Chapter IV: Science and Mysticism

The bogey of teleology frightens a good many honest scientific minds. To recognize anything akin to intelligence in nature, or to believe that a universal mind is immanent in, or a part of, the cosmos, is looked upon as disloyalty to the scientific spirit.

Lamarck’s idea of an indwelling directing principle in organic evolution discredited him with Darwin, and with the leading biologists since his time. Yet Darwin said he could not look upon the universe as the result of chance. But he faltered before the other alternative--that any will or design lay back of it.

It is unfortunate that these words connote things purely human, and to that extent are likely to lead us astray. But are not all our terms human, even the word “astray” itself? Can we have any other? Emerson says that anything may be affirmed or denied of the Infinite, and that God can be hinted only in signs and symbols. In trying to describe time, we need a new language that differs as much from our ordinary speech as algebra differs from arithmetic. The circle and sphere are the only complete types of Infinity.

In Professor Loeb’s mechanistic conception of life there is no hint of mind or soul; all is matter and force. All the mechanists and energists and materialists unconsciously endow their matter and force with creative power, thus elevating them to the rank of a _Deus_.

Science knows no mysteries; it knows only insoluble problems and comparatively few of them. But may not one see mysteries in nature without being a mystic? Physical facts may be inexplicable, but we do not call them mysteries. The birth and development of the cell is wonderful, but can we say that it is mysterious? Does not mystery imply something occult and unknowable? Is a biologist or evolutionist to be charged with mysticism because he refuses to admit that the development of species is all a matter of chance? If he believes, for instance, that the horse as we know him was inevitable in that small beast of Eocene times, the eohippus, is he to be charged with a teleological taint? Or if we speak of the predestined course of evolution are we unfaithful to the true scientific spirit? Is not the acorn predestined to become an oak? Does growth imply a mysterious guiding force or principle? The little brown house wren that fusses and chatters here around its box on my porch has come all the way from Central America. Did something guide it? Life is full of this kind of guidance. Not much of nature can be explained by addition and subtraction; not much of it can be explained by mere mechanics, or physics; not much of it can be explained by the doctrine of chance. There are reasons behind reasons. You may give good physiological reasons why the heart beats, why the liver secretes bile, why the digestive processes go on and our food nourishes us, but can you find the mind by dissecting the brain or connect mind with matter?

Mysticism belongs to the sphere of our religious emotions, and when we read natural phenomena through these emotions we are mystical. We cannot say that the course of evolution has been directed, and we cannot say it goes by chance. The changes of the seasons are not directed; the circuit of the waters from the earth, through the sea to the clouds and back to the earth, is not directed; the orbs in their courses are not directed; the sap in the trees, the blood in our veins, are not directed; neither are these things by chance. “An inward perfecting principle” is the divinity that shapes the ends of all organisms.

Many scientific men are so shy of teleology that they tend to the other extreme and land in a world of chance.

Now, if man and all the other forms of life are the result of chance, then Chance is a very good god and should be written with a capital. No matter what we call the power out of which the universe flows, or with which it is identified, it is a veritable _Deus_.

We cannot affirm that we are the result of chance, nor the result of design, as we use these words in our daily lives. These words apply to parts and fragments of which our lives are made up. They do not help us in dealing with the whole. We share in the life of the universe; we are a part of it, and what keeps it going keeps us going. What set evolution on foot and evolved the organic from the inorganic is the parent of us all. It is not we that are immortal; it is life, and the universe. We pass like shadows, but the sun remains--for a season. We say of a thing, or an event, that it came by chance, when we see no will like unto our own directing it; at the same time we know that the laws of matter and force control everything. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without their immutable decrees. In the same sense the hairs of our heads are numbered.

When we discuss or describe the universe in terms of experience, we are dealing in half-truths. We cannot describe a sphere in terms of angles and right lines; no more can we describe or interpret the All in terms of our own experience.

If it were Chance, or Darwin’s Natural Selection, or orthogenesis, or whatever it was, that brought me and all other forms of life here, that gave me my mind and body, that put my two eyes and my two ears just where they are of most service to me, and my two arms and hands, and my two legs and feet, and all my internal organs, my double circulation, my heart to pump the blood and keep the vital machinery going, my secretions and my excretions, my lungs to lay hold of the air and purify the blood, my liver and kidneys to eliminate the poisons and effete matter, my marvelous digestive system to furnish the fuel that generates the physical power, and, more than all these things, that looked after my germ in the old Cambrian seas and brought it safely down through the hazards of the long road of evolution and developed it and made me a man, and gave me the capacity to contemplate and enjoy this amazing universe--the power or the blind force or the law of chance, I say, that could do all this is god enough for me. I want no other.

Do we expect to see the Natural Providence at work as we see man at work? Nature works from the inside. In the human sphere there is a maker and a thing made. Not so in the universe. Things are in their place without being made. Our concepts of the beginning and the end do not apply to them. The words “chance” and “design” are born of our limited knowledge.

That man or an ant or a leaf or a flower could result from the haphazard jostling together of the molecules of matter, or the units of force, is unthinkable. Could one get an intelligent sentence, or one’s own name, by putting the letters of the printer’s type in a hat and shaking them up till the crack of doom?--an old and trite comparison, but it seems to state the case fairly. And yet, how can a naturalist fall back upon teleology? Is not Nature sufficient unto herself? Must we inject our own little methods and makeshifts into the ways of the Eternal? We might as well try to walk off the sphere as try to compass this problem in the terms of our own experience. The inscrutable, the unthinkable, the unknowable, confront us on all sides.

So far as I can see the Creative Energy in nature has no plan nor end. Plans are the ways of the finite, not of the Infinite. Man alone has plans and ends. The Infinite cannot be defined or interpreted in terms of our human lives. It transcends all speech. To name any one thing as the purpose and end of creation is like naming the end of a sphere, or the direction of a circle. All bodies with which we deal on the earth have an upper and an under side, but the earth itself is all top side; there is no under side, though the orbs in the heavens, to our eye, have a lowest point or bottom side. Every tangible body with which we deal rests upon some other body, but the orbs float in vacuity. The irregular solid bodies with which we deal have three dimensions--length, breadth, and thickness--but, properly speaking, the sphere has none of these; it has only mass.

When we discuss or attempt to describe what we call God, or what I call the Eternal, in terms of man, as the theologians do, something within us rises up and says, No. A magnified man, or a man raised to the _n_th power, is not God; he is still man. I fancy that with most men the denial of a God means simply this: there is no God who can be described in the terms usually employed. One is an atheist because he cannot accept a God made in man’s image. It belittles the Mystery. Our belief in God is so radical that we reject half-gods. The fatherhood of God means no more than the manhood of God, or the governorship, or the judgeship, of God.

In many respects the manlike God falls below his human prototype, being more cruel than any human being dares to be.

No, we cannot measure the Infinite Mystery with our foot-rule. Boundless space is the negation of space. We can say that there is no space in the sense that we can say that there is no God. There is no motion unless there is something at rest; there is no Infinite Good unless there is Infinite Evil. Hence we have invented a hell to balance heaven, a Devil to offset God.

The universe is a reality, though we cannot define it. Life goes on, though we cannot account for it. Boundless space exists, though words fail us in the attempt to fathom it. The earth has its center, though we do not know whether we should be standing on our heads or our heels were we to reach it. Heavenly bodies do collide, though we cannot visualize the collision. Our language fails us when we come to the ultimate questions.

That this is the best possible world, humanly speaking, I have no doubt, yet sin and misery are on every hand. Sin and misery are terms of our own which simply express some of the conditions of our development. They are like the terms “up” and “down,” “east” and “west,” and “near” and “far”; they are relative. Nature knows no good and no bad; all is good; that is, all favors development. The rivers reach the sea, no matter what the obstacles in the way. The seasons come and go, no matter how delayed.

Nature’s ends, so far as we can name them, are wholesale--to keep the game going, to heap the measure, to play one hand against the other. She is more solicitous about the race than about the individual. The wreck of worlds or suns in sidereal space matters little; there are infinite worlds and suns left. What would really matter would be failure of celestial mechanics. The eclipse of the sun and the moon occurring exactly on time, “without the untruth of a single second,” tells how perfectly the great machine runs. The eclipse itself is an accident, but a harmless one; it is not a necessity in the movements of our system.

If man is the end of things, as we would fain believe, then why was he so long a-coming? Why will he as surely disappear from the earth? Why has he not come to other planets in our system? When he disappears from our solar system, will not the great procession go on just the same without him? No doubt of it. He is only an incident, and maybe an accident--a lucky throw of the dice.