Modern Skepticism
by unknown · English · Gutenberg #42957 · 753,390 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Modern Skepticism
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Modern Skepticism
Contributor: C. J. Ellicott
Author of introduction, etc.: Earl of Dudley Ryder Harrowby
Other: Christian Evidence Society
Release date: June 16, 2013 [eBook #42957]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42957
Credits: Produced by Charlene Taylor, Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe,
Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN SKEPTICISM ***
MODERN SCEPTICISM.
MODERN SCEPTICISM.
A
COURSE OF LECTURES
DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE
CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE SOCIETY,
_WITH AN EXPLANATORY PAPER_
BY THE RIGHT REVEREND
C. J. ELLICOTT, D.D.,
LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND BRISTOL.
NEW YORK:
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH AND CO.,
770, BROADWAY.
MDCCCLXXI.
_Issued in this Country
by special arrangement with the English Publishers_,
MESSRS. HODDER AND STOUGHTON.
PREFACE.
The following Lectures, delivered at the request of the Christian
Evidence Society, are now, for the convenience of the reader, gathered
together into one volume, and earnestly commended to his serious
consideration.
A short account of the general designs of the Society, of the plan of
the Lectures, and the reasons for their appearing in a different order
from that in which they were delivered, will be found in an explanatory
paper which the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol has been kind enough
to draw up at the request of the Committee. Though placed, as last
written, at the end of the volume, the attention of the reader should
be early directed to this paper.
The Committee take this opportunity of offering their best thanks to
the eminent men who have found time, in the midst of their varied and
laborious avocations, to lend such able and efficient service to the
great cause in hand,--the maintenance of the truth of the Christian
Revelation.
HARROWBY,
_Chairman of Committee._
CONTENTS.
Page
DESIGN IN NATURE 1
BY THE MOST REVEREND THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK.
PANTHEISM 33
BY THE REV. J. H. RIGG, D.D., Principal of Westminster
Training College.
POSITIVISM 79
BY THE REV. W. JACKSON, M.A., F.S.A., late Fellow of
Worcester College, Oxford.
SCIENCE AND REVELATION 139
BY THE VERY REV. R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D., Dean of
Canterbury; late Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford.
THE NATURE AND VALUE OF THE MIRACULOUS TESTIMONY TO
CHRISTIANITY 179
BY THE REV. JOHN STOUGHTON, D.D.
THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF REVELATION 229
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF CARLISLE.
THE ALLEGED HISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE OLD AND NEW
TESTAMENTS, AND THE LIGHT THROWN ON THEM BY MODERN
DISCOVERIES 265
BY THE REV. GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., Camden Professor of
Ancient History, Oxford.
MYTHICAL THEORIES OF CHRISTIANITY 305
BY THE REV. CHARLES ROW, M.A., of Pembroke College,
Oxford.
THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES 361
BY THE REV. STANLEY LEATHES, M.A., Professor of Hebrew,
King's College.
CHRIST'S TEACHING AND INFLUENCE ON THE WORLD 409
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF ELY.
THE COMPLETENESS AND ADEQUACY OF THE EVIDENCES OF
CHRISTIANITY 457
BY THE REV. CANON COOK, M.A., Canon of Exeter; Preacher
at Lincoln's Inn.
EXPLANATORY PAPER 503
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND
BRISTOL.
NOTES 529
DESIGN IN NATURE.
BY THE MOST REVEREND
THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK.
DESIGN IN NATURE.
"All things are full of God," said the father of Greek philosophy.
"We have no need of the hypothesis of God," said a modern French
astronomer. It is with the latter saying, which is descriptive of the
attitude of modern science at this time, that the present address will
have to do. Atheism no doubt exists; but far more common is the mode
of thinking which would dispense with all questions about the Divine
nature in dealing with the world and its phenomena; which considers
that the introduction of the name of God into scientific research,
complicates what is simple, obscures the rules of observation,
introduces controversies that are useless to science, restrains the
free course of inductive reasoning by an apprehension of consequences,
and entangles physical inquiry which leads to sure and clear results,
with mental and with spiritual inquiry which have produced nothing but
disputation. Those who hold such views would think it unphilosophical
to deny, just as they would regard it to affirm, the existence of God.
But the popular mind is not equal to nice distinctions; and it seems
almost the same thing to most people to deny the existence of God as to
exclude the thought of Him when exploring His creation.
I am not without hope that a few words delivered here upon "the
argument from design," as it is called, may tend to diminish the
growing estrangement between science and religion, and at the same
time to revindicate for religion her legitimate share in matters of
scientific interest.
I may undertake that the subject, however unworthily treated in other
respects, shall be discussed without bitterness, and with a fitting
respect for those who have done so much for physical science during the
present generation.
It is necessary to sketch in a few sentences that field of creation
with which the argument from design has to do. The world presents to
us four kingdoms or classes of facts. One of these, and the first in
point of order, is the mineral kingdom. A few so-called elements, as
metals, earthy bases, and the like, acted upon by certain forces,
known to us as gravitation, motion, heat, electricity, magnetism,
chemical affinity, have formed the mountain and the valley, the wind
and the clouds, the sea margin and the cave; in a word, all the grand
substructure on which the higher kingdoms are to take their places.
Modern science has discovered however, that these physico-chemical
forces are interchangeable or convertible; that retarded motion turns
to heat, as in the railway break, that heat generates electricity, and
the electric current magnetises the iron round which it passes. Not
only this, but each force generates a certain equivalent of another--so
much and no more; and no force is lost, though a force may pass from an
active to a potential state. For example, two tuns of water are raised
by evaporation from the sea, and one of them falls in rain in a valley
drained by a river, and in its downward motion back to the sea it will
turn the water-wheel, lift the tilt-hammer, bear the barge swiftly in
its current, leap over the rocky ledge a foaming cataract, and in all
these it is only sending back a portion of the force which was spent
upon its evaporation; and the real source of all this work is, and
must be, the sun's heat. And ere the water rests again in the sea it
will have accounted for the whole of the force, neither less nor more,
that had operated upon it; part of it in friction on its bed and in
consequent heat; part of it in tasks imposed by human skill. The other
tun of water shall fall into some land-locked tarn, high in the hills,
where it cannot at once render back its force in work or duty, but the
force is there, held in suspense or in reserve. Water lifted from the
sea level to the valley of the Engadine, a mile higher, has used much
of the sun's heat; it will restore that heat or some equivalent force,
as soon as you make a way for it to the sea level again; and it will
have parted with all the force, neither more nor less, which raised it
to that height. That forces are convertible, and that whether converted
or not they are conserved, so that nothing is lost, are propositions
demonstrated. It is not, I believe, demonstrated, but it is a probable
supposition, that all forces are but one force manifested in different
modes.
Then as to the material elements on which these forces work; the
hydrogen, carbon, iron, lime, and the like, the name of elements must
be held to mean no more than that they have not as yet been resolved
into simpler substances. Of their ultimate composition we know nothing.
They may be so many modifications of an ultimate matter; but whether
this ultimate matter exists, whether it be, as modern materialists
tell us with such confidence, eternal and indestructible, whether
impenetrability be one of its properties, whether it be not a kind of
polar opposite to the physico-chemical forces, and engendered with
them, so that in a different universe, with other forces at work,
there must have been different elements, these are all questions of
mere speculation, incapable of proof. The physical enquirer has bound
himself to consider only the facts which he can observe; and when
he tells us that matter is eternal, and that therefore creation is
impossible, he is deserting the ground where alone he is strong.
Bishop Berkeley's and Collier's denial that matter truly exists is
quite as probable as this affirmation. But both alike are speculative
guesses and not science.
There is a second kingdom to add to the first. The world is not a
mere agglomeration of rocks and mountains, seas and lakes. Before the
physical forces had completed their work, a new force had been added
to them; that of life. The bare rocks became clothed with living
moss. In marshy places, warm and moist, a rich vegetation grew and
decayed. Along the slopes the interlacing roots of grasses detained the
particles of soil which would otherwise have been washed down to some
lower bed. The vegetable world, with thousands of varieties, clothed
and adorned the stony earth. England's greatness in the present was
taken order for in those ages when her coal measures were formed out
of the forests which grew rank and died in a climate different in all
respects from that which forms the subject of our daily animadversion.
Third in order comes the Animal Kingdom. I do not attempt to define
life, whether animal or vegetable, with exactness. Every one has
failed in that attempt. As a rough description of animal life, it
may, perhaps, suffice to say that the living being is one endowed
with sensation and spontaneous motion, of which each of the parts
contributes something to the continuance of the whole, and is in
turn preserved or defended by the whole. If those who find fault with
this, look for another definition in Dr. Whewell's comprehensive
work,[1] they will find my excuse in the variety and the inadequacy of
the definitions there collected. The animal life spread out over the
globe from the first is profuse, is beautiful and various. The oolitic
limestone and the white chalk are almost wholly made up of shells of
Foraminifera. On the river Columbia is a bed of clay 500 feet thick,
which consists largely of the shells of Diatoms, if, indeed, these are
to be ranked in the animal kingdom. The shells of the Foraminifera,
which can only be examined by the microscope, exhibit wonderful variety
and beauty. Still more remarkable in this respect are the Polycystina,
whose shells, as figured in Mr. Ponton's book, recall censers and
vases, jewelled crosses and stars, pendants and tripods, such as a
London goldsmith would do well to reproduce. Until the microscope was
invented no eye can have explored this wonderful dust. The shells of
both these humble tribes, the Foraminifera and Polycystina resemble the
shells of other animals much higher in the scale of organization; but
nearly as they are related in organization to each other, the forms
are very different, and each in itself presents a wonderful diversity
of forms. In higher families of animals there are the same characters.
The globe teems with life in earth, and air, and water. If you will
permit me, so early in my argument, to speak of the Maker of them all,
I will say that the creative power is inexhaustible in invention, both
of useful and beautiful parts. And in the ceaseless activity of these
creatures, great and small, we recognise the physical happiness which
accompanies so much life. It is a chorus of thanksgiving and praise,
from pool and jungle, from treetop and soft grass, from the creatures
that revel in the life that God has given them.
In demanding the right to regard man as the fourth kingdom of nature, I
am aware that some may demur to the claim. No doubt he must take rank
in the kingdom of the animals, by reason of his identity with animals
in all the vital functions. Disparaging things have been said of his
brain; and Moleschott has remarked, I think, that all its finest things
are but modified phosphorus after all. "No phosphorus, no thinking!"
The slight projection on the outer margin of the ear has lately assumed
portentous proportions. The possession of that precious relic, which
has turned up suddenly like the locket of the long lost child in a
stimulating novel, proves our kinship to the Simian race, from some
balder specimens of which we are supposed to have descended, and gives
us a place on an unsuspected family tree. But, after all that has been
said by the naturalists to teach us humility, there do remain some
facts, which entitle man to a separate place, to one at least of which
the modern school have given greater prominence than before. They are
these. Man can control nature. He can read nature and understand it. He
has a power of self-regulation, which we call conscience. And he can
and does think much about God.
As to the power of man to control nature, I prefer to employ the
words of Mr. Wallace, one of the first to put forward what is called
"the law of natural selection," who will not be suspected of claiming
any transcendental place or privilege for man. "With a naked and
unprotected body," he says, man's intelligence "gave him clothing
against the varying inclemencies of the seasons. Though unable to
compete with the deer in swiftness, or with the wild bull in strength,
it has given him weapons wherewith to capture and overcome both. Though
less capable than most other animals, of living on the herbs and the
fruits which unaided nature supplies, this wonderful faculty taught
him to govern and direct nature to his own benefit, and to make her
produce food for him when and where he pleased. From the moment when
the first skin was used as a covering, when the first rude spear was
formed to assist in the chase, the first seed sown or root planted, a
grand revolution was effected in nature, a revolution which in all the
previous ages of the world had had no parallel, for a being had arisen
who was no longer necessarily subject to change with the changing
universe, a being who was, in some degree, superior to nature, inasmuch
as he knew how to control and regulate her action, and could keep
himself in harmony with her, not by a change in body, but by an advance
in mind. Here, then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man. On
this view of his special attributes we may admit that even those who
claim for him a position and an order a class or a sub-kingdom by
himself, have some reason on their side. He is indeed a being apart,
since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify
all other organic beings. Nay, more, this victory which he has gained
for himself gives him a directing influence over other existences. Man
has not only escaped natural selection himself, but he is actually able
to take away some of that power from nature which before his appearance
she universally exercised. We can anticipate the time when the earth
will produce only cultivated plants and domestic animals; when man's
selection shall have supplanted natural selection; and when the ocean
will be the only domain in which that power can be exerted, which for
countless cycles of ages ruled supreme over the earth."[2]
Thus eloquently and forcibly speaks Mr. Wallace; and I do not stop
now to criticise the exaggeration of language which treats the law of
natural selection as supreme ruler of the earth. Let me say a few words
next upon man's power to reflect on, and to understand nature. For this
was the second mark by which man was distinguished from the animal
creation, with which he has so much in common.
Man alone is capable of an unselfish interest in the world around him;
that is, an interest that does not bear immediately on his bodily
wants. How far he has carried this interest, let modern science bear
witness. The common feat of foretelling all the eclipses of sun and
moon for a given year, is performed for our almanack yearly, without
exciting surprise or gratitude. Yet it means that man can so follow
the heavenly bodies in their path, for years and years to come, for
all the years that are gone, that he can tell, without fear of error,
on what day the cone of shadow thrown by the sun-lighted earth into
space, shall sweep over the face of the moon and blot out her light,
completely or a little. But this is an old triumph, hardly worth
quoting, but for its aptness to impress all kinds of minds. A clerk
in one of our public offices, using only such leisure as official
work allowed, has told us lately wonders about the composition of
the sun; and here in London, armed with a little instrument (the
spectroscope), this distinguished man has been able to ascertain that
in yonder photosphere the same elements are found which the chemist
seeks and finds in the crust of our little earth. What proofs can be
more convincing of the fitness of man to play his part in the scene
in which he is placed? His senses are adapted to the facts he is to
observe; his eye to light, his ear to sonorous vibrations, his touch
to resistance and to weight. But the naked organ soon falls short of
his wishes. And soon the microscope unfolds the beautiful forms of the
Polycystina shells, the minute fibril of the muscle, and the components
of the blood of life. The telescope brings near the world of stars, and
resolves the bright mist into clusters of distinct orbs. The balance
weighs quantities of matter too small for the touch to appreciate.
And lastly, the spectroscope takes the picture, so to speak, of
chemical phenomena too distant to be realised by these means; and so
the composition of the heavenly bodies, about which the most sanguine
observer twenty years ago would have admitted that we should never
know anything firmer than conjecture, is already the subject of exact
observation.
The names of Homer, Plato, and Shakspeare remind us how marvellously
the world is imaged and reproduced in the minds of some great men, and
of the share which we smaller men can take in their work by an admiring
sympathy. A production of art, whether literary, pictorial, or
plastic, is a creation. The things of Troy were not so touching nor so
grand in their reality as they became in the form which the poet gave
them. Legend enters largely into the stories of Macbeth and Hamlet. The
histories are shadowy, but the plays are substantial; they contain some
touch of truth. Old and young read them, and lend to the author all
their feelings to work on as he will. Weigh this fact well. It seems
to me to show so plainly that man's constitution has been fitted by
foresight and preparation for the place in earth that he was to fill.
Supposing that Moleschott was right in his startling aphorism,
"Without phosphorus there is no thought," what a wonder are we forced
to recognise here. The rage of Achilles, the death of Socrates, the
resolute wickedness of Lady Macbeth, the character of her husband,
so weak in his crime, so grand in his remorse and ruin; the refined
and gentle Hamlet, forced by a preternatural command to assume the
character of an avenger; to all these the presence of phosphorus in
the brain is indispensable. How comes so small a cause to work such
grand effects. It is sufficiently wonderful to hear Joachim discourse
eloquent music upon the simplest of instruments, a violin; take away
the violin and substitute a bit of wood; if the music still continues,
what was before a wonderful exercise of skill is now miraculous. If
great thoughts are but phosphorus burnt in the closed stove of a poet's
brain, I am more ready than ever to admire that creative wisdom which
could bring this out of that, which could so dispense with ordinary
means in His highest productions. But the aphorism is not true as it
stands. I believe there is no free phosphorus in the brain. "Without
lime, no thought; without oxygen, no thought; without water, no
thought." All these are true, and they import a well-known fact, that
man who thinks is a creature in a material world, and that certain
forms of matter are needful to his existence as an organised being.[3]
"Two things are awful to me," said Kant, "the starry firmament and the
sense of responsibility in man." In his "Metaphysics of Ethics" he
has treated this sense of responsibility with singular logical power.
It is one of the marks that separate man from all other creatures. No
doubt this principle has allowed men to come to very wrong and absurd
conclusions. Because the savage practises cannibalism, and knows no
rules of chastity but those which flow from the husband's right of
property in the wife, it is inferred that the savage has no moral
sense. It would be as fair to infer that because England once traded
in slaves, fought cocks, baited bulls, and oppressed the native races
in India and her colonies, therefore there was no sense of right
and wrong in England. It is for the existence of the principle that
I contend, and not for its perfect education and enlightenment. The
principle is that something is right to will and to do, and something
is not right. The existence of the principle is proved if the poor
savage of whom I spoke would consider his manhood disgraced by fleeing,
even for his life's sake, before the foe, or by suffering one cry to
escape him under the tortures, wherewith his captors are doing him
to death. The education of this principle is a different matter; no
one could say that even now his conscience was completely educated.
"So act that your principle of action would bear to be made a law for
the whole world,"[4] is a noble maxim; but it requires knowledge and
light, as well as right intention. If you twit us with the fact that
men have been cruel, impure, capricious, and absurd in their conduct,
we answer that they had still a right and a wrong. One who has the
sense of sight may find himself compelled to live in some narrow cleft
or ravine, where there is little to see, but the sense is there still.
The bathing-men at Pfeffers, with the earth closed almost over their
heads, see little of the scenery of Switzerland: but they have eyes not
the less. We are claiming for men now, not the fine sweep of moral
prospect, but the moral sense of sight; and this is never wanting. Upon
this sense every artifice has been used to make it look like something
else;[5] for until it can be so transformed, it is a powerful witness
for another world than this. The commonest explanation is that it is
only a principle of enlightened self-interest. Study it for yourself
in the savage, in the little child; you will find that these two
principles run on different lines.
The last mark of man, that distinguishes him from all animals is, that
he believes in God. One half the human race at this moment profess
some creed in which God is the great first cause, the Creator and
Governor of the world. Of the other half, hardly any are quite without
religion. "Obliged as I am," says M. Quatrefages, in words which I have
had occasion to quote elsewhere,[6] "even by my education, to pass in
review the races of men, I have sought for atheism in the lowest and in
the highest, but nowhere have I met with it, except in an individual,
or at most in some school of men, more or less known, as we have seen
in Europe in the last century, and as we see at the present day.
Everywhere and always the masses of the people have escaped it." But
for my present argument it is not necessary to insist that a right
belief in God prevails. There is a belief in God, and it cannot have
come from experience or observation of visible facts. You may lower the
position of man, by comparing him to the apes, and by chemical analysis
of his brain; all the more wonderful is it that a creature in such
sorry case should pretend to hold communion with the divine. His feet
are in the earthy clay, but his head is lifted up towards heaven. Heir
to a hundred maladies, the sport of a hundred passions, holding on this
life, so chequered in its complexion, but for a few days, this creature
cries out of his trouble: "God exists; and he can see and hear me."
Man, if I have proved my position, stands quite alone at the head of
the kingdoms of nature, alone in his power of controlling it, alone
in his appreciation of its beauty, alone in the self-government of
conscience, the first of all the creatures of God, to pronounce the
name of Him who had made all things, in a world which for ages had been
blind to its Maker, and thankless because blind.
Now it has become, and will probably continue to be, a question of the
deepest interest to mankind, how these four kingdoms came into being.
And at present there is a tendency towards a theory purely material
and mechanical. It is so in Germany, the country of Büchner, Vogt, and
Moleschott; it is so in France, where Comte and Littré have written;
it is so here in England, where it is needless to quote distinguished
names. I purpose, in the remainder of this lecture, to attempt an
interpretation of the facts before us, quite different from this
prevalent notion; and also to show how vicious and how inadequate in a
scientific point of view the system known as materialism appears to be.
The time is all too short for such a purpose: but any address like this
can only aim to scatter germs of thought, not to present a system.
That the creation was gradual, appears alike from the account of the
Bible and from scientific observation. Matter and motion must have
existed before the ball of earth was formed; and the physico-chemical
forces must have been in full play when the first lichen clothed the
rocks, or the first plants were formed in the sea. The first appearance
of life on the globe was a mighty step in creation, and from this point
the question of design becomes a very urgent one. Observe: the plant
world is a new world, with a series of wonders all its own. There was
nothing in the heat of the sun, nor in the earth's motion or magnetic
currents, to give any promise or presage of the marvels of the forest.
Supposing that we admit that these were evolved by law, that is to
say, that as a matter of fact plants only appeared where certain
conditions of light and heat and moisture combined to favour them,
and that wherever these conditions were combined they never failed
to appear. The question next arises whether matter and force evolved
them from their own inherent nature, or force and matter were created
with the intention to produce them, so that the plant was intended and
prepared then when the other forces began to stir the formless void.
Is the plant world the accidental or necessary outcome of the forces
that made the mineral world? or must we say that it bears marks of
design? Here we must observe that it is a wider and richer world than
that which preceded it: more full by far of forms of beauty and grace,
each of them sustained by a vascular system of which the mineral world
affords no parallel. You stand before the gnarled and twisted oak that
rises out of the feathering ferns; you never think that this giant of
two centuries, endued with a certain power of self-protection against
the storms of two hundred years, is an accidental product. It is so
grandly strong, so richly clothed with a myriad leaves, alike but
yet in something different each from each. The cattle count upon its
friendly shade; the fowls of the air make it their resting-place. This
a result of certain motions in the universe and certain properties
of matter, not designed at all, foreseen by no eye? To no one would
such a thought naturally occur. The world, full in its first stage of
marks of order and purpose, shows more of the same marks in its second
and more complicated state. The change that has taken place is not
towards confusion and exhaustion from unforeseen defects in mechanism,
but a higher development. The mineral kingdom was wonderful; that it
should be able to clothe itself with a mantle of verdure, and pass
into another kingdom much more complex, heightens the wonder. But then
comes the further change, the pouring out of animal life upon the
globe. Was this too an inevitable consequence of physical forces? All
the animal creation teems with marks of purpose. Consider only some of
the contrivances by which the fowls of the air are fitted for their
peculiar life. Describing a night of extreme coldness, the poet says:
"The owl, for all her feathers, is a-cold."
That warm covering of the bird must be portable as well as warm; it
weighs about an ounce and a half. But the covering of birds would be
useless to them if the showers to which they must be exposed were
absorbed by the plumage, so that it became a heavy clinging mass. An
oily secretion makes it waterproof; we have all seen the duck free
itself by one shake from every trace of its recent bath. The heavy
skeleton that befits pedestrian creatures, would disable the bird from
flight; so it is provided with tubes of thin bone, surrounding a cavity
filled with air. Its pinions must be light as well as strong; observe
how the light barbs of the feather have roughened edges so that they
form one strong continuous surface, almost impervious to the air which
they strike. The air in the bones of birds and in other cavities of
the body, heated too by an inner warmth much greater than that of man,
contributes something to their buoyancy. Their speed and endurance are
enormous. It is said that the swallow's flight is ninety miles an hour.
One long stretch across the North Sea brings the sea-fowl from Norway
to Flamborough Head; they rest for a short time after this flight, and
pass inland, not the worse for their exploit. You may infer from the
beak of a bird its habits and its food. The bill of a woodpecker is a
pointed tool, tipped with hardest horn, to break open the bark of the
tree for insects. The flat bill of the duck has plates of horn at the
side; an excellent instrument for straining off the water and retaining
the food. The bill of the snipe is long, and narrow, and sensitive, to
pierce the marshy ground, and feel after its food. We might go on for
hours multiplying such instances, and from every part of the field of
creation.
Now, any mind in its natural state knows that in human works such
adaptations could only proceed from contrivance, and is willing to
regard these in the same way as proofs of design in creation. The
physicist has to tutor himself to a different view. All these things
are evolutions, under pressure of circumstances, of the original forces
of creation. For example, out of certain birds tenanting marshy
places, one has a somewhat larger beak, and this gives him an advantage
in piercing the ground for food; and so his share of food is larger,
and his strength and courage greater, and he has a freer choice of a
mate; and so the long beak grows longer in the next generation, and
the grandson's beak is longer than the son's, from the same causes;
and thus the law works, until in course of time there stands confessed
a new species--a perfect snipe. Is the scientific theory better in
this case than the popular? It is not. It does not account for the
facts so well. But is not our belief that God made the fowl of the
air with fitting instruments for a peculiar life because He saw that
it was good, and wished all portions of His varied earth to be the
scene of the joy and energy of appropriate tenants, a mere hypothesis?
The worship of God is universal, and exists without any explicit
opinion that He is the Creator, the first Cause. Because you are able
to conceive of Him, and are willing to accept Him as the Ruler of
your will and conscience, He must exist. Does this seem too rapid an
assumption? Consider the alternative. If He exists not, the sound of
worship has gone up from all lands in vain, and in vain have all good
men consecrated their lives to an obedience to the law of duty. Were
such deceit felt to be possible, a darkness that might be felt would
settle upon our spirits, and the hands would indeed hang down, and the
feeble knees be paralyzed, and a strict silence on all moral subjects
become us best. But we must see with such eyes as God has given us; and
scepticism about faith and conscience is perhaps as unprofitable as
scepticism about touch and sight. God exists then, it is assured to us
by the common faith of mankind, by the highest law within ourselves.
And as He exists, to Him, and to no other, must we assign the place
of Creator. There cannot be two Gods. I cannot give my conscience to
one as its guide, and adore another for the wisdom of the universe.
God exists then, and His existence is not merely assumed in order to
account for marks of design in nature. And we maintain that the easier
supposition is also the truer. These marks of purpose are what they
appear to be, tokens of the wisdom of God. "Thou hast made heaven, the
heaven of heavens with all their host, the earth and all things that
are therein, the sea and all that is therein, and thou preservest them
all."[7]
If I were to venture to express in a few sentences the belief of a man
of ordinary education upon this subject I should say that God alone is
and can be the first cause of this universe, the mover of its motion,
the giver of its life. The wise purposes which shine forth for us
in nature, were in the mind of God from the first act of creation.
In saying that He has wrought by laws, we do not detract from His
power; we seem rather to enhance it to our minds in attributing to Him
constancy as well as wisdom. A law is not a restraint; it is a fixed
manner of working. To say of a painter that he never produces any but
fine works, does not affirm that he is less free than an inferior
artist; just because producing bad work is no power or privilege but a
defect. And so, when we admit that God works by law, and expect to find
the same spectrum from the sun's rays, which we have once made with
our own prism, at every time and in every place where the sun's light
shines, and so on, we do not narrow the power of the Great Artificer,
unless it can be shown that caprice is a privilege and a good. The
subject of miracles is not here to be discussed; I will only observe
that they are presented to us as parts of a great purpose for the
good of man; and that our Lord refused, when He was tempted, to work
wonders out of wilfulness, or only to astonish. The extreme jealousy
of scientific men of admitting any allusion to theology, in connection
with the course of nature, proceeds from erroneous conceptions of God.
Mr. Wallace, whom I have already quoted with respect, is ready to
admit that the Creator works in the beginning as the founder of the
laws on which the world is to proceed; but he is afraid of admitting
that there has been continual interference and re-arrangement of
details.[8] But this eminent naturalist attributes to us a conception
of the Most High which we do not hold, nay, which we energetically
reject. If the laws were wise and good, whence would come the need
of interference or re-arrangement? Who are we that we should bid God
speak once, and forbid Him twice to speak? The laws of nature are God's
laws, and God's laws are His utterance of Himself through the speech
of nature. God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and so His
laws remain the same. They are, if I may say so without irreverence,
the veil and vesture over the form of God, too bright in itself for
us to look on; they take their outline from Him who is beneath them.
You may continue your researches in full confidence that the laws
will stand sure, not because you have the slightest guarantee as a
man of science that these laws will never be interfered with; such a
guarantee you have on your own principles no right to ask. You are to
observe that the facts are so; that they shall eternally be so is not
for you, for that is all beyond experience. But the wisdom that made
the laws needs not to revise its work, and erase and insert and amend
its code. In the days of creation God saw that it was good; the eye
that so approved it changes not. Until the purpose that runs through
the ages is completed the laws will stand sure. But each new kingdom
of nature has introduced a change amounting to a revolution, which
neither the theologian nor the naturalist regards as an interference or
a caprice. When the principle of plant-life was introduced, the mineral
world became the material on which the plant-life worked; it gathered
into itself the lower elements, carbon, silica, nitrogen, and used
them as means of its own organic life. The plant partook of the nature
of the class below it, whilst it dominated and used that class. This
same took place when animal life was introduced. The beautiful plants
become the material whereon the animal life worked, the food whereby it
sustained itself. It was the same when man was added, in whom instinct
is replaced by reason, and ethical action supervenes over action by
impulse and appetite. Each of these kingdoms has much in common with
that which is below it. The animal is in many respects a plant; for the
diatomaceous creatures one knows hardly in which kingdom to find their
place. The man is an animal in much, and perhaps his animal instincts
play a larger part in the world's history and in his own development
than we are wont to allow. But each higher step brings in something
wholly new. "An animal," says Hegel, "is a miracle for the vegetable
world." Each step is a revolution in one point of view; but then the
lower state prepared itself for the higher, prophesied, so to speak,
of its coming, and the higher seated itself so easily on the throne
prepared for it, that we do not wonder to find it there. You call it
evolution; we call it a creative act. We think that God exists, and if
He acts anywhere it must be in this, the universe of things. Ἐξ ἑνὸς τὰ
πάντα γίγνεσθαι [Greek: Ex henos ta panta gignesthai] is an old saying
long before Christianity. But you and we may work by the same calculus
and rules of observation. The facts are the same, the interpretation of
what is behind them is different. Nor need we deny that the principle
of which Mr. Wallace spoke as "supreme in the world," has its truth and
its use in explaining the facts of creation. It never raised an inert
mineral mass into a vegetable organism; it never raised a plant into
an animal. It never raised an ape into a man. No facts have yet been
produced that go to prove any such leaps, and if our logic is to be
improved in anything by the light of experience, it is in this, that
facts should be recorded and generalised, but not assumed. But that
climatic conditions, and the struggles for life, have modified species,
and worked out new varieties, or new species, we may fearlessly admit;
it is one more proof, perhaps, that the world is a meet school and
training ground for the creatures placed in it for discipline. But a
law is not a god; it never ruled supreme; never was other than one
precept out of many in the Divine code of the world.
It has become the fashion with some naturalists to speak of God as "the
Unknowable." Mr. Martineau has finely observed, somewhere, that this
name is self-contradictory; for we affirm by the use of it that we
know so much, that He cannot be known. I go much further. It assumes
the existence of God, and in the same breath separates us from Him
for ever. Theologians have ever been ready to confess that God cannot
be known in His own essence to creatures such as we. "Lo! these are
parts of His ways: but how little a portion is known of Him? but the
thunder of His power who can understand?"[9] An uninspired writer
speaks the same language as the inspired. "For us that are men to talk
about divine things is as when the unmusical discourse of music or
civilians of strategy."[10] But shall we then sit down in despair, and
no more look up to God? We shall be untrue to our own best instincts;
we shall not have used all our means of enlightenment. I grant that
the mere contemplation of God in nature is not enough. Like the pillar
of cloud of old, it is at once light and darkness; a light to us in
contemplating the book of nature, a darkness to our hearts, shut in
with their own sins and sorrows. Naturalists have never done justice,
as it seems to me, to the most important facts of man's nature. Not
only can he study nature, but he can act in it and upon it. And this
power of action assures him of his freedom. Possessed of this gift,
that places him a little lower than the angels, he knows that he can
use it either way. He may follow his own foolish vanity, his own evil
wishes, and set up for his own law, and be his own God; or he may
return to Him, whence he came out, and offer to God the homage of his
own will, of his love, and his obedience. To one who has performed this
great act God is no more "the Unknowable." In the mutual commerce of
two wills, two spirits, the finite and the infinite, the finite rises
more and more, and sees more and more of Him who has manifested Himself
to us in His creation of the world out of free love, in His creation of
a free being to rule in the same world, crowned with glory and honor,
in His giving that free being a law of duty wherewith to rule himself,
in His having planted in him hopes and longings that will be satisfied
only in eternity.
Yes; man is humble and low. By every organ, and by every fibre he is
mated with some analogous creature in the brute world. He surpasses
them in the variety of his ailments, and the profundity of his pains.
He is part of a system, which naturalists tell us is hastening towards
night and death;[11] the motion of the power of nature tending plainly
towards universal rest. But
"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great,"
he has that in him which unites him to another sphere. To be able
to conceive of God at all; to have within him a will and a power of
worship, these make him one with God, and assure him against death and
darkness. To deny oneself this privilege of viewing the earth in its
relation to God, to shut out God artificially from that sphere where
the natural understanding has always found Him without assistance, is
a pedantry for which we shall surely suffer. God will find us out.
There is often a certain irritation in those who would exclude Him
from their sphere of view. They lose their philosophic calmness when
they speak of religious things. These are the tokens of past conflicts
and past quarrels, of a soul that might know more of God if it had not
refused. God is reflected in the world, in the man's intelligence, in
his conscience, in his will. "Whither shall I go from His presence?"
we seem to be saying. It is better to be able to say, "Whom have I in
heaven and earth but Thee?"
PANTHEISM.
BY THE
REV. J. H. RIGG, D.D.,
PRINCIPAL OF WESTMINSTER TRAINING COLLEGE.
PANTHEISM.
A hundred years ago the controversy of Christianity in England was
with Deism, and in France with Atheism; while at that time the
transcendental infidelity of Germany was as yet undeveloped, and the
name of Spinoza was nowhere held in honour. Now, however, deistic
infidelity appears to be obsolete, and it is universally felt by those
who have entered truly into the thought and controversies of the age,
that the question for the present is between Christian Theism and that
style of philosophy which recognises an impersonal divinity in all
things.
Deism grants too much to the Christian. If a man really believes in a
living and personal God, a Divine Maker and Ruler of the universe, with
a moral character and will, he finds it hard to deny the possibility
and probability of a revelation, and impossible to maintain the
impossibility of miracles. Having been obliged to yield thus far to
the Christian argument, the deist is unable thereafter to withstand
the positive evidence in favour of Christianity. Moreover Deism is
beset by the same difficulties in effect which surround the Christian
revelation, without its lights, its consolations, its blessings. The
man, therefore, who rejects Christianity seldom finds his resting-place
in Deism. He becomes a pantheist or an atheist.
Naked atheism, however, is a repulsive creed. It is a heart-withering
negation. It touches no sympathy; it stimulates no play of intellect;
under the deadly chill of its unlighted vacancy, imagination cannot
breathe. There is nothing about it refined, or subtle, or profound. It
is the barest and hardest form of infidelity, and has been professed
by the coarsest minds. It demands no effort to comprehend its one
universal negation and it taxes no skill to expound it. It is an arid
and barren, a cold and dreary, hypothesis, which no genius, not even
that of Lucretius, could make attractive. The old illustration is
conclusive as to its absurdity. It would be immensely less monstrous
to maintain that the Iliad, in its full perfection, might have been
the product of the "fortuitous concourse" of the letters of the Greek
alphabet, than that this infinitely wonderful and glorious universe
is the result of the "fortuitous concourse of atoms." Stark atheism,
therefore, however it may have flourished in the heartless and
hopeless France of a hundred years ago, was never likely to take root
in the soil of European scepticism as the alternative of Christianity.
In England it has had very few votaries. Nor has atheism, as such,
ever found favour in the land of Luther and Melancthon, the favourite
soil of mysticism and pietism. English deism and Scottish scepticism
did, indeed, produce potent effects in Germany a hundred years ago;
but the result was neither deism, nor such scepticism as that of Hume,
nor atheism, but a dreamy idealistic pantheism. And now Germany,
with a disastrous fidelity, by an infusion into our literature of
its pantheistic unbelief, has repaid to Britain the debt which it
contracted by its importation of English deism and Scottish scepticism.
At the present moment a pantheistic philosophy is the philosophy in
which unbelief for the most part invests itself in England.
Hence the task which falls to me to-day cannot but be felt by myself
to be one of very grave importance. I could unfeignedly have wished
that it had fallen into other and more competent hands. Perhaps,
however, I may venture to claim two qualifications which may, in some
measure, help to fit me for dealing with the subject on which I have
to speak. One is, that the subject of Pantheism is one which has much
and frequently exercised my thoughts for many years past, ever since I
learnt from the writings of Coleridge, Hare, and others the meaning
of what Hare spoke of as the "fascination of Pantheism;" ever since I
was led to the study of philosophy and its development, and especially
of the thoughts of the early Greek wrestlers with the mysteries of
being, of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists, and of the modern thinkers
of Germany, who have filled with transcendental exhalations of verbal
dialectics the vacuum in speculation which had been created by the
destructive logic of Kant. The other qualification which I venture
to claim for my task to-day is that I have some knowledge of the
difficulties of thought and belief which may lead honest men to become
pantheists; that I understand the manner of thought of one who has
become entangled in the mazy coil of pantheistic reasonings; at all
events, that I know that honest searchers after truth may reluctantly
become intellectually pantheists, while yet their heart longs to
retain faith and worship towards a personal God. If, therefore, one
necessary condition of true success in argument is an intellectual
and, as far as possible, a moral sympathy with one's opponents, that
condition, I believe, is fulfilled in my case. And I cannot but think
that all Christian controversialists ought to feel a tender sympathy
towards honest thinkers who are involved in the bewildering confusions
of a philosophy which they do not love, even although they may, after
many a struggle and in sadness of heart, have succumbed at length to
Pantheism as the only conclusion of controversy in which they are able
to abide.
My subject to-day is not the history of Pantheism, but its principles.
The history could not be dealt with in one lecture; the principles, I
hope, may. And whatever may be the intellectual genesis, the descent
and derivation, or the special character, of any particular form of
Pantheism, all its forms will be found to coincide in certain respects.
The semi-Hegelian of Oxford, and the pantheist who falls back on the
lines of Mr. Herbert Spencer's speculations as his place of defence,
may both be regarded as standing on common ground for the purpose of my
present argument.
In attempting a criticism of the principles of Pantheism, the first
thing to be done is to obtain as clear an idea as possible of what
is to be understood by Pantheism, as distinguished from Theism on
the one hand, and from Atheism on the other. There can be no doubt
that the difficulties, both metaphysical and moral, which attach to
the conception of a personal God, the Creator and Governor of the
universe, have, more than any other cause, constrained thoughtful
men who have pondered the problem of the universe, to endeavour to
escape from their perplexities and bewilderments by taking refuge
in the notion of a diffused impersonal divinity. And it must be
confessed that these difficulties are so oppressive and so staggering
to our incompetent human reason, that they might well tempt the
mere reasoner, the mere logician, the mere metaphysician, to give up
faith in a personal God, if so to do were not really to involve one's
self in more than equivalent difficulties of the very same class,
besides many other difficulties, and in truth contradictions, both
intellectual and also moral, which are involved in the pantheistic
hypothesis. That the alternative is such as I have now stated, that
the pantheistic hypothesis is necessarily beset with such difficulties
and contradictions, will in part be shown by the inquiry which, as
I have intimated, must needs come first of all in the criticism I
am to attempt. An investigation of the meaning of Pantheism, of the
characteristic idea proper to the intermediate hypothesis which rejects
equally A-Theism and Theism, will open to view the metaphysical
difficulties and contradictions involved in the hypothesis. I shall
afterwards try to show the incompatibility of the principles of
Pantheism with the true principles of natural science. The moral
considerations belonging to the Christian controversy with Pantheism I
shall reserve till the final stage in my argument.
Pantheism agrees with atheism in its denial of a personal Deity. Its
divinity of the universe is a divinity without a will and without
conscious intelligence. In what respect, then, does Pantheism really
differ from atheism? If we eliminate from our idea of the divinity
of the universe all consciousness, all sympathy, all will, what
sort of a divinity remains, what sense of a present and real divine
power is left to the man that shrinks from atheism? Atheism denies
that in, or over, or with nature there is anything whatever besides
nature. Does not Pantheism do the very same? If not, what is there,
let the pantheist tell us, in nature besides nature? What sort of a
divinity is that which is separate from conscious intelligence and
from voluntary will or power? Is it said that though there be no Deity
in the universe, yet there is a harmony, a unity, an unfolding plan
and purpose, which must be recognised as transcending all limitation,
as unerring, inexhaustible, infinite, and therefore as divine? Let us
ask ourselves what unity that can be which is above mere nature, as
such, and yet stands in no relation to a personal Lord and Ruler of the
universe; what plan and purpose that can be which is the product of no
intelligence, which no mind ever planned; what infinite and unerring
harmony can mean, when there is no harmonist to inspire and regulate
the life and movement of the whole. Do not the points of distinction
which the pantheist makes between his philosophy and the bald tenets of
the atheist amount in effect to so many admissions that the facts of
the universe cannot be stated, that the phenomena of nature cannot be
described, with anything like fidelity or accuracy, without the use of
language such as has no real meaning unless it implies the existence
and operation throughout universal nature of a supreme actuative and
providential Mind and Will?
The least and lowest implication which is involved in Pantheism, the
most elementary idea which the word pantheism can be held to connote,
the barest _minimum_ of meaning which the creed of the pantheist can
be presumed to contain, is that there is in the whole of nature--in
this universe of being--a _divine unity_. Let us then look at this word
_unity_, and consider closely what it must mean.
Those who believe in a divine unity pervading all nature must imply
that in the midst of the infinite complexity and variety of the
universe there is everywhere to be recognised a grand law and order
of nature--a method, plan, and harmony in the great whole, which must
consequently be traceable through all the parts. But whose and whence
is this grand law? Is it indeed a reality? Are all things fitted to
each other, part to part, law to law, force to force, throughout the
infinite depths of microscopic disclosures, throughout the infinite
exuberance of nature's grandest provinces, throughout all space and
all duration? Do all things work to meet each other? Is every several
life-cell, each organic fibre, moving, tending, developing, making
escapes or overtures, as if a separate angel of unerring sympathy and
insight, of illimitable plastic skill and power, of creative energy
and perfect providence, inhabited, inspired, and actuated it? Is it so
that the man of science, who enters into communion with nature's actual
life, and movement, and purpose, seems to see and feel divinities,
unrestingly, unweariedly, in silent omnipotence, in infinite diffusion,
everywhere at work, so that the reverent inquirer and gazer to
whom this wondrous spectacle is unveiled, could almost, in his own
pantheistic sense, adopt the invocation of Coleridge, and address the
powers he sees at work in such words as these:
"Spirits that hover o'er
The immeasurable fount,
Ebullient with creative Deity!
_And ye of plastic power that interfused
Roll through the grosser and material mass,
In organising surge! Holies of God!
(And what if Monads of the Infinite Mind?)_"
Is it so? I ask. Then, what does such a real harmony and such universal
correspondence and providence as this imply? Surely we must perforce
adopt one of two alternatives. If we refuse to believe in One Ruling,
Organizing, Creative Mind, One Living, Universal Mind and Will and
Providence, which works through all, we must endow each separate being,
or at least each form of life, with creative energy, illimitable and
all-answering sensibility and sympathy, unerring wisdom, and veritable
will. Nay, ultimately, as it seems to me, the alternative must be
between accepting the faith in an infinite God, and attributing to even
the particles of inorganic matter, amenable as these are to the laws
of gravitation and chemical combination, a wisdom, will, and power of
their own, the power of intelligence and of self-direction. As to what
are called the laws of gravitation and of chemical combination, we
know that a law, like "an idol," is "nothing in the world" but a name.
"There is no power but of God; the powers that be, are ordained of
God." A law is not a power; the laws of science do but define observed
methods of movement or forms of customary relation between thing and
thing.
Of one thing, at any rate, I think we may be sure, that a mere order
of nature, ascertained though it may have been by the truest and
surest induction, cannot have made and cannot sustain itself, cannot
be self-originated and self-impelled. So also it is certain that a
mere plastic universal power, apart from any creative or providential
mind, however its products might seem to imply intelligence, could be
animated by no conscious purpose, and could not be conceived as working
with blind automatic certainty conformably to a grand cosmical plan
or towards a providential end. And if the divinity of the pantheist
is nothing more than a personified law or order of nature, his
personification of this order or law can add nothing to its virtue
or potency, can by no means transform it from a phrase into a living
power, from a figure of speech into a real and intelligent force,
can never constitute it into a divinity. The more I reflect upon the
subject, the more assured the conclusion appears to be, that any
conception of a real unity in and of nature is self-contradictory and
unmeaning, except upon the assumption of a conscious and intelligent
Creator. The unity of nature, to a man who denies the existence of
a real God, cannot be a unity inherent in nature, cannot be a unity
according to which nature itself has been planned, and is really
working; it is an imputed unity, the conception of the pantheistic
philosopher's own mind. Unity, indeed, as apprehended by us--and it
can only be known through our apprehension of it--is essentially a
conception, a relative idea. If one could conceive nature as existing
destitute of a mind either to work on a plan, or to recognise a plan
in working, in such nature there could be no unity. Unity in action
implies a plan of voluntary working, and therefore a regulating mind.
Unity of conception and exposition implies an intelligent observer. The
unity of nature, if it be not the plan and work of the very God, can be
nothing more than a scheme and conception which has been invented and
imputed by man.
But perhaps it may be thought that the word unity, as used by
pantheists, should be understood rather as referring to the ultimate
oneness and identity of all force throughout the universe, than to
harmony of universal plan and purpose. Various as are the appearances
of nature, and the modes in which the laws of nature operate, it may
yet be set forth by the pantheist as his belief,--a belief, he will
say, which the modern advance of science tends continually to establish
as the true theory of the universe,--that all force is ultimately
one, that the different forces of nature are mutually convertible and
equivalent, that one energy of nature, Protean, universal, of infinite
plasticity and power of variation or adaptation, pervades and actuates
all things. It may be called gravitation, or electricity, or light, or
heat, or nervous energy, or vital force; but ultimately and essentially
it is one and the same; it is, to quote well-worn lines which will be
held here strictly to apply--
"Changed thro' all, and yet in all the same."
It
"Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
* * * * *
To it no high, no low, no great, no small,
It fills, it bounds, connects, and equals all."
Now if this be the pantheistic unity which is admitted by men who
deny a personal Deity, I will not stay to object that such a view is
hardly consistent with the essential distinction in nature which even
Professor Huxley and men of his school unwaveringly and powerfully
maintain, between inorganic matter and living forms. It is more to my
purpose to remark that it is much simpler and easier to believe in
a personal God, than in such an impersonal divinity as this Protean
Force. Every difficulty which belongs to the thought of God's existence
belongs to this also. This force must be self-originated, must have
been from everlasting, must be creative, omnipresent, providential,
equal to all plans, purposes, contrivances, inspirations, which have
been, or ever will be, in this dædalean and infinite universe; must be
the source of all intelligence, though itself unintelligent; of all
sympathy, although itself incapable of sympathy; must have formed the
eye, though it cannot see, and the ear, though it cannot hear; must
have blossomed and developed into personal intelligences, although
personal intelligence is a property which cannot be attributed to
it; must unquestionably be omniscient as well as omnipresent, or it
could not, in its infinite convertibility, anticipate all needs,
meet all demands, answer in absolute and universal harmony to every
faculty, capability, and tendency of all things that are and all
things that become. Now is it reasonable to object to the doctrine of
a personal Deity because of its inconceivability and its stupendous
difficulties, and yet to believe in such a primal, essential,
immaterial, creative, infinite, blind and unintelligent force as
this? Surely no contradiction could be greater. The conception of God
as from everlasting _is_ stupendous. But an infinite Protean Force
from everlasting, destitute of intelligence and will, yet continually
operative as the life, soul, wisdom, and providence, of all things, is
nothing less than contradictory and absurd.
I can come to no conclusion, accordingly, but that Pantheism really
only differs from atheism, in so far as it confesses that it is
impossible to speak with ordinary propriety, or in any such way as to
meet the necessities either of science itself or of the common sense
and feelings of mankind, without employing theistic language. It has
been said that hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue. So
a profession of Pantheism is the tribute of compliance at least in
speech, is the outward language of homage, which theism has power
to extort from atheism. "Pantheism," as is said by the author of
_Lothair_, "is but atheism _in domino_. Nothing," as the same writer
adds, "can surely be more monstrous than to represent a creator as
unconscious of creating."
Yes, Pantheism is but veiled atheism. Strip Pantheism of all
involutions of thought and all investitures of language, and in
its naked truth it stands forth as mere atheism. Every form which
Pantheism takes, every disguise which it assumes, to hide from itself
and from the world its real character, is a testimony borne by atheism
to the necessity which all men feel for assuming the existence of
Deity; What Robespierre is reported to have said with reference to
political government and national well-being, that if there were not
a God, it would be necessary to invent one, is felt by pantheistic
philosophers to be true in regard to nature. So monstrous a conception
is that of this universe without a governing mind; so clearly and
directly to the common sense of mankind do the infinite harmonies of
the universe seem to imply a designing and governing Intelligence; so
indubitably does the might and life of the universe, ever coming forth
anew, ever springing up afresh, ever unfolding and advancing, imply a
central living Power, One with the infinite governing Intelligence;
that pantheists, in order to speak and write intelligibly, are
compelled to invest nature with the qualities which they deny to the
Deity, to attribute a spirit and intelligence to the whole machine,
because they deny the existence of the great Mechanist; to personify
a harmony and unity which is but an abstraction, which, on their own
hypothesis, is but a grand accident, a result without a cause, because
they refuse to believe in a personal God.
I am very far indeed from wishing to come under the definition of
what Mr. Hutton has spoken of as the "Hard Church," or to carry my
positions merely by the use of the dilemma, yet I cannot refrain from
saying, parenthetically, that the argument of the dilemma, carefully
and truly applied, is not only always legitimate but often necessary,
and I must affirm that it applies very closely in the present instance.
The pantheist cannot maintain his position midway between atheism
and theism. If he absolutely refuses to be a theist, it is necessary
to show him that he will have to yield to the cruel necessity of
acknowledging himself to be an atheist. Standing midway, his position
is altogether untenable, from whichever side it is assailed. On the one
side, the pantheist is condemned by the same arguments which condemn
atheism; on the other side, the atheist may justly allege against
the position of the pantheist the self-same difficulties which both
pantheist and atheist urge against theism.
But if pantheism be in reality only atheism, I may henceforth
disregard the verbal distinction between the two, and bring forward
considerations and arguments which apply indifferently to either.
In pursuing the discussion I shall take up in detail some points of
argument already, as to their general scope, more or less distinctly
intimated in the preliminary considerations which I have advanced.
To explode any view of the world which excludes from it the presence
and government of a personal God, nothing more is needed than to
realize and truly understand the atheistic view in its various aspects.
Let us try the atheist's theory on the history of the universe, and see
whether it can be made to fit, or must be broken in the attempt to fit
it.
The will and interference of God, as the Lord and Ruler of the
universe, is excluded. The universe is held to have been from the
beginning without a shaping and ruling intelligence and will. No
mind has presided over its destinies, has animated its energies; no
providence of Divine power and wisdom has guided its changes and
progress, has renewed and replenished and sustained it. It follows
that no power or will from beyond itself has ever touched the
universe. Its own unaided and unguided powers have done all. If the
universe did not make itself, it has developed itself: all that has
been, or is to be, was included potentially in that which was at the
beginning, and has unfolded in necessary order. The vision presented
is to certain minds very fascinating: it is a vision of vast unbroken
progress, of continual and infinite self-development. But let it
be worked out, and let us consider what it really means. Such an
hypothesis must lead us back, in the infinite dim distance of the
original and indistinguishable past, into a universe-mist of germinal
powers from which all has since developed.--But stay. Was this mist
and expanse of universal nature in its _origines_ all homogeneous
and at one stage of existence? Then I have to ask, whence came it?
What, going ever further and further back, where were the infinitely
earlier, fainter, evanishing entities or powers, into which infinite
creative force and potentiality was diffused? and what the one life
and grand harmony of influences and impulses, tending towards an
infinite goal of progress and perfection, which pervaded the whole?
What does all this mean? Is this easier, simpler, more rational, than
to believe in God from everlasting? Is anything gained in simplicity,
comprehensibility, probability, or in scientific character, by denying
that in the "increasing purpose" which "runs through the ages" there
is any guidance of a divine intelligence or working of a divine will;
and calling the whole process from first to last, from everlasting to
everlasting, "development"? What is this word development but a name?
Does the use of the word explain anything? Does the use of the word
reduce the mystery of the universe to the simplicity of an axiom? Does
the use of the word provide a simple equivalent for all that divine
wisdom, power, and providence, have ever been imagined to do for the
universe? Men call the mystery of being and becoming by the name of
development, and then say that all things are effected by development,
and that development explains all! Whereas this development of which
they talk so familiarly, as though they understood all its secrets, and
were privy to its infinitely various and mighty workings, and could
unfold its source and meaning, is itself all the time the very mystery
to be resolved and explained. Development is in truth as amazing and
incomprehensible a mystery as creation. It seems to be but another
word for creation. Only they who affect its use instead of the word
_creation_, insist upon creation without a creator. The unintelligent
and unconscious universe, on their view, is continually creating itself.
The hypothesis of development, however, is not only unintelligible and
utterly devoid of reality, when criticized in its general principle;
as might be expected, it altogether breaks down when it is tested
in detail. Professor Huxley's protoplasm breaks it down. All the
scientific evidence, as that eminent teacher of science showed at
Liverpool last autumn, is opposed to the idea that protoplasm was
developed out of inorganic matter. The hypothesis of spontaneous
life-generation appears to be exploded. Science, at any rate, on its
own positive principles, has no right whatever to pretend that life has
ever been developed out of what was not living. Here, then, a great
and, so far as science can help us to form a judgment, an altogether
impassable barrier rises to view against any development hypothesis. At
a certain stage in the history of the universe protoplasm, organized
life, made its appearance on the scene, starting up as a perfectly new,
an original, an undeveloped phenomenon. Before, all had been inorganic
and dead; now Life was abroad in the world, destined to increase and
multiply, and replenish the universe. Let those who deny divine and
creative will and government, inform us whence came this life. It was
not developed. Must it not have been created. If not, then whence, I
ask, whence did it spring?
The argument which I have just urged should, as I venture to think, be
conclusive even with those who know, and seek to know, nothing more
of science than the order and method of its phenomenal processes. I
will now bring forward a consideration which will, I hope, be admitted
to have weight by those men of science--it is to be greatly lamented
that there should be so few of these--who have studied the nature and
working of the mind as well as the phenomena of sense. We have seen
that protoplasm--that Life--was not developed out of inorganic matter,
but appears to have been an entirely new and primary fact on the face
of the universe. Life came in and appropriated, put to its own uses,
bound up under its own seal, impregnated with its own specific virtue,
the raw inorganic materials which it found in nature; but the power of
Life itself was altogether new. A fact in some sort analogous to this
confronts us in a higher sphere, in the sphere of living intelligence
itself. I refer to the emergence of personal consciousness among
the world of living creatures. To me it appears that the sense of
personality is an altogether new and original fact, one which cannot
be conceived as developed or developable out of any pre-existing
phenomena or conditions. Whence it comes, or how it arises, I know not.
But it appears to be, in and of itself, the assertion of an essential
separateness between One's Self and all phenomena, all constituents,
all conditions whatever. The sense of an I Myself, of Personality,
asserts an antithesis between the Man, and all that the Man uses, takes
up into his personality, makes his own. As Life binds up inorganic
matter under its seal, but is not developed out of inorganic matter, so
the voluntary and responsible Self binds up under the seal of its own
personality all that belongs to the manifold life of its complex being.
As life brings into the universe a new world of phenomena, higher and
more manifold than those of mere inorganic matter, yet embodying and
adopting these, so personality brings into the universe a new world
of vastly higher and rarer phenomena than those of mere vitality,
yet embodies and adopts these:--it introduces all that belongs to
reflection and morality, giving birth to an intelligence and a world
of thought, in which all the lower and anterior phenomena of the world
become matters of cognisance, and are mirrored as objects of thought.
As I venture to think that this sense of personality, with the new
world of reflective consciousness and morality which it brings in, is a
fact, starting up in the midst of a universe of anterior developments,
such as all Mr. Darwin's solvents utterly fail to touch, a phenomenon
which remains as far from explanation as before he wrote his last book,
so it appears to me that the power of human speech is another fact
starting up in the midst of the line of supposed developments which
no hypothesis of evolution can afford any help towards explaining.
Miraculously developed reason, something higher, as it seems to me,
than any development of human reason our race has, in its highest
culture, as yet put forth, must have been necessary in order to the
invention of language by any race even of the most sagacious mammals.
And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument,
in order to the high development of reason. We have some idea what
deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and
kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper,
and affections, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of
man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not indeed deaf, but
congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate
expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. What would the
development of human reason have been under such conditions? How, then,
is it possible to conceive that the wondrous faculty and instrument
of speech was ever invented and perfected by mammals of infra-human
faculty and development, and that they were afterwards through this
invention developed yet more highly, until they attained to the dignity
and advancement of humanity? Such infra-human mammals must have been
more miraculously endowed in order to such an invention than ever man
himself has been.
After all that Mr. Darwin has written, does or can any reasonable
man or woman actually believe in the possibility,--_apart from the
Divine Power and Will and Guidance_,--for that is the point,--of the
self-development, the spontaneous upgrowth of articulate language?
Let us study our quadrupedal familiars, for the sake of illustration
and analogy. We see daily how our noble dogs strain and groan after
speech, do all but speak: we mark their eloquent looks, their speaking
gestures, their wonderfully expressive movements, how they watch us
speak, and seem as if they understood what speech is to us, and as if
they craved most longingly the power for themselves. We cannot but
sympathetically admire the intelligent, the benevolent, the noble, the
sagacious physiognomies which they show. If any creature ever could,
would, or did develop speech in any rudimentary form, are not they
just in the circumstances to do it? And when once rudimentally begun,
however uncouthly and imperfectly, should not their organs continually
improve by the continual effort and the increasing intelligence? Is it
not immensely less hard of belief, and less difficult to imagine, that
dogs should develop speech, than that man should have been developed
from the larvæ of the _ascidiæ_? Yet is there even a beginning made
towards the canine development of articulate language, or does any
living man believe that such a beginning ever could be made?
To me it appears that human speech and human personality are in some
way bound up with each other, that the one, in some sort, implies
the other, and that these two characteristics of our race present an
insuperable obstacle to the acceptance by really scientific thinkers
of any hypothesis of evolution which, leaving God out of nature, would
account for the whole existence and progress of the universe on the
principle of spontaneous development.
But again, let me be allowed to test the development hypothesis in
detail at another point. This hypothesis--and any pantheistic or
atheistic view of the universe which professes to be scientific--is
obliged to confess that all living beings, of whatever sort, have been
developed out of a single primary cell--called often a germ-cell--of
protoplasm. Here they find the beginning of every kind of life. The
plant, the animal, of every sort,--the lichen, the cedar, the sponge,
the bird, the mammal, the minutest entozoon, the most microscopic
infusorium, and man,--have been developed out of these primary
cells. What then do the same men who teach us this, find to be the
constitution of these same cells, when microscopically examined?
They find them to be, for the most part, and indeed always, if
allowance be made for very trivial exceptions, identically the same.
The matter is identically the same, the appearance identically the
same; no difference whatever of constitution, form, or properties,
is to be detected. They cannot tell whether the nettle, or the frog,
or the eagle, or the man, is to be developed out of any given cell:
for anything their science can teach them, any of these might be
developed, as they call it, out of any cell. But if this be so, is it
scientific, is it real or true, is it not altogether misleading, to
speak of _mere development_ in such a case? The flower may be said to
be developed out of the bud because the bud is the flower in miniature,
the flower is really folded up in the bud. But surely here is no
case of mere development; here is no unfolding out of the germ-cell
of what is potentially contained in the cell, regarded as a merely
material organism. Judged by every test of physical experiment, the
primary cells are identically the same; and yet they grow into forms
essentially and infinitely dissimilar. Does it not clearly appear that
here is a matter in which some power above and beyond the mere physical
constitution and nature of the primary cell must be admitted, on every
principle of science, on every ground of pure candour and truth, to
be of necessity present? Is it not evident that with each germ-cell
there must be associated some individual life-power which animates
the cell, which uses it as a unit to multiply, as a foundation to
build upon, which does build and weave and work into it and upon it
continually new material, which, for its own use in its work of weaving
and fabricating, and for the completion of its own distinctive form
and vehicle, takes toll of air and earth and water and heat-power--the
ancient elements--selecting out of them its appropriate pabulum,
in whatever chemical combinations of the primary elements known to
our modern scientific analysis may be fit and needful? Surely not
development, but life, the mystery of individual life, is here. And
if the philosopher will deny the omnipresent creative and sustaining
power of God, it appears to me that he must be prepared to animate
each germ-cell with an individual intelligence which works with divine
power, on a definite and most miraculous plan, and towards a distinct
goal of perfection. To call such various powers and processes, such
diverse and generically different operations, in every sphere of life,
by the same term, appears to me to be unscientific; to speak of them
all alike as processes of unfolding or development, when results the
most infinitely unlike and separate are obtained from beginnings
which are identically alike, appears to be not only unscientific but
altogether misleading.
I do not think it arrogant or unwarranted to conclude from such
considerations as I have been trying to set forth, that evolution,
or development, apart from the power and guidance of the Living God,
is an unphilosophical, an unscientific idea, an empty, an unmeaning
word. It is a thing of naught, utterly impotent to solve the mysteries
of the universe, even when expounded and reinforced by Mr. Darwin's
"Natural Selection." I have not a word to say here against the views of
Mr. Darwin, as defined and modified by the requirements of scientific
modesty and precision. If I had any pretensions to be called a student
of natural science, I should sit at the feet of Mr. Darwin when he
speaks, not as a philosophic theorist, but as a scientific observer
and a truly inductive naturalist. But I must say here in respect to
Natural Selection, regarded as, according to Mr. Darwin's hypothesis,
the handmaid of development, that, like development, it is but a
name, and not a power. It describes the order and mode according to
which Providence works; it is not itself a force--a working energy.
Mr. Darwin himself indeed often speaks as if Natural Selection were
itself a power and a providence. I find to my hand in Mr. Kingsley's
fine, suggestive paper on _The Natural Theology of the Future_,
recently published in _Macmillan's Magazine_, a sentence of Mr.
Darwin's in regard to Natural Selection which I will quote. "It may
be metaphorically said," writes Mr. Darwin, "that natural selection
is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation
even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding
up that which is good, silently and necessarily working whenever and
wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being."
"It may be metaphorically said," are Mr. Darwin's words. But in fact
he is using, not a metaphor, but a personification. The distinction
Mr. Darwin does not see. He repeatedly speaks of his personifications
as metaphors. But the distinction notwithstanding is most important.
By personifying Natural Selection Mr. Darwin makes it appear to be a
cause, attributes to it a real power, nay, wisdom and providence, as
well as power. He speaks in one place of "Nature's power of selection;"
contrasting this with the "powers of artificial selection exercised
by feeble man," by which, however, man can do so much; and arguing
that "Nature's power of selection" must be incomparably greater, and
competent to produce incomparably superior effects in respect of "the
beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all
organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions
of life." Language of a similar sort he very frequently uses. He has,
therefore, as a scientific man laid himself open to the reproof of M.
Flourens, whom no one will deny to be a scientific critic. "Either,"
says M. Flourens, "Natural Selection is nothing, or it is nature, but
nature endowed with the attribute of selection--nature personified,
which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has
done with personifications." The nineteenth century ought to have done
with personifications; but with the spirit of Lamarck's speculations
the style of the French atheistic philosophy of the last century
reappears.
Mr. Darwin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Kingsley, describes the
manner in which his Natural Selection may be conceived as operating.
What, if his meaning were expressed with strict scientific truth, he
ought to intend to say, is that such as he describes is the result
of providential working according to the mode and order which he
designates by the phrase Natural Selection. "All we ask," says one of
Mr. Darwin's ablest critics, "is that we may be allowed to believe in a
God and a real Divine Providence, as powerful and wise and good as Mr.
Darwin's Natural Selection."
But, moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is something besides
the mere process of change and growth, of what our philosophers call
development, to be accounted for. There is a fact on which the growth,
the change, the evolution, must be held in a true sense to depend: a
prior fact to be taken account of. The growth proceeds upon a plan,
and fulfils an idea: protoplasm itself embodies a scientific principle.
But as the seal must be before the impression, the original before the
copy, so the principle must be before its embodiment, the plan and the
idea must be before the growth: the end, towards which as its goal the
growth or development proceeds, must have been conceived and set up
as an aim before its fulfilment began. We are bound therefore, if we
would exhaust the problem, nay, if we would truly conceive, and justly
state it, to ask how and whence the principle, the plan, the idea, the
end, had their existence? These are realities; they are the most inner
and essential realities in every instance of growth or development;
to deal only with the development of the physical basis, is to leave
untouched the kernel of the matter, is altogether superficial and
unreal. But principles, plans, types and ideas, ends contemplated in
movement and progress, these at any rate are not physical, are not
matters of sense and organization. They are, as I have said, prior to
what is physical, they are conditions antecedent to organization and
growth. Moreover, they are mental conceptions, not physical affections.
They are only possible, they have no meaning, except as the thoughts of
some mind. Here, then, we are brought back by an inevitable necessity
to an antecedent mind, the seat and origin of all the principles, the
plans the ideas, the ends, embodied in organized beings, and fulfilled
in their existence, growth, and perfection. In short, from whatever
side we contemplate the problems of nature, and whencesoever we take
our point of departure in their investigation, we find ourselves
brought face to face with creative mind. The things which are "seen and
temporal" lead us always inwards to "the things which are unseen and
eternal;" man and creaturely existence conduct us to the living God.
If any one would escape from the pressure of this argument by hardily
denying that living organization involves principle or plan, type or
idea, purpose or end, it can only follow that the living forms of the
universe are an infinite congeries of accidental combinations, that in
reality there are no such things as organs, that there can be no such
thing as development, and that there is no such thing as law. What men
call law is mere sequence that happens to follow regularly. The whole
universe has been constituted and regulated by the fortuitous concourse
of atoms. Against such a conclusion as this I do not need to argue. It
is the naked and repulsive atheism of which I spoke in the introduction
to this lecture. The line of argument which I have been pursuing seems
to force us to the conclusion that there is no logical resting-place
between such theism as Christianity teaches and such Democritean
atheism as that of which we have now had a glimpse.
But if this be so, it follows that it is impossible to deny design and
final causes in creation, and the sway and oversight of a universal
Divine Providence, the providence of a living God, except by denying
all law. To the Christian theist, science is living science indeed; to
the pantheist, no less than the atheist, science is hardly better than
a dead register. He may talk of the wisdom, the power, the order, the
benevolence, of nature. But such expressions on the lips of a pantheist
are utterly illusive. All the wisdom, all the marvellous adjustments
of nature, are but the happy conjunctures, the exquisite chance
unisons, of he knows not what. When lost in admiration of marvellous
organizations, complexly apt and beautiful contrivances, of what seem
like the most studied and beneficent provisions, the soul that is
beginning to glow with wonder at this seeming wisdom, and to swell with
thankfulness because of this seeming love, must be chilled into blank
confusion and amazement by the thought that there is no Being of Wisdom
and Benevolence Who is to be thanked and adored because of these His
marvellous works. Surely this is enough to darken the universe to the
explorer of nature's mysteries, and to fill his soul with perpetual
melancholy. Nor is it easy to understand how any man of true science,
any real inductive philosopher, who comes into contact with nature's
living processes and hears the perpetual whisper of her living voice,
can be ensnared into the acceptance of such a hard mystery of sceptical
belief as this.
Surely, then, on purely scientific grounds,--the grounds not only of
metaphysical but also of natural science, on every ground which can be
appealed to by high and pure philosophy, we are at liberty, I should
say we are bound, to reject the hypothesis which attempts to expound
nature and to solve its mysteries, without the admission of a divine
mind. Sense and matter and the observed order of phenomena do not
constitute the whole of our science. There are some words written by a
poet, too much neglected at the present time, which I cannot forbear
from quoting here.
"How should matter occupy a charge
Dull as it is, and satisfy a law,
So vast in its demands, unless impelled
To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
And under pressure of some conscious cause?
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains, and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire
By which the mighty process is maintained,
Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight
Slow circling ages are as transient days;
Whose work is without labour; whose designs
No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts;
And whose beneficence no charge exhausts."
Surely, if I may here quote some words of Mr. Kingsley's in the
lecture to which I have already referred, this is what men of science
"are finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena
which the scalpel and the microscope can show, a something nameless,
invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent,
retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve, that
which the old schoolmen called 'forma formativa,' the mystery of that
unknown and truly miraculous element in nature which is always escaping
them, though they cannot escape it, that of which it was written of
old, 'Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee
from Thy Spirit?'"
The observations which I have thus far offered are directed wholly to
the philosophical and scientific aspect of the argument respecting
Pantheism. I cannot bring this lecture to an end without referring to
the moral branch of the argument. The existence of evil in the universe
is alleged as an argument against the existence of God and divine
government. Doubtless, the existence of evil is a painful mystery.
Many good Christians have felt it to be an oppressive and almost an
overwhelming mystery. It is one of the difficulties attendant on the
Christian's belief; it is, in fact, the one moral difficulty. But
difficulties and mysteries cannot annul the positive necessities of
thought and argument. If such arguments as I have endeavoured to state
make all science to be contradictory and unintelligible which speaks,
in one breath, of the laws and wisdom of nature, and, in the next,
denies the existence of a God, then we are bound to accept theism with
its inevitable consequences, notwithstanding the mysteries, whether
metaphysical or moral, which our faith may involve. Mysteries are not
contradictions, and, in whichever direction we move, we shall find it
impossible to escape from them. Mysteries surround the position of the
sceptic or the atheist, no less than that of the Christian theist;
not only mysteries, but, as we have seen, contradictions, beset him
round, in whichever direction he turns. The Christian theist, by his
faith in God, accepts the mysteries which are involved in the thought
of God, but, unlike the unbeliever, he escapes from contradictions and
absurdities. It appears that the morality of man--his great glory--that
his sense of responsibility and of voluntary moral power, that which
most peculiarly constitutes him man, involves the law of moral
influence as between man and man. It appears further that the power
and faculty of moral influence for good must needs involve the law of
moral influence for evil. From the fact of man's own moral nature and
moral responsibility, and the consequent fact of his moral influence
over his fellow-men, is derived, not only the possibility of moral evil
in the case of a solitary individual, but the possibility, perhaps
I may say the naturalness, the probability, of a contagion of moral
evil spreading throughout the race, the effect of which can only be
counteracted or limited by moral arrangements and influences specially
constituted for that end. So much I may perhaps say in general,
although the subject is one on which I think it wiser, as a rule, to
say nothing. I feel it to be a profound and perilous mystery, however
gloriously it may have been made the occasion for the manifestation in
Christ Jesus our Lord of the Divine superabounding wisdom, mercy, and
power. But if we admit the subject to be involved in profound, even
terrible mystery, is that a reason why, making shipwreck at one plunge
of all that belongs to humanity, faith and hope and philosophy should
commit suicide, and descend together into the gulf of everlasting
darkness and despair! Reason may reel and grow dizzy while it looks too
long and too absorbedly down the fearful and fathomless depths of the
mystery of sin, but that is no sufficient cause why reason should cast
itself headlong into the abyss.
Pantheism has only one way in which to escape from the mystery of
evil, and that is to deny all distinction between right and wrong,
between moral good and moral evil. Of course there can be no such thing
as sin for the pantheist, because all, according to his creed, is
nature and development and necessity. Holiness is a matter of taste or
sentiment. Conscience is an illusive development; what we regard as
divine morality is but utilitarianism sentimentalized and exalted into
sacred law under the influence of unenlightened impulse and antique
superstition, a mere affair of the association of ideas which science
will some day explain away. The ontology and ethics of Pantheism may be
summed up in one sentence, "Whatever is, is; and there is neither right
nor wrong, but all is fate and nature." Pantheism--I say Pantheism just
as truly and completely as atheism, for the difference between the
two, as we have seen, is but one of name and phrase, and both alike
deny God and conscience--Pantheism thus does cruel violence to every
better instinct of our nature, outrages all the demands of religion and
government, whether human or divine, and makes itself the direst foe of
human progress and well-being. Many pantheists, doubtless, have been
and are virtuous, even noble, men; some, I am prepared to believe, may
even, in a certain sense, be religious men. But the direct tendency
of the pantheistic philosophy is confessedly what I have now stated.
When moral and pure, its pure morality can be nothing more, at least in
theory, than a refined utilitarianism. Only as such can any pantheist
pretend to impose morality as law.
To sum up, may I not say that Pantheism, whether in its metaphysical or
its moral aspect, is the dream of men who will not admit that there is
in the universe anything beyond what their senses immediately reveal
to them? Its philosophy was represented in the last century in its
lower and more popular form by Condorcet; the basis of whose system was
laid in the principle, "penser c'est sentir,"--thought is nothing more
than sense or feeling; in its higher and more intellectual form it was
represented by the sceptical sense-idealism of Hume. At the present day
Bain and Mill have endeavoured to develop the principle of Condorcet
in harmony with the higher and more subtle philosophy of Hume. The
result appears to be a sort of nihilistic sense-idealism. Matter is
probably nothing different from our mental ideas--so far Berkeley, no
less than Hume, is followed; our ideas, however developed, are yet
essentially only the combination and interfusion of our sensations
and sense-associations; meantime there is no evidence of the real and
substantial existence either of the world outside us, or of ourselves
as true and separate selves or persons, or of God. Such at least would
seem to be the metaphysics of the distinctively _English_ school of
Pantheism, _i.e._, of Pantheism rendered into philosophic system by
the English mind. The German Pantheism has _infected_ the _tendencies_
of English thought and criticism, but, notwithstanding the influence
of Hegel at Oxford, has not been reproduced in any English system of
egoistic Pantheism. In their aspects and results, in relation to
theism and Christian faith, the German egoistic Pantheism and the
English sense-idealistic Pantheism strictly coincide.
Such then is the highest philosophy to-day of those who, refusing to
be called atheists, nevertheless reject all faith in God; of those
who, rejecting Christian theism, claim to be positively neither more
nor less than the men of science. Men of science though they be,
their philosophy is the philosophy of nescience and the philosophy
of despair. We need be under no apprehension that such a philosophy
will ever be generally accepted. It is too strong, too sorrowful, too
nauseous a composition to suit the common taste. It not only dissolves
morality and its foundations, but it precludes all hope of immortality.
The race indeed may be immortal and progressively great and glorious,
although how even so much can be known is more than I can see; but the
individual man by man, woman by woman, child by child, perishes each
one for ever. Men and women with yearning, loving hearts, with tender
and passionate affections, who have buried their dead out of their
sight, and who could not endure to live if they were doomed to sorrow
without hope, cannot but reject with loathing and horror such doctrines
as these. Men of various culture, of manifold intellectual resources,
who live in the midst of refined and accomplished society, and who are
not suffering from the pang of immedicable anguish and irreparable
bereavement, may possibly live so merely intellectual and speculative
a life, may be so wholly absorbed in mere science, may have so far
separated themselves from all that belongs to the heart's affections
and the trembling religious sensibilities of human nature, as to adopt
the philosophy of nihilism with hardy calmness, although I confess
that it passes my power to understand or conceive this; such men may
be content to follow their speculative conclusions into the "blackness
of darkness" for ever, and may thus, if not less, be more than the
common crowd of humanity. But such a philosophy will not content
those who share the ordinary wants and sensibilities of our race. The
working, sorrowing, loving, hoping men and women of this human race
will no more be able to satisfy themselves with any atheistic or, if
any should prefer so to call it, pantheistic philosophy, than they can
"feast upon the east wind." They will cleave to that Christian truth
and faith which has "brought life and immortality to light," and which,
in "showing" to the craving heart of needy, sorrowing, sinful man "the
Father" reconciled in Christ, has blessedly "sufficed" a longing world.
