On the Importance of Being Indifferent to One's Ancestors: With a Few Remarks on the Sea Worm

IT would be mere affectation in writing about ancestors to avoid all personal references and pretend to be indifferent to one’s own. There is nothing for it but to speak out. It is comforting to reflect, however, that one cannot be personal very long; for if you go any distance backward in your analysis you presently lose yourself in a crowd that is unflatteringly promiscuous. If you ascend as far as the twentieth generation in tracing your lineage, mathematics will tell you — doubtless quite erroneously — that you have already something over a million ancestors in all, and though there are subtractions to be made from this appalling number by the crossing and recrossing of the lines of descent, the number remains large. In any case it will be too large for an inclusive view.

I

There are people all about us, no doubt, who coolly select from the mob those individuals from whom it satisfies their vanity to be descended — indeed in this sense we all select our own ancestry. Even among our four grandparents we had, most of us, our favorites. Proximity or the mere fact of survival made us better acquainted with one than with the rest; and no doubt it was better so, for a superfluity of grandparents might prove embarrassing to a child. And if, to pile Ossa on Pelion, you enter upon the next stage and contemplate the atavistic complexities of your eight great-grandparents, the problem begins to take on something of the mystery and majesty that mark all profound matters. I once met a man who could remember, besides his four grandparents, three of his great-grandparents. The sum of those ancestors — parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents — with whom he had come into something like personal contact was therefore nine, a number of bonds with the past which would, I fear, have proved disturbing to my sense of individuality.

I myself was not so blessed. There was nothing — indeed, there never has been anything — to prevent me from conceiving of myself quite as individualistically as I chose. My paternal grandmother was the only one of my grandparents with whom I was acquainted — a stern, Puritan lady from the Connecticut Valley, who had read Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and had sheltered a runaway slave-girl. Our ancestors, as I came to know them through her, were a sufficiently uninteresting group — farmers in Connecticut who, like so many others there, seem never to have done very well. The only thing that appears to have distinguished our farm from the score of sterile estates that environed it was a cranberry bog, a sufficiently uncertain foundation on which to build any family pride.

A vague rumor, which I once heard, had it that one of our ancestors had been hanged as a pirate in the Bahama Islands. I have the most serious doubts about the historicity of this legend, though it is almost as gratifying to have a family pirate as it is to have a family ghost, and I suspect some primitive genealogist of trying thus to lend a tang of romance to an otherwise drab tradition. If he really existed, the buccaneer bequeathed nothing of his adventurous disposition to me. I do not remember that I ever longed to be a pirate. I am aware that heroic little boys, such as Mr. Barrie creates, always want to be pirates; but I was by no means an heroic little boy. My great ambition was to be a conductor on the Boston & Maine Railway. And even this desire I should have difficulty in accounting for on any theories of heredity. We were not a race of travelers or gadabouts, unless the name Tinker be taken to connect us with those wayfarers who moved up and down the roads and lanes of England mending pots and pans, lending meanwhile force and picturesqueness to the English vocabulary.

There was a fine paternalism about the old Boston & Maine. The conductors, it seemed, always shook hands with one’s father, and sometimes — oh, bliss! — bestowed a salutation from Olympus upon the small boy at his side. At a certain point in the journey a brakeman dispensed ice water from a copper teakettle, and at the journey’s end the blue-and-gold conductor, having collected all his pink slips, dismissed you with a warning cry to remember your ‘packages, wraps, and umbrellas.’ Yes, that was the life for a man! Journeying about the world, armed with a small and fascinating device for punching holes in tickets, bestowing smiles and warning cries, obviously the god of that particular machine! In all my clerical and agricultural ancestry I had heard of none so glorious as he. In my wild desire there was, I am sure, no atavism, no snapback toward the past. It was the soul’s leap toward the glorious and the impossible — the desire of the moth for the star.

