The Conquering Cockroach
460 THE COMMONWEAL September II, I929 especially by those of us who are obliged, because of our own devotion to truth, to criticize and at times to oppose, not science in itself but the...
...And man, of course, according to the Times writer, after "his short and brilliant career on the face of the earth," a mere matter of a few millions of years, is a late comer to the scene of the Star-Dust-Drift...
...But he does, unwittingly of course, pretty fully explain the reason why a good many of us will go on preferring the idea of God to that of the Second Principle of Thermodynamics, or even to the Star-Dust-Drift...
...The cockroach "has a straight line ancestry of two hundred million years or more...
...As to his being the image, no matter if faint or distorted, of God, his Creator--well, the writer thinks that, as it cannot be love, in spite of what Dante said, that governs the heavens and controls the motions of the earth, man can only be a creature of the ultimate material force moving and shaping everything, which, he says, should be called the Drift...
...How "caprice" can coexist and function in a world, or a universe of worlds, controlled by unchanging law the writer, even though so ambitious in theme and thought as to handle universes and cockroaches with equal facility, does not explain...
...WEEK BY WEEK T WAS Mr...
...There is no need to go into them in any detail...
...The one creature which really seems to be the favored child of the Star-Dust-Drift is the cockroach...
...It needs only an easy extension of our imagination to see behind him the other men and women of science in other observatories, and in laboratories and libraries and a hundred similar fields of work, all engaged upon other parts of this "research magnificent...
...inclined to believe that But we are a man who the Hague stands to gain more in the way of personal prestige out of this meeting is M. Aristide Briand...
...Of course France will evacuate the Rhineland, but that is something which Briand has desired almost as eagerly as Stresemann himself...
...Snowden who injected the dramatics into the Hague conference and who gave it a spectacular ending by surrendering some part of the concessions he had won to gratify the hopes Winners at of the smaller nations...
...They follow a sadly familiar course...
...That we can make the choice may strike the philosophers of materialism as being merely one of those "minor whims" of man which hasten his defeat by the conquering cockroach...
...Thus, because the Harvard astronomer, like many other astronomers, finds that what used to be considered as mere star-dust is really a mass of unnumbered stars and planets, millions and millions of miles away and millions and millions of times larger than the earth, therefore mankind, "a lucky accident" brought into being by some sort of chemical change in the all-pervading "star-stuff" out of which everything comes into being (though how the star-stuff came into being remains a mystery) is and can only be one of the briefest and most evanescent forms of matter...
...upon the measurable results of scientific investigation...
...It is, perhaps, recognized by you (according to your various inherited traditions and spiritual tenets) as the Tendency, or Evolution, or God, or Fate, or the Will to Live, or the Second Principle of Thermodynamics...
...He is not the unique "lord of creation...
...His stock is "sufficiently strong to carry him through numerous terrestrial upheavals, through desiccations and glaciations...
...And we honor the man we read about, and are grateful to the man who writes about him, and the great newspaper which brings to its million readers such a fascinating and essentially valuable contribution to human knowledge...
...460 THE COMMONWEAL September II, I929 especially by those of us who are obliged, because of our own devotion to truth, to criticize and at times to oppose, not science in itself but the destructive and at times even diabolical ideas and teachings based (though how unfairly and how wrongly...
...Therefore, as man is not so well adapted --his worst enemy being himself--some day, the writer tells us, some "conservative cockroach" crawling over the skull of the last man, and he a dead one, may be able to observe: "A relic here of another highly specialized organism which failed to recognize the laws of the universe, which preferred the minor whims to the search for survival, and which missed its great opportunity to inherit the planet, perishing an early victim of the world's subtle chemistries...
...Moreover, the cockroach is "well attuned with physical law and the environment's seeming caprice...
...The important thing is that it...
...Eventually it must be recognized that he was the dominating figure at the Hague...
...The rapport between him and Stresemann, established some years ago at Geneva, was never more apparent, but here it was Stresemann who was the follower and not, as it has elsewhere appeared, Briand...
...It is, in a sense, law...
...but man will go on preferring these whims to the "facts" which constitute, when interpreted by the cockroach school of philosophy, such solemn nonsense as we have been considering...
...For, not content with telling us about the great discoveries of astronomical science, the writer brings in his own interpretations...
...Apparently, he "today is just as good as ever he was...
...In the article under examination for instance, no fair-minded reader can help but be deeply impressed not merely by the marvelous facts recorded about the depths of space in which our little world goes on its course amid millions of other stars, but by the vision which we are afforded of the patient, dedicated astronomer in his observatory, set apart amid the multitudes of men concerned only with the meaner affairs of life, to study the heavens, and chart the mysteries of the universe...
...But l If only that obscene cockroach, and the false philosophy of which it is the appropriate image, did not crawl out of some crack in the writer's head (so to speak) and defile the splendid vision of the starry heavens which is the main theme of the article...
...Don Marquis should call Archie's attention to the fact...
...In fact, there are many things he does not explain...
Vol. 10 • September 1929 • No. 19
