It may, however, occur to us here, that when we consider man as an improver and innovator in the world, there is much that suggests a contrariety between him and nature, and that, instead of being the pupil of his environment, he becomes its tyrant. In this aspect man, and especially civilized man, appears as the enemy of wild nature, so that in those districts which he has most fully subdued, many animals and plants have been exterminated, and nearly the whole surface has come under his processes of culture, and has lost the characteristics which belonged to it in its primitive state. Nay more, we find that by certain kinds of so called culture man tends to exhaust and impoverish the soil, so that it ceases to minister to his comfortable support, and becomes a desert. Vast regions of the earth are in this impoverished condition, and the westward march of exhaustion warns us that the time may come when even in comparatively new countries, like America, the land will cease to be able to sustain its inhabitants. Behind this stands a still farther and portentous possibility. The resources of chemistry are now being taxed to the utmost to discover methods by which the materials of human food may be produced synthetically, and we may possibly, at some future time, find that albumen and starch may be manufactured cheaply from their elements by artificial processes. Such a discovery might render man independent of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Agriculture might become an unnecessary and unprofitable art. A time might come when it would no longer be possible to find on earth a green field, or a wild animal; and when the whole earth would be one great factory, in which toiling millions were producing all the materials of food, clothing, and shelter. Such a world may never exist, but its possible existence may be imagined, and its contemplation brings vividly before us the vast powers inherent in man as a subverter of the ordinary course of nature. Yet even this ultimate annulling of wild nature would be brought about not by anything preternatural in man, but simply by his placing himself in alliance with certain natural powers and agencies, and by their means attaining dominion over the rest.
Here there rises before us a spectre which science and philosophy appear afraid to face, and which asks the dread question,—What is the cause of the apparent abnormality in the relations of man and nature? In attempting to solve this question, we must admit that the position of man, even here, is not without natural analogies. The stronger preys upon the weaker, the lower form gives place to the higher, and in the progress of geological time old species have died out in favour of newer, and old forms of life have been exterminated by later successors. Man, as the newest and highest of all, has thus the natural right to subdue and rule the world. Yet there can be little doubt that he uses this right unwisely and cruelly, and these terms themselves explain why he does so, because they imply freedom of will. Given a system of nature destitute of any being higher than the instinctive animal, and introduce into it a free rational agent, and you have at once an element of instability. So long as his free thought and purpose continue in harmony with the arrangements of his environment, so long all will be harmonious; but the very hypothesis of freedom implies that he can act otherwise, and so perfect is the equilibrium of existing things, that one wrong or unwise action may unsettle the nice balance, and set in operation trains of causes and effects producing continued and ever-increasing disturbance. Thus the most primitive state of man, though destitute of all mechanical inventions, may have been better in relation to the other parts of nature than any that he has subsequently attained to. His "many inventions" have injured him in his natural relations. This "fall of man" we know as a matter of observation and experience has actually occurred, and it can be retrieved only by casting man back again into the circle of merely instinctive action, or by carrying him forward until, by growth in wisdom and knowledge, he becomes fitted to be the lord of creation. The first method has been proved unsuccessful by the rebound of humanity against all the attempts to curb and suppress its liberty. The second has been the effort of all reformers and philanthropists since the world began, and its imperfect success affords a strong ground for clinging to the theistic view of nature, for soliciting the intervention of a Power higher than man, and for hoping for a final restitution of all things through the intervention of that Power. Mere materialistic evolution must ever and necessarily fail to account for the higher nature of man, and also for his moral aberrations. These only come rationally into the system of nature under the supposition of a Higher Intelligence, from whom man emanates, and whose nature he shares.
But on this theistic view we are introduced to a kind of unity and of evolution for a future age, which is the great topic of revelation, and is not unknown to science and philosophy, in connection with the law of progress and development deducible from the geological history, in which an ascending series of lower animals culminates in man himself. Why should there not be a new and higher plane of existence to be attained to by humanity—a new geological period, so to speak, in which present anomalies shall be corrected, and the grand unity of the universe and its harmony with its Maker fully restored. This is what Paul anticipates when he tells us of a "pneumatical" or spiritual body, to succeed to the present natural or "psychical" one, or what Jesus Himself tells us when He says that in the future state we shall be like to the angels. Angels are not known to us as objects of scientific observation, but such an order of beings is quite conceivable, and this not as supernatural, but as part of the order of nature. They are created beings like ourselves, subject to the laws of the universe, yet free and intelligent and liable to error, in bodily constitution freed from many of the limitations imposed on us, mentally having higher range and grasp, and consequently masters of natural powers not under our control. In short, we have here pictured to us an order of beings forming a part of nature, yet in their powers as miraculous to us as we might be supposed to be to lower animals, could they think of such things. This idea of angels bridges over the great natural gulf between humanity and deity, and illustrates a higher plane than that of man in his present state, but attainable in the future. Dim perceptions of this would seem to constitute the substratum of the ideas of the so-called polytheistic religions. Christianity itself is in this aspect not so much a revelation of the supernatural as the highest bond of the great unity of nature. It reveals to us the perfect Man, who is also one with God, and the mission of this Divine Man to restore the harmonies of God and humanity, and consequently also of man with his natural environment in this world, and with his spiritual environment in the higher world of the future. If it is true that nature now groans because of man's depravity, and that man himself shares in the evils of this disharmony with nature around him, it is clear that if man could be restored to his true place in nature he would be restored to happiness and to harmony with God, and if, on the other hand, he can be restored to harmony with God, he will then be restored also to harmony with his natural environment, and so to life and happiness and immortality. It is here that the old story of Eden, and the teaching of Christ, and the prophecy of the New Jerusalem strike the same note which all material nature gives forth when we interrogate it respecting its relations to man. The profound manner in which these truths appear in the teaching of Christ has perhaps not been appreciated as it should, because we have not sought in that teaching the philosophy of nature which it contains. When He points to the common weeds of the fields, and asks us to consider the garments more gorgeous than those of kings in which God has clothed them, and when He says of these same wild flowers, so daintily made by the Supreme Artificer, that to-day they are, and to-morrow are cast into the oven, He gives us not merely a lesson of faith, but a deep insight into that want of unison which, centring in humanity, reaches all the way from the wild flower to the God who made it, and requires for its rectification nothing less than the breathing of that Divine Spirit which first evoked order and life out of primeval chaos.
References:—Articles in Princeton Review on Man in Nature and on Evolution. "The Story of the Earth and Man." London, 1890. "Modern Ideas of Evolution." London, 1891. Nature as an Educator. Canadian Record of Science, 1890.
[INDEX OF PRINCIPAL TOPICS.]
Air-breathers, their Origin and History, [257], [303].
Alpine and Arctic Plants, their Geological History, [425].
American Stone Age, [464].
Animals, their Apparition and Succession, [169].
---- their Geological History, [176], [187], [194].
---- Permanent Forms of, [87], [180].
Anthropic Age, [461].
Antiquity of Man, [469].
Arctic Climates in the Past, [213].
Atlantic, its Origin and History, [57].
---- Cosmical Functions of, [72].
---- its Influence on Climate, [81].
---- Deposits in, [83].
---- Migrations across, [84].
---- Future of, [90].
Azores, their Animals, [408].
Baphetes planiceps, [263].
Bay of Fundy, its Deposits, [312].
---- Footprints on Shores of, [311].
Bermudas, their Flora, etc., [85].
Boulders, Belts of, on Lower St. Lawrence, [345].
Boulder-Clay, Nature, etc., of, [360].
Cave Men, [476].
Cannstadt Race, [474]
Chaos, Vision of, [90].
Chronology of Pleistocene, [470].
Climate, its Causes, [81].
---- as related to Plants, [215].
Climatal Changes, [382].
Coal, its Nature and Structure, [235].
---- its Origin and Growth, [233].
---- Summary of Facts relating to, [241].
---- of Mesozoic and Tertiary, [249].
---- its Connection with Erect Forests, [296].
Continents and Islands, [402].
---- Permanence of, [31], [403].
Contrast of land and sea-borne Ice, [360].
Cordilleran Glaciers, [369].
Cromagnon Race, [474].
Crust and Sub-crust, [62].
Dawn of Life, [95].
Deluge, The, [467].
Dendrerpeton Acadianum, [270].
Determination in Nature, [329].
Development of Life, [23].
---- Laws of, [194].
Distribution of Animals and Plants, [401].
Drift of Western Canada, [369]
Early Man, [459].
Engis Race, [472].
Eozoon, Discovery of, [111].
---- Nature of, [112].
---- Contemporaries of, [129].
---- Teachings of, [135].
Eozoon, Preservation of and Structure, [143].
Eyes, earliest Types of, [331].
Evolution, its partial Character, [188].
Flora of White Mountains, [421].
Floras originate in the Arctic, [297].
Floating Ice, [360].
Footprints of Reptiles, [260].
---- of Limulus, [319].
Fossils, Preservation of, [136].
Fucoids, [311].
Galapagos, how Peopled, [412].
Geographical Changes and Climate, [390].
Geological Record, Imperfection of, [40].
Glaciers, Work of, [353].
Glacial Period, Conditions of, [375].
Gulf Stream, [388].
Hydrous Silicates, [144].
Huronian as a Geological System, [104].
Hylonomus Lyelli, [279].
Icebergs, their Nature and Work, [348].
Ice Age, the, [343].
Imperfection of the Geological Record, [40].
Land and Water, [58].
Land Snails, Earliest, [247].
Labyrinthodonts, their Origin and History, [265].
Laurentian System, [97].
---- Life in the, [107].
Laurentide Glaciers, [364], [368].
Leda Clay of Lower St. Lawrence, [365].
Life, First Appearance of, [19], [96], [157].
Limbs, the Earliest, [337].
Limulus, Footprints of, [319].
Magmas under Crust of the Earth, [63].
Mammoth Age, [466].
Man in Nature, [484].
---- Early, [461].
---- an Imitator of Natural Objects, [490].
---- at War with other Natural Agencies, [495].
---- in harmony with Nature, [496].
Markings, Footprints, etc., [301].
---- Rill and Rain, etc., [317].
Microsauria, [279].
Migrations of Plants, [434].
Millipedes of Carboniferous Age, [295].
Mineral Charcoal, [237].
Missouri Coteau, [271].
Mountains, Origin of, [33].
---- Classes of, [66].
Mount Washington, [426].
Nature, Various Senses of the Term, [483].
Neanthropic Age, [472].
Ocean, the Atlantic, [58], [67].
Oceanic Islands, [407].
Palanthropic Age, [462].
Permanence of Continents, [31], [403].
---- of Animal Forms, [87], [180].
Plants, Geological History of, [202].
---- as Indicators of Time and Climate, [229].
---- of the Erian, Carboniferous, etc., [202].
---- of the Pleistocene, [439].