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

by T. W. Rolleston

Nur allein der Mensch

Vermag das Unmögliche;

Er unterscheidet,

Wählet und richtet;

Er kann dem Augenblick

Dauer verleihn.[138]

Behind the mechanism of the pianola, behind the mechanism of the brain, there stands this living directive force of which we can give no scientific account whatever—we can only say that it is there. Indeed, it is just at this point that all comparison between mechanism, as usually understood, and vital action of any kind must break down. But the fact is that mechanism is usually not understood at all. I spoke above of a piece of mechanism taken by itself. But in truth we cannot take it by itself. Nothing in nature can be truly isolated, it only exists in relation to other things. Every machine has a soul, the soul of the man who made or who works it. Without that it would be merely scrap-iron; and even as scrap-iron it has relations with things about it—air, water, acids, and the like. In these relations we detect the soul of nature. Nothing exists by itself—nor even, permanently, as itself. The living universe of our experience is not a Being but an Acting and a Becoming. It is precisely this fact which, on the one hand, imposes a mysterious limit on the intellect, and, on the other, opens a boundless horizon before the will.

The human brain, the most highly organized form of protoplasm known to us, may be called in one sense a machine through which the personal will, the moral emotions, the æsthetic sense, the faculties of reasoning, have to assert themselves in action. But to say that they would never have existed but for this special form of protoplasm is to say that they were created by it out of nothing. And, no doubt, one can say that, one can say anything; but one cannot think it. I do not see how to represent the matter to our thought except by supposing that every stage in physical evolution is accompanied by what has been called ‘involution,’ a drawing in, from the potentialities of Being, of powers and faculties of living for which the opportunity to become actual had ripened.

An image may make clearer what I mean, and I offer it only for this purpose, well knowing that “the best in this kind are but shadows.” Suppose that a man were enclosed in a sheath composed of metal having certain peculiar properties: it is opaque when cold, but when heated it becomes transparent, and the hotter it is the more transparent it grows. Such a substance might easily exist, at any rate it is entirely conceivable. We must assume in addition that the heat is not such as to be injurious to the occupant. Now a man enclosed in such a sheath would, when it was at the proper temperature, see what was going on around him; he could also be seen, he could hold communication with other men, and direct operations which he wished carried out. If the sheath, in addition to being transparent at the right temperature, were also, under the same conditions, flexible, and fitted him like a skin, he could do things himself. If it got cold, however, and thereby became, in the measure of its coolness, opaque and rigid, the man would be shut off from all communication or interaction with the world outside, he would be what we call dead.

I suggest that Consciousness with all its attendant phenomena is represented by the man, the sheath is Matter, the heat is Life. Matter, historically, precedes the manifestation of consciousness, but as it is never without a certain degree of life, so, even in the nebular form in which it exists before it has cohered into worlds and systems, it is not without the element of directivity, of harmonious inter-relation and interaction. A higher organization of life makes possible the subtler sensitiveness of the vegetable kingdom. The most vital, the most highly organized form of matter we know is the human brain and nervous system. Here the sheath has assumed a considerable degree of transparency and flexibility. But doubtless a far higher degree of organization is possible, and when this is reached the capacities of consciousness will have developed to an extent altogether inconceivable to us at present, though every now and then some exceptionally constituted individual gives us a hint of stages of development as yet far beyond the capacities of the race in general.