Even if we had been a race of conductors I am not sure that I should have been permitted to take any satisfaction in our relation to them, since no particular respect for ancestors was inculcated in the young of our family. There was no hint that we needed to be ashamed of them, whatever the truth might be about that dark soul who perished in the Bahamas. But in the stout old days before the New Englanders had moved out to make room for the Italians, children were not encouraged to take pride in such vanities. At the very best one’s line ended in Adam and Eve, whose deplorable conduct accounted for miseries enough and was a perpetual reminder of an innate perverseness of heart in little boys. Not that we were permitted to deride or denounce poor Adam and Eve. No indeed! Had we been in their position, our teachers urged us to consider, how deplorably similar, how much worse in all likelihood, our own conduct would have been! If Adam and Eve were punished for a trifle, in a new and beautiful world, what, pray, were naughty little boys to expect who disobeyed and did n’t love their fellow men or, mayhap, ran away to be conductors on the Boston & Maine? It was the traditional attitude, the ancient argument, and I am glad to have heard it, not only for its inherent truthfulness, but for the views that it opens up to me. ‘Dost thou hear, Hal?’ said Falstaff. ‘Thou knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy?’

II

In our modern, scientifically trained generation it has become difficult for some persons to read the story of our first parents understandingly. We have become so imbued with the conception of progress that we tend even to interpret the fall of man as a sort of majestic catastrophe that made progress possible.

Better the mad yearning and tragedy of growth through imperfection than the serene stagnation of the ideal. The latest expression of this view that I have seen is by Mr. Neil Grant who, in the Atlantic Monthly for December 1923, utters this surprising theory: —

There is something extraordinarily uplifting in the thought that man, once the equal of the angels, had the courage and the will to fall down to his present level.

Mr. Grant is referring to Adam and Eve, and apparently means to be taken seriously. Falstaff, I am sure, would instantly have accused him of heresy, since he propounds the astonishing doctrine that man was once the equal of the angels. Has Mr. Grant never read Milton, not to speak of the Holy Bible? Certainly he could not have had the luck to be born in old New England in the days when children knew Adam and Eve as well as a modern youngster knows an ichthyosaurus. Any child knew that angels belonged to a different order from men; that man never had been an angel (though he had, to be sure, once been perfect); and that, for that matter, he never would be an angel, despite sentimental hymns about children who wanted to die, no matter how good he might be (though he might, in truth, be restored to the state of primal perfection). But Mr. Grant, being modern, does n’t believe in angels any more than he does in snarks. So what difference does it make if his snark turns out to be a boojum, anyhow?

It would certainly have seemed odd, to any Puritan, to take pride in a descent from Adam and Eve — odd and probably sinful. To take pride in man’s descent has become a habit among the modern disciples of Evolution, and has, indeed, the august authority of the discoverer of the origin of species. In a famous passage at the very close of the Descent of Man, Darwin wrote: —

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale, and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.

How much pseudoscientific sentimentalism issued out of this! Drummond’s Ascent of Man, a book now, no doubt, quite forgotten, expanded this view of things and provided it with a fervor somewhat unscientific. To me it all seems very remote. I accept, of course, cordially enough the whole evolutionary hypothesis; but what has pride to do with it? Pride and humiliation seem out of place in science as in history. Who can get up any pride over the fact that man survived the fifteenth century, or the fifth, or the fiftieth B.C.? I read about the Punic Wars — or did — with a certain detachment, and the more remote history of the race, in its simian and pithecanthropic stages, leaves my emotions untouched. I cannot thrill at the names Piltdown and Neanderthal. It is all so dreadfully long ago. And at this rate where is one to end? We shall soon be taking pride in the solar system.

Yet Darwin did not hesitate to express this emotional view. The most famous sentences in that famous book were perhaps these, in which he would seem to be offering a crumb of comfort to the world that he was accused of having humiliated: —

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Here surely is an appeal to the imagination and the emotions unusual in a scientific treatise. Heroic monkeys and affectionate baboons, set over against bloodthirsty and superstitious savages, open a long line of ‘nature stories,’ ending with Mowgli and Tarzan and other fine reversions to type. How much pure Jack Londonism there is in this attitudinizing of Darwin’s! Our scientist talks as if he were permitted to choose whether he would be descended from a savage or a baboon, whereas the plain truth, which even a literary man may see, is that he is descended from both. He cannot get rid of the savages by allying himself with the baboons; he must take the disgrace of the head-hunter and the cannibal along with the glory of the chimpanzee.

Something of the bravado that found satisfaction in its descent from apes, or apelike men, or Pithecanthropus erectus (I do not know what the proper scientific designation is to-day), has passed away with the Huxleys and the Spencers, and the race that took pride in a new view of the universe. We are, as a whole, conscious of an ancestry humble indeed compared with the ape and the lemur. Mr. Grant, whatever his scientific pretensions, may be taken as a fair example of that public which has learned of its past from Mr. H. G. Wells, and the anthropologists whom he, in turn, derives from. The idea, he says, is gradually soaking into the popular mind ‘ that man, far from being once the equal of the angels, has developed painfully and slowly from the sea worm which one fine day was daring enough to leave the ocean for the land. . . . How can we be heroworshipers when we think of the sea worm? ‘

Here is a new note — humility. Instead of taking pride in the heroic little monkey of Darwin, I am humbly to recall the sea worm and, along with it, all the vast line that stretches from the amœba up through sea worm and lemur and Piltdown man. And, having confronted myself with this vast cloud of witnesses, I am to remember my extraction from the mud, and be humble. But if Darwin could be proud remembering the monkey and the baboon, why may not I be proud remembering the adventurous sea-worm, and all the plucky little vermin from whom I come and whom I so obviously resemble?

III

In answering this somewhat rhetorical question — for it can be answered — we must notice that it is much harder to visualize a sea worm than a monkey. Every child delights in monkeys, but (I suppose) only the children of biologists have a speaking acquaintance with sea worms. Darwin, moreover, however sentimental he may have been, did what all ancestorworshipers do: he selected his forbears. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he fixed his attention on an individual monkey and an individual baboon, as proper heroes to be descended from; whereas Mr. Grant and Mr. Wells and the modern anthropologists generally perform the far more difficult feat of remembering them in the mass. Mr. Grant does this in the interest of humility and as an opponent of hero-worship. Others have motives equally high, no doubt. But the task, even for those who have imagination enough to succeed in it, is unpalatable. Men in the mass are not admirable. Men and their ancestors through myriads of centuries, viewed in the mass, are loathsome, not because they are worms or reptiles or monkeys, but just because they are so numerous. Nothing sickens like numbers.

If you will ascend to the roof of a New York skyscraper, and look down upon your kind in the busy street below, you will there see men as maggots. You cannot look into their eyes and see the tragedy or the farce that is being enacted far within in the theatre of their hearts; therefore you see them as tiny, racing mites, appearing, in the mass, impersonal, galvanized, antlike.

If you wish to love an animal you must separate it from its kind, even if it be a lamb. Restore your creature to the pack and out goes the affection between you. You cannot love a swarm of bees, even if you are an idiot. No one except Mr. Maeterlinck, I think, ever tried it, and he, quite characteristically, selected the queen bee as the object of his more ardent attention.

When I was a boy I was greatly interested in ants and, in pursuance of Biblical precept, spent many hours in their contemplation. I grew very fond of ants and came to know something of them, but once it was my misfortune to be with a whole army of ants. From that time on my whole attitude toward that industrious race suffered a change. Ants — thousands and thousands of them — swarmed about me, and I was both mortified and afraid. There were ants on my hands and in my face; in my shoes ants were concealed; they appeared in every part of my clothing, while hordes of reënforcements came from nowhere; and when at last I emerged from the unequal conflict it was with a fear of pismires that would, I suppose, appear contemptible to those who could not know the experience I had had.

Well, I have no desire to deluge my imagination in any such way with the incalculable myriads of my ancestors. The globe on which we live would have no more dignity for me than a crawling cheese.

I repeat that what depresses one in the evolutionary hypothesis is the promiscuous aspect of it, this tendency to regard the world as a vast breeding and hatching ground, swarming with crawling things, — sucking, snarling, breeding, dying things, — devoured by more crawling creatures, bloody-fanged, who suck and snarl, breed and die.

It is not safe to think in this wise. But there is nothing unpleasant, as any child or any savage will tell you, about conceiving of yourself as bloodbrother to the animals: it has never been deemed a disgrace to call a man a lion or a girl a gazelle. It has become a commonplace for men and women alike to say that they prefer the society of their dog to that of most human beings.

Pass to the less noble animals and still the relationship is so close that it cannot be denied. To visit the Zoo is, I find, to renew my acquaintance with my friends and associates. I look into my heart, and there I find the pig and the peacock struggling for preëminence.

In all this there is much that results from early teaching, for I was always taught that man was an animal. Even in the same breath that the child was taught that he was the child of God and heir of eternal life, he was reminded that he was dust and that to dust he should return. Even the relationship to the sea worm will surprise none that belong to that generation, for they will all recall the hymn beginning: —

Is the mud of the biologist any more mortifying than the clay and dust of which the prophets were always reminding us? Pulvis et umbra sumus.

IV

Pride, humility, and their attendant emotions are all proportionate to the perspective in which the world is viewed. It is all a matter of proportions, sea worm or heroic monkey, conductor on the Boston & Maine or angel in glory — destroy the perspective in which they are viewed, and the emotions in which they are regarded change or disappear. Of what conceivable importance is the whole evolutionary process if you remove yourself to a sufficient distance from it? There is an advertisement in the popular magazines at the present moment which shows a clock-dial beside the countenance of primitive man and invites the reader to reflect that, if the entire career of the human race be estimated as filling the twelve hours represented on this dial, then it may be said that man has as yet lived but a minute and a quarter, according to such a reckoning of time.

Just what we are to learn from this I do not know, other than the importance of purchasing the book which is referred to; perhaps the larger implication of the emblem is that there is plenty of time even yet for man to achieve that perfection and complete that progress which have seemed to be so seriously threatened in the past decade. But I cannot, when once this hideous conception of time has entered my mind, take any comfort in the thought of those eleven hours and fifty-eight minutes that remain. For imagine a lapse of time, say of three months, as time is computed by that dreadful clock; take, if you can, such a giddy plunge into the abyss of eternity, and then look back and ask of what conceivable significance were those twelve hours filled by the minute history of the human race, the whole evolutionary process, or even the career of the planet itself, from its inception in fire to its death in ice. A bubble bursting unheard and unheeded in the endless night of time! This way, too, lies madness, and there is no better cure for the vertiginous sickness which it begets within one than to turn to the nearest human being, and fix one’s attention on a mystery less benumbing.

It is the dignity of the individual that is threatened by any study that tends merely to view him in his environment of space or to write his long history as a detail in the rise and fall of species. Earlier generations had known quite as well as we that man was an animal; that he had had a long and bewildering history on this planet, and that there were myriads of savages in the world to remind us of a humble origin. But all this did not prevent them from inquiring into the nature of the problem as well as into its history. There is a vast fallacy in all this inquiry into origins, since it rests upon an assumption that the history of a phenomenon is its explanation. When the biologists have completed their researches, and the whole history of life is known from the first bubble of consciousness in the mud down to the full emergence of Homo sapiens, the explanation of it all will still elude us. Causa latet.

Suppose that the whole history of man could be compressed into a moving picture, and that in some dreadful ‘educational film’ you could watch the development of man from sea worm to Socrates, just as now we watch on the screen the development of a plant, would the mystery be less of a mystery?

In other ages the problem of man’s relation to animals was stated in a different and perhaps a more philosophical way. Man, it was argued, is an animal, a biped without feathers. He was taken out of the dust. This is certain because we see that he returns to dust. He is dust, then, and he is an animal — but he is more. He is an animal that wears clothes, or some sort of extraneous addition to his person, for ornament if not for warmth; he plainly is not satisfied with the skin and hair which nature provided, but tries to fashion himself according to another pattern.

