Читать книгу The Making of a Man - James W. Lee - Страница 9

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Considered as an embodiment of thought, man is the only creature who can interpret Nature. The ideas and principles that fill his great books were gathered from a study of her secrets and processes. The first books on geology, giving the history of the earth, its upheavals, changes, and transformations, were written in the rocks, sands, coal-beds, and shells of the primal ages. The first books on chemistry were written in the shape, sizes, affinities, and specific gravities of the atoms which enter into the composition of all natural bodies. The first books on arithmetic, by the knowledge of which man learns to divide and conquer nature, were written in the qualitative relations and movements of matter. The first books on astronomy were written in the orbits and movements of the heavenly bodies. The first books on zoölogy were written in the structure and habits of the lower animals. The books that fill our libraries are but transcripts from the original volumes written in rocks, seas, flowers, and skies. Man is the only being who can read and transcribe these wonderful volumes. They lie unopened and unknown till his interest is provoked. Their language carries no meaning till he comes to find it and to ponder it. The herds that low amid the Alpine echoes see, as well as the distinguished Tyndall, the great glaciers, as they press with slow and measured pace down the mountain side; but their meaning, and the law by which they move, is not known till the man of science comes. To him, they speak in awful and majestic terms. To the sheep in the meadow, the grass means nothing but food; to man, however, every blade has a message, poetic and beautiful.

Considered as a home, this world was made for man; in a thousand senses, it was not made for any other creature. It is the home of the oyster, but its wants are met by a little basin in the sea. It is the home of the elephant, but a few acres of Asiatic jungle furnish the food and the conditions necessary to its life. It is the home of the bird, but give it a tree and a worm, and a small circle of sky to fly around, and it needs no more. But man needs it all. For his hunger, the foods and the fruits of its continents, oceans, and skies. For his thirst, the waters of its thousand rills. For his shelter and protection, all its woods. For his thought, all its order and law. For his ills, the tender ministry of all its minerals and plants. He is related to it all, and to be completely furnished must be able to use it all.

Considered as a place of discipline, the earth is for man, for he is the only creature helped and advanced by discipline. The beaver cuts his tree and builds his dam to-day just as the beaver did in the first year of his existence. He has had the discipline that comes through work, but it has not improved him nor elevated him. In order that the bee may live, he must gather his honey and build his cell. This is discipline. But he never improves. He never grows in culture or skill. The bee that built his cell in the trees of paradise, and gathered his honey from the flowers that grew in the garden of Eden, knew as well how to construct a cell according to mathematical principles, and to pack it with honey, as the Italian bee of the nineteenth century, who stores his honey in a painted gum prepared for him by man.

Monkeys in South America cross rivers by twisting their tails, thus making bridges of themselves. This is discipline and exercise of a complex and marvelous sort, but they devise no new ways of building bridges. They do not increase in knowledge or skill by their work. That he may gain the means of subsistence, man is under the necessity of work too. But his work is to him a means of growth and knowledge. His work has helped him forward, and secured to him culture and skill. Suggestions come to him, as he fells the forest, as he plows the field, as he plants the seed, and as he rows his dug-out. These suggestions he turns to account. He builds them into better axes for cutting the trees, into better plow-stocks for breaking the land, and into better boats for crossing the sea.

By turning the suggestions he has received into better methods, into improved tools and machinery, he has come from the dug-out to the ocean steamer; from the pack-mule to the palace car; from the scythe-blade to the mower and reaper; from the stone and sling to the improved army gun; from the spinning-wheel to the cotton-factory; and from the foaming steed of the flying messenger to the electric telegraph.

Because of the growth and improvement he has received through work, the tom-tom has long given place to the piano, and the tent to the modern home. Through struggle with nature, he has been piqued into a determination to conquer her, to ferret out her secrets, and master her processes.

The forces that oppose him he makes to serve him. The river current, which forbids him to cross, he utilizes to ferry him over. He sets his sail in the wind blowing eastward and avails himself of its power to carry him westward. The waves that rise to engulf him he turns into steam to outride them. The winds draw his water, the river saws his plank. The tail of the beaver is adjusted by nature to the mud he needs to cement his dam; his tooth is already adjusted to the hardness of the tree, so that he cuts it down by instinct and without thought. The eagle finds the air already under his wings when he would fly, and his talons already prepared to hold his food, or to grasp a limb in the forest. The fish finds itself in the beginning of its existence in an element ready to respond to its fins, and in the presence of food adapted to its life. The lower animals find themselves at the start in a world immediately adjusted to their needs, so that they have only to use their feet, their teeth, their horns, their claws, their wings, and their fins, to conquer their enemies and find their food. The animal is wholly governed by natural law, and hence has no history. He moves on nature’s level, and is adjusted to her plains, her forests, her seas, and her skies, without his thought or his device. Man is not related in the same outward, immediate way to clothing, food, and fuel. His understanding, it is true, corresponds to the scheme of nature, but he must grow into this by study, by insight, by hints, by the use of faculties the lower animals do not possess. As long as he remains on the plain of the tiger and panther, and emulates their stealthy step to creep upon his prey, or his human foe, like them, he has no history.

The savage, perhaps, did master the mystery of the dug-out and the birch-bark canoe, but he had no place for his archives but a hole in the ground, and no experience but such as died with him. Man’s history begins with the attempt to conquer Nature. The contribution that Nature makes to human civilization is that she sets herself against his inward energies, as if to call them out. She puts limitations about him, that he may be prompted to rise above them. The fury and storm of the sea provokes his ingenuity to express itself in the steamship. The peril to life and fortune contained in the lightning’s flash, begets the steel rod that disarms it. The distance between the wheat that grows in one part of the globe and the need for bread in another, leads to the discovery of a method of transportation that obliterates it. Civilization is the expression that man has made of himself in his attempts, through thought and will, to effect the conquest of Nature. This witnesses to the peculiar and magnificent place which alone belongs to him in nature.

It may be true that he has no kingdom of his own, no privileged class of his own, and no titled order of his own; but it can hardly be disputed that he has a history of his own. This history, written in the dim glories of vast empires, in the rush of splendid cities, in the age-long conflict between good and evil, in the undying creed of martyred faith, in the hope, fidelity, trial, agony, triumph, and self-sacrifice of the human race, bears witness to the fact, either that the earth was made for man, or else that he is the only creature upon it capable of subduing it, transforming it, recreating it, and appropriating it. If man is only a natural product, the powers have certainly been engaged in a marvelously intelligent and complicated sort of conspiracy to advance his interests and to serve his dominion.

Nothing but what we have been accustomed to regard as design, intention, purpose, is sufficient to account for the fact, that the scheme of nature so completely corresponds to the understanding of man as to make it possible for him to command and claim all her possessions for his own.

Men will never accept such a happy coincidence as the work of chance. They will, by the very structure of their minds, believe that the scheme and the understanding, which, through the process of struggle and trial, grows into it, were intended, by the Great Author of both, the one for the other.