Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers | Page 7

know what happened. The cloud formed into rain and our three
drops were washed into a tiny trickling stream. The thin stream of rain
ran into a brook, the brook into a river. Soon the three drops were back
in the ocean--possibly without knowing it.
Shall we some day go rolling back to the ocean of cosmic wisdom
whence we came?
Is it possible that man is indeed made in the image of God, as drops are
made in the ocean's image--the individual men, like the individual
drops, being sent forth to do necessary cosmic work through the
universe, going back to the ocean after each errand is done, and so
going back and forth, forever and ever?
That would not be such a mean destiny, we should say. It would
certainly be a very democratic form of cosmic government. ----
Inferior men, inferior women, unworthy of comparison with perfect,
cosmic wisdom?
Not at all. Not inferior men and women, but inferior mediums, inferior
brains, bodies and planets through which to work.
Is one drop of water inferior to another? Is any inferior to the purest
drop in the ocean?

No. But one drop runs through the gutter of a stable, another rolls from
a mountain spring, a third carries in solution the germ of typhus. But all
three came pure from the ocean and all will go back to the ocean pure.
DID WE ONCE LIVE ON THE MOON? AND SHALL WE MOVE
ON TO THE SUN SOME FINE DAY?
The most interesting questions are such as these:
Whence did we come?
Whither are we going?
And, by the way, what are we? Are we of any true importance? Are we
a permanent part of the universal scheme, privileged to move along
through the ages and see the end as we have seen the beginning? Or are
we, as advanced science says, merely like the weevil in the biscuit--no
part of the Baker's plan?
Are we indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up and
animating one material body after another--never destroyed--or do we
play on this earth the passing part of the microbe in the Brie cheese,
which gives that cheese its flavor? ----
A great scientist, coldly analyzing the chemical processes essential to
the creation of each new human being, scoffs at any possibility of
immortality. With the microscope at his eye, he magnifies nature's
mysteries; he sums up the investigations of the Hertwig brothers; he
discourses learnedly of the nucleolus of the Cytula--or progeny cell. He
declares that science is able to watch the creation of a human being, as
it watches the progress of a chick in the egg. He asserts that each new
creature is merely the result of a chemical process blending qualities of
the mother and father. Having a "final beginning," man must have a
final end. Man--a mixture of two sets of qualities--has no more chance
of immortality than has beer, which is a mixture of malt and hops.
Read and think over this cold summing-up of our mean, limited destiny
as science farthest advanced now sees it:
"It must appear utterly senseless now to speak of the immortality of the
human person, when we know how this person, with all its individual
qualities of body and mind, has arisen. How can this person possess an
eternal life without end? The human person, like every other
many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING PHENOMENON OF
ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its vital activities ceases
entirely, just as it began."

That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has sung "I
want to be an angel."
Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of immortality.
But the other side of the grave has the LAST say, and we think it will
discredit Haeckel. We should even undertake to do that now and here in
two columns of a yellow journal. But we are DETERMINED before
the column ends to ask you what you think of our moon-earth-sun
transmigration notion.
The sun is now a blazing mass, inconceivably huge, inconceivably
fierce in our eyes. Its flames leap hundreds of thousands of miles into
space. If our earth fell to the sun, it would melt as a snow-flake falling
upon a blazing forest. We certainly do not readily look upon the sun as
our future home, if we accept its present condition as permanent.
But once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years back, this earth
used to look TO THE MOON, on a smaller scale, as the sun now looks
to us. If there were on the moon at that time inferior human beings, in a
low state of cosmic evolution, they undoubtedly had to thank the earth
for their life, as we thank the sun.