Anyhow, we should remember that with plants it will not be as with us. Lacking our faculties, they may yet be richer than us in other directions, endowed with senses whose deficiency in ourselves we cannot perceive: and perhaps even things have their senses. There may really be "tears in things." It would be an attractive doctrine that the energies which affect inanimate things may affect them in sensible degrees, that the universe (which is a rounded whole) obeys the same laws in forms which change according to circumstance, but remain alike in force and means.
CHAPTER 6
The Law of Balance
How lustreless and same the passage of time appears when we review it in our memory! but how uncertain and varied it is when we live it moment by moment, leaning out of each second to encounter the next! Likewise with the life of the great tree. Its sap on the daily round of work may have had fresh pleasures and discomforts at each revolution; but the tree's life seemed to have slipped past in a tame monotony when taken in a period of thirty or forty centuries. Yet it may be that the sequoia felt the seasons change about it, and that the times and scenes (so constant to our eyes) in which it lived affected it variously, just as its great outline may not have been without influence on its own country. One can picture the huge reddish spout leaping up into the air, with a hazy network of hundreds of branches about it. Its head seemed to be lost in the blue. Its bole was twenty-five paces about, but against its enormous height such a thickness seemed slight, and the whole tree had an air of slender grace, quite unlike other great trees, as, for instance, the baobab, whose trunk might be thicker than a sequoia trunk, but whose height would be incomparably less.
Like all conifers, the root-system of the sequoia was not elaborate. Of course it had great roots, and many of them, and luxuriant ones—but not to compare with the tree's size. Here also one may trace the all-seeing Eye, having regard for universal harmony. If trunk and roots were in due proportion, the tree's appetite would be empowered to satisfy its hunger by ravaging an immense area of ground. Its roots would exhaust the vital essences from a wide circle, and reduce it to a desert. So the principle of balance enters, and applies itself to the pine-giant: and we find if we search diligently into nature that its greatest creatures have their weak spots, and the feeblest things of the world have their unexpected means of defence.
Examples of this law are well found in the fantastic prehistoric time. Through its dense jungle rolled a nightmare shape, a reptile (called the Diplodocus) unnaturally huge, perhaps a hundred feet long and proportionally tall. On the end of its prolonged neck was a grotesque little head, in which stared two glassy stupid eyes. The beast would seem to have been doomed to a miserable life, for to nourish its demensurate body would require nearly unlimited food, and it had only a tiny mouth, able to pick up a spoonful at a time. So poor Diplodocus passed his whole life chewing leaves, and had no time off for sleep or holiday. He could do nothing all the while but eat, and so by the law of compensation his greatness was brought low. If his head had been as good as his body, and if instead of being only a grass-eating lizard he had learned to eat meat, then nothing alive could have resisted him, and he would have depopulated his radius of action.
This harmony in life, this astonishing foresight watching over matter makes one think. Every source of energy in the world has irrefragible bounds marked out for it. The curse of Diplodocus seems to have fallen on our modern whale, whose strength would make the sea barren of other life if its gullet had not been made too small to swallow them. What a danger for the rest of the world that other mammal, the elephant, might have been with his union of strength and intelligence, had his nature not been made so peaceable, and the period of gestation so long!
Lions, tigers and panthers are fierce and powerful, but have found a pitiless exterminator in man. The larger felines have ever been the most tempting game for hunters, who pursue them with particular zest: and things are always so, everywhere. Men give infinite reasons or pretexts, on which they think (or say they think) they acted: but behind all these we can trace the constant operation of an immutable law, to which their obedience is implicit.
This terrible law of compensations cuts often across our brief freedom—across those periods when we fancy ourselves all-powerful, masters of the event. We might really be so, if the Eye was not watching and regulating the smallest details of creation: but as it is, this law which checks excessive strength comes into operation against us, using ourselves as its own means. It may be for this reason that we are tormented by drugs or drinks or other plagues; for most non-human beings are comparatively free of them, and they cause any number of weaknesses and harmful complications, fatal to the health of society. As a crowning debilitant we have our man-devouring wars.
For it really seems that they must be half-divine, these terrible events which impose themselves upon us, as though at the dictates of superhuman authority. If fate did not decree them how could these wars yet pour out the life-blood of our peoples, since man has always condemned them with the whole force of his reason?