The Breath of Life
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THE
BREATH OF LIFE
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published May 1915_
PREFACE
As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more
upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope
that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other
world. In these studies I fancy I am about as far from mastering the
mystery as the ant which I saw this morning industriously exploring a
small section of the garden walk is from getting a clear idea of the
geography of the North American Continent. But the ant was occupied and
was apparently happy, and she must have learned something about a small
fraction of that part of the earth's surface.
I have passed many pleasant summer days in my hay-barn study, or under
the apple trees, exploring these questions, and though I have not solved
them, I am satisfied with the clearer view I have given myself of the
mystery that envelops them. I have set down in these pages all the
thoughts that have come to me on this subject. I have not aimed so much
at consistency as at clearness and definiteness of statement, letting my
mind drift as upon a shoreless sea. Indeed, what are such questions, and
all other ultimate questions, but shoreless seas whereon the chief
reward of the navigator is the joy of the adventure?
Sir Thomas Browne said, over two hundred years ago, that in philosophy
truth seemed double-faced, by which I fancy he meant that there was
always more than one point of view of all great problems, often
contradictory points of view, from which truth is revealed. In the
following pages I am aware that two ideas, or principles, struggle in my
mind for mastery. One is the idea of the super-mechanical and the
super-chemical character of living things; the other is the idea of the
supremacy and universality of what we call natural law. The first
probably springs from my inborn idealism and literary habit of mind; the
second from my love of nature and my scientific bent. It is hard for me
to reduce the life impulse to a level with common material forces that
shape and control the world of inert matter, and it is equally hard for
me to reconcile my reason to the introduction of a new principle, or to
see anything in natural processes that savors of the _ab-extra_. It is
the working of these two different ideas in my mind that seems to give
rise to the obvious contradictions that crop out here and there
throughout this volume. An explanation of life phenomena that savors of
the laboratory and chemism repels me, and an explanation that savors of
the theological point of view is equally distasteful to me. I crave and
seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the
word "natural" to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics. The
birth of a baby, and the blooming of a flower, are natural events, but
the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of
either.
I am forced to conclude that my passion for nature and for all open-air
life, though tinged and stimulated by science, is not a passion for pure
science, but for literature and philosophy. My imagination and ingrained
humanism are appealed to by the facts and methods of natural history. I
find something akin to poetry and religion (using the latter word in its
non-mythological sense, as indicating the sum of mystery and reverence
we feel in the presence of the great facts of life and death) in the
shows of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and woods. The
love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the
two may go together. The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of "something
far more deeply interfused" than the principles of exact science, is
probably the source of nearly if not quite all that this volume holds.
To the rigid man of science this is frank mysticism; but without a sense
of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat and barren. Without the
emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art,
no religion, no literature. How to get from the clod underfoot to the
brain and consciousness of man without invoking something outside of,
and superior to, natural laws, is the question. For my own part I
content myself with the thought of some unknown and doubtless unknowable
tendency or power in the elements themselves--a kind of universal mind
pervading living matter and the reason of its living, through which the
whole drama of evolution is brought about.
This is getting very near to the old teleological conception, as it is
also near to that of Henri Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge. Our minds
easily slide into the groove of supernaturalism and spiritualism because
they have long moved therein. We have the words and they mould our
thoughts. But science is fast teaching us that the universe is complete
in itself; that whatever takes place in matter is by virtue of the force
of matter; that it does not defer to or borrow from some other universe;
that there is deep beneath deep in it; that gross matter has its
interior in the molecule, and the molecule has its interior in the atom,
and the atom has its interior in the electron, and that the electron is
matter in its fourth or non-material state--the point where it touches
the super-material. The transformation of physical energy into vital,
and of vital into mental, doubtless takes place in this invisible inner
world of atoms and electrons. The electric constitution of matter is a
deduction of physics. It seems in some degree to bridge over the chasm
between what we call the material and the spiritual. If we are not
within hailing distance of life and mind, we seem assuredly on the road
thither. The mystery of the transformation of the ethereal, imponderable
forces into the vital and the mental seems quite beyond the power of the
mind to solve. The explanation of it in the bald terms of chemistry and
physics can never satisfy a mind with a trace of idealism in it.
