John Burroughs

“ Even in inert matter—in the dews, the rains, the winds, the tides, the snows, the streams,—her mechanics and her chemistry and her hydrostatics and pneumatics, seem much nearer akin to life than our own. We must remember that Nature's machines are not human machines. When we place our machine so that it is driven by the great universal currents,—the wheel in the stream, the sail on the water,—the result is much more pleasing and poetic than when propelled by artificial power. The more machinery we get between ourselves and Nature, the farther off Nature seems. ”

“ There are degrees of mystery in the universe. The most mystifying thing in inorganic nature is electricity,—that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate particles of matter, unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm, or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of energy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life, that something which clothes itself in each infinitely varied and beautiful as well as unbeautiful form of matter. ”

“ Can we make the dead live? You may bray your living body in a mortar, destroy every one of its myriad cells, and yet you may not extinguish the last spark of life; the protoplasm is still living. But boil it or bake it and the vitality is gone, and all the art and science of mankind cannot bring it back again. The physical and chemical activities remain after the vital activities have ceased. Do we not then have to supply a non-chemical, a non-physical force or factor to account for the living body? ”

“ We cannot blame science for ruling out that which it cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. The phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that is all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than the horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities in the universe—matter, energy, and consciousness. But consciousness is the crown of a vital process. ”

“ One sees with his mind's eye this stream of energy, which we name the material universe, flowing down the endless cycles of time; at a certain point in its course, a change comes over its surface; what we call life appears, and assumes many forms; at a point farther along in its course, life disappears, and the eternal river flows on regardless, till, at some other point, the same changes take place again. Life is inseparable from this river of energy, but it is not coextensive with it, either in time or in space. ”

“ What part the atoms and electrons, and the energy they bear, play in it we shall never know. Even if we ever succeed in bringing the elements together in our laboratories so that there living matter appears, shall we then know the secret of life?
After we have got the spark of life kindled, how are we going to get all the myriad forms of life that swarm upon the earth? How are we going to get man with physics and chemistry alone? How are we going to get this tremendous drama of evolution out of mere protoplasm from the bottom of the old geologic seas? ”

“ All trees go to the same soil for their ponderable elements, their ashes, and to the air and the light for their imponderable,—their carbon and their energy,—but what makes the tree, and makes one tree differ from another? Has the career of life upon this globe, the unfolding of the evolutionary process, been accounted for when you have named all the physical and material elements and processes which it involves? We take refuge in the phrase "the nature of things," but the nature of things evidently embraces something not dreamed of in our science. ”

“ Science cannot go outside of matter and its laws for an explanation of any phenomena that appear in matter. It goes inside of matter instead, and in its mysterious molecular attractions and repulsions, in the whirl and dance of the atoms and electrons, in their emanations and transformations, in their amazing potencies and activities, sees, or seems to see, the secret of the origin of life itself. ”

“ If we say the particular essence of life is chemical, do we mean any more than that life is inseparable from chemical reactions?
After we have mastered the chemistry of life, laid bare all its processes, named all its transformations and transmutations, analyzed the living cell, seen the inorganic pass into the organic, and beheld chemical reaction, the chief priestess of this hidden rite, we shall have to ask ourselves, Is chemistry the creator of life, or does life create or use chemistry? ”

“ Not otherwise could he organize his scientific facts and see their due relations, see their drift and the sequence of forces that bind the universe into a whole. As a man of science he traces out the causes of the tides and the seasons, the nature and origin of disease, and a thousand and one other things; but only as a philosopher can he see the body as a whole and speculate about the mystery of its organization; only as a philosopher can he frame theories and compare values and interpret the phenomena he sees about him. ”

“ Could one by analyzing a hive of bees find out the secret of its organization—its unity as an aggregate of living insects? Behold its wonderful economics, its division of labor, its complex social structure,—the queen, the workers, the drones,—thousands of bees without any head or code of laws or directing agent, all acting as one individual, all living and working for the common good. There is no confusion or cross-purpose in the hive. When the time of swarming comes, they are all of one mind and the swarm comes forth. ”

