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III

When we are bold enough to ask the question, Is life an addition to matter or an evolution from matter? how all these extra-scientific theories about life as a separate entity wilt and fade away! If we know anything about the ways of creative energy, we know that they are not as our ways; we know its processes bear no analogy to the linear and external doings of man. Creative energy works from within; it identifies itself with, and is inseparable from, the element in which it works. I know that in this very statement I am idealizing the creative energy, but my reader will, I trust, excuse this inevitable anthropomorphism. The way of the creative energy is the way of evolution. When we begin to introduce things, when we begin to separate the two orders, the vital and the material, or, as Bergson says, when we begin to think of things created, and of a thing that creates, we are not far from the state of mind of our childhood, and of the childhood of the race. We are not far from the Mosaic account of creation. Life appears as an introduction, man and his soul as introductions.

Our reason, our knowledge of the method of Nature, declare for evolution; because here we are, here is this amazing world of life about us, and here it goes on through the action and interaction of purely physical and chemical forces. Life seems as natural as day and night, as the dews and the rain. Our studies of the past history of the globe reveal the fact that life appeared upon a cooling planet when the temperature was suitable, and when its basic elements, water and carbon dioxide, were at hand. How it began, whether through insensible changes in the activities of inert matter, lasting whole geologic ages, or by a sudden transformation at many points on the earth’s surface, we can never know. But science can see no reason for believing that its beginning was other than natural; it was inevitable from the constitution of matter itself. Moreover, since the law of evolution seems of universal application, and affords the key to more great problems than any other generalization of the human mind, one would say on a priori grounds that life is an evolution, that its genesis is to be sought in the inherent capacities and potentialities of matter itself. How else could it come? Science cannot go outside of matter and its laws for an explanation of any phenomena that appear in matter. It goes inside of matter instead, and in its mysterious molecular attractions and repulsions, in the whirl and dance of the atoms and electrons, in their emanations and transformations, in their amazing potencies and activities, sees, or seems to see, the secret of the origin of life itself. But this view is distasteful to a large number of thinking persons. Many would call it frank materialism, and declare that it is utterly inadequate to supply the spiritual and ideal background which is the strength and solace of our human life.

IV

The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man of science feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of the natural order. To the scientist the universe is complete in itself. He can admit of no break or discontinuity anywhere. Threads of relation, visible and invisible,–chemical, mechanical, electric, magnetic, solar, lunar, stellar, geologic, biologic,–forming an intricate web of subtle forces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmic unity. Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere which rests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds all forms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning and no ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines are fluid and continuous. The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy we see are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war with itself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to the universe, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit; all is inside; deep beneath deep, height above height, and this mystery and miracle that we call life must arise out of the natural order in the course of time as inevitably as the dew forms and the rain falls. When the rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall,–a time which science predicts,–then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish from the earth. Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves, as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still not exempt from the operation of the universal physical laws. It came by them or through them, and it must go by them or through them.