but grudge
to it. But when Mr. Balfour says that Man, ac-
cording to Naturalism, is "no more than a phe-
nomenon among phenomena, a natural object
among other natural objects, his very existence an
accident, his story a brief and transitory episode
in the life of one of the meanest of the planets,"
we must submit that there is more in such a state-
ment than science warrants. " His very existence
is an accident," is not a scientific statement; we
do not know of any great step in Nature that has
been taken by accident. We may use a word like
"episode" if we choose, but whatever be our
view of man, it must include the fact that he has
given a scientific interpretation of nature and of
his place in it.

Naturalism finds the permanent reality of the
Universe simply in the world as revealed to us

1 See R. Otto, "Naturalism and Religion," Trans., Lon-
don, 1907.

200 The Bible of Nature

through perception or through the spectacles of
Natural Science. But the whole hierarchy of the
sciences speaks of another reality which cannot be
sense-perceived, and even with scientific spectacles
we cannot but be aware of the fundamental mys-
teriousness of Nature, though we may not
therewith be able to discern that "higher nature
in nature which makes us men." Naturalism de-
nies any real causality to the personal agent and
makes consciousness no more than inactive control.
But it is difficult to doubt the genuine conscious
activity of the subject. It seems the surest of all
scientific facts. Ideas have hands and feet, as
Hegel said, and move the world. One may ask,
indeed, whether the existence of a material world
per se — a system of unconscious forces — a self-
acting machine — is a thinkable idea at all.

Human Conduct and Animal Behaviour. — In the
ordinary man's daily activity we can readily dis-
tinguish various grades. There is usually a good
deal of habitual routine, the determination of
which does not rise to the focus of consciousness
at all. Lower than this is some instinctive be-
haviour, and there are reflex activities often of con-
siderable complexity. On the other hand, the
man often passes beyond habitual routine to do
something which is positively intelligent. Now
and again we must describe his activity as rational
conduct. It almost goes without saying that the

Man's Place in Nature 201

greater part of his activity is non-ethical, that is
to say, it is not consciously determined in reference
to general ideas or ideals, with their attendant feel-
ings as impulses. Some highly moralized men
and women are able to give an ethical note to a
great part of their daily activity, but this is not
the way with most, though at almost any turn a
commonplace act may acquire ethical value. By
ethical conduct we do not necessarily mean good
conduct, but conduct deliberately controlled in
relation to some ideal — in most cases, doubtless,
one that makes for progressive righteousness.

When a man is hungry he usually leaves his
work or his play and goes to dine — obedient to an
organic signal which sounds in the philosopher
as well as in his dog. Instinctively or by force of
habit, he neither hurries nor eats more than is
customary at the time. Ethically, he may refrain
from something which he is fond of, which inter-
feres with his effectiveness as a workman.

Moreover, an action which was ethical to one
generation or time of life need not remain so. We
live in the hope of this. It was an ethical act on
our forefather's part not to overeat himself, and
to refrain from killing his enemy, but it costs none
of us much ethical effort to avoid gluttony in solids
and to abstain from rapid murder. Thus, in a sense,
we become happier and better as we become less
ethical — as our virtues become more instinctive.

202 The Bible of Nature

Among animals we find the same inclined plane
of activities as in man, with this difference that
there is no convincing evidence of ethical conduct.
Instinctive activities — which depend on inborn
capacities and require neither education or experi-
ence for their performance, though they may be
improved thereby — often bulk largely; intelligent
behaviour, up to the limits of what can be rede-
scribed in terms of perceptual inference — is wide-
spread, but in the strict sense there is no evidence
of reason or of morals. Animals may be most
loving mates, most careful parents, faithful to their
friends, brave to the death for their near kin, but
— poor creatures — they are not moral agents.
As Nietzsche said, "their virtue is free from any
moralic acid." Animal behaviour differs from
human conduct for lack of a conceived purpose.
Not that animals are automata or wholly instru-
ments in Nature's hand, but their purposefulness
is at most perceptual.

It seems, then, that the whole range of activity,
which is non-rational and non-ethical, is in a very
real sense common ground for man and beast, al-
ways allowing that in man's case the activity may
be at any moment rationalized or moralized. A
day of routine work, performed without definite
pleasure or pain, without definite effort or con-
trol, but just "gone through with," is often lived
by man, but it is hardly human, not to speak

Man's Place in Nature 203

of ethical. Yet we all know of many who can
transform their dreary "day's darg" into a dis-
cipline of nobility — thus raising it higher than its
own poor merits do above the daily activity of that
exemplar of our childhood — the busy bee. On the
other hand, the bees are perhaps happier, till the
winter of their discontent draws near; they may be
troubled with parasites, but not with ideals. As
Walt Whitman said — so truly — of animals in gen-
eral— "They do not sweat and whine about their
condition; they do not lie awake in the dark and
weep for their sins; they do not make me sick
discussing their duty — not one is respectable or
unhappy in the whole world."

As we study animal life we see a gradual emer-
gence of the fundamental springs of conduct which
we find — transmuted of course — in ourselves.
Starting with the simple protoplasts, responsive
to oxygen, warmth, food, and one another, and
also exhibiting in some cases a selective behaviour
which we cannot redescribe in physical and chem-
ical terms, we can hypothetically trace the evo-
lution of behaviour. Very important steps were
the formation of a "body" of which death was
the price, the beginning of bilateral symmetry, the
consequent acquisition of head brains, the differ-
entiation of the sexes. From the stages now per-
sistent at different grades of the animal kingdom,
we infer that from a primary hunger there arose

204 The Bible of Nature

that other prime-mover — Love — which almost
alone disputes hunger's claims with success. The
originally simple attraction between the sexes
becomes gradually associated with aesthetic at-
tractions, psychical sympathies, and practical co-
operation in work, and fondness is sublimed into
Love. This expands till it laps the family in its
folds, returns enhanced to the pair, and broadens
out again to the kindred. Along another line the
primary hunger becomes differentiated into desire
to avoid pain, to increase comfort and well-being,
to realize the self. As in mankind, the egoistic
and altruistic, the self-preserving and other-re-
garding impulses intertwine, so that at the end
they are no more distinguishable than at the be-
ginning.

Has Human Conduct Evolved from Animal Be-
haviour ? — A study of animal behaviour seems to in-
dicate that while we may not be justified in crediting
animals with reason or with morals in the strict
sense, we must credit them with what may be
called the raw materials of morality — with af-
fection, gentleness, and self-sacrifice, with jealousy,
vanity, self-assertiveness, and so on through a long
list. The fundamental motives are all there.

But in what sense, if any, may it be said that
human conduct has evolved from "animal be-
haviour" ? It appears to us that the true answer
is, that man inherited from his pre-human an-

Man's Place in Nature 205

cestry what may be called a set of primary im-
pulses, which he immediately proceeded to raise
to a higher power by virtue of his peculiarly in-
creased cerebral complexity. What we mean
may be illustrated by considering the case of
language.

It seems certain that not a few animals have
definite words, expressive of particular emotional
states or with particular significance of some sort.
Even the chick has some half-dozen words and
the dog perhaps more, both excelling in vocabu-
lary the infant who has no language but a cry.
But no animal is known to have the power of ex-
pressing a judgment, however simple, which is the
essence of language. It may be, as John Oliver
Hobbes says, that "a dog can put more soul into a
look than a kind friend can talk in an hour," but
we have no warrant for supposing that the dog's
sympathy, even when expressed in a welcoming
bark, has any general idea behind it.

Now, while we cannot doubt that Man has in-
herited his brains and the centre of speech and his
vocal cords from simpler non-human ancestors,
we cannot say that his language was directly
evolved from their speech. What was evolved
was the Man, with a more complex cerebral struc-
ture; and language is a human product. The po-
tentiality of it, the raw materials of it, were pre-
human, but so far as we know, language is solely

206 The Bible of Nature

human. Even if we knew precisely what cerebral
differentiations and integrations are conditionally
associated with Man's higher powers, even if we
could place these in line with a series of progressive
changes in animals, we should still have to say —
"The Man arose, an organism at length rational;
to him all things became new — he spoke, and he
was moral." In other words, while we need not
despair of finding among animals the analogues,
the rudiments, the Anlagen of language and con-
science, we need not hope to discover the phyletic
history of these powers by studying animals. In-
creasing cerebral complexity made a higher in-
telligence possible, and both language and con-
science date from that dawn.

When we consider how it stands with our feel-
ings and those of animals, we find a certain degree
of common ground — such as fear of enemies, dis-
like of pain, sexual passion, jealousy of rival mates,
parental affection and the like. On a second plane
are those feelings which though shared with ani-
mals are peculiarly modified in the case of Man,
through association with ideas rather than sense-
experiences. On a third plane are those feelings
of which Man seems to be sole possessor, such as
modesty, remorse, reverence, and religious emo-
tion. The "moral feelings" closely associated
with our ethical judgments and entering into the
composition of what we call conscience, such as

Man's Place in Nature . 207

"shame for evil done," remorse for injury in-
flicted, "pleasure in good as such," are unique
in man, with only dim analogues in the beast, and
hardly recognizable buds in the young child.

The two opposed errors which we have to avoid
are, too absolute separation, and too complete !
identification. In regard to the first it is obvious
that we cannot prove that any given emotion in the
dog is closely akin to one in man; there is no se-
cretion to be analyzed, and the expressions in
gesture and physiognomy, though very valuable
indices of what is passing within, afford insuffi-
cient basis for identification. Notwithstanding,
our faith in the unity of nature leads us to suppose
two apparently similar emotions in man and beast
to be in general nature alike except where there is
good reason to believe them different, e. g., when
the human form of the feeling in question has ob-
viously been influenced by general ideas. It is
easy to see some difference between the jealousy
of a stag and the jealousy of a man; but it is equally
easy to see differences between the jealousy of two
men. One man's jealousy is comforted by a ;£50
note, another's is cruel as the grave.

On the other hand, we have to avoid the error
of hasty identification. By experience, definitized
in some sort of social convention, rooks recognize
the eighth commandment in the rookery; perhaps
men began to recognize it in a similar way. But

208 The Bible of Nature

as things are, rooks obey the convention by a ne-
cessity of a somewhat lower order than that which
moves the virtuous man, who is moved by a
thought of racial and social consequences, or by
a conception of what is fit for conduct universal.
In man's case, moreover, the matter is compli-
cated theoretically — though simplified practically
— by the high development of what might be
called the external conscience, embodied in social
traditions, institutions, and laws. In short, just
as we find in animals perceptual inferences but not
conceptual inferences, so we find no feelings born
of general ideas. Animals may be kind, gentle,
devoted, and rich in good feelings, but they have
no moral feelings or conscience.

At the same time, one cannot doubt that ani-
mals have the power of controlling present con-
duct in reference to an end more or less distant.
Apart from the habitual inhibitory powers of
trained animals, there are many such cases; thus
it is difficult to believe that beavers, who cut a
canal across an island or across the bend of a river,
have not a perception of the end to be gained.
The labor hardly justifies itself until the work is
done. But at the most this is a concrete ideal.
It would be an error, however, to exaggerate this
distinction as if it were quite absolute. It seems
more likely that intelligence and reason, the powers
of perception and conception, will merge, for just as

Man's Place in Nature 209

species are only arcs of curves, marked off for our
convenience, so is it with many other distinctions
equally legitimate and useful.

In the history of the cosmos, the emergence of
the first living animals marked a new era. There
was a new synthesis of matter and energy, the
secret of which is hidden.

In the history of animals the establishment of a
centralized nervous system and the associated
beginning of a unified experience marked another
new era.

Similarly, the origin of Man implied a new
series of differentiations and integrations of which
we get some hint from a study of the child. With
Man all things became new.

Thus it seems that to look for morals in the beast
is like looking for a backbone in a worm. What
we may look for is an Anlage, a primordium, a
rudiment of that tissue, so to speak, from which
reason, conscience, and language, and other dis-
tinctively human qualities had their origin. But
the real crossing of the Rubicon was due to cere-
bral mutation. In so saying, it must be remem-
bered that no scientific formula-word lessens the
magnitude of the step which was taken. We agree
with the philosopher who says that "the breach
between ethical man and pre-human nature con-
stitutes, without exception, the most important
fact which the universe has to show."

210 The Bible of Nature

Huxley's Thesis as Regards Human and Cosmic
Evolution. — We must now return to the argument
expounded by Huxley in his "Romanes Lecture
on Evolution and Ethics." The argument was
that the mechanism of organic evolution is natural
selection in an inexorable struggle for existence,
in which there is nothing but ruthless self-asser-
tion, a treading down of rivals, a gladiatorial show,
more or less enduring suffering, and the result of
which is merely the survival of the most suitable,
not of the best in any sense. If this be so, then
"the practice of that which is ethically best — what
we call goodness or virtue — involves a course of
conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that
which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for
existence." "Social progress means the checking
of the cosmic process at every step, and the substi-
tution for it of the ethical process, the end of which
is not the survival of the fittest, but the survival
of those ethically the best." Man must pit his
microcosm against the macrocosm, and he must
not be discouraged. " Man alone," as Goethe said,
"can achieve the impossible." The dwarf by his
intelligence can bend the Titan to his will in mat-
ters practical, so may it be in the domain of morals.
"The intelligence which has converted the brother
of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock
ought to be able to do something toward curbing
the instincts of savagery in civilized men." But,

Man's Place in Nature 211

"let us understand, once for all, that the ethical
progress of society depends, not on imitating the
cosmic process, still less in running away from it,
but in combating it." " The practice of that which
is ethically best — what we call goodness or virtue —
involves a course of conduct, which, in all respects,
is opposed to that which leads to success in the
cosmic struggle for existence." Nature has many
voices, but Huxley could hear no helpful word for
man in his endeavor after better-being. Similarly,
so far as we understand, Professor James, of Har-
vard, in his lecture, "Is Life Worth Living?" also
gives Nature up, finding no "universe," but a
"multiverse"; "all plasticity and indifference," a
"harlot" and "mere weather."

In Huxley's thesis we recognize several truths,
but not the whole truth. It is useful inasmuch as
it emphasizes the difference between man and pre-
human nature, between the %u>ov \oyiicbv TTO\I,TUCOV
(f)L\d\Xrj\ov (the rational, social, and altruistic
organism of the Stoics) and the rest of creation.
It is useful, since it hints at the fact that we can-
not find any ethical conduct in the strict sense in
even the most loving of animals, though it perhaps
exaggerates this difference. It is useful inasmuch
as it presses home the truth that man as a personal
agent has emerged from the drastic rule of Nat-
ural Selection; he is Nature's rebellious child and
must continue to rebel if he is to continue to hold

212 The Bible of Nature

his own, still more if he is to make progress. It
is useful inasmuch as it emphasizes the fact that
ethical progress must always be a struggle, an en-
deavor, a fight as St. Paul said. On the other
hand, we would dissent from Huxley's reasoning
on the following grounds:

(1) Huxley does not appear to us to have given a
just picture of the cosmic process. He used far too
much red. Is it not the case that, while the logic
of organic evolution always remains the same,
the significance of the process changes when we
observe that the milk of animal kindness is se-
lected as well as teeth and claws, that maternal
care is selected as well as paternal belligerence,
that the world is not merely the battlefield of the
strong, but the home of the loving ? According to
Huxley, life has been and is a continual free fight,
and beyond the limited and temporary relations
of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against
all has been and is the normal state of existence.
But, as Kropotkin observes, this has as little claim
to be taken as a scientific deduction as the opposite
view of Rousseau, who saw in nature nothing but
love, peace, and harmony (disturbed by the ac-
cession of man).

Almost every critic has pointed out that Huxley
could not himself adhere to his gladiatorial show
picture. Somewhat contradictorily and some-
what grudgingly he added in the appendix a note

Man's Place in Nature 213

to the following effect: "Of course, strictly speak-
ing, social life and the ethical process in virtue of
which it advances toward perfection, are part and
parcel of the general process of Evolution, just as
the gregarious habit of innumerable plants and
animals, which has been of much service to them,
is." "Among birds and mammals, societies are
formed, of which the bond in many cases seems to
be purely psychological; that is to say, it appears to
depend upon the liking of the individuals for one
another's company. The tendency of individuals
to over-self-assertion is kept down by righting.
Even in these rudimentary forms of society, love
and fear come into play, and enforce a greater or
less renunciation of self-will. To this extent the
general cosmic process begins to be checked by a
rudimentary ethical process, which is, strictly
speaking, part of the former, just as the "gov-
ernor" in a steam engine is part of the mechanism
of the engine."

It may be pointed out that the sentence, "The
tendency of individuals to over-self-assertion is
kept down by fighting," is, for many cases, a quite
unverifiable statement, but let that pass. It is
more to the point to notice that to admit a rudi-
mentary ethical process to a r°le like that of the
"governor" is admitting much; in fact, it rather
takes the edge off his previous argument. But
in spite of his appendix, Huxley leaves the reader

214 The Bible of Nature

with the impression that the self-assertion of the
strong at the expense of the weak is the universal
law of nature.

(2) Moreover, while it is quite true that the cos-
mic process leads to the survival of the fittest for
given conditions, not necessarily to the survival
of the noblest or the most beautiful or, in any way
but one, the best; that the parasite is the result of
selection just as much as the paragon of creation ;
that if the northern hemisphere became glacial
again, the fittest creatures would be lichens and
snow plants; does not Huxley's argument tend to
obscure the fact that, after all, there has been a
progressive evolution of finer and freer types in
the course of the ages ? The cosmic process may
have "no sort of relation to moral ends," but it has
led up to most marvellous masterpieces, along any
line you choose to follow, and notably along that
line which leads to man. Has it " no sort of rela-
tion to moral ends,"1 when it has led up along
many lines to extraordinary exhibitions of parental
sacrifice and altruistic devotion? Has it "no
sort of relation to moral ends," if it puts a premium
on health, vigor, self-control, temperance?

(3) Speaking of the more or less sound argu-

1 It seems rather strange that Huxley in disclaiming any
ethical note in organic evolution should have persistently
used phrases like "ruthless self-assertion," or "the un-
fathomable injustice of the nature of things."

Man's Place in Nature 215

ments in favor of the theory that the moral senti-
ments have arisen in the same way as other natural
phenomena, by a process of evolution, Huxley said,
"but as immoral sentiments have no less been
evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction
for the one as the other. The thief and the
murderer follow nature just as much as the philan-
thropist." " Cosmic evolution may teach us how
the good and evil tendencies of man may have
come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to
furnish any better reason,1 why what we call good
is preferable to what we call evil, than we had be-
fore."

Is this really so ? On the contrary, it seems that

1 It is difficult to understand what Huxley meant by
''better reason." We must first ask whether the study of
cosmic evolution furnishes any reason why well-doing is
preferable to ill-doing. It is not to be expected that it
will furnish any more convincing reason than the study of
human history furnishes. Without raising any deep
questions we may surely agree that good conduct in man
is that which, on the whole, makes for evolution — for
progress along the line indicated by the ascent of man,
that it makes for health, clear minds, fulness and freedom
of life, a happier and more harmonious society, and so on.
It is thus in a line with that kind of doing which among
animals has persisted, and is the opposite of that kind of
doing which, as it crops up in Protean guise, is subjected
to elimination, or, in the case of parasites, to degradation,
to a loss, for instance, of the- nervous and muscular activi-
ties which make life most worth living. As already ex-
plained, it seems to us futile to look among animals for
any ethical conduct in the strict sense.

216 The Bible of Nature

the naturalists are right who point out that what we
may call "crime" does not flourish in Nature, ex-
cept in a few rare cases such as that of the cuckoo ;
that it is the law of the forest that certain conven-
tions of mutual regard be observed (during hunting
at least even the wolves of the pack must forget
their private quarrels); and that the reward of
great success attends those creatures that excel
in sociality, such as the ants and the bees, the
rooks and the cranes, the beavers and the monkeys.
That man has almost exterminated the beaver
does not affect this argument.

Besides, we should remember that what corre-
sponds to virtue in Man is in great measure neces-
sarily represented simply by vigor among animals,
and that here Nature's verdict is clear. Disease
is very rare unless man interferes. To say that
well-doing has only as much natural sanction as
ill-doing seems like saying that disease has as
much natural sanction as health. On the con-
trary, it has so little that in extra-human condi-
tions1 diseased organisms are in most cases
rapidly eliminated. Nature's verdict is quite
clear.

(4) In general terms, Nature's method of or-

1 Professor Ray Lankester points out that almost the
only case of a persistent microbic disease among animals
in a state of nature is that of the phosphorescent sand-
hoppers on the French coast; and perhaps even this is due
to some human interference with their environment.

Man's Place in Nature 217

ganic evolution is the elimination of unfit varia-
tions, the selection of fit variations, and this as a
formula remains for us — perhaps the greatest
lesson that Nature teaches. As we have seen,
the modes of selection differ widely, though the
logic of the process is always the same. We sub-
mit, therefore, that in social progress we have not
to combat Nature's method, but to follow it, and
that we do so every time that we favor the vir-
tuous and thwart the vicious, every time that we
reject an ugly product and choose a beautiful one,
every time that we vote against militarism and
make for peace. It is our prerogative to select
those forms of struggle which seem most likely to
favor the survival of our human ideals.

(5) Finally, another consideration may be sug-
gested. Is it not generally admitted that the moral
ideal is one of self-realization through social
service, a self-realization which implies a willing-
ness to be immersed and even lost in the good
of the whole? And is this not also the deeper
aspect of Nature's strategy, that the individual
organism realizes itself in its interrelations, and
has to submit to being lost that the larger welfare
of the whole may be served? To sum up, our
general conclusion may be stated thus: "We see
that it is possible to interpret the ideals of ethical
progress — through love and sociality, cooperation
and sacrifice — not as mere Utopias contradicted

218 The Bible of Nature

by experience, but as the highest expressions of
the central evolutionary process of the natural
world. As evolutionary biologists we are thus
practically with moralist and theologian, even with
poet and sentimentalist, if you will, against the
' vulgar economist* of Ruskin, or the self-styled
'practical politician* of to-day."1

Retrospect. — So far, we have considered man as
an organism, the long result of time, the pre-
destined outcome of a long-drawn-out orderly
process, the heir of all the ages. We see him
emerging, to use Walt Whitman's quaint phrase,
"stuccoed all over with quadrupeds."

We then saw, however, that man, because he
is man, has freed himself from passive subordina-
tion to the cosmic mechanism — in a much greater
degree than any other creature. He will not be
tied to his mother's apron strings, though he often
returns to her wearied. He will make a kingdom
for himself — an imperium in imperio; he pits him-
self against the cosmic processes.

We have thus simply hinted at another chapter
— how man actively uses Nature for his own ad-
vancement, for fuller self-realization, for the de-
velopment of his spirit. The servant becomes a
master, the searcher an interpreter, and the prod-
uct of evolution furnishes a key to the whole.

•Thomson and Geddes, in "Ideals of Science and
Faith/' London, 1905, p. 73.

Man's Place in Nature 219

Value of the Evolutionary Conception of Man. — In
accordance with the philosophical temper of the
time, we must now ask what the evolutionary in-
terpretation of man is good for. What is the value
of the view that science takes of man's place in
Nature? Nietzsche said that history has three
great uses — a monumental use, perpetuating the
memory of great deeds and great men; an anti-
quarian use, showing the living hand of the past in
the present; and a critical use, enabling us to
estimate the present provisional order of things by
comparing it with what has been before. So the
evolution-doctrine has a monumental use, re-
minding us of great events in the past; an anti-
quarian use, showing the solidarity of what is and
what has been; and a critical use, enabling us to
judge of the present trend of things in the light of
past history.

In the first place, is it not of great significance
that, while science does not pretend to deal at all
with ultimate realities or with the purpose of evo-
lution, it can give a provisional intelligible history
of things and living creatures and man himself —
intelligible in the sense that it is a genetic descrip-
tion of what has occurred. This, it seems to us, is
the greatest contribution which science makes to
human thought. As Professor Pringle-Pattison
says: "The postulate which underlies every sci-
entific induction is the intelligibility of the uni-

220 The Bible of Nature

verse — the belief, in other words, that we are living
in a cosmos, not a chaos, the belief that the Power
at work in the Universe will not put us to per-
manent intellectual confusion. This is an ultimate
trust, which is not capable of demonstration,
though progressively verified and justified by every
step we take in the intellectual conquest of the world."

Again, looking at the Evolution-idea quite gen-
erally as the largest contribution which Natural
Science has made to human thought, may we not
augue to some purpose in this fashion ? Science
looks backward to a beginning, and says there is
nothing in the end which is not also in the begin-
ning. Philosophy looks forward to an end which
illustrates the significance of the whole. Science
uses the amoeba in its interpretation of man,
philosophy uses man in its interpretation of the
amoeba. There are doubtless difficulties in both
interpretations; we have seen that the scientific one
is far from easy. But they are not opposed to
one another and they seem equally natural to all
of us, though we may not be expert in following
up either of them. We cannot mix them up to-
gether, but neither can we hold them in insulation
in our thinking. They are complementary out-
looks on the world.

The embryologist describes the development of
an individual bird, he uses the fertilized egg-cell
as his starting-point, he believes that this in some

Man's Place in Nature 221

way contains the potentiality of all that is to follow
— intelligent behavior included, always admitting,
of course, that the organism, as it develops, trades
with its legacy of talents, using time to gather into
itself the influences of environmental nurture. In
his science the biologist tries to take the developing
egg just for what it seems to him to be — a growing
mass of protoplasmic units — self-differentiating,
self-regulating, autonomous. He does not use
the intelligence of the adult as a factor in em-
bryonic development, for he can describe the se-
quences without using psychological terms, and
he must keep to that method. Yet, for the life of
him, he cannot forget that the egg becomes an in-
telligent creature, and in his whole thought of the
egg he must see it in relation to its end.

Similarly, the evolutionist describes the history
of the race of birds, using a reptilian stock, and long
before that a Protist stock as his starting-point.
He believes that his beginning in some way in-
cludes the potentiality of all that follows, but in
his method he tries to take each stage just for what
it seems to him to be. He cannot credit the
Protists with a central nervous system, though he
believes that they have the remote potentiality of
it. Yet, for the life of him, he cannot forget that
the original Protists must have had in them the
promise and potency of all that follows, always re-
membering that each stage gathers the results of

222 The Bible of Nature

time into itself. In his whole thought of the evo-
lution, he must see it in relation to the end. In
short, in philosophical language, "If the lower
carries in it the promise and potency of the higher,
then how can we substantiate the lower as out of
relation to the higher in which we read the mean-
ing of the whole development ? " (A. S. Pringle-
Pattison.)

Inheritance. — Let us think for a moment of the
fundamental fact of inheritance.1 As Huxley says ^

"Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his
parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More par-
ticularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way,
which we call 'character,' is often to be traced through a
long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may
justly say that this 'character'— this moral and intellectual
essence of a man— does veritably pass over from one
fleshly tabernacle to another and does really transmigrate
from generation to generation. In the new-born infant,
the character of the stock lies latent and the Ego is little
more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early,
these become actualities; from childhood to age they
manifest themselves in dullness or brightness, weakness
or strength, viciousness or uprightness; and with each
feature modified by confluence with another character, if
by nothing else, the character passes on to its incarnation
in new bodies."

Now let us extend this conception a little. From

1 See J. Arthur Thomson, " Heredity," Murray, London,
1908.
> "Evolution and Ethics," p. 14.

Man's Place in Nature 223

the scientific outlook man is seen as the child of
nature. He is the "last inheritor and the last re-
sult" of a pedigree which goes back for millions
of years, the last manifestation of a Karma which
has been gradually modified since the time when
life appeared upon the earth. More immediately
the paragon of animals is a scion of a Simian stock.
Thus, perhaps, we can better understand the beast
in the man. Much of the inherent sinfulness which
vexes the righteous soul, is the outcrop — the re-
crudescence— of ancestral habits. We need no
elaborate theory of it. We have to let the ape and
tiger die, and they often die hard. We rise on
stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things,
but the grave clothes hang about us, as about
Lazarus, hampering our steps.
Huxley goes on to say:

"After the manner of successful persons, civilized man
would gladly kick down the ladder by which he has
climbed. He would be only too pleased to see 'the ape
and tiger die.' But they decline to suit his convenience;
and the unwelcome intrusion of these boon companions
of his hot youth into the ranged existence of civilized life
adds pains and griefs, innumerable and immeasurably
great, to those which the cosmic process necessarily brings
on the mere animal. In fact, civilized man brands all
these ape and tiger promptings with the name of sins;
he punishes many of the acts which flow from them as
crimes; and, in extreme cases, he does his best to put an
end to the survival of the fittest of former days by axe and
rope."