“ Behold a man with his wonderful body, and still more wonderful mind; try to think of him as being fathered and mothered by the mere mechanical and chemical forces that we see at work in the rocks and soil underfoot, begotten by chemical affinity or the solar energy working as molecular physic, and mothered by the warmth and moisture, by osmosis and the colloid state—and all through the chance clashings and groupings of the irrational physical forces. ”

“ Science is the redeemer of the physical world. It opens our eyes to its true inwardness, and purges it of the coarse and brutal qualities with which, in our practical lives, it is associated. It has its inner world of activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint. This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled and vibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitely rapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant and automatic—what a revelation it all is! ”

“ The result of chance man certainly is—is he not?—as are all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon the organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves no intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories? ”

“ The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man of science feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of the natural order. To the scientist the universe is complete in itself. He can admit of no break or discontinuity anywhere. Threads of relation, visible and invisible,—chemical, mechanical, electric, magnetic, solar, lunar, stellar, geologic, biologic,—forming an intricate web of subtle forces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmic unity. ”

“ Can we evoke life from the omnipotent ether, or see it arise in the whirling stream of atoms and electrons? Molecular science opens up to us a world where the infinitely little matches the infinitely great, where matter is dematerialized and answers to many of the conceptions of spirit; but does it bring us any nearer the origin of life? Is radio-active matter any nearer living matter than is the clod under foot? Are the darting electrons any more vital than the shooting-stars? Can a flash of radium emanations on a zinc-sulphide plate kindle the precious spark? ”

“ Those who live in this age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogous to the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men who never saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engage in a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries of science and civilization can give them—a tragedy that darkens the very heavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and good will to men. ”

“ More and more does science hold us to the view of the unity of nature—that the universe of life and matter and force is all natural or all supernatural, it matters little which you call it, but it is not both. One need not go away from his own doorstep to find mysteries enough to last him a lifetime, but he will find them in his own body, in the ground upon which he stands, not less than in his mind, and in the invisible forces that play around him. ”

“ Modern biochemistry will not listen to the old notion of a vital force—that is only a metaphysical will-o'-the-wisp that leaves us floundering in the quagmire. If I question the forces about me, what answer do I get? Molecular attraction and repulsion seem to say, "It is not in us; we are as active in the clod as in the flower." The four principal elements—oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon—say, "It is not in us, because we are from all eternity, and life is not; we form only its physical basis." ”

“ When we have followed matter from mass to molecule, from molecule to atom, from atom to electron, and seen it in effect dematerialized,—seen it in its fourth or ethereal, I had almost said spiritual, state,—when we have grasped the wonder of radio-activity, and the atomic transformations that attend it, we shall have a conception of the potencies and possibilities of matter that robs scientific materialism of most of its ugliness. Of course, no deductions of science can satisfy our longings for something kindred to our own spirits in the universe. ”

“ The drama or tragedy of evolution has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who have played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purpose was the entertainment of some unseen spectator. When we reach human history, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, what futile undertakings!—war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress or bringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men! ”

“ When I try to think of life as a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mystic dance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people taking hold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing all sorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's throats, or occupying one another's bodies, thrilled and vibrating at an inconceivable rate. ”

“ The materialism of the great seers and prophets of science who penetrate into the true inwardness of matter, who see through the veil of its gross obstructive forms and behold it translated into pure energy, need disturb no one.
In our religious culture we have beggared matter that we might exalt spirit; we have bankrupted earth that we might enrich heaven; we have debased the body that we might glorify the soul. But science has changed all this. Mankind can never again rest in the old crude dualism. ”

“ Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere which rests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds all forms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning and no ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines are fluid and continuous. The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy we see are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war with itself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to the universe, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit ”