Читать книгу Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries - Edwin E. Slosson - Страница 9

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The story of Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of human history. Man is a castaway upon a desert planet, isolated from other inhabited worlds—if there be any such—by millions of miles of untraversable space. He is absolutely dependent upon his own exertions, for this world of his, as Wells says, has no imports except meteorites and no exports of any kind. Man has no wrecked ship from a former civilization to draw upon for tools and weapons, but must utilize as best he may such raw materials as he can find. In this conquest of nature by man there are three stages distinguishable:

1. The Appropriative Period

2. The Adaptive Period

3. The Creative Period

These eras overlap, and the human race, or rather its vanguard, civilized man, may be passing into the third stage in one field of human endeavor while still lingering in the second or first in some other respect. But in any particular line this sequence is followed. The primitive man picks up whatever he can find available for his use. His successor in the next stage of culture shapes and develops this crude instrument until it becomes more suitable for his purpose. But in the course of time man often finds that he can make something new which is better than anything in nature or naturally produced. The savage discovers. The barbarian improves. The civilized man invents. The first finds. The second fashions. The third fabricates.

The primitive man was a troglodyte. He sought shelter in any cave or crevice that he could find. Later he dug it out to make it more roomy and piled up stones at the entrance to keep out the wild beasts. This artificial barricade, this false façade, was gradually extended and solidified until finally man could build a cave for himself anywhere in the open field from stones he quarried out of the hill. But man was not content with such materials and now puts up a building which may be composed of steel, brick, terra cotta, glass, concrete and plaster, none of which materials are to be found in nature.

The untutored savage might cross a stream astride a floating tree trunk. By and by it occurred to him to sit inside the log instead of on it, so he hollowed it out with fire or flint. Later, much later, he constructed an ocean liner.

Cain, or whoever it was first slew his brother man, made use of a stone or stick. Afterward it was found a better weapon could be made by tying the stone to the end of the stick, and as murder developed into a fine art the stick was converted into the bow and this into the catapult and finally into the cannon, while the stone was developed into the high explosive projectile. The first music to soothe the savage breast was the soughing of the wind through the trees. Then strings were stretched across a crevice for the wind to play upon and there was the Æolian harp. The second stage was entered when Hermes strung the tortoise shell and plucked it with his fingers and when Athena, raising the wind from her own lungs, forced it through a hollow reed. From these beginnings we have the organ and the orchestra, producing such sounds as nothing in nature can equal.

The first idol was doubtless a meteorite fallen from heaven or a fulgurite or concretion picked up from the sand, bearing some slight resemblance to a human being. Later man made gods in his own image, and so sculpture and painting grew until now the creations of futuristic art could be worshiped—if one wanted to—without violation of the second commandment, for they are not the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.

In the textile industry the same development is observable. The primitive man used the skins of animals he had slain to protect his own skin. In the course of time he—or more probably his wife, for it is to the women rather than to the men that we owe the early steps in the arts and sciences—fastened leaves together or pounded out bark to make garments. Later fibers were plucked from the sheepskin, the cocoon and the cotton-ball, twisted together and woven into cloth. Nowadays it is possible to make a complete suit of clothes, from hat to shoes, of any desirable texture, form and color, and not include any substance to be found in nature. The first metals available were those found free in nature such as gold and copper. In a later age it was found possible to extract iron from its ores and today we have artificial alloys made of multifarious combinations of rare metals. The medicine man dosed his patients with decoctions of such roots and herbs as had a bad taste or queer look. The pharmacist discovered how to extract from these their medicinal principle such as morphine, quinine and cocaine, and the creative chemist has discovered how to make innumerable drugs adapted to specific diseases and individual idiosyncrasies.

In the later or creative stages we enter the domain of chemistry, for it is the chemist alone who possesses the power of reducing a substance to its constituent atoms and from them producing substances entirely new. But the chemist has been slow to realize his unique power and the world has been still slower to utilize his invaluable services. Until recently indeed the leaders of chemical science expressly disclaimed what should have been their proudest boast. The French chemist Lavoisier in 1793 defined chemistry as "the science of analysis." The German chemist Gerhardt in 1844 said: "I have demonstrated that the chemist works in opposition to living nature, that he burns, destroys, analyzes, that the vital force alone operates by synthesis, that it reconstructs the edifice torn down by the chemical forces."

