5/ m. Date Due '^feS«'41 ^T3A B13 m -h&4i .Lll JM |9-47 h:b 10 m iSBTT ii;>Y 9 s»#— m f t957A P Cornell University Library BL 51.M64T5 1874 Three essays on religion, 3 1924 020 335 620 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924020335620 THREE ESSAYS ON KELIGION UNIFORM LIBRARY EDITION OF THE MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF JOHN STUART MILL. Tinted and laid paper, 8vo, .'J'S.SO per vol. (except vol. on Comte.) Three Essays on Religion. 1 vol. The Autobiography. 1 vol. Dissertations and Discussions. 4 vols. Considerations on Representative Government. 1vol. Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. 2 vols. On Liberty; The Subjection of Women. Both in 1 vol. Comte's Positive Philosophy. 1 vol $1.50. CHEAPER EDITIONS, On Liberty. 16iuo, plain, $1.25. The Subjection of Women. 13mo, plain, $1.25. MEMORIAL V0LV2IE. John Stuart Mill: His Life and Works. Twelve sketchef?, as follows : HIr Life, by J. R. Fox Bourne ; Hie Career in the Ind'a Hon^e, by \V. T. Thoraton : HiR Moral Character, by Hc-rbert Spencer; His Botanical Studies, by Henry Turner; His Place as a Critic, by W. Minto ; His Work in Philosophy, by J. H. Levy: His Studies in Morals and Jurisprudence, by W. A. Hunter; His Work in Political Economy, by J. B. Cairnes; His Influence at the Universities, by Henry Fawcett ; His Influence as a Practic:il Politician, by Mrs. Fawcett; JHis B;jUa.tiQzi_ lo Positivis m, by Frederic Harrison ; His Position aaA-J^^usopher, by w. A. Sunter. IGmo, price, $1.0Or — ~^ ' ^ HENRY HOLT & CO., Publishers, N. Y. THREE ESSAYS ON RELIGION JOHN STUART MILL NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1874 / PUBLISHED BY ARRAKQEMENT WITH THE AUTHOR'S EXECUTOR. J K\\ John- F. Trow & Son, Printers, 205-213 East i2Th St., New Yokk. CONTENTS NATURE 8 UTILITY OF HELlGlO^r 60 THEISM 125 PAU'r I INTRODUCTION 125 THEISM l;3() THE EVIDENCES OF THEISM 138 ARGUMENT FOR A FIRST CAUSE 142 ARGUMENT FROM THE GENERAL CONSKNT OF SIANKIND . . 155 THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIOUSNESS 161 THE ARGUMENT FROM MAKKS OF DESIGN IN NATURE , , . 167 PAiir II ATTUir.UTES ]7{3 PART III IMMORTALITY .........,.,,,, l'J7 PART IV REVELATION 212 PART V GENERAL RESULT 243 BERKELEY'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 201 PUBLISHERS' NOTE. Acting upon the Lope of making their uni- form edition of Mr. Mill's Miscellaneous Writings ultimately include them all, the American Pub- lishers have inserted his Essay on *' Berkeley's Life and Writings," in the present volume. INTRODUCTORY NOTICE The three following Essays on Religion were written at considerable intervals of time, without any intention of forming a consecutive series, and must not there- fore be regarded as a connected body of thought, excepting in so far as they exhibit the Author's delibe- rate and exhaustive treatment of the topics under consideration. The two first of these three Essays were written between the years 1850 and 1858, during the period which intervened between the publication of the Principles of Political Economy, and that of the work on Liberty ; during which interval three other Essays — on Justice, on Utility, and on Liberty —were also composed. Of the five Essays written at that time, three have already been given to the public by the Author. That on Liberty was ex- panded into the now well-known work bearing the same title. Those on Justice and Utility were afterwards incorporated, with some alterations and additions, into one, and published under the name of Utilitarianism. The remaining two — on Nature and Vlll INTRODUCTORY NOTICE on tlie Utility of Eeligion— are now given to tlie public, with the addition of a third — on Theism — ■ which was produced at a much later period. In these two first Essays indications may easily be found of the date at which they were composed; among which indications may be noted the absence of any mention of the works of Mr. Darwin and Sir Henry Maine in passages where there is coincidence of thought with those writers, or where subjects are treated which they have since discussed in a manner to which the Author of these Essays would certainly ' have referred had their works been published before these were wi-itten. The last Essay in the present volume belongs to a different epoch ; it was written between the year^s 1868 and 1870, but it was not designed as a sequel to the two Essays which now appear along with it, nor were they intended to appear all together. On the other hand it is certain that the Author con- sidered the opinions expressed in these different Essays, as fundamentally consistent. The evidence of this lies in the fact that in the year 1873, after he had completed his Essay on Theism, it w^as ]iis intention to have published the Essay on Nature at once, with only such slight revision as might be judged necessary in preparing it for the press, but substantially in its present form. From this it is INTRODUCTORY NOTICE IX apparent* that his manner of thinking had under- gone no substantial change. Whatever discrepancies, therefore, may seem to remain after a really careful comparison between different passages, may be set down either to the fact that the last Essay had not undergone the many revisions which it was the Author's habit to make peculiarly searching and thorough; or to that difference of tone, and of ap- parent estimate of the relative weight of different considerations, which results from taking a wider view and including a larger number of considerations in the estimate of the subject as a whole, than in dealing with parts of it only. The fact that the Author intended to publish the Essay on Nature in 1873 is sufficient evidence, if any is needed, that the volume now given to the public was not withheld by him on account of reluctance to encounter whatever odium might i^esult from the free expression of his opinions on religion. That he did not purpose to publish the other two Essays at the same time, was in accord with the Author's habit in 3'egard to the public utterance of his religious opinions. For at the same time that he was peculiarly delibe- rate and slow in forming opinions, he had a special dislike to the utterance of half-formed opinions. He declined altogether to be hurried into premature de- cision on any point to which he did not think he had X INTRODUCTORY NOTICE given sufficient time and labour to have exhausted it to the utmost limit of his own thinking powers. And, in the same way, even after he had arrived at definite conclusions, he refused to allow the curiosity of others to force him to the expression of them before he had bestowed all the elaboration in his power upon their adequate expression, and before, thex*efore, he liad subjected to the test of time, not only the conclusions themselves, but also the form into which he had thrown them. The same reasons, tlierefore, that made him cautious in the spoken utterance of his opinion in proportion as it was necessary to be at once precise and compreliensive in order to be properly un- derstood, which in his judgment was pre-eminently the case in religious speculation, were the reasons that made him abstain from publishing his Essay on Nature for upwards of fifteen years, and might have led him still to withhold the others which now appear in the same volume. From this point of view it will be seen tliat the Essay on Theism has both greater value and less than any other of the Author's works. The last consider- able work which he completed, it shows the latest state of the Author's mind, the carefully balanced result of the deliberations of a lifetime. , On the other hand, there had not been time for it to undergo the revision to which from time to time he subjected most of his writings beibre making them public. Not only INTRODUCTORY NOTICE XI therefore is the style less polished than that of any other of his published works, but even the matter itself, at least in the exact shape it here assumes, has never undergone the repeated examination which it certainly would have passed through before he would himself have given it to the world. Helen Taylor. NATURE NATURE "IVTATURE, natural, and tlie group of words derived from them, or allied to them in etymology, have at all times filled a great place in the thoughts and taken a strong hold on the feelings of mankind. That they should have done so is not surprising, when we consider what the words, in their primitive and most obvious signification, represent ; but it is unfortunate that a set of terms which plgy so great a part in moral and metaphysical speculation, should have acquired many meanings different from the primary one, yet sufficiently allied to it to admit of confusion. The words have thus become entangled in so many foreign associations, mostly of a very powerful and tenacious character, that they have come to excite, and to be the symbols of, feelings which their original meaning will by no means justify; and which have made them one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law. 4 NATUBE The most important application of the Socratic Eleiichus, as exhibited and improved by Plato, consists in dissecting large abstractions of this description ; fixing down to a precise definition the meaning which as popularly used they merely shadow forth, and questioning and testing the common maxims and opinions in which they bear a part. It