Part 7 (1/2)
Our account of the rise and progress of the general belief in an Unseen World is, however, not yet complete. No mention has been made of an element which apparently has always been present in the belief. I mean the ethical element. The savage's primeval ghost-world is always mixed up with his childlike notions of what he ought to do and what he ought not to do. The native of Tierra del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed some birds for specimens, furnishes an excellent ill.u.s.tration. In a tribe living always on the brink of starvation, any wanton sacrifice of meat must awaken the wrath of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities who control the weather. Notions of a similar sort are connected with the direful host of omens that dog the savage's footsteps through the world. Whatever conduct the necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited soon comes to wear the aspect of sacrilege.
Thus inextricably intertwined from the moment of their first dim dawning upon the consciousness of nascent Humanity, have been the notion of Deity, the notion of an Unseen World, and the notions of Right and Wrong. In their beginnings theology and ethics were inseparable; in all the vast historic development of religion they have remained inseparable. The grotesque conceptions of primitive men have given place to conceptions framed after wider and deeper experience, but the union of ethics with theology remains undisturbed even in that most refined religious philosophy which ventures no opinion concerning the happiness or misery of a future life, except that the seed sown here will naturally determine the fruit to be gathered hereafter. All the a.n.a.logies that modern knowledge can bring to bear upon the theory of a future life point to the opinion that the breach of physical continuity is not accompanied by any breach of ethical continuity. Such an opinion relating to matters beyond experience cannot of course be called scientific, but whether it be justifiable or not, my point is that neither in the crude fancies of primitive men nor in the most refined modern philosophy can theology divorce itself from ethics. Take away the ethical significance from our conceptions of the Unseen World and the quasi-human G.o.d, and no element of significance remains. All that was vital in theism is gone.
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VII
_Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an Eternal Reality?_
We are now prepared to see what is involved in the Reality of Religion.
Speaking historically, it may be said that Religion has always had two sides: on the one side it has consisted of a theory, more or less elaborate, and on the other side it has consisted of a group of sentiments conformable to the theory. Now in all ages and in every form of Religion, the theory has comprised three essential elements: first, belief in Deity, as quasi-human; secondly, belief in an Unseen World in which human beings continue to exist after death; thirdly, recognition of the ethical aspects of human life as related in a special and intimate sense to this Unseen World. These three elements are alike indispensable. If any one of the three be taken away, the remnant cannot properly be called Religion. Is then the subject-matter of Religion something real and substantial, or is it a mere figment of the imagination? Has Religion through all these weary centuries been dealing with an eternal verity, or has it been blindly groping after a phantom?
Can that history of the universe which we call the Doctrine of Evolution be made to furnish any lesson that will prove helpful in answering this question? We shall find, I think, that it does furnish such a lesson.
But first let us remember that along with the three indispensable elements here specified, every historic Religion has also contained a quant.i.ty of cosmological speculations, metaphysical doctrines, priestly rites and ceremonies and injunctions, and a very considerable part of this structure has been demolished by modern criticism. The destruction of beliefs has been so great that we can hardly think it strange if some critics have taken it into their heads that nothing can be rescued. But let us see what the doctrine of evolution has to say. Our inquiry may seem to take us very far afield, but that we need not mind if we find the answer by and by directing us homeward.
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VIII
_The Fundamental Aspect of Life_
I often think, when working over my plants, of what Linnaeus once said of the unfolding of a blossom: ”I saw G.o.d in His glory pa.s.sing near me, and bowed my head in wors.h.i.+p,” The scientific aspect of the same thought has been put into words by Tennyson:--
”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 G.o.d and man is.”
No deeper thought was ever uttered by poet. For in this world of plants, which with its magician chlorophyll conjuring with sunbeams is ceaselessly at work bringing life out of death,--in this quiet vegetable world we may find the elementary principles of all life in almost visible operation. It is one of these elementary principles--a very simple and broad one--that here concerns us.
One of the greatest contributions ever made to scientific knowledge is Herbert Spencer's profound and luminous exposition of Life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations. The extreme simplicity of the subject in its earliest ill.u.s.trations is such that the student at first hardly suspects the wealth of knowledge toward which it is pointing the way. The most fundamental characteristic of living things is their response to external stimuli. If you come upon a dog lying by the roadside and are in doubt whether he is alive or dead, you poke him with a stick; if you get no response you presently conclude that it is a dead dog. So if the tree fails to put forth leaves in response to the rising vernal temperature, it is an indication of death.
Pour water on a drooping plant, and it shows its life by rearing its head. The growth of a plant is in its ultimate a.n.a.lysis a group of motions put forth in adjustment to a group of physical and chemical conditions in the soil and atmosphere. A fine ill.u.s.tration is the spiral distribution of leaves about the stem, at different angular intervals in different kinds of plants, but always so arranged as to ensure the most complete exposure of the chlorophyll to the sunbeams. Every feature of the plant is explicable on similar principles. It is the result of a continuous adjustment of relations within the plant to relations existing outside of it. It is important that we should form a clear conception of this, and a contrasted instance will help us. Take one of those storm-gla.s.ses in which the approach of atmospheric disturbance sets up a feathery crystallization that changes in shape and distribution as the state of the air outside changes. Here is something that simulates vegetable life, but there is a profound difference. In every one of these changes the liquid in the storm-gla.s.s is pa.s.sive; it is changed and waits until it is changed again. But in the case of a tree, when the increased supply of solar radiance in spring causes those internal motions which result in the putting forth of leaves, it is quite another affair. Here the external change sets up an internal change which leads to a second internal change that antic.i.p.ates a second external change. It is this active response that is the mark of life.
All life upon the globe, whether physical or psychical, represents the continuous adjustment of inner to outer relations. The degree of life is low or high, according as the correspondence between internal and external relations is simple or complex, limited or extensive, partial or complete, perfect or imperfect. The relations established within a plant answer only to the presence or absence of a certain quant.i.ty of light and heat, and to sundry chemical and physical relations in atmosphere and soil. In a polyp, besides general relations similar to these, certain more special relations are established in correspondence with the eternal existence of mechanical irritants; as when its tentacles contract on being touched. The increase of extension acquired by the correspondences as we ascend the animal scale may be seen by contrasting the polyp, which can simply distinguish between soluble and insoluble matter, or between opacity and translucence in its environment, with the keen-scented bloodhound and the far-sighted vulture. And the increase of complexity may be appreciated by comparing the motions respectively gone through by the polyp on the one hand, and by the dog and vulture on the other, while securing and disposing of their prey. The more specific and accurate, the more complex and extensive, is the response to environing relations, the higher and richer, we say, is the life.
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