The Breath of Life

by John Burroughs

VI

When the man of science seeks to understand and explain the world in which we live, he guards himself against seeing double, or seeing two worlds instead of one, as our unscientific fathers did—an immaterial or spiritual world surrounding and interpenetrating the physical world, or the supernatural enveloping and directing the natural. He sees but one world, and that a world complete in itself; surrounded, it is true, by invisible forces, and holding immeasured and immeasurable potencies; a vastly more complex and wonderful world than our fathers ever dreamed of; a fruit, as it were, of the great sidereal tree, bound by natal bonds to myriads of other worlds, of one stuff with them, ahead or behind them in its ripening, but still complete in itself, needing no miracle to explain it, no spirits or demons to account for its processes, not even its vital processes.

In the light of what he knows of the past history of the earth, the man of science sees with his mind's eye the successive changes that have taken place in it; he sees the globe a mass of incandescent matter rolling through space; he sees the crust cooling and hardening; he sees the waters appear, the air and the soil appear, he sees the clouds begin to form and the rain to fall, he sees living things appear in the waters, then upon the land, and in the air; he sees the two forms of life arise, the vegetable and the animal, the latter standing upon the former; he sees more and more complex forms of both vegetable and animal arise and cover the earth. They all appear in the course of the geologic ages on the surface of the earth; they arise out of it; they are a part of it; they come naturally; no hand reaches down from heaven and places them there; they are not an addendum; they are not a sudden creation; they are an evolution; they were potential in the earth before they arose out of it. The earth ripened, her crust mellowed, and thickened, her airs softened and cleared, her waters were purified, and in due time her finer fruits were evolved, and, last of all, man arose. It was all one process. There was no miracle, no first day of creation; all were days of creation. Brooded by the sun, the earth hatched her offspring; the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life was in the earth herself; her womb was fertile from the first. All that we call the spiritual, the divine, the celestial, were hers, because man is hers. Our religions and our philosophies and our literatures are hers; man is a part of the whole system of things; he is not an alien, nor an accident, nor an interloper; he is here as the rains, the dews, the flowers, the rocks, the soil, the trees, are here. He appeared when the time was ripe, and he will disappear when the time is over-ripe. He is of the same stuff as the ground he walks upon; there is no better stuff in the heavens above him, nor in the depths below him, than sticks to his own ribs. The celestial and the terrestrial forces unite and work together in him, as in all other creatures. We cannot magnify man without magnifying the universe of which he is a part; and we cannot belittle it without belittling him.

Now we can turn all this about and look upon it as mankind looked upon it in the prescientific ages, and as so many persons still look upon it, and think of it all as the work of external and higher powers. We can think of the earth as the footstool of some god, or the sport of some demon; we can people the earth and the air with innumerable spirits, high and low; we can think of life as something apart from matter. But science will not, cannot follow us; it cannot discredit the world it has disclosed—I had almost said, the world it has created. Science has made us at home in the universe. It has visited the farthest stars with its telescope and spectroscope, and finds we are all akin. It has sounded the depths of matter with its analysis, and it finds nothing alien to our own bodies. It sees motion everywhere, motion within motion, transformation, metamorphosis everywhere, energy everywhere, currents and counter-currents everywhere, ceaseless change everywhere; it finds nothing in the heavens more spiritual, more mysterious, more celestial, more godlike, than it finds upon this earth. This does not imply that evolution may not have progressed farther upon other worlds, and given rise to a higher order of intelligences than here; it only implies that creation is one, and that the same forces, the same elements and possibilities, exist everywhere.

VII

Give free rein to our anthropomorphic tendencies, and we fill the world with spirits, good and bad—bad in war, famine, pestilence, disease; good in all the events and fortunes that favor us. Early man did this on all occasions; he read his own hopes and fears and passions into all the operations of nature. Our fathers did it in many things; good people of our own time do it in exceptional instances, and credit any good fortune to Providence. Men high in the intellectual and philosophical world, still invoke something antithetical to matter, to account for the appearance of life on the planet.

