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An essay by John Burroughs |
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A Bird Of Passage |
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Title: A Bird Of Passage Author: John Burroughs [More Titles by Burroughs] I
The everlasting, all-inclusive thing in this universe seems to be inert matter with the energy it holds; while the slight, flitting, casual thing seems to be living matter. The inorganic is from all eternity to all eternity; it is distributed throughout all space and endures through all time, while the organic is, in comparison, only of the here and the now; it was not here yesterday, and it may not be here to-morrow; it comes and goes. Life is like a bird of passage which alights and tarries for a time and is gone, and the places where it perched and nested and led forth its brood know it no more. Apparently it flits from world to world as the great cosmic spring comes to each, and departs as the cosmic winter returns to each. It is a visitor, a migrant, a frail, timid thing, which waits upon the seasons and flees from the coming tempests and vicissitudes. How casual, uncertain, and inconsequential the vital order seems in our own solar system--a mere incident or by-product in its cosmic evolution! Astronomy sounds the depths of space, and sees only mechanical and chemical forces at work there. It is almost certain that only a small fraction of the planetary surfaces is the abode of life. On the earth alone, of all the great family of planets and satellites, is the vital order in full career. It may yet linger upon Mars, but it is evidently waning. On the inferior planets it probably had its day long ago, while it must be millions of years before it comes to the superior planets, if it ever comes to them. What a vast, inconceivable outlay of time and energy for such small returns! Evidently the vital order is only an episode, a transient or secondary phase of matter in the process of sidereal evolution. Astronomic space is strewn with dead worlds, as a New England field is with drift boulders. That life has touched and tarried here and there upon them can hardly be doubted, but if it is anything more than a passing incident, an infant crying in the night, a flush of color upon the cheek, a flower blooming by the wayside, appearances are against it. We read our astronomy and geology in the light of our enormous egotism, and appropriate all to ourselves; but science sees in our appearance here a no more significant event than in the foam and bubbles that whirl and dance for a moment upon the river's current. The bubbles have their reason for being; all the mysteries of molecular attraction and repulsion may be involved in their production; without the solar energy, and the revolution of the earth upon its axis, they would not appear; and yet they are only bubbles upon the river's current, as we are bubbles upon the stream of energy that flows through the universe. Apparently the cosmic game is played for us no more than for the parasites that infest our bodies, or for the frost ferns that form upon our window-panes in winter. The making of suns and systems goes on in the depths of space, and doubtless will go on to all eternity, without any more reference to the vital order than to the chemical compounds. The amount of living matter in the universe, so far as we can penetrate it, compared with the non-living, is, in amount, like a flurry of snow that whitens the fields and hills of a spring morning compared to the miles of rock and soil beneath it; and with reference to geologic time it is about as fleeting. In the vast welter of suns and systems in the heavens above us, we see only dead matter, and most of it is in a condition of glowing metallic vapor. There are doubtless living organisms upon some of the invisible planetary bodies, but they are probably as fugitive and temporary as upon our own world. Much of the surface of the earth is clothed in a light vestment of life, which, back in geologic time, seems to have more completely enveloped it than at present, as both the arctic and the antarctic regions bear evidence in their coal-beds and other fossil remains of luxuriant vegetable growths. Strip the earth of its thin pellicle of soil, thinner with reference to the mass than is the peel to the apple, and you have stripped it of its life. Or, rob it of its watery vapor and the carbon dioxide in the air, both stages in its evolution, and you have a dead world. The huge globe swings through space only as a mass of insensate rock. So limited and evanescent is the world of living matter, so vast and enduring is the world of the non-living. Looked at in this way, in the light of physical science, life, I repeat, seems like a mere passing phase of the cosmic evolution, a flitting and temporary stage of matter which it passes through in the procession of changes on the surface of a cooling planet. Between the fiery mist of the nebula, and the frigid and consolidated globe, there is a brief span, ranging over about one hundred and twenty degrees of temperature, where life appears and organic evolution takes place. Compared with the whole scale of temperature, from absolute zero to the white heat of the hottest stars, it is about a hand's-breadth compared to a mile. Life processes cease, but chemical and mechanical processes go on forever. Life is as fugitive and uncertain as the bow in the clouds, and, like the bow in the clouds, is confined to a limited range of conditions. Like the bow, also, it is a perpetual creation, a constant becoming, and its source is not in the matter through which it is manifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life, like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always on the verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail, to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life is as literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equally dependent upon the material elements; but whether the physical conditions sum up the whole truth about it, as they do with the bow, is the insoluble question. Science says "Yes," but our philosophy and our religion say "No." The poets and the prophets say "No," and our hopes and aspirations say "No."
