Suddenly and very softly, the thought steals into my mind that the most wonderful of possible visions is really all about me in the mere common green of the world,—in the ceaseless manifestation of Life.
Ever and everywhere, from beginnings invisible, green things are growing,—out of soft earth, out of hard rock,—forms multitudinous, dumb soundless races incalculably older than man. Of their visible history we know much: names we have given them, and classification. The reason of the forms of their leaves, of the qualities of their fruits, of the colors of their flowers, we also know; for we have learned not a little about the course of the eternal laws that give shape to all terrestrial things. But why they are,—that we do not know. What is the ghostliness that seeks expression in this universal green,—the mystery of that which multiplies forever issuing out of that which multiplies not? Or is the seeming lifeless itself life,—only a life more silent still, more hidden?
But a stranger and quicker life moves upon the face of the world, peoples wind and flood. This has the ghostlier power of separating itself from earth, yet is always at last recalled thereto, and condemned to feed that which it once fed upon. It feels; it knows; it crawls, swims, runs, flies, thinks. Countless the shapes of it. The green slower life seeks being only. But this forever struggles against non-being. We know the mechanism of its motion, the laws of its growth: the innermost mazes of its structure have been explored? the territories of its sensation have been mapped and named. But the meaning of it, who will tell us? Out of what ultimate came it? Or, more simply, what is it? Why should it know pain? Why is it evolved by pain?
And this life of pain is our own. Relatively, it sees, it knows. Absolutely, it is blind, and gropes, like the slow cold green life which supports it. But does it also support a higher existence,—nourish some invisible life infinitely more active and more complex? Is there ghostliness orbed in ghostliness,—life within life without end? Are there universes interpenetrating universes?
For our era, at least, the boundaries of human knowledge have been irrevocably fixed; and far beyond those limits only exist the solutions of such questions. Yet what constitutes those limits of the possible? Nothing more than human nature itself. Must that nature remain equally limited in those who shall come after us? Will they never develop higher senses, vaster faculties, subtler perceptions? What is the teaching of science?
Perhaps it has been suggested in the profound saying of Clifford, that we were never made, but have made ourselves. This is, indeed, the deepest of all teachings of science. And wherefore has man made himself? To escape suffering and death. Under the pressure of pain alone was our being shaped; and even so long as pain lives, so long must continue the ceaseless toil of self-change. Once in the ancient past, the necessities of life were physical; they are not less moral than physical now. And of all future necessities, none seems likely to prove so merciless, so mighty, so tremendous, as that of trying to read the Universal Riddle.
The world's greatest thinker—he who has told us why the Riddle cannot be read—has told us also how the longing to solve it must endure, and grow with the growing of man.[1]
And surely the mere recognition of this necessity contains within it the germ of a hope. May not the desire to know, as the possibly highest form of future pain, compel within men the natural evolution of powers to achieve the now impossible,—of capacities to perceive the now invisible? We of to-day are that which we are through longing so to be; and may not the inheritors of our work yet make themselves that which we now would wish to become?
[1] First Principles (The Reconciliation).