It may be justly urged that the effect upon our habits of thought of the long ages during which this process has been going on, leading us to differentiate matter and spirit and look upon them as two opposite entities, hindering or contending with each other,—one heavenly, the other earthly, one everlasting, the other perishable, one the supreme good, the other the seat and parent of all that is evil,—the cumulative effect of this habit of thought in the race-mind is, I say, not easily changed or overcome. We still think, and probably many of us always will think, of spirit as something alien to matter, something mystical, transcendental, and not of this world. We look upon matter as gross, obstructive, and the enemy of the spirit. We do not know how we are going to get along without it, but we solace ourselves with the thought that by and by, in some other, non-material world, we shall get along without it, and experience a great expansion of life by reason of our emancipation from it. Our practical life upon this planet is more or less a struggle with gross matter; our senses apprehend it coarsely; of its true inwardness they tell us nothing; of the perpetual change and transformation of energy going on in bodies about us they tell us nothing; of the wonders and potencies of matter as revealed in radio-activity, in the X-ray, in chemical affinity and polarity, they tell us nothing; of the all-pervasive ether, without which we could not see or live at all, they tell us nothing. In fact we live and move and have our being in a complex of forces and tendencies of which, even by the aid of science, we but see as through a glass darkly. Of the effluence of things, the emanations from the minds and bodies of our friends, and from other living forms about us, from the heavens above and from the earth below, our daily lives tell us nothing, any more than our eyes tell us of the invisible rays in the sun's spectrum, or than our ears tell us of the murmurs of the life-currents in growing things. Science alone unveils the hidden wonders and sleepless activities of the world forces that play through us and about us. It alone brings the heavens near, and reveals the brotherhood or sisterhood of worlds. It alone makes man at home in the universe, and shows us how many friendly powers wait upon him day and night. It alone shows him the glories and the wonders of the voyage we are making upon this ship in the stellar infinitude, and that, whatever the port, we shall still be on familiar ground—we cannot get away from home.

There is always an activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and forming flint or chert nodules; or see them in the process of petrifaction slowly building up a tree of chalcedony or onyx in place of a tree of wood, repeating every cell, every knot, every worm-hole—dead matter copying exactly a form of living matter; or see the phenomenon of crystallization everywhere; see the solution of salt mimicking, as Tyndall says, the architecture of Egypt, building up miniature pyramids, terrace upon terrace, from base to apex, forming a series of steps like those up which the traveler in Egypt is dragged by his guides! We can fancy, if we like, these infinitesimal structures built by an invisible population which swarms among the constituent molecules, controlled and coerced by some invisible matter, says Tyndall. This might be called literature, or poetry, or religion, but it would not be science; science says that these salt pyramids are the result of the play of attraction and repulsion among the salt molecules themselves; that they are self-poised and self-quarried; it goes further than that and says that the quality we call saltness is the result of a certain definite arrangement of their ultimate atoms of matter; that the qualities of things as they affect our senses—hardness, softness, sweetness, bitterness—are the result of molecular motion and combination among the ultimate atoms. All these things seem on the threshold of life, waiting in the antechamber, as it were; to-morrow they will be life, or, as Tyndall says, "Incipient life, as it were, manifests itself throughout the whole of what is called inorganic nature."

VIII

The question of the nature and origin of life is a kind of perpetual motion question in biology. Life without antecedent life, so far as human experience goes, is an impossibility, and motion without previous motion, is equally impossible. Yet, while science shows us that this last is true among ponderable bodies where friction occurs, it is not true among the finer particles of matter, where friction does not exist. Here perpetual or spontaneous motion is the rule. The motions of the molecules of gases and liquids, and their vibrations in solids, are beyond the reach of our unaided senses, yet they are unceasing. By analogy we may infer that while living bodies, as we know them, do not and cannot originate spontaneously, yet the movement that we call life may and probably does take place spontaneously in the ultimate particles of matter. But can atomic energy be translated into the motion of ponderable bodies, or mass energy? In like manner can, or does, this potential life of the world of atoms and electrons give rise to organized living beings?