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THE IMMENSE JOURNEY -- TIME READING PROGRAM INTRODUCTION |
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Time Reading Program Introduction The immense journey with which this remarkable book deals is the most tremendous and the most mysterious that has ever been made. It began, no one knows how and no one knows how long ago, when something called Life first appeared on this globe. It has been proceeding for so many millions of years that the human mind cannot conceive such a stretch of time. But its direction has always been, in some sense, upward as well as onward. What presumably began as some barely living jelly much like the protoplasm which still fills the cells of our bodies is now Man the Maker and Man the Thinker. Because something we call Mind has emerged from that merely mechanical ability to react, which is the most primitive characteristic of life, Man has taken control of his own destiny, to at least some limited extent, instead of leaving it in the hands of whatever mysterious power first created life. He can send capsules containing incredible instruments, and even other men, far out into the measureless space which surrounds the globe to which he was once confined. What is much more remarkable and perhaps more fateful is that he can also wonder and speculate about his origins, his destiny and the meaning of his existence. Moreover, as Loren Eiseley suggests, we have no way of even guessing how much longer the journey may last. We think of ourselves as the climax of evolution, but we may be hardly more than its beginning. Perhaps the journey will soon end, as some pessimists suggest, in universal death. But perhaps it will continue for even longer than it has already lasted. The emergence of Mind, relatively recently, may be the first step in the development of creatures who will look back upon us as primitive organisms. Nothing is more characteristic of man than the brevity of his earthly existence, and his passionate desire both to know the past and to guess at the future is an attempt to escape from this limitation. The desire led 19th Century evolutionists to accept various theories which no competent biologists today believe. (An example: the assumption that a missing link between the animate and the inanimate had been found on the sea bottom.) It also leads us to indulge in fantasies about the Man of the Future. Such speculation usually is limited to a picture of men much like ourselves equipped with a few new gadgets. Yet the experimentation indulged in by living creatures did not stop billions of years ago. It is still going on. Life is not satisfied now that self-satisfied man has been achieved. It is still producing "lower forms" engaged upon their own widely varied experiments. And since it seems to have been only an accident that one special form of organism reached what we like to think of as the summit represented by man, it is by no means impossible that some other organization, as lowly as man's remotest ancestors once were, may someday achieve an equally spectacular success. The story of evolution has been told many times, but it has seldom been viewed as Loren Eiseley views it. He takes more or less for granted the established external facts such as the fossil evidence which records (despite a good many important gaps) the step-by-step emergence of increasingly complex organic forms. His chief interest is in the questions which most 19th and too many 20th Century scientists refuse to ask, questions which concern the ultimate meaning of those facts. Darwin and his immediate followers were content to say, "This is what happened," to reduce it all to mechanics and chemistry and to assume that they had not only explained everything but actually explained it away. Professor Eiseley is one of the increasing number of contemporary scientists who insist that the mystery still exists, and that there is more to evolution than was dreamed of in the 19th Century's refusal to philosophize. Moreover, he makes us feel that unless we too realize this we are in danger of ceasing to be truly human. This is not, of course, to doubt that the evolutionary process was a real one. That evolution took place is as certain as circumstantial evidence can make anything. But both the Darwinians and most of the Neo-Darwinians go far beyond that. They insist that it was all mechanistically determined and that purposefulness and meaning are nowhere to be found in the process. This is what Dr. Eiseley refuses to believe. They try to explain everything by the mechanistic concept of "adaption." He sees instead what he prefers to call "a reaching out"--something which suggests direction, purpose, an end in view. This end in view is not mere survival but a fuller and fuller realization of the potentialities of life and mind. To grant this--and it certainly makes the whole process more credible--is to make man, and everything which preceded him and accompanies him, not a machine but something unique. In another of his books, The Firmament of Time, Dr. Eiseley has stated what this means so clearly that a few sentences should be quoted: "Into this world of the machine ... a ghost has come, a ghost whose step must have been as light and imperceptible as the first scurry of a mouse in Cheops' tomb .... 'It is carbon,' says one, as the music fades within his ear. 'It is done with the amino acids,' contributes another. 'It rots and ebbs into the ground,' growls a realist, 'It began in the mud,' criticizes a dreamer. 'It endures pain,' cries a sufferer. 'It is evil,' sighs a man of many disillusionments." To this should be added a few sentences from the present volume: "If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time crawls under man's direction, we shall have great need of humbleness. It will be difficult for us to believe, in our pride of achievement, that the secret of life has slipped through our fingers and eludes us still. We will list all the chemicals and the reactions. The men who have become gods will pose austerely before the popping flash bulbs of news photographers, and there will be few to consider--so deep is the mind-set of an age--whether the desire to link life to matter may not have blinded us to the more remarkable characteristics of both .... "I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the tiniest and most humble house of life, that many of these questions will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the deep sea and living batteries in the waters of tropical swamps, or the dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble workings of the human brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say, that if 'dead' matter had reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, 'But one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.' " Some of the best books of science addressed to the general reader have been written by trained men dealing with subjects a little aside from their specialty. Because they are trained in one science they are competent in dealing with scientific facts. Because they are not, for the moment, functioning as specialists they are freer to deal imaginatively, and even speculatively, with the subject. This book is a case in point. By profession Dr. Eiseley is a well-known anthropologist. Anthropology comes into his book, but primarily it is the immense journey of evolution with which Dr. Eiseley is concerned. The oft-told story is told here, not only from a fresh point of view, but with unusual eloquence and imagination. The essential facts are there (including some puzzling ones which the usual accounts prefer to omit), but the stress is on the wonderful paradox of man trying to grasp something that must elude him just because he is himself a part of it. It is often said today that "what we need are more facts." Actually we already have more facts than we know how to interpret or how to use wisely. What we need most is the wisdom which facts ought to generate but often, unfortunately, do not. Anyone who wants to know not merely the so-called facts of evolution but what they may mean concerning himself, the universe in which he lives and the future which stretches before him could not do better than to read Eiseley's account of this most immense of all journeys. --JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH
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