IS THE EARTH ALIVE?
Some of the ancients thought the earth was an animal. It has its hard and soft parts, its bone and flesh—rock and soil—as the Norse cosmology pictured it; also its blood, of seas, rivers, and the like. To a coast-dwelling people, the rhythmic inflow and outflow of the tides would suggest a huge slow blood-pulsation, or a breathing. And heat increases with depth, in mine or cave; fire spouts from Etna and Vesuvius; evidently the earth is hotter inside than at the surface, as animals are hotter inside than on their skins. Some such animal-notion was held by Plato, and by some of the later Stoics; though it does not seem to have been worked out in detail. And the Greek, Indian, or Egyptian theology which made the earth a goddess and the bride of Heaven or the sun, is still more indefinite, or is crudely anthropomorphic and primitive.
Modern approximations have been chiefly in poetry, and are pan-psychic rather than animistic; as in Pope’s Essay on Man:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul,
and in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey where the presence which disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts is felt to be the Spirit which has its dwelling in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear.
Emerson expresses the same thought in Pan and in much of his prose—Nature, The Over Soul, Self-Reliance. William James, in early days before his pluralistic development, thought that an anima mundi thinking in all of us was a more likely hypothesis than that of “a lot of individual souls”; and Leibnitz, among other metaphysical great ones, Spinozistically speaks of “un seul esprit qui est universel et qui anime tout l’univers”. Finally, to quote a modern of the moderns, we find Mr H. G. Wells finely saying that “between you and me as we set our minds together, and between us and the rest of mankind, there is something, something real, something that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us, that is thinking here and using me and you to play against each other in that thinking just as my finger and thumb play against each other as I hold this pen with which I write”. (First and Last Things, p. 67.)
But these various poets and thinkers, while suggesting a soul-side of the material universe, have not ventured to attribute spirits to specific lumps of matter such as the planets. Science has banished those celestial genii. Kepler and Newton substituted for them the “bald and barren doctrine of gravitation”, to the disgust of the theologically orthodox. It is possible, however, that science did not banish these planetary spirits, but only prevented us from seeing them, by turning our eyes in another direction, towards the laws according to which the material universe works; as if we should become so absorbed in the chemistry and physics of blood oxidation, digestion, cerebral change, and the like, as to forget that the human body has a consciousness associated with it. It may be that we are too materialistic in our astronomy. Perhaps Lorenzo was right, even about the music of the spheres; and that our deafness, not their silence, is the reason why we do not hear it.
The nineteenth century produced a thinker who revived the animistic idea in an improved form. He elaborated it into a system of philosophy, welding into it the discoveries of science, and leaving room for any further advance in that direction. At the same time he showed that his system was essentially religious, and indeed quite consistent with Christianity in its best interpretations. But his writings fell almost dead from the press, for he was before his time. The scientific men were materialists, and sneered at a system which recognised a spiritual world; while the orthodox Christians were scared by its evolutionary method and its acceptance of Darwinism when the latter arrived—for the philosophy preceded it—and also by the novelty of some of its ideas.
Gustav Theodor Fechner was born on April 19, 1801, at Gross-Särchen in what is now Silesia, then under the Elector of Saxony. He studied at Leipzig, and was appointed professor of Physics at the University there, in 1834. He conducted several scientific journals, wrote text-books, translated Biot’s Physics (4 vols.) Thénard’s Chemistry (6 vols.) and a work on cerebral pathology; also edited an eight-volume Encyclopædia of which he wrote about a third himself, lectured, and made researches in electro-magnetism which injured his eyesight. His chief scientific work, Elements of Psycho-Physics, was published in 1859, additions being made in 1877 and 1882. “Fechner’s Law”, the fundamental law of psychophysics (that sensation varies in the ratio of the logarithm of impression) is now an internationally current term. Men like Paulsen and Wundt do not hesitate to call Fechner master. His chief philosophical work is Zend-Avesta (3 vols.) published in 1851, and rearranged and condensed in Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht (1879); but he published also many subsidiary volumes. Only one of his works has appeared in English—the small volume on Life After Death—and even this had to be brought out by an American publisher! Yet Fechner is, as Professor William James said, “a philosopher in the great sense … little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on”. (A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 135, 149.) The prophecy is already beginning to come true.