Someone accused Byron of imitating Faust. His reply was: “I did not follow Goethe, but both Goethe and I followed the Book of Job.” It is about the same resemblance as that which exists between passages of the New Testament and Epictetus. Not personal but merely expressive of the distributed thought of a period, a kind of thought, (in case of Goethe), following in the wake of the French Revolution. It was a fashion people had of wearing minds, in disturbing days of reconstruction. Stillings declared that Goethe’s heart, which few knew, was as great as his mind, which all knew.
The time will come when the insistence of the East, written in the most ancient documents known, that life is one, will be proven. The deep heart-dream, the poetic fancy, of one age becomes the fact of another, and the cheap commonplace of a third. We shall find that the despised weed of the garden, the bullfrog in the pool, and Napoleon on the throne of France, are one manifestation of life. The most interesting thing the world has done, or will do, is slow turning of the ponderous pages of science, each leaf of which represents an age. One of my regrets is that I can not watch the turning leaves of all the future.
Sanskrit teaches that in the tree and in man dwell the same spirit. What a thing it was to do, to be able, by abstract thought, to reach that conclusion! An ancient Vedic hymn sings of Aranyani, spirit of the trees. Some of the words I have forgotten. These I recall:
Desire then at the first arose within it,
Desire which is the earliest seed of spirit,
The Lord of Being, in non-being ages.
The Rig Veda describes how offerings were made to plants because they were powers of life. The plant that has climbed nearest to human life, shown best what possibilities are there, and sometime probably will reward the observations of scientists, is the orchid. The only thing Darwin had interest in, he who was eager to solve the mystery of man, was that other mystery, life of the orchid. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, declared: The tree is thy brother! It was while standing under a palm tree, in the garden of Padua, that the idea of metamorphosis of plants came to Goethe. Perhaps Goethe thought noble palms above his head were exclamation points of wisdom! I am not sure he did not say something like that. Linnæus insisted that luxuriant flowers are none natural but all monsters.
Modern scientists tell us that when biologists write of the principle of life, they find illustrations among plants as often as among animals. The germ from which a human being is evolved differs in no wise from germ from which a plant is evolved.
What is life? Schelling, Comte, Lamarck, De Blainville, Spencer, have tried in vain to define it. Is it easy to know the exact difference between animal and vegetable protoplasm? In both are life. Life means progress, change. It is not impossible that the fragile lines marking a flower carry sensation. A nerve is protoplasm.