On the Nature of Man
An Essay in Primitive Philosophy
CONTENTS
The Quest
The Hem of the Gods
Maker of the Alphabet
Ethics and Energy
The Furtive Hunter
The Riddle of the Mouth
Puzzling Gods
Adonai Echod!
The Flame
Professionals at the Altar
The Bloody Chain
Shamans and Kings
The Ugly Fence
The Yoke
The Axe and the Scepter
The Many, the Few and the One
Evening Thoughts
The Greater Self
Byways of Reason
Only About God
The Gregarious Creature
Adverse and Universe
Giant Shadows and Small Men
THE QUEST
As I write these lines, and as you read them, we find ourselves aware of living in an ocean of energies. We are much like a tree in the forest, visibly growing from sapling to huge ripe trunk. As time goes on, we wither away, dry and lifeless, unless some blight cuts us down before our time.
What is man, beyond the awareness of shooting up for a while from parental roots into a being like his parents, then growing to be like his grandparents? And there the drama ends, except that man too sets out seedlings for tomorrow’s growth.
Still, we are not mere plants. We are animals prowling for food and shelter. We move about restlessly. Yet we are not mere animals either, forever on the hunt unless asleep—we are imbued with an awesome feeling of nature beyond the touch of paw and nose, of tongue and tooth, of ear and eye. The trees turn knowingly with the wind; spiders spin webs cunningly; but we fashion thoughts and tales and tartans in zigzags and spires which wander and rise far beyond their use and purpose.
We are spiritual.
We are plants inspired by unpredictable notions of useless games, by intricate laws and bizarre morals that give us more unease than comfort; by fanciful cogitations about invisibilities—we are full of mysteries that, at least to our perception, trouble neither tree nor tapir.
What goes on in the core of our mind, this tumult created of our vexation with the business of animal living, lies just in our mind. Our mind is our whole world; the whole world is in our mind.
Our sculpture is just a rock to the bird, our painting only a greasy canvas to the cat, our songs scarcely a noise to the fish, and the words spouting from our lips—what are they to the tree?
To a city of ants, a destructive rip of the bulldozer means the end of the world; perhaps to a shoal of fish, the draining of a pool means the Great Drought; to a stranded herd of sheep the river’s overflow in spring is the Everlasting Flood; and to the worm in a stomach there is no world outside those walls.
Man splits some atoms and talks of harnessing the universe. Which universe? Which one of the infinite universes?
Man, little two-legged man, riding like a fungus on an elephant at breathless speed on this uncontrollable gigantic rock vehicle through endless space in aeonic time—man finds himself aware of some few of the unfathomed energies of this little globe, and in his mind he appears nature’s master, deus ex machina.
The homing pigeon which finds its way high above a hundred miles of broken landscape, the bat which flies in the black of night, the salmon which crosses an ocean against fearful obstacles, the tiny caterpillar which spins an almost perfect cocoon, the day-old chick which pecks a grain instead of a pebble—they all, and many million others from microbe to gorilla, live under manifold energies as strange to us as the turning of the green plant to the sun.
Certainly there are quick and quack answers to every query. It is amazing how rapidly shallow explanations come forth. Sometimes men even think they solve a problem by giving it a Greek or Latin name.
We are shipwrecked on this watery, germ- and microbe-infested splinter of a minor star and are just another growth on it, shifting for food and shelter. And after all is said and done, today as in the age of the stilt-dwellers, the days of man are still devoted to the lowly purpose of digging for food and toiling for shelter.
But man is spiritual.
Man must ponder. He ponders his past and learns from mistakes as well as successes; he ponders his future in looking back at his past; he ponders the lines on the horizon and the lines on the face of his mate; he ponders the thunder and lightning, the sun, the moon and the stars, the heaving ocean and the rising mountains, the green of the faraway valley and the blooming sweetness of the flowers, the fury of the howling beasts and the uncertainty about his neighbor—man ponders, and from his meditations, his fears, his loves and anguish, spring helpful faith and philosophies, lawful union and the manners of comfortable living.
This is all man’s world in man’s mind; man’s mind is man’s world.
To the timeless universe coursing through infinite space, what is this all but the dreams and doodlings of a blade of grass in the evening wind?
That which man calls “beauty”—what is it? That which man calls “knowledge”—what is it? What man calls “moral”—what is it? What he calls “heritage”—what is it? The blade of grass is singing in the wind and it thinks the wide, wide universe hearkens.
Man must still live as if his world were real and perennial, but if he finds his true and tiny measure, a better man he may be—more humble, more kind, more forgiving, more hesitant.
Hesitance is the beginning of philosophy, and charity its end.
THE HEM OF THE GODS
We can but touch the hem of the gods. I presume it behooves us to interpret our narrow milieu as well as we can, as well as we can see and comprehend it. And frequently, in trying to piece together this jigsaw puzzle, we throw in a hypothesis, or even a word, where a part of the facts is missing—a new synthetic word which makes some people feel they have the answer, though they have only a word.
A Greek philosopher in ancient days mused that if horses and cows and fish could think, they probably would picture their gods as horses, cows, and fish. Humans are no different. They imagine the world has come about by creation or spontaneous generation for the sake of humans, with humans as the universe’s crowning diadem. Religious teleologies and evolutionary rationalism are, on this issue, brothers of one skin.
Man is as little the final purpose of divine providence as an elk or a beetle or a salamander. By the same token, the popular ladder of evolution from fish through amphibia, reptiles, and mammals to sterling man is equally anthropomorphic and monotheistic.
I cannot tell whether a skunk be a higher level creature than a trout, or whether a clam rank above a bee, or whether in the great order of things Hitler be placed above a nervous orangutan in the zoo.
I presume the antelope regards the gamekeeper, who feeds him in winter and waters him during the dry season, as some sort of demigod and spells out to his offspring the smell and step of the gun-toting hunter as the devil incarnate-such is his theology. Perhaps the barracuda in the ocean considers himself as being at the summit of evolutionary development since he can pretty much master the waters of the bay, except for the tricky barbed hooks from hell above; for to the barracuda there is heaven below and the devil overhead.
Man will naturally make his own hells and heavens, as will other animals, and feel himself cock of the evolutionary roost.
All animals are mere creatures living in the ocean of oxygen and hydrogen, or in the ocean of plain oxygen. They procreate in a similar manner, usually by fertilizing eggs within the body or without; they eat the same kinds of grubs; they suffer from like ailments, and perish by disintegration and disease, unless they kill each other before their natural lifetime has expired. Whole organs of man and animals are so much alike they could almost be interchanged. Perhaps some day they will be; some animal glands have already been transplanted successfully into humans.
There are some reasons for man to feel that he may be the epitome of the universe; man has become aware of quite a few sources of energy; most of which he has used immediately to destroy other men. But it is not unreasonable to assume that some insects have learned to manage sources of energy unknown to man which they use, for instance, to carry loads many hundred times heavier than themselves. Their use of strength as well as ingenuity is often applied to gathering a supply of food for their settlements.
These and many parallel considerations fail to inspire me with the idea that there is such a process in nature as evolution toward perfection. And even if evolution is taking place, the goal of its progress is positively not man.
When writers, clear-thinking or otherwise, set up a whole plausible system of probabilities and likelihoods, there is a danger that some lazy-minded epoch will take cover under this comfortable philosophy and stay there like a worm that has crawled into an empty snail shell. It is so pride-warming and satisfying to think: fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal and, finally, glorious rational man!