Under the Maples Part 10

VI. A LIVE WORLD

It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."

But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a disordered mind.

Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times.

They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call them, are occurring constantly.

Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions, occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds."

"The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible earthquake.

Our apparently impa.s.sive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams we know little of.

From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself.

Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jura.s.sic period, while both Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions, which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.

VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR

That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly made a G.o.d of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact that the organic world had reached its present stage of development through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.

The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous.

Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.

The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code.

Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the sanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious to the fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological law which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which has tremendous authority and survival value--the law of right, justice, mercy, honor, love.

We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or among wolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, for heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things are involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right or wrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. It is not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the gra.s.s, but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star.

Germany's a.s.sault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crime against the very heavens.

Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organic forms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated man as an animal, and fitted him into the zoological scheme. He removed him from the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For all purposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is not saying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animal evolution. The European man is supposed to have pa.s.sed the stage of savagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To have made Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased a sound natural philosophy to a selfish and ign.o.ble end.

Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it, and failed. The moral sense of the world--the sense of justice, of fair play--was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders were morally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, the German leaders said, "We think you are fools." But these standards brought England into the war--the sacredness of treaties. They brought the United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy of mankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal--for justice and fair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored and trampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the world being swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from the first, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative." And what astonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley, and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watched Germany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make ready to destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization would have been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selection theory was to lead.

VIII. THE ROBIN

Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.

He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word--a typical American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins.

Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would not like to miss.

The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"--it starts "in high" and stops "in high."

IX. THE WEASEL

In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both.

Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them.

Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many yards and then had pulled it down.

Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its methods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is the incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.

X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE

We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the a.s.sumption that her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quant.i.ty of milk, irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want b.u.t.ter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object with as little waste and delay as possible.

Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.

Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are necessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness of eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.

Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?

Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we a.s.sume that Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He wants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better quality or greater quant.i.ty of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with her progeny. Only power to win in the compet.i.tion of life counts with her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She pits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tails you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage. Quack gra.s.s will run out other gra.s.s because it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.

XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE

We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling up and pulling down--aggregating and acc.u.mulating, and separating and disintegrating.

It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an obelisk, caves, ca.n.a.ls, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Canon and in the Garden of the G.o.ds, are all the result of erosion. Water and other aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of them in the Grand Canon! It looks as though t.i.tanic architects and sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand and a vast mult.i.tude of little drops of water, active through geologic ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the material it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one end of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new series of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Canons may be carved. Thus the G.o.ds of erosion are the artists, while the builders of the mountains are only ordinary workmen.

XI

RUMINATIONS

I. MAN A PART OF NATURE

This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.

It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization is the separating of one thing from another and cla.s.sifying and organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own purposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--are still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the hammer because he greatly outweighs it.

II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH

Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of the body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus, magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed.

Is that all? Is this a true a.n.a.logy? The meaning of the printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds of our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists after he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?

We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character, personality, mentality--do not these escape your a.n.a.lysis? and are they not also real?

III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE

Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superst.i.tions another, so that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the perfect good; in his science he ill.u.s.trates his capacity for logical order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him his susceptibility to beauty.