We seek renewed reverence for the biosphere as
the ultimate context for human existence....
We seek renewed reverence for the biosphere as
the ultimate context for human existence....
|
|
|
The Scheme of the Universeby John Burroughs
The mystery of life deepens when we set up a being, no matter how large and all powerful, over the universe apart from and independent of it, and to whom we assign human motives and purposes - some sort of economic scheme with reference to it. When a good man dies with his work half done, how mysterious, we say, that the master of the vineyard should thus strike down one of his most useful servants and spare so many worthless and worse than worthless ones. The universe viewed in the light of anything like human economy is indeed a puzzle. But this is not the right view. We must get rid of the great moral governor, or head director. He is a fiction of our own brains. We must recognize only Nature, the All; call it God if we will, but divest it of all anthropological conceptions. Nature we know; we are of it; we are in it. But this paternal Providence above Nature - events are constantly knocking it down. Here is this vast congeries of vital forces which we call Nature, regardless of time, because it has all time, regardless of waste because it is the All, regardless of space because it is infinite, regardless of man because man is a part of it, regardless of life because it is the sum total of life, gaining what it spends, conserving what it destroys, always young, always old, reconciling all contradictions - the sum and synthesis of all powers and qualities, infinite and incomprehensible. This is all the God we can know, and this we cannot help but know. We want no evidence of this God. Such a notion seems to orphan the universe to some souls, but need it be so? This vital Nature out of which we came, out of which father and mother came, out of which all men come, and to which again we all in due time return, why should we fear it or distrust it? It makes our hearts beat and our brains think. When it stops the beating and the thinking, will it not be well also? It looked after us before we were born; it will look after us when we are dead. Every particle of us will be taken care of; the force of every heart-beat is conserved somewhere, somehow. There is no stoppage and no waste, forever and ever. My consciousness ceases as a flame ceases, but that which made my consciousness does not cease. What comfort is that to the me? Ah, the me wants to go on and on. But let the me learn that only Nature goes on and on, that the law which makes the me and unmakes it is alone immortal, and that it is best so. Identity is a thought, a concept of our minds, and not a property of our minds. The universe is so stupendous, so unspeakable, that we dare not, cannot, name any end or purpose for which it exists. It is because it is. If man exists on other worlds, or if he does not exist, It is all the same. They are no more there for his sake than yonder river is there for the sake of the fishes, or yonder clay bank for the sake of the brickmakers. Space is no doubt strewn with dead worlds and dead suns as thickly as yonder field with dead boulders, and with worlds upon which only the rudiments of life can ever develop, too hot or too cold. Our own earth must have been millions of years without man, and it will again be millions without him. He is the insect of a summer hour. The scheme of the universe is too big for us to grasp - so big, that it is no scheme at all. The infinite -- what is that? Is it equal to absolute negation'? It is when we have such thoughts that all notions of a God disappear and one says in his ear, "There is no God." Any God we can conceive of is inadequate. The universe is no more a temple than it is a brothel or a library. The Cosmos knows no God - it is super deus. In the light of the nebular hypothesis how one wilts! How vain all your striving and ambition. The proudest records of earth must perish like autumn leaves. When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the outstanding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. Mankind used to think that the dews and rains were sent for their benefit, and the church still encourages this idea by praying for rain in times of drought, but the notion is nearly dissipated. Read correctly the moral of the solar system, -- of this harmony, this balance, this compensation, and there is no deeper lesson to be learned. Follow out this elementary form for which the earth stands -- the curve or sphere - an you shall solve all problems, reconcile all philosophies, mend all breaks, and make the commonest fact illustrious. The earth, we say, is forever failing into the sun and forever ceasing to fall, indicating all directions and going no direction; every point at the top, and yet no one point at the top. Do we realize the amazing grandeur and beauty of the voyage we are making -- all the more grand and beautiful because on so large a scale and in so vast an orbit that none suspect it, none witness it; speeding with more than the speed of a rifle-bullet, and the fact patent only to the imagination, not to the senses? In the heavens, among the stars, separated from the nearest by measureless space, yet related to the farthest by the closest ties, upheld and nourished by a power so vast that nothing can measure it, yet so subtle that not a hair loses its place, the morning or the evening star no more favored, no more divine, these ways the eternal ways, the heavenly ways, the immutable ways - what more would we have! Incorruptible and undefiled - the soil under foot as well as the sky overhead. It fills me with awe when I think how vital and alive the world is; how the water forever cleanses itself; how the air forever cleanses itself, and the ground forever cleanses itself - how the sorting, sifting, distributing process, no atom missing or losing its place, goes on forever and ever! Perpetual renewal and promotion! Does this power with which I move my arm begin and end in myself? On the contrary, is it not the same or a part of that which holds the stars and the planets in their places? In performing the meanest act, do I not draw upon the vast force with which the universe is held together? I cannot tell what the simple apparition of the earth and sky mean to me; I think at rare intervals one sees that they have an immense spiritual meaning, altogether unspeakable, and that they are the great helps, after all. In the open air I know what the poet means when he swears he will never mention love again inside of a house, and that he will follow up these continual lessons of the earth, air, sky, water - declaring at the outset that he will make the poems of materials, For only thus does he hope to attain to the spiritual.
Excerpted from John Burroughs' The Light of Day , 1900. "The Scheme of the Universe" |
Copyright is held by the indicated organization
and/ or author. All rights are reserved.
Best viewed at 800*600 High Color |
