Mr Mill's charges against nature are very vigorously and graphically expressed. "Next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes every one who does not avert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end, without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. Optimists, in their attempts to prove that 'whatever is, is right,' are obliged to maintain, not that Nature ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction, but that it would be very unreasonable in us to expect that she should. Pope's 'Shall gravitation cease when you go by?' may be a just rebuke to any one who should be so silly as to expect common human morality from Nature. But if the question were between two men, instead of between a man and a natural phenomenon, that triumphant apostrophe would be thought a rare piece of impudence. A man who should persist in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man 'goes by,' and, having killed him, should urge a similar plea in exculpation, would very deservedly be found guilty of murder. In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures, such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges to a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, Nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst—upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts,—and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the wellbeing of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature's dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual case, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it, according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and Nature does this, too, on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing, as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire-damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison-cups of the Borgias. Even the love of 'order,' which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is, in fact, a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' and its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of Nature's ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death, by a hurricane and a pestilence."—Three Essays, pp. 28-31.
The opinion that the world would be either physically or morally improved were gravitation to cease when men went by, were fire not always to burn and were water occasionally to refuse to drown, were laws few and miracles numerous, may safely be left to refute itself. Therefore, let me simply set over against Mr Mill's censure of Nature Wordsworth's praise:—
"Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore, let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me
And these my exhortations!"
Note XXXII., page [241].
No best possible Created System.
Dante has given magnificent expression to the truth that no created system can be absolutely perfect:—
"Colui che volse il sesto
Allo stremo del mondo, e dentro ad esso
Distinse tanto occulto e manifesto,
Non poteo suo valor si fare impresso
In tutto l'universo, che il suo verbo
Non rimanesse in infinito eccesso.
E ciò fa certo, che il primo Superbo,
Che fu la somma d'ogni creatura,
Per non aspettar lume, cadde acerbo:
E quinci appar ch' ogni minor natura
È corto recettacolo a quel bene
Che non ha fine, e se in se misura.
Dunque nostra veduta, che conviene
Essere alcun de' raggi della mente
Di che tutte le cose son ripiene,
Non può di sua natura esser possente
Tanto, che suo principio non discerna
Molto di là, da quel ch' egli è, parvente.
Però nella giustizia sempiterna
La vista che riceve il vostro mondo,
Com' occhio per lo mare, entro s' interna;
Che, benchè dalla proda veggia il fondo,
In pelago nol vede; e nondimeno
Egli è; ma cela lui l'esser profondo."
—Del Paradiso, cant. xix. 40-63.
"He his compasses who placed
At the world's limit, and within the line
Drew beauties, dimly or distinctly traced—
Could not upon the universe so write
The impress of his power, but that His Word
Must still be left in distance infinite:
And hence 'tis evident that he in heaven
Created loftiest his fate incurred
Because he would not wait till light was given.
And hence are all inferior creatures shown
Scant vessels of that Goodness unconfined
Which nought can measure save Itself alone.
Therefore our intellect—a feeble beam,
Struck from the light of the Eternal Mind,
With which all things throughout creation teem,—
Must by its nature be incapable,
Save in a low and most remote degree,
Of viewing its exalted principle.
Wherefore the heavenly Justice can no more
By mortal ken be fathomed than the sea:
For though the eye of one upon the shore
May pierce its shallows, waves unfathomed bound
His further sight, yet under them is laid
A bottom, viewless through the deep profound."
—Wright.