Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/64

54 verse in order. She at once began to make distinctions by getting her material together, and turning out worlds. It was the first step. Leaving other worlds to themselves, watch the progress of affairs at home. As soon as the first flurry is over, Nature settles down to the creation of differences. She puts the solid earth as a foundation, and piles the hot atmosphere above it; then she takes the water from the atmosphere, and we have air, earth, and water. With these she gets up some low forms of life. But, as she has only begun her work, she makes very little difference between the opposite ends of these forms. One end of a worm is so much like the other end that you may cut him in two, and one part putting on a tail and the other a head, you will in a short time have two very respectable worms. From these low forms, which carry as much life in one end as in the other, Nature goes on differentiating, till at last we find her getting up forms whose parts are so widely different that each has its own work to do, and one part cannot be substituted for another. A man losing any organ is imperfect; and many of his organs are such that the loss of one of them requires that he should go back into Nature's melting-pot, and be moulded over again into a new form of life—a Rhode Island pippin it may be, as good Roger Williams was. There is no record of any surgeon's having cut a man in two, and having made two men of the pieces. Nature is not content with multiplying species alone. She shows the same love for difference in varieties, and even in individuals, so that, as we are often told, there are no two peas exactly alike.

The utilitarian may ask: "But what is the need of all this variety? Why not have all peas alike?" This brings me to the important part of my essay; for, whimsical as some of my notions may appear to others, the conclusion to which I hope to bring my readers is to me a source of moral rest:

1. Relation of Difference to Consciousness.—How is it that we gain a knowledge of the external world whereby we become conscious intelligences? Simply by a perception of differences. What would follow were there no difference in color or shade? Go into a dark cellar with an extinguished candle to find a black cat that is not there. I know black is said to be no color, but it answers as an illustration. Your eyes are wider open than when above-ground in broad daylight, looking for a white cat that is there. Things being "all of a color," as common people remark when left in the dark, you are for the time as blind as the eyeless fish. Were white light put in the place of darkness, and each object to reflect it with absolute sameness, you would be just as unable to distinguish between objects, or between an object and its background. Were the black cat there eating a white rabbit, the cat having become white you could not tell where cat left off and rabbit began; neither could you tell where cat and rabbit ended and cellar-floor began. Everything would be of a piece.