Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

Quintilian says that the early blossom of talent is rarely followed by the fruit of great achievement, but the early works of a man or a youth are just as much fruit as his later ones. There is really no analogy between the early works of an author and the blossoms of a tree. The dreams, the visions, the aspirations of youth are more like blossoms. Probably no great man has been without them; but how they wither and fall, and how much more sober the aspect which life puts on before any solid achievements can be pointed to! There is usually something more fresh and pristine about the earlier works of a man—more buoyancy, more unction, more of the “fluid and attaching character;” but the ripest wisdom always goes with age.

There are, no doubt, many strict and striking analogies between the mind and the body, their growth and decay, their health and disease, their assimilative, digestive, and reproductive processes.

The mind is only a finer body. It is hardly a figure of speech to speak of wounded feelings, of a wounded spirit. How acute at first, and how surely healing with time. But the scar remains. Then there are real analogies, real parallels, between the mind and outward nature, in the laws of growth and decay, nutrition and reproduction. “The mind of Otho,” says Tacitus, “was not, like his body, soft and effeminate.” There are minds that are best described by the word masculine, and others by the word feminine. There are dull, sluggish minds, just as there are heavy, sluggish bodies, and the two usually go together. There are dry, lean minds, and there are minds full of unction and juice. We even use the phrase “mental dyspepsia,” but the analogy here implied is probably purely fanciful, though mental dissipation and mental intemperance are no idle words. Some persons acquire the same craze for highly exciting and stimulating mental food that others have for strong drink, or for pepper and other condiments. They lose their taste for simple, natural, healthful things,—for good sound literature,—and crave sensational novels and the Sunday newspapers. Doubtless a large part of the reading of the American people to-day is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by an abnormal craving for mental excitement. There is degeneration in the physical world, and there is degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual world. There are proportion, relation, cause and effect, health and disease, in one as in the other. Logic is but the natural relation of parts as we see them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any more than the body can; it progresses from one fact or consideration to another, step by step, though often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of the steps. A large view of truth may be suddenly revealed to the mind, as of a landscape from a hill-top; but the mind did not fly to the vantage ground; it reached it by a slow and maybe obscure process.

The world is simpler than we think. The modes and processes of things widely dissimilar are more likely to be identical than we suspect. There are homologies where we see apparent contradiction. There is but one protoplasm for animal and vegetable. A little more or less heat makes the gaseous, makes the liquid, makes the solid. Lava crystallizes or freezes at a high temperature; water, at a low one; mercury, at a still lower. Charcoal and the diamond are one; the same law of gravitation which makes the cloud float makes the rain fall. The law that spheres a tear spheres a globe. These facts warrant us in looking for real homologies, vital correspondences, in nature. Only such correspondences give logical and scientific value to analogy. If the likeness means identity of law, or is the same principle in another disguise, then it is an instrument of truth. We might expect to find many analogies between air and water, the atmosphere being but a finer ocean; also between ice and water, and between ice and the stratified rocks. If water flows, then will ice flow; if ice bends, then will the rocky strata bend. If cross fertilization is good in the vegetable world, we should expect to find it good in the animal world.

There is thought to be a strict analogy between the succession of plants in different months of the year and the prevalence of different diseases at different seasons. The germ theory of disease gives force to the comparison. The different species of germs no doubt find some periods of the year more favorable to their development than others.

If on this planet men walk about while trees are rooted to the ground, we may reasonably expect that the same is true—provided that on them there are men and trees—of all other planets. If the law of variation, and the survival of the fittest, are the laws of one species, then they will prove to be the laws of all. The bud is a kind of seed; the fruit is a kind of leaf. High culture has the same effect upon man and animals that it has upon plants,—it lessens the powers of reproduction. The lowest organisms multiply by myriads; the higher barely keep from retrograding. A wild apple is full of seeds; in a choice pippin the seeds are largely abortive. Indeed, all weeds and parasites seem bent on filling the world with their progeny, while the higher forms fall off and tend to extinction. Such agreements and correspondences point to identity of law. The analogy is vital.

In the animal economy there are analogies with outward nature. Thus respiration is a kind of combustion. Life itself is a kind of fire which goes out when it has no fuel to feed upon. The foliage of a tree has functions like those of the lungs of an animal. Darwin has noted the sleep of plants and their diurnal motions. Dr. Holmes had a bold fancy that trees are animals, with their tails in the air and their heads in the ground; but there is nothing in the trunk and branches of a tree analogous to a tail, though there is a sort of rudimentary intelligence in the root, as Darwin has shown. We use the tree as a symbol of the branching of a family; hence the family tree. But the analogy is not a true one. The branches of a family multiply and diverge when traced backward the same as forward. You had two parents, they had four, these four had eight, and so on. If the human race sprang from one pair, then are its branchings more a kind of network, an endless multiplication of meshes. All the past appears to centre in you, and all the future to spring from you. We get the family tree only by cutting out a fragment of this network.

There is little doubt that certain natural laws pervade alike both mind and matter. The law of evolution is universally operative, and is the key to development in the moral and intellectual world no less than in the physical. We are probably, in all our thoughts and purposes, much more under the dominion of universal natural laws than we suspect. The will reaches but a little way. I have no doubt that the race of man bears a definite relation to the life of the globe,—that is, to its age, its store of vitality; that it will culminate as the vital power of the earth culminates, and decline as it declines. Like man, the earth has had its youth,—its nebulous, fiery, molten youth; then its turbulent, luxuriant, copious, riotous middle period; then its placid, temperate, ripe later age, when the higher forms emerge upon the scene. The analogy is deep and radical. The vital energy of the globe was once much more rampant and overflowing than it is now; the time will come when the pulse of the planet will be much feebler than it is now. Youth and age, growth and decay, are universal conditions. The heavens themselves shall wax old as doth a garment. Life and death are universal conditions, and to fancy a place where death is not is to fancy one’s self entirely outside of this universe and of all possible universes.

Men in communities and assemblages are under laws that do not reach or affect the single individual, just as vast bodies of water respond to attractions and planetary perturbations that do not affect the lesser bodies. Men kindle one another as do firebrands, and beget a collective heat and an enthusiasm that tyrannize over the individual purposes and wills. We say things are in the air, that a spirit is abroad; that is, that influences are at work above the wills and below the consciousness of the people. There are changes or movements in the world and in the communities that seem strictly analogous to drifting; it is as when a ship is carried out of its course by unsuspected currents, or as when arctic explorers, with their faces set northward, are unconsciously carried in the opposite direction by the ice floe beneath them. The spirit of the age, or the time-spirit, is always at work, and takes us with it, whether we know it or not. For instance, the whole religious world is now drifting away from the old theology, and drifting faster than we suspect. Certain zealots have their faces very strongly set against it, but, like Commodore Parry on the ice floe, they are going south faster than their efforts are carrying them north. Indeed, the whole sentiment of the race is moving into a more genial and temperate theological climate, away from purgatorial fires rather than toward them.

The political sentiment of a country also drifts. That of our own may be said to have been drifting for some time now in the direction of freer commercial intercourse with other nations.