Collected Essays, Volume V
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Title: Collected Essays, Volume V
Author: Thomas Henry Huxley
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COLLECTED ESSAYS; VOLUME V
SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION
BY THOMAS H. HUXLEY
NEW YORK, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 1902
PREFACE
"For close upon forty years I have been writing with one purpose; from
time to time, I have fought for that which seemed to me the truth,
perhaps still more, against that which I have thought error; and, in
this way, I have reached, indeed over-stepped, the threshold of old
age. There, every earnest man has to listen to the voice within: 'Give
an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward.'
"That I have been an unjust steward my conscience does not bear
witness. At times blundering, at times negligent, Heaven knows: but,
on the whole, I have done that which I felt able and called upon to
do; and I have done it without looking to the right or to the left;
seeking no man's favor, fearing no man's disfavor.
"But what is it that I have been doing? In the end one's conceptions
should form a whole, though only parts may have found utterance, as
occasion arose; now do these exhibit harmony and mutual connexion? In
one's zeal much of the old gets broken to pieces; but has one made
ready something new, fit to be set in the place of the old?
"That they merely destroy without reconstructing, is the especial
charge, with which those who work in this direction are constantly
reproached. In a certain sense I do not defend myself against the
charge; but I deny that any reproach is deserved.
"I have never proposed to myself to begin outward construction;
because I do not believe that the time has come for it. Our present
business is with inward preparation, especially the preparation of
those who have ceased to be content with the old, and find no
satisfaction in half measures. I have wished, and I still wish, to
disturb no man's peace of mind, no man's beliefs; but only to point
out to those in whom they are already shattered, the direction in
which, in my conviction, firmer ground lies."[1]
So wrote one of the protagonists of the New Reformation--and a
well-abused man if ever there was one--a score of years since, in the
remarkable book in which he discusses the negative and the positive
results of the rigorous application of scientific method to the
investigation of the higher problems of human life.
Recent experience leads me to imagine that there may be a good many
countrymen of my own, even at this time, to whom it may be profitable
to read, mark and inwardly digest, the weighty words of the author of
that "Leben Jesu," which, half a century ago, stirred the religious
world so seriously that it has never settled down again quite on the
old foundations; indeed, some think it never will. I have a personal
interest in the carrying out of the recommendation I venture to make.
It may enable many worthy persons, in whose estimation I should really
be glad to stand higher than I do, to become aware of the possibility
that my motives in writing the essays, contained in this and the
preceding volume, were not exactly those that they ascribe to me.
I too have reached the term at which the still, small voice, more
audible than any other to the dulled ear of age, makes its demand; and
I have found that it is of no sort of use to try to cook the accounts
rendered. Nevertheless, I distinctly decline to admit some of the
items charged; more particularly that of having "gone out of my way"
to attack the Bible; and I as steadfastly deny that "hatred of
Christianity" is a feeling with which I have any acquaintance. There
are very few things which I find it permissible to hate; and though,
it may be, that some of the organisations, which arrogate to
themselves the Christian name, have richly earned a place in the
category of hateful things, that ought to have nothing to do with
one's estimation of the religion, which they have perverted and
disfigured out of all likeness to the original.
The simple fact is that, as I have already more than once hinted, my
story is that of the wolf and the lamb over again. I have never "gone
out of my way" to attack the Bible, or anything else: it was the
dominant ecclesiasticism of my early days, which, as I believe,
without any warrant from the Bible itself, thrust the book in my way.
I had set out on a journey, with no other purpose than that of
exploring a certain province of natural knowledge; I strayed no hair's
breadth from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue;
and yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long, I came to a
tall and formidable-looking fence. Confident as I might be in the
existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood
the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice-board--"No
Thoroughfare. By order. Moses." There seemed no way over; nor did the
prospect of creeping round, as I saw some do, attract me. True there
was no longer any cause to fear the spring guns and man-traps set by
former lords of the manor; but one is apt to get very dirty going on
all-fours. The only alternatives were either to give up my
journey--which I was not minded to do--or to break the fence down and
go through it.
Now I was and am, by nature, a law-abiding person, ready and willing
to submit to all legitimate authority. But I also had and have a
rooted conviction, that reasonable assurance of the legitimacy should
precede the submission; so I made it my business to look up the
manorial title-deeds. The pretensions of the ecclesiastical "Moses" to
exercise a control over the operations of the reasoning faculty in the
search after truth, thirty centuries after his age, might be
justifiable; but, assuredly, the credentials produced in justification
of claims so large required careful scrutiny.
Singular discoveries rewarded my industry. The ecclesiastical "Moses"
proved to be a mere traditional mask, behind which, no doubt, lay the
features of the historical Moses--just as many a mediæval fresco has
been hidden by the whitewash of Georgian churchwardens. And as the
æsthetic rector too often scrapes away the defacement, only to find
blurred, parti-coloured patches, in which the original design is no
longer to be traced; so, when the successive layers of Jewish and
Christian traditional pigment, laid on, at intervals, for near three
thousand years, had been removed, by even the tenderest critical
operations, there was not much to be discerned of the leader of the
Exodus.
Only one point became perfectly clear to me, namely, that Moses is not
responsible for nine-tenths of the Pentateuch; certainly not for the
legends which had been made the bugbears of science. In fact, the
fence turned out to be a mere heap of dry sticks and brushwood, and
one might walk through it with impunity: the which I did. But I was
still young, when I thus ventured to assert my liberty; and young
people are apt to be filled with a kind of _sæva indignatio_, when
they discover the wide discrepancies between things as they seem and
things as they are. It hurts their vanity to feel that they have
prepared themselves for a mighty struggle to climb over, or break
their way through, a rampart, which turns out, on close approach, to
be a mere heap of ruins; venerable, indeed, and archæologically
interesting, but of no other moment. And some fragment of the
superfluous energy accumulated is apt to find vent in strong language.
Such, I suppose, was my case, when I wrote some passages which occur
in an essay reprinted among "Darwiniana."[2] But when, not long ago
"the voice" put it to me, whether I had better not expunge, or modify,
these passages; whether, really, they were not a little too strong; I
had to reply, with all deference, that while, from a merely literary
point of view, I might admit them to be rather crude, I must stand by
the substance of these items of my expenditure. I further ventured to
express the conviction that scientific criticism of the Old Testament,
since 1860, has justified every word of the estimate of the authority
of the ecclesiastical "Moses" written at that time. And, carried away
by the heat of self-justification, I even ventured to add, that the
desperate attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical
mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary
to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet,
has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the
"incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not
yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet,
are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their
fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," and "to force the
generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism."
But I am aware that the head and front of my offending lies not now
where it formerly lay. Thirty years ago, criticism of "Moses" was held
by most respectable people to be deadly sin; now it has sunk to the
rank of a mere peccadillo; at least, if it stops short of the history
of Abraham. Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic
Christianity contained in the second chapter of Genesis, if you will;
the new ecclesiasticism undertakes to underpin the superstructure and
make it, at any rate to the eye, as firm as ever: but let him be
anathema who applies exactly the same canons of criticism to the
opening chapters of "Matthew" or of "Luke." School-children may be
told that the world was by no means made in six days, and that
implicit belief in the story of Noah's Ark is permissible only, as a
matter of business, to their toy-makers; but they are to hold for the
certainest of truths, to be doubted only at peril of their salvation,
that their Galilean fellow-child Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no
human father.
* * * * *
Well, we will pass the item of 1860, said "the voice." But why all
this more recent coil about the Gadarene swine and the like? Do you
pretend that these poor animals got in your way, years and years after
the "Mosaic" fences were down, at any rate so far as you are
concerned?
Got in my way? Why, my good "voice," they were driven in my way. I had
happened to make a statement, than which, so far as I have ever been
able to see, nothing can be more modest or inoffensive; to wit, that I
am convinced of my own utter ignorance about a great number of things,
respecting which the great majority of my neighbours (not only those
of adult years, but children repeating their catechisms) affirm
themselves to possess full information. I ask any candid and impartial
judge, Is that attacking anybody or anything?
Yet, if I had made the most wanton and arrogant onslaught on the
honest convictions of other people, I could not have been more hardly
dealt with. The pentecostal charism, I believe, exhausted itself
amongst the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as
I have done, to copious objurgations, strewn with such appellations as
"infidel" and "coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts
the existence of a "gift of tongues" in the Churches of our time;
unless, indeed, it should occur to him that some of these outpourings
may have taken place after "the third hour of the day." I am far from
thinking that it is worth while to give much attention to these
inevitable incidents of all controversies, in which one party has
acquired the mental peculiarities which are generated by the habit of
much talking, with immunity from criticism. But as a rule, they are
the sauce of dishes of misrepresentations and inaccuracies which it
may be a duty, nay, even an innocent pleasure, to expose. In the
particular case of which I am thinking, I felt, as Strauss says, "able
and called upon" to undertake the business: and it is no
responsibility of mine, if I found the Gospels, with their miraculous
stories, of which the Gadarene is a typical example, blocking my way,
as heretofore, the Pentateuch had done.
I was challenged to question the authority for the theory of "the
spiritual world," and the practical consequences deducible from human
relations to it, contained in these documents.
In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world--the value of
the evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the
course of things--are matters, which lie as much within the province
of science, as any other question about the existence and powers of
the varied forms of living and conscious activity.
It really is my strong conviction that a man has no more right to say
he believes this world is haunted by swarms of evil spirits, without
being able to produce satisfactory evidence of the fact, than he has a
right to say, without adducing adequate proof, that the circumpolar
antarctic ice swarms with sea-serpents. I should not like to assert
positively that it does not. I imagine that no cautious biologist
would say as much; but while quite open to conviction, he might
properly decline to waste time upon the consideration of talk, no
better accredited than forecastle "yarns," about such monsters of the
deep. And if the interests of ordinary veracity dictate this course,
in relation to a matter of so little consequence as this, what must be
our obligations in respect of the treatment of a question which is
fundamental alike for science and for ethics? For not only does our
general theory of the universe and of the nature of the order which
pervades it, hang upon the answer; but the rules of practical life
must be deeply affected by it.
The belief in a demonic world is inculcated throughout the Gospels and
the rest of the books of the New Testament; it pervades the whole
patristic literature; it colours the theory and the practice of every
Christian church down to modern times. Indeed, I doubt if, even now,
there is any church which, officially, departs from such a fundamental
doctrine of primitive Christianity as the existence, in addition to
the Cosmos with which natural knowledge is conversant, of a world of
spirits; that is to say, of intelligent agents, not subject to the
physical or mental limitations of humanity, but nevertheless competent
to interfere, to an undefined extent, with the ordinary course of both
physical and mental phenomena.
More especially is this conception fundamental for the authors of the
Gospels. Without the belief that the present world, and particularly
that part of it which is constituted by human society, has been given
over, since the Fall, to the influence of wicked and malignant
spiritual beings, governed and directed by a supreme devil--the moral
antithesis and enemy of the supreme God--their theory of salvation by
the Messiah falls to pieces. "To this end was the Son of God
manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil."[3]
The half-hearted religiosity of latter-day Christianity may choose to
ignore the fact; but it remains none the less true, that he who
refuses to accept the demonology of the Gospels rejects the revelation
of a spiritual world, made in them, as much as if he denied the
existence of such a person as Jesus of Nazareth; and deserves, as much
as any one can do, to be ear-marked "infidel" by our gentle shepherds.
* * * * *
Now that which I thought it desirable to make perfectly clear, on my
own account, and for the sake of those who find their capacity of
belief in the Gospel theory of the universe failing them, is the fact,
that, in my judgment, the demonology of primitive Christianity is
totally devoid of foundation; and that no man, who is guided by the
rules of investigation which are found to lead to the discovery of
truth in other matters, not merely of science, but in the everyday
affairs of life, will arrive at any other conclusion. To those who
profess to be otherwise guided, I have nothing to say; but to beg them
to go their own way and leave me to mine.
I think it may be as well to repeat what I have said, over and over
again, elsewhere, that _a priori_ notions, about the possibility, or
the impossibility, of the existence of a world of spirits, such as
that presupposed by genuine Christianity, have no influence on my
mind. The question for me is purely one of evidence: is the evidence
adequate to bear out the theory, or is it not? In my judgment it is
not only inadequate, but quite absurdly insufficient. And on that
ground, I should feel compelled to reject the theory; even if there
were no positive grounds for adopting a totally different conception
of the Cosmos.
For most people, the question of the evidence of the existence of a
demonic world, in the long run, resolves itself into that of the
trustworthiness of the Gospels; first, as to the objective truth of
that which they narrate on this topic; second, as to the accuracy of
the interpretation which their authors put upon these objective facts.
For example, with respect to the Gadarene miracle, it is one question
whether, at a certain time and place, a raving madman became sane, and
a herd of swine rushed into the lake of Tiberias; and quite another,
whether the cause of these occurrences was the transmigration of
certain devils from the man into the pigs. And again, it is one
question whether Jesus made a long oration on a certain occasion,
mentioned in the first Gospel; altogether another, whether more or
fewer of the propositions contained in the "Sermon on the Mount" were
uttered on that occasion. One may give an affirmative answer to one of
each of these pairs of questions and a negative to the other: one may
affirm all, or deny all.
In considering the historical value of any four documents, proof when
they were written and who wrote them is, no doubt, highly important.
For if proof exists, that A B C and D wrote them, and that they were
intelligent persons, writing independently and without prejudice,
about facts within their own knowledge--their statements must needs be
worthy of the most attentive consideration.[4] But, even
ecclesiastical tradition does not assert that either "Mark" or "Luke"
wrote from his own knowledge--indeed "Luke" expressly asserts he did
not. I cannot discover that any competent authority now maintains that
the apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel which passes under his name. And
whether the apostle John had, or had not, anything to do with the
fourth Gospel; and if he had, what his share amounted to; are, as
everybody who has attended to these matters knows, questions still
hotly disputed, and with regard to which the extant evidence can
hardly carry an impartial judge beyond the admission of a possibility
this way or that.
Thus, nothing but a balancing of very dubious probabilities is to be
attained by approaching the question from this side. It is otherwise
if we make the documents tell their own story: if we study them, as we
study fossils, to discover internal evidence, of when they arose, and
how they have come to be. That really fruitful line of inquiry has led
to the statement and the discussion of what is known as the _Synoptic
Problem_.
In the Essays (VII.--XI.) which deal with the consequences of the
application of the agnostic principle to Christian Evidences,
contained in this volume, there are several references to the results
of the attempts which have been made, during the last hundred years,
to solve this problem. And, though it has been clearly stated and
discussed, in works accessible to, and intelligible by, every English
reader,[5] it may be well that I should here set forth a very brief
exposition of the matters of fact out of which the problem has arisen;
and of some consequences, which, as I conceive, must be admitted if
the facts are accepted.
These undisputed and, apparently, indisputable data may be thus
stated:
I. The three books of which an ancient, but very questionable,
ecclesiastical tradition asserts Matthew, Mark, and Luke to be the
authors, agree, not only in presenting the same general view, or
_Synopsis_, of the nature and the order of the events narrated; but,
to a remarkable extent, the very words which they employ coincide.
