Part 11 (1/2)
It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such false a.n.a.logies! Can we say that the music existed in the flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor, and he fas.h.i.+ons the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.
The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Sh.e.l.ley interpret the skylark, or Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.
All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.
The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the att.i.tude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to reach one's hands for the moon.
IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES
The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are, in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.
The secondary men go to books and creeds and inst.i.tutions for their religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth inspires them.
V. THE COSMIC HARMONY
The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man produces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that will give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends; and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of s.p.a.ce, which undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough, would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are the exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolution reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the orderly development of life.
The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures, she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.
Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.
VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS
The swells that beat upon the sh.o.r.es of the ocean are not merely the result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which the sun and moon constantly pluck at and s.h.i.+ft from side to side. Only the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them--they are too small for the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters--how they follow the sun and moon, ”with fluid step,” as Whitman says, ”round the world”! The land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.
VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his ”Origin and Evolution of Life,” makes no account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I saw in the Grand Canon of the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms.
Some of our polis.h.i.+ng powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many exquisite forms, _Foraminiferae_. The Pyramids are said to be built of rocks formed by these organisms. ”No single group of the animal kingdom,” says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, ”has contributed, or is at present contributing, so largely as has the _Foraminiferae_ to the formation of the earth's crust.” In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the ”bordering primordial seas.” This last suggestion comes nearer the mark.
There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have pa.s.sed over them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with myriads of animal forms.
VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE
Emerson says, ”Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.” She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written large--written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many trees yield fruit only every other year.
I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most.
Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the gra.s.ses in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts--b.u.t.ternuts, hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she offers the delectable pulp: ”Do this ch.o.r.e for me, and you will find the service its own reward.” All the wild fruits of the fields and woods hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with strychnine.
We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few, extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western farmer burns corn in place of coal, be a.s.sured he sees his own account in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.
XII
NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD
As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again, which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in the whole performance.