Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 106.djvu/637

Rh can be reached and moved only through its senses.

The animal mind seems more like the mind we see manifested in the operations of outward nature, than like our own. The mind we see active in outward nature—if it is mind—is so unlike our own, that when we seek to describe it in terms of our own, ascribing to it design, plan, purpose, invention, rationality, etc., we are accused of anthropomorphism, and science will not listen to us. Yet all we know of laws and principles, of cause and effect, of mechanics and dynamics, of chemistry and evolution, etc., we learn from this outward nature. Through our gift of reason we draw out and formulate, or translate into our mental concepts, nature's method of procedure. Shall we say, then, that nature is rational without reason? wise without counsel? that she builds without rule, and dispenses without plan? is she full of mind-stuff, or does she only stimulate the mind-stuff in ourselves? It is evident that nature knows not our wisdom or economics, our prudence, our benevolence, our methods, our science. These things are the result of our reaction to the stimulus she affords, just as the sensation we call light is our reaction to certain vibrations, the sensation we call sound is the reaction to other kinds of vibrations, and the sensation we call heat, the reaction to still other. The mind, the reason, is in us; the cause of it is in nature. She has no mechanics, no chemistry, no philosophy, yet all we know of these things we draw from her.

When we translate her methods into our own terms, we call it the method of 'trial and error,'—a blind groping through infinite time and infinite space, till every goal is reached. If her arch falls, a stronger arch may be formed by its ruins; if her worlds collide, other worlds may be born of the collision; if one species perishes, other species may take its place; always if her 'bark sinks, 't is to another sea.' She is all in all, and all the parts are hers. Her delays, her failures, her trials, are like those of a blind man who seeks to reach a particular point in an unknown landscape; if his strength holds out, he will finally reach it. Nature's strength always holds out; she reaches her goal because she leaves no direction untried.

She felt her way to man through countless forms, through countless geological ages. If the development of man was possible at the outset, evolution was bound to fetch him in time; if not in a million years, then in a billion or a trillion. In the conflict of forces, mechanical and biological, his coming must have been delayed many times; the cup must have been spilled, or the vessel broken, times without number. Hence the surplus-age, the heaping measures in nature, her prodigality of seed and germ. To produce one brook trout, thousands of eggs perish; to produce one oak, thousands of acorns are cast. If there is the remotest chance that our solar system will come in collision with some other system,—and of course there is,—that collision is bound to occur, no matter if the time is so distant that it would take a row of figures miles in extent to express it.

I am aware that it is my anthropomorphism that compels me to speak of nature the way I am speaking; we have to describe that which is not man in terms of man, because we have no other terms, and thereby tell a kind of untruth. It is as when we put bird-songs or animal-calls into words, or write them on the musical scale—we only hint what we cannot express.

I look out of my window and see the tide in its endless quest, racing up and racing down the river; every day, every