II. Nevertheless, there are many equally marked, and some
irreconcilable, differences between them. Narratives, verbally
identical in some portions, diverge more or less in others. The order
in which they occur in one, or in two, Gospels may be changed in
another. In "Matthew" and in "Luke" events of great importance make
their appearance, where the story of "Mark" seems to leave no place
for them; and, at the beginning and the end of the two former Gospels,
there is a great amount of matter of which there is no trace in
"Mark."
III. Obvious and highly important differences, in style and substance,
separate the three "Synoptics," taken together, from the fourth
Gospel, connected, by ecclesiastical tradition, with the name of the
apostle John. In its philosophical proemium; in the conspicuous
absence of exorcistic miracles; in the self-assertive theosophy of the
long and diffuse monologues, which are so utterly unlike the brief
and pregnant utterances of Jesus recorded in the Synoptics; in the
assertion that the crucifixion took place before the Passover, which
involves the denial, by implication, of the truth of the Synoptic
story--to mention only a few particulars--the "Johannine" Gospel
presents a wide divergence from the other three.
IV. If the mutual resemblances and differences of the Synoptic Gospels
are closely considered, a curious result comes out; namely, that each
may be analyzed into four components. The _first_ of these consists of
passages, to a greater or less extent verbally identical, which occur
in all three Gospels. If this triple tradition is separated from the
rest it will be found to comprise:
_a_. A narrative, of a somewhat broken and anecdotic aspect, which
covers the period from the appearance of John the Baptist to the
discovery of the emptiness of the tomb, on the first day of the week,
some six-and-thirty hours after the crucifixion.
_b_. An apocalyptic address.
_c_. Parables and brief discourses, or rather, centos of religious and
ethical exhortations and injunctions.
The _second_ and the _third_ set of components of each Gospel present
equally close resemblances to passages, which are found in only one of
the other Gospels; therefore it may be said that, for them, the
tradition is double. The _fourth_ component is peculiar to each
Gospel; it is a single tradition and has no representative in the
others.
To put the facts in another way: each Gospel is composed of a
_threefold tradition_, two _twofold traditions_, and one _peculiar
tradition_. If the Gospels were the work of totally independent
writers, it would follow that there are three witnesses for the
statements in the first tradition; two for each of those in the
second, and only one for those in the third.
V. If the reader will now take up that extremely instructive little
book, Abbott and Rushbrooke's "Common Tradition" he will easily
satisfy himself that "Mark" has the remarkable structure just
described. Almost the whole of this Gospel consists of the first
component; namely, the _threefold tradition_. But in chap. i. 23-28 he
will discover an exorcistic story, not to be found in "Matthew," but
repeated, often word for word, in "Luke." This, therefore, belongs to
one of the _twofold traditions_. In chap. viii. 1-10, on the other
hand, there is a detailed account of the miracle of feeding the four
thousand; which is closely repeated in "Matthew" xv. 32-39, but is not
to be found in "Luke." This is an example of the other _twofold
tradition_, possible in "Mark." Finally, the story of the blind man of
Bethsaida, "Mark" viii. 22-26, is _peculiar_ to "Mark."
VI. Suppose that, A standing for the _threefold tradition_, or the
matter common to all three Gospels; we call the matter common to
"Mark" and "Matthew" only--B; that common to "Mark" and "Luke"
only--C; that common to "Matthew" and "Luke" only--D; while the
peculiar components of "Mark," "Matthew," and "Luke" are severally
indicated by E, F, G; then the structure of the Gospels may be
represented thus:
Components of "Mark" = A + B + C + E.
" "Matthew" = A + B + D + F.
" "Luke" = A + C + D + G.
VII. The analysis of the Synoptic documents need be carried no further
than this point, in order to suggest one extremely important, and,
apparently unavoidable conclusion; and that is, that their authors
were neither three independent witnesses of the things narrated; nor,
for the parts of the narrative about which all agree, that is to say,
the _threefold tradition_, did they employ independent sources of
information. It is simply incredible that each of three independent
witnesses of any series of occurrences should tell a story so similar,
not only in arrangement and in small details, but in words, to that of
each of the others.
Hence it follows, either that the Synoptic writers have, mediately or
immediately, copied one from the other: or that the three have drawn
from a common source; that is to say, from one arrangement of similar
traditions (whether oral or written); though that arrangement may have
been extant in three or more, somewhat different versions.
VIII. The suppositions (_a_) that "Mark" had "Matthew" and "Luke"
before him; and (_b_) that either of the two latter was acquainted
with the work of the other, would seem to involve some singular
consequences.
_a_. The second Gospel is saturated with the lowest supernaturalism.
Jesus is exhibited as a wonder-worker and exorcist of the first rank.
The earliest public recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus comes from
an "unclean spirit"; he himself is made to testify to the occurrence
of the miraculous feeding twice over.
The purpose with which "Mark" sets out is to show forth Jesus as the
Son of God, and it is suggested, if not distinctly stated, that he
acquired this character at his baptism by John. The absence of any
reference to the miraculous events of the infancy, detailed by
"Matthew" and "Luke;" or to the appearances after the discovery of the
emptiness of the tomb; is unintelligible, if "Mark" knew anything
about them, or believed in the miraculous conception. The second
Gospel is no summary: "Mark" can find room for the detailed story,
irrelevant to his main purpose, of the beheading of John the Baptist,
and his miraculous narrations are crowded with minute particulars. Is
it to be imagined that, with the supposed apostolic authority of
Matthew before him, he could leave out the miraculous conception of
Jesus and the ascension? Further, ecclesiastical tradition would have
us believe that Mark wrote down his recollections of what Peter
taught. Did Peter then omit to mention these matters? Did the fact
testified by the oldest authority extant, that the first appearance of
the risen Jesus was to himself seem not worth mentioning? Did he
really fail to speak of the great position in the Church solemnly
assigned to him by Jesus? The alternative would seem to be the
impeachment either of Mark's memory, or of his judgment. But Mark's
memory, is so good that he can recollect how, on the occasion of the
stilling of the waves, Jesus was asleep "on the cushion," he remembers
that the woman with the issue had "spent all she had" on her
physicians; that there was not room "even about the door" on a certain
occasion at Capernaum. And it is surely hard to believe that "Mark"
should have failed to recollect occurrences of infinitely greater
moment, or that he should have deliberately left them out, as things
not worthy of mention.
_b_. The supposition that "Matthew" was acquainted with "Luke," or
"Luke" with "Matthew" has equally grave implications. If that be so,
the one who used the other could have had but a poor opinion of his
predecessor's historical veracity. If, as most experts agree, "Luke"
is later than "Matthew," it is clear that he does not credit
"Matthew's" account of the infancy; does not believe the "Sermon on
the Mount" as given by Matthew was preached; does not believe in the
two feeding miracles, to which Jesus himself is made to refer; wholly
discredits "Matthew's" account of the events after the crucifixion;
and thinks it not worth while to notice "Matthew's" grave admission
that "some doubted."
IX. None of these troublesome consequences pursue the hypothesis that
the _threefold tradition_, in one, or more, Greek versions, was extant
before either of the canonical Synoptic Gospels; and that it furnished
the fundamental framework of their several narratives. Where and when
the threefold narrative arose, there is no positive evidence; though
it is obviously probable that the traditions it embodies, and perhaps
many others, took their rise in Palestine and spread thence to Asia
Minor, Greece, Egypt and Italy, in the track of the early
missionaries. Nor is it less likely that they formed part of the
"didaskalia" of the primitive Nazarene and Christian communities.[6]
X. The interest which attaches to "Mark" arises from the fact that it
seems to present this early, probably earliest, Greek Gospel
narrative, with least addition, or modification. If, as appears likely
from some internal evidences, it was compiled for the use of the
Christian sodalities in Rome; and that it was accepted by them as an
adequate account of the life and work of Jesus, it is evidence of the
most valuable kind respecting their beliefs and the limits of dogma,
as conceived by them.
In such case, a good Roman Christian of that epoch might know nothing
of the doctrine of the incarnation, as taught by "Matthew" and "Luke";
still less of the "logos" doctrine of "John"; neither need he have
believed anything more than the simple fact of the resurrection. It
was open to him to believe it either corporeal or spiritual. He would
never have heard of the power of the keys bestowed upon Peter; nor
have had brought to his mind so much as a suggestion of trinitarian
doctrine. He might be a rigidly monotheistic Judæo-Christian, and
consider himself bound by the law: he might be a Gentile Pauline
convert, neither knowing of nor caring for such restrictions. In
neither case would he find in "Mark" any serious stumbling-block. In
fact, persons of all the categories admitted to salvation by Justin,
in the middle of the second century,[7] could accept "Mark" from
beginning to end. It may well be, that, in this wide adaptability,
backed by the authority of the metropolitan church, there lies the
reason for the fact of the preservation of "Mark," notwithstanding its
limited and dogmatically colourless character, as compared with the
Gospels of "Luke" and "Matthew."
XI. "Mark," as we have seen, contains a relatively small body of
ethical and religious instruction and only a few parables. Were these
all that existed in the primitive threefold tradition? Were none
others current in the Roman communities, at the time "Mark" wrote,
supposing he wrote in Rome? Or, on the other hand, was there extant,
as early as the time at which "Mark" composed his Greek edition of the
primitive Evangel, one or more collections of parables and teachings,
such as those which form the bulk of the twofold tradition, common
exclusively to "Matthew" and "Luke," and are also found in their
single traditions? Many have assumed this, or these, collections to be
identical with, or at any rate based upon, the "logia," of which
ecclesiastical tradition says, that they were written in Aramaic by
Matthew, and that everybody translated them as he could.
Here is the old difficulty again. If such materials were known to
"Mark," what imaginable reason could he have for not using them?
Surely displacement of the long episode of John the Baptist--even
perhaps of the story of the Gadarene swine--by portions of the Sermon
on the Mount or by one or two of the beautiful parables in the twofold
and single traditions would have been great improvements; and might
have been effected, even though "Mark" was as much pressed for space
as some have imagined. But there is no ground for that imagination;
Mark has actually found room for four or five parables; why should he
not have given the best, if he had known of them? Admitting he was the
mere _pedissequus et breviator_ of Matthew, that even Augustine
supposed him to be, what could induce him to omit the Lord's Prayer?
Whether more or less of the materials of the twofold tradition D, and
of the peculiar traditions F and G, were or were not current in some
of the communities, as early as, or perhaps earlier than, the triple
tradition, it is not necessary for me to discuss; nor to consider
those solutions of the Synoptic problem which assume that it existed
earlier, and was already combined with more or less narrative. Those
who are working out the final solution of the Synoptic problem are
taking into account, more than hitherto, the possibility that the
widely separated Christian communities of Palestine, Asia Minor,
Egypt, and Italy, especially after the Jewish war of A.D. 66-70, may
have found themselves in possession of very different traditional
materials. Many circumstances tend to the conclusion that, in Asia
Minor, even the narrative part of the threefold tradition had a
formidable rival; and that, around this second narrative, teaching
traditions of a totally different order from those in the Synoptics,
grouped themselves; and, under the influence of converts imbued more
or less with the philosophical speculations of the time, eventually
took shape in the fourth Gospel and its associated literature.
XII. But it is unnecessary, and it would be out of place, for me to
attempt to do more than indicate the existence of these complex and
difficult questions. My purpose has been to make it clear that the
Synoptic problem must force itself upon every one who studies the
Gospels with attention; that the broad facts of the case, and some of
the consequences deducible from these facts, are just as plain to the
simple English reader as they are to the profoundest scholar.
One of these consequences is that the threefold tradition presents us
with a narrative believed to be historically true, in all its
particulars, by the major part, if not the whole, of the Christian
communities. That narrative is penetrated, from beginning to end, by
the demonological beliefs of which the Gadarene story is a specimen;
and, if the fourth Gospel indicates the existence of another and, in
some respects, irreconcilably divergent narrative, in which the
demonology retires into the background, it is none the less there.
Therefore, the demonology is an integral and inseparable component of
primitive Christianity. The farther back the origin of the gospels is
dated, the stronger does the certainty of this conclusion grow; and
the more difficult it becomes to suppose that Jesus himself may not
have shared the superstitious beliefs of his disciples.
It further follows that those who accept devils, possession, and
exorcism as essential elements of their conception of the spiritual
world may consistently consider the testimony of the Gospels to be
unimpeachable in respect of the information they give us respecting
other matters which appertain to that world.
Those who reject the gospel demonology, on the other hand, would seem
to be as completely barred, as I feel myself to be, from professing to
take the accuracy of that information for granted. If the threefold
tradition is wrong about one fundamental topic, it may be wrong about
another, while the authority of the single traditions, often mutually
contradictory as they are, becomes a vanishing quantity.
It really is unreasonable to ask any rejector of the demonology to say
more with respect to those other matters, than that the statements
regarding them may be true, or may be false; and that the ultimate
decision, if it is to be favourable, must depend on the production of
testimony of a very different character from that of the writers of
the four gospels. Until such evidence is brought forward, that
refusal of assent, with willingness to re-open the question, on cause
shown, which is what I mean by Agnosticism, is, for me, the only
course open.
* * * * *
A verdict of "not proven" is undoubtedly unsatisfactory and
essentially provisional, so far forth as the subject of the trial is
capable of being dealt with by due process of reason.
Those who are of opinion that the historical realities at the root of
Christianity, lie beyond the jurisdiction of science, need not be
considered. Those who are convinced that the evidence is, and must
always remain, insufficient to support any definite conclusion, are
justified in ignoring the subject. They must be content to put up with
that reproach of being mere destroyers, of which Strauss speaks. They
may say that there are so many problems which are and must remain
insoluble, that the "burden of the mystery" "of all this
unintelligible world" is not appreciably affected by one more or less.
For myself, I must confess that the problem of the origin of such very
remarkable historical phenomena as the doctrines, and the social
organization, which in their broad features certainly existed, and
were in a state of rapid development, within a hundred years of the
crucifixion of Jesus; and which have steadily prevailed against all
rivals, among the most intelligent and civilized nations in the world
ever since, is, and always has been, profoundly interesting; and,
considering how recent the really scientific study of that problem,
and how great the progress made during the last half century in
supplying the conditions for a positive solution of the problem, I
cannot doubt that the attainment of such a solution is a mere question
of time.
I am well aware that it has lain far beyond my powers to take any
share in this great undertaking. All that I can hope is to have done
somewhat towards "the preparation of those who have ceased to be
contented with the old and find no satisfaction in half measures":
perhaps, also, something towards the lessening of that great
proportion of my countrymen, whose eminent characteristic it is that
they find "full satisfaction in half measures."
T.H.H.
HODESLEA, EASTBOURNE,
_December 4th, 1893_.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] D.F. Strauss, _Der alte und der neue Glaube_
(1872), pp. 9, 10.
[2] _Collected Essays_, vol. ii., "On the Origin of
Species" (1860).
[3] 1 John iii. 8.
