The meaning of personal life

Front matter

Class _2wJi^i.

Book ^J 6

Copyiight]^^ „

Preface

Tms book is the result of studies of the meanings of nature and life, which the author has pursued since the publication in 1902 of his Lowell Lectures, Through Science to Faith. Since then the author has from time to time taken up anew the conclusions to which he had been led in that volume, and it has been his aim to review the reasonings of that earlier book as though it were the work of another. From more recent scientific researches and working-theories he has sought to know better what is the real meaning of the final and supreme fact in nature of the personal life. This is no easy task; for aU ways of investigation lead up toward this ultimate problem, yet no science by itself alone can tell the answer to the old question, What is your Hfe? The reasonable answer, which religious faith seeks, is ultimately to be found at the point where all the ways of knowledge meet. Though such inquiries must traverse many fields of the specialists and among confusing sidepaths, nevertheless, the method of such pursuit of truth may be simple and straightforward.

Many summer wanderings through the sohtudes of the woods of northern Maine may have unconsciously taught me the method which I have pursued through the following pages. As described more fully in the opening chapter, it is to look at first all around for any slightest indications of direction; and then, keeping preconceived ideas out of mind, to follow the trail from sign to sign. Accordingly I must begin in the first chapter by taking notice of some scientific teachings con-

vii viii PREFACE

cerning the first, least things that are known. Possibly the general reader may find some of these earlier pages too scientific to possess for him any personal interest; but they are of primary importance for our present purpose. For, in order to know ourselves, we must go back, as far as our knowledge possibly can, to the point where we, the latest born of the children of nature, began first to be. Otherwise, if we do not observe intelligently whatever physical science or biology may discover concerning the origins of things, in our haste to find the way of life we may only circle round and round, and never come out of the metaphysical woods. The subject-matter will become more famihar, and of more human interest, as in the succeeding chapters we shall be led through our own experience of life on and up to the fulfilment aHke of nature and of personahty in the Son of man. Only thus, when we shall have come to the close of this search from sign to sign to know the meaning of our Hfe here and now, may faith look up toward the unrevealed mystery of Ufe beyond, and ask of all the sciences whether such knowledge as we do have of our present kind of life is not enough to yield a reasonable hope that it shall be continued hereafter.

For the sake of readers who may have Httle leisure or inclination for philosophical and scientific studies, but who desire to think of these things, I have avoided technical terms of the schools, so far as accuracy would permit; where more critical discussions or references seemed desirable, I have inserted paragraphs of that nature in smaller type. The chapter on the Fulfilment of Personal Life in Jesus Christ has been taken in part from my recent small book of four lectures on Constructive Natural Theology.

It would be idle for one to assume in such inquiries an attitude of entire detachment from his own mental

PREFACE ix

heredity or preformed beliefs; but one may be resolved to accept unhesitatingly every ascertained fact, as well as to entertain any probable working- theory of modern science, whatever may seem to be its bearings upon his habits of thinking; he must do so, if he is to be a teacher of thinkers or a true prophet of rehgion among men. I may commend, therefore, to students of the meanings of the world and ourselves, both in the laboratories and in the schools especially of rehgion, the simple yet searching method, which I have desired to follow, irrespective of any mistakes into which I may have fallen by the way, in the hope that, as knowledge advances, they may be led to more open vision and assurance of the immortal meaning of the personal Ufe.

New Haven, March i, 1916.

Contents

CHAFFER PAGE

I. The Earliest Signs of Meaning 3

II. Beginnings of Mind in Nature 24

Chapter I

Life brings to us daily questionings concerning the meanings of things; but the one question running through them all is: What do we mean to ourselves? The supreme problem of the world for us is: What is the ultimate meaning of the personal Hfe?

Modern science requires of philosophy a revision of our conception of personality. In the light of new knowledge of nature we are to seek anew to know ourselves. We are facts of nature amid other facts of nature, having our being in the one whole of existence, coming to ourselves in the relations of all the elements and influences that make the universe what it is. Our consciousness of being is set in the mould of nature, and modern science will have us interpret ourselves from the nature side. Such is the end to be pursued in the following pages. Our quest is to seek what natural signs, if any, of an ultimate meaning and worth of personal Hfe may be discerned.

