Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

by T. W. Rolleston

We are now in a position to discuss the difficulty raised by Eimer and by Günther, when they point to instances where the supposed psychic force in nature has failed to achieve its end. It fails because, on its mechanical side, it sometimes encounters obstacles which on the psychic side were not provided for. The law of gravitation is a condition of life, but it will kill a man who falls over a precipice. The adaptability of protoplasm is a necessary condition of evolution, but circumstances will occur in which the adaptation means degeneracy for the organism as a whole. Eimer’s argument is good, indeed, against the mythological conception of a supreme Creator, perfect in prescience and in power, who orders the goings-on of the universe from his throne above and outside it. But we seek for no such being in natural phenomena. Perfection is no attribute of anything that operates in Time, and so far as we regard the divine life as working in Time we must regard it as becoming, not as being, perfect. Again, Eimer’s objection shows that he conceives the psychic force against which he is arguing as in itself something mechanical, a mechanized kind of vitality, which ought to achieve its end with a flawless exactitude. Of this, also, nature knows nothing. The universe is what it is precisely because the Power behind its phenomena is neither blind Chance on the one hand nor rigid determination on the other—because it is vital, progressive, and free. This power is certainly capable of making imperfect adaptations and of diverging into false side-tracks of development. That is a fact of much significance, but it is no argument against the existence of such a power—it merely reveals its character. A special study of regressive structures and of the laws and principles which lead to them would have extreme interest, both for biology and for philosophy. But it could not affect the significance of the broad fact that, in a world where the highest living being was once a particle of shapeless protoplasm, we have now Man, a being lamentably unfit, indeed, to be the last birth of Time, but uniquely great by his very consciousness of that unfitness.

In contemplating this wonderful ascending movement let us not forget that the warrant for its continuance rests in ourselves. The false tracks, the regressive forms, which meet us in nature prove at least this: that the line of development which we observe on earth may conceivably end in a disaster which would bear to the course of Life in general just such a relation as the degeneration of the Amazon ants does to life on this globe. We are by no means entitled to sit still and expect that the current of evolution will bear mankind along irresistibly to its goal. With the development of the conscious will we are made responsible for the advance of life in the only sphere which we know and which our actions can affect. Man is, as it were, the growing-point of that progressive life. If his strange passion for the perfection which he has never seen should be smothered in the struggle for mere existence, or corrupted by brutal luxury, then growth will be at an end, atrophy or degeneration will set in. The vision of a nobler, freer, more humane life than is anywhere widely possible on earth at present cannot be realized without the strenuous help of men and women who have learned to subdue the Ego with its fierce egotisms into harmony with the purposes of the divine Whole. But this much we may say—that they will not fight alone. No one ever pursued a high and worthy aim without finding that he had drawn to himself those ‘great allies’ of whom Wordsworth has written so greatly; powers implicit in the nature of the world, and always waiting to be unlocked by the heroic Will.

The Power, some of whose workings it has been attempted to trace in the foregoing pages, is a controlling and directive force, making, through countless varieties of being, for one clear and definable end—the realization of life. It may be asked, Are we to regard this divine Power as wholly immanent in matter or as partly transcending it and governing it from without?

The nature of the divine principle, so far as we are able to discern it, cannot be fully discussed until we come to consider it in the highest sphere of manifestation yet known to us, that of the human soul. But with the question which has just been raised we are now in some measure able to deal, and the consideration of it may bring this section of our study to a close.

In the world of inorganic matter, the tendency of units to form themselves into groups having relation to other groups is already visible. A force immanent in the atom clearly becomes transcendent in relation to the atom when atoms group themselves into molecules. And when molecular affinities come into play, and obey definite laws of form, as in the wonderful phenomena of crystallization, we see that the force immanent in each molecule becomes transcendent, as regards the molecules taken separately, when we look at them from the point of view of the completed group. Crystallization is a process which trembles on the very verge of vital action. And in vital action the alternation of immanence and transcendence in an ever-ascending scale becomes still clearer and more significant. Every cell is a collection of forces controlled by a power which transcends each one of them, or any number of them below the whole. Every cell colony, like the Alga described in an earlier chapter,[122] has a life which is immanent in the colony but transcendent as regards its component members. Definite groups of cells make up the structure of the highly organized plant or animal, and exhibit the same combination of forces immanent in the parts and transcendent, as regards those parts, in the whole. Again, each whole, each individual, is moved by life-impulses immanent in itself but transcendent in so far as they represent the communal life of the species to which it belongs. This communal life of the species becomes immanent again when we regard it as embraced in the life of the totality of beings on the globe. The thought must at once occur, as the ascending series passes out of reach of man’s intelligence: Whither, then, does it lead us in the end? Is there any end? And is our knowledge of Being absolutely limited to those parts of it which lie beneath us?

We are, I think, able, without going beyond the limits of observation and experience, to frame a synthesis of all physical nature, and to express its character in terms of Life and Response. But at the next step we have to embrace man with his moral nature, his intelligence, his personal consciousness, and there may for aught we know be beings far higher than man who must also be included. Now here we are not only in the synthesis and therefore unable to grasp and survey it, but we are also quite unaware of its contents and limits. We ask, Is the All of Things personal? is It conscious? has It a manlike intelligence? and so forth, and I confess I see no way of answering these questions with our present capacities. We can only say—but this is much—that as the universe is one, the part of it which we do not see cannot stand in any essential contradiction to that which we do.

Furthermore we must remember that since, in that aspect of us which observes and studies, we are distinct personalities, we are obliged, in so observing and studying, to regard things as outside of ourselves. This is the core of the whole difficulty. At bottom, the relativity of human knowledge does not depend on the fact that time, space, and causality are, as Kant has taught us, modes of thought imposed upon our ‘I,’ with nothing external answering to them; it goes deeper, it depends on the ultimate fact that I am an ‘I,’ and therefore separate (as such) from what I observe, and therefore only capable of studying my own states as affected by external things, not the very things themselves. Real knowledge, then, must consist in getting out of this prison of ‘I’-hood and entering into actual union with what we observe. Could we do that, we should at once live not in our ‘selves’ but in the Whole. The question then is, whether it is ever possible so to escape, and how?

We must note, however, that no one who has done this could ever tell us precisely what he has done. For the moment he begins to put his experiences into an intellectual form, the laws of the mind reassert themselves, things externalize themselves again, the ‘I’ reappears, the gulf yawns again between subject and object.