is to be regretted that among the instructive specimens of this kind of investigation which Plato has left, and to Avliich subsequent times have been so much indebted for whatever intellectual clearness they have attained, he has not enriched posterity with a dialogue irepl ^vo-ewc. If the idea denoted by the word had been subjected to his searching analysis, and the popular common- places in which it .figures had been submitted to the ordeal of his powerful dialectics, his successors probably ■would not have rushed, as they speedily did, into modes of thinking and reasoning of which the falla- cious use of that word formed the corner stone ; a hind of fallacy from which he was himself singulaidy free. According to the Platonic method which is still the best type of such investigations, the first thing to be done with so vague a term is to ascertain precisely w^hat it means. It is also a rule of the same method, that the meaning of an abstraction is best sought for in the concrete — of an universal in the particular. Adopting this course with the word Nature, the first question must be, what is meant by the " nature " of NATUUE 5 a particular object? as of fire, of water, or of some individual plant or animal ? Evidently the ensemble or aggregate of its powers or properties : the modes in which it acts on other tilings (counting among those things the senses of the observer) and the modes in which other things act upon it ; to which, in the case of a sentient being, must be added, its own capacities of feeling, or being conscious. The Nature of the thing means all this; means its entire capacity, of exhibiting phenomena. And siAce the phenomena which a thing exhibits, however much they vary in different circumstances, are always the same in the same circumstances, they admit of being described in general forms of words, which are called the laios of the thing's nature. " Thus it is a law of the nature of water that under the mean pressure of the atmosphere at the level of the sea, it boils at 212° Fahrenheit. FAs the nature of any given thing is the aggregate ofrFs powers and properties, so Nature in the abstract is the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them; in- cluding not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening ; the unused capabilities of causes being as much a part of the idea of Nature, as those which take effect^ Since all phenomena which have been safBciently examined are found to take place with regularity, each having certain fixed conditions, 6 KATUEB positive and negative, on tlie occurrence of wliicli it invariably happens; mankind have been able to ascer- tain^ either by direct observation or by reasoning pro- cesses grounded on it, the conditions of the occurrence of many phenomena ; and the progress of science mainly consists in ascertaining those conditions. When dis- covered they can be expressed in general propositions, which are called laws of the particular phenomenon, and also, more generally. Laws of Nature. Thus, the truth that all material objects tend towards one another with a force directly as their masses and inversely as the square of their distance, is a law of ]!!^ature. The proposition that air and food are neces- sary to animal life, if it be as we have good reason to believe, true without exception, is also a law of nature, though the phenomenon of which it is the law is special, and not, like gravitation, universal, TNature, then, in this its simplest acceptation, is a collective name for all facts, actual and possible : or (to speak more accurately) a name for the mode, partly known to us and partly unknown, in which all thino-s iake place.^^^or the word suggests, not so much the multitudinous detail of the phenomena, as the con- ception which might be formed of their manner of existence as a mental whole, by a mind possessing* a complete knowledge of them : to which conception it is the aim of science to raise itself, by successive steps of generalization from experience. NATURE 7 Suchj then, is a correct definition of tlie word Nature. But this definition corresponds only to one of the senses of that ambiguous term. It is evidently inapplicable to some of the modes in which the word is familiarly employed. jPor example, it entirely con- flicts with the common form of speech by which Nature is opposed to Art, and natural to artificial. For in the sense of the word Nature which has just been defined, and which is the true scientific sense. Art is as much Nature as anything else ; and every- thing which is artificial is natural^^rt/ias no independent powers of its own: Art is but the employment of the powers of Nature for an endTl, Phenomena produced by human agency, no less than those which as far as we are concerned are spontaneous, depend on the properties of the elementary forces, or of the elementary substances and their compounds. The united powers of the whole human race could not create a new property of matter in general, or of any one of its species. We can qnly take advantage for our purposes of the properties which we find. A ship floats by the same laws of specific gravity and equilibrium, as a tree uprooted by the wind and blown into the water. The corn which men raise for food, grows and produces its grain by the same laws of vegetation by which the wild rose and the mountain strawberry bring forth their flowers and fruit, A house stands and holds together by the natural pro- 8 NATUKB perties, the weight and cohesion of the materials which compose it : a steam engine works by the natural expansive force of steam, exerting a pressure upon one part of a system of arrangements, which pressure, by the mechanical properties of the lever, is transferred from that to another part where it raises the weight or removes the obstacle brought into connexion with it. In these and all other artificial operations the ofiice of man is, as has often been remarked, a very limited one ; it consists in moving things into certain places. We move objects, and by doing this, bring some things into contact which were separate, or separate others which were in contact : and by this simple change of place, natural forces previously dormant are called into action, and produce the cesired effect. Even the volition which designs, the intelligence which contrives, and the muscular force whjch executes these movements, are themselves pmvers of Nature. \ It thus appears that we must recognize at least two principal meanings in the word Nature. In one sense, it means all the powers existing in either the"' outer or the inner world and everything which takes place by means of those powers. In another sense, it means, not everything which happens, but only what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man. 1 This dis- tinction is far from exhausting the ambiguities of the NATURE y word ; but it is the key to most of those on which important consequences depend. Such, then, being the two principal senses of the word Nature ; in which of these is it taken, or is it taken in either, when the word and its derivatives are used to convey ideas of commendation, approval, and even moral obligation? It has conveyed such ideas in all ages. Naturam sequi was the fundamental j)rinciple of morals in many of the most admired schools of philosophy. Among the ancients, especially in the declining period of ancient intellect and thought, it was the test to which all ethical doctrines were brought. The Stoics and the Epicureans, however irreconcilable in the rest of their systems, agreed in holding themselves bound to prove that their respective maxims of conduct were the dictates of nature. Under their influence the Eoman jurists, when attempting to systematize jurisprudence, placed in the front of their exposition a certain Jus Naturale, " quod natura", as Justinian declares in the Institutes, " omnia animalia docuit " : and as the modern systematic writers not only on law but on moral philosophy, have generally taken the Eoman jurists for their models, treatises on the so-called Law of Nature have abounded ; and references to this Law as a supreme rule and ultimate standard have per- vaded literature. The writers on International Law have done more than any others to give currency to •10 NATUBE this style of ethical speculation ; inasnmch as having no positive law to write about, and yet being anxious to invest the most approved opinions respecting inter- national morality with as much as they could of the authority of law, they endeavoured to find such an authority in Nature's imaginary code. The Christian theology during the period of its greatest ascendancy, opposed some, though not a complete, hindrance to the modes of thought which erected Nature into the criterion of morals, inasmuch as, according to the creed of most denominations of Christians (though assuredly not of Christ) man is by nature wicked. But this very doctrine, by the reaction which it provoked, has made the deistical moralists almost unanimous in proclaiming the divinity of Nature, and setting up its fancied dictates as an authoritative rule of action. A reference to that supposed standard is the predominant ingredient in the vein of thought and feeling which was opened by Eousseau, and which has infiltrated itself most widely into the modern mind, not excepting that portion of it which calls itself Christian. The doctrines of Christianity have in every age been largely accommodated to the philosophy which happened to be prevalent, and the Christianity of our day has borrowed a considerable part of its colour and flavour from sentimental deism. At the present time it cannot be said that Nature, or any other standard, is applied as it was wont to be, to deduce rules of action with juridical precision, and with an attempt to make its application co-extensive with all human agency. The people of this genera- tion do not commonly apply principles with any such studious exactness, nor own such binding allegiance to any standard, but live in a kind of confusion of many standards ; a condition not propitious to the formation of steady moral convictions, but convenient enough to those whose moral opinions sit lightly on them, since it gives them a much wider range of arguments for defending the doctrine of the moment. But though perhaps no one could now be found who like the institutional writers of former times, adopts the so-called Law of Nature as the foundation of ethics, and endeavours consistently to reason from it, the word and its cognates must still be counted among those which carry great weight in moral argumenta- tion. That any mode of thinking, feeling, or acting, is "according to nature" is usually accepted as a strong argument for its goodness. If it Ciin be said with any plausibility that "nature enjoins" anything, the propriety of obeying the injunction is by most people considered to be made out : and conversely, the imputation of being contrary to nature, is thought to bar the door against any pretension on the part of the thing so designated, to be tolerated or excused ; and the word unnatural has not ceased to be one of the most vituperative epithets in the language. Those 12 NATUKE ■who ^eal in these expressions, may avoid making 4'hemselves responsible for any fundamental theorem respecting the standard of moral obligation, but they do not the less imply such a theorem, and one which must be the same in substance with that on which the more logical thinkers of a more laborious age grounded their systematic treatises on Natural Law. ■^ Is it necessary to recognize in these forms of speech, another distinct meaning of the word Nature ? Or can they be connected, by any rational bond of union, with either of the two meanings already treated of? At first it may seem that we have no option but to admit another ambiguity in the term. All inquiries are either into what is, or into what ought to be : science and history belonging to the first division, art, morals and politics to the second. But the two senses of the word Nature first pointed out, agree in referring only to what is. In the first meaning. Nature is a collective name for everything which is. In the second, it is a name for everything which is of itself, without voluntary human intervention. But ithe employment of the word Nature as a term of ethics seems to disclose a third meaning, in which Nature does not stand for what is, but for what ought to be ; or for the rule or standard of what ought to be. A little consideration, however, will show that this is not a case of ambiguity ; there is not here a third sense of -the word. Those who set up Nature as a NATURE 13 standard of action do not intend a merely verbal pro- position ; tliey do not mean that the standard, whatever it be, should be called Nature ; they think they are giving some information as to what the standard of action really is. Those who say that we ought to act according to Nature do not mean the mere identical proposition that we ought to do what we ought to do. They think that the word Nature affords some external criterion of what we should do j and if they lay down as a rule for what ought to be, a word which in its proper signification denotes what is, they do so because ^ they have a notion, either clearly or confusedly, that what is, constitutes the rule and standard of "what ought to be. The examination of this notion, is the object of the ' '^resSiF^EssayT)! It is proposed to inquire into the truth of the doctrines which make Nature a test of right and wrong, good and evil, or which in any mode or degree attach merit or approval to following, imitat- ing, or obeying Nature^J^o this inquiry the foregoing discussion respecting the meaning of terms, was an indispensable introduction. Language is as it were the atmosphere of philosophical investigation, which must be made transparent before anything can be seen through it in the true figure and position. In the present case it is necessary to guard against a further ambiguity, which though abundantly obvious, has sometimes misled even sagacious minds, and of \ 14 NATURE which it is well to take distinct note before proceeding further. No word is more commonly associated with the word Nature, tlian Law ; and this last word has distinctly two meanings, in one of which it denotes some definite portion of what is, in the other, of what ought to be. We speak of the law of gravitation, the three laws of motion, the law of definite proportions in chemical combination, the vital laws of organized beings. All these are portions of what is. We also speak of the criminal law, the civil law, the law of honour, the law of veracity, the law of justice; all of which are por- tions of what ought to be, or of somebody's suppositions, feelings, or commands respecting what ought to be. The first kind of laws, such as the laws of motion, and of gravitation, are neither more n^r less than the ob- served uniformities in the occurrence of phenomena : partly uniformities of antecedence and sequence, partly of concomitance. These are what, in science, and even in ordinary parlance, are meant by laws of nature. Laws in the other sense are the laws of the land, the law of nations, or moral laws; among which, as already noticed, is dragged in, by jurists and publi- cists, something which they think proper to call the Law of Nature. Of the liability of these two mean- ings of the word to be confounded there can be no better example than the first chapter of Montesquieu ; where he remarks, that the material world has its laws, the inferior animals have their laws, and man has NATUUE 15 Ills laws; and calls attention to the much, greater strictness with which the first two sets of laws are observed, than the last ; as if it were an inconsistency, and a paradox, that things always are what they are, but men not always what they ought to be. A similar confusion of ideas pervades the writings of Mr. Greorge Combe, from whence it has overflowed into a large region of popular literature, and we are now con- tinually reading injunctions to obey the pliysical laws of the universe, as being obligatory in the same sense and manner as the moral. fTlie conception which the ethical use of the word Nature implies, of a close rela- tion if not absolute identity between what is and what ought to be, certainly derives part of its hold on the mind from the custom of designating what is, by tlie expression "laws of nature," while the same word Law is also used, and even more familiarly and em- phatically, to express what ought to he7\ "When it is asserted, or implied, that Nature, or the laws of Nature, should be conformed to, is the Nature which is meant. Nature in the first sense of the term, meaning all which is — the powers and properties of all things ? But in this signification, there is no need of a recommendation to act according to nature, since it is what nobody can possibly help doing, and equally whether he acts well or ill. There is no mode of acting, which is not conformable to Nature in this sense of the term, and all modes of acting are so in 16 NATURE exactly tlie same degree. Every action is the exertion of some natural power, and its effects of all sorts are so many phenomena of nature, produced by the powers and properties of some of the objects of nature, in exact obedience to some law or laws of nature. When I voluntarily use my organs to take in food, the act, and its consequences, take place according to laws of nature : if instead of food I swallow poison, the case is exactly the same. To bid people conform to the laws of nature when they have no power but what the laws of nature give them — when it is a physical im- possibility for them to do the smallest thing otherwise than through some law of nature, is an absurdity. The thing they need to be told is, what particular law of nature they should make use of in a particular case. "When, for example, a person is crossing a river by a narrow bridge to which there is no parapet, he will do well to regulate his proceedings by the laws of equilibrium in moving bodies, instead of conforming only to the law of gravitation, and falling into the river. Yet, idle as it is to exhort people to do what they cannot avoid doing, and absurd as it is to prescribe as a rule of right conduct what agrees exactly as well with wrong ; nevertheless a rational rule of conduct may be constructed out of the relation which it ought to bear to the laws of nature in this widest acceptation of the term. Man necessarily obeys the laws of nature. NATURE 17 J>Y in other words the properties of things, but he does not necessarily ^uide himself by them. Though all conduct is in conformity to laws of nature, all con- duct is not grounded on knowledge of them, and intelligently directed to the attainment of purposes by means of them. Though we cannot emancipate ourselves from the laws of nature as a whole, we can escape from any parbicular law of nature, if we are able to withdraw ourselves from tlie circumstances in which it acts. Though we can do nothing except through laws of nature, we can use one law to counter- act another. According to Bacon's maxim, we can obey nature in such a manner as to command it. ^ Every alteration of circumstances alters more or less the laws of nature under which we act ; and by every choice which we make either of ends or of means, we place ourselves to a greater or less extent under one set of laws of nature instead of another.\lf, therefore, the useless precept to follow nature were changed into a precept to s tudy nature ; to know and take heed of the properties of the things we have to deal with, so far as these properties are capable of forwarding or ob- structing any given purpose ; we should have arrived at the first principle of all intelligent action, or rather at the definition of intellisrent action itself.^ And a confused notion of this true principle, is, I doubt not, in the minds of many of those who set up the un- meaning doctrine which superficially resembles it. 18 NATURE They perceive that the essential difference between wise and foolish conduct consists in attending, or not attending, to the particular laws of nature on which some important result depends. And they think, that a person who attends to a law of nature in order to shape his conduct by it, may be said to obey it, while a person who practically disregards it, and acts as if no such law existed, may be said to disobey it : the circumstance being overlooked, that what is thus called disobedience to a law of nature is obedience to some other or perhaps to the very law itself. For example, a person who goes into a powder magazine either not knowing, or carelessly omitting to think of, the ex- plosive force of gunpowder, is likely to do some act which will cause him to be blown to atoms in obedir ence to the very law which he has disregarded. But however much of its authority the "Naturam sequi" doctrine may owe to its being confounded with the rational precept ''Naturam observare," its favourers and promoters unquestionably intend much more by it than that precept. To acquire knowledge of the pro- perties of things, and make use of the knowledge for guidance, is a rule of prudence, for the adaptation of means to ends ; for giving effect to our wishes and intentions whatever they may be. But the maxim of obedience to Nature, or conformity to Nature, is held up not as a simply prudential but as an ethical maxim ; and by those who talk o^ jus naturce, even as a law, fit NATUEE 19 to be administered by tribunals and enforced by sanctions. Eight action, must mean something more and other than merely intelligent action : yet no precept beyond this last, can be connected with the word Nature in the wider and more philosophical of its acceptations. We must try it therefore in the other sense, that in which Nature stands distinguished from Art, and denotes, not the whole course of the pheno- mena which come under our observation, but only their spontaneous course. Let us then consider whether we can attach any meaning to the supposed practical maxim of following Nature, in this second sense o f th e word, in which^ Nature stands for that which takes place without hu- man intervention. In Nature as thus understood, is the spontaneous course of things when left to them- selves, the rule to be followed in endeavouring to adapt things to our use? But it is evident at once that the maxim, taken in this sense, is not merely, as it is in the other sense, superfluous and unmeaning, but palpably absurd and self-contradictory. For while human action cannot help conforming to Nature in the one meaning of the term, the very aim and ob-' ject of action is to alter and improve Nature in tlie other meaning. \If the natural course of things were perfectly right and satisfactory, to act at all would be a gratuitous meddling, which as it could not make things better, must make them worse. Or if action at I 20 NATUKE all could be justified, it would only be wben in direct obedience to instincts, since these iniglit perhaps be accounted part of the spontaneous order of Nature ; but to do anything with forethought and purpose, would be a violation of that perfect order. If the artificial is not better than the natural, to what end arc all the arts of life? To dig, to plough, to build, to wear clothes, are direct infringements of the injunc- tion to follow naturer> Accordingly it would be said by every one, even of those most under the influence of the feelings which prompt the injunction, that to apply it to such cases as those just spoken of, would be to push it too far. Everj-body professes to approve and admire many great triumphs of Art over Nature : the junction by bridges of shores which Nature had made separate, the draining of Nature's marshes, the excavation of her wells, the dragging to light of what she has buried at immense depths in the earth; the turning away of her thunderbolts by lightning rods, of her inundations by embankments, of her ocean by-break- waters. VBut to commend these and similar feats, is to acknowledge that the ways of Nature are to be conquered, not obeyed : that her powers are often towards man in the position of enemies, from whom he must wrest, by force and ingenuity, what little lie can for his own use,yand deserves to be applauded when that little is raiEtier more than mii>ht be ex- NATURE 21 pected from his physical weakness in comparison to those gigantic powers. All praise of Civilization,/ or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature; an admission of imperfection, which it is^ man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring! to correct or mitigate. 7/ The consciousness that whatever man does to improve his condition is in so much a censure and a thwarting of the spontaneous order of Nature, has in al] ages caused new and unprecedented attempts at improvement to be generally at first under a shade of religious suspicion; as being in any case uncompli- mentary, and very probably offensive to the powerful beings (or, when polytheism gave place to mono- theism, to the all-powerful Being) supposed to govern the various phenomena of the universe, and of whose will the course of nature was conceived to be the expression. Any attempt to mould natural phenomena to the convenience of mankind might easily appear an interference with the government of those superior beings : and though life could not have been maintained, much less made pleasant, without perpetual interferences of the kind, each new one was doubtless made with fear and trembling, until experience had shown that it could be ventured on without drawing down the vengeance of the Grods. The sagacity of priests showed them a way to j*econ- cile the impunity of particular infringements with the ■ c 2 22 NATUUE maintenance of the general dread of encroacliing on the divine administration. This was effected by repre- senting each of the principal human inventions as the gift and favour of some God. The old religions also afforded many resources for consulting the Gods, and obtaining their express permission for what would otherwise have appeared a breach of their prerogative. When oracles had ceased, any religion which recognized a revelation afforded expedients for the same purpose. The Catholic religion had the resource of an infalhble Church, authorized to declare what exertions of human spontaneity were permitted or forbidden; and in default of this, the case was always open to argu- ment from the Bible whether any particular practice had expressly or by implication been sanctioned. The notion remained that this liberty to control ligature was conceded to man only by special in- dulgence, and as far as required by his necessities ; and there was always a tendency, though a diminishing one, to regard any attempt to exercise power over , nature, beyond a certain degree, and a certain ad- '; mitted range, as an impious effort to usurp divine \power, and dare more than was permitted to maul The lines of Horace in which the famihar arts of shipbuilding and navigation are reprobated as vetiUm nefas, indicate even in that sceptical age a still unex- hausted vein of the old sentiment. The intensity of the corresponding feeling in the middle ages is not a Tti NATURE 23 precise parallel, on account of the superstition about dealing with evil spirits with which it was com- plicated : but the imputation of prying into the secrets of the Almighty long remained a powerful weapon o attack against unpopular inquirers into nature ; and the charge of presumptuously attempting to defeat the designs of Providence, still retains enough of its original force to be thrown in as a make-weight along with other objections when there is a desire to find fault with any new exertion of human forethought and contrivance. 'No one, indeed, asserts it to be the intention of the Creator that the spontaneous order of the creation should not be altered, or even that it should not be altered in any new way. JBut there still exists a vague notion that though) it is very proper to control this or the other natural phenomenon, the general scheme of nature is a model for us to imitate : that with more or less liberty in details, we should on the whole be guided by the spirit and general conception of nature's own ways : that they are God's work, and as such perfect W that man cannot rival their unapproachable excellence, and can best show his skill and piety by attempting, in however imperfect a way, to reproduce their likeness ; and that if not the whole, yet some par- ticular parts of the spontaneous order of nature, selected according to the speaker's predilections, are in a peculiar sense, manifestations of the Creator's 24 NATUE.B will ; a sort of finger posts pointing out the direction which things in general, and therefore our voluntary actions, are intended to take. Feelings of this sort, though repressed on ordinary occasions by the contrary current of life, are ready to break out whenever custom is silent, and the native promptings of the mind have nothing opposed to them but reason : and appeals are continually made to them by rhetoricians, wifh the effect, if not of convincing opponents, at least of making those who already hold the opinion which the rhetorician desires to re- commend, better satisfied with it. For in the present day it probably seldom happens that any one is persuaded to approve any course of action because it appears to him to bear an analogy to the divine government of the world, though the argument tells on him with great force, and is felt by him to be a great support, in behalf of anything which he is already inclined to approve. V If this notion of imitating the ways of Providence as manifested in Nature, is seldom expressed plainly and downrightly as a maxim of general application, it also is seldom directly contradicted. Those who find it on their path, prefer to turn the obstacle rather than to attack it, being often themselves not free from the feeling, and in any case afraid of incurring the charge of impiety by saying anything which might be held to disparage the works of the Creator's power. They NATURE 25 therefore, for the most part, rather endeavour to show, that they have as much right to the religious argu- ment as their opponents, and that if the course they recommend seems to conflict with some part of the ways of Providence, there is some other part with, which it agrees better than what is contended for on the other side. In this mode of dealing with the great a priori fallacies, the progress of improvement clears away particular errors while the causes of errors are still left standing, and very little weakened by each conflict : yet by a long series of such partial victories precedents are accumulated, to which an appeal may be made against these powerful pre- possessions, and which aff'ord a growing hope that the misplaced feeling, after having so often learnt to recede, may some day be compelled to an unconditional surrender. ^For however offensive the proposition { may appear tVmany religious persons, they should be | willing to look in the face the undeniable fact, tbat | the order of nature, in so far as unmodifled by man, ' is such as no bemg, whose attributes are justice and| benevolence, would have made, with the intentions that his rational creatures should follow it as an; example. J If made wholly by such a Being, and not; partly by beings of very diff'erent qualities, it could only be as a designedly imperfect work, which man, in his limited sphere, is to exercise justice and bene- volence in amending. The best persons have always 26 NATURE teld it to be the essence of religion, that the paramounfc duty of man upon earth is to amend himself: but all except monkish quietists have annexed to this in their inmost minds (though seldom willing to enunciate the obligation with the same clearness) the additional religious duty of amending the world, and not solely the human part of it but the material ; the order of. physical nature. In considering this subjeci[it is necessary to divest ourselves of certain preconceptions which may justly be called natural prejudicesT] being grounded on feelings which, in themselves natural and inevitable, intrude into matters with which they ought to have ^no concern. jOne of these feelings is the astonishment, rising into awe, which is inspired (even independently of all religious sentiment) by any of the greater natural phenomena, j A hurricane; a mountain pre- cipice ; the desert ; the ocean, either agitated or at rest ; the solar system, and the great cosmic forces which hold it together ; the boundless firmament, and to an educated mind any single star ; excite feelings which^make all human enterprises and powers appear.so insignificant, that to a mind thus occupied it seems insufferable presumption in so puny a creature as man to look critically on things so iixx above him, or dare to measure himself against the grandeur of the universe. But a little interrogation of our own consciousness will suffice to convince us, NATURE, 27 thatjwhat makes these phenomena so impressive is \ simply their vastness. The enormous extension in j space and time, or the enormous power thej exemplify, constitutes their su'jlimity; a feeling inl| all cases, more allied to terror than to any raoral|| emotion.A And though the vast scale of these pheno- mena may well excite wonder, and sets at defiance all idea of rivalry, the feeling it inspires is of a totally different character from admiration of excellence. Those in whom awe produces admiration may be Wsthetically developed, but they are morally uncul- ! "tivated. It is one of the endowments of the imagina- tive part of our mental nature that conceptions of greatness and power, vividly realized, produce a feeling which though in its higher degrees closely bordering on pain, we prefer to most of what are accounted pleasures. But we are quite equally capable of experiencing this feeling towards male- ficent power ; and we never experience it so strongly towards most of the powers of the universe, as when we have most present to our consciousness a vivid sense of their capacity of inflicting evil. jBecaus^ these natural powers have what we cannot imitate,! enormous might, and overawe us by that one attribute^! it would be a great error to infer that their other, attributes are such as we ought to emulate, or that /' we should be justified in using our small jpqwers after^. the example which Nature sets us with her vast forces.^ 28 NATURE For, how stands the fact? That next to the greatness of these cosmic forces, the quality which Siiost forcibly strikes every one who does not avert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end, without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. Optimists, in their attempts to prove that "whatever is, is right," are obliged to maintain, not that Nature ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction, but that it would be verv. unreasonable in us to expect that she should. /Pope's "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" may be a just rebuke to any one who should be so silly as to expect common human morality from nature. I But if the question were between two men, instead of between a man and a natural phenomenon, that triumphant apostrophe would be thought a rare piece of impu- dence. A man who should persist in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man " goes by," and having killed him should urge a similar plea in exculpation, would very deservedly be found guilty of murder. VT.n sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws. Nature does once to every being that livesT^nd in a large pro- portion of cases, after proiracted tortures such as only JSTATUUE 29 the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purjDosely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, aiid does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature imjDales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first christian martyr,! starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold,' poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her ex-' halations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelt}'- of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this. Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and -noblest indifferently with the meanest arid worst ; upon those who are engaged in the highest and Avorthiest enterprises, and often as the direct con-* sf-quence of the noblest acts ; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunc- tion as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. 30 NATURE Such are Nature's dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termina- tion she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live ; and Nature does this too on the largest scale and with tlie most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an i inundation, desolates a district ; a trifling chemical change in an edible root, starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti seize and appro- priate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human antitypes. Everything in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of ^re^damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Bori^ias. Even the love of '' order" which is thoup-ht to be a following of the ways of Nature, is in fact NATUEE 3 1 a contradiction of them. All which peoi)le are accustomed to deprecate as "disorder" and its con- sequences, is precisely a counterpart of Nature's ways. Anarchy and the Eeign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death, by a hurricane and a pestilence. \ But, it is said, all these things are for wise and [ grod ends. On this I must first remark that whether \ they are so or not, is altogether beside the point. Supposing it true that contrary to appearances these horrors when perpetrated by Nature, promote good ends, still as no one believes that good ends would be promoted by our following the example, the course off) Nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. [ Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills ; torture because nature tortures ; ruin and devastate because nature does the like ; or we ought not to consider at all what nature does, but what it is good to do. If there^ is s uch a thing as a reductio ad absiirdum, this surely amounts to ondT;] If it is a sufficient reason for doing one thing, that nature does it, why not another thing? If not all things, why anything? The physical government of the world being full of the things which when done by men are deemed the greatest enormities, it cannot be religious or moral in us to guide our actions by the analogy of the course of nature. This proposition remains true, whatever occult quality of producing good may reside 32 NATUKE in those facts of nature which to our perceptions are most noxiouSj and which no one considers it other than a crime to produce artificially. But, in reality, no one consistently believes in any such occult quality. The phrases which, ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be con- sidered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. I No one, either religipus or irreligious, believes that tte^liurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them. If we believed that those agencies were appointed by a benevolent Providence as the means of accomplishing wise purposes w^hich could not be compassed if they did not exist, then everything done by mankind which tends to chain up these natural agencies or to restrict their^'mischievous operation, from draining a pestilential marsh down to curing the toothache, or putting up an umbrella, ought to be accounted impious ; which assuredly nobody does account them, notwithstanding an undercurrent of sentiment setting in that direction wliich is occasionally perceptible^ On the contrary, the improvements on which the civilized part of mankind most pride themselves, consist in more successfully warding off those natural calamities which if we really believed what most people profess NATURE 33 to believe, we should cherish as medicines provided for our earthly state by inlinite wisdom. Inasmuch- too as each generation greatly surpasses its pre- decessors in the amount of natural evil which it succeeds in averting, our condition, if the theory were true, ought by this time to have become a" terrible manifestation of some tremendous calamity, against which the physical evils we have learnt to overmaster, had" previously operated as a pre- servative. Any one, however, who acted as if he supposed this to be the case, would be more likely, I think, to be confined as a lunatic, than reverenced as a saint. I It is undoubtedly a very common fact that good comes out of evil, and when it does occur, it is far too agreeable not to find people eager to dilate on it. But in the first place, it is quite as often true of humM^rimes, as of jaturaLcalamities. The fire of London, which is believed to have had so salutaiy an effect on the healthiness of the city, would have produced that effect just as much if it had been really the work of the " furor papisticus" so long com- memorated on the Monument. The deaths of those whom tyrants or persecutors have made martyrs in any noble cause, have done a service to mankind// which would not have been obtained if they had died]! by accident or disease. Yet whatever incidental and unexpected benefits may result from crimes, thev arc 34 NATUHL crimes nevertheless. In the second place, if good frequently comes out of evil, the converse fact, evil coming out of good, is equally common. Every event public or privateT which, regretted on its occurrence, was declared providential at a later period on account of some unforeseen good consequence, might be matched by some other event, deemed fortunate at the time, but ■which proved calamitous or fatal to those whom it appeared to benefit,. Such conflicts between the beginning and the end, or between the event and the expectation, are not only as frequent, but as often held up to notice, in the painful cases as in tlie agreeable ; but there is not the same inclination to generalize on them ; or at all events they are not regarded by the moderns (though they were by the ancients) as similarly an indication of the divine purposes : men satisfy themselves with moralizing on the imperfect nature of our foresight, the uncertainty of events, and the vanity of human expectations. The simple fact is, human interests are so compli- cated, and the effects of any incident whatever so multitudinous, that if it touches mankind at all, its influence on them is, in the great majority of cases, Jboth good and bad. If the greater number of personal misfortunes have their good side, hardly any good fortune ever befel any one which did not give either : to the same or to some other person, something to regret: and unhappily there are many misfortunes so NATURE 35 overwlieltning that their favourable side, if it exist, is 1 en fch'ely overshadowed and made insignificant; while/ the corresponding statement can seldom be made concerning blessings. The eflJects too of every cause depend so much on the circumstances which acci- dentally accompany it, that many cases are sure to occur, in which even the total result is markedly opposed to the predominant tendency : and thus not only evil has its good and good its evil side, but good often produces an overbalance of evil and evil an overbalance of good. This, however, is by no means tlie general tendency of either phenomenon. On thejl contrary, both good and evil naturally tend to fructify, j each in its own kind, good producing good, and evil, evil. It is one of Nature's general rules, and part of her habitual injustice, that "to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not, shall be taken even that which he hath." The ordinary and pre- dominant tendency of good is towards more good. Health, strength, wealth, knowledge, virtue, are not only good in themselves but facilitate and promote the acquisition of good, both of the same and of olher kinds. The person who can learn easily, is he who already knows much : it is the strong and not the sickly person who can do everything which most conduces to health; those who find it easy to gain money are not the poor but the rich ; while healt)i, strength, knowledge, talents, are all means of acquiring 36 NATURE riches, and riclies are often an indispensable means of - acquiring these. Again, e coiiverso, whatever may be said of evil turning into good, the general tendency lof evil is towards further evil Bodily illness renders the body more susceptible of disease; it produces incapacity of exertion, sometimes debility of mind, and often the loss of means of subsistence. All severe pain, either bodily or mental, tends to increase the susceptibilities of pain for ever after. Poverty is the parent of a thousand mental and moral evils. What is still worse, to be injured or oppressed, when habitual, lowers the whole tone of the character. I One bad action leads to others, both in the aerent I himself, in the bystanders, and in the sufferers. All bad qualities are strengthened by habit, and all vices and follies tend to spread. Intellectual defects generate moral, and moral, intellectual; and every intellectual or moral defect generates others, and so on without end. That much applauded class of authors, the writers onijiatural theology, have, I venture to think, entirely lost their way, and missed the sole line of argument which could have made their speculations acceptable to any one who can perceive v/hen two propositions contradict one another. | They have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater — that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery : a NATURE S7 thesis wliicli if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will ; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to. If the maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion. The more consistent of those who have deemed themselves qualified to " vin- dicate the ways of God to man " have endeavoured to avoid the alternative by hardening their hearts, and denying that misery is an evil. The goodness oi God, they say, does not consist in willing the happit ness of his creatures, but their virtue ; and the unin verse, if not a happy, is a just, universe. But waving) the objections to this scheme of ethics, it does not at : all get rid of the difficulty. If the Creator of man-'-' kind willed that they should all be virtuous, his designs are as completely bafiled as if he had willed that they should all be happy : and the order of nature is constructed with even less regard to the requirements of justice than to those of benevolenceTlIf the law of all creation were justice and the Creator omnipotent, then in whatever amount