[4] Not necessarily of more than this. A few centuries
ago the twelve most intelligent and impartial men to be
found in England, would have independently testified
that the sun moves, from east to west, across the
heavens every day.
[5] Nowhere more concisely and clearly than in Dr.
Sutherland Black's article "Gospels" in Chambers's
_Encyclopædia_. References are given to the more
elaborate discussions of the problem.
[6] Those who regard the Apocalyptic discourse as a
"vaticination after the event" may draw conclusions
therefrom as to the date of the Gospels in which its
several forms occur. But the assumption is surely
dangerous, from an apologetic point of view, since it
begs the question as to the unhistorical character of
this solemn prophecy.
[7] See p. 287 of this volume.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. PROLOGUE 1
(_Controverted Questions_, 1892).
II. SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM [1887] 59
III. SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE [1887] 90
IV. AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY [1887] 126
V. THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS [1889] 160
VI. POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES [1891] 192
VII. AGNOSTICISM [1889] 209
VIII. AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER [1889] 263
IX. AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY [1889] 309
X. THE KEEPERS OF THE HERD OF SWINE [1890] 366
XI. ILLUSTRATIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL
METHODS [1891] 393
I: PROLOGUE
[_Controverted Questions_, 1892]
Le plus grand service qu'on puisse rendre à la science est d'y faire
place nette avant d'y rien construire.--CUVIER.
Most of the Essays comprised in the present volume have been written
during the last six or seven years, without premeditated purpose or
intentional connection, in reply to attacks upon doctrines which I
hold to be well founded; or in refutation of allegations respecting
matters lying within the province of natural knowledge, which I
believe to be erroneous; and they bear the mark of their origin in the
controversial tone which pervades them.
Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of warfare, I think it may be
said, that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or
less of an evil. It is useful, when it attracts attention to topics
which might otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes
happen, those who come to see a contest remain to think. It is
necessary, when the interests of truth and of justice are at stake.
It is an evil, in so far as controversy always tends to degenerate
into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue of what is right and
what is wrong to the very small question of who is right and who is
wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary were more
conspicuous than the evil attributes of literary militancy, when these
papers were first published; but I have had some hesitation about
reprinting them. If I may judge by my own taste, few literary dishes
are less appetising than cold controversy; moreover, there is an air
of unfairness about the presentation of only one side of a discussion,
and a flavour of unkindness in the reproduction of "winged words,"
which, however appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find
a still more appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly
ask those who have honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer
lustre on this collection, by permitting me to present their
lucubrations along with my own; and since it would be a manifest wrong
to them to deprive their, by no means rare, vivacities of language of
such justification as they may derive from similar freedoms on my
part; I came to the conclusion that my best course was to leave the
essays just as they were written;[8] assuring my honourable
adversaries that any heat of which signs may remain was generated, in
accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, by the force of
their own blows, and has long since been dissipated into space.
But, however the polemical coincomitants of these discussions may be
regarded--or better, disregarded--there is no doubt either about the
importance of the topics of which they treat, or as to the public
interest in the "Controverted Questions" with which they deal. Or
rather, the Controverted Question; for disconnected as these pieces
may, perhaps, appear to be, they are, in fact, concerned only with
different aspects of a single problem, with which thinking men have
been occupied, ever since they began seriously to consider the
wonderful frame of things in which their lives are set, and to seek
for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies.
Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the
world's stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst
the seeming confusion, and that many events take place according to
unchanging rules. To this region of familiar steadiness and customary
regularity they gave the name of Nature. But, at the same time, their
infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the
playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible,
commonplace, orderly world of Nature was surrounded and
interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more
bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and
passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an
intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They attributed to
the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful region, an
unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events of
which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus came to regard
them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature.
Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to
"Nature"--the primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and
a supernatural, left to the free play of volition--which has pervaded
all later speculation and, for thousands of years, has exercised a
profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory
of the Universe, the successful conduct of life must demand careful
attention to both worlds; and, if either is to be neglected, it may be
safer that it should be Nature. In any given contingency, it must
doubtless be desirable to know what may be expected to happen in the
ordinary course of things; but it must be quite as necessary to have
some inkling of the line likely to be taken by supernatural agencies
able, and possibly willing, to suspend or reverse that course. Indeed,
logically developed, the dualistic theory must needs end in almost
exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that its overruling
strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well with its
denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great schoolmaster,
experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this conclusion. They
have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not answer to
neglect Nature; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid to her
dictates the better men fare.
Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism.
From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and
Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and
struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest
are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those
of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our
own time and people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to
Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed
the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence;
and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality
and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of
discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally
accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of
morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and
more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of
right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded
its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a
different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of
Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which
natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about
Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of
their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their
interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or
averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have
attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history
indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice,
with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions
are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents
delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with
criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In
singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of
mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more
exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the
greater, the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of
civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there
would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural
knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in
trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and
questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of
action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or
vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition.
Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of
Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress,
of humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life;
is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention
is that the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are
growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the historical
evolution of humanity, which is generally, and I venture to think not
unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being,
accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its
originally large occupation of men's thoughts. The question--How far
is this process to go?--is, in my apprehension, the Controverted
Question of our time.
* * * * *
Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the
weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new
thing to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these
five hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to
establish a _modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which
have had a world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have
proved universally and permanently satisfactory.
In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was,
whether certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediæval
Christianity were well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of
the problem which, in the course of the following two hundred years,
acquired wide popularity and vast historical importance: Lollards,
Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Socinians, and
Anabaptists, whatever their disagreements, concurred in the proposal
to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits
sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of Protestantism
called in question either the supernatural origin and infallible
authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the
supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford
to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible
was the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to
upset the Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which
they proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to
themselves to make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church,
in respect of the canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words
of the canonical books. Private judgment--that is to say, reason--was
(theoretically, at any rate) at liberty to decide what books were and
what were not to take the rank of "Scripture"; and to determine the
sense of any passage in such books. But this sense, once ascertained
to the mind of the sectary, was to be taken for pure truth--for the
very word of God. The controversial efficiency of the principle of
biblical infallibility lay in the fact that the conservative
adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to contravene it
without entangling themselves in serious difficulties; while, since
both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to
stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count.
The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the
inherent weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the
infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the
infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the
latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by
private judgment, why not the former? Even if the Bible could be
proved anywhere to assert its own infallibility, the value of that
self-assertion to those who dispute the point is not obvious. On the
other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible was rested on that of a
"primitive Church," the admission that the "Church" was formerly
infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its present
infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle
applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible
text, when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially
countenance contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and
confessions as diverse as the quality and the information of the
intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway,
such judgments. Every sect, confident in the derivative infallibility
of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, was ready to supply its
contingent of martyrs; and to enable history, once more, to illustrate
the truth, that steadfastness under persecution says much for the
sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very
little for the objective truth of that which he believes. No martyrs
have sealed their faith with their blood more steadfastly than the
Anabaptists.
Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself
the germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran,
Calvinistic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had
reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical
Scriptures, it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the
canon defined the creed. If the private judgment of Luther might
legitimately conclude that the epistle of James was contemptible,
while the epistles of Paul contained the very essence of Christianity,
it must be permissible for some other private judgment, on as good or
as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the critical process
which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any rate by
people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its
operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got
so far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further
progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of
Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at
the feet of Reason; and, in the hands of latitudinarian and
rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly
converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much
respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised;
and its decrees were valid only so far as they were countersigned by
common sense, the responsible minister.
The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the
Reformation of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason;
but it may be doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while
there is a good deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after
intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement.
Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself
and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from
any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas
of mediæval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to
Münzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any
desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a
proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the
intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more
accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly
shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the
arrogant Cæsaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed, had no more
hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and
judges, than had the old-fashioned Pontiff-papistry.
It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal
system that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was,
essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain
practical deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in
principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of
abolishing transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences,
ecclesiastical infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal
presence mystifications, the bibliolatry, the "inner-light"
pretensions, and the demonology, which are fruits of the same
supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and
temporal support of a new infallibility? One does not free a prisoner
by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles.
It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products
of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included
under the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von
Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist,
Erasmus, fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened
and basely deserted it?
From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they
often forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means
convertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous
reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of
Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the
rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of
Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of
the noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical
learning; the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by
the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold
of mediæval Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture and
of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to
anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the
monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of
weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of
a common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the
protestant; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and,
sooner or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of
the humanists, whether they were aware of it or not, was the
attainment of the complete intellectual freedom of the antique
philosopher, than which nothing could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a
Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.
The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to
lie in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many
weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and
professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory
movement which he originally contemplated; and it was impossible he
should have deserted the specifically Protestant reformation in which
he never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom
radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or, to borrow a still
more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who
refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church
zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and
traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic
remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr
for that in which he does not believe; and a fair consideration of the
circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems
to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted.
Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of
Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual
shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of
Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond
imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to
rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard,
whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and
princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware
of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from
the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than
from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their
oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in
England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most
influential men in each country among his friends, was not likely to
estimate wrongly the enormous forces which were still at the command
of the Papacy. Bad as the churchmen might be, the statesmen were
worse; and a person of far more sanguine temperament than Erasmus
might have seen no hope for the future, except in gradually freeing
the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from the corruptions which
alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as beneficent as it was
powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man of the world
might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of one great
light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however learned and
logical, of others; and to a cautious thinker, by whom, whatever his
shortcomings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sincerely
prized, it really was a fair question, whether it was worth while to
bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no mortal
could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian, and
other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion
of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman.
Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian
movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to
Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of
Anabaptist communism, which opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in
shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England,
with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter
tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the
long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which
devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing
with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere
dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry
triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in
its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his
friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought
this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more
especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know
how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to
bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism
would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus
was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent
Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have
discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but
of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church
Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as
Voltaire by his Deism.
In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later.
By this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was
incarnate became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked
Supernaturalism in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants
and Romanists with equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch,"
Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and Calvinism were merely three persons of
the one "Infâme" which it was the object of his life to crush. If he
hated one more than another, it was probably the last; while
D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the free-thinking host, were
disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and Pantheism.
The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific
noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but
cool judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of
the later rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to
furnish permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry.
However worthy of admiration may be the acuteness, the common sense,
the wit, the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best
of the free-thinkers; there is rarely much to be said for their work
as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult
investigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that,
from this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries.
It must be admitted that they share to the full the fatal weakness of
_a priori_ philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to
their age; while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the
record of the moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted
them to resort to preposterous theories of imposture, in order to
account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of that
evolution.
For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the
free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and
with vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one
great Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the
free-thinking array, and turned their batteries upon themselves.
Speculative "infidelity" of the eighteenth century type was mortally
wounded by the _Analogy_; while the progress of the historical and
psychological sciences brought to light the important part played by
the mythopoeic faculty; and, by demonstrating the extreme readiness of
men to impose upon themselves, rendered the calling in of sacerdotal
cooperation, in most cases, a superfluity.
Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and
political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_,
who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as
they did to _L'Infâme_, were credited with the responsibility for all
the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much
justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants'
revolt, or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our
_ancien régime_ was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was
never in such a bad way as in France; it was still capable of being
repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until
that operation could be safely performed, rather than pull it all down
about their ears, in order to build a philosophically planned house on
brand-new speculative foundations. Under these circumstances, it is
not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the
gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while enough
of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and
support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical
supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the
indifference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth
century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which
submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time,
to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which that work was an
imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier,
free-thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or
later, to return to the surface.
* * * * *
My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and
the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the
neighbourhood of Oxford; but when nevertheless, bibliolatry was
rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of
God, the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural
sequence, the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.
In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without
my authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the
vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some
preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and
even of theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school,
poured forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives
against those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark
allusions to "sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the
existence of people who trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously
doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that the
deluge was universal; perhaps even went so far as to question the
literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of Balaam's ass;
and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I
should have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash
men belonged to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were
more directly responsible for providing me with the knowledge
essential to the right guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to
do so), imagined they were discharging that most sacred duty by
impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain of reprobation
in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in the strict
and literal sense, every statement contained in the Protestant Bible.
I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt about any of them
was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I suppose that,
out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at least, had
their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of the God
of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years
later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of
any part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the Gospels, had to
expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the
other disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run
counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.
My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the
perusal of a remarkable document,[9] signed by as many as thirty-eight
out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It
does not appear that the signataries are officially accredited
spokesmen of the ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but
I feel bound to take their word for it, that they are "stewards of the
Lord, who have received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept
this memorial as evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early
days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the
colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of
Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it
did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to
offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to
God," imperilling his salvation.
It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they
discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They
are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been
discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the
supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate
myself upon such weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have
had the fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the
credit of the courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight
that they should go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of
the Old and New Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual
historical truth in all records, both of past events and of the
delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to
the coming generation to decide.
The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think,
be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of
which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put
forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary
character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical
body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare
themselves "stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In
fact, the stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I
have briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even
the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to
swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican
establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are
as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there
were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago.
Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual
historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives.
University professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical
decision that the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of
Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly
demonstrable as it might be; highly placed Divines tell us that the
pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored; that the book of
Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of the second century
B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always
to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus.
Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages,
some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations.
An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility
seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to
substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my
old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding
Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I
should have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no
less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more
anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the
Protestant Reformation and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic."
Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down
into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they
contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human element"; and this
unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping
boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical,
proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame; while the
divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of
reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour
inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat
the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal, forty
years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop
Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical
ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of
the scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will
ne'er consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific
criticism which the memorialists renounce and denounce.
A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to
assume even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may
well find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities
perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention
to either, until the question of precedence between them is settled.
And this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more
closely the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.
"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on
literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical,
criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere
with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once
ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity."[10]
Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which
guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and
New Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet,
according to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary testimony" has to be
"ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." But "ascertainment
and verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be
conducted according to the strict rules of scientific investigation,
or be self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set
about the appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully
vague term must be defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include
any number of centuries, great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to
comprise the Council of Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of
Nicæa, or to come to an end in the time of Irenænus, or in that of
Justin Martyr, are knotty questions which can be decided, if at all,
only by those critical methods which the signataries treat so
cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is fundamental,
for as the limits of the canonical scriptures vary, so may the dogmas
deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing, if
the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles,
and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly
true; and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said,
whoso defines the canon defines the creed.
Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as
the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and
the Western Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither
the one branch nor the other can have considered its judgment
infallible, since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which
each gave up its objection to the book patronised by the other.
Moreover, the "fathers" argue (in a more or less rational manner)
about the canonicity of this or that book, and are by no means above
producing evidence, internal and external, in favour of the opinions
they advocate. In fact, imperfect as their conceptions of scientific
method may be, they not unfrequently used it to the best of their
ability. Thus it would appear that though science, like Nature, may be
driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes
back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in fact, an appeal to
science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to determine
what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity; thirdly, to prove
that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the
shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this appeal, and has
shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and
imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants, and
demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science
should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry
it out efficiently.
But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius,
Origen, Tertullian, Irenæus, to argue for the reception of this book
into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds,
"antiquity" admitted the whole principle of modern criticism. If
Irenæus produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four,
it was open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them)
for cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the
Eastern branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and
accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to
accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth
century, any other branch would have an equal right, on cause shown,
to reject both, or, as the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to
accept both.
Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own
petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a
round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of
which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian
supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and
furnished the elephant with standing ground on the tortoise of
"antiquity," they, like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been
content to look no further; and have thereby been spared the horror of
discovering that the tortoise rests on a grievously fragile
construction, to a great extent the work of that very intellectual
operation which they anathematise and repudiate.
Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course
true that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not,
depends on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the
Christian scriptures; and that the infallibility of these depends upon
the infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the
books of which they are composed, out of the mass of literature
current among the early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine
showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on
that of the Church to which he belonged.[11] But it is no less true
that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of
the Old Testament books existed before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth;
and that their divine authority is presupposed by, and therefore can
hardly depend upon, the religious body constituted by his disciples.
As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is purely
Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic prophecies
vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a
matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the
writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised
as the highest court of appeal of the Christian.
The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the
infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority
vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are
erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if
a claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should
offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the
will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory,
argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the
infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible
Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it remains permissible to
ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its
infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has
officially decreed the "actual historical truth of all records" in the
Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he denied the actual
historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father Suarez,
standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that he
was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal
to that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part,
to say so.
* * * * *
Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view
with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of
Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged
along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the
sublime from the ridiculous--from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light
mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the
same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of
these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms
of Supernaturalism have deep roots in human nature, and will
undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days, they have to cope
with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning to be put
out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are hemming
them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of
systematized natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries,
has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is
confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which the
Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.
When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic
Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of
authorship of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific
literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after
exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar
system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks,
circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite
space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the
earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its
relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic
gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian
records would be treated in the same manner; that the authorship of
the Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested; and that
the evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found
in the Scriptures would have to be strong indeed, if they were to be
opposed to the conclusions of physical science. In point of fact, so
far as I can discover, no one competent to judge of the evidential
strength of these conclusions, ventures now to say that the biblical
accounts of the creation and of the deluge are true in the natural
sense of the words of the narratives. The most modern Reconcilers
venture upon is to affirm, that some quite different sense may he put
upon the words; and that this non-natural sense may, with a little
trouble, be manipulated into some sort of noncontradiction of
scientific truth.
My purpose, in the essay (XVI.) which treats of the narrative of the
Deluge, was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as
that described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character
of the narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to
account for its origin, by producing a form of those ancient legends
of pagan Chaldæa, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly
derived. I have yet to learn that the main propositions of this essay
can be seriously challenged.
In the essays (II., III.) on the narrative of the Creation, I have
endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports,
either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any
interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the
narrative, quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of
Genesis teaches the supernatural creation of the present forms of
life; modern science teaches that they have come about by evolution.
The first chapter of Genesis teaches the successive origin--firstly,
of all the plants, secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals,
thirdly, of all the terrestrial animals, which now exist--during
distinct intervals of time; modern science teaches that, throughout
all the duration of an immensely long past so far as we have any
adequate knowledge of it (that is as far back as the Silurian epoch),
plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial animals have co-existed; that
the earliest known are unlike those which at present exist; and that
the modern species have come into existence as the last terms of a
series, the members of which have appeared one after another. Thus,
far from confirming the account in Genesis, the results of modern
science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in detail, hopelessly
discordant with it.
Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient
Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and
friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter
themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the
two most important of all events, the origin of things and the
palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any
serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of
the Fall, of the commerce between the _Bene Elohim_ and the daughters
of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends?
And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what becomes of the
infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have
accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic
conclusions upon their historical accuracy?
It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to
try to hide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable
connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked.
The question will still be asked, if the first nine chapters of the
Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the
remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of
the Exodus than that of the Deluge, to belief? If God did not walk in
the Garden of Eden, how can we be assured that he spoke from Sinai?
* * * * *
In some other of the following essays (IX., X., XI., XII., XIV., XV.)
I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and
literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the
canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare incontrovertibly
the actual historical truth in all records." We are told that the
Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world--a
proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I should not
think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to signify that
everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is
infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology which
constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess
belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive
people--it is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be
unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from
the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged
wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence
for the Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply
three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive
form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely
nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good
as that for any other.
Elsewhere, I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to
declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted
tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian
faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality; still less to brand
them with the question-begging vituperative appellation of
"infidelity." The point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether,
from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably
true. If they are, they will be accepted in time, whether they are
wicked, or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have been able to attain
to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes
for righteousness by very round-about paths. And, at any rate,
whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and
less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of
ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by
daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any
matter. But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific
methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their
daily professional and business needs, is increasing and will
continually increase. The phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on
men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who
listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday, dismisses, as intrinsically
absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman;
the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for
rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office;
even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as
the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence sends men, not
to the churches, but to the drains. In spite of prayers for the
success of our arms and _Te Deums_ for victory, our real faith is in
big battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge of the science
of warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all
other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "_Laborare est
orare_"; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable
worship; and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, our business
is with Nature.
* * * * *
It is important to note that the principle of the scientific
Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the
intellectual movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was
first clearly formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the
existence of any Supernature;[12] but simply to the denial of the
validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant
form of Supernaturalism.
Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view,
the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through
endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than
man's as his is greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with
powers of influencing the course of nature as much greater than his,
as his is greater than a snail's seems to me not merely baseless, but
impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is
known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending
scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from
omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can,
in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago
and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly
within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of
the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole
future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature
that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun,
an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant
knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience
may confer indefinably greater power. Finally, if evidence that a
thing may be, were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might
justify the construction of a naturalistic theology and demonology not
less wonderful than the current supernatural; just as it might justify
the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms to which
terrestrial biology offers no parallel. Until human life is longer and
the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not think that wise
men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural history;
and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in respect
of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic confession,
which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to
say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know. As to
the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind
could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of
life, a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet
seen; an approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic
religion has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in
effecting.
* * * * *
I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Naturalism chiefly in its
critical and destructive aspect. But the present incarnation of the
spirit of the Renascence differs from its predecessor in the
eighteenth century, in that it builds up, as well as pulls down.
That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it is already
raising the superstructure, is the doctrine of evolution. But so many
strange misconceptions are current about this doctrine--it is attacked
on such false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that
is disputable by some of its friends, that I think it well to define
as clearly as I can, what I do not and what I do understand by the
doctrine.
I have nothing to say to any "Philosophy of Evolution." Attempts to
construct such a philosophy may be as useful, nay, even as admirable,
as was the attempt of Descartes to get at a theory of the universe by
the same _a priori_ road; but, in my judgment, they are as premature.
Nor, for this purpose, have I to do with any theory of the "Origin of
Species," much as I value that which is known as the Darwinian theory.
That the doctrine of natural selection presupposes evolution is quite
true; but it is not true that evolution necessarily implies natural
selection. In fact, evolution might conceivably have taken place
without the development of groups possessing the characters of
species.
For me, the doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a
generalisation of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who
will take the necessary trouble. These facts are those which are
classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of
Palæontology. Embryology proves that every higher form of individual
life becomes what it is by a process of gradual differentiation from
an extremely low form; palæontology proves, in some cases, and renders
probable in all, that the oldest types of a group are the lowest; and
that they have been followed by a gradual succession of more and more
differentiated forms. It is simply a fact, that evolution of the
individual animal and plant is taking place, as a natural process, in
millions and millions of cases every day; it is a fact, that the
species which have succeeded one another in the past, do, in many
cases, present just those morphological relations, which they must
possess, if they had proceeded, one from the other, by an analogous
process of evolution.
The alternative presented, therefore, is: either the forms of one and
the same type--say, _e.g._, that of the Horse tribe[13]--arose
successively, but independently of one another, at intervals, during
myriads of years; or, the later forms are modified descendants of the
earlier. And the latter supposition is so vastly more probable than
the former, that rational men will adopt it, unless satisfactory
evidence to the contrary can be produced. The objection sometimes put
forward, that no one yet professes to have seen one species pass into
another, comes oddly from those who believe that mankind are all
descended from Adam. Has any one then yet seen the production of
negroes from a white stock, or _vice versâ_? Moreover, is it
absolutely necessary to have watched every step of the progress of a
planet, to be justified in concluding that it really does go round the
sun? If so, astronomy is in a bad way.
I do not, for a moment, presume to suggest that some one, far better
acquainted than I am with astronomy and physics; or that a master of
the new chemistry, with its extraordinary revelations; or that a
student of the development of human society, of language, and of
religions, may not find a sufficient foundation for the doctrine of
evolution in these several regions. On the contrary, I rejoice to see
that scientific investigation, in all directions, is tending to the
same result. And it may well be, that it is only my long occupation
with biological matters that leads me to feel safer among them than
anywhere else. Be that as it may, I take my stand on the facts of
embryology and of palæontology; and I hold that our present knowledge
of these facts is sufficiently thorough and extensive to justify the
assertion that all future philosophical and theological speculations
will have to accommodate themselves to some such common body of
established truths as the following:--
1. Plants and animals have existed on our planet for many hundred
thousand, probably millions, of years. During this time, their forms,
or species, have undergone a succession of changes, which eventually
gave rise to the species which constitute the present living
population of the earth. There is no evidence, nor any reason to
suspect, that this secular process of evolution is other than a part
of the ordinary course of nature; there is no more ground for
imagining the occurrence of supernatural intervention, at any moment
in the development of species in the past, than there is for supposing
such intervention to take place, at any moment in the development of
an individual animal or plant, at the present day.
2. At present, every individual animal or plant commences its
existence as an organism of extremely simple anatomical structure; and
it acquires all the complexity it ultimately possesses by gradual
differentiation into parts of various structure and function. When a
series of specific forms of the same type, extending over a long
period of past time, is examined, the relation between the earlier and
the later forms is analogous to that between earlier and later stages
of individual development. Therefore, it is a probable conclusion
that, if we could follow living beings back to their earlier states,
we should find them to present forms similar to those of the
individual germ, or, what comes to the same thing, of those lowest
known organisms which stand upon the boundary line between plants and
animals. At present, our knowledge of the ancient living world stops
very far short of this point.
3. It is generally agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the
contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they
neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution
of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along
the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of
vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though
certainly widely different from the present flora, in the evolution of
which animals have played so great a part. But the living world thus
constituted would be simply an admirable piece of unconscious
machinery, the working out of which lay potentially in its primitive
composition; pleasure and pain would have no place in it; it would be
a veritable Garden of Eden without any tree of the knowledge of good
and evil. The question of the moral government of such a world could
no more be asked, than we could reasonably seek for a moral purpose in
a kaleidoscope.
4. How far down the scale of animal life the phenomena of
consciousness are manifested, it is impossible to say. No one doubts
their presence in his fellow-men; and, unless any strict Cartesians
are left, no one doubts that mammals and birds are to be reckoned
creatures that have feelings analogous to our smell, taste, sight,
hearing, touch, pleasure, and pain. For my own part, I should be
disposed to extend this analogical judgment a good deal further. On
the other hand, if the lowest forms of plants are to be denied
consciousness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the
lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule,
a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in
spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the
"poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing
when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a
fowl feels; that the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it
chirps within the egg may possibly feel; what is to be said of it on
the fifth day, when the bird is there, but with all its tissues
nascent? Still more, on the first day, when it is nothing but a flat
cellular disk? I certainly cannot bring myself to believe that this
disk feels. Yet if it does not, there must be some time in the three
weeks, between the first day and the day of hatching, when, as a
concomitant, or a consequence, of the attainment by the brain of the
chick of a certain stage of structural evolution, consciousness makes
its appearance. I have frequently expressed my incapacity to
understand the nature of the relation between consciousness and a
certain anatomical tissue, which is thus established by observation.
But the fact remains that, so far as observation and experiment go,
they teach us that the psychical phenomena are dependent on the
physical.
In like manner, if fishes, insects, scorpions, and such animals as the
pearly nautilus, possess feeling, then undoubtedly consciousness was
present in the world as far back as the Silurian epoch. But, if the
earliest animals were similar to our rhizopods and monads, there must
have been some time, between the much earlier epoch in which they
constituted the whole animal population and the Silurian, in which
feeling dawned, in consequence of the organism having reached the
stage of evolution on which it depends.
5. Consciousness has various forms, which may be manifested
independently of one another. The feelings of light and colour, of
sound, of touch, though so often associated with those of pleasure and
pain, are, by nature, as entirely independent of them as is thinking.
An animal devoid of the feelings of pleasure and of pain, may
nevertheless exhibit all the effects of sensation and purposive
action. Therefore, it would be a justifiable hypothesis that, long
after organic evolution had attained to consciousness, pleasure and
pain were still absent. Such a world would be without either happiness
or misery; no act could be punished and none could be rewarded; and it
could have no moral purpose.
6. Suppose, for argument's sake, that all mammals and birds are
subjects of pleasure and pain. Then we may be certain that these forms
of consciousness were in existence at the beginning of the Mesozoic
epoch. From that time forth, pleasure has been distributed without
reference to merit, and pain inflicted without reference to demerit,
throughout all but a mere fraction of the higher animals. Moreover,
the amount and the severity of the pain, no less than the variety and
acuteness of the pleasure, have increased with every advance in the
scale of evolution. As suffering came into the world, not in
consequence of a fall, but of a rise, in the scale of being, so every
further rise has brought more suffering. As the evidence stands it
would appear that the sort of brain which characterizes the highest
mammals and which, so far as we know, is the indispensable condition
of the highest sensibility, did not come into existence before the
Tertiary epoch. The primordial anthropoid was probably, in this
respect, on much the same footing as his pithecoid kin. Like them he
stood upon his "natural rights," gratified all his desires to the best
of his ability, and was as incapable of either right or wrong doing
as they. It would be as absurd as in their case, to regard his
pleasures, any more than theirs, as moral rewards, and his pains, any
more than theirs, as moral punishments.
7. From the remotest ages of which we have any cognizance, death has
been the natural and, apparently, the necessary concomitant of life.
In our hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing but plants, death
must have very early resulted from the struggle for existence: many of
the crowd must have jostled one another out of the conditions on which
life depends. The occurrence of death, as far back as we have any
fossil record of life, however, needs not to be proved by such
arguments; for, if there had been no death there would have been no
fossil remains, such as the great majority of those we met with. Not
only was there death in the world, as far as the record of life takes
us; but, ever since mammals and birds have been preyed upon by
carnivorous animals, there has been painful death, inflicted by
mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it.
8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural
relations between the human organisation and that of the mammals which
come nearest to him, on the one hand; and with the palæontological
history of such animals as horses and dogs, on the other; will not be
disposed to question the origin of man from forms which stand in the
same sort of relation to _Homo sapiens_, as _Hipparion_ does to
_Equus_. I think it a conclusion, fully justified by analogy, that,
sooner or later, we shall discover the remains of our less specialised
primatic ancestors in the strata which have yielded the less
specialised equine and canine quadrupeds. At present, fossil remains
of men do not take us hack further than the later part of the
Quaternary epoch; and, as was to be expected, they do not differ more
from existing men, than Quaternary horses differ from existing horses.
Still earlier we find traces of man, in implements, such as are used
by the ruder savages at the present day. Later, the remains of the
palæolithic and neolithic conditions take us gradually from the savage
state to the civilizations of Egypt and of Mycenæ; though the true
chronological order of the remains actually discovered may be
uncertain.
9. Much has yet to be learned, but, at present, natural knowledge
affords no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to
a lower state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural
evolution; which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such
localities as the valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the
Nile, reached a relatively high pitch, five or six thousand years ago;
while, in many other regions, the savage condition has persisted down
to our day. In all this vast lapse of time there is not a trace of the
occurrence of any general destruction of the human race; not the
smallest indication that man has been treated on any other principles
than the rest of the animal world.
10. The results of the process of evolution in the case of man, and in
that of his more nearly allied contemporaries, have been marvellously
different. Yet it is easy to see that small primitive differences of a
certain order, must, in the long run, bring about a wide divergence of
the human stock from the others. It is a reasonable supposition that,
in the earliest human organisms, an improved brain, a voice more
capable of modulation and articulation, limbs which lent themselves
better to gesture, a more perfect hand, capable among other things of
imitating form in plastic or other material, were combined with the
curiosity, the mimetic tendency, the strong family affection of the
next lower group; and that they were accompanied by exceptional length
of life and a prolonged minority. The last two peculiarities are
obviously calculated to strengthen the family organisation, and to
give great weight to its educative influences. The potentiality of
language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of
modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of writing, as
the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw; and in
the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing, as
far back as the days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in
tradition, of the experience of more than one generation; with writing
as the record of that of any number of generations; the experience of
the race, tested and corrected generation after generation, could be
stored up and made the starting point for fresh progress. Having these
perfectly natural factors of the evolutionary process in man before
us, it seems unnecessary to go further a-field in search of others.
11. That the doctrine of evolution implies a former state of innocence
of mankind is quite true; but, as I have remarked, it is the innocence
of the ape and of the tiger, whose acts, however they may run counter
to the principles of morality, it would be absurd to blame. The lust
of the one and the ferocity of the other are as much provided for in
their organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other
features that can be named.
Observation and experiment upon the phenomena of society soon taught
men that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence,
certain rules must be observed. Morality commenced with society.
Society is possible only upon the condition that the members of it
shall surrender more or less of their individual freedom of action. In
primitive societies, individual selfishness is a centrifugal force of
such intensity that it is constantly bringing the social organisation
to the verge of destruction. Hence the prominence of the positive
rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by the family or the
tribe in all emergencies; of fulfilling the religious rites,
non-observance of which is conceived to damage it with the
supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest
products of human thought; and of the negative rules which restrain
each from meddling with the life or property of another.
12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the
desire to do what is best for the whole dominates and limits the
action of every member of that society. The more complex the social
organisation the greater the number of acts from which each man must
abstain if he desires to do that which is best for all. Thus the
progressive evolution of society means increasing restriction of
individual freedom in certain directions.
With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of
nations by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which
constitute the common foundation of morality and of law became more
numerous and complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many
of them stronger. In the absence of a clear apprehension of the
natural sanctions of these rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed;
and imagination supplied the motives which reason was supposed to be
incompetent to furnish. Religion, at first independent of morality,
gradually took morality under its protection; and the supernaturalists
have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics
is bound up with that of supernaturalism.
I am not of that opinion. But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it
is very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the
aid of Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality.
It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a
liar from the beginning. If we set out in life with pretending to know
that which we do not know; with professing to accept for proof
evidence which we are well aware is inadequate; with wilfully shutting
our eyes and our ears to facts which militate against this or that
comfortable hypothesis; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve the
same character.
* * * * *
I have not the presumption to imagine that, in spite of all my
efforts, errors may not have crept into these propositions. But I am
tolerably confident that time will prove them to be substantially
correct. And if they are so, I confess I do not see how any extant
supernaturalistic system can also claim exactness. That they are
irreconcilable with the biblical cosmogony, anthropology, and
theodicy is obvious; but they are no less inconsistent with the
sentimental Deism of the "Vicaire Savoyard" and his numerous modern
progeny. It is as impossible, to my mind, to suppose that the
evolutionary process was set going with full foreknowledge of the
result and yet with what we should understand by a purely benevolent
intention, as it is to imagine that the intention was purely
malevolent. And the prevalence of dualistic theories from the earliest
times to the present day--whether in the shape of the doctrine of the
inherently evil nature of matter; of an Ahriman; of a hard and cruel
Demiurge; of a diabolical "prince of this world," show how widely this
difficulty has been felt.
Many seem to think that, when it is admitted that the ancient
literature, contained in our Bibles, has no more claim to
infallibility than any other ancient literature; when it is proved
that the Israelites and their Christian successors accepted a great
many supernaturalistic theories and legends which have no better
foundation than those of heathenism, nothing remains to be done but to
throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper.
I have always opposed this opinion. It appears to me that if there is
anybody more objectionable than the orthodox Bibliolater it is the
heterodox Philistine, who can discover in a literature which, in some
respects, has no superior, nothing but a subject for scoffing and an
occasion for the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he
owes to former generations.
Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of the Bible as an
instrument of popular education, and I venture to repeat what I then
said:
"Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this
book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in
English history; that it has become the national Epic of Britain and
is as familiar to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to
Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is
written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite
beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the
veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant of the
existence of other countries and other civilisations and of a great
past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in
the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much
humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical
procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the
interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses
of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as
they also are earning their payment for their work?"[14]
At the same time, I laid stress upon the necessity of placing such
instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief, that it would thus
gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that
the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight,
while the perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical
contents would come more and more into view.
I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the
attention of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western
world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great
instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and
political despotism. The Bible has been the _Magna Charta_ of the poor
and of the oppressed; down to modern times, no State has had a
constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken
into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges,
of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in
Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that
the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness
of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no
trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of
duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is
somewhat different from struggling for "rights"; on the fraternity of
taking thought for one's neighbour as for one's self.
So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity are included under
the democratic principles which assume the same names, the Bible is
the most democratic book in the world. As such it began, through the
heretical sects, to undermine the clerico-political despotism of the
middle ages, almost as soon as it was formed, in the eleventh century;
Pope and King had as much as they could do to put down the Albigenses
and the Waldenses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the
Lollards and the Hussites gave them still more trouble in the
fourteenth and fifteenth; from the sixteenth century onward, the
Protestant sects have favoured political freedom in proportion to the
degree in which they have refused to acknowledge any ultimate
authority save that of the Bible.
But the enormous influence which has thus been exerted by the Jewish
and Christian Scriptures has had no necessary connection with
cosmogonies, demonologies, and miraculous interferences. Their
strength lies in their appeals, not to the reason, but to the ethical
sense. I do not say that even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive
of others or needs no supplement. But I do believe that the human race
is not yet, possibly may never be, in a position to dispense with it.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] With a few exceptions, which are duly noted when
they amount to more than verbal corrections.
[9] _Declaration on the Truth of Holy Scripture._ The
_Times_, 18th December, 1891.
[10] _Declaration_, Article 10.
[11] Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi ecclesiæ
Catholicæ me commoveret auctoritas.--_Contra Epistolam
Manichæi_, cap. v.
[12] I employ the words "Supernature" and "Supernatural"
in their popular senses. For myself, I am bound to say
that the term "Nature" covers the totality of that
which is. The world of psychical phenomena appears to
me to be as much part of "Nature" as the world of
physical phenomena; and I am unable to perceive any
justification for cutting the Universe into two halves,
one natural and one supernatural.
[13] The general reader will find an admirably clear
and concise statement of the evidence in this case, in
Professor Flower's recently published work _The Horse:
a Study in Natural History_.
[14] "The School Boards: What they Can do and what they
May do," 1870. _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 51.
II: SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM
[1887]
Next to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending
investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most
hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is
the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors
recorded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at
the present day, there is more excuse than at any former time for such
neglect. No small labour is needed to raise one's self to the level of
the acquisitions already made; and able men, who have achieved thus
much, know that, if they devote themselves body and soul to the
increase of their store, and avoid looking back, with as much care as
if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon them,
such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the
discoverer and the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less
elevated character.
So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse _inter mortuos
quærere vivum_; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our
intellectual ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the
evil example set us, not only by Bacon but by almost all the men of
the Renaissance, in pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate
spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. It is
accepted as a truth which is indisputable, that, for seven or eight
centuries, a long succession of able men--some of them of transcendent
acuteness and encyclopædic knowledge--devoted laborious lives to the
grave discussion of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of
intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a little modesty, a
little impartial pondering over personal experience might suggest a
doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy method of dealing with
a large chapter of the history of the human mind. Even an acquaintance
with popular literature which had extended so far as to include that
part of the contributions of Sam Slick which contains his weighty
aphorism that "there is a great deal of human nature in all mankind,"
might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that epoch, who,
take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly in much the
same proportion as ourselves, were likely to display nothing better
than the qualities of energetic idiots, when they devoted their
faculties to the elucidation of problems which were to them, and
indeed are to us, the most serious which life has to offer. Speaking
for myself, the longer I live the more I am disposed to think that
there is much less either of pure folly, or of pure wickedness, in the
world than is commonly supposed. It may be doubted if any sane man
ever said to himself, "Evil, be thou my good," and I have never yet
had the good fortune to meet with a perfect fool. When I have brought
to the inquiry the patience and long-suffering which become a
scientific investigator, the most promising specimens have turned out
to have a good deal to say for themselves from their own point of
view. And, sometimes, calm reflection has taught the humiliating
lesson, that their point of view was not so different from my own as I
had fondly imagined. Comprehension is more than half-way to sympathy,
here as elsewhere.
If we turn our attention to scholastic philosophy in the frame of mind
suggested by these prefatory remarks, it assumes a very different
character from that which it bears in general estimation. No doubt it
is surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny logomachies and obscured by
the dust-clouds of a barbarous and perplexing terminology. But suppose
that, undeterred by much grime and by many scratches, the explorer
has toiled through this jungle, he comes to an open country which is
amazingly like his dear native land. The hills which he has to climb,
the ravines he has to avoid, look very much the same; there is the
same infinite space above, and the same abyss of the unknown below;
the means of travelling are the same, and the goal is the same.
That goal for the schoolmen, as for us, is the settlement of the
question how far the universe is the manifestation of a rational
order; in other words, how far logical deduction from indisputable
premisses will account for what which has happened and does happen.
That was the object of scholasticism, and, so far as I am aware, the
object of modern science may be expressed in the same terms. In
pursuit of this end, modern science takes into account all the
phenomena of the universe which are brought to our knowledge by
observation or by experiment. It admits that there are two worlds to
be considered, the one physical and the other psychical; and that
though there is a most intimate relation and interconnection between
the two, the bridge from one to the other has yet to be found; that
their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two parallel lines.
To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a
different aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless
we clearly apprehend the fact that they did really believe in
dogmatic Christianity as it was formulated by the Roman Church. They
did not give a mere dull assent to anything the Church told them on
Sundays, and ignore her teachings for the rest of the week; but they
lived and moved and had their being in that supersensible theological
world which was created, or rather grew up, during the first four
centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their thoughts far more
than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was cast.
For the most part, we learn history from the colourless compendiums or
partisan briefs of mere scholars, who have too little acquaintance
with practical life, and too little insight into speculative problems,
to understand that about which they write. In historical science, as
in all sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory
practice is indispensable; and the laboratory practice of historical
science is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political
life, and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and
operations of the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and
theological systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our
own time, Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by
direct contact with social and political history in the making, the
secret of understanding how such history is made. Our notions of the
intellectual history of the middle ages are, unfortunately, too often
derived from writers who have never seriously grappled with
philosophical and theological problems: and hence that strange myth of
a millennium of moonshine to which I have adverted.
However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers
who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy,
were learned and enlightened--such men, for example, as Eginhard or
Dante--is necessary to convince one's self, that, for them, the world
of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. From the
centre of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of
angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insignificant
sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the
debasement of their material embodiment and continually solicited to
their perdition by a no less numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy
of devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the pit of
everlasting damnation.[15]
The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, the
traditions of the Fathers, and the authority of the Church, they were
in possession of far more, and more trustworthy, information with
respect to the nature and order of things in the theological world
than they had in regard to the nature and order of things in the
sensible world. And, if the two sources of information came into
conflict, so much the worse for the sensible world, which, after all,
was more or less under the dominion of Satan. Let us suppose that a
telescope powerful enough to show us what is going on in the nebula of
the sword of Orion, should reveal a world in which stones fell
upwards, parallel lines met, and the fourth dimension of space was
quite obvious. Men of science would have only two alternatives before
them. Either the terrestrial and the nebular facts must be brought
into harmony by such feats of subtle sophistry as the human mind is
always capable of performing when driven into a corner; or science
must throw down its arms in despair, and commit suicide, either by the
admission that the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as
that which is truth in one corner of it is absurdity in another, or by
a declaration of incompetency.
In the middle ages, the labours of those great men who endeavoured to
reconcile the system of thought which started from the data of pure
reason, with that which started from the data of Roman theology,
produced the system of thought which is known as scholastic
philosophy; the alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified by
Avicenna and his followers when they declared that that which is true
in theology may be false in philosophy, and _vice versâ_; and by
Sanchez in his famous defence of the thesis "_Quod nil scitur_."
To those who deny the validity of one of the primary assumptions of
the disputants--who decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency
of the evidence, to put faith in the reality of that other world, the
geography and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in
the so-called[16] Christianity of Catholicism--the long and bitter
contest, which engaged the best intellects for so many centuries, may
seem a terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle
for existence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in
that of matter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the
history of scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic
implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the
result of which men thought their eternal, no less than their
temporal, interests were at stake, could have done. When a logical
blunder may ensure combustion, not only in the next world but in this,
the construction of syllogisms acquires a peculiar interest. Moreover,
the schools kept the thinking faculty alive and active, when the
disturbed state of civil life, the mephitic atmosphere engendered by
the dominant ecclesiasticism, and the almost total neglect of natural
knowledge, might well have stifled it. And, finally, it should be
remembered that scholasticism really did thresh out pretty effectually
certain problems which have presented themselves to mankind ever since
they began to think, and which, I suppose, will present themselves so
long as they continue to think. Consider, for example, the controversy
of the Realists and the Nominalists, which was carried on with varying
fortunes, and under various names, from the time of Scotus Erigena to
the end of the scholastic period. Has it now a merely antiquarian
interest? Has Nominalism, in any of its modifications, so completely
won the day that Realism may be regarded as dead and buried without
hope of resurrection? Many people seem to think so, but it appears to
me that, without taking Catholic philosophy into consideration, one
has not to look about far to find evidence that Realism is still to
the fore, and indeed extremely lively.[17]
* * * * *
The other day I happened to meet with a report of a sermon recently
preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. From internal evidence I am inclined
to think that the report is substantially correct. But as I have not
the slightest intention of finding fault with the eminent theologian
and eloquent preacher to whom the discourse is attributed, for
employment of scientific language in a manner for which he could find
only too many scientific precedents, the accuracy of the report in
detail is not to the purpose. I may safely take it as the embodiment
of views which are thought to be quite in accordance with science by
many excellent, instructed, and intelligent people.
The preacher further contended that it was yet more
difficult to realise that our earthly home would become the
scene of a vast physical catastrophe. Imagination recoils
from the idea that the course of nature--the phrase helps to
disguise the truth--so unvarying and regular, the ordered
sequence of movement and life, should suddenly cease.
Imagination looks more reasonable when it assumes the air of
scientific reason. Physical law, it says, will prevent the
occurrence of catastrophes only anticipated by an apostle in
an unscientific age. Might not there, however, be a
suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?
Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied the laws of
gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws
were held in check by others. The flood and the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah were brought about by the operation of
existing laws, and may it not be that in His illimitable
universe there are more important laws than those which
surround our puny life--moral and not merely physical
forces? Is it inconceivable that the day will come when
these royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order
of things which seems so stable and so fair? Earthquakes
were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy,
the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore
witness.... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how
powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their
weakness. The end of human probation, the final dissolution
of organised society, and the destruction of man's home on
the surface of the globe, were none of them violently
contrary to our present experience, but only the extension
of present facts. The presentiment of death was common;
there were felt to be many things which threatened the
existence of society; and as our globe was a ball of fire,
at any moment the pent-up forces which surge and boil
beneath our feet might be poured out ("Pall Mall Gazette,"
December 6, 1886).
The preacher appears to entertain the notion that the occurrence of a
"catastrophe"[18] involves a breach of the present order of
nature--that it is an event incompatible with the physical laws which
at present obtain. He seems to be of opinion that "scientific reason"
lends its authority to the imaginative supposition that physical law
will prevent the occurrence of the "catastrophes" anticipated by an
unscientific apostle.
Scientific reason, like Homer, sometimes nods; but I am not aware that
it has ever dreamed dreams of this sort. The fundamental axiom of
scientific thought is that there is not, never has been, and never
will be, any disorder in nature. The admission of the occurrence of
any event which was not the logical consequence of the immediately
antecedent events, according to these definite, ascertained, or
unascertained rules which we call the "laws of nature," would be an
act of self-destruction on the part of science.
"Catastrophe" is a relative conception. For ourselves it means an
event which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or
impresses his mind by its magnitude relatively to him. But events
which are quite in the natural order of things to us, may be
frightful catastrophes to other sentient beings. Surely no
interruption of the order of nature is involved if, in the course of
descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an anthill and in
a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a hundred thousand of its
inhabitants. To the ants the catastrophe is worse than the earthquake
of Lisbon. To me it is the natural and necessary consequence of the
laws of matter in motion. A redistribution of energy has taken place,
which is perfectly in accordance with natural order, however
unpleasant its effects may be to the ants.
Imagination, inspired by scientific reason, and not merely assuming
the airs thereof, as it unfortunately too often does in the pulpit, so
far from having any right to repudiate catastrophes and deny the
possibility of the cessation of motion and life, easily finds
justification for the exactly contrary course. Kant in his famous
"Theory of the Heavens" declares the end of the world and its
reduction to a formless condition to be a necessary consequence of the
causes to which it owes its origin and continuance. And, as to
catastrophes of prodigious magnitude and frequent occurrence, they
were the favourite _asylum ignorantiæ_ of geologists, not a quarter of
a century ago. If modern geology is becoming more and more disinclined
to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any _a
priori_ difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with
the universality of order, but because the _a posteriori_ evidence of
the occurrence of events of this character in past times has more or
less completely broken down.
It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of
extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the
hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness. It
is no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and
fractures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and
slow movements through miles of elevation and depression, and its
small and rapid movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived
and unperceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to
the shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus.
Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, conditions
are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more
rapid than it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as
much in accordance with ascertained laws of nature, as the more rapid
cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when
it remains in the air. But much more rapid cooling might entail a
shifting and rearrangement of the parts of the crust of the earth on a
scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about "catastrophes" to
which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle. It is conceivable that
man and his works and all the higher forms of animal life should be
utterly destroyed; that mountain regions should he converted into
ocean depths and the floor of oceans raised into mountains; and the
earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy of the
writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And yet, to the eye of
science, there would he no more disorder here than in the sabbatical
peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of natural causes and
effects would he broken, nowhere would there be the slightest
indication of the "suspension of a lower law by a higher." If a sober
scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild
vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than
the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a
revengeful fanatic, rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid
men love their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict
scientific principles; but because the evidence of their scientific
value does not fulfil the conditions on which weight is attached to
evidence. The imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not
"assume the air of scientific reason."
I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by
science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect
intellectual and æsthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for
suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost
powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him
to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of
time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry
would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the
logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions
which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be
filled with that _Amor intellectualis Dei_, the beatific vision of the
_vita contemplativa_, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages,
Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable
eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if
sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the
bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor
mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and
disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.
The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions
which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the proper
topic of the present essay. It is the use of the word "law" as if it
denoted a thing--as if a "law of nature," as science understands it,
were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the
phenomena expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher asks,
"Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of
a higher?" He tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the
law of gravitation. He asks whether some day certain "royal and
ultimate laws" may not come and "wreck" those laws which are at
present, it would appear, acting as nature's police. It is evident,
from these expressions, that "laws," in the mind of the preacher, are
entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy. And
it would appear that the "royal laws" are by no means to be regarded
as constitutional royalties: at any moment, they may, like Eastern
despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian laws,
which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and, to use
phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning--"make hay" of their
belongings. Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has suggested
this singular theory; and it is thought that high laws may "suspend"
low laws, as a bishop may suspend a curate.
Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to hold
them. All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the nature of
"laws" has nothing to do with modern science. It is scholastic
realism--realism as intense and unmitigated as that of Scotus Erigena
a thousand years ago. The essence of such realism is that it maintains
the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them nowadays,
general propositions. It affirms, for example, that "man" is a real
thing, apart from individual men, having its existence, not in the
sensible, but in the intelligible world, and clothing itself with the
accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we know.
Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific thought, it
really pervades ordinary language. There are few people who would, at
once, hesitate to admit that colour, for example, exists apart from
the mind which conceives the idea of colour. They hold it to be
something which resides in the coloured object; and so far they are as
much Realists as if they had sat at Plato's feet. Reflection on the
facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that "colour"
is--not a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist position--but a
name for that group of states of feeling which we call blue, red,
yellow, and so on, and which we believe to be caused by luminiferous
vibrations which have not the slightest resemblance to colour; while
these again are set afoot by states of the body to which we ascribe
colour, but which are equally devoid of likeness to colour.
In the same way, a law of nature, in the scientific sense, is the
product of a mental operation upon the facts of nature which come
under our observation, and has no more existence outside the mind than
colour has. The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner in
which experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in
fact, move towards one another. But the other facts of observation,
that bodies are not always moving in this fashion, and sometimes move
in a contrary direction, are implied in the words "free to move." If
it is a law of nature that bodies tend to move towards one another in
a certain way; it is another and no less true law of nature that, if
bodies are not free to move as they tend to do, either in consequence
of an obstacle, or of a contrary impulse from some other source of
energy than that to which we give the name of gravitation, they either
stop still, or go another way.
Scientifically speaking, it is the acme of absurdity to talk of a man
defying the law of gravitation when he lifts his arm. The general
store of energy in the universe working through terrestrial matter is
doubtless tending to bring the man's arm down; but the particular
fraction of that energy which is working through certain of his
nervous and muscular organs is tending to drive it up, and more energy
being expended on the arm in the upward than in the downward
direction, the arm goes up accordingly. But the law of gravitation is
no more defied, in this case, than when a grocer throws so much sugar
into the empty pan of his scales that the one which contains the
weight kicks the beam.
The tenacity of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are
agents, instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of
experience, upon which we base our interpretations of that which does
happen, and our anticipation of that which will happen, is an
interesting psychological fact; and would be unintelligible if the
tendency of the human mind towards realism were less strong.
Even at the present day, and in the writings of men who would at once
repudiate scholastic realism in any form, "law" is often inadvertently
employed in the sense of cause, just as, in common life, a man will
say that he is compelled by the law to do so and so, when, in point of
fact, all he means is that the law orders him to do it, and tells him
what will happen if he does not do it. We commonly hear of bodies
falling to the ground by reason of the law of gravitation, whereas
that law is simply the record of the fact that, according to all
experience, they have so fallen (when free to move), and of the
grounds of a reasonable expectation that they will so fall. If it
should be worth anybody's while to seek for examples of such misuse of
language on my own part, I am not at all sure he might not succeed,
though I have usually been on my guard against such looseness of
expression. If I am guilty, I do penance beforehand, and only hope
that I may thereby deter others from committing the like fault. And I
venture on this personal observation by way of showing that I have no
wish to bear hardly on the preacher for falling into an error for
which he might find good precedents. But it is one of those errors
which, in the case of a person engaged in scientific pursuits, do
little harm, because it is corrected as soon as its consequences
become obvious; while those who know physical science only by name
are, as has been seen, easily led to build a mighty fabric of
unrealities on this fundamental fallacy. In fact, the habitual use of
the word "law," in the sense of an active thing, is almost a mark of
pseudo-science; it characterises the writings of those who have
appropriated the forms of science without knowing anything of its
substance.
There are two classes of these people: those who are ready to believe
in any miracle so long as it is guaranteed by ecclesiastical
authority; and those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long
as it has some different guarantee. The believers in what are
ordinarily called miracles--those who accept the miraculous narratives
which they are taught to think are essential elements of religious
doctrine--are in the one category; the spirit-rappers, table-turners,
and all the other devotees of the occult sciences of our day are in
the other: and, if they disagree in most things they agree in this,
namely, that they ascribe to science a dictum that is not scientific;
and that they endeavour to upset the dictum thus foisted on science by
a realistic argument which is equally unscientific.
It is asserted, for example, that, on a particular occasion, water
was turned into wine; and, on the other hand, it is asserted that a
man or a woman "levitated" to the ceiling, floated about there, and
finally sailed out by the window. And it is assumed that the
pardonable scepticism, with which most scientific men receive these
statements, is due to the fact that they feel themselves justified in
denying the possibility of any such metamorphosis of water, or of any
such levitation, because such events are contrary to the laws of
nature. So the question of the preacher is triumphantly put: How do
you know that there are not "higher" laws of nature than your chemical
and physical laws, and that these higher laws may not intervene and
"wreck" the latter?
The plain answer to this question is, Why should anybody be called
upon to say how he knows that which he does not know? You are assuming
that laws are agents--efficient causes of that which happens--and that
one law can interfere with another. To us, that assumption is as
nonsensical as if you were to talk of a proposition of Euclid being
the cause of the diagram which illustrates it, or of the integral
calculus interfering with the rule of three. Your question really
implies that we pretend to complete knowledge not only of all past and
present phenomena, but of all that are possible in the future, and we
leave all that sort of thing to the adepts of esoteric Buddhism. Our
pretensions are infinitely more modest. We have succeeded in finding
out the rules of action of a little bit of the universe; we call these
rules "laws of nature," not because anybody knows whether they bind
nature or not, but because we find it is obligatory on us to take them
into account, both as actors under nature, and as interpreters of
nature. We have any quantity of genuine miracles of our own, and if
you will furnish us with as good evidence of your miracles as we have
of ours, we shall be quite happy to accept them and to amend our
expression of the laws of nature in accordance with the new facts.
As to the particular cases adduced, we are so perfectly fair-minded as
to be willing to help your case as far as we can. You are quite
mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the
possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny
that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are
already inclined to think that the bodies, which we have hitherto
called elementary, are really composite arrangements of the particles
of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct,
there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into
alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this
present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such
miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid,
glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes
rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple. If the so-called
"elements," oxygen and hydrogen, which compose water, are aggregates
of the same ultimate particles, or physical units, as those which
enter into the structure of the so-called element "carbon," it is
obvious that alcohol and other substances, composed of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen, may be produced by a rearrangement of some of
the units of oxygen and hydrogen into the "element" carbon, and their
synthesis with the rest of the oxygen and hydrogen.
Theoretically, therefore, we can have no sort of objection to your
miracle. And our reply to the levitators is just the same. Why should
not your friend "levitate"? Fish are said to rise and sink in the
water by altering the volume of an internal air-receptacle; and there
may be many ways science, as yet, knows nothing of, by which we, who
live at the bottom of an ocean of air, may do the same thing.
Dialectic gas and wind appear to be by no means wanting among you, and
why should not long practice in pneumatic philosophy have resulted in
the internal generation of something a thousand times rarer than
hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws,
you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in
quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is
said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to
"still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there,
for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of
anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about
evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us from being
roared down by their inextinguishable laughter.
Enough of the realism which clings about "laws." There are plenty of
other exemplifications of its vitality in modern science, but I will
cite only one of them.
This is the conception of "vital force" which comes straight from the
philosophy of Aristotle. It is a fundamental proposition of that
philosophy that a natural object is composed of two constituents--the
one its matter, conceived as inert or even, to a certain extent,
opposed to orderly and purposive motion; the other its form, conceived
as a quasi-spiritual something, containing or conditioning the actual
activities of the body and the potentiality of its possible
activities.
I am disposed to think that the prominence of this conception in
Aristotle's theory of things arose from the circumstance that he was
to begin with and throughout his life, devoted to biological studies.
In fact it is a notion which must force itself upon the mind of any
one who studies biological phenomena, without reference to general
physics, as they now stand. Everybody who observes the obvious
phenomena of the development of a seed into a tree, or of an egg into
an animal, will note that a relatively formless mass of matter
gradually grows, takes a definite shape and structure, and, finally,
begins to perform actions which contribute towards a certain end,
namely, the maintenance of the individual in the first place, and of
the species in the second. Starting from the axiom that every event
has a cause, we have here the _causa finalis_ manifested in the last
set of phenomena, the _causa materialis_ and _formalis_ in the first,
while the existence of a _causa efficiens_ within the seed or egg and
its product, is a corollary from the phenomena of growth and
metamorphosis, which proceed in unbroken succession and make up the
life of the animal or plant.
Thus, at starting, the egg or seed is matter having a "form" like all
other material bodies. But this form has the peculiarity, in
contradistinction to lower substantial "forms," that it is a power
which constantly works towards an end by means of living organisation.
