CHAPTER VI

THE TREE OF LIFE

Atheism denies knowledge of a God of any kind.Pantheism andTheism alike profess to give us a God, but they alike fail toperform what they have promised.We can know nothing of the Godthey offer us, for not even do they themselves profess that anyof our senses can be cognisant [sic] of him.They tell us that heis a personal God, but that he has no material person.This isdisguised Atheism.What we want is a Personal God, the glory ofwhose Presence can be made in part evident to our senses, thoughwhat we can realise [sic] is less than nothing in comparison withwhat we must leave for ever unimagined.

And truly such a God is not far from every one of us; for if wesurvey the broader and deeper currents of men's thoughts duringthe last three thousand years, we may observe two great andsteady sets as having carried away with them the more eligibleraces of mankind.The one is a tendency from Polytheism toMonotheism; the other from Polytypism to Monotypism of theearliest forms of life-all animal and vegetable forms having atlength come to be regarded as differentiations of a singlesubstance-to wit, protoplasm.

No man does well so to kick against the pricks as to set himselfagainst tendencies of such depth, strength, and permanence asthis.If he is to be in harmony with the dominant opinion of hisown and of many past ages, he will see a single God-impregnatesubstance as having been the parent from which all living formshave sprung.One spirit, and one form capable of suchmodification as its directing spirit shall think fit; one souland one body, one God and one Life.

For the time has come when the two unities so painfully arrivedat must be joined together as body and soul, and be seen not astwo, but one.There is no living organism untenanted by theSpirit of God, nor any Spirit of God perceivable by man apartfrom organism embodying and expressing it.God and the Life ofthe World are like a mountain, which will present differentaspects as we look at it from different sides, but which, when

wehave gone all round it, proves to be one only.God is the animaland vegetable world, and the animal and vegetable world is God.

I have repeatedly said that we ought to see all animal andvegetable life as uniting to form a single personality.I shouldperhaps explain this more fully, for the idea of a compoundperson is one which at first is not very easy to grasp, inasmuchas we are not conscious of any but our more superficial aspects,and have therefore until lately failed to understand that we areourselves compound persons.I may perhaps be allowed to quotefrom an earlier work.

"Each cell in the human body is now admitted by physiologists tobe a person with an intelligent soul, differing from our own morecomplex soul in degree and not in kind, and, like ourselves,being born, living, and dying.It would appear, then, as though'we,' 'our souls,' or 'selves,' or 'personalities,' or bywhatever name we may prefer to be called, are but theconsensus and full- flowing stream of countless sensationsand impulses on the part of our tributary souls or 'selves,' whoprobably no more know that we exist, and that they exist as apart of us, than a microscopic insect knows the results ofspectrum analysis, or than an agricultural labourer [sic] knowsthe working of the British Constitution; and of whom we know nomore than we do of the habits and feelings of some class widelyseparated from our own."-("Life and Habit," p.110.)

After which it became natural to ask the following question :-"Is it possible to avoid imagining that we may be ourselvesatoms, undesignedly combining to form some vaster being, thoughwe are utterly incapable of perceiving this being as a singleindividual, or of realising [sic] the scheme and scope of our owncombination? And this, too, not a spiritual being, which, withoutmatter or what we think matter of some sort, is as completenonsense to us as though men bade us love and lean upon anintelligent vacuum, but a being with what is virtually flesh andblood and bones, with organs, senses, dimensions in some wayanalogous to our own, into some other part of which being at thetime of our great change we must infallibly re-enter, startingclean anew, with bygones bygones, and no more ache for ever fromage or antecedents.

"'An organic being,' writes Mr.Darwin, 'is a microcosm, a littleuniverse,

formed of a host of self-propagating organismsinconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in Heaven.'Asthese myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us,so are we parts and processes of life at large."

A tree is composed of a multitude of subordinate trees, each budbeing a distinct individual.So coral polypes [sic] form a tree- like growth of animal life, with branches from which springindividual polypes [sic] that are connected by a common tissueand supported by a common skeleton.We have no difficulty inseeing a unity in multitude, and a multitude in unity here,because we can observe the wood and the gelatinous tissueconnecting together all the individuals which compose either thetree or the mass of polypes [sic].Yet the skeleton, whether oftree or of polype [sic], is inanimate; and the tissue, whether ofbark or gelatine [sic], is only the matted roots of theindividual buds; so that the outward and striking connectionbetween the individuals is more delusive than real.The trueconnection is one which cannot be seen, and consists in theanimation of each bud by a like spirit-in the community of soul,in "the voice of the Lord which maketh men to be of one mind inan house"-"to dwell together in unity"-to take what arepractically identical views of things, and express themselves inconcert under all circumstances.Provided this-the true unifierof organism-can be shown to exist, the absence of gross outwardand visible but inanimate common skeleton is no bar to oneness ofpersonality.