Indeed, it would seem that, when, it comes to the point, even
distinguished leaders in the ranks of those against whose views I have
been arguing, find it impossible to give up their faith, at least in
immortality. Rénan is unquestionably one of the most distinguished
leaders among those men of learning and culture who deny the existence
of a creative will and Personal God. Yet Rénan cannot make up his mind
that he has lost for ever his beloved sister; that she has passed
into the night of nothingness into which he must soon follow her. In
the dedication to her memory of his "Life of Jesus," he addresses an
invocation to "the pure soul of his sister Henriette, who died at
Byblos, Sept. 24th, 1861;" and appeals to her "to reveal to him, from
the bosom of God in which she rests, those truths which are mightier
than death, and take away the fear of death."
Rénan, then, after all, cannot give up his sister, nor, if it were
only for her sake, his belief in immortality. And yet how utterly
unscientific is such a belief, if science is to be defined and limited
in accordance with the principles of the anti-theistic philosophy.
Where can our men of mere sense-science find any physical basis of
immortality? There is no hope, no instinct or faith, at once so
indissolubly bound up with our nature, so necessary to the development
of all that is best in man, and so utterly destitute of evidence and
basis in merely natural science, as our assurance of immortality. If
we are to retain our belief in immortality, we must maintain our faith
in realities above and apart from sense, in realities which cannot
be tested or investigated by any appliances of natural science. If
immortality be true, Pantheism cannot be true.
What, then, have we found respecting the seductive and too fashionable
illusion which has led astray so many minds, especially of speculative,
restless, and daring intelligence, in the present age? We have found
that Pantheism is essentially only atheism in disguise, and occupies
a position in which it combines against itself the arguments which
theists have to allege against atheism, and atheists against theism;
that, while it dethrones the true God, it sets up in His place
Development and Natural Selection as its divinities, clothing them
with the attributes which it denies to deity; that its development
hypothesis will not bear the test of science, of the natural science
to which it professes to appeal; that the origin of protoplasm, the
attributes of man, and the growth and transformation of germ-cells,
alike refuse to accord with the hypothesis; that the very nature of
science itself, as recognizing law and organization, is incompatible
with any philosophy which denies theism; that the moral difficulties
which rise up as a barrier against a denial of the Christian theism
are no less insurmountable than the metaphysical and scientific
difficulties; that morality, conscience, natural affection, immortal
hope, every deepest, most tender and sacred, most blessed and
humanising, instinct of our nature is violated by the denial of a
personal and holy God and Judge; in a word, that our whole humanity
revolts against it.
May I venture to hope that the views which I have now endeavoured to
set forth may have some weight with young and inquiring spirits? No
more terrible suffering can there be, than for an honest, loving, and
virtuous nature to become involved in the meshes of pantheistic doubt
and unbelief. We must make up our minds to bear with many profound and
painful mysteries which are not to be solved by man; but may the good
Spirit of God save us each and all from losing our childlike faith in
His almighty, omnipresent, and absolutely good and holy government and
providence!
POSITIVISM.
BY THE
REV. W. JACKSON, M.A., F.S.A.,
LATE FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD.
POSITIVISM.
Everybody in this room has, I suppose, heard of the "positive"
sciences, or "Positivism" in some shape or other.
What does "Positivism" mean?
A system based on _positive_ facts. But what are facts? They are (says
the Positivist) observed phenomena. As for metaphysical conceptions of
all sorts, these are _negatives_ with nothing real, nothing positively
true in them. Truth must be sought amongst observed phenomena.
It is worth our while to examine this last proposition. Take a
"_phenomenon_." You have all observed colour,--what is it?
A physicist, if you ask him, will tell you of a modification in a
ray of light variously produced--by refraction, for example--as when
sunlight breaks a dark cloud into many-tinted beauty. But how if all
the world of men and animals were blind?
The physiologist will step in and speak to you of the structure of the
eye--the susceptibility of its retina for special impressions; there he
says you may find colour.
Put both accounts together, and they appear as part-causes, each
a factor helping to make up a result; which result physicist and
physiologist would agree to call colour.
Yet again: Suppose the human and animal world were deprived of all
consciousness, all which in the widest meaning we call mind--their eyes
remaining like mirrors, telescopes, microscopes; perfect instruments,
only every kind of intelligence, instinctive or rational, gone. Where
would colour then be? The sun might play upon cloud or rain, the light
of a rainbow be reflected in the eye. Were there but perceiving mind,
the impression would exist. But we are supposing the impressible to
be wanting; there is no sensation, no percipient; colour must remain
unknown, for there is nothing capable of observing it.
Now this shows you, first, how important it is to emphasize the word
_observed_ added to phenomenon. It shows you, secondly, _where_
the ultimate seat of every observation really lies; each observed
phenomenon, each positive fact, is at last neither more nor less than
a mental state. The evidence for each fact is the condition of your
own mind, your consciousness as it is called. You may sift the thing
witnessed, verify, examine, and cross-examine; but after all, your own
consciousness is the first real evidence you have got.
It would seem, then, that the most positive of all sciences would be
the science of mind; and the next most positive the sciences which
enable us to draw conclusions from our positively existing mental
states; the statements, we may call them, which our minds make to
us. Yet, strange to say, the very first thing Positivism does is to
dispense with a science of mind, as mind, altogether. Mr. Mill makes
it a severe reproach against Comte, that he ignores both psychology
and logic; recognizes no power in the mind, even of self-observation;
accepts no theory even of the inductive process. Mr. Mill characterises
Comte's want of mental science as "a grave aberration."[12] It is
indeed so. This appears plainly enough in the example just adduced
from our commonest sensation, the every-day phenomenon of colour.
It was made up, you saw, of three factors, a physical antecedent, a
condition of the sensitive apparatus, and a mind which received into
its consciousness the impression instrumentally conveyed to it. This
last, you will remember, was the _first_ fact to us. It is _the_ fact:
the revelation of an outward world, its changes and its continuing
presence, its rest and its constant motion. Without this fact of inward
consciousness, nature would have possessed no more significance than
pictures seen in the eyes of the newly dead.
Such being the case, it needs no argument to show the importance
of making quite sure that our interpretation of nature is correct.
If there be any unobserved illusion in our sensory instruments, or
what must evidently be much worse, in our percipient mind, truth is
at an end, and falsehood received in its stead. Hence the necessity
of observing our own observations, subjecting our consciousness to
scrutiny, and being acquainted with the criteria, not only of our
perceptions, but of our judgments. It is this process of analysis and
criticism which forms a large part of the method of verification,--a
method the value of which did not escape the great Greek philosophers,
though some recent writers seem to fancy it a modern discovery.
Inexperienced observers are often so little aware of the pre-eminent
importance of this critical process, that I will detain you with an
illustration of it for the benefit of my younger auditors. My example
shall be taken from perception _par excellence_--our eyesight, _the_
sense pronounced surest both in poetry and prose. You will remember
your Horace
Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem,
Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quæ
Ipse sibi tradit spectator.
And almost everybody else has said the same, as witness the old
proverb, "Seeing is believing." Now I will mention five instances in
which people believe they see something, and do not see it; in other
words, the objective antecedent is wanting, and the impression is
produced partly by the sensory apparatus, partly by the mind itself. As
I describe these instances one by one, let my hearers ask themselves,
How does this illusion come about? Is it produced by our optic
instrument or by our mental activity?
First, then, Take a lighted stick, and whirl it rapidly round and
round. You believe you see a circle of sparks--in reality it is no more
than a simple train, and on a like illusion the Catherine-wheel is
constructed. Again, put yourself in the hands of an optically inclined
friend, and let him operate upon you thus. He shall place a cardboard
down the middle axis of your face, quite close against your nose--one
side of his board, say the right, coloured a brilliant red, the left
a vivid green. After an instant or two let him suddenly substitute
another board, white on both sides. Do my young friends guess what will
follow? Your right eye will see green, your left red--the reverse of
what they saw before; yet neither will see correctly, for both eyes are
looking at uncoloured surfaces.
Thirdly, Watch the full moon rising--how large and round she looks,
resting as it were upon that eastern hill, and seen amidst the tops
of its forest trees! How much larger and broader than when she hangs
aloft in upper sky! Has every one here learned the true reason why?
If not, look at her through a slit in a card, and her diameter will be
the same. Fourthly, A schoolboy is crossing his bedroom in the deep
dark night, anxiously hoping that his head may not come into collision
with the bed-post. Though carefully and successfully avoiding it, he
imagines of a sudden that the blow is imminent. Quick as thought he
stops to save his head, and, behold, the room is as quickly filled
with sparks or flames of fire. Another moment, and all becomes dark
once more. I have heard many a schoolboy exclaim over this phenomenon,
but never knew one who could explain it. Finally, did you ever, on
opening your eyes in a morning, close them quickly again, and keep them
shut, directing them as if to look straight forwards? Most persons of
active nervous power, after a few trials--say a dozen, or a score--are
surprised to see colours appear and flit before the sight. Some years
ago, Germany's greatest poet tried, at the suggestion of her greatest
physiologist, a series of experiments on these coloured images. He
found that by an effort of will he could cause them to come and go,
govern their movement, march, and succession. And this took place
under no conditions of impaired sensation, nor any hallucination of a
diseased mind. A thoroughly healthy will succeeded in impressing itself
upon physical instruments, controlling their law, and creating at its
own pleasure an unfailingly bright phantasmagoria.
Some here may, others may not, have apprehended the distinctions
between our five cases. The first two are due to the sensory apparatus,
its optical laws of continued impression and complementary colour.
In the latter three, mind intervenes. The enlarged size of the moon
occurs through rapid comparison, the fiery lights in a dark room
through instinctive apprehension, both influences of mind on the
sensory system. The fifth and most interesting of all is no bad
example of interference between moral and material law. The will truly
causative (you may remark) overrules the natural process of physical
impression, alters it, and creates a designed effect. I wish I could
induce my young friends to devise a number of experiments on similar
mixed cases, and, having tried them, to dissect out their real laws.
These sharpenings of the critical faculty are exceedingly useful--they
cultivate clearness; and most people know that two-thirds among our
mistakes in life are caused by confusion of thought.
Besides all other uses, such lessons teach at once the necessity, as
we said before, of observing your own observations. And as, first, the
real witness of every observation is our mind; every fact[168] which
comes through our bodily senses being to us a mental impression, it
seems but common sense to hear above all things what mind has to say
for and about itself. Then, secondly, where would be the benefit
derived from our observations, if we could not reason upon them,
or could place no confidence in our own reasonings? Yet the art of
reasoning is so purely a mental process, that it can be represented by
symbols as abstract and free from material meaning as if they were bare
algebraic signs. Thirdly, in the most accurate of sciences mind extends
our knowledge far beyond the circle of observation, and gives us
axiomatic assurance of its own accuracy. Who ever saw, or ever can see,
all straight lines in all conceivable positions, yet who doubts that
throughout the whole universe no two straight lines ever did inclose or
can inclose a space? And, fourthly, can it be a matter of indifference
to any of us what evidence the mind offers concerning its own moral
nature, and what is the value of that evidence, and the laws deducible
therefrom? How true it thus appears that "know thyself" lies at the
root of all knowledge, and that the man who receives no witness from
within can know nothing as he ought to know it!
Comte swept away all these and the like considerations by a neat little
fiction of his own. We cannot observe ourselves observing, he said, we
cannot observe ourselves reasoning. So, then, logic becomes a chimera,
and psychology a word of contempt. Respecting this fallacy, Mr. Mill
thinks the only wonder is that it should impose on any one. Clearly
it imposed on Comte himself. But, "what organon," asks Mill, "for
the study of our moral and intellectual functions does M. Comte offer
in lieu of the direct mental observation which he repudiates? We are
almost ashamed to say it is phrenology!" Mill regards this statement
as a _reductio ad absurdum_, but the actual organon substituted is
more absurd still. Comte's phrenology was not the phrenology of Gall
or Spurzheim, but a funny small bantling of his own, a sort of "infant
phenomenon," called into existence not without a Positive purpose. In
plain words, mind was no longer to give evidence respecting itself. We
must study its laws in brain. How any true correspondence of brain and
mind could be known unless both were studied, does not appear. Comte
overlooked the question in his anxiety to substitute for psychology and
its laws a bodily function and _its_ laws. Yet his motive appears to
have been excellent! He regarded this dwarfed superficial phrenology,
Mr. Mill tells us, "as extricating the mental study of man from the
metaphysical stage, and elevating it to the positive." The chief gist
of which sentence, bewildering to the uninitiated, opens up the very
core and centre of the Positive system--a subject for dissection of
some considerable human interest.
Each science is brought into the positive stage when it is co-ordinated
according to positive laws--"systematized," Comte would say. He has
a perfect mania for systematization; system is with him almost an
equivalent for truth. Of course, the real value of every system turns
entirely on its co-ordinating method, or principle of formation; and
Comte's, we see, was one of positive laws. The nature of these laws is,
therefore, the essence and turning-point of the whole matter. I cannot
impress upon you too strongly the paramount importance of keeping this
truth steadily in view.
But if any one inquires exactly what these laws are, he asks, I fear,
a puzzling question. Puzzling, for this reason that, say what one
will--employ any words, however carefully selected--one may become
liable to the charge of raising a false impression. Positivist _savans_
themselves do not use any uniform phraseology, and many phrases they
do use are necessarily derived from philosophies most disedifying to
Positive ears.
Examples showing what sort of law is really meant are therefore always
welcome; and few could be more instructive than this way of making
mind Positive. Comte did not falter in his purpose. Later on he
explained the necessity (for his system, you understand) of bringing
our intellectual and moral phenomena under the same law with other
phenomena of animal life; and reduced them, not to brain action pure
and simple, but to cerebral functions, controlled by the viscera and
vegetative movements of our bodily existence.
Let us look at the meaning of all this. Soul used to be conceived of
as different in _kind_ from body. The brain, the nervous system, the
body, were its organs, allies, machines. Sometimes they, especially the
instruments through which the soul more immediately works, exercised
reaction on their sovereign employer; they impeded or suspended her
functions, and troubled her serenity. But though they might cloud the
manifestation, they could not destroy the essence of a living soul.
What they did was temporal and transitory; but they shall pass away and
be dissolved, while soul will endure for ever.
The word mind has been much used to signify soul, as acting in and
through body. There is, however, some vagueness in its employment. Yet
we constantly speak of the laws of mind, because soul is in this life
the partner of body; and therefore known to us as mind, and _as_ mind
is studied through its laws. One psychological task has always been to
separate the pure activity of soul from the mixed workings of mind, by
examination and cross-examination of our internal consciousness.
You will now easily understand how vast the change Comte intended by
his physiological organon for the study of our moral and intellectual
functions. You will see what is meant by elevating mental science
to the Positive stage, and systematizing it under laws which people
may variously describe as phenomenal, mechanical, or material;
adjectives all roughly used to express the same general idea. What we
took for a spiritual essence is only a developed animal nature, the
difference between men and beasts of the field is not one of _kind_,
but of degree. ManKIND is a misnomer. Humanity is (as Comte thought)
a higher degree of animality. We have no right to suppose a personal
immortality. Man may be said to live after death in the memory of his
fellow-men, but the truly Positive philosopher believes in no other
deathless existence. What we really can see and investigate is a vast
moving mechanism, _our_ universe. Beyond this all knowledge is a blank.
We know of nothing which set this mechanism in motion; it may have
moved from all eternity; it may go on moving everlastingly; or it may
wear itself out. Philosophy can teach us no more than distinctions
and degrees in the phenomenal law which pervades and rules a universe
without a God.
Yet Comte said that he was no Atheist. He even denounced Atheism, and
declared it as bad as theology. He did not wish to deny, only to ignore
God. Neither did he desire to appear ungrateful; (pardon words which
sound in your ears profanity;) God was a really useful hypothesis once;
in the days when men had recently issued from their primæval forests.
Thanking the Deity for His provisional services, Comte courteously
dismissed Him from His throne.
All this will have seemed to you a most monstrous tissue of negations.
But Comte held it to be a code of Positive faith; a faith firmly
grounded on the self-sufficingness of human nature, read according to
his version of course--void of belief in a personality which survives
the grave, without knowledge of, trust in, or prayer to God. The
blessings of this advanced faith he desired to extend far and wide.
At the present moment his desire is realizing itself; for the like
attitude of thought has become a favourite position among the _savans_
of our Western world. When it penetrates the more active classes, we
shall discern it easily by its _fruits_! what those fruits will be, is
a question for statesmen and for us all.
The chief hindrance opposing its spread amongst unsophisticated minds
has been a point much dwelt upon of old by Plato, and by Cicero after
him. It is the protest which that irrepressible entity called soul
perseveres in alleging. We are all apt to shrink from the picture of
bodily dissolution:
"To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod!"
But what if the "delighted spirit" has been developed by brain, and
with brain must be dissolved? Our whole distinctive human life,
our mind, moral, intellectual, spiritual, rebels against a doom
of subjection to that crass material law! Yet can we establish a
difference? Can we show that the law of our true being differs from the
law of things outside us?
This question, unspeakably interesting to every one of us, might be
put in various shapes. We might ask, Can the protest of soul be set
down as a mere sentiment only? If it were no more than an instinct of
our nature, it would deserve consideration; for why should so high and
noble an instinct be aimless and misleading? If we cannot trust our own
souls, what are we to trust? Phenomena themselves are given us within.
Mathematical truths, which Positivists are obliged to exempt from
phenomenal law, have a subjective validity--we cannot help thinking
them, and we cannot think their contradictories.
But suppose that a future state of recompence with its
inferential moralities cannot be denied without denying our own
consciousness--pronouncing the clearest of our intuitions a will o'
the wisp--or, sadder still, a corpse light on the grave of hope--nay,
more, without subverting the law which makes human society to differ
from animal gregariousness, and gives to human action its spring, its
liberty, its life--suppose all this true, what shall, what can we say?
And such is the issue I propose to try this morning.
The plan I have devised for trying it fairly is, first, to get as
clear an idea as short compass will allow of what Positivism says
on our question. Afterwards to state a case for moral law by way of
antithesis. It is through the law of our moral being that we may most
readily look for something to difference our souls from creatures below
them. The strain I shall have to put on your attention lies in this;
after grasping in brief the Positivist attitude, I must ask that you
will not take my facts or arguments on trust, but will verify each
severally by an appeal to your own consciousness. It is always upon the
law deduced from or applied to facts that you ought to exercise your
greatest vigilance. For law interprets facts to us--we might almost say
that under its manipulation they bend like a nose of wax; nothing, you
will remember, so flexible as figures, except facts.
Let me represent these maxims to you under a similitude. Everybody has
looked (when young at least) through a kaleidoscope, and has observed
the beauty of its many-coloured figures, their symmetrical shapes,
and the enchantment of their succession. What magic creates this
phantasmagoria? Some pretty bits of coloured glass, shining gewgaws,
scraps of lace, fripperies, and other odds and ends, are put into a
translucent box, and beheld through a tube fitted with mirrors which
are set at an angle determined by optical law. The broken knick-knacks
represent the facts of everybody's phenomenal kaleidoscope; the
reflecting angle under which they are seen is its law; the coloured
images are everybody's impressions of things, nature, and mankind.
As long as you live, remember that whenever you are contemplating
the world's phenomena--whenever you see facts of life, either great
or small, you are looking at them through some optical instrument or
another. If its law accords with their law, your view is truthful;
but then it will be all the less pretty, the less symmetrical. There
are dark spots in our real world, checks of all sorts, moral evil,
anguish of heart and conscience, foresights, stern accountabilities!
You have lost your childhood's magic glass, and have got a clear
reflecting telescope in its stead! Pity to forego the nice kaleidoscope
where all was so bright, so harmonious, and arrayed in such regular
shapes. Yet the view it gave was worth what most people's views are
worth--precisely nothing!
Comte had his kaleidoscope. Every systematizer who allows no mystery,
no darkness anywhere, must keep the article; in point of fact, most
people enjoy having one. Alas! for the 19th century! It has such a
feverish viewiness, such a fashion of incessantly turning its magic
tube, that life seems little else than a dreamy phantasmagoria!
To construct a steady reflecting instrument for yourself requires
industry, time, and thought, three things which few people care to
bestow upon their beliefs. Therefore the practice is to pick up
kaleidoscopes ready-made at a cheap rate, and to feel as easy as stern
realities will permit on the subject of their truthfulness. Romances
are the kaleidoscopes of one class, cram-books of a second, newspapers
of a third, self-love the optical law of the greatest number. We are
met this morning to break up a grand kaleidoscope, and to look into its
construction. I shall do my endeavour to prevent you all from replacing
it by any instrument of a ready-made sort. The easiest plan for all
lecturers is to display a series of transparent conclusions; but I
shall prefer furnishing you with facts and arguments, letting you put
them together, look at them, and verify their law of true vision for
yourselves.
Let us see Comte's law first. It was, strictly speaking, a law of
succession and resemblance. You will guess at once that were this
all we could see in the phenomenal world, our insight would be very
limited. And Comte's object was to limit us. We can never know,
Positively speaking, final causes; those which make up the common
notion of design, purpose, intention. Nor yet any efficient causes;
nothing truly productive of an effect, as men usually say. All we can
know is the middle of a chain of successive phenomena. The two ends are
absolutely hidden from our eyes. It was in this sense that Comte denied
causation--his language was vigorous; he denounced it as metaphysical,
and when Comte nicknames anything metaphysical or theological, he
means, as everybody knows, Anathema maranatha.
The difficulty here is palpable. A law of averages--a statistical law,
as it is often called, does not profess to account for anything; it
merely generalizes crude material, and gets it ready for scientific
thought to work out the true law. But a law of succession has an
imposing sound, and it does in the worst sense impose. The fallacy may
be shown in an instant. Day and night succeed each other regularly.
Does either _account_ for the other? The rotation of the earth is
simultaneous with both--it accounts for both. Its effect is to expose
the earth's two hemispheres alternately to the sun's rays. This
rotation coincides again with other laws of our planetary system, and
they account for it. It is on these laws, and not on such grounds as
Hume, Comte's great Positive antecedent, alleged, that we look for
sunset and sunrise. When they fail, the system of which our globe forms
part will have collapsed.
Such then was the original kaleidoscope of Positivism. It was condemned
for reasons which will have plainly appeared to you. Other eyes have
swept the field of vision this world offers, and other instruments to
aid our insight have been adopted.
You will not have failed already to remark the extreme vagueness of
that word "law." There are very few English words more vague: it
is applied to almost every sort of formula, force, principle, idea;
besides being misused in ways almost innumerable. You must therefore,
when busy with questions like the present, fix your attention upon
the adjectives added to it, and the examples selected by way of
illustration.
The Positive system is, according to Littré, of immeasurable extent,
embracing the whole universe. Thus, whatever was conceived in dark
preparatory ages, theological or metaphysical; whatsoever persons, who
philosophize in either of those antiquated ways may even now dream;--if
the conception cannot be reduced under Positive laws, it must be
regarded as non-existent. All that really exists is included within
such laws, the definition of which, therefore, becomes a subject of
the greatest possible importance. They are, he says, immanent causes.
The room we are in contains intelligent and educated people, but how
many here could define this word "immanent"? It and its correlative,
transcendent, are in truth metaphysical terms. If you will turn to
Mellin's Encyclopædic Word-Book (favourably known to metaphysicians for
purposes of pillage), you will find _immanent_ explained, under the
German _einheimisch_, into ten shades of usage. Probably, in common
English Littré might have said "inherent." "The universe," he writes,
"now appears to us as a whole, having its causes within itself,
causes which we name its laws. The long conflict between immanence
and transcendence is touching its close. Transcendence is theology or
metaphysic, explaining the universe by causes outside it; immanence is
science, explaining the universe by causes within itself."[13] Now,
one stock-in-trade example is that a stone falls to the ground by
virtue of an immanent cause. In plainer words, the stone belongs to
universal matter of which gravity is an inherent law. Next, we find
this same example Positively applied to the human will. Volition is
free just as a falling stone is free; it obeys its own inherent law.
Further, we read of "the rigorous fatalities which make the world
what it is." Comte, Littré, and others object against calling these
fatalities materialistic, because they distinguish gradations of law.
Yet they limit all human knowledge within the materialistic circle,
and Janet, who refuses to acquit them of Materialism, dwells on the
point that, instead of defining mind as an unknown cause of thought,
emotion, and will, it is said to be, "when anatomically considered,
the sum of the functions of brain and spinal cord; and when considered
physiologically, the sum of the functions of brain in consciously
receiving impressions."[14] We need not wish to dispute about words.
But suppose it had been stated in plain French or English that all
known or knowable objects in the universe are placed by Positivism
under the rule of laws as rigorous in their fatality as the laws
of matter, would not the ultimate point in question have been more
tangible, more intelligible? People might indeed have said, "Why, after
all Positivism comes to the same thing as Fatalism, or Materialism;"
and with certain writers this risk may very possibly be held a decisive
objection.
Once more,--another explanation given by Littré is, that Positivism
lies strictly within the "relative." Many here are aware how,
since Kant's time, England, France, and Germany have been flooded
with metaphysic, good, bad, and indifferent, on the relative and
the conditioned. Pity that Littré should have plunged into these
whirlpools! Ravaisson refers to Herbert Spencer and Sophie St. Germain
for the point that this conception, the relative, must always imply
the existence of an absolute, known or unknown.[169] I cannot follow
him now, but any one interested in doing so will find the subject
commenced at page 66 of his "Philosophie en France," (one of the
Imperial Reports), and continued through sections 9 and 10. It is a
very important discussion. Ravaisson stands out amongst Frenchmen as a
consummate master of his science; and he inclines to infer that Comte
tended, and that Positivism generally now tends, towards a final
return to metaphysic. However this may be, I fear I have tired you,
and am glad to quit this dry part of my lecture, and get away to more
common-sense ground.
By way of introducing our most interesting topic, let me draw one
common-sense conclusion from the difficult tract just shot over. During
our passage, a thought may have flashed upon you which I remember
hearing in a Bampton Lecture, somewhat to this effect--"Positivism is
the most negative system of all." It appears hard to avoid this idea;
for Positivism denies in express terms that human beings have any
knowledge outside those generalized laws of experience which make up
the Positive sciences. It denies (in a word) the most essential part of
what was formerly held to be a knowledge of mind, both human and Divine.
Positive thinkers rebut the charge of negativism this way. We confine
ourselves, they say, to what we know; we do not venture, like
Pantheists and Atheists, into the unknowable. We do not deny God, we
only ignore Him. We do not ask about the first cause of the world,
or whether it has a constructural final end. Such questions as these
are "disedifying." "The Positive philosophy," says Littré, "does not
busy itself with the beginning of the universe, if the universe had a
beginning--nor yet with what happens to living things, plants, animals,
men, after their death, or at the consummation of the ages, if the
ages have a consummation."[15] Littré's sentence, which I have rendered
_verbatim_, reminds one of the prayer told to Bishop Atterbury, as
offered by soldier on the eve of battle: "O God, if there be a God,
save my soul, if I have a soul!" I am sorry to repeat ill-sounding
words again; but is not this really the exact religious attitude of an
honest Positivist, who feels sometimes touched by visions of possible
life after death,
"Of all the nurse and all the priest have taught;"
that is, if we conceive his attitude according to the _least_ negative
interpretation put upon the system?
Continuing this least negative interpretation, let us view under its
light the Positive cosmology or theory of the world's existence; of
creation,--that is to say, if there ever was a creation. A stone
falls to the ground. Trying to account for the phenomenon, we grasp a
law inherent in the material world. Other phenomena lead us to other
laws. We contemplate the material world with its laws in operation,
a magnificent spectacle of moving forces; an organic whole, shining
through its own intrinsic glory of never-ceasing development. If we
turn and pursue the reverse road, and trace evolution back to its
elementary principles, we may dissolve worlds into primordial force, or
we may, as Professor Tyndall suggested at Liverpool, find the All in
a fiery cloud occupying space. Then comes the complex question,[170]
What beyond? What before? Whence, and How produced? a Positivist
thinker may return one of two answers. He may either say, "We do not
know," or he may say, "Nothing can be known." Take the least negative
first, as we proposed; it surely deserves this rejoinder: If you plead
ignorance, but surmise that knowledge is possible, you ought not, for
reasons valid with every true lover of wisdom, to stop here. You are
substituting for the ideas of creation and first cause, what you call
a primordial universe, a material condition of some kind, producing
phenomena regulated by inherent laws, successive, perishable, and
nothing more! All once believed beyond, a blank! Even the very name of
philosophy consecrated by consent of ages to the First and to the Last,
admonishes you. Renounce your vocation, deny your name, or proceed. We
demand a Positive result in the highest sense, not a fog of ignorance,
not a slough of despond. But if the second answer be the true one, if
the teaching of Positivism is that nothing more can be known, let us be
told so in plain words. Let no one be charmed into the Positive circle
by false allurements; for of all vices treachery and hypocrisy are the
most cowardly. Are you really wiser than the pagan Lucretius? If not,
why boast of 19th century discoveries in wisdom, insight, happiness?
If you have examined the relics of a primæval world, explored the races
of living and thinking creatures, if you have ascended to the starry
firmament, and traversed its shining hosts, to come back with shame and
disappointment, and tell us this is _your_ all, _our_ all, then indeed
the wages of your science is death. While you speak your final verdict
at least cover your faces,
"And, sad as angels for a good man's sin,
Weep to record, and blush to give it in!"
These thoughts have brought us to the most essential considerations
of this lecture. Whether the Positive _savant_ puts in a plea of
ignorance or of blank negation, we care not. We will treat it as a
challenge thrown down, and do our best to meet it. Succeed or not,
we will take no refuge in ambiguities, but maintain a truly positive
assertion. We say that the world we live in is not one world, but
two,[171] distinguishable through the laws by which each is governed.
There exists such a thing as phenomenal law; we accept the fact. But
distinct, broadly distinct, apart in its working, its elements, and its
final result, is moral law. An appeal lies to facts, and we shall try
to justify our assertion.
The mode of proof now to be adopted is not metaphysical. I mention
the circumstance because investigations into mind are apt to be
confounded with metaphysic, and are then supposed too difficult to
deserve attention. My argument will demand nothing beyond a hearing
and a scrutiny. It will consist of just so much mental dissection as
may be needful to show, first, a structural law of our inward nature,
and, secondly, to illustrate its workings and effects. These two sets
of facts will be placed side by side, in order that each may check
the other, and that their coincidence may also (as I hope it will)
furnish a fresh and sufficient proof of the contrast between moral and
material law. Everybody knows how convincing are, and ought to be,
facts separately ascertainable, yet converging into one and the same
conclusion.
One form of speech almost unavoidable ought to be remarked beforehand.
I mean the word freedom as applied to the human will and its volitions.
When compelled to use it, I shall do so only in the sense of
philosophic as contrasted with theological free will. By philosophic
freedom I understand that sort and degree of active choice free from
constraint which is required for the idea of responsibility, an
idea universally agreed on by divines opposed to each other on the
point of theological freewill. By this last-named idea I understand
supposed powers of spiritual attainment, which go to make up a notion
of self-sufficing moral strength. With it the present lecture, being
purely philosophical, can have nothing whatever to do, but I should
much deplore misconception, because any theory of self-sufficingness
would be repugnant to my own personal convictions.
Look now at the life of an animal, with senses often more
instrumentally accurate than ours. Survey the world around, which
furnishes the objects of his perception and his intelligence. The
mode in which that intelligence acts is held to be more or less under
the absolute rule of instinct, and creatures below man are commonly
described as those "that nourish a blind life within the brain."
Whether this be or be not perfectly correct makes no difference to
our present purpose. The point I want you to fix your thoughts upon
is the _directness_ of relation between the feeling or intelligent
principle of mere animal life, and the object perceived, felt, or
apprehended. Perhaps it may give vividness to your thought, if you
figure this relation under the similitude of a right line connecting
two points--object without, apprehension within. The line itself will
then represent the impulsive activity of a creature, as, for example,
when a hungry tiger leaps upon his prey.
Now this directness of action is _not_ the thing most marked in our own
proper human existence. What is really marked is the exact reverse;
the more truly _human_ any action appears, the farther is it away from
resemblance to that animal characteristic. Suppose a man acts like a
tiger, he is simply brutal; if he be governed by his feelings, however
amiable, we pronounce him weak or unreasoning.
Absolutely impulsive doings, such as the indulgence of an appetite,
blows struck in passion, or even in self-defence, we separate from
our volitions proper, and call them irrational and instinctive. In
educating children we check displays of impulse, we bid them pause
and reflect. And it is obvious that education presupposes an educable
power or principle, which principle self-education (the most important
training of all) will place in a clear light before you. Interrogate
yourselves, then. You will see that the mental power you most wish
to train and augment is distinguishable enough even in the commonest
affairs of life. Take a case of feeling. Some object--no matter
what--kindles an emotion within you--anger, wish affection, pursuit,
dislike, avoidance--and you feel strongly impelled to take action
thereupon. This would be the movement which was imaged to our minds
as a simple line. But to launch along it inconsiderately you would
feel neither proper _per se_--nor yet doing what is due to yourself,
because it is your human prerogative to act, not according to impulse,
but according to reason. And observe, to do, or to forbear doing, is
a question by no means determined by finding whether another emotion
be or be not stronger than the first. What reason demands is that the
impulse you feel, or it may chance the strongest of a dozen impulses,
shall become to you an object of careful scrutiny. You are bound in
honesty to scrutinize it; not only because it exists as an incitement
felt within yourself, but much, much more because it is felt to be your
actual self. It is your character which gave the spring, and lives in
the movement to action. Perchance this point of character is a hidden
nook, an unknown depth of feeling or desire, undiscovered, unsuspected
by your fellow-creatures--a secret of your inner self. Nevertheless it
is amenable to the tribunal of a more inward self still, to be brought
before it as an object that shall be examined and cross-examined,
sentenced either to vivid freedom or present suppression--it may
be even to extinction evermore! Each human being possesses this
wonderful self-objectivizing power. He is able to look at himself as
a NOT-self--a something partitioned off, and external; to be thought
about, felt about, reasoned about; to be controlled, chastened,
corrected. This power is our inalienable heritage; we cannot resign it
if we would; we cannot finally suspend its exercise. Mountains could
not crush, nor oceans drown it; flames of fire never burned it out from
the breast of one single martyr. Whether we use our birthright for good
or for evil, it still remains with us; when we act, our will is not a
feeling, an appetition, travelling simply from one point to another. It
is a movement of our world within, a movement of that microcosm called
Man.
Suppose a person resolves to employ this power aright. Some wish or
feeling, such as might drive a lower creature to instinctive action,
stirs within him, and becomes the object of his contemplation. To
the sessions of silent thought he summons whatever assistants he can
get; the witnesses of experience, prudence, duty, the golden rules
of the Gospel; whatever seems most proper to determine the question
at issue,--fitness or unfitness, to act or to abstain from acting.
He says to himself (as all here have done a thousand times), "This
longing, thought, state of mind, is wise or foolish, good or bad, right
or wrong; nay, 'tis I myself that am so!" And in thus saying he is
conscious of that sort of freedom to will or not to will, which makes
up responsibility. He does not deny--contrariwise, with the might of
his whole essential humanity he asserts--that the act of will is thus
taken out of the direct line of inevitable antecedency, away from the
physico-mechanical series, and enabled to commence a series of its own.
In a word, his consciousness evidences to him that functional law which
makes the human soul a thing more wonderful than all the inorganic or
all the animated universe besides. And the law thus evidenced is the
law of moral causation.
I said that our own soul thus becomes to us more wonderful than all
the known universe besides. I might have said more mysterious; so truly
_sui generis_ and different from all things not ensouled, as to be
inexplicable by human sciences, an enigma to itself, dwelling alone in
its own awful isolation. Do but think what _cause_ is--nothing less
than originating power; what then must it be in stern and sad reality
for a soul to originate a sin! Yet we cannot deny the fact. We confess
it every day, not only in our hearts and deeper utterances, but in the
commonest though most tremendous of words, the word responsibility.
If a man were in no true sense the cause of his own actions, he could
never be held responsible either by God or Man. But as long as Justice
maintains her seat, each criminal will be so held, so judged, so
recompensed. And the only principle under which Justice can justify her
judgments is the reality of moral causation.
If, then, this law be established, we have proved our point. Just as we
recognize a material world by mechanical law--and indeed our knowledge
of matter itself is only a knowledge of its laws--so in like manner,
and _pari passu_, we recognize a moral world by its distinctive law. We
live, therefore, not in one world, but in two:
"Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him."
The point is of surpassing importance! Upon it turns the whole issue.
"Can mechanism--or, as it is vaguely called, materialism--be or be
not accepted, with its attendant theories, as the truth; that is,
_our_ whole truth, all we have to live by and to die by?" Infinitely
important issue! having much to do at this very moment with the
happiness and real good of millions amongst our fellow-creatures and
fellow-countrymen. It is for this reason we must not spare pains to
demonstrate our moral law, for this reason also we will give some
passing sentences to show how worthless in argument is the sophism most
commonly circulated against it. Men speak of a "law of motives," with
complete assurance, and without seeming to be aware of the twofold
fallacy underlying it. Writers on the subject furnish statistics of
suicide, murder, and the like; and then ask how the freedom of moral
cause can be compatible with so visible a law? But what sort of a law
is this? Clearly not a law upon which the results are conditioned,
as sunrise on the earth's rotation; but a mere generalization, like
the laws of average before mentioned. Such a law does not govern the
acts, but the acts the law, or, in plain words, they _are_ the law.
It is an epitomized result, inferring no more consequence to our free
moral causation, than a life assurance infers to the contingency of
our individual life or death. The sophism would be readily detected if
it were not for that unfortunate word "motive." People forget that a
motive is not a power that compels us, but an object which we choose
to seek. "Will," we are seriously told, "must be determined by the
strongest motive." Now if, in thus speaking, the strongest motive
_objectively_ be meant, that is the motive essentially and in its own
nature the strongest, then indeed we may exclaim, "Would that this
were true!" For are not right, justice, goodness, absolutely and in
themselves the strongest? Yet men in general fail to pursue them;
they are chosen by those of whom the world is not worthy. But if, on
the other hand, the phrase "strongest motive" is to be understood
_subjectively_, and means that which on each occasion is _felt_ to be
the strongest; what form of sounding words has ever yielded a more
barren sense, a simpler truism? "Will must be determined by the choice
of will." It means this, and nothing more.
We may sum the whole matter of motive in a single sentence. Motives do
not make the man, but the man his motives. To conceive it otherwise
would be to imagine each man a mere bundle of instincts, such instincts
as we calculate with certainty in the brute animals we wish to allure,
to subdue, or to destroy.
"Be not like dumb driven cattle,"
says the Psalm of Life, and old Herbert exhorts--
"Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action."