suff'ering and happiness might be dispensed to the world, each person's share of them^ would be exactly proportioned to that person's good or \ evil deeds ; no human being would have a worse lot ■ 38 NATUBE than another, without worse deserts; accident or favouritism w^ould have no part in such a world, but every human life would be the playing out of a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale. No one is able to blind himself to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this ; insomuch that the necessity of redressing the balance has been deemed one of the strongest arguments for another life after death, which amounts to an admission that the order of things in this life is often an example of injustice, not justice. If it be said that God does not take sufficient account of pleasure and pain to make them the reward or punishment of the good or the wicked, but that virtue is itself the greatest good and vice the greatest evil, then these at least ought to be dis- pensed to all according to what they have done to deserve them ; instead of which, every kind of moral depravity is entailed upon multitudes by the fatality of their birth ; through the fault of their parents, of society, or of uncontrollable circumstances, certainly through no fault of their own. pSTot even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good wdiich ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent. The only admissible moral theory of Creation is that the Principle of Good cannot at once and alto- gether subdue the powers of evil, either physical or NATURE 39 moral ; coulJ not place mankind in a world free from the necessity of an incessant struggle with the male- ficent powers, or make them always victorious in that struggle, but could and did make them capable of carrying on the figlit with vigour and with progres- sively increasing success.^Of all the religious ex- planations of the order oflTature, this alone is neither contradictory to itself, nor to the facts for which it attempts to acconnt. According to it, man's dutyk would consist, not in simply taking care of his own interests by obeying irresistible power, but in standing forward a not ineffectual auxiliary to a Being of per- fect beneficence; a faith which seems much better adapted for nerving him to exertion than a vague and inconsistent reliance on an Author of Grood who is supposed to be also the author of evil. And I venture to assert that such has really been, though often unconsciously, the faith of all who have drawn strength and support of any worthy kind from trust in a super- intending Providence. There is no subject on which men's practical belief is more incorrectly indicated by the words they use to express it, than religion. Many have derived a base confidence from imagining them- selves to be favourites of an omnipotent but capricious and despotic Deity. Bui those who have been strength- ened in goodness by relying on the sympathizing support of a powerful and good Governor of the world, have, I am satisfied, never really believed that 40 NATUEE Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omni- potent. They have always saved his goodness at the expense of his power. They have beheved, perhaps, that he could, if he willed, remove all the thorns from their individual path, but not without causing greater harm to some one else, or frustrating some purpose of greater importance to the general well-being. They have believed that he could do any one thing, but not any combination of things : that his government, like human government, was a system of adjustments and compromises; that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to his intention.^'wAnd since the exertion of all his power to make it as little imperfect as pos- sible, leaves it no better than it is, they cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human esti-" mate, yet as in itself not merely finite, but extremely /!■ mited. They are bound, for example, to suppose * This irresistible conviction comes out in tlie writings of religious joliilosophers, in exact proportion to the general clearness of their un- derstanding. It nowhere shines forth so distinctly as in Leibnitz's famous Thdodicee, so strangely mistaken for a system of optimism, and, as such, satirized by Voltaire on grounds which do not even touch the author's argument. Leibnitz does not maintain that this world is the best of all imaginable, but only of all possible worlds ; which, he argues, it cannot but be, inasmuch as God, who is absolute goodness,' has chosen it and not another. In every page of the work he tacitly assumes an abstract possibility and impossibility, independent of the diviue power : and though his pious feelings make him continue to designate that power by the word Omnipotence, he so explaius that term as to make it mean, power extending to all that is within the limits of that abstract possibility. NATUBE 41 tliat tliebest lie could do for his human creatures was to make an immense majority of all who have yet existed, be born (without any fault of their own) Patagonians, or Esquimaux, or something nearly as brutal and degraded, but to give them capacities which by being cultivated for very many centuries in toil and suffering, and after many of the best speci- mens of the race have sacrificed their lives for the purpose, have at last enabled some chosen portions of the species to grow into something better, capable of . being improved in centuries more into something really good, of which hitherto there are only to be found individual instances- It may be possible ta, believe with Plato that perfect goodness, limited and 1 thwarted in every direction by the intractableness of ' the material, has done this because it could do no better. But that the same perfectly wise and good Being had absolute power over the material, and made it, by voluntary choice, what it is; to admit this might have been supposed impossible to any one who I has the simplest notions of moral good and evil. \ Nor can any such person, whatever kind of religious phrases he may use, fail to believe, that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect good- ness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man. \^But even though unable to believe that Nature, as a wnole, is a reaUzation of the designs of perfect wisdom 1/ 42 NATUKE and benevolence, men do not willingly renounce tlie idea that some part of Nature, at least, must be in- tended as an exemplar, or tj'-pe ; that on some portion or other of the Creator's works, tlie image of the moral qualities which they are accustomed to ascribe to him, must be impressed ;^iat if not all which is, yet some- thing which is, must not only be a faultless model of what ought to be, but must be intended to be our guide and standard in rectifying the rest. It does not suffice them to believe, that what tends to good is to be imitated and perfected, and what tends to evil is to be corrected : they are anxious for some more defi- nite indication of the Creator's designs ; and being persuaded that this must somewhere be met with in his works, undertake the dangerous responsibility of picking and choosing among them in quest of it. A choice which except so far as directed by the general maxim that he intends all the good and none of the evil, must of necessity be perfectly arbitrary ; and if it leads to any conclusions other than such as can be deduced from that maxim, must be, exactly in that proportion, pernicious. It has never been settled by any accredited doctrine, what particular departments of the order of nature shall be reputed to be designed for our moral instruc- tion and guidance ; and accordingly each person's individual predilections, or momentary convenience, have decided to what parts of the divine government NATUKE 4;:{ the practical conclusions that he was desirous of establishing, should be recommended to approval as being analogous. One such recommendation must be as fallacious as another, for it is impossible to decide \ that certain of the Creator's works are more truly ^ expressions of his character than the rest ; and the! only selection which does not lead to immoral results, is the selection of those which most conduce to the general good, in other words, of those which point to an end which if the entire scheme is the expression of a single omnipotent and consistent will, is evidently not the end intended by it. There is however^one particular element in the construction of the world, which to minds on the look-out for special indication of the Creator's will, has appeared, not without plausibility, peculiarly fitted to afford them ; vi^. the active impulses of human and other animated beings 7^ One can imagine such persons arguing that when the Author of Nature only made circumstances, he may not have meant to indicate the manner in which his rational creatures were to adjust themselves to those circumstances ; but that when he implanted positive stimuli in the creatures themselves, stirring them up to a particular kind of action, it is impossible to doubt that he intended that sort of action to be practised by them. IThis reasoning, fol- lowed out consistently, would leaTto the conclusion that the Deity intended, and approves, whatever 44 NATURE human beings do; since all that they do being the consequence of some of the impulses with which