The greater number of the chapters of this volume are variations upon a
single theme,--what Tyndall called "the mystery and the miracle of
vitality,"--and I can only hope that the variations are of sufficient
interest to justify the inevitable repetitions which occur. I am no more
inclined than Tyndall was to believe in miracles unless we name
everything a miracle, while at the same time I am deeply impressed with
the inadequacy of all known material forces to account for the phenomena
of living things.
That word of evil repute, materialism, is no longer the black sheep in
the flock that it was before the advent of modern transcendental
physics. The spiritualized materialism of men like Huxley and Tyndall
need not trouble us. It springs from the new conception of matter. It
stands on the threshold of idealism or mysticism with the door ajar.
After Tyndall had cast out the term "vital force," and reduced all
visible phenomena of life to mechanical attraction and repulsion, after
he had exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty mystery
still hovered beyond him. He recognized that he had made no step toward
its solution, and was forced to confess with the philosophers of all
ages that
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
CONTENTS
I. THE BREATH OF LIFE 1
II. THE LIVING WAVE 24
III. A WONDERFUL WORLD 46
IV. THE BAFFLING PROBLEM 71
V. SCIENTIFIC VITALISM 104
VI. A BIRD OF PASSAGE 115
VII. LIFE AND MIND 131
VIII. LIFE AND SCIENCE 159
IX. THE JOURNEYING ATOMS 188
X. THE VITAL ORDER 212
XI. THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIT 244
XII. THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE 254
INDEX 291
The reproduction of the bust of Mr. Burroughs which appears as the
frontispiece to this volume is used by courtesy of the sculptor, C. S.
Pietro.
I
THE BREATH OF LIFE
I
When for the third or fourth time during the spring or summer I take my
hoe and go out and cut off the heads of the lusty burdocks that send out
their broad leaves along the edge of my garden or lawn, I often ask
myself, "What is this thing that is so hard to scotch here in the
grass?" I decapitate it time after time and yet it forthwith gets itself
another head. We call it burdock, but what is burdock, and why does it
not change into yellow dock, or into a cabbage? What is it that is so
constant and so irrepressible, and before the summer is ended will be
lying in wait here with its ten thousand little hooks to attach itself
to every skirt or bushy tail or furry or woolly coat that comes along,
in order to get free transportation to other lawns and gardens, to green
fields and pastures new?
It is some living thing; but what is a living thing, and how does it
differ from a mechanical and non-living thing? If I smash or overturn
the sundial with my hoe, or break the hoe itself, these things stay
smashed and broken, but the burdock mends itself, renews itself, and, if
I am not on my guard, will surreptitiously mature some of the burs
before the season is passed.
Evidently a living thing is radically different from a mechanical thing;
yet modern physical science tells me that the burdock is only another
kind of machine, and manifests nothing but the activity of the
mechanical and chemical principles that we see in operation all about us
in dead matter; and that a little different mechanical arrangement of
its ultimate atoms would turn it into a yellow dock or into a cabbage,
into an oak or into a pine, into an ox or into a man.
I see that it is a machine in this respect, that it is set going by a
force exterior to itself--the warmth of the sun acting upon it, and upon
the moisture in the soil; but it is unmechanical in that it repairs
itself and grows and reproduces itself, and after it has ceased running
can never be made to run again. After I have reduced all its activities
to mechanical and chemical principles, my mind seems to see something
that chemistry and mechanics do not explain--something that avails
itself of these forces, but is not of them. This may be only my
anthropomorphic way of looking at things, but are not all our ways of
looking at things anthropomorphic? How can they be any other? They
cannot be deific since we are not gods. They may be scientific. But what
is science but a kind of anthropomorphism? Kant wisely said, "It sounds
at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding
does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature."
This is the anthropomorphism of science.
If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am
I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a
name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion,
osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain
special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own
minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.
We can help ourselves out, as Haeckel does, by calling the physical
forces--such as the magnet that attracts the iron filings, the powder
that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, and the
like--"living inorganics," and looking upon them as acting by "living
force as much as the sensitive mimosa does when it contracts its leaves
at touch." But living force is what we are trying to differentiate from
mechanical force, and what do we gain by confounding the two? We can
only look upon a living body as a machine by forming new conceptions of
a machine--a machine utterly unmechanical, which is a contradiction of
terms.
