The Firmament of Time, by Loren Eiseley

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Chapter 5: HOW HUMAN IS MAN?

Be not under any Brutal Metempsychosis while thou livest and walkest about erectly under the scheme of Man. -
- Sir Thomas Browne

Part I

Over a hundred years ago a Scandinavian philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, made a profound observation about the future. Kierkegaard's remark is of such great, though hidden, importance to our subject that I shall begin by quoting his words. "He who fights the future," remarked the philosopher, "has a dangerous enemy. The future is not, it borrows its strength from the man himself, and when it has tricked him out of this, then it appears outside of him as the enemy he must meet."

We in the western world have rushed eagerly to embrace the future -- and in so doing we have provided that future with a strength it has derived from us and our endeavors. Now, stunned, puzzled and dismayed, we try to withdraw from the embrace, not of a necessary tomorrow, but of that future which we have invited and of which, at last, we have grown perceptibly afraid. In a sudden horror we discover that the years now rushing upon us have drained our moral resources and have taken shape out of our own impotence. At this moment, if we possess even a modicum of reflective insight, we will give heed to Kierkegaard's concluding wisdom: "Through the eternal," he enjoins us, "we can conquer the future."

The advice is cryptic; the hour late. Moreover, what have we to do with the eternal? Our age, we know, is littered with the wrecks of war, of outworn philosophies, of broken faiths. We profess little but the new and study only change.

Three hundred years have passed since Galileo, with the telescope, opened the enormous vista of the night. In those three centuries the phenomenal world, previously explored with the unaided senses, has undergone tremendous alteration in our minds. A misty light so remote as to be scarcely sensed by the unaided eye has become a galaxy. Under the microscope the previously unseen has become a cosmos of both beautiful and repugnant life, while the tissues of the body have been resolved into a cellular hierarchy whose constituents mysteriously produce the human personality.

Similarly, the time dimension, by the use of other sensory extensions and the close calculations made possible by our improved knowledge of the elements, has been plumbed as never before, and even its dead, forgotten life has been made to yield remarkable secrets. The great stage, in other words, the world stage where the Elizabethans saw us strutting and mouthing our parts, has the skeletons of dead actors under the floor boards, and the dusty scenery of forgotten dramas lies abandoned in the wings. The idea necessarily comes home to us then with a sudden chill: What if we are not playing on the center stage? What if the Great Spectacle has no terminus and no meaning? What if there is no audience beyond the footlights, and the play, in spite of bold villains and posturing heroes, is a shabby repeat performance in an echoing vacuity? Man is a perceptive animal. He hates above all else to appear ridiculous. His explorations of reality in the course of just three hundred years have so enlarged his vision and reduced his ego that his tongue sometimes fumbles for the proper lines to speak, and he plays his part uncertainly, with one dubious eye cast upon the dark beyond the stage lights. He is beginning to feel alone and to hear nothing but echoes reverberating back.

It will do no harm then, if in this moment of hesitation we survey the history of our dilemma. Man's efforts to understand his predicament can be compassed in the simple mechanics of the theatre. We have examined the time allowed the play, the nature of the stage, and what appears to be the nature of the plot. All else is purely incidental to this drama, and it may well be that we can see our history in no other terms, being mentally structured to look within as well as without, and to be influenced within by what we consider the nature of the "without" to be. It is for this reason that the "without," and our modes of apprehending it, assume so pressing an importance. Nor is it fully possible to understand the human drama, the drama of the great stage, without a historical knowledge of how the characters have interpreted their parts in the play, and in doing so perhaps affected the nature of the plot itself.

This, in brief, epitomizes the role of the human mind in history. It has looked through many spectacles in the last several centuries, and each time the world has appeared real, and the plot has been played accordingly. Strange colorings have been given to reality and the colors have come mostly from within. As science extends itself, the colors, and through them the nature of reality, continue to change. The "within" and "without" are in some strange fashion intermingled. Perhaps, in a sense, the great play is actually a great magic, and we, the players, are a part of the illusion, making and transforming the plot as we go.

If the play has its magical aspect, however, there is an increasing malignancy about it. A great Russian novelist ventures to remark mildly that the human heart, rather than the state, is the final abode of goodness. He is immediately denounced by his colleagues as a heretic. In the West, psychological studies are made of human "rigidity," and although there is a dispassionate scientific air about them the suggestion lingers that the "normal" man should conform; that the deviant is pathological. The television networks seek the lowest denominator which will entrance their mass audience. There is a muted intimation that we can do without the kind of intellectual individualists who used to declaim along the edges of the American wilderness and who have left the world some highly explosive literature in the shape of Walden and Moby Dick. It is obvious that the whole of western ethic, whether Russian or American, is undergoing change, and that the change is increasingly toward conformity in exterior observance and, at the same time, toward confusion and uncertainty in deep personal relations. In our examination of this phenomenon there will emerge for us the meaning of Kierkegaard's faith in the eternal as the only way of achieving victory against the corrosive power of the human future.

Part II

If we examine the living universe around us which was before man and may be after him, we find two ways in which that universe, with its inhabitants, differs from the world of man: first, it is essentially a stable universe; second, its inhabitants are intensely concentrated upon their environment. They respond to it totally, and without it, or rather when they relax from it, they merely sleep. They reflect their environment but they do not alter it. In Browning's words, "It has them, not they it."

Life, as manifested through its instincts, demands a security guarantee from nature that is largely forthcoming. All the release mechanisms, the instinctive shorthand methods by which nature provides for organisms too simple to comprehend their environment, are based upon this guarantee. The inorganic world could, and does, exist in a kind of chaos, but before life can peep forth, even as a flower, or a stick insect, or a beetle, it has to have some kind of unofficial assurance of nature's stability, just as we have read that stability of forces in the ripples impressed in stone, or the rain marks on a long-vanished beach, or the unchanging laws of light in the eye of a four-hundred-million-year-old trilobite.

The nineteenth century was amazed when it discovered these things, but wasps and migratory birds were not. They had an old contract, an old promise, never broken till man began to interfere with things, that nature, in degree, is steadfast and continuous. Her laws do not deviate, nor the seasons come and go too violently. There is change, but throughout the past life alters with the slow pace of geological epochs. Calcium, iron, phosphorus, could exist in the jumbled world of the inorganic without the certainties that life demands. Taken up into a living system, however, being that system, they must, in a sense, have knowledge of the future. Tomorrow's rain may be important, or tomorrow's wind or sun. Life, in contrast to the inorganic, is historic in a new way. It reflects the past, but must also expect something of the future. It has nature's promise -- a guarantee that has not been broken in three billion years -- that the universe has this queer rationality and "expectedness" about it. "Whatever interrupts the even flow and luxurious monotony of organic life," wrote Santayana, "is odious to the primeval animal."

This is a true observation, because on the more simple levels of life, monotony is a necessity for survival. The life in pond and thicket is not equipped for the storms that shake the human world. Its small domain is frequently confined to a splinter of sunlight, or the hole under a root. What life does under such circumstances, how it meets the precarious future (for even here the future can be precarious), is written into its substance by the obscure mechanisms of nature. The snail recoils into his house, the dissembling caterpillar who does not know he dissembles, thrusts stiffly, like a budding twig, from his branch. The enemy is known, the contingency prepared for. But still the dreaming comes from below, from somewhere in the molecular substance. It is as if nature in a thousand forms played games against herself, but the games were each one known, the rules ancient and observed.

It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned -- escaped, it may be -- spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master.

