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XI

THE DIVINE SOIL

I

How person is repugnant to their feelings!

OW few persons can be convinced of the truth

of that which is

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings. Carlyle, for instance, treated the proposition with contempt. He called it the "gospel of dirt." "A good sort of man," he said, "is this Darwin, and well meaning, but with very little intellect." Huxley tells of seeing the old man one day upon the street, and of crossing over to greet him. Carlyle looked up and said, "You're Huxley, are n't you ? the man who says we are all descended from monkeys," and went on his way. It would be interesting to know just what Carlyle thought we were descended from. Could he, or did he, doubt at all that if he were to go back a few thousand years over his own line of descent, he would come upon rude savage men, who used stone implements, and lived in caves or rude huts, who had neither letters nor arts, and with whom might did indeed make right, and that back of these he would find

still more primitive races, and that these too had their still more savage and bestial forbears? When started on the back track of his own race, where could he stop? Could he stop anywhere? The neolithic man stands on the shoulders of the paleolithic, and he on a still lower human or semihuman form, till we come to a manlike ape or an apelike man, living in trees and subsisting on roots and nuts and wild fruits. Every child born to-day, by the grip of its hands, the strength of its arms, and the weakness of its legs, hints of those far-off arboreal ancestors. Carlyle must also have known that in his fetal or prenatal life there was a time when his embryo could not have been distinguished from that of a dog, to say nothing of a monkey. Was this fact also intolerable to him?

It must be a bitter pill to persons of Carlyle's temperament to have to accept the account of their own human origin; that the stork legend of the baby is, after all, not good natural history. The humble beginning of each of us is not one that appeals to the imagination, nor to the religious sentiment, nor to our love of the mysterious and the remote, yet the evidence in favor of its truth is pretty strong.

In fact, the Darwinian theory of the origin of man differs from the popular one just as the natural history of babies as we all know it differs from the account in the nursery legends, and gives about

the same shock to our sensibilities and our pride of origin.

One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand -to see that heaven

lies about us here in this world. Carlyle's gospel of dirt, when examined closely, differs in no respect from a gospel of star dust. Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar. We have had to cap the natural with the supernatural to satisfy our love for the marvelous and the inexplicable. As soon as a thing is brought within our ken and the region of our experience, it seems to lose caste and be cheapened. I am at a loss how to account for this mythopoetic tendency of ours, but what a part it has played in the history of mankind, and what a part it still plays — turning the light of day into a mysterious illusive and haunted twilight on every hand! It would seem as if it must have served some good purpose in the development of the race, but just what is not so easy to point out as the evil it has wrought, the mistakes and selfdelusions it has given rise to. One may probably say that in its healthy and legitimate action it has given rise to poetry and to art and to the many

escapes which the imagination provides us from the hard and wearing realities of life. Its implacable foe is undoubtedly the scientific spirit -the spirit of the now and the here, that seeks proof and finds the marvelous and the divine in the ground underfoot; the spirit that animated Lyell and opened his eyes to the fact that the forces and agencies at work every day around us were adequate to account for the tremendous changes in the earth's surface in the past; that animated Darwin and led him to trace the footsteps of the creative energy in the natural life of plants and animals to-day; that animated Huxley and filled him with such righteous wrath at the credulity of his theological brethren; and that animates every one of us when we clinch a nail, or stop a leak, or turn a thing over and look on the other side, and apply to practical affairs the touchstone of common sense.

That man is of divine origin in a sense that no other animal is, is a conviction dear to the common mind. It was dear to the mind of Carlyle, it chimed in well with his distrust of the present, his veneration of the past, and his Hebraic awe and reverential fear before the mysteries of the universe. While Darwin's attitude of mind toward outward things was one of inquiry and thirst for exact knowledge, Carlyle's was one of reverence and wonder. He was more inclined to worship where Darwin was moved to investigate. Darwin, too, felt the