Where, then, shall we look for the key to this mysterious thing we call life? Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vital force--that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves us floundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, what answer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It is not in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower." The four principal elements--oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon--say, "It is not in us, because we are from all eternity, and life is not; we form only its physical basis." Warmth and moisture say, "It is not in us; we are only its faithful nurses and handmaidens." The sun says: "It is not in me; I shine on dead worlds as well. I but quicken life after it is planted." The stars say, "It is not in us; we have seen life come and go among myriads of worlds for untold ages." No questioning of the heavens above nor of the earth below can reveal to us the secret we are in quest of. I can fancy brute matter saying to life: "You tarry with me at your peril. You will always be on the firing-line of my blind, contending forces; they will respect you not; you must take your chances amid my flying missiles. My forces go their eternal round without variableness or shadow of turning, and woe to you if you cross their courses. You may bring all your gods with you--gods of love, mercy, gentleness, altruism; but I know them not. Your prayers will fall upon ears of stone, your appealing gesture upon eyes of stone, your cries for mercy upon hearts of stone. I shall be neither your enemy nor your friend. I shall be utterly indifferent to you. My floods will drown you, my winds wreck you, my fires burn you, my quicksands suck you down, and not know what they are doing. My earth is a theatre of storms and cyclones, of avalanches and earthquakes, of lightnings and cloudbursts; wrecks and ruins strew my course. All my elements and forces are at your service; all my fluids and gases and solids; my stars in their courses will fight on your side, if you put and keep yourself in right relations to them. My atoms and electrons will build your houses, my lightning do your errands, my winds sail your ships, on the same terms. You cannot live without my air and my water and my warmth; but each of them is a source of power that will crush or engulf or devour you before it will turn one hair's-breadth from its course. Your trees will be uprooted by my tornadoes, your fair fields will be laid waste by floods or fires; my mountains will fall on your delicate forms and utterly crush and bury them; my glaciers will overspread vast areas and banish or destroy whole tribes and races of your handiwork; the shrinking and wrinkling crust of my earth will fold in its insensate bosom vast forests of your tropical growths, and convert them into black rock, and I will make rock of the myriad forms of minute life with which you plant the seas; through immense geologic ages my relentless, unseeing, unfeeling forces will drive on like the ploughshare that buries every flower and grass-blade and tiny creature in its path. My winds are life-giving breezes to-day, and the besom of destruction to-morrow; my rains will moisten and nourish you one day, and wash you into the gulf the next; my earthquakes will bury your cities as if they were ant-hills. So you must take your chances, but the chances are on your side. I am not all tempest, or flood, or fire, or earthquake. Your career will be a warfare, but you will win more battles than you will lose. But remember, you are nothing to me, while I am everything to you. I have nothing to lose or gain, while you have everything to gain. Without my soils and moisture and warmth, without my carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, you can do or be nothing; without my sunshine you perish; but you have these things on condition of effort and struggle. You have evolution on condition of pain and failure and the hazard of the warring geologic ages. Fate and necessity rule in my realm. When you fail, or are crushed or swallowed by my remorseless forces, do not blame my gods, or your own; there is no blame, there is only the price to be paid: the hazards of invading the closed circle of my unseeing forces." In California I saw an epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature deals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It had been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature concentrated--her wild welter of struggling and devouring forms through the geologic ages made visible and tangible in a small patch of mingled pitch and animal bones. There was nearly as much bone as pitch. The fate of the unlucky flies that alight upon tangle-foot fly-paper in our houses had been the fate of the victims that had perished here. How many wild creatures had turned appealing eyes to the great unheeding void as they felt themselves helpless and sinking in this all-engulfing pitch! In like manner how many human beings in storms and disasters at sea and in flood and fire upon land have turned the same appealing look to the unpitying heavens! There is no power in the world of physical forces, or apart from our own kind, that heeds us or turns aside for us, or bestows one pitying glance upon us. Life has run, and still runs, the gantlet of a long line of hostile forces, and escapes by dint of fleetness of foot, or agility in dodging, or else by toughness of fibre. Yet here we are; here is love and charity and mercy and intelligence; the fair face of childhood, the beautiful face of youth, the clear, strong face of manhood and womanhood, and the calm, benign face of old age, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, but seeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart of Nature. Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playing into the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of the inorganic, at strife with it, hourly crushed by it, yet sustained and kept going by its aid.
