Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [97]
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conceive how intelligence, which acts only in obedience to motives that it did not originate, could give rise to love. But love, which draws things together in harmonious union, might finally produce intelligence as an instrument to further this end. And whenever it is loyal to its source, intelligence pledges itself to serve love by promoting harmony. In the measure that it does this, it justifies the long agony of its troubled childhood.
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Epilogue:
The Failure of Success?
Whether in the mind's eye we survey the solar system, its nine planets floating majestically around the Sun, satellites orbiting around most of them, every celestial body remaining in its own space in a system so balanced and orderly that it has endured for ages; or through a lens we admire the filigree tracery of a snow crystal; or we reflect how our brains spontaneously integrate in meaningful figures the myriad discrete vibrations that excite the retinas of our eyeswhen we contemplate all this, and many similar facts, we become convinced that, from its physical foundations to its highest developments in the realm of mind and spirit, the universe is pervaded by a movement that arranges its constituents in patterns of increasing amplitude, complexity, and coherence: the cosmic process of harmonization. While bringing order out of chaos, harmonization enriches the cosmos with values, raising bare, meaningless existence to full, significant existence. Most notably, it has covered Earth with graceful forms and bright colors and has equipped certain animals to see and enjoy all this beauty. We owe to this tireless process, the true constructive factor in the evolution of life, all that makes living precious to us. It is the source of our moral nature, the foundation of our felicity.
The growth of an organism of whatever kind is an excellent example of harmonization. By adding molecule to molecule, cell to cell, organ to organ, a plant or animal grows into an organism
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of great complexity. Its survival from day to day depends upon the integration of all its parts and functions into a coherent system of mutually supporting organs. Even a protozoan hardly visible to the naked eye is a very complex creature, with a nucleus and plastids performing diverse functions and, on the scale of the atoms of which it is composed, an organism of great amplitude. Large animals containing trillions of atoms and billions of cells, a great diversity of organs, all united by circulatory and nervous systems, are marvels of coherent, self-regulated complexity, such as we have not yet achieved in our most intricate machines. When we reflect upon the vast variety of organisms, the multitude of species, and the incalculable billions of individuals that cover our hospitable planet, each a product of harmonization, each a harmoniously integrated system, as it must be to remain alive and active, we recognize that on Earth harmonization has been a highly successful process.
We might expect that organisms made by the same constructive process, alike in so many ways that biologists have recognized, would, whatever their outward shape, form a harmonious community of living creatures; that the relations between all members of the immense assemblage would be as harmonious as the internal organization of each of them. Why does the process that has brought order and stability to the solar system, that aligns atoms and molecules in glittering crystals, that is active in the growth of every least organism, fail so dismally to bring concord into the relations of all these organisms? Why does the world process, instead of continuing steadily onward