CHAPTER I.UNIVERSAL LIFE. OPINIONS OF PHILOSOPHERS AND POETS.
§ 1. Primitive beliefs; the ideas of poets.—§ 2. Opinions of philosophers—Transition from brute to living bodies—The principle of continuity: continuity by transition: continuity by summation—Ideas of philosophers as to sensibility and consciousness in brute bodies—The general principle of homogeneity—The principle of continuity as a consequence of the principle of homogeneity.
The teaching of science as to the analogies between brute bodies and living bodies accords with the conceptions of the philosophers and the fancies of the poets. The ancients held that all bodies in nature were the constituent parts of a universal organism, the macrocosm, which they compared to the human microcosm. They attributed to it a principle of action, thepsyche, analogous to the vital principle, and this psyche directed phenomena; and also an intelligent principle, thenous, analogous to the soul, and thenousserved for the comprehension of phenomena. This universal life and this universal soul played an important part in their metaphysical systems.
It was the same with the poets. Their tendency has always been to attribute life to Nature, so as to bring her into harmony with our thoughts and feelings. They seek to discover the life or soul hidden in the background of things.
“Hark to the voices. Nothing is silent.Winds, waves, and flames, trees, reeds, and rocksAll live; all are instinct with soul.”
“Hark to the voices. Nothing is silent.Winds, waves, and flames, trees, reeds, and rocksAll live; all are instinct with soul.”
“Hark to the voices. Nothing is silent.
“Hark to the voices. Nothing is silent.
Winds, waves, and flames, trees, reeds, and rocksAll live; all are instinct with soul.”
Winds, waves, and flames, trees, reeds, and rocks
All live; all are instinct with soul.”
After making proper allowance for emotional exaggeration, ought we to consider these ideas as the prophetic divination of a truth which science is only just beginning to dimly perceive? By no means. As Renan has said, this universal animism, instead of being a product of refined reflection, is merely a legacy from the most primitive of mental processes, a residue of conceptions belonging to the childhood of humanity. It recalls the time when men conceived of external things only in terms of themselves; when they pictured each object of nature as a living being. Thus, they personified the sky, the earth, the sea, the mountains, the rivers, the fountains, and the fields. They likened to animate voices the murmur of the forest:—
“ ... The oak chides and the birchIs whispering....And the beech murmurs....The willow’s shiver, soft and faint, sounds like a word.The pine-tree utters mysterious moans.”
“ ... The oak chides and the birchIs whispering....And the beech murmurs....The willow’s shiver, soft and faint, sounds like a word.The pine-tree utters mysterious moans.”
“ ... The oak chides and the birchIs whispering....And the beech murmurs....The willow’s shiver, soft and faint, sounds like a word.The pine-tree utters mysterious moans.”
“ ... The oak chides and the birch
Is whispering....
And the beech murmurs....
The willow’s shiver, soft and faint, sounds like a word.
The pine-tree utters mysterious moans.”
For primitive man, as for the poet of all times, everything is alive, and every sound is due to a being with feelings similar to our own. The sighing of the breeze, the moan of the wave upon the shore, thebabbling of the brook, the roaring of the sea, and the pealing of the thunder are nothing less than sad, joyous, or angry living voices.
These impressions were embodied in ancient mythology, the graceful beauty of which does not conceal its inadequacy. Then they passed into philosophy and approached the realm of science. Thales believed that all bodies in nature were animate and living. Origen considered the stars as actual beings. Even Kepler himself attributed to the celestial bodies an internal principle of action, which, it may be said in passing, is contrary to the law of the inertia of matter, which has been wrongly ascribed to him instead of to Galileo. The terrestrial globe was, according to him, a huge animal, sensitive to astral influences, frightened at the approach of the other planets, and manifesting its terror by tempests, hurricanes, and earthquakes. The wonderful flux and reflux of the ocean was its breathing. The earth had its blood, its perspiration, its excretions; it also had its foods, among which was the sea water which it absorbs by numerous channels. It is only fair to add that at the end of his life Kepler retracted these vague dreams, ascribing them to the influence of J. C. Scaliger. He explained that by the soul of the celestial bodies he meant nothing more than their motive force.
Transition from Brute to Living Bodies.—The lowering of the barrier between brute bodies and living bodies began with those philosophers whointroduced into the world the great principles of continuity and evolution.