The beast feels an incitement, and rushes direct upon the pitfall. It
is the prerogative of a true man to subsume (as logicians speak) each
line of impulse into the circle of his own soul; to deliberate in the
secret chambers of a being impenetrable even to his own understanding,
and to put in force the result which becomes as it were the free
manifestation of himself. When therefore you examine the actions of a
fellow-creature, and discern his motives, you praise or blame what? not
the motives, but the man.
Permit me to close this discussion by an example of the manner in which
we make and unmake our own motives.
No one present is so young, or so careless, as never to have felt the
pains of self-reproach. Some light or shade of life projects before us
the outline of ourself. By virtue of the law described, we view and
review it, as if it were the picture of another being. In contrast
with it, we place our own ideal, all that our boyhood fondly fancied
our manhood would become; the semblances of those we have loved and
lost; of the father, who taught us to prize truth and virtue above
earthly wealth and distinction; of the mother, at whose knee we knelt
in prayer, and whose upraised eye imaged the serenity of that heaven
to which she implored us to aspire. These beloved forms, robed in the
unfading freshness of a love stronger than death, stir our heart of
hearts, with accents unmistakable. They remind us of what we resolved
and trusted one day to be found, in thought, in feeling, and in life.
But, close to the glowing portrait of our purposed self stands the
dwindled figure of what we actually are; and, oh, the shame, the
anguish of that stern, disappointing comparison!
Among the lower creatures (we ask in passing) what is there to resemble
this self-reforming principle? In the domesticated animal, both beast
and bird, we see wounded affection, grief under a master's anger, and
desire to win back his love. In the gregarious tribes we find respect
for a common bond of what we almost may call utility; but has any sense
of wrong as wrong, or sin as sin, ever been found educable? Man shows
the mighty strength of this principle within him, even when he shows it
in its most repulsive shapes. The remorseful wretch who throws himself
beneath the wheel of Juggernaut, is a different _kind_ of being from
the horse or dog. And considering the self-interest, self-flattery, and
self-indulgence arrayed against it, may we not say that the root of
such passionate remorse has something sound in it, else it would long
ago have been trodden out from the life and heart of mankind?
For now, as always, our honest anguish and shame sow the appointed seed
of our noblest attainments. Those steps by which we climb our steep
ascent are hewn in the travail of our souls. David found it so, when
he heard the voice of Nathan saying, "Thou art the man!" and wrote
words which have come down near three thousand years;--"The sacrifices
of God are a broken spirit." "Of all acts," asks Mr. Carlyle, "is not,
for a man, _repentance_ the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were
that same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death; the
heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is
dead; it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history,
as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest
emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below."
Truest emblem indeed! In it, we see, as in a glass, how living in two
worlds we cannot but have a sympathy with each; insomuch that every man
feels himself to be two selves, not one; a spiritual and a psychical
man. "There is," says Sir Thomas Browne, "another man within me,
that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me." A _double_
consciousness which grows upon many a soul, until its truer choice and
better motives are attained:
"The life which is, and that which is to come,
Suspended hang in such nice equipoise
A breath disturbs the balance; and that scale
In which we throw our hearts preponderates."
This lecture started from the question, what is a phenomenon, and
how do we know of its existence? Seeing that our knowledge rests
primarily on the evidence of our own mind, we drew the inference that
Comte committed a fatal error when he banished the science of mind, as
mind, from his cycle. Reviewing his various devices, and some devices
of his successors, for eliminating psychology, and reducing the study
of mind to a study of bodily functions, we approached the stronghold
of Positivism,--law. And, after discussing the theories maintained
respecting it, we boldly threw down our challenge to this effect: law
phenomenal or mechanical admitted, we assert, the existence of another
kind of law. We say that the freedom of human choice between evil and
good is utterly unlike the freedom of a stone which falls by mechanical
law, and cannot choose but fall. The inference from phenomenal law
is the existence of a phenomenal world. The inference from another
existent law is that there is another existent world. Man, we affirm,
lives in both; has sympathies with both; and, by virtue of his double
nature, is a true citizen of both. The ultimate principle of man's
higher nature is to us inscrutable; for, even as the eye sees not
itself, so neither does the spirit of a man discern that which makes
it spirit. But, though we cannot know the soul, we can know much and
many things about it; things most important--nay, all-important for us
to know, since they distinguish the spirit that burns within us from
matter, from mechanism, and from mere animality. Hence we do not, with
the Positivist, ignore the unknowable. Contrariwise, confessing our
ignorance, where we are ignorant, we strive to observe and gather all
we can.
One thing that can be thus known is the principle of moral causation;
and this we have inductively investigated. We began by observing a
process in our own minds, a process or law of self-objectivity. I am
sorry to use such an uncouth word; but it saves a long description,
and you will all remember the fact. That process carries, on the very
face of it, adaptation to the purposes of moral choice, free from the
material necessity which governs a falling stone, and disengaged from
the control of such impulses as the incitement of ruling instincts. We
next verify this law by observing its operation; _first_, in single
acts of the Will accompanied, as you will recollect, by distinct
consciousness of choice and responsibility. It was in respect of
this conscious certainty that Dr. Johnson said, "We _know_ we are
free, and there ends the matter." We verified, a _second_ time, the
self-objectivising law, by its working and effects upon our motives,
which it makes and unmakes; eliminating some, adopting others, so as to
modify and alter our whole real character. Any one who is happy enough
to recall the slow advances of successful self-education, or a less
ordinary process by which old things passed away and all things became
new, may recollect with pleasure how this law served as an instrument
of change; how it placed himself before his own inward eye, even
daily, in freshly instructive lights, awakening new self-questionings,
emotions, aversions, desires, hopes, and stimulating to new exertions;
how it opposed itself to the mastery of any single dominant passion,
under which we say a man acts mechanically, because he has already
surrendered himself a slave to its sway; how it became a check upon all
day-dreaming or drifting with the tide, when again we are said to act
mechanically because we yield to circumstances as they flow, and live
a blind life, like creatures that cannot escape the chain of Instinct.
For, observe: let any instinct, even the noblest, be ever so nobly
developed, if we act from its impulse only, and not from a reflective
choice of the prompting which it gives, we are living below the image
of our true nature, because we are not striving to become a law unto
ourselves.
You may verify our moral law in numberless ways among the common
walks of life; and it really is a task of no great difficulty, if
you take with you the truth that the whole issue is summed in one
word--Responsibility. A falling stone cannot choose but fall; were
a man subject to material law, he could have no choice whatever.
Neither would it make any real difference, if the Will were impelled
by overpowering motive, and did not make its motive to itself. The
slate which slides from a roof, and kills a child, we do not accuse
of murder; we do not attach moral accountability to the hungry tiger.
It is because man is not impelled like stones or tigers, that we hold
him responsible. And we praise or blame in the highest degree his most
deliberate acts. The wrong he does with malice aforethought is a crime
in the strongest sense; the good he works with considerate purpose we
esteem his highest well-doing. In our time the wills of individual men
have changed the destinies of nations; and any one who reads books,
reviews, or newspapers sees a vigorous use of that word responsibility.
No one doubts that these powerful wills are the true causes of effects
felt throughout all Europe, effects which will remain when those who
caused them are in the grave; nay, even when generations--perchance
dynasties--shall have passed away.
In lower life, we honour the truly causative man who conquers a habit
of intemperance or any evil passion: it is greater to overcome one's
self than to conquer many cities. We deem every one accountable for
what he allows, or disallows, in relation to his God, his fellows, or
himself. In a word, we consider each man so far the true cause of his
own conduct, as to load him with responsibility.
Yes, responsibility! Do not shrink from the thought; it is wholesome
for all. Do but practise self-control enough to look yourself with
honest purpose in the face when you are about to act, you will never
suppose that you act mechanically, and you will seldom act amiss. If
you wish to benefit your countrymen, inculcate the grand lesson of
responsibility; for what well-informed person doubts that one main root
of our present social and religious ailments lies in compromise with
known immoralities, indolent acquiesence in hollow words, and lifeless
outside shows, where ought to be heard and seen the rigid truths of
accountability, duty, consistency?--all impossible without a practical
law of self-scrutiny and self-control. Yet further: Responsibility is
also an undeniable witness to a world of life beyond death. Just as
even Herbert Spencer himself has remarked, that the idea of relativity
involves the correlative idea of an absolute; even so, in thought,
responsibility involves its correlative belief, a recompence! But, in
morality, the evidence is stringent beyond expression. For, the idea of
responsibility is fixed in the nature of things; unchangeable, eternal.
And it contains in itself the loftier idea of personality. Leading us
to look for a world of righteous recompence, it leads also to belief in
a personal Being, before whom we are responsible, and who will award to
each of us our recompence. David travelled the same road to the same
conclusion, when he looked round upon men, who lacked mercy because
they lacked justice, and said, "Unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy:
for thou renderest to every man according to his work."
Did I not feel that my strain upon your attention must now cease, I
should have liked to show at length how the law by which we discover
moral causation, may be verified everywhere in the whole province
of mind. It is difficult, for instance, to look at the perplexing
questions raised about language, without perceiving that there
runs through its purely human formation the articulate results of
an element resembling internal dialogue; in other words, a law of
self-objectivising representation. In art, again, the perpetual efforts
of ages is to present our human manifoldness of thought, feeling, and
idea, before our one individual self. Hence the art formula of multeity
in unity. And what is the true bond of society as distinguished from
gregariousness? Is it not the Gospel's golden rule? But how can our
neighbour be viewed as a second self, unless self has been already
objectivised before our moral intuitions? We might follow the same
thread throughout the conditions of all philosophy.
The one thing we have to remember in every research concerning man
is that education, whether of self or others, implies an educable
principle; a germ, of which education and attainment are the bud, the
blossom, and the fruit. Therefore, if we want to know Humanity, we must
look to the educated human being. The philosopher, the artist, the
thinker of every sort, must have risen into clearness ere he can become
a typical man. Is it not, therefore, a mistake to appeal for theories
of human nature to the statistics (always statistics!) of ignorance and
savagery? When modelling our physical form, Buonarotti did not seek his
type in hospitals for maimed or distorted limbs, and exclaim, Behold,
such is man! Curious too, and contradictory, the way in which appeals
to barbarism have worked. In the 18th century we used always to hear of
that golden age,
"When free in woods the noble savage ran,
And man, the brother, lived the friend of man."
In the 19th, savage life is cannibalism, superstition, cruelty,
terrible, revolting, loathsome; perchance, time must yet pass before we
learn justice to our fellows of any age! Meanwhile, we may feel sure
that our human ideal is not to be found in the frost-bitten rickety
infant species; nor yet in its dwarfed and stunted adult; the cretin
and the imbecile will not give its lineaments; and it may be hard to
say which is least like a true man, the undeveloped or the perverted
creature. For example, what superiority in moral height has the
_savant_, whose self-satisfied science ignores or denies a God, over
the poor pigmy barbarian, unskilled in the use of fire, and living upon
berries and insects, who props himself against a tree with earthward
face, and prays, saying, "_Yere_, if indeed thou art, why dost thou
suffer us to be killed? Thou hast raised us up. Why dost thou cast us
down?"[16] Better perhaps the rude stammering of our race's childhood
than its half-speechless, half-paralyzed old age!
And here the argument of this lecture ends. Of causation in general,
and the grand subject of design, it has not been my hint to speak.
These vast topics have fallen into higher hands than mine. My aim was
limited to finding the _differentia_ of man--the moral characteristic
which places him in contrast with physico-mechanical laws.
It occurs to me, however, that you may employ ten minutes not
unpleasantly, upon what we can hardly help calling the romance
of Positivism. The story, taken from first to last--part comic,
part tragic--is as wild and weird as one of the Frenchman Doré's
pictures,--a story too strange to be thought true, if it did not
happen to have been true! It has also its stinging lessons, and they
follow naturally; evolved, as it were, from the motley and mystifying
commencement.
Comte's life has been written by friend and foe. For fulness of detail
the right book is by his disciple and executor, Dr. Robinet, who has
just figured among those who rule in the Commune of Paris. Robinet
is very interesting, for he thoroughly believes in his master, and
accepts the whole Comtist religion, calendar and all, which Littré and
others reject. No reproach this to Comte's biographer, for that same
worship is celebrated in our cooler atmosphere of England. The _Pall
Mall Gazette_ has, by its notices, made the celebrations widely known.
There is an account of the grandest yearly solemnity which will suffice
many, and excite the curiosity of more, in its number for January
7th, 1868. It is not hard to see that the worshippers differ from
the recusants by a strong feeling that they cannot live upon axioms
sounding like negatives. They want sentiment, emotion, excitement to
sustain them. Let us observe how Comte caught the first glimpse of this
requirement.
His life was sombre--a boy delicate and fractious, disliked by his
masters, turned out of the Polytechnique, repudiated by his great
socialist teacher St. Simon. His family relations not happy, his
marriage least of all. We cannot wonder at vagaries, for he had a
real fit of rampant insanity, and after release from an asylum had
nearly drowned himself in the Seine. His wife found him intolerable,
and left her home. Mr. Mill speaks of her respect for him;--it was
oddly testified after his death, for she pleads in law that he was a
madman, an atheist, and immoral; repudiates his will, and seizes the
consecrated relics of his dwelling. Littré supported her against those
who, like Robinet, thought her little less than blasphemous. If she had
appeared in an English law court, we should have known more truth than
we do.
Let us now look at such facts as we have from the more favourable
side. The man lived a lonely life, as became a sort of conceptual
alchemist, sustained by a belief that he was turning men's leaden
thoughts into his own pure gold. One brilliant projection of his has
made him the idol of Positivists. I confess it puzzles me, among
many others, to imagine how a qualified critic can treat such a
philosophic solvent either as true or as original. It supposes the
history of all human thinking to pass necessarily through three stages,
theology, metaphysics, positive truth; and that the world makes
progress accordingly. We will hope that the thing called theology, a
benighted belief in the government and intervention of supreme will,
is not altogether extinct in this age of progress; if it be so, Mr.
Froude encourages us to look for a revival. Among lesser matters, the
hypothesis of metaphysical cookery is an idea one fails to realise.
Was it a banquet with joints cut Laputa-like, after some fashion of
concepts, or syllogistic figures? Was it a "feast of reason and a flow
of soul," or, more probably, an abstraction pure and simple, as if a
man could
"Cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast"?
Comte's comicalities strike most people all the more because he writes
on, always utterly insensible to his own comedy. If any one wishes for
a serious critique in small compass, I may mention Stirling's appendix
to his translation of Schwegler's Handbook; Whewell in his Philosophy
of Discovery, and elsewhere.
Comte was most confiding in his own theory. Littré is not so confident,
for he has another theory of his own. But, putting aside the question
of its verification, we may remark that in the rough idea Comte showed
himself before his age. Positive thinkers have busied themselves with
physical evolution; for example, the development of a brain from an
oyster or an eozoon; but Comte was intent upon mental evolution.[172]
Man need not much care about the congeners of a body sprung from
earth; but soul is another thing. We trust our own spirit, as carrying
some image and superscription of God; we feel and conceive it to be
different in kind from sensitive life; we love to think of it in its
finality as a spark flowing out from Divine Light; a breath breathed
into body from above. In the reverse of this belief there is doubtless
an element unfavourable to happiness; it makes some men cynics, some
pessimists, some simply victims. Comte's infinite self-satisfaction
probably saved him from self-torture. But we judge that he felt his
condition deeply, from the rapture with which he hailed a new and
brilliant discovery!
Yes, it was the most wonderful of all his discoveries; he one day found
an unsuspected law of life within himself; he discovered that he had a
heart.
To many, this is the black spot on Comte's memory; they cannot receive
his love, nay, his frantic adoration, of the lonely wife of a convict,
absent in the gallies, as a piece of pure Platonism. Had Madame Comte's
allegations been sifted fully, we might have known all. As it is, I
for my own part like to think him innocent; he was mad from disease,
and perhaps from conceit; a conceit, says Mr. Mill, too colossal to be
believed without reading him up; but I trust he was not immoral. His
letters are against it, the lady's face is against it, and above all,
there is against it the lasting effect upon himself. After a year's
happiness to Comte, she died and left him, as he thoroughly supposed,
an enlightened and a religious man.
Poor Comte! His sweeter life was buried with the dead, who to him could
never rise again. His religion was no more than a funereal cult; a veil
thrown over it, no hope, no thought of reunion! The episode of Clotilde
was, in itself, one of those touches of nature which make the whole
world kin; the brief, bright, and long sad experience the solitary
had of his heart; the love, the loss, the unforgetting sorrow! But,
did it not prove, beyond the force of reclamation to disprove, that
Comte's system ends, at last, in what is commonly called materialism?
its faith (or negation of faith) being in effect this, that we look
for entire human dissolution coincident with bodily death. And the end
flows naturally from the beginning; all we think is phenomenal, all
we know is phenomenal, first and last. Our life is only a phenomenon;
and death, death joins us to the unreturning past. We are absorbed,
all that is good of us, into general and generic humanity; an Eidolon,
called the Great Being for our comfort; as if a name (what's in a
name?) could console us! The race we may have tried to serve is to be
our Euthanasia, our sepulchre, I had almost said our cenotaph!
Strange thought, not without a kind of serpent-fascination! Epidemic
in England now, gaining force from its unhallowed audacity! The
consistent pessimist, who rates men at the worst, thinks the worst in
himself, and does the worst by all others, and by himself, if he is
but fixed in this unbelief, need not fear what the world, man, or God
shall do unto him. It is the old whisper, "Ye shall be as gods!" 'Tis
superhuman to sit and watch the storm; to have our strong sensations,
illusions they are called in France; blood-poisons which circulate in
our life, working hot passion and mischief; sorrow to many a loving,
many a confiding heart; passion, mischief, sorrow, what matters it?
there comes an opiate by-and-by! The man of overwrought brain, used
up, worn-out feelings; the distempered dreamer; the reckless worker of
wrongs; the disappointed striver for an earthly crown, all shall have
their common slumber at last; unconscious, impervious, unbroken. I will
read you three stanzas from a longer piece written by one not unknown
always where that tree of knowledge grew:--
"Cessation is true rest,
And sleep for them opprest;
And not to be,--were blest.
Annihilation is
A better state than this;
Better than woe or bliss.
The name is dread;--the thing
Is death without its sting;
An overshadowing."
If such be the thought to them whose natural heritage stands strong,
fringed with luxurious hope to live beloved, to die regretted; what
will the "overshadowing" be when it passes, like a plague breath, over
the children of toil and anxiety, over them whose life is at best hard,
and their lot depressed and without "illusions"? Will they not want
their strong sensations? Will they respect any law, human or divine,
which stands between them and their enjoyments? Will they not crush
all who bar their pleasures, aye, choke them in their own blood? Why
not? The opiate comes to all at last. 'Tis an act of oblivion! The
overshadowing will cover all.
And this is the coming creed of the 19th century. To return to Comte,
about whom I might say much, but must not;--of course, he had no
foresight of anything worse than an immediate realization of his
crowning ideas--sociality, fraternity, Positivism. Europe split into
small states; women made incapable of property, but held objects
of religious worship; men worked on a communistic principle; an
oligarchy of rich; a spirituality of Positive believers, with a supreme
infallible pontiff at their head; Paris the seat of infallibility and
of order. Clotilde had shown Comte a principle antagonistic to, and
predominating over, all egoism; Altruism was to burn out of men all
selfish aims, nay, the ordinary feelings of a man! A rigorous rule of
life was to aid, and a religion without a God to enforce, this new
law. Two hours a day, divided into three private services, were to be
spent in the adoration of Humanity under the form of a living or dead
woman. The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything was to be
brought distinctly to mind; and the whole soul to be prostrated in her
honour. Comte, it has been said, gave woman everything except justice.