224 The Bible of Nature

"Return to Nature." — Another corollary drives
home a consideration which often seems so im-
practicable that we wriggle away from it. It is the
value of "a return to nature" in one sense of that
much-abused phrase. Biologists are familiar with
the fact that, if an inheritance is to find appropri-
ate expression, the organism must develop in an
appropriate environment. Otherwise, potentiali-
ties will not be realized, the legacy cannot be
cashed. Now, if our natural inheritance has been
determined in the distant past under conditions
that imply close contact with nature — emotional
as well as practical — it seems common sense that
we and our children will always be handicapped
unless we can renew the contact. This is part of
the true inwardness of the " Nature-study " move-
ment, the rus in urbe, and the garden-city. This
is, in part, the gospel according to Wordsworth,
and according to Thoreau.

There is, however, another side to this. There
were conditions of life in ancient days which man-
kind can never seriously wish to know again. A
struggle around the platter of bare subsistence, as
of pigs around the feeding-trough, should be an
impossible phenomenon among men. Yet, through
our selfishness and folly, we often sink back into
vital conditions which are horrible anachronisms,
which are inhuman and brutal, and then we
wonder at a recrudescence of hooliganism, licen-

Man's Place in Nature 225

tiousness, and savagery. There is no cause for
wonder. By restoring the undesirable stimuli we
have reawakened the beast in the man, the ape
once more gibbers folly and the tiger whets his
teeth. We have given new life to the latent
germs of brutality, which, otherwise, would gradu-
ally die away.

The Yoke of Natural Selection. — A third corollary
is not less important. There is one sense, at least,
in which we can never "return to nature," unless
we cease to be human. We can never resume the
yoke of natural selection which even early man
began to wriggle out of, which man has been more
and more effectively throwing off as the ages have
passed. Professor Ray Lankester has put this
point with splendid clearness.:

"The mental qualities which have developed in Man,
though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition
in some of his animal associates, are of such an unprece-
dented power and so far dominate everything else in his
activities as a living organism, that they have to a very
large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from the general
operation of that process of Natural Selection and sur-
vival of the fittest which up to their appearance has been
the law of the living world. They justify the view that
man forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of
Nature's predestined scheme. Knowledge, reason, self-
consciousness, will, are the attributes of Man.

"Nature's inexorable discipline of death to those who
do not rise to her standard — survival and parentage for
those alone who do — has been from the earliest times more

226 The Bible of Nature

and more definitely resisted by the will of Man. If we
may, for the purpose of analysis, as it were, extract man
from the rest of Nature of which he is truly a product and
part, then we may say that Man is Nature's rebel. Where
Nature says 'Die I' Man says 'I will live.'

"Civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference
with extra-human nature, has produced for himself and
the living organisms associated with him such a special
state of things by his rebellion against natural selection,
and his defiance of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that
he must either go on and acquire firmer control of the
conditions, or perish miserably by the vengeance certain
to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We
may indeed compare civilized man to a successful rebel
against Nature, who by every step forward renders him-
self liable to greater and greater penalties, and so cannot
afford to pause or fail in one single step. . . . Man,
whilst emancipating himself from the destructive methods
of natural selection, has accumulated a new series of
dangers and difficulties with which he must incessantly
contend."

The Hopefulness of the Evolutionist Outlook. — In
general, it seems to us that the evolutionary view
is one that inspires and encourages. It is an as-
cent, not a descent, that is behind us, and there are
no limits to set to our advance. Perhaps, indeed,
we shall advance more quickly as we become more
vividly conscious that our fates are in our own
hands. We are no longer as those who look back
to a Paradise in which man fell; we are rather as
those " who rowing hard against the stream, see
distant gates of Eden gleam and do not dream it is

Man's Place in Nature 227

a dream." We have spoken of our heritage from
pre-human ancestry whose recrudescence in evil
passions sometimes amazes and perplexes even
the godly; but we must remember the other side,
that we have a heritage of good impulses which
are much older than our race; the springs of good
conduct — of kin-sympathy, of family affection, of
gentleness — which have been welling forth almost
since life began.

Riddles of the Universe. — We cannot look back
on the story we have outlined without a sense of
the riddles of the universe.

Even when we keep to things as they are, we find
ourselves surrounded by unsolved problems. We
see the swallows flying south across the river; how
much patient inquiry has there been over this prob-
lem of migration; how far are we from a clear
understanding of it! This may serve as an in-
stance of the kind of problem that fascinates the
naturalist, which he hopes some day to solve.

We move our arm to turn a page, and we pause
to reflect upon all that this involves. With some
pains we could perhaps give a long account of the
motor impulses, muscular movements, chemical
explosions, and what not that have occurred; but
how far are we from having a clear view of the
whole chain of events. We know much, for in-
stance, in regard to the electrical change associated
with the muscular contraction, but how little we

228 The Bible of Nature

understand as to its precise significance. How
far we are from understanding what turning the
page really means.

It is part of the scientific business to describe
happenings in the simplest terms, to connect par-
ticular results with particular conditions, to make
formulse which sum up often repeated chains of
sequence — how much of this there is still to do in
every department of inquiry. Many of the unsolved
problems of things as they are will doubtless be
cleared up if science goes on developing, and will
be then replaced by other unsolved problems. So
it will go on — perhaps asymptotically. But even
supposing all problems of this sort were cleared up,
we should not have explained the world. Why
not ? Because the terms used are not self-explan-
atory.

There are many different forms of energy in
the world, — powers of changing the state of mo-
tion or of doing work. Science measures these
different "energies," studies their transferences
and transformations, and demonstrates their in-
destructibility, or, at any rate, our inability to
increase or decrease their amount by the slightest.
What energy ultimately is, science does not pre-
tend to tell us.

There are many different kinds of matter in
the world occupying space and possessing weight.
Science studies the properties of the different kinds

Man's Place in Nature 229

of matter, and forms theories of the constitution
of matter, e. g., that it consists of molecules which
consist of atoms, which consist of corpuscles sur-
rounded by positive electricity, which are them-
selves units of negative electricity. We know that
we cannot add to or take from the sum-total of
matter in the world. As far as we are concerned
it is quite indestructible. What matter ultimately
is, science does not pretend to tell us, unless it ex-
plains it away altogether in terms of electricity.
The "Ding an sich" is not a subject of scientific
inquiry.

It has apparently become necessary to postulate
besides matter and energy a third something —
the ether. This is a hypothetical "medium of
extreme tenuity and elasticity diffused throughout
all space, the medium for the transmission of
radiant energy." What it is, whether matter or
non-matter, we do not know; nor, in the strict
sense, do we know that it is at all. It is a necessary
fiction in the scientific redescription of occurrences,
and corresponds to something real.

