Time and Change

by John Burroughs

Evolution is not the final explanation of the universe, but it is probably the largest generalization of the modern mind. Science has to start somewhere, and it starts with the universe as it finds it and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; the evolutionist seeks to trace the footsteps of creative energy in the world of animal life. How did God make man? Out of the dust of the earth, says the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches essentially the same thing, only he does not abridge the process as the catechism has abridged it for us; he would fain unfold the whole long road that man has traveled from the first protozoic cell to the vast communities of cells that now make up his physical life. He would show how man has risen on stepping-stones of his dead self. These stepping-stones have been the animal forms below him. In them and through them something, some impulse, some force, has mounted and mounted through all the enormous lapse of geologic time. In imagination we see the dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling in a vast number of earlier forms. He has struggled upward through the invertebrates, through the fish, through the reptile, through the lower mammals, through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goal in the man we know.

Darwin was not the author of the theory of evolution, but he made the theory alive and real to the imagination. He showed us what a master key it is for unlocking the riddle of the life of the globe. He launched biological science upon a new career and made it worthy of its place in the great trilogy of sciences, astronomy, geology, and biology, of which Tennyson, in his poem "Parnassus," recognized only the first two. Had Tennyson written his poem in our day he would undoubtedly have included biology among his "terrible Muses" that tower above all others, eclipsing the glory of the great poets. Or is it true that we find it easier to accept the theory of the evolution of the worlds and suns from nebulous matter than to accept the theory of the evolution of man from the maze of the lower animal forms? It is less personal to us. The astronomer has the advantage of the biologist in one important respect: he can show us in the heavens now the process of the evolution of worlds actually going on, but the biologist cannot show us the transformation of one species into another taking place to-day. We can sound the abysses of astronomic space easier than we can sound the abysses of geologic time. The stars and the nebulae we have always with us, but where are the myriad earlier forms that were the antecedents of the present animal life of the globe? True, the palaeontologist finds a more or less disjointed record of them in the stratified rocks and sees in a measure the course evolution has taken, but he does not actually see it at work as does the astronomer. More than that, the forces the astronomer deals with are mechanical and chemical, but the biologist deals with a new force called life that often reverses or defies mechanical and chemical forces, but which is yet so identified and blended with them that we cannot conceive it apart from them. The stomach does not digest itself, nor gravity hold the blood in the lower extremities. The tree lifts up its weight of fluids and solids and holds aloft its fruit and foliage in spite of gravity; its growing roots split and lift the rocks; mosses and lichens disintegrate granite; vital energy triumphs over chemical and mechanical energy.

Biological laws are much more subtle and difficult to trace and formulate than chemical and mechanical laws. Hence the student of organic evolution can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certainties in this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and mechanics. It is very doubtful if life can ever be explained in terms of these things. Life works through chemical combinations and affinities, and yet is it not more than chemistry? It works with and through mechanical principles and forces, and yet it is evidently more than mechanics. It is manifested through matter, and yet no analysis of matter can reveal its secret. It comes and goes while matter stays; we destroy life, but cannot destroy matter. It is as fugitive as the wind which fills all sails one minute and is gone the next. It avails itself of fluids and gases and the laws which govern them, but fluids and gases do not explain it. It waits upon the rains and the dews, but it is more than they are; it follows in the footsteps of the decay and disintegration of the inorganic, and yet it is not the gift of these things; it transforms the face of the earth, and yet the earth has been and will be when it was not and when it will not be. Through his knowledge and his science man performs wonders every day; he can reduce mountains to powder and seas to dry land, but he cannot create or start de novo the least throb of life. At least, he has not yet done so. With all his vast resources of mechanics and chemistry, and his insight into the mechanism of the universe, he has not yet made the least particle of inorganic matter thrill with the mysterious something we call life.

There must have been a time when life was not upon the earth and there must again come a time when it will not be. It has probably vanished from the moon and all inferior planets, and it has not yet come to the superior planets, except maybe to Mars. It must be and must have always been potential in matter, but this fact leaves the mystery as profound as ever.

Yet if the artificial production of life were to happen to-day—if in some of our laboratories living matter were produced from non-living, should we not still have to credit the event to some mysterious potency residing in matter itself? If by a lucky stroke man were to evoke the organic from the inorganic, be assured he would not evoke something from nothing, or add anything to the latent possibilities of the elements with which he works. Does not the question still remain who or what made this feat possible? One dare affirm that man cannot create life de novo any more than he can create matter. He may yet evoke life as he evokes the spark from the flint and the flame from the match or as he evokes force from the food he eats. In this latter case he does not create the force; he liberates it through the vital forces of his body. The spark from the flint and the flame from the match were called forth by a mechanical process, but the process was set going by the will which waits upon the vital process. The body with all its many functions is a complicated system of mechanical devices and chemical processes, but that which is back of all and governs all is not mechanical; the body is a machine plus something else.

The chemist or biologist who shall produce a speck of protoplasm to-day will have the credit of unlocking a power in inorganic nature; he will prove by a short cut how immanent the creative energy or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He will not have eliminated the creative energy; he will only have disclosed it and availed himself of it.

We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self-kindled, but we do not see the activity of the particles of matter that preceded it or penetrate the secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was potential there in the very constitution of the elements. We flout at miracles, and then we disclose an unending miracle in the life about us.

All the life upon the globe, including man with all his marvelous powers, surely originated upon the globe, surely arose out of the non-living and the non-thinking, not by the fiat of some power external to nature, but through the creative energy inherent in nature and ever active there. The great physical instrumentality was heat—without heat the reaction called life could never have taken place. This fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe. Without the disintegration of the rocks and the formation of the soil and the precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could not have developed. If we succeed in proving that all these things are of chemico-mechanical origin, we still want to know who or what instituted these chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics is as mysterious as creation by miracle. We must still have a creator, while we can do nothing with him nor find any place for him in an endless, beginningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. We go out of the same door by which we came in.

When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will when the condition of heat and moisture has radically changed, and eternal refrigeration sets in—what then? The potencies of matter will not have changed and life will reappear and go through its cycle again on some other sphere.

Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the old sense, but by miracle in the new scientific sense—by the immanence and ceaseless activity of the creative energy in the physical world about us—in the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air currents, and in the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime, iron, silex, phosphorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its affinities, its likes and dislikes, and life is bound up with all of them. If we hypothesize the ether to explain certain phenomena, why should we not hypothesize a vital force to account for other mysteries?