There is a grave moral in this tale. Theology was extinguished; but the
desire to worship burned on--a fire unquenchable. Is that desire, or
is it not, a broad reality, an inalienable truth of our nature? Comte
accepted it for himself, and not for himself alone, but for our whole
human race. Along with it he accepted the only principle which could
bestow universal validity. Our moral intuitions were acknowledged safe
guides, and something more; the rulers of an intellectual world, the
revealers of truth higher than all beside. Often and often he asserted
the dominion of heart over mind. Probably, if Comte had lived longer he
would have acknowledged other revelations of our moral nature. Moral
causation, for example. That strange phrase of his--"a modifiable
fatality," self-contradiction in words, suicide in sense, what did it
portend? Was it the first sound of a marriage-bell, freedom and duty
once again united? A change of his system wonderful to contemplate, yet
not more wonderful than the state in which he left it.
One cannot help here asking how matters would have stood if Comte had
died without knowing his Clotilde. How incomplete according to his own
account his philosophy! how wanting in that which perfected the whole!
A notable fact this, throwing great light on the value of such-like
systematization which, after all, much resembles secretion from that
interesting viscus, the system-maker's own particular brain. And there
is another fact quite as notable. How curious that Comte should have
lived so long without discovering whatever truth his own heart and
a strong human affection disclosed to him! Hence we might illustrate
and confirm a previous remark, that any one not living a truly human
life--call him undeveloped, uneducated, dwarfed, or immature--is no
typical man; and if we believe ancient maxims, scarcely a learner in
philosophy, certainly not a judge of its highest and widest problems.
The most notable fact and greatest surprise of all is, that Comte's
prayer without petition, his passionate self-mesmerizing adoration,
his religion without a God, should have taken any hold on men. No
one can transfer to others his private sorrow or his private joy;
it is hard for a man to get his thought understood, harder still to
make common pasture of his heart. But Comte devised extraordinary
propagandist expedients; those who consider his developments mere
madness, should explain why sane people have accepted them. Comte
set no value on Protestantism in any shape. The religion of his own
country he carried back to mediæval forms, and then travestied it.
There were many festivals, a calendar of saints, nine sacraments, and
a horrible caricature of the Christian Trinity. This idea crowned his
sociology, which I need hardly say was communistic socialism, enfolding
(as socialism always must enfold) and scarcely veiling the most iron
of despotisms, both temporal and spiritual. His mind delighted in
contemplating a synthesis of the great Fetish, Earth, with the great
Being Humanity; which last somehow assumes on occasion a feminine
gender.
To Clotilde, symbolizing that supreme object, Clotilde, his noble and
tender patroness, he transferred Dante's homage of Beatrice; addresses
to the mother of our Lord; and stranger than all, the prayer of Thomas
à Kempis to Almighty God, "Amem te plusquam me, nec me nisi propter
te"--"May I love Thee more than self, nor self at all except for Thee."
Now consider: when Comte died, sixty-four years had not quite elapsed
since goddesses of Reason were worshipped in the cathedral and other
churches of Paris. Upon each high altar a fair woman, chosen for her
faultless beauty, sate enthroned, her feet resting upon the consecrated
slab. Gaily clothed in tunic and Greek mantle, she was so displayed
by a torch behind her throne, so elevated above her worshippers, as
to attract from Phrygian cap to Italic shoe their passionate gaze and
adoration. Low down beneath her footstool lay the broken symbols of
a faith then declared effete and passed away; just as half a century
afterwards Comte declared theology passed away. Music sounded, incense
smoked, Bishop Gobel, who assisted at a parody of sacred rites, wept
tears of shame, but in fear and trembling he assisted. The object of
this mad mockery of religion, this empire of heart over mind, this
woman-worship, was to proclaim afresh Fraternity, Progress, Sociality.
Sociality, for the supposed law of which final development Comte
worshipped humanity and Clotilde--but disowned immortality and God.
These two madnesses, how near akin, how far apart were they? The world
is not really made young by destroying old things; yet the path of 18th
century madness lay through fire and blood. Its deeds are sometimes
spoken of, even now, as great crimes; but no great crime is criminal
in the sight of men whose life is godless, dark, and unsubstantial.
Horrors pass before them like unrealities. "The world," writes Mercier
on the trial of Louis XVI,--"The world is all an optical shadow." In
our 19th century life, 'tis a skilfully prepared overshadowing, beneath
which men beat their brows till their blood-shot eyes see red. "I see
red," exclaimed Eugene Sue's ruffian, "and then I strike with the
knife."[17]
Let me end by telling you a dream, which is not all a dream.
A company of _savans_ were seen in the visions of the night, busy
with a new scientific invention. Earth, they argued, earth has her
volcanoes, her burning exhalations; men have electric lights, fires,
gas lamps, furnaces. These make up the world's proper illumination.
The effect intended was, therefore, to darken the air we breathe, so
that no rays from the upper sky should pass through it. The inventors
hoped that a district, a country, nay, even a world, might thus be
overshadowed by a gloom impervious to moon and stars by night, to sun
by day; and the human eye see no changes, save those which the earth's
activity, or human power and skill, might produce. Terrestrial and
artificial alternations excepted, all was to be changeless as winter
midnight--deep impenetrable darkness! It was seen slowly, very slowly,
to descend. In thirty years the men of science hoped and purposed its
perfection.
Did those who had previously known the beautiful light of heaven, who
had bathed and basked in the life-giving sunbeam, feel happy, or even
calm, when they saw their children and children's children robbed of
celestial glory and gladness?
Yet there is one thing worse than a world without a sun--you know what
I mean--Humanity without a GOD.
POSTSCRIPT.
The Lecturer purposely abstained from reading Professor Huxley's acute
critique on Positivism until this Lecture had gone to press. He now
strongly recommends his auditors to read No. viii. of the Lay Sermons.
Should any reader find difficulties in pages 23-25 of the foregoing
Lecture, he will do well to peruse Littré's "Auguste Comte et la
Philosophie Positive," chapter iii., particularly pp. 42, 43.
SCIENCE AND REVELATION.
BY THE VERY REVEREND
R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D.,
DEAN OF CANTERBURY; LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, OXFORD.
SCIENCE AND REVELATION.
The duty which has been imposed upon me to-day by the Christian
Evidence Society is, I conceive, to state as clearly as I can, what
is our ground for believing that a revelation is not only possible,
but is a necessary part of the system of this world. As the programme
further joins science and revelation, I conceive that I am debarred
from any but a strictly scientific proof. We may reasonably infer the
probability of a revelation from God's necessary attribute of love. We
may ourselves feel morally sure that a creature, approaching so nearly
to the spiritual world, and capable of so much good as is man, would
not be left by his Maker in that miserable state of vice and misery in
which we find ourselves. There are many good and weighty reasons for
believing that God would give us a revelation, and that the Christian
religion is God's revelation--reasons drawn from the nature of God,
from the actual condition in which man is placed, and from the direct
teachings of Holy Scripture--all these, like a cord of many threads
that cannot easily be broken, serve to confirm the faith of the
believer, but I must forego their use. In confining myself to what I
conceive to be the strictly scientific basis of a revelation, I would,
nevertheless, beg you to remember that the evidences of Christianity
are cumulative. They cover a vast field, and it is in their united
force that their strength lies. The very vastness of the field often
invites attack. Some outlying work seems capable of overthrow. Some
discovery in the domains of history, of philology, or of physical
science, seems to provide new weapons for the assault. Possibly not
all the arguments used in defence of Christianity will endure the
test of close and accurate examination. Possibly, too, in our views
of the nature of Christianity, and in our exegesis of the Scriptures,
we have arrived only at partial truth, and do not distinguish with
sufficient accuracy between what is certainly revealed, and what is
nothing more that a possible explanation of the Divine word. There
are, moreover, I will candidly confess, difficulties in the way of
faith. However new may be the form of the attack, and however modern
the materials which it uses, yet the strength of the attack lies in
real difficulties, which are no new matter, but have ever lain deep in
the minds of thoughtful men. I do not believe that belief is a thing
easy of attainment, any more than virtue is. I believe that both are
victories, gained by a struggle--gained over opposing forces.[173] But
as certain as I am that this present state of things was intended to
train man to virtue, though I cannot answer all the objections brought
against the system of the world being exactly what it is, nor solve all
the doubts and difficulties, moral and metaphysical, which surround
us: so I am convinced, in spite of similar difficulties in the way of
religion, that belief, and not unbelief, is the end at which man ought
to aim. I believe that man was intended to attain to a higher and more
perfect state than that in which he now finds himself, and that he can
only attain to it by virtue and faith; but as the very value of these
lies apparently in their being won by an effort, long and earnestly
maintained, I am not surprised at the existence of difficulties, least
of all of such difficulties as arise from our ignorance. Still belief
would be unnecessarily[18] difficult,[174] and we may even say, morally
impossible, if the sum of the arguments in defence of a revelation did
not largely exceed the sum of the arguments against one. With these
arguments I have to-day nothing to do. The evidences of Christianity,
external and internal, will be treated of by others. My business is to
show that a revelation was to be expected; that it was probable, or at
all events possible, and, therefore, that the evidences of Christianity
have a claim upon the consideration of every right thinking man. In
showing that a revelation was to be expected, I shall at the same
time show what is the exact position which it holds, and in what way
revealed knowledge differs from all other knowledge, scientific and
unscientific.
Now the argument which I shall use as my proof of the possibility of a
revelation is simply this, that in the present system of things we find
no being endowed with any faculties without there being also provided
a proper field for their exercise, and a necessity imposed upon that
being of using those faculties. In this statement I assume nothing.
I do not assume that there is a God who made these beings. I do not
assume that they were made or created; still less do I assume that
they were intended to use their faculties. I put aside all theories of
design and causation, not because I do not believe that they possess
force, but because the actual facts which I see around me, or which I
am taught by scientific men, are enough for my proof. The only thing
which I assume is, that the laws of nature are universal; and I assume
this simply because it will be readily granted me. The universality of
nature's laws compels us to admit that a law which holds good in all
known cases, will necessarily hold good in all cases whatsoever.
Our whole language is so essentially based upon religious ideas that it
would be very difficult for me to use only neutral words. But in using
religious words, I wish them to be understood in a neutral sense. If
I speak of creatures, I mean only beings, things which exist now, or
have existed. If I speak of them as endowed with faculties, I merely
mean that they possess them. By nature, I mean simply the present
state of things, whether designed by an intelligent mind, or a mere
come-by-chance. I look simply around me at what is--or at all events
appears to be--and I find myself in a world in which there is a very
exact correspondence between the endowments and faculties of every
existent being, and the state of things in which it happens to be.
So exact is this correspondence, that if you give Professor Owen a
bone, he will tell you to what order of animals its owner belonged,
what were its habits, the nature of its food, of its habitat, and mode
of life. Nature works out this correspondence even to the most minute
detail. By looking at the bone of a quadruped we can tell, not merely
great things about it, but such trifles as which leg it used first
in getting up from the ground. For nature is so undeviating that the
outward habits, even in things of no apparent moment, correspond to
the internal conformation.
Now, possibly, it will readily be granted that such is the present
state of things. Whatever may have been the stages through which we
have, or have not, passed, we now find ourselves in a world of apparent
cause and effect--full of infinitely varied forms of life, but of
which none are purposeless. I cannot upon this point bring forward a
better witness than Professor Huxley, who, in his most interesting
essay on Geological Contemporaneity (Lay Sermons, p. 236) speaks
as follows:--"All who are competent to express an opinion upon the
subject are, at present, agreed that the manifold varieties of animal
and vegetable form have not either come into existence by chance,
nor result from _capricious exertions of creative power_; but that
they have taken place in a definite order, the statement of which
order is what men of science term a natural law." The whole chain of
animal and vegetable life seems to this great authority so perfect
and complete, that even the variations which have taken place in it,
have been governed, he considers, by a law, that is, a regular and
orderly succession. These variations have been the result, apparently,
of certain changes in the external state of things, to which the
external conformation of the animal has somehow or other been made
to correspond. But as Professor Huxley points out, these variations
have been confined to very narrow limits. When people speak of the
enormous changes which have taken place in the living population of
the globe during geological eras, they refer, he says, to the presence
in the later rocks of fossil remains of a vast number of animals not
discoverable in the earlier rocks; but the fossils which you do find in
the early rocks differ but little from existing species. (See p. 238.)
He thus negatives on sure grounds the idea that a state of things ever
existed on this globe essentially unlike what exists now.
What then exists now? I answer, first of all a vast chain of vegetable
life, fitted in every portion of it to find its own subsistence, and
to propagate its species. Its main function is to "manufacture out
of mineral substances that protoplasm, upon which, in the long run,
all animal life depends." (Lay Sermons, p. 138.) I need not detain
you by enumerating the many various contrivances by which plants are
enabled to manufacture food for us out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen--substances upon which, in their original state, animals
cannot feed--nor the still more curious and elaborate processes by
which their fecundation, and the propagation of each species is
provided for--processes which seem often to require the intervention of
animal life. I need not detain you upon this point: you will readily
grant that this correspondence does exist. If a plant is not suited to
its habitat, and cannot use its natural powers, nature imposes upon it
the severe penalties--first, of degradation, and then of death.
Upon the animal world she imposes just the same penalties. There is
neither excess nor defect in her operations.[19] Whatever she gives
must be used, but animals, being governed in the main by instincts,
have no choice. They necessarily employ all their living powers,
and apparently have no powers beyond those indispensable for their
existence. This point, however, I will not press, though it seems to
follow from the fact asserted by Professor Huxley, that no important
difference can be observed between the fossil remains found in the
earliest strata, and animals of the same species and order existent
now. (See pp. 241, 242, and for vegetables, p. 240.) For, as he tells
you, facts establish a scientific law--law in the mouths of scientific
men, meaning an established order of facts. Well then! I will put this
fact of absence of progress aside, and with it the corollary of the
absence of latent powers.[20] But of actual powers it is evident that
animals do use them all, and have to use them all. So close, too, is
the agreement between the powers and the external position of every
animal, that a change in its external relations will modify its powers
to a certain extent. But only to a certain extent; there are fixed
limits to the adaptability of those living powers. If the changes are
such as to occasion a more active exercise of its living powers, the
animal increases in strength, size, and beauty; if unfavourable, but
still permitting some use of its powers, it dwindles and decays. But
pass the appointed bounds and the animal dies. Nature is exacting the
penalty of the non-use of what it has given. Nature exacts a severe
penalty for the mis-use, and the last and final penalty for the
violation of her laws. I do not know that an ascidian jelly-bag has any
other faculties than those of sucking in water, and of sticking to a
stone.[21] But this I know, that if it does not use all the powers it
possesses and suck in its water, and stick to its stone, no process of
natural selection will ever develop it into a monkey: it will go to the
limbo of nonentity.[22] But what an alarming thought, that at a period
separated from us by such vast geologic ages, that, according to the
nebular hypothesis, held by so many of our leading astronomers as a
probable theory, this whole universe was a mass of heated vapour; what
an alarming thought that the very existence of man should have depended
upon a jelly bag sticking to a stone and sucking up water! Alas! there
was then no water, no stones, no jelly bags, and therefore there are
now no men! Man escapes, poor thing, from his humble parentage: he
need not feel his ears to find the proof there of his monkeyhood:[23]
but his escape costs him dear. What with astronomy and biology, men of
science between them have cleared us out of existence. Scientifically,
man is no more.
My argument, fortunately, depends upon matters of fact: facts for which
the believer accounts by holding that this world is the work of a
Being possessed of infinite wisdom and power, and who therefore has
endowed all His creatures with those faculties which they needed, and
with no others; because to give useless faculties would be a violation
of God's attribute of wisdom. The student of natural science may take
another view. It is no part of his business to do so. His office is
to discover and tabulate the order of facts, of phenomena, and this
order he calls a natural law. Well and good. But teleology, the science
of ends, which gives the reason why a thing is what it is--teleology
belongs to the metaphysician. It is his business to inquire into causes
and effects. Still, as a matter of fact, scientific men do try their
hand at accounting for the present state of things, and they say,
perhaps, that there is a struggle, a competition in nature,[177] so
sharp and close that no creature can continue to exist save by the
vigorous exercise of all its necessary faculties, while all useless
qualities will be cast away as mere overweight and incumbrance. I
need no decision upon this point; the fact is all I want. I do not
want you to decide whether mind preceded matter, and consequently
that there is a God: or whether matter and mind came into existence
contemporaneously, in which case there is no room for the theory of
development, but abundant room for impossibilities, metaphysical and
actual; or, lastly, whether matter preceded mind, the latter being
simply the result of a high corporeal organisation, slowly attained to
by the processes of selection, natural and sexual. Whether this present
state of things was worked out intelligently, by a Being possessed of
will and understanding, or is the result of blind and unintelligent
powers, working fortuitously, this, to my argument, matters not. All
I want is the admitted fact--that every living organisation fully
possesses all those faculties which it needs, and must use all its
faculties under penalty, first of degradation, and, finally, in the
long run, of extinction.
But man is a living organization, and must, therefore, come under this
law. Let us see whether the fact confirms this deduction. Now, in all
the long line, from the ascidian upwards to man, nature had supplied
none but physical wants. Her children need food; she gives them each
those senses and that conformation which enables them to get each their
own food. They need safety: she uses much ingenuity in providing for
their safety. She is, moreover, liberal. Their food is, in general,
gained so easily, and their safety so well provided for, that their
lives are full of enjoyment. Her care, however, is taken in the main
for the species, and not for the individual. He enjoys his food because
nature has taken loving care for the whole family to which he belongs;
and she further takes care that that family shall continue to exist.
If it perish, it is because by some change in temperature, or the like,
the correspondence is destroyed between its faculties and its external
position. Short of this, the ingenuity employed by nature in providing
for the continued existence of every species of insect and animal is as
wonderful as that employed by her in continuing vegetable life; and,
as a rule, the lower the creature is in the scale of being, the more
curious the contrivances used for its preservation.
Well, when we come to man we find these three leading necessities
equally well provided for. Man is provided with the means for obtaining
food, for providing for his safety, and for propagating his species.
But, though nature's ends are the same, and reached with equal
certainty, her means are, in the main, different. The animals are moved
to gain their existence by their senses working upon their instincts.
This is a great advance upon vegetable life. You had there neither
senses nor instincts, but simply powers. But man rises above the
animals as much as they transcend vegetables. He attains to these same
ends of food, safety, and continued existence by the use of his reason.
Now, I wish you to notice this. Nature is not limited in her resources,
nor confined to one method. She is not obliged to plant animals in
the ground that they may suck up food through their legs; she can and
does give them instincts by which they can get their food in a very
different way. But perfect as these instincts are, nature can do still
better. She can produce an animal capable of reasoning upon causes and
effects, and who, therefore, provides for everything which he imagines
to be good for him by setting those causes in motion which produce the
desired effect.[24]
But with the possession of reason there also goes the possession of
what we call mental faculties. Not only can man by the use of his
reason obtain food, provide for his
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/42957