So far as I know, Leibnitz is the only philosopher (at the same time a
man of science, in the modern sense, of the first rank) who has noted
that the modern conception of Force, as a sort of atmosphere
enveloping the particles of bodies, and having potential or actual
activity, is simply a new name for the Aristotelian Form.[19] In
modern biology, up till within quite recent times, the Aristotelian
conception held undisputed sway; living matter was endowed with "vital
force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied
with that explanation was treated to that very "plain
argument"--"confound you eternally"--wherewith Lord Peter overcomes
the doubts of his brothers in the "Tale of a Tub." "Materialist" was
the mildest term applied to him--fortunate if he escaped pelting with
"infidel" and "atheist." There may be scientific Rip Van Winkles
about, who still hold by vital force; but among those biologists who
have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century "vital force"
no longer figures in the vocabulary of science. It is a patent
survival of realism; the generalisation from experience that all
living bodies exhibit certain activities of a definite character is
made the basis of the notion that every living body contains an
entity, "vital force," which is assumed to be the cause of those
activities.
It is remarkable, in looking back, to notice to what an extent this
and other survivals of scholastic realism arrested or, at any rate,
impeded the application of sound scientific principles to the
investigation of biological phenomena. When I was beginning to think
about these matters, the scientific world was occasionally agitated by
discussions respecting the nature of the "species" and "genera" of
Naturalists, of a different order from the disputes of a later time.
I think most were agreed that a "species" was something which existed
objectively, somehow or other, and had been created by a Divine fiat.
As to the objective reality of genera, there was a good deal of
difference of opinion. On the other hand, there were a few who could
see no objective reality in anything but individuals, and looked upon
both species and genera as hypostatised universals. As for myself, I
seem to have unconsciously emulated William of Occam, inasmuch as
almost the first public discourse I ever ventured upon, dealt with
"Animal Individuality," and its tendency was to fight the Nominalist
battle even in that quarter.
Realism appeared in still stranger forms at the time to which I refer.
The community of plan which is observable in each great group of
animals was hypostatised into a Platonic idea with the appropriate
name of "archetype," and we were told, as a disciple of Philo-Judæus
might have told us, that this realistic figment was "the archetypal
light" by which Nature has been guided amidst the "wreck of worlds."
So, again, another naturalist, who had no less earned a well-deserved
reputation by his contributions to positive knowledge, put forward a
theory of the production of living things which, as nearly as the
increase of knowledge allowed, was a reproduction of the doctrine
inculcated by the Jewish Cabbala.
Annexing the archetype notion, and carrying it to its full logical
consequence, the author of this theory conceived that the species of
animals and plants were so many incarnations of the thoughts of
God--material representations of Divine ideas--during the particular
period of the world's history at which they existed. But, under the
influence of the embryological and palæontological discoveries of
modern times, which had already lent some scientific support to the
revived ancient theories of cosmical evolution or emanation, the
ingenious author of this speculation, while denying and repudiating
the ordinary theory of evolution by successive modification of
individuals, maintained and endeavoured to prove the occurrence of a
progressive modification in the divine ideas of successive epochs.
On the foundation of a supposed elevation of organisation in the whole
living population of any epoch, as compared with that of its
predecessor, and a supposed complete difference in species between the
populations of any two epochs (neither of which suppositions has stood
the test of further inquiry), the author of this speculation based his
conclusion that the Creator had, so to speak, improved upon his
thoughts as time went on; and that, as each such amended scheme of
creation came up, the embodiment of the earlier divine thoughts was
swept away by a universal catastrophe, and an incarnation of the
improved ideas took its place. Only after the last such "wreck" thus
brought about, did the embodiment of a divine thought, in the shape of
the first man, make its appearance as the _ne plus ultra_ of the
cosmogonical process.
I imagine that Louis Agassiz, the genial backwoodsman of the science
of my young days, who did more to open out new tracks in the
scientific forest than most men, would have been much surprised to
learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and
simple. According to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with
Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable--without form or
attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is
filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar
hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like
immense waves of light, from the divine centre, and, as ten
consecutive zones of Sephiroth, form the universe. The farther away
from the centre, the more the primitive light wanes, until the
periphery ends in those mere negations, darkness and evil, which are
the essence of matter. On this, the divine agency transmitted through
the Sephiroth operates after the fashion of the Aristotelian forms,
and, at first, produces the lowest of a series of worlds. After a
certain duration the primitive world is demolished and its fragments
used up in making a better; and this process is repeated, until at
length a final world, with man for its crown and finish, makes its
appearance. It is needless to trace the process of retrogressive
metamorphosis by which, through the agency of the Messiah, the steps
of the process of evolution here sketched are retraced. Sufficient has
been said to prove that the extremist realism current in the
philosophy of the thirteenth century can be fully matched by the
speculations of our own time.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view
of the Catholic cosmos. But it would be unfair to leave it
to be supposed that the Reformation made any essential
alteration, except perhaps for the worse, in that cosmology
which called itself "Christian." The protagonist of the
Reformation, from whom the whole of the Evangelical sects
are lineally descended, states the case with that plainness
of speech, not to say brutality, which characterised him.
Luther says that man is a beast of burden who only moves as
his rider orders; sometimes God rides him, and sometimes
Satan. "Sic voluntas humana in medio posita est, ceu
jumentum; si insederit Deus, vult et vadit, quo vult
Deus.... Si insederit Satan, vult et vadit, quo vult Satan;
nec est in ejus arbitrio ad utrum sessorem currere, aut eum
quærere, sed ipsi sessores certant ob ipsum obtinendum et
possidendum" (_De Servo Arbitrio_, M. Lutheri Opera, ed.
1546, t. ii. p. 468). One may hear substantially the same
doctrine preached in the parks and at street-corners by
zealous volunteer missionaries of Evangelicism, any Sunday,
in modern London. Why these doctrines, which are conspicuous
by their absence in the four Gospels, should arrogate to
themselves the title of Evangelical, in contradistinction to
Catholic, Christianity, may well perplex the impartial
inquirer, who, if he were obliged to choose between the two,
might naturally prefer that which leaves the poor beast of
burden a little freedom of choice.
[16] I say "so-called" not by way of offence, but as a
protest against the monstrous assumption that Catholic
Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any
trustworthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
[17] It may be desirable to observe that, in modern times,
the term "Realism" has acquired a signification wholly
different from that which attached to it in the middle ages.
We commonly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist
holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective
existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I
am not aware that any mediæval philosopher was an Idealist
in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In
fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in
their oversight of the considerations which lead to
Idealism. If many of them regarded the material world as a
negation, it was an active negation; not zero, but a minus
quantity.
[18] At any rate a catastrophe greater than the flood,
which, as I observe with interest, is as calmly assumed by
the preacher to be an historical event as if science had
never had a word to say on that subject!
[19] "Les formes des anciens ou Entéléchies ne sont autre
chose que les forces" (Leibnitz, _Lettre au Père Bouvet_,
1697).
III: SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE
[1887]
In the opening sentences of a contribution to the last number of this
Review,[20] the Duke of Argyll has favoured me with a lecture on the
proprieties of controversy, to which I should be disposed to listen
with more docility if his Grace's precepts appeared to me to be based
upon rational principles, or if his example were more exemplary.
With respect to the latter point, the Duke has thought fit to entitle
his article "Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon," and thus forces into
prominence an element of personality, which those who read the paper
which is the object of the Duke's animadversions will observe I have
endeavoured, most carefully, to avoid. My criticisms dealt with a
report of a sermon, published in a newspaper, and thereby addressed to
all the world. Whether that sermon was preached by A or B was not a
matter of the smallest consequence; and I went out of my way to
absolve the learned divine to whom the discourse was attributed from
the responsibility for statements which, for anything I knew to the
contrary, might contain imperfect, or inaccurate, representations of
his views. The assertion that I had the wish, or was beset, by any
"temptation to attack" Canon Liddon is simply contrary to fact.
But suppose that if, instead of sedulously avoiding even the
appearance of such attack, I had thought fit to take a different
course; suppose that, after satisfying myself that the eminent
clergyman whose name is paraded by the Duke of Argyll had really
uttered the words attributed to him from the pulpit of St. Paul's,
what right would any one have to find fault with my action on grounds
either of justice, expediency, or good taste?
Establishment has its duties as well as its rights. The clergy of a
State Church enjoy many advantages over those of unprivileged and
unendowed religious persuasions; but they lie under a correlative
responsibility to the State, and to every member of the body politic.
I am not aware that any sacredness attaches to sermons. If preachers
stray beyond the doctrinal limits set by lay lawyers, the Privy
Council will see to it; and, if they think fit to use their pulpits
for the promulgation of literary, or historical, or scientific errors,
it is not only the right, but the duty, of the humblest layman, who
may happen to be better informed, to correct the evil effects of such
perversion of the opportunities which the State affords them; and such
misuse of the authority which its support lends them. Whatever else it
may claim to be, in its relations with the State, the Established
Church is a branch of the Civil Service; and, for those who repudiate
the ecclesiastical authority of the clergy, they are merely civil
servants, as much responsible to the English people for the proper
performance of their duties as any others.
The Duke of Argyll tells us that the "work and calling" of the clergy
prevent them from "pursuing disputation as others can." I wonder if
his Grace ever reads the so-called "religious" newspapers. It is not
an occupation which I should commend to any one who wishes to employ
his time profitably; but a very short devotion to this exercise will
suffice to convince him that the "pursuit of disputation," carried to
a degree of acrimony and vehemence unsurpassed in lay controversies,
seems to be found quite compatible with the "work and calling" of a
remarkably large number of the clergy.
Finally, it appears to me that nothing can be in worse taste than the
assumption that a body of English gentlemen can, by any possibility,
desire that immunity from criticism which the Duke of Argyll claims
for them. Nothing would be more personally offensive to me than the
supposition that I shirked criticism, just or unjust, of any lecture I
ever gave. I should be utterly ashamed of myself if, when I stood up
as an instructor of others, I had not taken every pains to assure
myself of the truth of that which I was about to say; and I should
feel myself bound to be even more careful with a popular assembly, who
would take me more or less on trust, than with an audience of
competent and critical experts.
I decline to assume that the standard of morality, in these matters,
is lower among the clergy than it is among scientific men. I refuse to
think that the priest who stands up before a congregation, as the
minister and interpreter of the Divinity, is less careful in his
utterances, less ready to meet adverse comment, than the layman who
comes before his audience, as the minister and interpreter of nature.
Yet what should we think of the man of science who, when his ignorance
or his carelessness was exposed, whined about the want of delicacy of
his critics, or pleaded his "work and calling" as a reason for being
let alone?
No man, nor any body of men, is good enough, or wise enough, to
dispense with the tonic of criticism. Nothing has done more harm to
the clergy than the practice, too common among laymen, of regarding
them, when in the pulpit, as a sort of chartered libertines, whose
divagations are not to be taken seriously. And I am well assured that
the distinguished divine, to whom the sermon is attributed, is the
last person who would desire to avail himself of the dishonouring
protection which has been superfluously thrown over him.
So much for the lecture on propriety. But the Duke of Argyll, to whom
the hortatory style seems to come naturally, does me the honour to
make my sayings the subjects of a series of other admonitions, some on
philosophical, some on geological, some on biological topics. I can
but rejoice that the Duke's authority in these matters is not always
employed to show that I am ignorant of them; on the contrary, I meet
with an amount of agreement, even of approbation, for which I proffer
such gratitude as may be due, even if that gratitude is sometimes
almost overshadowed by surprise.
I am unfeignedly astonished to find that the Duke of Argyll, who
professes to intervene on behalf of the preacher, does really, like
another Balaam, bless me altogether in respect of the main issue.
I denied the justice of the preacher's ascription to men of science of
the doctrine that miracles are incredible, because they are violations
of natural law; and the Duke of Argyll says that he believes my
"denial to be well-founded. The preacher was answering an objection
which has now been generally abandoned." Either the preacher knew this
or he did not know it. It seems to me, as a mere lay teacher, to be a
pity that the "great dome of St. Paul's" should have been made to
"echo" (if so be that such stentorian effects were really produced) a
statement which, admitting the first alternative, was unfair, and,
admitting the second, was ignorant.[21]
Having thus sacrified one half of the preacher's arguments, the Duke
of Argyll proceeds to make equally short work with the other half. It
appears that he fully accepts my position that the occurrence of those
events, which the preacher speaks of as catastrophes, is no evidence
of disorder, inasmuch as such catastrophes may be necessary occasional
consequences of uniform changes. Whence I conclude, his Grace agrees
with me, that the talk about royal laws "wrecking" ordinary laws may
be eloquent metaphor, but is also nonsense.
And now comes a further surprise. After having given these superfluous
stabs to the slain body of the preacher's argument, my good ally
remarks, with magnificent calmness: "So far, then, the preacher and
the professor are at one." "Let them smoke the calumet." By all means:
smoke would be the most appropriate symbol of this wonderful attempt
to cover a retreat. After all, the Duke has come to bury the preacher,
not to praise him; only he makes the funeral obsequies look as much
like a triumphal procession as possible.
So far as the questions between the preacher and myself are concerned,
then, I may feel happy. The authority of the Duke of Argyll is ranged
on my side. But the Duke has raised a number of other questions, with
respect to which I fear I shall have to dispense with his
support--nay, even be compelled to differ from him as much, or more,
than I have done about his Grace's new rendering of the "benefit of
clergy."
In discussing catastrophes, the Duke indulges in statements, partly
scientific, partly anecdotic, which appear to me to be somewhat
misleading. We are told, to begin with, that Sir Charles Lyell's
doctrine respecting the proper mode of interpreting the facts of
geology (which is commonly called uniformitarianism) "does not hold
its head quite so high as it once did." That is great news indeed.
But is it true? All I can say is that I am aware of nothing that has
happened of late that can in any way justify it; and my opinion is,
that the body of Lyell's doctrine, as laid down in that great work,
"The Principles of Geology," whatever may have happened to its head,
is a chief and permanent constituent of the foundations of geological
science.
But this question cannot he advantageously discussed, unless we take
some pains to discriminate between the essential part of the
uniformitarian doctrine and its accessories; and it does not appear
that the Duke of Argyll has carried his studies of geological
philosophy so far as this point. For he defines uniformitarianism to
be the assumption of the "extreme slowness and perfect continuity of
all geological changes."
What "perfect continuity" may mean in this definition, I am by no
means sure; but I can only imagine that it signifies the absence of
any break in the course of natural order during the millions of years,
the lapse of which is recorded by geological phenomena.
Is the Duke of Argyll prepared to say that any geologist of authority,
at the present day, believes that there is the slightest evidence of
the occurrence of supernatural intervention, during the long ages of
which the monuments are preserved to us in the crust of the earth? And
if he is not, in what sense has this part of the uniformitarian
doctrine, as he defines it, lowered its pretensions to represent
scientific truth?
As to the "extreme slowness of all geological changes," it is simply a
popular error to regard that as, in any wise, a fundamental and
necessary dogma of uniformitarianism. It is extremely astonishing to
me that any one who has carefully studied Lyell's great work can have
so completely failed to appreciate its purport, which yet is "writ
large" on the very title-page: "The Principles of Geology, being an
attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by
reference to causes now in operation." The essence of Lyell's doctrine
is here written so that those who run may read; and it has nothing to
do with the quickness or slowness of the past changes of the earth's
surface; except in so far as existing analogous changes may go on
slowly, and therefore create a presumption in favour of the slowness
of past changes.
