CHAPTER IX.
CUI BONO?
When I arrived at the Society's rooms on the evening for which I had aninvitation, I found them pleasantly lighted. The various scientificdiagrams and instruments had been removed, and comfortable arm-chairswere arranged so that a free passage was available, not merely to eachrow, but to each chair. The place was full when I entered, and soonafterwards the door was closed and locked. Natalie Brande and EdithMetford were seated beside each other. An empty chair was on MissMetford's right. She saw me standing at the door and nodded toward theempty seat which she had reserved for me. When I reached it she made amovement as if to forestall me and leave me the middle chair. Ideprecated this by a look which was intentionally so severe that shedescribed it later as a malignant scowl.
I could not at the moment seat myself voluntarily beside Natalie Brandewith the exact and final knowledge which I had learnt at Scotland Yardonly one week old. I could not do it just then, although I did not meanto draw back from what I had undertaken--to stand by her, innocent orguilty. But I must have time to become accustomed to the sensation whichfollowed this knowledge. Miss Metford's fugitive attempts atconversation pending the commencement of the lecture were disagreeableto me.
There was a little stir on the platform. The chairman, in a few words,announced Herbert Brande. "This is the first public lecture," he said,"which has been given since the formation of the Society, and inconsequence of the fact that a number of people not scientificallyeducated are present, the lecturer will avoid the more esoteric phasesof his subject, which would otherwise present themselves in histreatment of it, and confine himself to the commonplaces of scientificinsight. The title of the lecture is identical with that of ourSociety--_Cui Bono?_"
Brande came forward unostentatiously and placed a roll of paper on thereading-desk. I have copied the extracts which follow from thismanuscript. The whole essay, indeed, remains with me intact, but it istoo long--and it would be immaterial--to reproduce it all in thisnarrative. I cannot hope either to reproduce the weird impressiveness ofthe lecturer's personality, his hold over his audience, or my ownemotions in listening to this man--whom I had proved, not only from hisown confession, but by the strongest collateral evidence, to be acallous and relentless murderer--to hear him glide with sonorous voiceand graceful gesture from point to point in his logical and terribleindictment of suffering!--the futility of it, both in itself and that bywhich it was administered! No one could know Brande without findinginterest, if not pleasure, in his many chance expressions full ofcurious and mysterious thought. I had often listened to hisextemporaneous brain pictures, as the reader knows, but I had neverbefore heard him deliberately formulate a planned-out system of thought.And such a system! This is the gospel according to Brande.
"In the verbiage of primitive optimism a misleading limitation is placedon the significance of the word Nature and its inflections. And themisconception of the meaning of an important word is as certain to leadto an inaccurate concept as is the misstatement of a premise to precedea false conclusion. For instance, in the aphorism, variously rendered,'what is natural is right,' there is an excellent illustration of themisapplication of the word 'natural.' If the saying means that what isnatural is just and wise, it might as well run 'what is natural iswrong,' injustice and unwisdom being as natural, _i.e._, a part ofNature, as justice and wisdom. Morbidity and immorality are as naturalas health and purity. Not more so, but not less so. That 'Nature is madebetter by no mean but Nature makes that mean,' is true enough. It isinevitably true. The question remains, in making that mean, has shereally made anything that tends toward the final achievement ofuniversal happiness? I say she has not.
"The misuse of a word, it may be argued, could not prove a seriousobstacle to the growth of knowledge, and might be even interesting tothe student of etymology. But behind the misuse of the word 'natural'there is a serious confusion of thought which must be clarified beforethe mass of human intelligence can arrive at a just appreciation of theverities which surround human existence, and explain it. To this end itis necessary to get rid of the archaic idea of Nature as a paternal,providential, and beneficent protector, a successor to the 'specialprovidence,' and to know the true Nature, bond-slave as she is of herown eternal persistence of force; that sole primary principle of whichall other principles are only correlatives; of which the existence ofmatter is but a cognisable evidence.
"The optimist notion, therefore, that Nature is an all-wise designer, inwhose work order, system, wisdom, and beauty are prominent, does notfare well when placed under the microscope of scientific research.
"Order?
"There is no order in Nature. Her armies are but seething mobs ofrioters, destroying everything they can lay hands on.
"System?
"She has no system, unless it be a _reductio ad absurdum_, which onlyblunders on the right way after fruitlessly trying every otherconceivable path. She is not wise. She never fills a pail but she spillsa hogshead. All her works are not beautiful. She never makes amasterpiece but she smashes a million 'wasters' without a care. Thetheory of evolution--her gospel--reeks with ruffianism, nature-patentedand promoted. The whole scheme of the universe, all material existenceas it is popularly known, is founded upon and begotten of a system ofeverlasting suffering as hideous as the fantastic nightmares ofreligious maniacs. The Spanish Inquisitors have been regarded as themost unnatural monsters who ever disgraced the history of mankind. Yetthe atrocities of the Inquisitors, like the battlefields of Napoleon andother heroes, were not only natural, but they have their prototypes inevery cubic inch of stagnant water, or ounce of diseased tissue. Andstagnant water is as natural as sterilised water; and diseased tissue isas natural as healthy tissue. Wholesale murder is Nature's first law.She creates only to kill, and applies the rule as remorselessly to theunits in a star-drift as to the tadpoles in a horse-pond.
"It seems a far cry from a star-drift to a horse-pond. It is so indistance and magnitude. It is not in the matter of constituents. Inultimate composition they are identical. The great nebula in Andromedais an aggregation of atoms, and so is the river Thames. The onlydifference between them is the difference in the arrangement andincidence of these atoms and in the molecular motion of which they arethe first but not the final cause. In a pint of Thames water, we knowthat there is bound up a latent force beside which steam andelectricity are powerless in comparison. To release that force it isonly necessary to apply the sympathetic key; just as the heated point ofa needle will explode a mine of gunpowder and lay a city in ashes. Thatforce is asleep. The atoms which could give it reality are at rest, or,at least, in a condition of _quasi_-rest. But in the stupendous mass ofincandescent gas which constitutes the nebula of Andromeda, every atomis madly seeking rest and finding none; whirling in raging haste,battling with every other atom in its field of motion, impinging uponothers and influencing them, being impinged upon and influenced by them.That awful cauldron exemplifies admirably the method of progressstimulated by suffering. It is the embryo of a new Sun and his planets.After many million years of molecular agony, when his season of fissionhad come, he will rend huge fragments from his mass and hurl themhelpless into space, there to grow into his satellites. In their turnthey may reproduce themselves in like manner before their true planetarylife begins, in which they shall revolve around their parent as solidspheres. Follow them further and learn how beneficent Nature deals withthem.
"After the lapse of time-periods which man may calculate in figures, butof which his finite mind cannot form even a true symbolic conception,the outer skin of the planet cools--rests. Internal troubles prevail forlonger periods still; and these, in their unsupportable agony, bend andburst the solid strata overlying; vomit fire through their self-madeblow-holes, rear mountains from the depths of the sea, then dash them inpieces.
"Time strides on austere.
"The globe still cools. Life appears upon it. Then begins anew the oldstrife, but under conditions far more dreadful, for though it be found
edon atomic consciousness, the central consciousness of the heterogeneousaggregation of atoms becomes immeasurably more sentient and susceptiblewith every step it takes from homogenesis. This internecine war mustcontinue while any creature great or small shall remain alive upon theworld that bore it.
"By slow degrees the mighty milestones in the protoplasmic march arepassed. Plants and animals are now busy, murdering and devouring eachother--the strong everywhere destroying the weak. New types appear. Oldtypes disappear. Types possessing the greatest capacity for murderprogress most rapidly, and those with the least recede and determine.The neolithic man succeeds the palaeolithic man, and sharpens the stoneaxe. Then to increase their power for destruction, men find it better tohunt in packs. Communities appear. Soon each community discovers thatits own advantage is furthered by confining its killing, in the main, tothe members of neighbouring communities. Nations early make the samediscovery. And at last, as with ourselves, there is established a racewith conscience enough to know that it is vile, and intelligence enoughto know that it is insignificant.[1] But what profits this? In thefulness of its time the race shall die. Man will go down into the pit,and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which, inthis obscure corner, has for a brief space broken the silence of theUniverse, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Life anddeath and love, stronger than death, will be as though they never hadbeen. Nor will anything that _is_ be better or be worse for all thatthe labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven throughcountless generations to effect.
[1] From this sentence to the end of the paragraph Brande draws freely, for the purpose of his own argument, on Mr. Balfour's "Naturalism and Ethics."--_Ed._
"The roaring loom of Time weaves on. The globe cools out. Lifemercifully ceases from upon its surface. The atmosphere and waterdisappear. It rests. It is dead.
"But for its vicarious service in influencing more youthful planetswithin its reach, that dead world might as well be loosed at once fromits gravitation cable and be turned adrift into space. Its time has notyet come. It will not come until the great central sun of the system towhich it belongs has passed laboriously through all his stages ofstellar life and died out also. Then when that dead sun, according tothe impact theory, blunders across the path of another sun, dead andblind like himself, its time will come. The result of that impact willbe a new star nebula, with all its weary history before it; a history ofsuffering, in which a million years will not be long enough to write asingle page.
"Here we have a scientific parallel to the hell of superstition whichmay account for the instinctive origin of the smoking flax and the firewhich shall never be quenched. We know that the atoms of which thehuman body is built up are atoms of matter. It follows that every atomin every living body will be present in some form at that final impactin which the solar system will be ended in a blazing whirlwind whichwill melt the earth with its fervent heat. There is not a molecule orcell in any creature alive this day which will not in its ultimateconstituents endure the long agony, lasting countless aeons of centuries,wherein the solid mass of this great globe will be represented by a rushof incandescent gas, stupendous in itself, but trivial in comparisonwith the hurricane of flame in which it will be swallowed up and lost.
"And when from that hell a new star emerges, and new planets in theirseason are born of him, and he and they repeat, as they must repeat, theceaseless, changeless, remorseless story of the universe, every atom inthis earth will take its place, and fill again functions identical withthose which it, or its fellow, fills now. Life will reappear, develop,determine, to be renewed again as before. And so on for ever.
"Nature has known no rest. From the beginning--which never was--she hasbeen building up only to tear down again. She has been fabricatingpretty toys and trinkets, that cost her many a thousand years to forge,only to break them in pieces for her sport. With infinite painstakingshe has manufactured man only to torture him with mean miseries in theembryonic stages of his race, and in his higher development to maddenhim with intellectual puzzles. Thus it will be unto the end--which nevershall be. For there is neither beginning nor end to her unvaryingcycles. Whether the secular optimist be successful or unsuccessful inrealising his paltry span of terrestrial paradise, whether the paeans hesings about it are prophetic dithyrambs or misleading myths, noChristian man need fear for his own immortality. That is well assured.In some form he will surely be raised from the dead. In some shape hewill live again. But, _Cui bono_?"