Yet the coming of man was quiet enough. Even after he arrived, even after his strange retarded youth had given him the brain which opened up to him the dimensions of time and space, he walked softly. If, as was true, he had sloughed instinct away for a new interior world of consciousness, he did something which at the same time revealed his continued need for the stability which had preserved his ancestors. Scarcely had he stepped across the border of the old instinctive world when he began to create the world of custom. He was using reason, his new attribute, to remake, in another fashion, a substitute for the lost instinctive world of nature. He was, in fact, creating another nature, a new source of stability for his conflicting erratic reason. Custom became fixed: order, the new order imposed by cultural discipline, became the "nature" of human society. Custom directed the vagaries of the will. Among the fixed institutional bonds of society man found once more the security of the animal. He moved in a patient renewed orbit with the seasons. His life was directed, the gods had ordained it so. In some parts of the world this long twilight, half in and half out of nature, has persisted into the present. Viewed over a wide domain of history this cultural edifice, though somewhat less stable than the natural world, has yet appeared a fair substitute -- a structure, like nature, reasonably secure. But the security in the end was to prove an illusion. It was in the West that the whirlpool began to spin. Ironically, it began in the search for the earthly Paradise.

The medieval world was limited in time. It was a stage upon which the great drama of the human Fall and Redemption was being played out. Since the position in time of the medieval culture fell late in this drama, man's gaze was not centered scientifically upon the events of an earth destined soon to vanish. The ranks of society, even objects themselves, were Platonic reflections from eternity. They were as unalterable as the divine Empyrean world behind them. Life was directed and fixed from above. So far as the Christian world of the West was concerned, man was locked in an unchanging social structure well nigh as firm as nature. The earth was the center of divine attention. The ingenuity of intellectual men was turned almost exclusively upon theological problems.

As the medieval culture began to wane toward its close, men turned their curiosity upon the world around them. The era of the great voyages, of the breaking through barriers, had begun. Indeed, there is evidence that among the motivations of those same voyagers, dreams of the recovery of the earthly Paradise were legion. The legendary Garden of Eden was thought to be still in existence. There were stories that in this or that far land, behind cloud banks or over mountains, the abandoned Garden still survived. There were speculations that through one of those four great rivers which were supposed to flow from the Garden, the way back might still be found. Perhaps the angel with the sword might still be waiting at the weed-grown gateway, warning men away; nevertheless, the idea of that haven lingered wistfully in the minds of captains in whom the beliefs of the Middle Ages had not quite perished.

There was, however, another, a more symbolic road into the Garden. It was first glimpsed and the way to its discovery charted by Francis Bacon. With that act, though he did not intend it to be so, the philosopher had opened the doorway of the modern world. The paradise he sought, the dreams he dreamed, are now intermingled with the countdown on the latest model of the ICBM, or the radioactive cloud drifting downwind from a megaton explosion. Three centuries earlier, however, science had been Lord Bacon's road to the earthly Paradise. "Surely," he wrote in the Novum Organum, "it would be disgraceful if, while the regions of the material globe, that is, of the earth, of the sea, and of the stars -- have been in our times laid widely open and revealed, the intellectual globe should remain shut up within the narrow limits of the old discoveries."

Instead, Bacon chafed for another world than that of the restless voyagers. "I am now therefore to speak touching Hope," he rallied his audience, who believed, many of them, in a declining and decaying world. Much, if not all, that man lost in his ejection from the earthly Paradise might, Bacon thought, be regained by application, so long as the human intellect remained unimpaired. "Trial should be made," he contends in one famous passage, "whether the commerce between the mind of men and the nature of things ... might by any means be restored to its perfect and original condition, or if that may not be, yet reduced to a better condition than that in which it now is." To the task of raising up the new science he devoted himself as the bell ringer who "called the wits together."

Bacon was not blind to the dangers in his new philosophy. "Through the premature hurry of the understanding," he cautioned, "great dangers may be apprehended ... against which we ought even now to prepare." Out of the same fountain, he saw clearly, could pour the instruments of beneficence or death.

Bacon's warning went unheeded. The struggle between those forces he envisaged continues into the modern world. We have now reached the point where we must look deep into the whirlpool of the modern age. Whirlpool or flight, as Max Picard has called it, it is all one. The stability of nature on the planet -- that old and simple promise to the living, which is written in every sedimentary rock -- is threatened by nature's own product, man.

Not long ago a young man -- I hope not a forerunner of the coming race on the planet -- remarked to me with the colossal insensitivity of the new asphalt animal, "Why can't we just eventually kill off everything and live here by ourselves with more room? We'll be able to synthesize food pretty soon." It was his solution to the problem of overpopulation.

I had no response to make, for I saw suddenly that this man was in the world of the flight. For him there was no eternal, nature did not exist save as something to be crushed, and that second order of stability, the cultural world, was, for him, also ceasing to exist. If he meant what he said, pity had vanished, life was not sacred, and custom was a purely useless impediment from the past. There floated into my mind the penetrating statement of a modern critic and novelist, Wright Morris. "It is not fear of the bomb that paralyzes us," he writes, "not fear that man has no future. Rather, it is the nature of the future, not its extinction, that produces such foreboding in the artist. It is a numbing apprehension that such future as man has may dispense with art, with man as we now know him, and such as art has made him. The survival of men who are strangers to the nature of this conception is a more appalling thought than the extinction of the species."

There before me stood the new race in embryo. It was I who fled. There was no means of communication sufficient to call across the roaring cataract that lay between us, and down which this youth was already figuratively passing toward some doom I did not wish to see. Man's second rock of certitude, his cultural world, that had gotten him out of bed in the morning for many thousand years, that had taught him manners, how to love, and to see beauty, and how, when the time came, to die -- this cultural world was now dissolving even as it grew. The roar of jet aircraft, the ugly ostentation of badly designed automobiles, the clatter of the supermarkets could not lend stability nor reality to the world we face.

Before us is Bacon's road to Paradise after three hundred years. In the medieval world, man had felt God both as exterior lord above the stars, and as immanent in the human heart. He was both outside and within, the true hound of Heaven. All this alters as we enter modern times. Bacon's world to explore opens to infinity, but it is the world of the outside. Man's whole attention is shifted outward. Even if he looks within, it is largely with the eye of science, to examine what can be learned of the personality, or what excuses for its behavior can be found in the darker, ill-lit caverns of the brain.

The western scientific achievement, great though it is, has not concerned itself enough with the creation of better human beings, nor with self-discipline. It has concentrated instead upon things, and assumed that the good life would follow. Therefore it hungers for infinity. Outward in that infinity lies the Garden the sixteenth-century voyagers did not find. We no longer call it the Garden. We are sophisticated men. We call it, vaguely, "progress," because that word in itself implies the endless movement of pursuit. We have abandoned the past without realizing that without the past the pursued future has no meaning, that it leads, as Morris has anticipated, to the world of artless, dehumanized man.

Part III

Some time ago there was encountered, in the litter of a vacant lot in a small American town, a fallen sign. This sign was intended to commemorate the names of local heroes who had fallen in the Second World War. But that war was over, and another had come in Korea. Probably the population of that entire town had turned over in the meantime. Tom and Joe and Isaac were events of the past, and the past of the modern world is short. The names of yesterday's heroes lay with yesterday's torn newspaper. They had served their purpose and were now forgotten.

This incident may serve to reveal the nature of what has happened, or seems to be happening, to our culture, to that world which science was to beautify and embellish. I do not say that science is responsible except in the sense that men are responsible, but men increasingly are the victims of what they themselves have created. To the student of human culture, the rise of science and its dominating role in our society presents a unique phenomenon.

Nothing like it occurs in antiquity, for in antiquity nature represented the divine. It was an object of worship. It contained mysteries. It was the mother. Today the phrase has disappeared. It is nature we shape, nature, without the softening application of the word mother, which under our control and guidance hurls the missile on its path. There has been no age in history like this one, and men are increasingly brushed aside who speak of the possibility of another road into the future.