A man may expend the same kind of force in thinking that he expends in
chopping his wood, but that fact does not put the two kinds of activity
on the same level. There is no question but that the food consumed is
the source of the energy in both cases, but in the one the energy is
muscular, and in the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental or
spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception as when we speak of
physical force. It requires physical force to produce the effect that we
call mental force, though how the one can result in the other is past
understanding. The law of the correlation and conservation of energy
requires that what goes into the body as physical force must come out in
some form of physical force--heat, light, electricity, and so forth.
Science cannot trace force into the mental realm and connect it with our
states of consciousness. It loses track of it so completely that men
like Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer pause before it as an inscrutable
mystery, while John Fiske helps himself out with the conception of the
soul as quite independent of the body, standing related to it as the
musician is related to his instrument. This idea is the key to Fiske's
proof of the immortality of the soul. Finding himself face to face with
an insoluble mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the chasm, by
this extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, as we know it, is
inseparably bound up with physical conditions, it seems to me that a
more rational explanation of the phenomenon of mentality is the
conception that the physical force and substance that we use up in a
mental effort or emotional experience gives rise, through some unknown
kind of molecular activity, to something which is analogous to the
electric current in a live wire, and which traverses the nerves and
results in our changing states of consciousness. This is the mechanistic
explanation of mind, consciousness, etc., but it is the only one, or
kind of one, that lends itself to scientific interpretation. Life,
spirit, consciousness, may be a mode of motion as distinct from all
other modes of motion, such as heat, light, electricity, as these are
distinct from each other.
When we speak of force of mind, force of character, we of course speak
in parables, since the force here alluded to is an experience of our own
minds entirely and would not suffice to move the finest dust-particle in
the air.
There could be no vegetable or animal life without the sunbeam, yet when
we have explained or accounted for the growth of a tree in terms of the
chemistry and physics of the sunbeam, do we not have to figure to
ourselves something in the tree that avails itself of this chemistry,
that uses it and profits by it? After this mysterious something has
ceased to operate, or play its part, the chemistry of the sunbeam is no
longer effective, and the tree is dead.
Without the vibrations that we call light, there would have been no eye.
But, as Bergson happily says, it is not light passively received that
makes the eye; it is light meeting an indwelling need in the organism,
which amounts to an active creative principle, that begets the eye. With
fish in underground waters this need does not arise; hence they have no
sight. Fins and wings and legs are developed to meet some end of the
organism, but if the organism were not charged with an expansive or
developing force or impulse, would those needs arise?
Why should the vertebrate series have risen through the fish, the
reptile, the mammal, to man, unless the manward impulse was inherent in
the first vertebrate; something that struggled, that pushed on and up
from the more simple to the more complex forms? Why did not unicellular
life always remain unicellular? Could not the environment have acted
upon it endlessly without causing it to change toward higher and more
complex forms, had there not been some indwelling aboriginal tendency
toward these forms? How could natural selection, or any other process of
selection, work upon species to modify them, if there were not something
in species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, new forms, in fact some
active principle that is modifiable?
Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things. Why
has it risen? Why did it not keep on the same level, and go through the
cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without attaining to higher
forms? Because, it may be replied, it was life, and not mere matter and
motion--something that lifts matter and motion to a new plane.
Under the influence of the life impulse, the old routine of matter--from
compound to compound, from solid to fluid, from fluid to gaseous, from
rock to soil, the cycle always ending where it began--is broken into,
and cycles of a new order are instituted. From the stable equilibrium
which dead matter is always seeking, the same matter in the vital
circuit is always seeking the state of unstable equilibrium, or rather
is forever passing between the two, and evolving the myriad forms of
life in the passage. It is hard to think of the process as the work of
the physical and chemical forces of inorganic nature, without
supplementing them with a new and different force.
The forces of life are constructive forces, and they are operative in a
world of destructive or disintegrating forces which oppose them and
which they overcome. The physical and chemical forces of dead matter are
at war with the forces of life, till life overcomes and uses them.