The Principle of Continuity.—First and foremost we must mention Leibniz. According to the teaching of that illustrious philosopher, as interpreted by M. Fouillée, “there is no inorganic kingdom, only a great organic kingdom, of which mineral, vegetable, and animal forms are the various developments.... Continuity exists everywhere throughout the world; everywhere is life and organization. Nothing is dead; life is universal.” It follows that there is no interruption or break in the succession of natural phenomena; that everything is gradually developed; and finally, that the origin of the organic being must be sought in the inorganic. Life, properly so called, has not, in fact, always existed on the surface of the globe. It appeared at a certain geological epoch, in a purely inorganic medium, by reason of favourable conditions. The doctrine of continuity compels us, however, to admit that it pre-existed on the globe under some rudimentary form.
The modern philosophers who are imbued with these principles, MM. Fouillée, L. Bourdeau, and A. Sabatier, express themselves in similar language. “Dead matter and living matter are not two absolutely different entities, but represent two forms of the same matter, differing only in degree, sometimes but slightly.” When it is only a matter of degree, it cannot be held that these views are opposed. Inequalities must not be interpreted as contrary attributes, as when the untrained mind considers heat and cold as objective states, qualitatively opposed to each other.
Continuity by Transition.—The argument whichleads us to remove the barrier between the two kingdoms, and to consider minerals as endowed with a sort of rudimentary life, is the same as that which compels us to admit that there is no fundamental difference between natural phenomena. There are transitions between what lives and what does not, between the animate being and the brute body. And in the same way there are transitions between what thinks and what does not think, between what is thought and what is not thought, between the conscious and the unconscious. This idea of insensible transition, of a continuous path between apparent antitheses, at first arouses an insuperable opposition in minds not prepared for it by a long comparison of facts. It is slowly realized, and finally is accepted by those who, in the world of things, follow the infinity of gradations presented by natural phenomena. The principle of continuity comes at last to constitute, as one may say, a mental habit. Thus the man of science may be led, like the philosopher, to entertain the idea of a rudimentary form of life animating matter. He may, like the philosopher, be guided by this idea; he may attributea priorito brute matter all the really essential qualities of living beings. But this must be on the condition that, assuming these properties to be common, he must afterwards demonstrate them by means of observation and experiment. He must show that molecules and atoms, far from being inert and dead masses, are in reality active elements, endowed with a kind of inferior life, which is manifested by all the transformations observed in brute matter, by attractions and repulsions, by movements in response to external stimuli, by variations of state and of equilibrium; and finally, by the systematic methodsaccording to which these elements group themselves, conforming to those definite types of structure by means of which they produce different species of chemical compounds.
Continuity by Summation.—The idea of summation leads by another path to the same result. It is another form of the principle of continuity. A sum total of effects, obscure and indistinct in themselves, produces a phenomenon appreciable, perceptible, and distinct, apparently, but not really, heterogeneous in its components. The manifestations of atomic or molecular activity thus become manifestations of vital activity.
This is another consequence of the teaching of Leibniz. For, according to his philosophical theory, individual consciousness, like individual life, is the collective expression of a multitude of elementary lives or consciousnesses. These elements are inappreciable because of their low degree, and the real phenomenon is found in the sum, or rather theintegral, of all these insensible effects. The elementary consciousnesses are harmonized, unified, integrated into a result that becomes manifest, just as “the sounds of the waves, not one of which would be heard if by itself, yet, when united together and perceived at the same instant, become the resounding voice of the ocean.”
Ideas of the Philosophers as to Sensibility and Consciousness in Brute Bodies.—The philosophers have gone still further in the way of analogies, and have recognized in the play of the forces of brute matter, particularly in the play of chemical forces, a mere rudiment of the appetitions and tendencies that regulate, as they believe, the functional activity of livingbeings—a trace, as it were, of their sensibility. To them reactions of matter indicate the existence of a kind ofhedonic consciousness—i.e., a consciousness reduced simply to a distinction between comfort and discomfort, a desire for good and repulsion from evil, which they suppose to be the universal principle of all activity. This was the view held by Empedocles in antiquity; it was that of Diderot, of Cabanis, and, in general, of the modern materialistic school, eager to find, even in the lowest representatives of the inorganic world, the first traces of the vitality and intellectual life which blossom out at the top of the scale in the living world.