The method to be followed is simple and easy to state, though difficult to pursue; it is to accept every scientifically ascertained fact, and to ask of each in succession: Toward what does it point? Not What, taken by itself, does it prove? but What, beyond itself, may it signify? We assume thus the modern scientific postulates of the wholeness of the existing universe, its continuities of relations, its conservations of matter and energy. We are not to attempt to force any observed fact to fit any preconceived idea; we are to inquire what it is and may mean in its relation to what immediately precedes or follows it. We may thus reach finally a position where we may perceive whether aU the facts within the compass of our present knowledge indicate any definite direction toward any end; whether, taken all together, they have any meaning or worth which we may reasonably receive and trust. As we are careful at every step of the way not to force the facts of nature and life into any preformed conceptions of ourselves, we may bring to some assured conclusion the search for the final value of our own full consciousness of personal being.

Where, then, in such endeavor to know ourselves as personal facts of nature are we to begin? Mr. C. Lloyd Morgan, in his latest book. Instinct and Experience, commences his investigation at that exact point in evolution where the chick of the moor-hen makes its first peck at its shell. He starts there, he tells us, because he must start from somewhere. It is not his object, as a scientific observer, to enter into any question concerning the source of things, but to investigate how animal nature, as it is constituted, acts, and what are the laws of its constitution in accordance with which an organism behaves. But if we would know what it really is, our inquiry cannot strike into the course of evolution at any arbitrarily fixed point. To apprehend ourselves in our origins or our possible destiny, we must go back through all that is known to have been before us — before historic man, before the cave-dwellers, before the entire organic order and development — back to the molecules, the electrons, those least supposable particles of matter with their electric charge; back through the whole process and continuity of evolution as far as science in its most venturesome research may penetrate toward the "source." There, where all knowledge ends and science just begins, we are to put our first point of personal interrogation : What sign of anything beyond itself does the first elementary form of existence bear?

Such inquiry concerning the emergence and meaning of our own selfhood will compel us to traverse fields of scientific research which no one mind is capable of knowing as the speciaHst in each may do; yet it is not a too presumptuous task for one who is not a specialist to pursue a hmited but straightforward path of inquiry through these fields, which offer on every side opportunities for research so boundless.

What we shall have to do, then, in this inquiry is to follow from fact to fact, from sign to sign, the order of nature and the way of life; not until we shall have done this shall we be in a position to judge whether, as a whole, the universe, so far as known, and ourselves in it and of it, have intelligible meaning. It will not be necessary in the pursuit of this end to detain the general reader with detailed scientific technicalities, which require an expert's familiarity to be understood. It should be required of us to start from observed facts, and all the way through to keep close to the facts of experience. Nor should any knowledge be passed by which may seem to run counter to the course which other facts may seem to indicate. If we begin with a minimum of postulates we may hope for a maximum of rational assurance in our conclusion. Our starting-point, then, must be as far back as physical science may enable us to go. The nearer we can approach the point where matter first appears, the better it will be for our apprehension of how eventually we came to be. The further we may peer into the ethereal depths of the creation's origins, the deeper also, beyond the things that appear, we may possibly penetrate into the mystery of our being and destiny. Anything that modern science may assure us to be true of the first motions and elements from which have proceeded the things that are visible, may have some significance for our interpretation of the whole subsequent direction and end of evolution.

Recently physical science has pushed the limit of knowledge beyond the atom, which hitherto has been supposed to mark the last boundary of the world of matter, with nothing but cosmic ether beyond. Now between the ether of space and the atom another definite point of material form has been discovered, another fact further out on which science may find footing before knowledge stands facing the vast, formless unknown. The traditional atom has been dissociated into constituent elements, and the new physics starts with so-called electrons — the least particles of matter scientifically determined. Their existence is demonstrable; their trail can be traced and photographed as lines of vapor precipitated by their passage through an ingeniously prepared tube; but, though we thus know that they are, it is difl&cult to conceive what they are. They are supposed to have mass; we are informed that the "existence of masses which are much smaller than that of the smallest of the atoms of known substances has been demonstrated in the surest possible manner and by purely physical methods."^ Rutherford estimates them at slow velocities as 1,700 times smaller than the atom of hydrogen.^ Yet it is not certain how far this infinitesimal mass is more apparent than real. For, although it is measurable, it has been found to vary at different degrees of temperature, and hence it is inferred that in part at least it may be more apparent

^Righi, A., Modern Theory of Physical Phenomena, p. 127.

