Chapter XIV: The Tide of Life

We cannot find God by thinking. Thinking starts us on an endless quest. We can find neither end nor beginning to the sequence of cause and effect. It is a circle that ends and begins forever in itself. Men find what they call God in action, in experience, because in these practical dealings with the forces of this world they are under the law of cause and effect. They find beginnings and endings, they find an upper and an under side, they find a lower and a higher, a greater and a smaller: but in thought all things are relative. Some wise man has said that if there were no God, we should have to invent one--invent one if we wish to explain the world in the terms of human experience. Thinking turns the world topsy-turvy.

Our religious natures are still Ptolemaic. The heavens still revolve around us. We do not with the eye of the flesh see ourselves in this world as on a sphere--on a celestial body floating in space; we see ourselves as on an endless plain over and under which the heavenly bodies pass. It is only with the eye of the mind that we see things in their true relation and see that there is no up and no down, no under and no over, apart from the earth, and no God who rules as a ruler rules. We do not gain the tremendous facts of astronomy through our everyday experience; our search after scientific truth reveals them to us. Through this inquiry we see the grand voyage we are making among the stars, and see that the heavens are not a realm apart from us, the abode of superior beings, but are our veritable habitat; that our earth is a celestial body among myriads of others, and that when we solemnly lift our eyes heavenward, we are lifting them to other worlds made of the same stuff as our own. Our religious emotions and aspirations lead us to look away from the earth and to imagine finer and fairer realms, but disinterested science does not humor our illusions; it brings us back to earth again, back to the heaven we despise. Hence the trouble the narrow religious nature has with science. It experiences a cold shudder before its revelations and will none of it. It will have beginnings and endings, boundaries and limitations, heavenly and earthly, and will read the impersonal laws of the universe in terms of our personal human needs and relations. It sets up a judge and ruler of creation modeled on our human plan, and then to get out of the dilemma in which it finds itself, with all the sin and misery and injustice of the world which it finds upon its hands, and which omnipotent love and mercy could never tolerate, dopes itself with theological casuistry that seeks to justify the ways of God to man. It is a world-old problem. The only way I see out of it is by purging our minds of the old dogmas and boldly facing the reality as science shows it to us. Religion as the world has so long used the term--that human mixture of fear, reverence, superstition, and selfish desire--has had its day. We may still marvel and love and admire and rejoice, but let us fear and plead and tremble no more. There is nothing to be afraid of worse than ourselves, and nothing to implore and propitiate farther removed from us than the rain and the sunshine. In the end all things work together for our good--not always for the good of to-day, or of to-morrow, or for this man or that man, but for the good of all, for the good which evolution brings in its train. Evolution brings what we call evil also, but evil is a term of our human experience, and the Infinite, the Eternal, knows it not. What is evil to one creature in the struggle for life we have seen to be good to another, and often what our religious fears recoil from, science sees as the beneficent operation of law. In Nature nothing is unclean; her chemistry meets and appropriates all, even when we flee or faint. Our physical well-being forces upon us the conception of the clean and the unclean, but in the processes of the Nature that sustains us both are one.

We are adjustable creatures. We are neither sugar nor salt, neither round nor square, neither iron nor lead; we yield and we resist, we melt and we freeze. We are as adjustable and as adaptive as the leaves of the forest. The firmly woven texture of the leaf, its mobile stem, the flexible branch to which it clings, make it secure against the ordinary vicissitudes to which it is subject.

Man is the most adaptive of all creatures; he is as local as the turtle, and as cosmopolitan as the eagle. All climes, all conditions of wet and dry, of plain and mountain, of sea and shore, of island and continent, are his. His home is the world. Lately he has conquered the air with forces of the earth. Will he yet conquer the ether with forces of the air? Already the ether conveys his messages, but no mechanical contrivance of his can yet lay hands upon it.

Let me again say that by the Natural Providence I mean the general beneficence of Nature, the blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating, inevitable beneficence which brought us here and keeps us here, and makes it good for us to be alive, despite the vicissitudes and the occasional apparently lesser phases of malevolence to which we are subject. The changing seasons, the fertile soils, the rains, the dews, the snows, the blue skies, the green earth, the flowing streams, the gentle winds, in fact all the conditions that make life possible and permanent, are expressions of this beneficence. The whole movement of evolution, with all its dark and forbidding phases, is an expression of it. Allow time enough and the turbid stream flows itself clear, and the stream of evolution is fast losing, has lost, most of its terrible and repellent features. At its flood, in earlier geologic times, one may say that its waters were charged with the elements of huge, uncouth, and terrible forms which have been mostly eliminated; the current has cleared and purified as it advanced; the dragons and monsters have nearly disappeared; the reptiles have receded and left the fowl and birds; the saurians are gone, and in their stead we have the more comely and useful forms of mammalian life. From our human point of view--and we can have no other--creation has refined. The tide of life is still like a river that has its noisome and unlovely margins, but how has it cleared and sweetened since Permian and Jurassic times! The scale of animal life has changed, less bone and muscle and more nerve and brains, less emphasis laid upon size and more upon wit. Only in the insect world are the dragons and monsters, and the carnival of blood and slaughter, repeated. In the shade of a summer tree, or in a clover-field, one may see minute creatures pursuing or devouring one another which, if enough times magnified, would rival any of the dragons of the prime.