Again, man is the animal that uses tools. One of the famous assaults on the dignity of man in the eighteenth century consisted in an attempt to show that the orang-outang used a stick as a weapon, and engravings were published, notably by Goldsmith in his History of Animated Nature, showing the orang-outang thus armed and standing in front of rude houses which he had built for his shelter. Again, man is the animal that writes, draws, and records his invisible thoughts in tangible form, thus initiating civilization as we know it.

And so they continued. He is the animal that speaks. He is the animal that laughs.

The differences make a sum so astonishing and so important that it seemed to demonstrate that man was something more than, or rather something in addition to, an animal. In particular were thinkers impressed with the fact that man was the animal that aspired. Unlike a dog, a bee, or an ape, he was either fretting about himself or dreaming about himself, always vexed by the desire to get something that he did not have. For which reason he, the most gregarious of beasts, slew his fellows, and took from them and remained unsatisfied. In his dreams man fabled to himself that he was not wholly of this world, that he came from afar, that he was the child of the sun, the remote descendant of a god. He was not ashamed of his kinship with animals and even courted a likeness to them; but, unlike them, he always looked forward to a good time ahead, whether it consisted in stealing a number of women from a neighboring tribe, or passing at last to a heavenly mansion prepared in advance for one so important as himself. And this, if it be madness, must still be explained. It may be that, remembering the sea worm, we ought with Mr. Grant to become humble; but the interesting problem remains why man from the beginning of his history conceived of himself as something else. To this there has been found no parallel in the animal world.

V

The conclusion from these reflections upon the general nature of man, in the days before thinkers were obsessed by the mere history of the race, was that man must be two different and strangely unrelated things, inseparably connected, yet destined one day to be dissolved. Man was pulvis et umbra, a shadow of the eternal cast upon the dust, a spark of fire caught in a clod. To fix your attention on one of these to the exclusion of the other is to give up the problem; for, in its last analysis, it is the paradox of it which is its very heart. A clod, to be sure, with a history; an animal, to be sure, with ancestors; but an animal conducting itself in a most preposterous way, a divine-infernal way that, apart from man, is decidedly not of this world. For which reason such thinkers habitually taught man that he was an animal, or rather all sorts of animal, an ass in sloth, a wolf in wrath, a goat in lust, a hog in gluttony; indeed, they taught that he was below all these because he had within a standard of conduct that was of a different order of life altogether, and to which he had been disloyal. This was the spiritual part of him, and its origin was confidently taught as in another sphere beyond present experience. Dust shall return to dust, and the spirit shall go to its own place — which plainly is not here. ‘Magnificent out of the dust we came, and abject from the spheres.’

Because of this high origin and high destiny, it is well not to fix too great an attention upon our ancestors in this world, for to do so is to obscure the problem which is man. You are yourself the problem; you are the theatre of a struggle between two natures for the possession of you, and it is the issue of the struggle, not its origin, that would seem to be of importance. All that we know of the absorption of interest in one’s genealogy enforces the same truth. If a man is largely interested in the social position of his grandmother, it usually militates against his humanity and his charity. It is a terrible thing to be — like a king — the victim of your ancestors; never to escape from the iron cage in which your descent has imprisoned you. If you find yourself in bonds, like a duke or a drunkard, you may, I do not doubt, take a dubious satisfaction in tracing your character to your forbears. But for the vast multitude of my own — dear human souls, unknown to me even by name — I will dismiss them all with flourish of salutation as did Charles Surface, after he had sold his ancestors to the highest bidder: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your most obedient and very grateful servant.’ I wave a calm and, I hope, graceful farewell to them across the vista of years. I wish them well and, for that matter, rest eternal. And in this gesture of farewell I should like to include, in the wide sweep of my ceremonious bow, the ape, the lemur, and — well, yes — even the sea worm.