Studies in the Out-Lying Fields of Psychic Science. Hudson Tuttle
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its object. In this light the imperfection of organs proves nothing against design. The eye of man is instanced as more imperfect than a glass lens. It is as perfect as the organic material out of which it is made permits. That it becomes diseased is from the same necessity of organization.
Evolution.—Evolution is a new name for facts exceedingly old; but its supporters would have its scheme reach through creation to the foundation of things. Advancement with them means only better adaptation in the struggle for existence, the result of accidental fitness which has pushed unorganized protoplasm to man. Matter and its potentialities granted, all else flows in assured course. Difficulties disappear; the riddle of the Sphinx is no longer obscure. The sunlight has fallen on the marble lips, and Memnon has revealed in a single sentence what mortal man has never understood, “The survival of the fittest.” The theologian has rested in blissful confidence in the arms of the Creator; now comes the scientist who by easy methods calls the Creator “evolution,” and falls as blindly confident into the arms of his new-named God. The likeness is made more complete by the scorn of one equaling the sneer of the other.
It is a new name for the old fact, that the forms of life on this earth are united by common parentage, and have been differentiated by the accumulation of infinite beneficial changes. The struggle for existence has been the center around which these have aggregated. This no careful student will deny. Having granted this, what then? Is anything explained? Have we approached the cause by a single step? Really, has anything been done more than to explain the phenomena of the world with new words and phrases?
Of old it was said the world is a machine with gods or a god at the crank; to-day the god at the crank is the Unknowable, the laws of nature, the potentiality of matter; or in the most recent theory the all-god has appeared in the revival of the god imminent in the universe, which is regarded as an organism, with a god-soul. This is poetic but neither sensible nor scientific. Forever and forever old ideas are washed on the shore of time, out of the wreck of the past, and instead for being relegated to the museum, are galvanized into grimace of life, and branded as new, when they are rapidly disintegrating in every part.
The Survival of the Fittest.—The survival of the fittest is a wonderful scheme of the preservation of the best. To illustrate, take the tiger and the deer. Once they herded together, the tiger not being, as now, noted for strength or cunning, nor the deer for caution and fleetness. The dull tiger was able to take as prey the least cautious and weakest of the deer. The fleetest deer propagated, and then only the most cunning tigers were able to procure food, and continue their kind. As their strength and cunning increased, the cautiousness and fleetness of the deer increased in this matched game of life; the two species reacting on each other until we now have the perfected deer and tiger. In both kingdoms of living beings, among all their diverse families and species, this struggle has gone on, and the result is the differentiation from abysmal protoplasmic slime the humming bird on the flower to the leviathan in the deep; the litchen on the rock to man with an intellectual comprehension of unknown breadth. We here have the chronicle of creation, and Froissart was not more garrulous with his exploits of lord and lady than the chroniclers of the changes effected in specific forms “on their way to man.”
We hear all that is said, and with a feeling of disappointment, while admitting all, respond that we were promised a cause, and have been given only a method? What stands behind the “struggle for existence?” What is the infinite force of the ceaseless unrest, which throws each wave higher on the tide line, working like a blind giant, hewing out organic forms from protoplasm, and amid infinite failures approximating ever to the perfect, with constant prophecy that that perfection will be attained? The “survival of the fittest” reveals the prodigal method which preserves one of a million germs, casting the others back into the seething crucible for new trials. Can it claim anything more? The laws of nature are grooves in which causes run to effects; but why do they thus move? Calling them by other names will not satisfy. As Newton, when he gave the law of gravitation mathematical form, penetrated not a step toward its cause, so the biologist has not passed the threshold of the domain of life. A recent scientific association sat in silence after a verbose and flippant discussion on protoplasm, when asked by a member what was the difference between living and dead protoplasm? Not one could answer. Life had escaped their observation. Protoplasm dead is no longer protoplasm. The protoplasmic germ impelled by the forces of life, commences its growth, sending out its feeding vessels, and from the beginning copies the paleontological history of the earth, and more completely the biography of its direct ancestors.
When we consider that this invisible fleck bears in its cell or cells the impress of every condition bearing on its progenitors from remotest time, and will express it in all these conditions, it is no longer a phenomenon on which we gaze, but a miracle of creative power, and all that has been written by physiologists since Galen’s time as to its cause is as children’s prattle. The material side furnishes no adequate explanation. Its coarse methods are not adapted to measure the illusive psyche. The balance weighs not, the scalpel dissects not, the retort holds not the elements of the soul.
Scientific Methods of the Study of Man, and Results.
The Evolutionist.—Scientists have different ways of studying man. The evolutionist first develops the form. He says that life began in protoplasm in the unrecorded ages of the past, and step by step, through mollusk, fish, saurian and mammal, has arisen by the “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest,” until the mammal by strangely fortuitous chances has become a human being. As the human body is a modified animal form, so the intellect is a modified and developed instinct, the highest and most spiritual conscientiousness being only the result of accumulated experiences of what is for the best. The highest of animals is man, with no barrier between him and them, and subject to the same fate. There is no indication of a guiding intelligence, and if he possess an immortal spirit, so does the mollusk and the fleck of protoplasm.
The Chemist.—The chemist has his method, that of analysis. He takes the vital tissues and resolves them into their elementary parts. He tells us that there is so much hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen in the muscles; so much lime and phosphorus in the bones; so much phosphorus in the nerves, and iron in the blood. He separates these elements in retort or crucible, and weighs them with nicety so that he knows to a thousandth of a grain their proportions. He has made the ultimate analysis, and these are all he can discover. Life is the result of their union; mind the burning of phosphorus in the brain, and as for spirit, it is quite unnecessary to explain the phenomena. The chemist has finished his work, and placed in the museum the results of his analysis. That body perhaps weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. In a large glass jar is the water it contained—clear, crystal water, such as flashes in the sunlight of a rainbow-arching shower, or a dewdrop sparkling on the petals of a lily. There are about eight or ten gallons of it, for the body is three-fourths water. There is a small jar of white powder representing the lime; another, still smaller, the silex; another the phosphorus. There are homeopathic vials containing a trace of sulphur, of iron, magnesia, the potash, the soda, the salts and so on until the vials, great and small, contain more or less of almost every element. Here we have what was once a human being. We have every thing that went to make him, except one, which lacking, these elements are lifeless, and of no more value than water from the brook and earth from its banks: the vital, or psychic principle. Place the contents of all the lesser jars in the greater water jar, shake, dissolve, and manipulate, dead and inert they remain, and will remain so long as thus treated. The chemist in his analysis has made no account of the subtile principle which made these elementary atoms an expression of its purpose. The living form has its origin in the remote past, and its atoms were arranged and brought into union by a vital process which thus began; which must begin in this manner and traverse the same path. Phosphorus may be essential to give activity to the brain, and a given amount of thought may correspond to a fixed amount of phosphorus burned in nerve tissue. What of that? We know that in one of these vials is all the phosphorus that