Vitality is only a word, but it marks a class of phenomena in nature that stands apart from all merely mechanical manifestations in the universe. The cosmos is a vast machine, but in this machine--this tremendous complex of physical forces--there appears, at least on this earth, in the course of its evolution, this something, or this peculiar manifestation of energy, that we call vital. Apparently it is a transient phase of activity in matter, which, unlike other chemical and physical activities, has its beginning and its ending, and out of which have arisen all the myriad forms of terrestrial life. The merely material forces, blind and haphazard from the first, did not arise in matter; they are inseparable from it; they are as eternal as matter itself; but the activities called vital arose in time and place, and must eventually disappear as they arose, while the career of the inorganic elements goes on as if life had never visited the sphere. Was it, or is it, a visitation--something _ab extra_ that implies super-mundane, or supernatural, powers? Added to this wonder is the fact that the vital order has gone on unfolding through the geologic ages, mounting from form to form, or from order to order, becoming more and more complex, passing from the emphasis of size of body, to the emphasis of size of brain, and finally from instinct and reflex activities to free volition, and the reason and consciousness of man; while the purely physical and chemical forces remain where they began. There has been endless change among them, endless shifting of the balance of power, but always the tendency to a dead equilibrium, while the genius of the organic forces has been in the power to disturb the equilibrium and to ride into port on the crest of the wave it has created, or to hang forever between the stable and the unstable. So there we are, confronted by two apparently contrary truths. It is to me unthinkable that the vital order is not as truly rooted in the constitution of things as are the mechanical and chemical orders; and yet, here we are face to face with its limited, fugitive, or transitional character. It comes and goes like the dews of the morning; it has all the features of an exceptional, unexpected, extraordinary occurrence--of miracle, if you will; but if the light which physical science turns on the universe is not a delusion, if the habit of mind which it begets is not a false one, then life belongs to the same category of things as do day and night, rain and sun, rest and motion. Who shall reconcile these contradictions? Huxley spoke for physical science when he said that he did not know what it was that constituted life--what it was that made the "wonderful difference between the dead particles and the living particles of matter appearing in other respects identical." He thought there might be some bond between physico-chemical phenomena, on the one hand, and vital phenomena, on the other, which philosophers will some day find out. Living matter is characterized by "spontaneity of action," which is entirely absent from inert matter. Huxley cannot or does not think of a vital force distinct from all other forces, as the cause of life phenomena, as so many philosophers have done, from Aristotle down to our day. He finds protoplasm to be the physical basis of life; it is one in both the vegetable and animal worlds; the animal takes it from the vegetable, and the vegetable, by the aid of sunlight, takes or manufactures it from the inorganic elements. But protoplasm is living matter. Before there was any protoplasm, what brought about the stupendous change of the dead into the living? Protoplasm makes more protoplasm, as fire makes more fire, but what kindled the first spark of this living flame? Here we corner the mystery, but it is still a mystery that defies us. Cause and effect meet and are lost in each other. Science cannot admit a miracle, or a break in the continuity of life, yet here it reaches a point where no step can be taken. Huxley's illustrations do not help his argument. "Protoplasm," he says, "is the clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod." Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter's art, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained only clay? Do we not have to think of the potter? In the same way, do we not have to think of something that fashions these myriad forms of life out of protoplasm?--and back of that, of something that begat protoplasm out of non-protoplasmic matter, and started the flame of life going? Life accounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for life? We have to think of the living clay as separated by Nature from the inert "sun-dried clod." There is something in the one that is not in the other. There is really no authentic analogy between the potter's art and Nature's art of life. The force of the analogy, if it has any, drives us to the conclusion that life is an entity, or an agent, working upon matter and independent of it. There is more wit than science in Huxley's question, "What better philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?" There is at least this difference: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduce it by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which you have decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity back again; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry. But vitality will not come at your beck; it is not a chemical product, at least in the same sense that water is; it is not in the same category as the wetness or liquidity of water. It is a name for a phenomenon--the most remarkable phenomenon in nature. It is one that the art of man is powerless to reproduce, while water may be made to go through its cycle of change--solid, fluid, vapor, gas--and always come back to water. Well does the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say that "living things do, in some way and in some degree, control or condition inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their most notable and distinctive characteristic." Does not Ray Lankester, the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature's camp--"crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating her ends?" Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency into the cosmos. Henceforth the elements go new ways, form new compounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature. Rivers flow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in a space of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise, rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears--the world of man's physical and mental activities. If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us, but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here? Nature's method is always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular while ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of perpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, they turn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living things cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things, though mechanics and chemistry play the visible, tangible part in them. If we must discard the notion of a vital force, we may, as Professor Hartog suggests, make use of the term "vital behavior." Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards. He knows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, no justice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits his conception. In view of all these things, how man got here is a problem. Why the slender thread of his line of descent was not broken in the warrings and upheavals of the terrible geologic ages, what power or agent took a hand in furthering his development, is beyond the reach of our biologic science. Man's is the only intelligence, as we understand the word, in the universe, and his intelligence demands something akin to intelligence in the nature from which he sprang. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |