On a Negation

It is obvious that a materialist is always a mystic. It is equally true that he is often a mystagogue. He is a mystic because he deals entirely in mysteries, in things that our reason cannot picture j such as mindless order or objective matter merely becoming subjective mind. And he is a mystagogue because he sometimes actually hides these mysteries in mystifications. He pontificates 5 he is pompous j he tries to bully or to hypnotize, by the incantation of long and learned words, or by very simple things said in a very solemn fashion. That is the character of much popular science 3 at the best it is mysterious, and at the worst meaningless.

I never realized these truths so vividly as in reading the reverential report of an interview with Mr. Edison, the distinguished electrician, under the heading of "Do We Live Again?" It is possible, of course, that the distinguished electrician did not have much to do with it. It is possible that the reverential reporter is responsible for the form of it. To my simple mind it is not obvious that a successful electrician is an authority on the immortal soul, any more than that a successful military strategist has an ear for music, or an admirable French cook a grasp of the higher mathematics. But it may be that the air of authority here assumed does not come from the electrician but from the journalist. Anyhow, there is a very long and solemn encyclical that they have somehow made up between themj and I shall treat it as one thing. Whichever of them is responsible for the reasoning of the encyclical, I apologize to the other.

I will begin with the smaller point of pomposity. Mr. Edison as reported does not say much about whether we "live again," but in a few well-chosen words he disposes of the soul: "My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soulj but I simply do not believe it. What a soul may be is beyond my understanding." So far, so good 3 all right 3 amen. But I ask the reader to remember this agnostic statement in considering what follows. He then goes on to deal with the origin of life 3 or rather, not to deal with it. The following statement is of such fearful intensity and importance that the interviewer prints it all in italics, and I will so reproduce it: "/ believe the form of energy that we call life cante to the earth from some other ^planet or at any rate from somewhere out in the great spaces beyond us" In short, there will henceforth be branded upon our brains the conviction that life came from somewhere, and probably under some conditions of space. But the suggestion that it came from another planet seems a rather weak evasion. Even a mind enfeebled by popular science would be capable of stirring faintly at that, and feeling unsatisfied. If it came from another planet, how did it arise on that planet? And in whatever way it arose on that planet, why could it not arise in that way on this planet? We are dealing with something admittedly unique and mysterious: like a ghost. The original rising of life from the lifeless is as strange as a rising from the dead. But this is like explaining a ghost walking visibly in the churchyard, by saying that it must have come from the churchyard of another village.

Then we go on in the same solemn and stately fashion. The life-force comes from some other planet, where life-forces grow on trees, or are chained up in kennels, and it pours itself into this planet, and particularly into certain things lying about, such as eggs. The interpreter becomes very ponderous and profound at this point. "What does this mean? It means, first, that, if Edison is correct, life is life wherever found." I think we may boldly commit ourselves, with a loud cheer of loyalty, to the proposition that Edison is correct when he says that life is life wherever found. Life is life, as here suggested, into whatever kind of ^gg it may enter, of the lowest sea-beast or the loftiest bird. That is, in our popular pre-scientific formula, as sure as eggs are eggs 5 or, in deference to the American literary tradition, as pigs is pigs. But while these rhythmic and recurrent phrases, that life is life, and eggs are eggs, and pigs is pigs, have something of the rounded beauty of song and dance and decorative pattern, they are not what you might call hustling in the matter of getting any further in the process of an argument. And Edison evidently has something a little more definite to say than the identical proposition which his interpreter holds up before us, like a scroll of revelation.

What he says is that eggs are all dead 3 and the same applies to seeds. He denies that there is, as many assume, a sort of germ of life in each. "A seed or an ^gg is merely a blue-print — an architect's plans for the building of a structure. It is as dead as any other blue-print. The energy that \ye call life flows into the blue-print and goes to work. If the blueprint was made by a rose-bush, the life-force makes another rose-bush. If the plans and specifications call for a man, the life-force makes a man." I am not quite sure where Mr. Edison imagines that his argument is leading him; but the only direction in which it could logically lead him is back to the oldest and most orthodox argument from design. The metaphor which he makes so important makes the whole imagery a little fanciful. Few of us walking in our gardens at evening have ever actually conle upon a rose-bush making a blue-print, or even a red-print, or a green-print. And to believe that the rose-bush really does plan another rose-bush is to turn our garden into something of a fairyland. But if it does not, who does? The notion of a blind life in the germ did at least favour some vague evolutionary idea of a blind growth unfolding outwards into the void. But evolution has far less chance with the blue-prints of Mr. Edison. They are only an architect's plans: what architect's plans? It is the working out of a specification: who works out whose specification? So far as the argument has gone, it would seem that the reasoner has been forced to summon the aid of two mythological beings. One is a god called Life, who has winged his way from a strange star where such deities dwell, and who has the genius to understand and fulfil the most labyrinthine plans that he finds. The other is the Spirit of the Rose-Bush, a sort of dryad who draws up the most elaborate plans for posterity and leaves them like a last will and testament. Both of these figures, on the face of it, are far more improbable than the traditional truth in which most men have believed: that both were parts of the plan of a greater mind.

The philosopher seems to feel that he is becoming too much of a mystic, even for a materialist. In the next passage he treats the life-force merely as an instrument: "It is as if he had said that the electricity that prints a book might as easily have ground sausages if it had been applied to a sausage-grinder instead of to a printing-press." But a book does not print itself j still less does it print all by itself an appendix giving directions for the printing of another book. Still less does a sausage-machine grind out a specification of another sausage-machine. The electricity would not be applied to producing either books or sausages, if there were not a mind outside and above them: a mind that is neither a machine nor a book nor a sausage nor an electric current. His own analogy would prove that there is a mind behind nature, as there is a man behind machines.

Recoiling from this dreadful possibility, he falls back on a last fantastic theory. He says it is the cells that have souls. He says, again in italics: ^^All cells affarently go consciously about it to reproduce the forms of life in which they affearP I cannot italicize italics 3 or I would underline the word "consciously." Each one of the tiny cells in an elephant's tail has in its little mind a vivid and complete picture of an elephant. I will leave it at that. The article ends with the sad death of Mr. Edison's father at ninety-three j and the writer is quite sure (he does not explain why) that the old gentleman was thus cut off in his prime because the conscious cells found they could not come to an agreement. They seem to have taken some little time to discover their difference. But I only ask the reader to read again those words at the beginning: "My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul." Is it so very much easier to conceive such things as these? Is it so very much easier to conceive a million souls, where we suppose there are cells, than to conceive one soul where we know at least that there is one mind?