^ Radioactive Substances, p. 6i8. The limit of microscopic vision is about the one-hundred-thousandth of an inch. "A molecule of hydrogen, composed of two atoms, is about one two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-millionth part of an inch. About one thousand atoms are supposed to constitute a highly organized vital corpuscle. From i,ooo to 1,700 electrons are thought to compose an atom of hydrogen." — {Am. Journal of Psychology, April, 1908, p. 156.)

than real. Thus substantiality, as we ordinarily conceive of it, seems to vanish from the first estate of matter. Assuming the existence of the cosmic ether, and knowing the existence of these electrons, natural philosophy is confronted with the problem of the construction of ponderable matter from these imponderables or semi-imponderables. These infinitesimals are the beginnings of the creation. No science can tell by what travail of nature the first forms of matter were brought forth; yet by their unseen activities the worlds have been made. Here, then, with the appearance of these electrons out of a formless unknown, begins the Hne of questioning which we are to foUow to the end. Now that the physicist has succeeded in catching in his laboratory this primeval form of matter, our interest lies in putting to it the old question: What sign showest thou? For one thing, these primal invisibles show an active aptitude for combination; and fitness for combination characterizes further the atoms charged with their attractions. In this elemental fitness for combination a sign is given. It is a mark of some structural possibility. But a hint, indeed, the structure of the atom may be of something greater that shall follow because it is; yet evidently these electrons have come to do something — they are here that more may be. Herein there lies the potency of a forming finite order out of an infinite formlessness.

A physicist introduces his exposition of the modern theory of physical phenomena with this significant remark: "The new theory may perhaps acquire not a little importance in the future even from the philosophic point of view, since it points out a new method of considering the structure of ponderable matter, and tends to bring back to a single origin all the phenomena of the physical world." ^ He observes, that is, an apparent tendency in the earliest appearance of matter — a sign of one source —

* Righi, A., ibid., p. xiii.

a suggestion, at least, of monism, although not by itself alone an evidence of monotheism.

From such beginnings cosmic physics takes up the story of the making of the worlds. By means of mathematical symbols, from data obtained by instruments of precision, and with reasonable use of the scientific imagination it would write anew the genesis of the heavens and the earth. The spectroscope has taught the alphabet of the language of the skies. Some of its primitive constructive forms have been made out. The light from the stars brings some intelligible message; we know that they are formed of the same building materials of which the earth is made. It is now possible on a basis of scientific observations and calculations to construct plausible theories of the forces, the processes, the laws which have made the starry heavens and our habitable earth what they have become.^ We need only glance, in passing, at this fascinating revelation of the way the worlds have been made. The science of inorganic evolution is as yet only in its infancy, and we are but beginning to discover how the elements were fashioned and the existing order of inorganic nature evolved. The distinctive character, which we notice, is the fitness for combination which from the elemental origins marks with increasing significance the development of material forms. The elements have acquired distinctive properties and valencies; they enter into further structural combinations; nature begins at once to weave them into varied and intricate patterns. Everything seems to have been brought into existence for further uses. We may question Clerk-Maxwell's oft-quoted sentence that the atoms have the characteristics of manufactured articles; but the earth in its final forming has the appearance of some vast assembling-room of well-fitted parts. At a certain time, in a definite position

^ See Arrhenius, Kosmische Pkysik and The Worlds in Making; Lockyer, J. N., Inorganic Development as Studied by Spectrum Analysis.

in space, sustained by a balance of forces from interstellar space, our earth has acquired its determinate constitution and form, and then has shown itself to be possessed of a specific capacity for a further issue — its fertile fitness as the environment of Hfe. It has gained being and form for something beyond itself. It has become means for an end. We do not know, but very likely at other points in space and in other periods of cosmic time an inorganic environment for the organic may have come to pass; but, however that may be, this we know : on this earth at last primeval forces have been so combined, numberless influences have been so harmonized, subtle attractions and radiant energies from the outlying infinitude so balanced and timed and caused to work together for good, that here living matter appears and a new order of being and realm of untold richness and promise has been established, the full fruition of which does not yet appear. Henceforth, from sKghtest germ, so frail that the least unfitness, the sKghtest discord in all this wondrous concord were enough to destroy it, life begins its wondrous history. The mystery deepens, and at the same time its possible significance increases, the moment we cross the boundary between the inorganic and the organic world. In the early part of the last century the living cell was discovered to be the common basis of all organic structure. As the atoms were regarded as the fundamental building stones of the inorganic, so the protoplasmic cells were considered to be the units of the organic world. But the cells, like the atoms, have shown themselves to be composite substances; and recent biology has discerned in the cells complex systems of chemical and physical properties and stresses. The simplest living particle that the microscope can bring to light contains a world within itself waiting for future science to conquer if it can. How this Hving particle ever originated on this earth no one knows. To some extent organic compounds may be produced in lo THE MEANING OF PERSONAL LIFE

the laboratories; the eggs of some lower organisms have been artificially activated, the process of their development started up and carried to a certain degree of normal growth. Some eager biologists deem it quite possible that some day science may succeed in transforming inorganic into living matter, and, indeed, that the evolution of non-Hving into living substance has happened more than once, and may be happening now;^ but, at present, this possibiUty is as the alchemist's dream, and far beyond the achievement of our subtlest chemistry. It is not, indeed, a possibility to be denied ; and should science ever discern the secret of life's origin in the womb of nature, that would be only another advance in our endeavor to find out by searching the ultimate Source of the whole wonder of the creation.

