Fechner always begins with the known and indisputable, arguing thence to the unknown. His method is thus analogical and scientific. It is the only method that a scientific generation will tolerate. Its results may be disputed, but so can the results of science. Even mathematics gives us no certainties, for something must always be taken for granted. In philosophising by analogy, we do at least keep in close touch with experience; we do not evaporate the world into an “unearthly ballet of bloodless categories”. And if the analogies point mostly one way, with only weak ones pointing the other, the result may be at least acceptable as a working hypothesis, even if not “demonstrable”.
Man is a living, thinking, feeling being. He is on the surface of a nearly spherical body, which he calls the earth, out of which his material part has arisen. The elements of his body are the same as those in the earth. His carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen are the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen of the coal measures, soils, atmosphere, oceans, of the earth. The calcium carbonate of his bones is the calcium carbonate of her rocks as seen in cliffs at Flamborough and Dover. He is bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. Sometimes he calls her Mother Earth, and involuntarily speaks the truth in jest. In Siberia the Tartar word for the earth is “Mamma”—a curious fact. Indeed, the bond between the earth and her children is much closer than in the case of a human mother and her child; for we remain, all our lives, actually part of the planet’s mass. If our bodies were suddenly annihilated, the earth’s gravitative attraction would be altered, and the whole solar system would have to readjust itself to the slight diminution. We belong to the earth. We are a film of cells on her skin. In Piccadilly and the Bowery (and Throgmorton and Wall Streets?) we are—alas!—an eczematous patch.
But here it may be objected that man is more than a mere body. Quite true. Man has experiences of an order different from the material one. You cannot express joy and sorrow by chemical equations or number of foot-pounds. Even if there is a material equivalent or necessary concomitant, of electrical or chemical change in cerebral tissue or what not, the fact of the non-material experience remains a reality. To indicate this side of human life, we call it the spiritual side. We say that man is matter and spirit, body and soul. This is quite justifiable and right, whether we can define the terms or not. Definition means explaining a word by means of others that are better known. And as we cannot get any closer to reality than our own experience, which is reality to us, and as the two words conveniently classify two great departments of experience, we justifiably say that we are soul and body. Very well; the body, then, when we die, returns to the earth, from which indeed it has not been severed, except as being a point at which a special kind of activity was manifested. What then of the soul? Shall it not return to the earth-soul, as the body returns to the earth-body?
Man has arisen out of the earth. And can the dead give birth to the living? Such an idea is self-contradictory. If the Earth has produced us, it cannot be really a mere dead lump, as nineteenth-century materialistic science regarded it. It must be alive. The fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who live on its surface like microscopic insects on the body of an elephant, or like epidermis-cells on our own bodies, constitute in their total weight and size only an almost infinitesimal proportion of the earth’s mass. The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter; if human beings were so numerous that they could only stand up, wedged together all over its surface, tropics and poles, land and water—the latter covers seven-tenths of it—they would only be like a skin 1⁄200,000th part of an inch thick, on a globe a yard in diameter. The total mass of all the living creatures on the earth’s surface, including all animals and all vegetation, is almost inconceivably small, as compared with the mass of the earth. Is it not a trifle ludicrous to find some of these little creatures looking down so condescendingly on the remainder of the planet? Emerson was among the few who have seen the joke, for in Hamatreya he satirises those who boast of possessing pieces of the earth:
Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.
And the earth sings:
They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?
A very natural objection to the idea of the earth being full of life and mind—as my body is full of my life and my mind—is that the inorganic part of the planet presents no evidence of such. It does not act as if it were alive and conscious. But this begs the whole question. If you decide beforehand that all evidence for the existence of mind must be the sort of phenomena exhibited by the things we call living, the business is settled, and it is clear that the inorganic kingdom is without consciousness. There is then no sign of mind anywhere except in that infinitesimally thin and indeed discontinuous skin which is made up of living individuals on the earth’s surface. But is it not somewhat presumptuous to dogmatise thus? Why should mind always manifest itself in the same way? Non-living matter does not show vital activities, but it does show other activities, quite systematic and non-chaotic and comprehensible ones. How could “dead” matter have any activity at all? Even Haeckel postulates a sort of mind in the atom, and we have heard of “mind-stuff” before, from an equally determined materialist. Indeed, how can we rationalise the behaviour of phosphorus in oxygen but by saying that the two elements like each other so well that they rush to combine whenever possible? If carbon has great “affinity,” showing a tendency to combine with many atoms of other elements in various complicated ways—at least as regards its favourite types—it is reasonable to regard it as a much-loving element—the polygamous Solomon of the elements. If fluorine will have nothing to do with other substances—except under protest, when persuaded by Miss Hydrogen, whose gaiety and levity sometimes overcome its sulkiness, bringing it also into the society of calcium and one or two other metals—we must say that fluorine is unsociable, morbidly self-centred, or perhaps mystically disposed, like Thoreau, happy by his pond, alone. Chemical affinity is the loves of the elements.
Rising to the next grade of complexity above atoms, we find that molecular movements, visible in the apparently representative Brownian movements of particles, recall the fidget of a bunch of midges, and thereby suggest a sort of life. They disobey the second law of thermodynamics, rising in a lighter liquid, as midges rise in the tenuous air. Of course no one can deny that in the things we call living there are phenomena not seen elsewhere, and some of these are quite probably not understandable at all, in terms of measurement or imagery, as we can understand the Brownian movements by irregular bombardment of molecules. We cannot understand the relation between a supposed brain-change and the corresponding mental fact. The two orders of being seem disjunctive. Perhaps these things are too close to us to be understood; perhaps we cannot understand life and consciousness because we are ourselves alive and conscious—as we cannot lift ourselves by pulling at our boot tops, and cannot see our own faces because the eyes that see are in the face that is to be seen. Still the distinction between life at its lowest and non-life at its highest (crystals?) is so small that we may yet effect a smooth transition—may somehow see a continuity which now eludes us. And it seems likely that this will be effected by an extension of the mind-idea down into the inorganic, rather than by any explanation of life by physical and chemical concepts.