Riddles of History. — To understand things as
they are, we must throw upon them the light of
past history. This is a familar dictum, and it is,
of course, in a measure true. But we must not
forget how far from complete this genetic knowl-
edge is. How far we are from any security as to
the history of the solar system, of the earth, of its

230 The Bible of Nature

plants and animals, or of prehistoric man. Louis
Agassi z spoke of the gap between the unicellular
Protists and multicellular organisms with "bod-
ies" as "the greatest gulf in organic nature"; how
was that gulf bridged ? Every zoologist believes
— that is the proper word to use — that backboned
animals were evolved from backboneless ances-
tors, but who shall say from what kind of back-
boneless animal, or by what steps, or under what
conditions? Most anthropologists believe that
man was, like other organisms, the long result of
time, that he sprang from an ape-like stock, but
no one knows from which, or where, or when, or
how.

Riddles as to Origins. — Greatest of all perhaps are
the riddles as to origins. There is always a good
deal of difficulty in starting the triumphant char-
iot of evolution. "Ce n'est que le premier pas
qui coute."

Given the consolidated earth we can account
for its sculpturing, but how did the earth begin ?
Was it from a condensed nebula, how did the
nebula begin ? Was the nebula a swarm of collid-
ing meteorites, whence came they? Have the
different kinds of matter been evolved, what was
the raw material ? Is matter explained away as
"nothing but electricity," had this an origin ?

Given living organisms to start with, we can in
some measure redescribe the evolution of our

Man's Place in Nature 231

present-day fauna and flora, but whence came liv-
ing organisms ? Did they first arise from the dust
of the earth ? By what steps did this come about ?
And if the living arose from the not-living, what
was the origin of this marvellous raw material
which had the potentiality of livingness in it?

Given simple behaviour and (inferred) simple
psychical processes, we can, with much hesitancy
and hypothesis at present, sketch out a series of
stages leading on to intricate behaviour and intri-
cate mental processes, but what were the condi-
tions antecedent to mind ? Is it coextensive with
life, or does it mysteriously emerge when a suffi-
cient number of nerve-cells become integrated into
a tiny brain? And if the primitive protoplasts
from which the biologist starts had in them the
potentiality of mind, then how is that rudiment
related to the not-living if the protoplasts came
from that?

"Let us admit, as scientific men, that of real
origin, even of the simplest thing, we know noth-
ing; not even of a pebble."1

It is well, surely, that this perennial difficulty
as to origins should be frankly faced, even at the
risk of misunderstanding on the part of those who,
being unaware of what scientific method is, make
apologetic capital out of every such admission,

1 Sir Oliver Lodge, "Ideals of Science and Faith," Lon-
don, 1905, p. 27.

232 The Bible of Nature

proclaiming that science has confessed herself
bankrupt. Three notes are here necessary.

(a) In the first place, these difficulties as to
origins are not all on the same plane. The con-
ditions of the origin of birds are unknown, but
we cannot doubt that birds sprang from a reptilian
stock, and this problem is much more soluble than
that of the origin of Vertebrates. The origin of
Vertebrates or the origin of multicellular organisms
is almost certain to be much less obscure fifty years
hence than it is now; but it is possible that the
origin of living organisms will be no nearer solu-
tion a century hence. The question of the origin
of mind is again of a different order, and it may
be that the question as we have put it is quite ille-
gitimate. To ask where the first raw material
of the Kosmos came from is to ask how the be-
ginning began.

(6) In the second place, sound science can
begin at any point without necessarily accounting
for — i. e., describing the genesis of — its data.
There are few biologists who trouble their heads
about the origin of living creatures. They take
the origin of organisms for granted, and proceed
to study the structure and activities, the develop-
ment and racial history of particular forms.
Similarly there is thoroughly sound anthropology
and psychology, starting from man and mind as
"given."

Man's Place in Nature 233

(c) In the third place, while science aims at
redescribing in the simplest available terms what
has taken place in the past and goes on taking
place now, it does not pretend to explain anything.1
It shows painstakingly that a certain collocation
of antecedents will result in a certain collocation of
consequents; it can often analyze the sequence
of events into a series of simple movements; but
except in this sense of reducing to a common
denominator, it does not explain anything. Under
certain conditions hydrogen and oxygen combine
to form water, and some analysis of the probable
succession of events is possible, but in the long run
the chemist does not tell us how it is that the two
gases form water. Not to be too pedantic, there
is a sense in which the physicist can explain the
path of a projectile or the course of a comet, but
it is always in terms, such as gravitation, which are
not self-explanatory. In most cases, moreover, he
works with symbols, such as molecules, atoms, and
corpuscles, which are representative of the un-
known real things, so representative of them that

1 " It is very desirable," Huxley said, "to remember that
evolution is not an explanation of the cosmos, but merely
a generalized statement of the method and results of that
process. And, further, that, if there is any proof that the
cosmic process was set agoing by any agent, then that
agent will be the creator of it and of all its products, al-
though supernatural intervention may remain strictly
excluded from its further course."

234 The Bible of Nature

prediction is possible, but which are none the less
fictions of his own creation. Science tells us that
when counters A, B, C move in such and such a
way, counters D, E, F move in an equally definite
way. But what makes the moves, or how is it ex-
actly that A, B, C lead to D, E, F, what combines
the tactics into a strategy, why should there be a
strategy at all? Science cannot tell us.

Professor Ray Lankester1 puts the position
clearly.

"The whole order of nature, including living and life-
less matter — from man to gas — is a network of mechan-
ism,1 the main features and many details of which have
been made more or less obvious to the wondering intel-
ligence of mankind by the labor and ingenuity of scientific
investigators. But no sane man has ever pretended,
since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we
know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possi-
bility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why
it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may
not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable
of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by
science, and never can be."

The Death of the Earth. — Another riddle that gives
us pause is the suggestion that comes from various

1 See Times, May 17, 1903, and "The Kingdom of
Man," 1907, p. 62.

1 From our point of view mechanism is an inadequate
term for the redescription of living creatures, but it may
be used in a wide sense to include all arrangements of
natural causes.

Man's Place in Nature 235

quarters that this fair earth of ours and all that
it contains will some day die, as the moon for in-
stance has died. "For millions of years," Hux-
ley said, "our globe has taken the upward road,
yet, sometime, the summit will be reached and the
downward route will be commenced." The inde-
structible matter and energy will doubtless pass
into a different expression, but a particular thought
will have completed itself.

The Riddle of Suffering. — Another riddle which
can never be far from the thoughts of those who
are not extraordinarily light-hearted is the riddle
of suffering and sorrow and evil.

Let us consider for a little what is called "the
cruelty of nature." We probably make the riddle
more difficult by our anthropomorphic way of
looking at things, exaggerating the pain that ani-
mals feel, but there is a large residuum. Some
insects may be cut in two without showing any
reaction at all, but it requires an optimist to believe
that it can be pleasant to be eaten alive. Let us
hope that the oysters which often glide — very
much alive — down our gullets, like so many
"gustatory flashes of summer lightning," are
speedily paralyzed. But this aspect of the prob-
lem of " cruelty " does not seem to press heavily
on the souls of carnivorous mankind.