In the absence of knowledge several hypotheses of the origin of life have been ventured. One was the supposition that some living particles may have been wafted from other worlds, and, when the earth was ready, found here fertile soil for their germination. This hypothesis met the seemingly fatal objection that no living germ could have withstood the heat which its descent through our atmosphere might have engendered. Recently, however, Arrhenius has lent more plausibility to this conjecture as the result of his mathematical calculations and subsidiary hypotheses concerning the radiant forces which are now supposed to play throughout ethereal space. He holds it to be possible that the earth may have passed through multitudes of germs scattered through space, and that some of these living particles may have fallen undestroyed upon it. Thus all our life may have been the gift to us of other worlds more advanced than ours. More generally regarded as probable is the view that at some particular stage of the earth's development it was fitted for

' See Sir Edward A. Schafer's address as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1912.

THE EARLIEST SIGNS OF MEANING ii

the spontaneous birth of life. Just the right temperature and conditions of chemical elements may have occurred, perhaps once for all time in the earth's history, when, as at no other moment, the great transformation may have occurred. If so, a prophetic sign would have then been given of a greater world-age about to come. The philosophic monist and the theistic believer might well wish that science might find, indeed, the way which nature has taken in crossing the apparently impassable gap between the inorganic and the organic, over which we can throw only slender hypotheses. At present the philosopher beholds the wonder of the whole world of life in a dot of living matter under the microscope, and he must ask: Whence and why its coming and its potency to make it a world for us? Did it from the beginning mean us?

At this point, then, in the pursuit of our inquiry we observe that form and fitness for something to be achieved constitute the double mystery of the first known beginning of things.

Note more critically what thus far has taken place; viz., the total resultant of one cycle of development, the inorganic, has become a fitness of things for another cycle of evolution, the organic. The one development has become environment for another. Somehow, somewhy, one order has so come to pass that another order may use it for its existence. This elemental sign of fitness for something other than itself has become a plain mark on the face of things. Hence biology does not begin with the cell; it runs back into the antecedent problem of the adaptation of the inorganic environment for the cell. Nature took ages in making the inorganic a womb for the birth of the organic. Whether or not this is fortuitous, whether or not this character of fitness is a mere by-product of mechanical forces, at this stage of our inquiry is obviously not to be determined; but this character itself is a fact in evidence. It is an original hall-mark on the creation. The question at this point is not the survival of the fittest, but "the arrival of the fit."

Formerly this striking characteristic of nature, its constitutional adaptation to be the abode of life, was advanced as a signal evidence of intelHgent design. The scientific knowledge of the day was used with much force in the famous series of Bridgewater Treatises to illustrate the "Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation." Whewell reasoned that "a great number of quantities and laws appear to have been selected in the construction of the universe; and that by the adjustments to each other of the magnitudes and laws thus, selected, the constitution of the world is what we find it, and is fitted for the support of vegetables and animals in a manner in which it could not have been if the properties and quantities of the elements had been different from what they are." ^ But since Darwin this reasoning from construction directly to design and a Designer has been brought to a pause — not necessarily, indeed, to a full period; but a scientific parenthesis has been interposed between premise and conclusion. Before the significance which the Bridgewater Treatises attributed to these contrivances of nature can be admitted it must be shown further that mechanistic principles are not of themselves sufficient to account for them. The question also is raised whether other fortuitous combinations of the elements might not have proved available for organic ends. Since Darwinism has demonstrated some vast constructive power in the process of natural evolution, it is held that the presumption is changed from the side of an intelligent Artificer of the universe to that of its self-formative potentiality, at least if motion and matter be first assumed. Consequently, the point of view of the Bridgewater Treatises has been generally abandoned among sci-

^ Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 4th ed., pp. 141-143.