Similar ideas are clearly seen in the early history of all natural sciences. It was this same principle of appetition, or of love and of repulsion or hate that, under the names of affinity, selection, and incompatibility, was thought to direct the transformations of bodies when chemistry first began; when Boerhaave, for example, compared chemical combinations to voluntary and conscious alliances, in which the respective elements, drawn together by sympathy, contracted appropriate marriages.
General Principle of the Homogeneity of the Complex and its Components.—The assimilation of brute bodies to living bodies, and of the inorganic kingdom to the organic, was, in the mind of these philosophers, the natural consequence of positinga priorithe principles of continuity and evolution. There is, however, a principle underlying these principles. This principle is not expressed explicitly by the philosophers; it is not formulated in precise terms, but is more or less unconsciously implied; it is everywhere applied. It, however, may be clearly seen behind the apparatus ofphilosophical argument It is the assertion that no arrangement or combination of elements can put forth any new activity essentially different from the activities of the elements of which it is composed. Man is living clay, say Diderot and Cabanis; and, on the other hand, he is a thinking being.As it is impossible to produce that which thinks from that which does not think, the clay must possess a rudiment of thought. But is there not another alternative? May not the new phenomenon, thought, be the effect of the arrangement of this clay? If we exclude this alternative, we must then consider arrangement and organization as incapable of producing in arranged and organized matter a new property different from that which it presented before such arrangement. Living protoplasm, says another, is merely an assemblage of brute elements; “these brute elements must therefore possess a rudiment of life.” This is the same implied supposition which we have just considered; if life is not the basis of each element, it cannot result from their simple assemblage.
Man and animals are combinations of atoms, says M. le Dantec. It is more natural to admit that human consciousness is the result of the elementary consciousness of the constituent atoms than to consider it as resulting from construction by means of elements with no consciousness. “Life,” says Haeckel, “is universal; we could not conceive of its existence in certain aggregates of matter if it did not belong to their constituent elements.” Here the postulate is almost expressed.
The argument is always the same; even the same words are used: the fundamental hypothesis is the same; only it remains more or less unexpressed,more or less unperceived. It may be stated as follows:—Arrangement, assemblage, construction, and aggregation are powerless to bring to light in the complex anything new and essentially heterogeneous to what already exists in the elements. Reciprocally, grouping reveals in a complex a property and character which is the gradual development of an analogous property and character in the elements. It is in this sense that there exists a collective soul in crowds, the psychology of which has been discussed by M. G. Le Bon. In the same way, many sociologists, adopting the views advanced by P. de Lilienfeld in 1865, attribute to nations a formal individuality, after the type of that possessed by each of their constituent members. M. Izolet considers society as an organism, which he calls a “hyperzoan.” Herbert Spencer has developed the comparison of the collective organism with the individual organism, insisting on their resemblances and differences. Th. Ribot has dwelt, in particular, on the resemblances.
The postulate that we have clearly stated here is accepted by many as an axiom. But it is not an axiom. When we say that there is nothing in the complex that cannot be found in the parts, we think we are expressing a self-evident truth; but we are, in fact, merely stating an hypothesis. It is assumed that arrangement, aggregation, and complicated and skilful grouping of elements can produce nothing really new in the order of phenomena. And this is an assertion that requires verification in each particular case.
The Principle of Continuity, a Consequence of the Preceding.—Let us apply this principle to the beings in nature. All beings in nature are, according tocurrent ideas, arrangements, aggregates, or groupings of the same universal matter, that is to say, of the same simple chemical bodies. It results from the preceding postulate that their activities can only differ in degree and form, and not fundamentally. There is no essential difference of nature between the activities of various categories of beings, no heterogeneity, no discontinuity. We may pass from one to another without coming to an hiatus or impassable gulf. The law of continuity thus appears as a simple consequence of the fundamental postulate. And so it is with the law of evolution, for evolution is merely continuity of action.
Such are the origins of the philosophical doctrine which universalizes life and extends it to all bodies in nature.
It may be remarked that this doctrine is not confined to any particular school or sect. Leibniz was by no means a materialist, and he endowed his mundane elements, hismonads, not only with a sort of life, but even with a sort of soul. Father Boscovitch, Jesuit as he was, and professor in the college of Rome, did not deny to hisindivisible pointsa kind of inferior vitality. St. Thomas, too, the angelical doctor, attributed, according to M. Gardair, to inanimate substances a certain kind of activity, inborn inclinations, and a real appetition towards certain acts.