"RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19382, 17 July 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

"RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW."

NATURE AND HER CRITICS

BY KOTARE.

I wonder if man will ever be a rational animal. He lays claim to that title, boasts his superiority to all the other animals on that very ground. But our opinion of ourselves does not necessarily coincide with reality. In fact it is often a smoke screen of illusion we throw up to shield ourselves from reality. Usually, I am afraid, we see just what we want to see.

The blunt fact seems to be that we form our judgments -as our environment or our inherited or acquired prejudices dictate; and, as a general rule, we begin to use our reason only after we have taken our side, and declared our convictions. The reasoning part of us is, -as often as not, kept in abeyance until we have found our convictions; we bring it into full play only to justify and defend what we already believe. After all that is the better way, A race of beings governed by emotions and prejudices is, with all its obvious limitations, a thousand times better than a race of cold-blooded intellectualists whoso brains function at all times with perfect mechanical precision, in a cold white light of pure reason.

I have been reminded of this fortunate limitation of man as a rational animal by reading a succession of books dealing with the evolutionary theory of life and the universe. The authors are all men of the highest standing in their own line. Here is a poet and novelist; here a famous traveller; here a physicist, a biologist, a soldier. They are all facing exactly the same things. They are going over again the mass of scientific facts through which the genius of Darwin first found a way. And each of them reacts to these facts along the lines of his own personality, the prejudices and the preferences he has acquired apart altogether from the clear functioning of the reason. At least that is the only way in which I can explain the diversity of conclusion. The facts are the same in each case; the laws of logic are the same for each; the intellect of each man is of the same type, observes the same laws, operates in precisely the same way. It must be something apart altogether from pure intellect that produces this singular variation. The brain is obviously not the* essential man. There is something, of distinct character and individuality, that uses the thinking processes for its own ends, and very largely deterihines their direction. The Poet.

First the poet, then. Stevenson, with the artist's sensitiveness to impressions of beauty, found that a soul keyed to beauty inevitably revolted from the ugliness and brutality of nature. The two went together. His gift of seeing the glory in the tropical splendours or the grey of the north carried with it an abnormal sensitiveness to Nature's other side, her cold, relentless cruelty. His " Woodman " is the most perfect expression we have of nature's passionless brutality. It is too much . for Stevenson, optimist though he was through the fineness of the spirit of him.

Thick round mo in the teeming mud Brier and fern strove to the blood; The hooked liana in his pin Noosed his reluctant neighbours in: There the green murderer throve and spread, Upon his smothering victims fed. And what nature is in ths forest, man is in society. Why prate of peace ? when warriors all We clink in harness into hall, And ever bare upon the board

Lies the necessary sword. In the green field or quiet street

Besieged we sleep, beleaguered eat. The rose on roses'feeds: the lark On larks. The sedentary clerk All morning with a diligent pen Murders the babes of other men; * And like the beasts of wood and park Protects his whelps, defends his den. The Traveller.

Of the others 011 my list the only one that shares Stevenson's point of view is J. H Curie, a travel-writer of distinction, and, what must be particularly counted to him for righteousness, the great friend and adviser of Joseph Conrad. In his latest book, " To-day and Tomorrow," Curie gives' his .views on ultimate things. He has walked up and down on the face of the earth, but has not found peace. The cruelty of nature poisons all life for him. It is fundamental; he can see nothing else; it corrupts every picture; it rises as a miasmatic mist between him and the glory of the heavens or the splendour of the sunrise on the far mountains, or the grandeur of man's achievement toiling upward through the years. Not only is Nature cruel, she is wantonly, maliciously cruel. Man gets nothing from her save as he fights and holds. When I had read his indictment of nature I could scarcely look unkoved upon my flower-beds; each seemed to harbour a devil, whose lust for cruelty would never be sated, and which would get me if I were not upon my guard. It is a throw back, I take it, in a peculiar type of temperament, to the horror of the forest and the darkness that made the ancient worship of nature usually a nightmare of fear and bloodshed.

Still, even Curie finds a way of hope. Man has won through to the headship at last. He can direct the evolutionary process to the ends his mind chooses. At last the life-force has its master. Curie has come out in the end with Bergson and Bernard Shaw.

Blind force at last is conscious force, Sees clearly where it would arrive; I sfm.the runner, I the course, And I the goal to which I strive. The Soldier.

And now for the soldier. Sir Francis Younghusband, after many years in the service of his country, has turned his attention to fiction. His novel, " But In Our Lives," is marked by a very unusual naivete; that is the last quality one looks for among the ultra-sophistications of the modern novel. But two chapters on the forests of India are of the finest quality. The gallant author is more at home with nature than with human character and conduct. And, viewing the cruelty of nature through the eyes of an Indian forester,, this is his conclusion:

" Nature is not all red. There is a cruel, hard struggle. You can't get a\vay from that. But there 'is another sideBirds and beasts of prey have often higher qualities than the timid creatures on whom they prey. They have courage, audacity, alertness, physical fitness, intelligence and skill. Unless they keep themselves up to the mark tfcey die, just as their prev, unless they likewise keep themselves up to the mark, are killed. The penalty of death for failing to live life to the full hangs over both alike. And the general result is the fitness you everywhere see in wild life. Every creature in this forest is in tip-top condition, and alive to the finger-tips. . . Here in the wilds, the "beasts and the birds and the insects are in a state of incessant struggle. But they are sharpened by it in every nerve and fibre. They are kept at their best. Tney iive life to the full and enjoy it." A soldier's point of view, perhaps, laying stress on the soldierly virtues; but it has as much right to stand its ground as the hyper-sensitive morbidities of the literary temperament. Our physicist and our biologist we shall consider next week.