entific men, while this apparent character of the present fitness of environment to life has been taken for granted and neglected by biological writers. But, Hke all fundamental questions, this inquiry may be put off for a season, only to return again. It comes back to the philosophy of biology to-day in a new form : Is the principle of survival of the fittest a factor operative in inorganic evolution? Is it a principle sufficient to account for what we now know much better than the writers of the Bridgewater Treatises knew in their day concerning the physical and chemical properties of matter, and the specific adaptation of a few of their complex combinations to the subsequent evolution of living matter? Or on what mechanistic principle is this double fitness to be understood? Can a single factor or law be found, not merely to hold together two parallel developments, but to connect one antecedent, preparatory course with a subsequent course for which the first has value? We have in the development of the inorganic world what has been called "delayed utility"; the successive stages of inorganic evolution bear the broad mark of prospective utility. The prepared physical and chemical fitness of the environment for the advent of fife on this earth is evident enough, and on any known mechanistic principles puzzling enough, to compel science to search more thoroughly for some common principle sufficient for both kinds and periods of evolution.

This problem has recently been taken up anew from a critical physico-chemical point of view by Professor L. J. Henderson, of Harvard, in a book bearing the suggestive title, The Fitness of the Environment. His method of attack upon the problem is new and illuminating. He simplifies the question and renders it more scientifically determinable by narrowing it to the three chief elementary conditions of matter as related to life, on the one hand, and three distinctive characters of life, on the other hand

— carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, with carbon compounds; and complexity, regulation, metabolism of life. He asks: "How does it come about that each and all of these many unique properties should be favorable to the organic mechanism, should fit the universe for Hf e ? And for the answer to this question existing knowledge provides, I believe, no clew" (p. 278). "The two fitnesses are complementary; are they, then, single or dual in origin? The simple view would be to imagine one common impulse operating on all matter, inorganic and organic, through all stages of its evolution, in all its states and forms, and leading to worlds Hke our own through paths apparently purposeful and really not yet explained" (p. 299). He excludes mere contingency in his endeavor to find the formative principle of the fitness of the environment. "There is, in truth," he observes, "not one chance in countless milHons of millions that the many unique properties of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and especially of their stable compounds, water and carbonic acid, which chiefly make up the atmosphere of a new planet, should simultaneously occur in three elements otherwise than through the operation of a natural law which somehow connects them together. There is no greater probability that these unique properties should be without due cause uniquely favorable to the organic mechanism. These are no mere accidents; an explanation is to seek. It must be admitted, however, that no explanation is at hand" (p. 276). Excluding ordinary teleology as "a dangerous doctrine in science," he says: "Nevertheless, biological science has not been able to escape the recognition of a natural formative tendency, which Darwin identified as the result of natural selection. And now it appears to be necessary to postulate a like tendency in the evolution of inorganic nature" (p. 280). "The perfect induction of physical science, based upon each and all of its countless successes in every department of physics and chemistry, conclusively proves that the whole process of cosmic evolution from its earhest conceivable state to the present is pure mechanism" (p. 304). "On the other hand, it is conceivable that a tendency should work parallel with mechanism, without interfering with it," etc. (p. 306). "Matter and energy have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizes the universe in space and time. . . . Given the universe, life, and the tendency" (i. e., teleological), "mechanism is inductively proved sufficient to account for all phenomena" (p. 308). Thus we are brought back to Lotze's maxim: "How universal is the extent and how little is the significance of mechanism in nature!" This "tendency" is a mark, which we thus hit at the very beginning of the trail, which we must seek to follow through nature.

Descartes, who was both philosopher and physicist, sought to explain mechanically all physical phenomena, including the hfe of plants and animals; he denied the vital principle attributed to them by Aristotle. During the three centuries now nearly passed since his day the controversy has been repeatedly renewed. No sooner does the one view appear to triumph than the other in a new form returns to the field. The hypothesis of a special vital force is exploded; but Driesch brings back Aristotle's " entelechies " in full array into the field once more. In the hour of the apparent subjection of the entire known field of organic phenomena to mechanism, the new vitalism returns to the charge and asserts the dominion of some higher factor of organic evolution. On either side an array of names eminent in science and natural philosophy might be mentioned; at present the philosophy of nature is as a house divided against itself. Some issues, however, have been cleared up; and as a result of the prolonged discussion and research we may draw a twofold conclusion. On the one hand, vital phenomena, one after another, have been investigated on mechanical principles and their mechanical actions and reactions with more or less probability determined. Some vital phenomena still elude mathematical exploitation; they are not calculable as yet in terms of physico-chemical quantities and motions. But undeniably it is no small part of the great achievement of modern science that it has unravelled the intricacies of many vital processes, and demonstrated laws of mechanics in the order of the organic world.