DeWitt C. Wing

One of the momentous achievements of applied science is the convincing demonstration that the earth is a living thing. It is as truly a live organism as any of the animals of which it is the mother. Life could not have been evolved by or from it if there had not been life in it. We do not require an inexplicable miracle to account for the evolution of man; we can trace his pedigree back to an ancestry with fins and gills, and of course it stretches far beyond that comparatively recent stage in his development. From the beginning of the world conditions have steadily grown more favorable to the habitation of the earth by the higher animals. Since man is a part of the earth, what he himself has done to bring about this auspicious change may be credited to the mind or life resident in the earth. Then there is essential goodness in the earth—which is not saying that there is no evil in it. The world is a better place for a man to live in now than it was when his ancestors occupied dismal caves. It is no illusion that, design or no design, the cosmic urge has been toward goodness, by which I mean an increasingly hospitable dwelling-place for men. There have been recessions, and there will be others, but, apart from faith and hope, established facts compel the man who understands them to declare his absolute and unalterable certainty that the inexorable law of life’s becoming greater than it is cannot be nullified. So that, regardless of all poverty and misery, of all that is unlovely, of all the blind and passionate class hatreds and sex quibbles, the man who really thinks must think hopefully. There is indeed the most ample justification of optimism.

The world is God, and the man who worships it the new pagan. He comes off the same stock as the old pagans, who were called heathens—because they were not Christians. They were, in fact, the classic earth-lovers, and, hence, more truly the sons of God than the crusaders who, directed by an anthropomorphic Deity, tortured and killed them. The new pagan, who not only feels, smells, hears, and sees the earth, but comprehends the established scientific facts about it, finds a keener and larger delight and satisfaction in it than his forefathers could experience. He loves it with his heart and his mind. Having this attitude toward it, he wishes to serve it, prompted by the same motive which actuates him when he serves his immediate father and mother.

Ruskin was sure that his beautiful England was desecrated when steel rails were laid across its green fields and factory smoke contaminated the golden air; he canonized the landscape, and when it changed, his heart ached. He was an artist, not a prophet. The industrialism that he hated disseminated his written appreciations of beauty. Machinery is the extension of man’s personality and power; the instrument with which he is realizing the bounties and the Fatherhood of God. At present it is too much an end in itself instead of a means toward nobler results, but tomorrow will see the needed adjustment. Wherefore the new pagan is not saddened but gladdened at the sight of factories and the development of commerce. The awful carnage which commercialism entails is the price which we have been fated to pay for experience. Through commerce we are paving the way for the action of the world-mind—the collective thought of men. Collective thinking precludes socialism as well as individualism, and brings in humanism. The increasing complexity of civilizations symbolizes the enlarged intricacy of human life. Experience and consciousness are expanded by the maze of external detail through which a child in a modern state passes to maturity. The extension of a more highly organized civilization into every habitable region of the earth, and commercial and intellectual communication among all nations, will synthesize the thought of the world. Toward this goal every vital movement is directed, whether consciously or unwittingly. The germ of life was the original leaven, and it will leaven the whole lump. That races and states should disappear does not matter; if human life as a whole were to vanish the birth-labor that the world has begun would be retarded but not abandoned. Man would return in a few billion years. If not, a higher animal would; man himself is on the long way to ever-new heights. He has climbed up out of the sea, and with the birth of reason in his brain he began to ascend into loftier realms. The power of reason is a late acquisition, but it has provided the wondrous banquet at which the modern pagan feasts. It has enabled him literally to soar and revel in high, thin air.

All the fine arts are subsidiary to and dependent upon material progress, and the primal source of well-being is the soil. Man is a land animal, and he must have access to the land with the same freedom that a babe enjoys at its mother’s breast; otherwise he will be stunted and dwarfed. The earth is the Old Mother, yielding an abundance of food for all her children. More reason and more consciousness on their part will induce them to share it with one another, not like unreasoning pigs but like reasoning men. The “new freedom” means eventually the accessibility of the earth to every man. In the meantime the biggest business at hand is to build soils as well as schools; to keep the land full of sap; to extend mechanism into the arts of agriculture; to unify the thought and purpose of city and country. All this will follow the world-mindedness that is being developed by industrialism and internationalism.

All constructive thought and action must deal not less with the city but more and more with the country—the land. Typical cities are sapping the wealth of life that grows up round them. The obsessed man in the market place needs the poise and power of the shepherd on the hill. The only true and durable magnificence of a state lies in the equitable use of its natural resources. No man who has thought profoundly wants to own land, but the majority of men do want to use it. That ought to be every man’s privilege, for every man is in some fashion a lover of the verdant earth. But even the millions of us who are landless, because a few men legally own the earth, have occasional esthetic accesses to it, and if we passionately loved its beauty we should hasten the day of its release by an uneconomic monopoly. An intelligent love of the earth as a living thing is at the bottom of the dynamic impulse of man to be forever becoming.

And as these lovely days of wanton greenness steal like fairies into the secret recesses of his child-heart, man has a sense of eternal kinship with