It is quite true that chemists up to the middle of the last century were so absorbed in the destructive side of their science that they were blind to the constructive side of it. In this respect they were less prescient than their contemned predecessors, the alchemists, who, foolish and pretentious as they were, aspired at least to the formation of something new.

It was, I think, the French chemist Berthelot who first clearly perceived the double aspect of chemistry, for he defined it as "the science of analysis and synthesis," of taking apart and of putting together. The motto of chemistry, as of all the empirical sciences, is savoir c'est pouvoir, to know in order to do. This is the pragmatic test of all useful knowledge. Berthelot goes on to say:

Chemistry creates its object. This creative faculty, comparable to that of art itself, distinguishes it essentially from the natural and historical sciences. … These sciences do not control their object. Thus they are too often condemned to an eternal impotence in the search for truth of which they must content themselves with possessing some few and often uncertain fragments. On the contrary, the experimental sciences have the power to realize their conjectures. … What they dream of that they can manifest in actuality. …

Chemistry possesses this creative faculty to a more eminent degree than the other sciences because it penetrates more profoundly and attains even to the natural elements of existences.

Since Berthelot's time, that is, within the last fifty years, chemistry has won its chief triumphs in the field of synthesis. Organic chemistry, that is, the chemistry of the carbon compounds, so called because it was formerly assumed, as Gerhardt says, that they could only be formed by "vital force" of organized plants and animals, has taken a development far overshadowing inorganic chemistry, or the chemistry of mineral substances. Chemists have prepared or know how to prepare hundreds of thousands of such "organic compounds," few of which occur in the natural world.

But this conception of chemistry is yet far from having been accepted by the world at large. This was brought forcibly to my attention during the publication of these chapters in "The Independent" by various letters, raising such objections as the following:

When you say in your article on "What Comes from Coal Tar" that "Art can go ahead of nature in the dyestuff business" you have doubtless for the moment allowed your enthusiasm to sweep you away from the moorings of reason. Shakespeare, anticipating you and your "Creative Chemistry," has shown the utter untenableness of your position:

Nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: so o'er that art,

Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes.

How can you say that art surpasses nature when you know very well that nothing man is able to make can in any way equal the perfection of all nature's products?

It is blasphemous of you to claim that man can improve the works of God as they appear in nature. Only the Creator can create. Man only imitates, destroys or defiles God's handiwork.

No, it was not in momentary absence of mind that I claimed that man could improve upon nature in the making of dyes. I not only said it, but I proved it. I not only proved it, but I can back it up. I will give a million dollars to anybody finding in nature dyestuffs as numerous, varied, brilliant, pure and cheap as those that are manufactured in the laboratory. I haven't that amount of money with me at the moment, but the dyers would be glad to put it up for the discovery of a satisfactory natural source for their tinctorial materials. This is not an opinion of mine but a matter of fact, not to be decided by Shakespeare, who was not acquainted with the aniline products.

Shakespeare in the passage quoted is indulging in his favorite amusement of a play upon words. There is a possible and a proper sense of the word "nature" that makes it include everything except the supernatural. Therefore man and all his works belong to the realm of nature. A tenement house in this sense is as "natural" as a bird's nest, a peapod or a crystal.

But such a wide extension of the term destroys its distinctive value. It is more convenient and quite as correct to use "nature" as I have used it, in contradistinction to "art," meaning by the former the products of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, excluding the designs, inventions and constructions of man which we call "art."

We cannot, in a general and abstract fashion, say which is superior, art or nature, because it all depends on the point of view. The worm loves a rotten log into which he can bore. Man prefers a steel cabinet into which the worm cannot bore. If man cannot improve Upon nature he has no motive for making anything. Artificial products are therefore superior to natural products as measured by man's convenience, otherwise they would have no reason for existence.

