The Life of the World to Come : Part 1

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 2 of 25)

When we survey the past of the earth as science has revealed it to us, we gain some conceptions which will help us in our judgments as to what this phenomenon of human life may signify in the future. We are accustomed to look upon the earth as aged, but these terms are only relative; and if we compare our own planet with its neighbors in the solar system, we should have good reason to suppose that, though the past of the earth is very prolonged, its future will probably be far more so. As for life - and we must think not only of human life, but of life as a planetary phenomenon - that is necessarily much more recent than the formation even of the earth's crust, the existence of water in the liquid state being necessary for life in any of its forms.

And human life itself, though the extent of its past duration is seen to be greater the more deeply we study the records, is yet a relatively recent thing. The utmost, it appears, that we can assign to our past would be perhaps six million years, taking our species back to mid-Miocene times. Doubtless this is a mighty age as compared with the few thousand years allotted to us in bygone chronologies; but, looked at sub specie eternitatis, and with an eye which is prepared to look forward also, and especially with relation to what we know and can predict regarding the sun, these past six million years may reasonably be held to comprise only the infantine period of man's life.

It is very true that on such estimates as those of Lord Kelvin, and according to what astronomers and geologists believed not more than twelve or even eight years ago, regarding the secular cooling of earth and sun - that, according to these, the time is by no means "unending long," and we may foresee, not so remotely, the end of the solar heat and light of which we are the beneficiaries. But the discovery of radium and the phenomena of radio-activity have profoundly modified these estimates, justifying, indeed, the acumen of Lord Kelvin, who always left the way open for reconsideration should a new source of heat and energy in general be discovered. We know now that, to consider the earth first, its crust is not self-cooling, or at any rate not self-cooling only, for it is certainly self-heating. There is an almost embarrassing amount of radium in the earth's crust, so far as we have examined it; a quantity, that is to say, so great that if the same proportion were maintained at deeper levels as at those which we can investigate, the earth would have to be far hotter than it is.

Similar reasoning applies to the sun. Definite, immediate proof of the presence of radium there is not forthcoming yet, but that presence is far more than probable, especially since the existence of solar uranium, the known ancestor of radium, has been demonstrated. The reckonings of Helmholtz and others, based upon the supposition that the solar energy is entirely derived from its gravitational contraction, must be superseded. It would require but a very small proportion of radium in the solar constitution to account for all the energy which the center of our system produces; and, as we have already seen, the earth is to no small extent its own sun - its own source of heat. The prospec. Therefore opened out by modern physical inquiry supports more strongly than ever the conviction that the life of this world to come will be very prolonged. It is true that there is always the possibility of accident. Encountering another globe, our sun would doubtless produce so much heat as to incinerate all planetary life. But the excessive remoteness of the sun from the nearest fixed star suggests that the constitution of the stellar universe is such that an accident of this kind is extremely improbable. As for comets, the earth's atmosphere has already encountered a comet, even during the brief period of astronomical observation. This thick overcoat of ours protects us from the danger of such chances.

What, then, is the record? We are told that the belief in progress is a malady of youth, which experience and the riper mind will dissipate. Some such argument from the lips of the disillusioned or the disidealized has been possible, perhaps, with some measure of probability, until within our own times. They must now forever hold their peace. We know as surely as we know the elementary phenomena of physics or chemistry, that the record of life upon our planet, though not only a record of progress by any means, has nevertheless included that to which the name of progress cannot be denied in any possible definition of the word. For myself, I understand by progress the emergence of mind, and its increasing dominance over matter. Such categories are, no doubt, not philosophical in the ultimate sense, but they are proximately convenient and significant.

Now, if progress b. Therefore defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not merely in terms of anatomical or physiological - i. e. mechanical or chemical - complexity, but in terms of mind. The facts of nutrition teach us that the first life upon the earth was vegetable; and though the vegetable world displays great complexity, and that which, on some definitions, would be called progress, yet we cannot say that there is any more mind, any greater differentiation or development of sentience, in the oak than in the alga. When we turn, however, to the animal world - which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world - we find that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for the body.

But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely real turning of the tables, so that, even in a dog, as the lover of that dog would grant, the loss of limbs and tail, or, indeed, of any portion of the body not necessary to life, does not mean the loss of the essential dog - not the loss of that which the lover of the dog loves. Already, that which is not to be seen or handled has become the more real. In ourselves, it is a capital truth, which asceticism, old or new, perverted or sane, has always recognized, that the mind is the man, and must be master, and the body the servant. Yet, historically, this creature, who by the self means not the body, but, as he thinks, its inhabitant, is historically and lineally developed - is also, indeed, developed as an individual - from an organism in which anything to be called psychical is but an apparently accidental attribute, to be discerned only on close examination. This emergence of mind is progress; and this, notwithstanding the sneers of those who do not love the word or the light, has occurred. Its history is written indelibly in the rocks. And, as we should argue, this is the supreme lesson of evolution - that progress is possible, because progress has occurred.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.