IV
But unhappily this is not the only species of change. It is not that which has brought a wail from the ages, when men have seen what they prize slip away. The common root of sorrow has been destructive change. Holding the watch in my hand, I may drop it on the floor; and at once the crystal, which has been so transparently protective, is gone. If the floor is of stone, the back of the watch may be wrenched away, the wheels of its delicate machinery jarred asunder. Destruction has come upon it, and not merely an extraneous accident. In consequence of altered surroundings, dissolution is wrought within. Change of a lamentable sort has come. What before was a beautiful whole, organically constituted in the way described in my first two chapters, has been torn asunder. What we formerly beheld with delight has disappeared.
And let us not accept false comfort. We often hear it said that, after all, destruction is an illusion. There is no such thing. What is once in the world is here forever. No particle of the watch can by any possibility be lost. And what is true of the watch is true of things far higher, of persons even. When persons decay and die, may not their destruction be only in outward seeming? We cannot imagine absolute cessation. As well imagine an absolute beginning. There is no loss. Everything abides. Only to our apprehension do destructive changes occur. We are all familiar with consolation of this sort, and how inwardly unsatisfactory it is! For while it is true that no particle of the watch is destroyed, it is precisely those particles which were in our minds of little consequence. Almost equally well they might have been of gold, silver, or steel. The precious part of the, watch was the organization of its particles, and that is gone. The face and form of my friend can indeed be blotted out in no single item. But I care nothing for its material items, The totality may be wrecked, and it is that totality to which my affections cling. And so it is in the world around—material remains, organic wholeness goes. It is almost a sarcasm of nature that she counts our precious things so cheap, while the bricks and mortar of which these are made—matters on which no human affection can fasten—she holds for everlasting. The lamentations of the ages, then, have not erred. Something tragic is involved in the framework of the universe. In order to abide, divulsion must occur. Destruction of organism is going on all around us, and ever will go on. Things must unceasingly be torn apart. One might call this destructive and lamentable change the only steadfast feature of the world.
V
Yet after all, and often in this very process of divulsion, we catch glimpses of a nobler sort of change, For there is a third species to which I might perhaps give the name of transforming: change. When, for example, a certain portion of oxygen and a certain portion of hydrogen, each having its own distinctive qualities, are brought into contact with one another, they utterly change. The qualities of both disappear, and a new set of qualities takes their place. The old ones are gone,—gone, but not lost; for they have been transformed into new ones of a predetermined and constant kind. Only a single sort of change is open to these elements when in each other's presence, and in precisely that way they will always change. In so changing they do not, it is true, fully keep their past; but a fixed relation to it they do keep, and under certain conditions may return to it again. The transforming changes of chemistry, then, are of a different nature from those of the mechanic destruction just described. In those the ruined organism leaves not a wrack behind. In chemic change something definite is held, something that originally was planned and can he prophesied. An end is attained: the fixed combination of just so much oxygen with just so much hydrogen for the making of the new substance, water. Here change is productive, and is not mere waste, as in organic destruction. Something, however, is lost—the old qualities; for these cannot be restored except through the disruption of the new substance, the water in which they are combined.
VI
But there is a more peculiar change of a higher order still, that which we speak of as development, evolution, growth. This sort of change might be described as movement toward a mark. When the seed begins to be transformed in the earth, it is adapted not merely to the next stage; but that stage has reference to one farther on, and that to still others. It would hardly be a metaphor to declare that the whole elm is already prophesied when its seed is laid in the earth. For though the entire tree is not there, though in order that the seed may become an elm it must have a helpful environment, still a certain plan of movement elmwards is, we may say, already schemed in the seed. Here accordingly, change—far from being a loss—is a continual increment and revelation. And since the later stages successively disclose the meaning of those which went before, these later stages might with accuracy he styled the truth of their predecessors, and those be accounted in comparison trivial and meaningless until thus changed. This sort of change carries its past along with it. In the destructive changes which we were lamenting a moment ago, the past was lost and the new began as an independent affair. Even in chemic change this was true to a certain extent. Yet there, though the past was lost, a future was prophesied. In the case of development the future, so far from annihilating the past, is its exhibition on a larger scale. The full significance of any single stage is not manifest until the final one is reached.
I suppose when we arrive at this thought of change as expressing development, our lamentation may well turn to rejoicing. Possibly this may be the reason why the gloom which is a noticeable feature of the thought of many preceding centuries has in our time somewhat disappeared. While our ambitions are generally wider, and we might seem, therefore, more exposed to disappointment, I think the last half of the century which has closed has been a time of large hopefulness. Perhaps it has not yet gone so far as rejoicing, for failure and sorrow are still by no means extirpated. But at least the thoughts of our day have become turned rather to the future than the past, a result which has attended the wider comprehension of development. To call development the discovery of our century would, however, be absurd. Aristotle bases his whole philosophy upon it, and it was already venerable in his time. Yet the many writers who have expounded the doctrine during the last fifty years have brought the thought of it home to the common man. It has entered into daily life as never before, and has done much to protect us against the sadness of destructive change. Perceiving that changes, apparently destructive, repeatedly bring to light meaning previously undisclosed, we more willingly than our ancestors part with the imperfect that a path to the perfect may be opened.
Is not this, then, the great conception of change which we now need to study as self-development? I believe not. One essential feature is omitted. In the typical example which I have just reviewed, the growth of an elm from its seed, we cannot say that the seed expands itself with a view to becoming a tree. That would be to carry over into the tree's existence notions borrowed from an alien sphere. Indeed, to assert that there has been any genuine development from the seed up to the finished tree is to use terms in an accommodated, metaphoric, and hypothetical way. Development there certainly has been as estimated by an outsider, an onlooker, but not as perceived by the tree itself. It has not known where it was going. Out of the unknown earth the seed pushes its way into the still less known air. But in doing so it is devoid of purpose. Nor, if we endow it with consciousness, can we suppose it would behold its end and seek it. The forces driving it toward that end are not conscious forces; they are mechanic forces. Through every stage it is pushed from behind, not drawn from before. There is no causative goal set up, alluring the seed onward. In speaking as if there were, we employ language which can have significance only for rational beings. We may hold that there is a rational plan of the universe which that seed is fulfilling. But if so, the plan does not belong to the seed. It is imposed from without, and the seed does its bidding unawares.