Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries. Edwin E. Slosson
Berthelot's time, that is, within the last fifty years, chemistry has won its chief triumphs in the field of synthesis. Organic chemistry, that is, the chemistry of the carbon compounds, so called because it was formerly assumed, as Gerhardt says, that they could only be formed by "vital force" of organized plants and animals, has taken a development far overshadowing inorganic chemistry, or the chemistry of mineral substances. Chemists have prepared or know how to prepare hundreds of thousands of such "organic compounds," few of which occur in the natural world.
But this conception of chemistry is yet far from having been accepted by the world at large. This was brought forcibly to my attention during the publication of these chapters in "The Independent" by various letters, raising such objections as the following:
When you say in your article on "What Comes from Coal Tar" that "Art can go ahead of nature in the dyestuff business" you have doubtless for the moment allowed your enthusiasm to sweep you away from the moorings of reason. Shakespeare, anticipating you and your "Creative Chemistry," has shown the utter untenableness of your position:
Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean: so o'er that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.
How can you say that art surpasses nature when you know very well that nothing man is able to make can in any way equal the perfection of all nature's products?
It is blasphemous of you to claim that man can improve the works of God as they appear in nature. Only the Creator can create. Man only imitates, destroys or defiles God's handiwork.
No, it was not in momentary absence of mind that I claimed that man could improve upon nature in the making of dyes. I not only said it, but I proved it. I not only proved it, but I can back it up. I will give a million dollars to anybody finding in nature dyestuffs as numerous, varied, brilliant, pure and cheap as those that are manufactured in the laboratory. I haven't that amount of money with me at the moment, but the dyers would be glad to put it up for the discovery of a satisfactory natural source for their tinctorial materials. This is not an opinion of mine but a matter of fact, not to be decided by Shakespeare, who was not acquainted with the aniline products.
Shakespeare in the passage quoted is indulging in his favorite amusement of a play upon words. There is a possible and a proper sense of the word "nature" that makes it include everything except the supernatural. Therefore man and all his works belong to the realm of nature. A tenement house in this sense is as "natural" as a bird's nest, a peapod or a crystal.
But such a wide extension of the term destroys its distinctive value. It is more convenient and quite as correct to use "nature" as I have used it, in contradistinction to "art," meaning by the former the products of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, excluding the designs, inventions and constructions of man which we call "art."
We cannot, in a general and abstract fashion, say which is superior, art or nature, because it all depends on the point of view. The worm loves a rotten log into which he can bore. Man prefers a steel cabinet into which the worm cannot bore. If man cannot improve Upon nature he has no motive for making anything. Artificial products are therefore superior to natural products as measured by man's convenience, otherwise they would have no reason for existence.
Science and Christianity are at one in abhorring the natural man and calling upon the civilized man to fight and subdue him. The conquest of nature, not the imitation of nature, is the whole duty of man. Metchnikoff and St. Paul unite in criticizing the body we were born with. St. Augustine and Huxley are in agreement as to the eternal conflict between man and nature. In his Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" Huxley said: "The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less on running away from it, but on combating it," and again: "The history of civilization details the steps by which man has succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos."
There speaks the true evolutionist, whose one desire is to get away from nature as fast and far as possible. Imitate Nature? Yes, when we cannot improve upon her. Admire Nature? Possibly, but be not blinded to her defects. Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet until we can stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. The wild beasts that man has kept at bay for a few centuries will in the end invade his palaces: the moss will envelop his walls and the lichen disrupt them. The clam may survive man by as many millennia as it preceded him. In the ultimate devolution of the world animal life will disappear before vegetable, the higher plants will be killed off before the lower, and finally the three kingdoms of nature will be reduced to one, the mineral. Civilized man, enthroned in his citadel and defended by all the forces of nature that he has brought under his control, is after all in the same situation as a savage, shivering in the darkness beside his fire, listening to the pad of predatory feet, the rustle of serpents and the cry of birds of prey, knowing that only the fire keeps his enemies off, but knowing too that every stick he lays on the fire lessens his fuel supply and hastens the inevitable time when the beasts of the jungle will make their fatal rush.
Chaos is the "natural" state of the universe. Cosmos is the rare and temporary exception. Of all the million spheres this is apparently the only one habitable and of this only a small part—the reader may draw the boundaries to suit himself—can be called civilized. Anarchy is the natural state of the human race. It prevailed exclusively all over the world up to some five thousand years ago, since which a few peoples have for a time succeeded in establishing a certain degree of peace and order. This, however, can be maintained only by strenuous and persistent efforts, for society tends naturally to sink into the chaos out of which it has arisen.
It is only by overcoming nature that man can rise. The sole salvation for the human race lies in the removal of the primal curse, the sentence of hard labor for life that was imposed on man as he left Paradise. Some folks are trying to elevate the laboring classes; some are trying to keep them down. The scientist has a more radical remedy; he wants to annihilate the laboring classes by abolishing labor. There is no longer any need for human labor in the sense of personal toil, for the physical energy necessary to accomplish all kinds of work may be obtained from external sources and it can be directed and controlled without extreme exertion. Man's first effort in this direction was to throw part of his burden upon the horse and ox or upon other men. But within the last century it has been discovered that neither human nor animal servitude is necessary to give man leisure for the higher life, for by means of the machine he can do the work of giants without exhaustion. But the introduction of machines, like every other step of human progress, met with the most violent opposition from those it was to benefit. "Smash 'em!" cried the workingman. "Smash 'em!" cried the poet. "Smash 'em!" cried the artist. "Smash 'em!" cried the theologian. "Smash 'em!" cried the magistrate. This opposition yet lingers and every new invention, especially in chemistry, is greeted with general distrust and often with legislative prohibition.
Man is the tool-using animal, and the machine, that is, the power-driven tool, is his peculiar achievement. It is purely a creation of the human mind. The wheel, its essential feature, does not exist in nature. The lever, with its to-and-fro motion, we find in the limbs of all animals, but the continuous and revolving lever, the wheel, cannot be formed of bone and flesh. Man as a motive power is a poor thing. He can only convert three or four thousand calories of energy a day and he does that very inefficiently. But he can make an engine that will handle a hundred thousand times that, twice as efficiently and three times as long. In this way only can he get rid of pain and toil and gain the wealth he wants.
Gradually then he will substitute for the natural world an artificial world, molded nearer to his heart's desire. Man the Artifex will ultimately master Nature and reign supreme over his own creation until chaos shall come again. In the ancient drama it was deus ex machina that came in at the end to solve the problems of the play. It is to the same supernatural agency, the divinity in machinery, that we must look for the salvation of society. It is by means of applied science that the earth can be made habitable