Science and Christianity are at one in abhorring the natural man and calling upon the civilized man to fight and subdue him. The conquest of nature, not the imitation of nature, is the whole duty of man. Metchnikoff and St. Paul unite in criticizing the body we were born with. St. Augustine and Huxley are in agreement as to the eternal conflict between man and nature. In his Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" Huxley said: "The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less on running away from it, but on combating it," and again: "The history of civilization details the steps by which man has succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos."

There speaks the true evolutionist, whose one desire is to get away from nature as fast and far as possible. Imitate Nature? Yes, when we cannot improve upon her. Admire Nature? Possibly, but be not blinded to her defects. Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet until we can stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. The wild beasts that man has kept at bay for a few centuries will in the end invade his palaces: the moss will envelop his walls and the lichen disrupt them. The clam may survive man by as many millennia as it preceded him. In the ultimate devolution of the world animal life will disappear before vegetable, the higher plants will be killed off before the lower, and finally the three kingdoms of nature will be reduced to one, the mineral. Civilized man, enthroned in his citadel and defended by all the forces of nature that he has brought under his control, is after all in the same situation as a savage, shivering in the darkness beside his fire, listening to the pad of predatory feet, the rustle of serpents and the cry of birds of prey, knowing that only the fire keeps his enemies off, but knowing too that every stick he lays on the fire lessens his fuel supply and hastens the inevitable time when the beasts of the jungle will make their fatal rush.

Chaos is the "natural" state of the universe. Cosmos is the rare and temporary exception. Of all the million spheres this is apparently the only one habitable and of this only a small part—the reader may draw the boundaries to suit himself—can be called civilized. Anarchy is the natural state of the human race. It prevailed exclusively all over the world up to some five thousand years ago, since which a few peoples have for a time succeeded in establishing a certain degree of peace and order. This, however, can be maintained only by strenuous and persistent efforts, for society tends naturally to sink into the chaos out of which it has arisen.

It is only by overcoming nature that man can rise. The sole salvation for the human race lies in the removal of the primal curse, the sentence of hard labor for life that was imposed on man as he left Paradise. Some folks are trying to elevate the laboring classes; some are trying to keep them down. The scientist has a more radical remedy; he wants to annihilate the laboring classes by abolishing labor. There is no longer any need for human labor in the sense of personal toil, for the physical energy necessary to accomplish all kinds of work may be obtained from external sources and it can be directed and controlled without extreme exertion. Man's first effort in this direction was to throw part of his burden upon the horse and ox or upon other men. But within the last century it has been discovered that neither human nor animal servitude is necessary to give man leisure for the higher life, for by means of the machine he can do the work of giants without exhaustion. But the introduction of machines, like every other step of human progress, met with the most violent opposition from those it was to benefit. "Smash 'em!" cried the workingman. "Smash 'em!" cried the poet. "Smash 'em!" cried the artist. "Smash 'em!" cried the theologian. "Smash 'em!" cried the magistrate. This opposition yet lingers and every new invention, especially in chemistry, is greeted with general distrust and often with legislative prohibition.

Man is the tool-using animal, and the machine, that is, the power-driven tool, is his peculiar achievement. It is purely a creation of the human mind. The wheel, its essential feature, does not exist in nature. The lever, with its to-and-fro motion, we find in the limbs of all animals, but the continuous and revolving lever, the wheel, cannot be formed of bone and flesh. Man as a motive power is a poor thing. He can only convert three or four thousand calories of energy a day and he does that very inefficiently. But he can make an engine that will handle a hundred thousand times that, twice as efficiently and three times as long. In this way only can he get rid of pain and toil and gain the wealth he wants.

Gradually then he will substitute for the natural world an artificial world, molded nearer to his heart's desire. Man the Artifex will ultimately master Nature and reign supreme over his own creation until chaos shall come again. In the ancient drama it was deus ex machina that came in at the end to solve the problems of the play. It is to the same supernatural agency, the divinity in machinery, that we must look for the salvation of society. It is by means of applied science that the earth can be made habitable and a decent human life made possible. Creative evolution is at last becoming conscious.