Some time ago, in a magazine of considerable circulation, I spoke about the role of love in human society, and about pressing human problems which I felt, rightly or wrongly, would not be solved by the penetration of space. The response amazed me, in some instances, by its virulence. I was denounced for interfering with the colonization of other planets, and for corruption of the young. Most pathetically of all, several people wrote me letters in which they tried to prove, largely for their own satisfaction, that love did not exist, that parents abused and murdered their children and children their parents. They concentrated upon sparse incidents of pathological violence, and averted their eyes from the normal.

It was all too plain that these individuals were seeking rationalizations behind which they might hide from their own responsibilities. They were in the whirlpool, that much was evident. But so are we all. In 1914 the London Times editorialized confidently that no civilized nation would bomb open cities from the air. Today there is not a civilized nation on the face of the globe that does not take this aspect of warfare for granted. Technology demands it. In Kierkegaard's deadly future man strives, or rather ceases to strive, against himself.

But crime, moral deficiencies, inadequate ethical standards, we are prone to accept as part of the life of man. Why, in this respect, should we be regarded as unique? True, we have had Buchenwald and the Arctic slave camps, but the Romans had their circuses. It is just here, however, that the uniqueness enters in. After the passage of three hundred years from Bacon and his followers -- three hundred years on the road to the earthly Paradise -- there is a rising poison in the air. It crosses frontiers and follows the winds across the planet. It is man-made; no treaty of the powers has yet halted it.

Yet it is only a symbol, a token of that vast maelstrom which has caught up states and stone-age peoples equally with the modern world. It is the technological revolution, and it has brought three things to man which it has been impossible for him to do to himself previously.

First, it has brought a social environment altering so rapidly with technological change that personal adjustments to it are frequently not viable. The individual either becomes anxious and confused or, what is worse, develops a superficial philosophy intended to carry him over the surface of life with the least possible expenditure of himself. Never before in history has it been literally possible to have been born in one age and to die in another. Many of us are now living in an age quite different from the one into which we were born. The experience is not confined to a ride in a buggy, followed in later years by a ride in a Cadillac. Of far greater significance are the social patterns and ethical adjustments which have followed fast upon the alterations in living habits introduced by machines.

Second, much of man's attention is directed exteriorly upon the machines which now occupy most of his waking hours. He has less time alone than any man before him. In dictator-controlled countries he is harangued and stirred by propaganda projected upon him by machines to which he is forced to listen. In America he sits quiescent before the flickering screen in the living room while horsemen gallop across an American wilderness long vanished in the past. In the presence of so compelling an instrument, there is little opportunity in the evenings to explore his own thoughts or to participate in family living in the way that the man from the early part of the century remembers. For too many men, the exterior world with its mass-produced daydreams has become the conqueror. Where are the eager listeners who used to throng the lecture halls; where are the workingmen's intellectual clubs? This world has vanished into the whirlpool.

Third, this outward projection of attention, along with the rise of a science whose powers and creations seem awe-inspiringly remote, as if above both man and nature, has come dangerously close to bringing into existence a type of man who is not human. He no longer thinks in the old terms; he has ceased to have a conscience. He is an instrument of power. Because his mind is directed outward upon this power torn from nature, he does not realize that the moment such power is brought into the human domain it partakes of human freedom. It is no longer safely within nature; it has become violent, sharing in human ambivalence and moral uncertainty.

At the same time that this has occurred, the scientific worker has frequently denied personal responsibility for the way his discoveries are used. The scientist points to the evils of the statesmen's use of power. The statesmen shrug and remind the scientist that they are encumbered with monstrous forces that science has unleashed upon a totally unprepared public. But there are few men on either side of the Iron Curtain able to believe themselves in any sense personally responsible for this situation. Individual conscience lies too close to home, and is archaic. It is better, we subconsciously tell ourselves, to speak of inevitable forces beyond human control. When we reason thus, however, we lend powers to the whirlpool; we bring nearer the future which Kierkegaard saw, not as the necessary future, but one just as inevitable as man has made it.

Part IV

We have now glimpsed, however briefly and inadequately, the fact that modern man is being swept along in a stream of things, giving rise to other things, at such a pace that no substantial ethic, no inward stability, has been achieved. Such stability as survives, such human courtesies as remain, are the remnants of an older Christian order. Daily they are attenuated. In the name of mass man, in the name of unionism, for example, we have seen violence done and rudeness justified. I will not argue the justice or injustice of particular strikes. I can only remark that the violence to which I refer has been the stupid, meaningless violence of the rootless, nonhuman members of the age that is close to us. It is the asphalt man who defiantly votes the convicted labor boss back into office and who says: "He gets me a bigger pay check. What do I care what he does?" This is a growing aspect of modern society that runs from teenage gangs to the corporation boards of amusement industries that deliberately plan the further debauchment of public taste.

It is, unfortunately, the "ethic" of groups, not of society. It cannot replace personal ethic or a sense of personal responsibility for society at large. It is, in reality, group selfishness, not ethics. In the words of Max Picard, "Spirit has been divided, fragmented; here is a spirit belonging to this and to that sociological group, each group having its own peculiar little spirit, exactly what one needs in the Flight, where, in order to flee more easily, one breaks the whole up into parts; and as always happens when one separates the part from the whole ... one magnifies the tiny part, making it ridiculously important, so that no one may notice that the tiny part is not the whole."

All over the world this fragmentation is taking place. Small nationalisms, as in Cyprus or Algiers, murder in the name of freedom. In America, child gangs battle in the streets. The group ethic as distinct from personal ethic is faceless and obscure. It is whatever its leaders choose it to mean; it destroys the innocent and justifies the act in terms of the future. In Russia this has been done on a colossal scale. The future is no more than the running of the whirlpool. It is not divinely ordained. It has been wrought by man in ignorance and folly. That folly has two faces; one is our secularized conception of progress; the other is the mass loss of personal ethic as distinguished from group ethic.

It would be idle to deny that progress has its root in the Christian ethic, or that history, viewed as progression toward a goal, as unique rather than cyclic, is also a product of Christian thinking. There is a sense in which one can say that man entered into history through Christianity, for as Berdyaev somewhere observes, it is this religion, par excellence, which took God out of nature and elevated man above nature. The struggle for the realization of the human soul, the attempt to lift it beyond its base origins, became, in the earlier Christian centuries, the major preoccupation of the Church.

When science developed, in the hands of Bacon and his followers, the struggle for progress ceased to be an interior struggle directed toward the good life in the soul of the individual. Instead, the enormous success of the experimental method focused attention upon the power which man could exert over nature. Now he found, through Bacon's road back to the Garden, that he could share once more in that fruit of the legendary tree. With the rise of industrial science, "progress" became the watchword of the age, but it was a secularized progress. It was the increasing whirlpool of goods, cannon, bodies and yielded-up souls that an outward concentration upon the mastery of material nature was sure to bring.

Let us admit at once that the interpretation of secular progress is two-sided. If this were not so, men would more easily recognize their dilemma. Science has brought remedies for physical pain and disease; it has opened out the far fields of the universe. Gross superstition and petty dogmatism have withered under its glance. It has supplied us with fruits unseen in nature, and given an opportunity, has told us dramatically of the paradise that might be ours if we could struggle free of ancient prejudices that still beset us. No man can afford to ignore this aspect of science, no man can evade those haunting visions.

It is the roar of the whirlpool, nonetheless, that breaks now most constantly upon our listening ears, increasingly instructing us upon the most important aspect of progress -- that which in secularizing the concept we have forgotten. Its sound marks the dangerous near-dissolution of man's second nature, custom. Ideas, heresies, run like wildfire and death over the crackling static of the air. They no longer pick their way slowly through the experience of generations. Tax burdens multiply and reach upward year by year as man pays for his engines of death and underwrites ever more wearily the cost of the "progress" to which this road has led him. There is no retreat. The great green forest that once surrounded us Americans and behind which we could seek refuge has been consumed.