Concerning "the cruelty of Nature" Alfred
Russel Wallace writes: "There is good reason

236 The Bible of Nature

to believe that the supposed torments and mise-
ries of animals have little real existence — that
the amount of actual suffering caused by the
struggle for existence is altogether insignificant."
. . . "Animals are spared from the pain of
anticipating death; violent deaths, if not too
prolonged, are painless and easy; neither do
those which die of cold or hunger suffer much;
the popular idea of the struggle for existence en-
tailing misery and pain on the animal world is the
very reverse of the truth." This is cheerful opti-
mism, yet even Darwin, who confessed that he
found in the world "too much misery," concludes
his chapter on the struggle for Existence with the
sentence, "When we reflect on the struggle, we
may console ourselves with the full belief that the
war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt,
that death is generally prompt, and that the vigor-
ous, the healthy, and the happy survive and
multiply."

If we say that it is not so much the cruelty that
repels us, but the rank egoism of it all, then we
are raising a different problem, which was con-
sidered in connection with Huxley's contrast of
human and cosmic evolution.

Or if we allow ourselves to think of the wastage
of individual life, we raise another problem.
"Admirable doubtless," Prof. D. G. Ritchie wrote,
" this scheme of salvation for the elect by the dam-

Man's Place in Nature 237

nation of the vast majority, but pray, do not let us
hear anything more about its beneficence." There
is no end to self-made problems of this sort — made
by introducing irrelevant concepts.

In regard to human affairs, without any affecta-
tion of callousness, the scientific inquirer is bound
to recognize a number of facts.

(a) There are what may be called "growing
pains," the tax on progress, the troubles incident
on new adjustments and new adaptations. "A
heavy tax is levied on all forms of success," as
Huxley said. In mankind, as in nature, it holds
good that

" Life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipped in baths of hissing tears
And battered by the shocks oi doom
To shape and use."

This is surely better than what Nietzsche called
"the universal green-grazing happiness of the
herd."

(6) Secondly, as we have already indicated, a
considerable part of human evil is due to our an-
cestral inheritance, especially to the beast in the
man. We can only set against this the still strong-
er assets of our inheritance, and the means that are
at our disposal for improving our inherited nature
by nurture in the widest and highest sense.

238 The Bible of Nature

(c) Thirdly, from the biological point of view,
a good many of our troubles and disharmonies are
due to the fact that we tend to continue habits,
e. g., of eating, which are anachronisms, from which
we have both organically and socially evolved
away. If we persist in wearing an arctic ex-
plorer's dress in the Tropics we should not com-
plain of the heat. The problem becomes com-
plicated for man because he has created around
himself an intricate social environment which
evolves regardless of the individual. Thus there
comes about, for instance, a continual clashing of
biological and sociological ideals.

(d) Fourthly, we must recognize with Huxley
that "there is a terrible amount of needless suffer-
ing amongst us, part of the awfulness of which is
that it means piling up pain and sorrow for gener-
ations yet unborn." We must not blame the sys-
tem of things for this; we are ourselves to blame.
And of all futile exercises of the human intelligence
perhaps that is worst which seeks to find some
apologetic interpretation of needless suffering. We
should never seek to apologize for the preventible,
we should seek to prevent it. Better than any
philosophical consolation over spilt milk is the in-
vention of an unupsettable pitcher.

The Philosophical and the Scientific Outlook. — Our
general position may be made clearer if we try to
indicate how the philosophical outlook differs from

Man's Place in Nature 239

that of science. It is the work of science to reduce
things to a common denominator or to a simple
beginning, such as Matter, Energy, and Ether, or
the life of a protoplast. This sort of analysis and
genetic description clears up obscurities, affords
a basis for action, and is in any case forced upon
us by our desire to unravel things, to refund phe-
nomena into their antecedent conditions. But it
does not satisfy the human spirit, partly because
the common denominator is in itself mysterious,
partly because science never tells us why so much
should come out of apparently little. It gives an
account of the tactics of Nature, but never explains
the strategy. It is unsatisfying.

For this reason every one has some philosophy,
which is based on his own experience. He feels,
for instance, that the surest reality to him is his
own personal agency, particularly his moral activ-
ity, and he projects this upon Nature, saying that
there must be a First Cause, some real power,
giving substance to all the metaphorical causes,
the secondary or caused causes, that Natural
Science deals with. Thus he finds God as the
ever-present real power in the world, operating in
and through natural laws. He sees in "natural
causes only the connections of phenomena es-
tablished by an ever-active divine will " ; he believes
in God as "the real agent in Nature and in all
natural evolution."

240 The Bible of Nature

Or again, he feels that "the purpose of his life
is the most intimate and fundamental reality of
which he has any knowledge," and he projects on
Nature this explanatory unifying idea of purpose,
believing that the causal reality of which Nature
is an expression is also Purpose — a wider and
richer Purpose.

Again, amid the ceaseless flux of things, the
endless making and unmaking, Werden und
Vergehen, Man makes a demand for an end — in
itself — " that is, for a fact of such a nature that its
existence justifies itself." He cannot find this in
extra-human nature; he can find it only in his own
spiritual development. There he finds an end in
itself worthy of attainment, and he reads this back
into nature as the end of existence as such, as " the
open secret of the universe." To many "the
moral and spiritual life remains unintelligible un-
less on the supposition that it is in reality the key
to the world's meaning, the fact in the light of
which all other phenomena must be read."
"Man's personal agency — the one perpetual mir-
acle— is nevertheless our sure datum and our only
clue to the mystery of existence." (A. Pringle
Pattison.)

Limitations of Science. — There have been some
who have not hesitated to publish abroad what
they regard as a scientific clearing up of the riddles
of the universe, leaving their gullible readers with

Man's Place in Nature 241

the impression that everything has been explained.
It would be more accurate to say that, as far as
science is concerned, nothing has been explained.
Of course immediate explanations are contin-
ually being given, but they are never more than
statements of fact, or accurate descriptions of
happenings, or unravellings of an intricate se-
ries of sequences into their component more
familiar sequences, or comparisons of what
seems a novel succession of events with previ-
ously well-known successions, or tracing back a
development through its phases, or making :a
general formula which unifies a whole series of
occurrences, and so on. These interpretations
leave the fundamental mysteriousness of the uni-
verse untouched.

Perhaps the greatest service that we can do in
this course is simply to emphasize these limitations
of science, thus clearing the way for ideal con-
structions which each of us must make after his
own fashion, which will not be true for us unless
we make them ourselves. Thus while it may seem
at first discouraging to say that "all our physical
experience is rounded with mystery," further re-
flection will show that "this final margin of mys-
tery becomes the light of life." In face of these
riddles, we feel that the scientific outlook alone is
unsatisfying. Many scientific workers, who can
find no resting-place in science alone, agree with

242 The Bible of Nature

the author of the "Foundations of Belief," when
he says:

" I do not believe that any escape from these perplexities
is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study
of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a
rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same
time made us, in however feeble a fashion, able to under-
stand it." (Page 301.)

Anima Animans. — We have tried to indicate what
we believe to be the modern scientific position in
regard to the genesis of the Earth, Living Creat-
ures, and Man. How, it may be asked, is the
idealistic outlook l affected ? As far as we can un-
derstand, not in the slightest.

(1) It is open to the idealist to give a name to
the scientific x which lies behind energy, matter,
and ether, and to call it Spirit, the Logos, the
Absolute, God.

(2) It is legitimate to use the familiar epistemo-
logical argument which points out that the scien-
tific categories are mental concepts of our own
making. If we interpret nature in terms of our
own thoughts, we cannot use scientific formulae
to explain away our thoughts, as by-products of
nervous matter. Those who are fond of talking
of the bankruptcy of science — we do not know

1 The philosophical doctrine of idealism " finds the ulti-
mate reality of the universe in mind or spirit, and its end
in the perfecting of spiritual life."

Man's Place in Nature 243

why — often begin by pointing out that this bank-
ruptcy is a foregone conclusion because of the
debts with which science starts. But to make
apologetic capital of this is again to fail to under-
stand what the aim of science is.

(3) It is legitimate, at present at least, to main-
tain that, when we pass from inanimate to animate
nature, we cannot redescribe vital phenomena in
terms of mechanical categories. In life there is
something new — in any case there is new synthesis
of matter and energy with new properties more
wonderful than those of radium. Nothing per-
haps is gained by postulating a vital principle
or a vital force, but the mechanical categories,
as at present formulated, do not enable us to
read the secret of the organism. If the ani-
mate world has emerged from the bosom of
the inanimate, then the common denominator of
Matter, Energy, Ether must include the poten-
tiality of giving rise in appropriate conditions
to what we call life. This invests the common
denominator with even more significance than
before.

(4) It is legitimate to point out that the most
real thing in the world to us is our own conscious
experience. In thinking about ourselves, mind
is as necessary a postulate as ether is to the physi-
cist. When we pass from.ourselves to the behaviour
of other living creatures, we cannot leave mind

244 The Bible of Nature

out, if we are not to give a false simplicity to the
facts. We do not in any way understand how the
bodily life comes to have this inner aspect which
we call conscious experience. Nor do we under-
stand radio-activity. We know that our mind,
as far as we know it, is bound up with matter;
we know that it cannot give rise to matter; we
cannot think of any way in which matter — say,
units of negative electricity — could give rise to it.
Mind comes into potency under certain conditions.
This is true1 in individual development as well as
in racial history. We cannot think of its being
interpolated from without into instruments pre-
pared for its reception. This invests the common
denominator with even more significance than be-
fore. In fact, it merges into the greatest common
measure.

We observe the every-day life of, let us say, a
clever bird, such as a parrot or a rook. It seems
impossible to give an intelligible account of it
without crediting the bird with an intelligence as
real as our own. Its power of intelligent behaviour
is wrapped up with its highly evolved nervous
system. We cannot separate the objective and
the subjective aspects, or interpret the one in
terms of the other. But this mental life of the
bird was implicit in the egg just as the nerve ele-
ments were. The power of intelligent behaviour
becomes patent at a certain stage in development

Man's Place in Nature 245

just as the power of flight does. Thus mind or
something analogous to mind may be latent in a
material basis which in itself shows no trace of
mind. No trace, except indeed this, that it de-
velops after a fashion that we cannot redescribe
in terms of the movements of corpuscles. May
it not be that mind lies in the egg — not inactive
like a sleeping bud — but doing for the egg what
the mind does for the body, unifying, regulat-
ing, in a sense directing it, not insinuating itself
into the sequences of metabolism, but, so to speak,
informing them and expressing itself through
them ? We mean that the regulative principle, the
entelechy, which many embryologists find it nec-
essary to postulate in giving a more than merely
chronological account of an individual develop-
ment, is that resident quality of a living organism
which in its full expression we call mind. May
not the same conception be extended to the
amoeba ? And why stop there ? Why not extend
it also to the crystal, the jewel, the mineral, the
mountain, the meteorites and the nebula — in short,
to the Cosmos in general ? It may be said, how-
ever, that though man materializes an idea when
he makes a clever machine, there is no mind in the
machine, and may not the bird be a materialized
idea in which likewise there is no mind ? But it
must not be forgotten that the bird is a creative
machine.

246 The Bible of Nature

Conclusion. — We have given to these studies,
which must in the meantime end, a large title —
"The Bible of Nature"— intending to suggest that
Nature is a book we can read and ought to read,
a book from which we may learn much that con-
cerns our mortal well-being. In fact, as Goethe
said, Nature is the only book with a great lesson
on every page. It will be evident, however, that
we have hardly done more than touch on one aspect
of Nature, namely, its history or Genesis. These
studies must, therefore, be regarded simply as the
first book of the "Bible of Nature." It should
be followed up by other books, such as the book
of the Law, the book of Psalms, and the book of
Wisdom!

After our preliminary outlook of wonder — at
Nature's immensity and magnificent abundance
of power, her manifoldness, intricacy, and beauty,
we considered the history of the earth as a cooling
planet, the advent of life, the evolution of animals,
and the ascent of Man. It has all been a story of
genesis. Have we read this so that to the con-
cept of an order established from everlasting there
has been added the concept of progress, and to
that the concept of an evolution which suggests
purpose? Have we told the story so as to sug-
gest, as one of our foremost investigators has said,
that "men of Science seek, in all reverence, to
discover the Almighty, the Everlasting. They

Man's Place in Nature 247

claim sympathy and friendship with those who,
like themselves, have turned away from the more
material struggles of human life, and have set
their hearts and minds on the knowledge of the
Eternal"?

Have we told the story so as to make plain that
to the healthy-minded the world is as full of
wonder now as it was in the ancient days when
Job marvelled at the coming and going of Maz-
zaroth and the sons of Arcturus ? Have we made
it plain that even when physical science succeeds
in reducing a whole order of facts to a common
denominator, it cannot explain its nature or origin ?
That even when biological science discerns great
chains of sequence, it remains unaware of what
life really is; and that even when science, as a
whole, traces out for its own purposes a network
of mechanism embracing all, "no sane man has
ever pretended, since science became a definite
body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope
to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing,
whence this mechanism has come, why it is there,
whither it is going, and what may or may not be
beyond and beside it which our senses are incap-
able of appreciating. These things are not 'ex-
plained ' by science, and never can be " ? These are
things of the spirit, and must be spiritually dis-
cerned.

If we have succeeded in some measure with our

248 The Bible of Nature

task, the meaning of our ambitious title will be
clear. It was expressed long ago by Sir Thomas
Browne in his "Religio Medici":

"Thus there are two books from whence I collect my
divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his
servant nature, that universal and public manuscript that
lies expansed unto the eyes of all, those that never saw
him in the one, have discovered him in the other: this was
the scripture and theology of the heathens: the natural
motion of the sun made them more admire him than its
supernatural station did the children of Israel; the ordi-
nary effects of nature wrought more admiration in them
than in the other all his miracles; surely the heathens
knew better how to joyn and read these mystical letters
than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these
common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from
the flowers of nature." (Sect. 16.)

Hear, indeed, in Bacon's words the conclusion
of the whole matter.

"This I dare affirm in knowledge of Nature, that a
little natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it,
doth dispose the opinion to atheism, but on the other side,
much natural philosophy, and .wading deep into it, will
bring about men's minds to religion." — (Bacon, "Medita-
tiones Sacra X.")

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