The mechanical forces go on repeating or dividing through the same
cycles forever and ever, seeking a stable condition, but the vital force
is inventive and creative and constantly breaks the repose that organic
nature seeks to impose upon it.
External forces may modify a body, but they cannot develop it unless
there is something in the body waiting to be developed, craving
development, as it were. The warmth and moisture in the soil act alike
upon the grains of sand and upon the seed-germs; the germ changes into
something else, the sand does not. These agents liberate a force in the
germ that is not in the grain of sand. The warmth of the brooding fowl
does not spend itself upon mere passive, inert matter (unless there is a
china egg in the nest), but upon matter straining upon its leash, and in
a state of expectancy. We do not know how the activity of the molecules
of the egg differs from the activity of the molecules of the pebble,
under the influence of warmth, but we know there must be a difference
between the interior movements of organized and unorganized matter.
Life lifts inert matter up into a thousand varied and beautiful forms
and holds it there for a season,--holds it against gravity and chemical
affinity, though you may say, if you please, not without their aid,--and
then in due course lets go of it, or abandons it, and lets it fall back
into the great sea of the inorganic. Its constant tendency is to fall
back; indeed, in animal life it does fall back every moment; it rises on
the one hand, serves its purpose of life, and falls back on the other.
In going through the cycle of life the mineral elements experience some
change that chemical analysis does not disclose--they are the more
readily absorbed again by life. It is as if the elements had profited
in some way under the tutelage of life. Their experience has been a
unique and exceptional one. Only a small fraction of the sum total of
the inert matter of the globe can have this experience. It must first go
through the vegetable cycle before it can be taken up by the animal. The
only things we can take directly from the inorganic world are water and
air; and the function of water is largely a mechanical one, and the
function of air a chemical one.
I think of the vital as flowing out of the physical, just as the
psychical flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animal
life flow out of the lower. It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes,
and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to
inert matter; but the germ and start of each is in the series below it.
The living came out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical
origin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannot
explain. The butterfly comes out of the grub, man came out of the brute,
but, as Darwin says, "not by his own efforts," any more than the child
becomes the man by its own efforts.
The push of life, of the evolutionary process, is back of all and in
all. We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is immanent
in matter, and this gives the mind something to take hold of.
II
According to the latest scientific views held on the question by such
men as Professor Loeb, the appearance of life on the globe was a purely
accidental circumstance. The proper elements just happened to come
together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right
conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermal
history of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume of
essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life,"
enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms the
metaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the problem,
and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy of
mechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms;
and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only automatic
responses to the play of the blind, material forces of external nature.
All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only the
chance happenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead matter:
"We eat, drink, and reproduce [and, of course, think and speculate and
write books on the problems of life], not because mankind has reached an
agreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we are
compelled to do so!"
He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is
amenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple
animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis--the basis of
animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the
dark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that the
origin of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities,
because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense
with the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms
of marine life by chemical compounds alone. "The problem of the
beginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"--much
clearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins
with the egg, but where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis will
give us this, the problem is solved. We can analyze the material
elements of an organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce the
least spark of living matter. That all forms of life have a mechanical
and chemical basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis to
them, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But apply
the same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed.
Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish and
sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the
mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the
very foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts of
chemical synthesis to reproduce it.
It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question Professor
Loeb's scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of living
experimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of his
philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only the
mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics.
Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical
determinism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanity
is entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations come
in? A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that we
are compelled to do things, are we in the same category. Freedom of
choice alone gives any validity to ethical consideration. I dissent from
the idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is only applied
physics and chemistry. Is not geology also applied physics and
chemistry? Is it any more or any less? Yet what a world of difference
between the two--between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soil
he cultivates. Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are the
same in both, yet they work to such different ends in each. In one case
they are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a static
equilibrium; in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a state
of dynamic activity--to build up a body that hangs forever between a
state of integration and disintegration. What is it that determines this
new mode and end of their activities?
In all his biological experimentation, Professor Loeb starts with living
matter and, finding its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis,
he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for by
the action and interaction of these principles alone.