And thus, though more symbolically, has it been everywhere for man. We have re-entered nature, not like a Greek shepherd on a hillside hearing joyfully the returning pipes of Pan, but rather as an evil and precocious animal who slinks home in the night with a few stolen powers. The serenity of the gods is not disturbed. They know well on whose head the final lightning will fall.

Progress secularized, progress which pursues only the next invention, progress which pulls thought out of the mind and replaces it with idle slogans, is not progress at all. It is a beckoning mirage in a desert over which stagger the generations of men. Because man, each individual man among us, possesses his own soul and by that light must live or perish, there is no way by which Utopias -- or the lost Garden itself -- can be brought out of the future and presented to man. Neither can he go forward to such a destiny. Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden. With the fading of religious emphasis and the growth of the torrent, modern man is confused. The tumult without has obscured those voices that still cry desperately to man from somewhere within his consciousness.

Part V

One hundred years ago last autumn, Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species. Epic of science though it is, it was a great blow to man. Earlier, man had seen his world displaced from the center of space; he had seen the Empyrean heaven vanish to be replaced by a void filled only with the wandering dust of worlds; he had seen earthly time lengthen until man's duration within it was only a small whisper on the sidereal clock. Finally, now, he was to be taught that his trail ran backward until in some lost era it faded into the night-world of the beast. Because it is easier to look backward than to look forward, since the past is written in the rocks, this observation, too, was added to the whirlpool.

"I am an animal," man considered. It was a fair judgment, an outside judgment. Man went into the torrent along with the steel of the first ironclads and a new slogan, "the survival of the fittest." There would be one more human retreat when, in the twentieth century, human values themselves would fall under scrutiny and be judged relative, shifting and uncertain. It is the way of the torrent -- everything touched by it begins to circle without direction. All is relative, there is nothing fixed, and of guilt there can, of course, remain but little. Moral responsibility has difficulty in existing consistently beside the new scientific determinism.

I remarked at the beginning of this discussion that the "within," man's subjective nature, and the things that come to him from without often bear a striking relationship. Man cannot be long studied as an object without his cleverly altering his inner defenses. He thus becomes a very difficult creature with which to deal. Let me illustrate this concretely.

Not long ago, hoping to find relief from the duties of my office, I sought refuge with my books on a campus bench. In a little while there sidled up to me a red-faced derelict whose parboiled features spoke eloquently of his particular weakness. I was resolved to resist all blandishments for a handout.

"Mac," he said, "I'm out of a job. I need help."

I remained stonily indifferent.

"Sir," he repeated.

"Uh huh," I said, unwillingly looking up from my book.

"I'm an alcoholic."

"Oh," I said. There didn't seem to be anything else to say. You can't berate a man for what he's already confessed to you.

"I'm an alcoholic," he repeated. "You know what that means? I'm a sick man. Not giving me alcohol is ill-treating a sick man. I'm a sick man. I'm an alcoholic. I have to have a drink. I'm telling you honest. It's a disease. I'm an alcoholic. I can't help myself."

"Okay," I said, "you're an alcoholic." Grudgingly I contributed a quarter to his disease and his increasing degradation. But the words stayed in my head. "I can't help myself." Let us face it. In one disastrous sense, he was probably right. At least at this point. But where had the point been reached, and when had he developed this clever neo-modern, post-Freudian panhandling lingo? From what judicious purloining of psychiatric or social-work literature and lectures had come these useful phrases?

And he had chosen his subject well. At a glance he had seen from my book and spectacles that I was susceptible to this approach. I was immersed in the modern dilemma. I could have listened, gazing into his mottled face, without an emotion if he had spoken of home and mother. But he was an alcoholic. He knew it and he guessed that I might be a scientist. He had to be helped from the outside. It was not a moral problem. He was ill.

I settled uncomfortably into my book once more, but the phrase stayed with me, "I can't help myself." The clever reversal. The outside judgment turned back and put to dubious, unethical use by the man inside.

"I can't help myself." It is the final exteriorization of man's moral predicament, of his loss of authority over himself. It is the phrase that, above all others, tortures the social scientist. In it is truth, but in it also is a dreadful, contrived folly. It is society, a genuinely sick society, saying to its social scientists, as it says to its engineers and doctors: "Help me. I'm rotten with hate and ignorance that I won't give up, but you are the doctor; fix me." This, says society, is our duty. We are social scientists. Individuals, poor blighted specimens, cannot assume such responsibilities. "True, true," we mutter as we read the case histories. "Life is dreadful, and yet --"

Man on the inside is quick to accept scientific judgments and make use of them. He is conditioned to do this. This new judgment is an easy one; it deadens man's concern for himself. It makes the way into the whirlpool easier. In spite of our boasted vigor we wait for the next age to be brought to us by Madison Avenue and General Motors. We do not prepare to go there by means of the good inner life. We wait, and in the meantime it slowly becomes easier to mistake longer cars or brighter lights for progress. And yet --

Forty thousand years ago in the bleak uplands of southwestern Asia, a man, a Neanderthal man, once labeled by the Darwinian proponents of struggle as a ferocious ancestral beast -- a man whose face might cause you some slight uneasiness if he sat beside you -- a man of this sort existed with a fearful body handicap in that ice-age world. He had lost an arm. But still he lived and was cared for. Somebody, some group of human things, in a hard, violent and stony world, loved this maimed creature enough to cherish him.

And looking so, across the centuries and the millennia, toward the animal men of the past, one can see a faint light, like a patch of sunlight moving over the dark shadows on a forest floor. It shifts and widens, it winks out, it comes again, but it persists. It is the human spirit, the human soul, however transient, however faulty men may claim it to be. In its coming man had no part. It merely came, that curious light, and man, the animal, sought to be something that no animal had been before. Cruel he might be, vengeful he might be, but there had entered into his nature a curious wistful gentleness and courage. It seemed to have little to do with survival, for such men died over and over. They did not value life compared to what they saw in themselves -- that strange inner light which has come from no man knows where, and which was not made by us. It has followed us all the way from the age of ice, from the dark borders of the ancient forest into which our footprints vanish. It is in this that Kierkegaard glimpsed the eternal, the way of the heart, the way of love which is not of today, but is of the whole journey and may lead us at last to the end. Through this, he thought, the future may be conquered. Certainly it is true. For man may grow until he towers to the skies, but without this light he is nothing, and his place is nothing. Even as we try to deny the light, we know that it has made us, and what we are without it remains meaningless.

We have come a long road up from the darkness, and it well may be -- so brief, even so, is the human story -- that viewed in the light of history, we are still uncouth barbarians. We are potential love animals, wrenching and floundering in our larval envelopes, trying to fling off the bestial past. Like children or savages, we have delighted ourselves with technics. We have thought they alone might free us. As I remarked before, once launched on this road, there is no retreat. The whirlpool can be conquered, but only by placing it in proper perspective. As it grows, we must learn to cultivate that which must never be permitted to enter the maelstrom -- ourselves. We must never accept utility as the sole reason for education. If all knowledge is of the outside, if none is turned inward, if self-awareness fades into the blind acquiescence of the mass man, then the personal responsibility by which democracy lives will fade also.

Schoolrooms are not and should not be the place where man learns only scientific techniques. They are the place where selfhood, what has been called "the supreme instrument of knowledge," is created. Only such deep inner knowledge truly expands horizons and makes use of technology, not for power, but for human happiness. As the capacity for self-awareness is intensified, so will return that sense of personal responsibility which has been well-nigh lost in the eager yearning for aggrandizement of the asphalt man. The group may abstractly desire an ethic, theologians may preach an ethic, but no group ethic ever could, or should, replace the personal ethic of individual, responsible men. Yet it is just this which the Marxist countries are seeking to destroy; and we, in a vague, good-natured indifference, are furthering its destruction by our concentration upon material enjoyment and our expressed contempt for the man who thinks, to our mind, unnecessarily.

Let it be admitted that the world's problems are many and wearing, and that the whirlpool runs fast. If we are to build a stable cultural structure above that which threatens to engulf us by changing our lives more rapidly than we can adjust our habits, it will only be by flinging over the torrent a structure as taut and flexible as a spider's web, a human society deeply self-conscious and undeceived by the waters that race beneath it, a society more literate, more appreciative of human worth than any society that has previously existed. That is the sole prescription, not for survival -- which is meaningless -- but for a society worthy to survive. It should be, in the end, a society more interested in the cultivation of noble minds than in change.

There is a story about one of our great atomic physicists -- a story for whose authenticity I cannot vouch, and therefore I will not mention his name. I hope, however, with all my heart that it is true. If it is not, then it ought to be, for it illustrates well what I mean by a growing self-awareness, a sense of responsibility about the universe.

This man, one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb, so the story runs, was out wandering in the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small tortoise. Overcome with pleasurable excitement, he took up the tortoise and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps he paused and surveyed the tortoise doubtfully.

"What's the matter?" asked his friend.

Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down upon the exact spot from which he had taken him up.

Then he turned solemnly to his friend. "It just struck me," he said, "that perhaps, for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe." He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.

The man who made that remark was one of the best of the modern men, and what he had devised had gone down into the whirlpool. "I have tampered enough," he said. It was not a denial of science. It was a final recognition that science is not enough for man. It is not the road back to the waiting Garden, for that road lies through the heart of man. Only when man has recognized this fact will science become what it was for Bacon, something to speak of as "touching upon Hope." Only then will man be truly human.

[admin]

Chapter 6: HOW NATURAL IS "NATURAL"?

The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another, a celestial nature.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Part I

In the more obscure scientific circles which I frequent there is a legend circulating about a late distinguished scientist who, in his declining years, persisted in wearing enormous padded boots much too large for him. He had developed, it seems, what to his fellows was a wholly irrational fear of falling through the interstices of that largely empty molecular space which common men in their folly speak of as the world. A stroll across his living room floor had become, for him, something as dizzily horrendous as the activities of a window washer on the Empire State Building. Indeed, with equal reason he could have passed a ghostly hand through his own ribs.

The quivering network of his nerves, the awe-inspiring movement of his thought had become a vague cloud of electrons interspersed with the light-year distances that obtain between us and the farther galaxies. This was the natural world which he had helped to create, and in which, at last, he had found himself a lonely and imprisoned occupant. All around him the ignorant rushed on their way over the illusion of substantial floors, leaping, though they did not see it, from particle to particle, over a bottomless abyss. There was even a question as to the reality of the particles which bore them up. It did not, however, keep insubstantial newspapers from being sold, or insubstantial love from being made.

Not long ago I became aware of another world perhaps equally natural and real, which man is beginning to forget. My thinking began in New England under a boat dock. The lake I speak of has been pre-empted and civilized by man. All day long in the vacation season high-speed motorboats, driven with the reckless abandon common to the young Apollos of our society, speed back and forth, carrying loads of equally attractive girls. The shores echo to the roar of powerful motors and the delighted screams of young Americans with uncounted horsepower surging under their hands. In truth, as I sat there under the boat dock, I had some desire to swim or to canoe in the older ways of the great forest which once lay about this region. Either notion would have been folly. I would have been gaily chopped to ribbons by teenage youngsters whose eyes were always immutably fixed on the far horizons of space, or upon the dials which indicated the speed of their passing. There was another world, I was to discover, along the lake shallows and under the boat dock, where the motors could not come.

As I sat there one sunny morning when the water was peculiarly translucent, I saw a dark shadow moving swiftly over the bottom. It was the first sign of life I had seen in this lake, whose shores seemed to yield little but washed-in beer cans. By and by the gliding shadow ceased to scurry from stone to stone over the bottom. Unexpectedly, it headed almost directly for me. A furry nose with gray whiskers broke the surface. Below the whiskers green water foliage trailed out in an inverted V as long as his body. A muskrat still lived in the lake. He was bringing in his breakfast.

I sat very still in the strips of sunlight under the pier. To my surprise the muskrat came almost to my feet with his little breakfast of greens. He was young, and it rapidly became obvious to me that he was laboring under an illusion of his own, and that he thought animals and men were still living in the Garden of Eden. He gave me a friendly glance from time to time as he nibbled his greens. Once, even, he went out into the lake again and returned to my feet with more greens. He had not, it seemed, heard very much about men. I shuddered. Only the evening before I had heard a man describe with triumphant enthusiasm how he had killed a rat in the garden because the creature had dared to nibble his petunias. He had even showed me the murder weapon, a sharp-edged brick.

On this pleasant shore a war existed and would go on until nothing remained but man. Yet this creature with the gray, appealing face wanted very little: a strip of shore to coast up and down, sunlight and moonlight, some weeds from the deep water. He was an edge-of-the-world dweller, caught between a vanishing forest and a deep lake preempted by unpredictable machines full of chopping blades. He eyed me nearsightedly, a green leaf poised in his mouth. Plainly he had come with some poorly instructed memory about the lion and the lamb.

"You had better run away now," I said softly, making no movement in the shafts of light. "You are in the wrong universe and must not make this mistake again. I am really a very terrible and cunning beast. I can throw stones." With this I dropped a little pebble at his feet.

He looked at me half blindly, with eyes much better adjusted to the wavering shadows of his lake bottom than to sight in the open air. He made almost as if to take the pebble up into his forepaws. Then a thought seemed to cross his mind -- a thought perhaps telepathically received, as Freud once hinted, in the dark world below and before man, a whisper of ancient disaster heard in the depths of a burrow. Perhaps after all this was not Eden. His nose twitched carefully; he edged toward the water.

As he vanished in an oncoming wave, there went with him a natural world, distinct from the world of girls and motorboats, distinct from the world of the professor holding to reality by some great snow-shoe effort in his study. My muskrat's shore-line universe was edged with the dark wall of hills on one side and the waspish drone of motors farther out, but it was a world of sunlight he had taken down into the water weeds. It hovered there, waiting for my disappearance. I walked away, obscurely pleased that darkness had not gained on life by any act of mine. In so many worlds, I thought, how natural is "natural" -- and is there anything we can call a natural world at all?

Part II

Nature, contended John Donne in the seventeenth century, is the common law by which God governs us. Donne was already aware of the new science and impressed by glimpses of those vast abstractions which man was beginning to build across the gulfs of his ignorance. Donne makes, however, a reservation, which rings strangely in the modern ear. If nature is the common law, he said, then Miracle is God's Prerogative.

By the nineteenth century, this spider web of common law had been flung across the deeps of space and time. "In astronomy," meditates Emerson, "vast distance, but we never go into a foreign system. In geology, vast duration, but we are never strangers. Our metaphysic should be able to follow the flying force through all its transformations."

Now admittedly there is a way in which all these worlds are real and sufficiently natural. We can say, if we like, that the muskrat's world is naive and limited, a fraction, a bare fraction, of the world of life: a view from a little pile of wet stones on a nameless shore. The view of the motor speedsters in essence is similar and no less naive. All would give way to the priority of that desperate professor, striving like a tired swimmer to hold himself aloft against the soft and fluid nothingness beneath his feet. In terms of the modern temper, the physicist has penetrated the deepest into life. He has come to that place of whirling sparks which are themselves phantoms. He is close upon the void where science ends and the manifestation of God's Prerogative begins. "He can be no creature," argued Donne, "who is present at the first creation."

Yet there is a way in which the intelligence of man in this era of science and the machine can be viewed as having taken the wrong turning. There is a dislocation of our vision which is, perhaps, the product of the kind of creatures we are, or at least conceive ourselves to be. As we mentioned earlier, man, as a two-handed manipulator of the world about him, has projected himself outward upon his surroundings in a way impossible to other creatures. He has done this since the first half-human man-ape hefted a stone in his hand. He has always sought mastery over the materials of his environment, and in our day he has pierced so deeply through the screen of appearances that the age-old distinctions between matter and energy have been dimmed to the point of disappearance. The creations of his clever intellect ride in the skies and the sea's depths; he has hurled a great fragment of metal at the moon, which he once feared. He holds the heat of suns within his hands and threatens with it both the lives and happiness of his unborn descendants.

Man, in the words of one astute biologist, is "caught in a physiological trap and faced with the problem of escaping from his own ingenuity." Pascal, with intuitive sensitivity, saw this at the very dawn of the modern era in science. "There is nothing which we cannot make natural," he wrote, and then, prophetically, comes the full weight of his judgment upon man, "there is nothing natural which we do not destroy." Homo faber, the toolmaker, is not enough. There must be another road and another kind of man lurking in the mind of this odd creature, but whether the attraction of that path is as strong as the age-old primate addiction to taking things apart remains to be seen.

We who are engaged in the life of thought are likely to assume that the key to an understanding of the world is knowledge, both of the past and of the future -- that if we had that knowledge we would also have wisdom. It is not my intention here to decry learning. It is only to say that we must come to understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make us ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual, and are all the more horrified at those mass movements of terror which have so typified the first half of this century.

On the morning of which I want to speak, I was surfeited with the smell of mortality and tired of the years I had spent in archaeological dustbins. I rode out of a camp and across a mountain. I would never have believed, before it happened, that one could ride into the past on horseback. It is true I rode with a purpose, but that purpose was to settle an argument within myself.

It was time, I thought, to face up to what was in my mind -- to the dust and the broken teeth and the spilled chemicals of life seeping away into the sand. It was time I admitted that life was of the earth, earthy, and could be turned into a piece of wretched tar. It was time I consented to the proposition that man had as little to do with his fate as a seed blown against a grating. It was time I looked upon the world without spectacles and saw love and pride and beauty dissolve into effervescing juices. I could be an empiricist with the best of them. I would be deceived by no more music. I had entered a black cloud of merciless thought, but the horse, as it chanced, worked his own way over that mountain.

I could hear the sudden ring of his hooves as we came cautiously treading over a tilted table of granite, past the winds that blow on the high places of the world. There were stones there so polished that they shone from the long ages that the storms had rushed across them. We crossed the divide then, picking our way in places scoured by ancient ice action, through boulder fields where nothing moved, and yet where one could feel time like an enemy hidden behind each stone.

If there was life on those heights, it was the thin life of mountain spiders who caught nothing in their webs, or of small gray birds that slipped soundlessly among the stones. The wind in the pass caught me head on and blew whatever thoughts I had into a raveling stream behind me, until they were all gone and there was only myself and the horse, moving in an eternal dangerous present, free of the encumbrances of the past.

We crossed a wind that smelled of ice from still higher snowfields, we cantered with a breeze that came from somewhere among cedars, we passed a gust like Hell's breath that had risen straight up from the desert floor. They were winds and they did not stay with us. Presently we descended out of their domain, and it was curious to see, as we dropped farther through gloomy woods and canyons, how the cleansed and scoured mind I had brought over the mountain began, like the water in those rumbling gorges, to talk in a variety of voices, to debate, to argue, to push at stones, or curve subtly around obstacles. Sometimes I wonder whether we are only endlessly repeating in our heads an argument that is going on in the world's foundations among crashing stones and recalcitrant roots.

"Fall, fall, fall," cried the roaring water and the grinding pebbles in the torrent. "Let go, come with us, come home to the place without light." But the roots clung and climbed and the trees pushed up, impeding the water, and forests filled even the wind with their sighing and grasped after the sun. It is so in the mind. One can hear the rattle of falling stones in the night, and the thoughts like trees holding their place. Sometimes one can shut the noise away by turning over on the other ear, sometimes the sounds are as dreadful as a storm in the mountains, and one lies awake, holding, like the roots that wait for daylight. It was after such a night that I came over the mountain, but it was the descent on the other side that suddenly struck me as a journey into the eons of the past.

I came down across stones dotted with pink and gray lichens -- a barren land dreaming life's last dreams in the thin air of a cold and future world.

I passed a meadow and a meadow mouse in a little shower of petals struck from mountain flowers. I dismissed it -- it was almost my own time -- a pleasant golden hour in the age of mammals, lost before the human coming. I rode heavily toward an old age far backward in the reptilian dark.

I was below timber line and sinking deeper and deeper into the pine woods, whose fallen needles lay thick and springy over the ungrassed slopes. The brown needles and the fallen cones, the stiff, endless green forests were a mark that placed me in the Age of Dinosaurs. I moved in silence now, waiting a sign. I saw it finally, a green lizard on a stone. We were far back, far back. He bobbed his head uncertainly at me, and I reined in with the nostalgic intent, for a moment, to call him father, but I saw soon enough that I was a ghost who troubled him and that he would wish me, though he had not the voice to speak, to ride on. A man who comes down the road of time should not expect to converse -- even with his own kin. I made a brief, uncertain sign of recognition, to which he did not respond, and passed by. Things grew more lonely. I was coming out upon the barren ridges of an old sea beach that rose along the desert floor. Life was small and grubby now. The hot, warning scarlet of peculiar desert ants occasionally flashed among the stones. I had lost all trace of myself and thought regretfully of the lizard who might have directed me.

A turned-up stone yielded only a scorpion who curled his tail in a kind of evil malice. I surveyed him reproachfully. He was old enough to know the secret of my origin, but once more an ancient, bitter animus drawn from that poisoned soil possessed him and he raised his tail. I turned away. An enormous emptiness by degrees possessed me. I was back almost, in a different way, to the thin air over the mountain, to the end of all things in the cold starlight of space.

I passed some indefinable bones and shells in the salt-crusted wall of a dry arroyo. As I reined up, only sand dunes rose like waves before me and if life was there it was no longer visible. It was like coming down to the end -- to the place of fires where we began. I turned about then and let my gaze go up, tier after tier, height after height, from crawling desert bush to towering pine on the great slopes far above me.

In the same way animal life had gone up that road from these dry, envenomed things to the deer nuzzling a fawn in the meadows far above. I had come down the whole way into a place where one could lift sand and ask in a hollow, dust-shrouded whisper, "Life, what is it? Why am I here? Why am I here?"

And my mind went up that figurative ladder of the ages, bone by bone, skull by skull, seeking an answer. There was none, except that in all that downrush of wild energy that I had passed in the canyons there was this other strange organized stream that marched upward, gaining a foothold here, tossing there a pine cone a little farther upward into a crevice in the rock.

And again one asked, not of the past this time, but of the future, there where the winds howled through open space and the last lichens clung to the naked rock, "Why did we live?" There was no answer I could hear. The living river flowed out of nowhere into nothing. No one knew its source or its departing. It was an apparition. If one did not see it there was no way to prove that it was real.

No way, that is, except within the mind itself. And the mind, in some strange manner so involved with time, moving against the cutting edge of it like the wind I had faced on the mountain, has yet its own small skull-borne image of eternity. It is not alone that I can reach out and receive within my head a handsbreadth replica of the far fields of the universe. It is not because I can touch a trilobite and know the fall of light in ages before my birth. Rather, it lies in the fact that the human mind can transcend time, even though trapped, to all appearances, within that medium. As from some remote place, I see myself as child and young man, watch with a certain dispassionate objectivity the violence and tears of a remote youth who was once I, shaping his character, for good or ill, toward the creature he is today. Shrinking, I see him teeter at the edge of abysses he never saw. With pain I acknowledge acts undone that might have saved and led him into some serene and noble pathway. I move about him like a ghost, that vanished youth. I exhort, I plead. He does not hear me. Indeed, he too is already a ghost. He has become me. I am what I am. Yet the point is, we are not wholly given over to time -- if we were, such acts, such leaps through that gray medium, would be impossible. Perhaps God himself may rove in similar pain up the dark roads of his universe. Only how would it be, I wonder, to contain at once both the beginning and the end, and to hear, in helplessness perhaps, the fall of worlds in the night?

This is what the mind of man is just beginning to achieve -- a little microcosm, a replica of whatever it is that, from some unimaginable "outside," contains the universe and all the fractured bits of seeing which the world's creatures see. It is not necessary to ride over a mountain range to experience historical infinity. It can descend upon one in the lecture room.

I find it is really in daylight that the sensation I am about to describe is apt to come most clearly upon me, and for some reason I associate it extensively with crowds. It is not, you understand, an hallucination. It is a reality. It is, I can only say with difficulty, a chink torn in a dimension life was never intended to look through. It connotes a sense beyond the eye, though the twenty years' impressions are visual. Man, it is said, is a time-binding animal, but he was never intended for this. Here is the way it comes.

I mount the lecturer's rostrum to address a class. Like any work-worn professor fond of his subject, I fumble among my skulls and papers, shuffle to the blackboard and back again, begin the patient translation of three billion years of time into chalk scrawls and uncertain words ventured timidly to a sea of young, impatient faces. Time does not frighten them, I think enviously. They have, most of them, never lain awake and grasped the sides of a cot, staring upward into the dark while the slow clock strokes begin.

"Doctor." A voice diverts me. I stare out near-sightedly over the class. A hand from the back row gesticulates. "Doctor, do you believe there is a direction to evolution? Do you believe, Doctor ... Doctor, do you believe? ..." Instead of the words, I hear a faint piping, and see an eager scholar's face squeezed and dissolving on the body of a chest-thumping ape. "Doctor, is there a direction?"

I see it then -- the trunk that stretches monstrously behind him. It winds out of the door, down dark and obscure corridors to the cellar, and vanishes into the floor. It writhes, it crawls, it barks and snuffles and roars, and the odor of the swamp exhales from it. That pale young scholar's face is the last bloom on a curious animal extrusion through time. And who among us, under the cold persuasion of the archaeological eye, can perceive which of his many shapes is real, or if, perhaps, the entire shape in time is not a greater and more curious animal than its single appearance?

I too am aware of the trunk that stretches loathsomely back of me along the floor. I too am a many-visaged thing that has climbed upward out of the dark of endless leaf falls, and has slunk, furred, through the glitter of blue glacial nights. I, the professor, trembling absurdly on the platform with my book and spectacles, am the single philosophical animal. I am the unfolding worm, and mud fish, the weird tree of Igdrasil shaping itself endlessly out of darkness toward the light.

I have said this is not an illusion. It is when one sees in this manner, or a sense of strangeness halts one on a busy street to verify the appearance of one's fellows, that one knows a terrible new sense has opened a faint crack into the Absolute. It is in this way alone that one comes to grips with a great mystery, that life and time bear some curious relationship to each other that is not shared by inanimate things.

It is in the brain that this world opens. To our descendants it may become a commonplace, but me, and others like me, it has made a castaway. I have no refuge in time, as others do who troop homeward at nightfall. As a result, I am one of those who linger furtively over coffee in the kitchen at bedtime or haunt the all-night restaurants. Nevertheless, I shall say without regret: there are hazards in all professions.

Part III

It may seem at this point that I have gone considerably round about in my examination of the natural world. I have done so in the attempt to indicate that the spider web of law which has been flung, as Emerson indicated, across the deeps of time and space and between each member of the living world, has brought us some quite remarkable, but at the same time disquieting, knowledge. In rapid summary, man has passed from a natural world of appearances invisibly controlled by the caprice of spirits to an astronomical universe visualized by Newton, through the law of gravitation, as operating with the regularity of a clock.

Newton, who remained devout, assumed that God, at the time of the creation of the solar system, had set everything to operating in its proper orbit. He recognized, however, certain irregularities of planetary movement which, in time, would lead to a disruption of his perfect astronomical machine. It was here, as a seventeenth-century scholar, that he felt no objection to the notion that God interfered at periodic intervals to correct the deviations of the machine.

A century later Laplace had succeeded in dispensing with this last vestige of divine intervention. Hutton had similarly dealt with supernaturalism in earth-building, and Darwin, in the nineteenth century, had gone far toward producing a similar mechanistic explanation of life. The machine that began in the heavens had finally been installed in the human heart and brain. "We can make everything natural," Pascal had truly said, and surely the more naive forms of worship of the unseen are vanishing.

Yet strangely, with the discovery of evolutionary, as opposed to purely durational, time, there emerges into this safe-and-sane mechanical universe something quite unanticipated by the eighteenth-century rationalists -- a kind of emergent, if not miraculous, novelty.

I know that the word "miraculous" is regarded dubiously in scientific circles because of past quarrels with theologians. The word has been defined, however, as an event transcending the known laws of nature. Since, as we have seen, the laws of nature have a way of being altered from one generation of scientists to the next, a little taste for the miraculous in this broad sense will do us no harm. We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.

Whatever may be the power behind those dancing motes to which the physicist has penetrated, it makes the light of the muskrat's world as it makes the world of the great poet. It makes, in fact, all of the innumerable and private worlds which exist in the heads of men. There is a sense in which we can say that the planet, with its strange freight of life, is always just passing from the unnatural to the natural, from that Unseen which man has always reverenced to the small reality of the day. If all life were to be swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in the moon's airless craters, or in the road before our door.

Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing. How natural was man, we may ask, until he came? What forces dictated that a walking ape should watch the red shift of light beyond the island universes or listen by carefully devised antennae to the pulse of unseen stars? Who, whimsically, conceived that the plot of the world should begin in a mud puddle and end -- where, and with whom? Men argue learnedly over whether life is chemical chance or antichance, but they seem to forget that the life in chemicals may be the greatest chance of all, the most mysterious and unexplainable property in matter.

"The special value of science," a perceptive philosopher once wrote, "lies not in what it makes of the world, but in what it makes of the knower." Some years ago, while camping in a vast eroded area in the West, I came upon one of those unlikely sights which illuminate such truths.

I suppose that nothing living had moved among those great stones for centuries. They lay toppled against each other like fallen dolmens. The huge stones were beasts, I used to think, of a kind man ordinarily lived too fast to understand. They seemed inanimate because the tempo of the life in them was slow. They lived ages in one place and moved only when man was not looking. Sometimes at night I would hear a low rumble as one drew itself into a new position and subsided again. Sometimes I found their tracks ground deeply into the hillsides.

It was with considerable surprise that while traversing this barren valley I came, one afternoon, upon what I can only describe as a very remarkable sight. Some distance away, so far that for a little space I could make nothing of the spectacle, my eyes were attracted by a dun-colored object about the size of a football, which periodically bounded up from the desert floor. Wonderingly, I drew closer and observed that something ropelike which glittered in the sun appeared to be dangling from the ball-shaped object. Whatever the object was, it appeared to be bouncing faster and more desperately as I approached. My surroundings were such that this hysterical dance of what at first glance appeared to be a common stone was quite unnerving, as though suddenly all the natural objects in the valley were about to break into a jig. Going closer, I penetrated the mystery.

The sun was sparkling on the scales of a huge blacksnake which was partially looped about the body of a hen pheasant. Desperately the bird tried to rise, and just as desperately the big snake coiled and clung, though each time the bird, falling several feet, was pounding the snake's body in the gravel. I gazed at the scene in astonishment. Here in this silent waste, like an emanation from nowhere, two bitter and desperate vapors, two little whirlwinds of contending energy, were beating each other to death because their plans -- something, I suspected, about whether a clutch of eggs was to turn into a thing with wings or scales -- this problem, I say, of the onrushing nonexistent future, had catapulted serpent against bird.

The bird was too big for the snake to have had it in mind as prey. Most probably, he had been intent on stealing the pheasant's eggs and had been set upon and pecked. Somehow in the ensuing scuffle he had flung a loop over the bird's back and partially blocked her wings. She could not take off, and the snake would not let go. The snake was taking a heavy battering among the stones, but the high-speed metabolism and tremendous flight exertion of the mother bird were rapidly exhausting her. I stood a moment and saw the bloodshot glaze deepen in her eyes. I suppose I could have waited there to see what would happen when she could not fly; I suppose it might have been worth scientifically recording. But I could not stand that ceaseless, bloody pounding in the gravel. I thought of the eggs somewhere about, and whether they were to elongate and writhe into an armor of scales, or eventually to go whistling into the wind with their wild mother.

So I, the mammal, in my way supple, and less bound by instinct, arbitrated the matter. I unwound the serpent from the bird and let him hiss and wrap his battered coils around my arm. The bird, her wings flung out, rocked on her legs and gasped repeatedly. I moved away in order not to drive her further from her nest. Thus the serpent and I, two terrible and feared beings, passed quickly out of view.

Over the next ridge, where he could do no more damage, I let the snake, whose anger had subsided, slowly uncoil and slither from my arm. He flowed away into a little patch of bunch grass -- aloof, forgetting, unaware of the journey he had made upon my wrist, which throbbed from his expert constriction. The bird had contended for birds against the oncoming future; the serpent writhing into the bunch grass had contended just as desperately for serpents. And I, the apparition in that valley -- for what had I contended? -- I who contained the serpent and the bird and who read the past long written in their bodies.

Slowly, as I sauntered dwarfed among overhanging pinnacles, as the great slabs which were the visible remnants of past ages laid their enormous shadows rhythmically as life and death across my face, the answer came to me. Man could contain more than himself. Among these many appearances that flew, or swam in the waters, or wavered momentarily into being, man alone possessed that unique ability.

The Renaissance thinkers were right when they said that man, the Microcosm, contains the Macrocosm. I had touched the lives of creatures other than myself and had seen their shapes waver and blow like smoke through the corridors of time. I had watched, with sudden concentrated attention, myself, this brain, unrolling from the seed like a genie from a bottle, and casting my eyes forward, I had seen it vanish again into the formless alchemies of the earth.

For what then had I contended, weighing the serpent with the bird in that wild valley? I had struggled, I am now convinced, for a greater, more comprehensive version of myself.

Part IV

I am a man who has spent a great deal of his life on his knees, though not in prayer. I do not say this last pridefully, but with the feeling that the posture, if not the thought behind it, may have had some final salutary effect. I am a naturalist and a fossil hunter, and I have crawled most of the way through life. I have crawled downward into holes without a bottom, and upward, wedged into crevices where the wind and the birds scream at you until the sound of a falling pebble is enough to make the sick heart lurch. In man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have learned this with my face against the ground. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power; yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science -- islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed.

It is our custom to deny this; we are men of precision, measurement and logic; we abhor the unexplainable and reject it. This, too, is a green island. We wish our lives to be one continuous growth in knowledge; indeed, we expect them to be. Yet well over a hundred years ago Kierkegaard observed that maturity consists in the discovery that "there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood."

When I separated the serpent from the bird and released them in that wild upland, it was not for knowledge; not for anything I had learned in science. Instead, I contained, to put it simply, the serpent and the bird. I would always contain them. I was no longer one of the contending vapors; I had embraced them in my own substance and, in some insubstantial way, reconciled them, as I had sought reconciliation with the muskrat on the shore. I had transcended feather and scale and gone beyond them into another sphere of reality. I was trying to give birth to a different self whose only expression lies again in the deeply religious words of Pascal, "You would not seek me had you not found me."

I had not known what I sought, but I was aware at last that something had found me. I no longer believed that nature was either natural or unnatural, only that nature now appears natural to man. But the nature that appears natural to man is another version of the muskrat's world under the boat dock, or the elusive sparks over which the physicist made his trembling passage. They were appearances, specialized insights, but unreal because in the constantly onrushing future they were swept away.

What had become of the natural world of that gorilla-headed little ape from which we sprang -- that dim African corner with its chewed fish bones and giant ice-age pigs? It was gone more utterly than my muskrat's tiny domain, yet it had given birth to an unimaginable thing -- ourselves -- something overreaching the observable laws of that far epoch. Man since the beginning seems to be awaiting an event the nature of which he does not know. "With reference to the near past," Thoreau once shrewdly commented, "we all occupy the region of common sense, but in the prospect of the future we are, by instinct, transcendentalists." This is the way of the man who makes nature "natural." He stands at the point where the miraculous comes into being, and after the event he calls it "natural." The imagination of man, in its highest manifestations, stands close to the doorway of the infinite, to the world beyond the nature that we know. Perhaps, after all, in this respect man constitutes the exertion of that act which Donne three centuries ago called God's Prerogative.

Man's quest for certainty is, in the last analysis, a quest for meaning. But the meaning lies buried within himself rather than in the void he has vainly searched for portents since antiquity. Perhaps the first act in its unfolding was taken by a raw beast with a fearsome head who dreamed some difficult and unimaginable thing denied his fellows. Perhaps the flashes of beauty and insight which trouble us so deeply are no less prophetic of what the race might achieve. All that prevents us is doubt -- the power to make everything natural without the accompanying gift to see, beyond the natural, to that inexpressible realm in which the words "natural" and "supernatural" cease to have meaning.

Man, at last, is face to face with himself in natural guise. "What we make natural, we destroy," said Pascal. He knew, with superlative insight, man's complete necessity to transcend the worldly image that this word connotes. It is not the outward powers of man the toolmaker that threaten us. It is a growing danger which has already afflicted vast areas of the world -- the danger that we have created an unbearable last idol for our worship. That idol, that uncreate and ruined visage which confronts us daily, is no less than man made natural. Beyond this replica of ourselves, this countenance already grown so distantly inhuman that it terrifies us, still beckons the lonely figure of man's dreams. It is a nature, not of this age, but of the becoming -- the light once glimpsed by a creature just over the threshold from a beast, a despairing cry from the dark shadow of a cross on Golgotha long ago.

Man is not totally compounded of the nature we profess to understand. Man is always partly of the future, and the future he possesses a power to shape. "Natural" is a magician's word -- and like all such entities, it should be used sparingly lest there arise from it, as now, some unglimpsed, unintended world, some monstrous caricature called into being by the indiscreet articulation of worn syllables. Perhaps, if we are wise, we will prefer to stand like those forgotten humble creatures who poured little gifts of flints into a grave. Perhaps there may come to us then, in some such moment, a ghostly sense that an invisible doorway has been opened -- a doorway which, widening out, will take man beyond the nature that he knows.

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LOREN C. EISELEY, University Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Immense Journey and Darwin's Century. Darwin's Century received the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Award for 1958 and the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science for 1958. Dr. Eiseley has published essays in The American Scholar, Scientific
American, Science and Harper's Magazine.