With that epigrammatic force which characterises his style, Buffon
wrote, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in his famous "Théorie de
la Terre": "Pour juger de ce qui est arrivé, et même de ce qui
arrivera, nous n'avons qu'à examiner ce qui arrive." The key of the
past, as of the future, is to be sought in the present; and, only when
known causes of change have been shown to be insufficient, have we any
right to have recourse to unknown causes. Geology is as much a
historical science as archæology; and I apprehend that all sound
historical investigation rests upon this axiom. It underlay all
Hutton's work and animated Lyell and Scope in their successful efforts
to revolutionise the geology of half a century ago.
There is no antagonism whatever, and there never was, between the
belief in the views which had their chief and unwearied advocate in
Lyell and the belief in the occurrence of catastrophes. The first
edition of Lyell's "Principles," published in 1830, lies before me;
and a large part of the first volume is occupied by an account of
volcanic, seismic, and diluvial catastrophes which have occurred
within the historical period. Moreover, the author, over and over
again, expressly draws the attention of his readers to the consistency
of catastrophes with his doctrine.
Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed
within the last three thousand years the devastation by
deluge of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the
future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorized to
regard them as part of the present order of nature, and they
may be introduced into geological speculations respecting
the past, provided that we do not imagine them to have been
more frequent or general than we expect them to be in time
to come (vol. i. p. 89).
Again:--
If we regard each of the causes separately, which we know to
be at present the most instrumental in remodelling the state
of the surface, we shall find that we must expect each to
be in action for thousands of years, without producing any
extensive alterations in the habitable surface, and then to
give rise, during a very brief period, to important
revolutions (vol. ii. p. 161).[22]
Lyell quarrelled with the catastrophists then, by no means because
they assumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because
they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to
help them, when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the
wheel of observation of the present course of nature, in order to help
themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has
become what it is, chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted
Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts.
So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can
be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more
intensely or more rapidly, at any time between the older tertiary and
the oldest palæozoic epochs than they have done between the older
tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformitarianism,
even as limited by Lyell,[23] has no call to lower its crest. But if
the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains
impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of nature
were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now; what he did
maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good
evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet
been shown to be incorrect.
I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the "Principles of
Geology" in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was
familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not
incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown,
is taught _totidem verbis_ in that work. Even had it been possible for
me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the
"Principles," Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,"
published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar,
must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound,
author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points
out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of
catastrophes.
With regard to such occurrences [earthquakes, deluges,
etc.], terrible as they appear at the time, they may not
much affect the average rate of change: there may be a
_cycle_, though an irregular one, of rapid and slow change:
and if such cycles go on succeeding each other, we may still
call the order of nature uniform, notwithstanding the
periods of violence which it involves.[24]
The reader who has followed me through this brief chapter of the
history of geological philosophy will probably find the following
passage in the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little
remarkable:--
Many years ago, when I had the honor of being President of
the British Association,[25] I ventured to point out, in the
presence and in the hearing of that most distinguished man
[Sir C. Lyell] that the doctrine of uniformity was not
incompatible with great and sudden changes, since cycles of
these and other cycles of comparative rest might well be
constituent parts of that uniformity which he asserted.
Lyell did not object to this extended interpretation of his
own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me his entire
concurrence.
I should think he did; for, as I have shown, there was nothing in it
that Lyell himself had not said, six-and-twenty years before, and
enforced, three years before; and it is almost verbally identical
with the view of uniformitarianism taken by Whewell, sixteen years
before, in a work with which, one would think, that any one who
undertakes to discuss the philosophy of science should be familiar.
Thirty years have elapsed since the beginner of 1856 persuaded himself
that he enlightened the foremost geologist of his time, and one of the
most acute and far-seeing men of science of any time, as to the scope
of the doctrines which the veteran philosopher had grown gray in
promulgating; and the Duke of Argyll's acquaintance with the
literature of geology has not, even now, become sufficiently profound
to dissipate that pleasant delusion.
If the Duke of Argyll's guidance in that branch of physical science,
with which alone he has given evidence of any practical acquaintance,
is thus unsafe, I may breathe more freely in setting my opinion
against the authoritative deliverances of his Grace about matters
which lie outside the province of geology.
And here the Duke's paper offers me such a wealth of opportunities
that choice becomes embarrassing. I must bear in mind the good old
adage, "Non multa sed multum." Tempting as it would be to follow the
Duke through his labyrinthine misunderstandings of the ordinary
terminology of philosophy and to comment on the curious
unintelligibility which hangs about his frequent outpourings of
fervid language, limits of space oblige me to restrict myself to those
points, the discussion of which may help to enlighten the public in
respect of matters of more importance than the competence of my Mentor
for the task which he has undertaken.
I am not sure when the employment of the word Law, in the sense in
which we speak of laws of nature, commenced, but examples of it may be
found in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza. Bacon employs
"Law" as the equivalent of "Form," and I am inclined to think that he
may be responsible for a good deal of the confusion that has
subsequently arisen; but I am not aware that the term is used by other
authorities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any other
sense than that of "rule" or "definite order" of the coexistence of
things or succession of events in nature. Descartes speaks of "règles,
que je nomme les lois de la nature." Leibnitz says "loi ou règle
générale," as if he considered the terms interchangeable.
The Duke of Argyll, however, affirms that the "law of gravitation" as
put forth by Newton was something more than the statement of an
observed order. He admits that Kepler's three laws "were an observed
order of facts and nothing more." As to the law of gravitation, "it
contains an element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even an
element of causation, the recognition of which belongs to a higher
category of intellectual conceptions than that which is concerned in
the mere observation and record of separate and apparently unconnected
facts." There is hardly a line in these paragraphs which appears to me
to be indisputable. But, to confine myself to the matter in hand, I
cannot conceive that any one who had taken ordinary pains to acquaint
himself with the real nature of either Kepler's or Newton's work could
have written them. That the labours of Kepler, of all men in the
world, should be called "mere observation and record," is truly
wonderful. And any one who will look into the "Principia," or the
"Optics," or the "Letters to Bentley," will see, even if he has no
more special knowledge of the topics discussed than I have, that
Newton over and over again insisted that he had nothing to do with
gravitation as a physical cause, and that when he used the terms
attraction, force, and the like, he employed them, as he says,
"_mathematicè_" and not "_physicè_."
How these attractions [of gravity, magnetism, and
electricity] may be performed, I do not here consider. What
I call attraction may be performed by impulse or by some
other means unknown to me. I use that word here to signify
only in a general way any force by which bodies tend towards
one another, whatever be the cause.[26]
According to my reading of the best authorities upon the history of
science, Newton discovered neither gravitation, nor the law of
gravitation; nor did he pretend to offer more than a conjecture as to
the causation of gravitation. Moreover, his assertion that the notion
of a body acting where it is not, is one that no competent thinker
could entertain, is antagonistic to the whole current conception of
attractive and repulsive forces, and therefore of "the attractive
force of gravitation." What, then, was that labour of unsurpassed
magnitude and excellence and of immortal influence which Newton did
perform? In the first place, Newton defined the laws, rules, or
observed order of the phenomena of motion, which come under our daily
observation, with greater precision than had been before attained;
and, by following out, with marvellous power and subtlety, the
mathematical consequences of these rules, he almost created the modern
science of pure mechanics. In the second place, applying exactly the
same method to the explication of the facts of astronomy as that which
was applied a century and a half later to the facts of geology by
Lyell, he set himself to solve the following problem. Assuming that
all bodies, free to move, tend to approach one another as the earth
and the bodies on it do; assuming that the strength of that tendency
is directly as the mass and inversely as the squares of the distances;
assuming that the laws of motion, determined for terrestrial bodies,
hold good throughout the universe; assuming that the planets and
their satellites were created and placed at their observed mean
distances, and that each received a certain impulse from the Creator;
will the form of the orbits, the varying rates of motion of the
planets, and the ratio between those rates and their distances from
the sun, which must follow by mathematical reasoning from these
premisses, agree with the order of facts determined by Kepler and
others, or not?
Newton, employing mathematical methods which are the admiration of
adepts, but which no one but himself appears to have been able to use
with ease, not only answered this question in the affirmative, but
stayed not his constructive genius before it had founded modern
physical astronomy.
The historians of mechanical and of astronomical science appear to be
agreed that he was the first person who clearly and distinctly put
forth the hypothesis that the phenomena comprehended under the general
name of "gravity" follow the same order throughout the universe, and
that all material bodies exhibit these phenomena; so that, in this
sense, the idea of universal gravitation may, doubtless, be properly
ascribed to him.
Newton proved that the laws of Kepler were particular consequences of
the laws of motion and the law of gravitation--in other words, the
reason of the first lay in the two latter. But to talk of the law of
gravitation alone as the reason of Kepler's laws, and still more as
standing in any causal relation to Kepler's laws, is simply a misuse
of language. It would really be interesting if the Duke of Argyll
would explain how he proposes to set about showing that the elliptical
form of the orbits of the planets, the constant area described by the
radius vector, and the proportionality of the squares of the periodic
times to the cubes of the distances from the sun, are either caused by
the "force of gravitation" or deducible from the "law of gravitation."
I conceive that it would be about as apposite to say that the various
compounds of nitrogen with oxygen are caused by chemical attraction
and deducible from the atomic theory.
* * * * *
Newton assuredly lent no shadow of support to the modern
pseudo-scientific philosophy which confounds laws with causes. I have
not taken the trouble to trace out this commonest of fallacies to its
first beginning; but I was familiar with it in full bloom more than
thirty years ago, in a work which had a great vogue in its day--the
"Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation"--of which the first
edition was published in 1844.
It is full of apt and forcible illustrations of pseudo-scientific
realism. Consider, for example, this gem serene. When a boy who has
climbed a tree loses his hold of the branch, "the law of gravitation
unrelentingly pulls him to the ground, and then he is hurt," whereby
the Almighty is quite relieved from any responsibility for the
accident. Here is the "law of gravitation" acting as a cause in a way
quite in accordance with the Duke of Argyll's conception of it. In
fact, in the mind of the author of the "Vestiges," "laws" are
existences intermediate between the Creator and His works, like the
"ideas" of the Platonisers or the Logos of the Alexandrians.[27] I may
cite a passage which is quite in the vein of Philo:--
We have seen powerful evidences that the construction of
this globe and its associates; and, inferentially, that of
all the other globes in space, was the result, not of any
immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but
of natural laws which are the expression of His will. What
is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also
a result of natural laws which are in like manner an
expression of His will? (p. 154, 1st edition).
And creation "operating by law" is constantly cited as relieving the
Creator from trouble about insignificant details.
I am perplexed to picture to myself the state of mind which accepts
these verbal juggleries. It is intelligible that the Creator should
operate according to such rules as he might think fit to lay down for
himself (and therefore according to law); but that would leave the
operation of his will just as much a direct personal act as it would
be under any other circumstances. I can also understand that (as in
Leibnitz's caricature of Newton's views) the Creator might have made
the cosmical machine, and, after setting it going, have left it to
itself till it needed repair. But then, by the supposition, his
personal responsibility would have been involved in all that it did;
just as much as a dynamiter is responsible for what happens, when he
has set his machine going and left it to explode.
The only hypothesis which gives a sort of mad consistency to the
Vestigiarian's views is the supposition that laws are a kind of angels
or demiurgoi, who, being supplied with the Great Architect's plan,
were permitted to settle the details among themselves. Accepting this
doctrine, the conception of royal laws and plebeian laws, and of those
more than Homeric contests in which the big laws "wreck" the little
ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the
paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the
preacher's discourse must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, be
attributed to the author of the "Vestiges."
But the author of the "Vestiges" is not the only writer who is
responsible for the current pseudo-scientific mystifications which
hang about the term "law." When I wrote my paper about "Scientific and
Pseudo-Scientific Realism," I had not read a work by the Duke of
Argyll, "The Reign of Law," which, I believe, has enjoyed, possibly
still enjoys, a widespread popularity. But the vivacity of the Duke's
attack led me to think it possible that criticisms directed elsewhere
might have come home to him. And, in fact, I find that the second
chapter of the work in question, which is entitled "Law; its
definitions," is, from my point of view, a sort of "summa" of
pseudo-scientific philosophy. It will be worth while to examine it in
some detail.
In the first place, it is to be noted that the author of the "Reign of
Law" admits that "law," in many cases, means nothing more than the
statement of the order in which facts occur, or, as he says, "an
observed order of facts" (p. 66). But his appreciation of the value of
accuracy of expression does not hinder him from adding, almost in the
same breath, "In this sense the laws of nature are simply those facts
of nature which recur according to rule" (p. 66). Thus "laws," which
were rightly said to be the statement of an order of facts in one
paragraph, are declared to be the facts themselves in the next.
We are next told that, though it may be customary and permissible to
use "law" in the sense of a statement of the order of facts, this is a
low use of the word; and, indeed, two pages farther on, the writer,
flatly contradicting himself, altogether denies its admissibility.
An observed order of facts, to be entitled to the rank of a
law, must be an order so constant and uniform as to indicate
necessity, and necessity can only arise out of the action
of some compelling force (p. 68).
This is undoubtedly one of the most singular propositions that I have
ever met with in a professedly scientific work, and its rarity is
embellished by another direct self-contradiction which it implies. For
on the preceding page (67), when the Duke of Argyll is speaking of the
laws of Kepler, which he admits to be laws, and which are types of
that which men of science understand by "laws," he says that they are
"simply and purely an order of facts." Moreover, he adds: "A very
large proportion of the laws of every science are laws of this kind
and in this sense."
If, according to the Duke of Argyll's admission, law is understood, in
this sense, thus widely and constantly by scientific authorities,
where is the justification for his unqualified assertion that such
statements of the observed order of facts are not "entitled to the
rank" of laws?
But let us examine the consequences of the really interesting
proposition I have just quoted. I presume that it is a law of nature
that "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points."
This law affirms the constant association of a certain fact of form
with a certain fact of dimension. Whether the notion of necessity
which attaches to it has an _a priori_, or an _a posteriori_ origin is
a question not relevant to the present discussion. But I would beg to
be informed, if it is necessary, where is the "compelling force" out
of which the necessity arises; and further, if it is not necessary,
whether it loses the character of a law of nature?
I take it to be the law of nature, based on unexceptionable evidence,
that the mass of matter remains unchanged, whatever chemical or other
modifications it may undergo. This law is one of the foundations of
chemistry. But it is by no means necessary. It is quite possible to
imagine that the mass of matter should vary according to
circumstances, as we know its weight does. Moreover, the determination
of the "force" which makes mass constant (if there is any
intelligibility in that form of words) would not, so far as I can see,
confer any more validity on the law than it has now.
There is a law of nature, so well vouched by experience, that all
mankind, from pure logicians in search of examples to parish sextons
in search of fees, confide in it. This is the law that "all men are
mortal." It is simply a statement of t
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