Let us picture to our minds a tree of which all the woody fibre[sic] shall be invisible, the buds and leaves seeming to stand inmid-air unsupported and unconnected with one another, so thatthere is nothing but a certain tree- like collocation of foliageto suggest any common principle of growth uniting the leaves.

Three or four leaves of different ages stand living together atthe place in the air where the end of each bough should be; ofthese the youngest are still tender and in the bud, while theolder ones are turning yellow and on the point of falling. Between these leaves a sort of twig-like growth can be detectedif they are looked at in certain lights, but it is hard to see,except perhaps when a bud is on the point of coming out.Thenthere does appear to be a connection which might be calledbranch-like.

The separate tufts are very different from one another, so thatoak leaves, ash leaves, horse-chestnut leaves, etc., are eachrepresented, but there is one species only at the end of eachbough.

Though the trunk and all the inner boughs and leaves havedisappeared, yet there hang here and there fossil leaves, also inmid-air; they appear to have been petrified, without method orselection, by what we call the caprices of nature; they hang inthe path which the boughs and twigs would have taken, and theyseem to indicate that if the tree could have been seen a millionyears earlier, before it had grown near its present size, theleaves standing at the end of each bough would have been foundvery different from what they are now.Let us suppose that allthe leaves at the end of all the invisible boughs, no matter howdifferent they now are from one another, were found in earliestbudhood to be absolutely indistinguishable, and afterwards todevelop towards each differentiation through stages which wereindicated by the fossil leaves.Lastly, let us suppose thatthough the boughs which seem wanted to connect all the livingforms of leaves with the fossil leaves, and with countless formsof which all trace has disappeared, and also with a single root- have become invisible, yet that there is irrefragable evidence toshow that they once actually existed, and indeed are existing atthis moment, in a condition as real though as invisible to theeye as air or electricity.Should we, I ask, under thesecircumstances hesitate to call our imaginary plant or tree by asingle name, and to think of it as one person, merely upon thescore that the woody fibre [sic] was invisible? Should we notesteem the common soul, memories and principles of growth whichare preserved between all the buds, no matter how widely theydiffer in detail, as a more living bond of union than a frameworkof wood would be, which, though it were visible to the eye, wouldstill be inanimate?

The mistletoe appears as closely connected with the tree on whichit grows as any of the buds of the tree itself; it is fed uponthe same sap as the other buds are, which sap-however much it maymodify it at the last moment-it draws through the same fibres[sic] as do its foster-brothers-why then do we at once feel thatthe mistletoe is no part of the apple tree? Not from any want ofmanifest continuity, but from the spiritual difference-

from theprofoundly different views of life and things which are taken bythe parasite and the tree on which it grows-the two arenow different because they think differently-as long asthey thought alike they were alike-that is to say they wereprotoplasm-they and we and all that lives meeting in this commonsubstance.

We ought therefore to regard our supposed tufts of leaves as atree, that is to say, as a compound existence, each one of whosecomponent items is compounded of others which are also in theirturn compounded.But the tree above described is no imaginaryparallel to the condition of life upon the globe; it is perhapsas accurate a description of the Tree of Life as can be put intoso small a compass.The most sure proof of a man's identity isthe power to remember that such and such things happened, whichnone but he can know; the most sure proof of his remembering isthe power to react his part in the original drama, whatever itmay have been; if a man can repeat a performance with consummatetruth, and can stand any amount of cross-questioning about it, heis the performer of the original performance, whatever it was. The memories which all living forms prove by their actions thatthey possess-the memories of their common identity with a singleperson in whom they meet-this is incontestable proof of theirbeing animated by a common soul.It is certain, therefore, thatall living forms, whether animal or vegetable, are in reality oneanimal; we and the mosses being part of the same vast person inno figurative sense, but with as much bona fide literaltruth as when we say that a man's finger- nails and his eyes areparts of the same man.

It is in this Person that we may see the Body of God-and in theevolution of this Person, the mystery of His Incarnation.

[In "Unconscious Memory," Chapter V, Butler wrote: "In thearticles above alluded to ("God the Known and God the Unknown") Iseparated the organic from the inorganic, but when I came torewrite them I found that this could not be done, and that I mustreconstruct what I had written." This reconstruction never havingbeen effected, it may be well to quote further from "UnconsciousMemory" (concluding chapter): "At parting, therefore, I wouldrecommend the reader to see every atom in the universe as livingand able to feel and remember, but in a humble way.He must

havelife eternal as well as matter eternal; and the life and thematter must be joined together inseparably as body and soul toone another.Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those whorepeat phrases conventionally, but as people who would have theirwords taken according to their most natural and legitimatemeaning; and he will feel that the main difference between himand many of those who oppose him lies in the fact that whereasboth he and they use the same language, his opponents only halfmean what they say, while he means it entirely...We shallendeavour [sic] to see the so-called inorganic as living, inrespect of the qualities it has in common with the organic,rather than the organic as non- living in respect of thequalities it has in common with the inorganic."]