their J Creator must have endowed them, all must equally be 'I considered as done in obedience to his will. As this practical conclusion was shrunk from, it was necessary to draw a distinction, and to pronounce that not the / whole, but only parts of the active nature of mankind ' point to a special intention of the Creator in respect to their conduct. These parts it seemed natural to suppose, must be those in which the Creator's hand is manifested rather than the man's own : and hence the frequent antithesis between man as God made Jiim, and man as he has made himself Since what is done with deliberation seems more the man's own ; act, and he is held more completely responsible ibr j it than for what he does from sudden impulse, the i considerate part of human conduct is apt to be set ; down as man's share in the business, and the incon- Lsiderate as God's. The result is the vein of senti- ment so common in the modern world (though unknown to the philosophic anci.mts) wj iich exalts instinct at the expense of reason ; an aberration rendered still more mischievous by the opinion commonly held in con- junction with it, that every, or almost every, feeling or impulse which acts promptly without waiting to ask questions, is an instinct^T Thus almost every variety of unreflecting and uncalculating impulse receives a kind of consecration, except those which, NATURE 45 thougli unreflecting at the moment, owe their origin to previous habits of reflection: these, being evidently not instinctive, do not meet with the favour accorded to the rest; so that all unreflecting impulses are invested with authority over reason, except the only ones which are most probably right. I do not mean, of course, that this mode of judgment is even pre- tended to be consistently carried out : life could not go on if it were not admitted that impulses must be controlled, and that reason ought to govern our actions. The pretension is not to drive Eeason from the helm but rather to bind her by articles to steer only in a particular way. - Instinct is not to govern, but reason is to practise some vague and unassignable amount of deference to Instinct. Though the impression in favour of instinct as being a peculiar manifestation of the divine purposes, has not been cast into the form of a consistent general ^heory, it remains a standing prejudice, capable of being stirred up into hostility to reason in any case in which the dictate of the rational faculty has not acquired the authority of prescription. I shall not here enter into the diflicult psychological question, what are, or are not instincts : the subject would require a volume to itself. Without touching upon any disputed theoretical points, it is possible to judg^[Ji(iiaj little worthy is the instinctive gart of human nature to be held up as its chief excellence-j-as the part in which the hand of infinite goodness and wisdom is 46 NATURE peculiarly visible. Allowing everything to be an instinct which anybody has ever asserted to be one, it remains true tha^early every respectable attribute of humanity is the result not of instinct^ but of a victory over instinct; and that there is hardly anything valuable in the natural man except capacities — a whole world of possibilities, all of them dependent upon e^iinently artificial discipline for being realized./ \ It is only in a highly artificialized condition of \ numan nature that the notion grew up, or, I believe, ever could have grown up, that goodness was natural : jbecause only after a long course of artificial education ! did good sentiments become so habitual, and so ipredominant over bad, as to arise unprompted when occasion called, for them."~|ln the times when man- kind were nearer to their natural state, cultivated observers regarded the natural man as a sort of wild animal, distinguished chiefly by being craftier than the other beasts of the field ; and all worth of charac- ter was deemed the result of a sort of taming; a phrase often applied by the ancient philosophers to the appropriate discipline of human beings. The truth is that there is hardly a single point of excel- lence belonging to human character, which is not decidedly repugnant to the untutored feelings of human nature. If there be a virtue which more than any other we expect to find, and really do find, in an uncivilized NATURE 47 state, it is the virtue of courage. Yet this is from first to last a victory achieved over one of the most powerful emotions of human nature. If there is any one feelino- or attribute more natural than all others to human beings, itiaJJear; and no greater proof can be given of the power of artificial discipline than the conquest which it has at all times and places shown itself capable of achieving over so mighty and so universal a sentiment. The widest difference no doubt exists between one human being and another in the facility or difficulty with which they acquire this virtue. There is hardly any department of human excellence in which difference of original temperament goes so far. But it may fairly be questioned if any human being is naturally courageous. Many are natu- rally pugnacious, or irascible^ or enthusiastic, and these passions when strongly excited may render them in- sensible to fear. But take away the conflicting emotion, and fear reasserts its dominion : ' consistent courage is always the efffect of cultivation. The courage which is occasionally though by no means generally found among tribes of savages, is as much the result of education as that of the Spartans or Eomans. In all such tribes there is a most emphatic direction of the public sentiment into every channel of expression through which honour can be paid to courage and cowardice held up to contempt and de- rision. It will" perhaps be said, that as the expression 48 NATUKE of a sentiment implies the sentiment itself, the train- ing of the young to courage presupposes an originally courageous people. It presupposes only what all good customs presuppose — that there must have been in- dividuals better than the rest, who set the customs going. Some individuals, who like other people had fears to conquer, must have had strength of mind and will to conquer thera for themselves. These would obtain the influence belonging to heroes, for that which is at once astonishing and obviously useful never fails to be admired : and partly through this admiration, partly through the fear they themselves excite, they would obtain the power of legislators, and could establish whatever customs they pleased. Let us next consider a quality which forms the most visible, and one of the most radical of the moral dis- tinctions between human beit^gs and most of the lower animals ; that of wbich the absence, more than of anything else, renders men bestial; the quality of cleanliness. Can anything be more entirely artificial? Children, and the lower classes of most countries, seem to be actually fond of dirt : the vast majorit}'" of the human race are indifferent to it: whole nations of otherwise civilized and cultivated human beings tolerate it in some of its worst forms, and only a very small minority are consistently offended by it. Indeed \the universal law of the subject appears to be, that un- cleanliness offends only those to whom it is unfamiliar, NATUES 4y SO tljat those wlio have lived in so artificial a state as to be unused to it in any form, are the sole persons whom it disgusts in all forms. Of all virtues this is the most evidently not instinctive, but a triumph over instinct. Assuredly neither cleanliness nor the lov.- of cleanliness is natural to man, but only the capacity of acquiring a love of cleanliness. Our examples have thus far been taken from the personal, or as they are called by Bentham, the self regarding virtues, because these, if any, might be sup- posed to be congenial even to the uncultivated mind. Of the social virtues it is almost superfluous to speak ; so completely is it the verdict of all experience tha selfishness is natural. By thisi do not in any wise mean* to deny that sympathy is natural also ; I believe on the contrary that on that important fact rests the possibility of any cultivation of goodness and noble- ness, and the hope of their ultimate entire ascendancy. But sympathetic characters, left uncultivated, and given up to their sympathetic ijistincts, are as selfish as others. The difference is in the kind of selfishness : theirs is not solitary but sympathetic selfishness; Vegdisme a dense, a trots, or h qimtre ; and they may be very amiable and delightful to those with whom they sympathize, and grossly unjust and unfeeling to the rest of the world. Indeed the finer nervous orp-a- nizations which are most capable of and most require ' synlpathy, have, from their fineness, so much stronger 50 NATURE impulses of all sorts, that tliey often furnisli tlie most striking examples of selfishness, though of a less repul- sive kind than that of colder natures. Whether there ever was a person in whom, apart from all teaching of instructors, friends or books, and from all inten- tional self-modelling according to an ideal, natural benevolence was a more powerful attribute than self- ishness in any of its forms, may remain undecided. That such cases are extremely rare, every one must admit, and this is enough for the argument. ^''^But (to speak no further of self-control for the benefit of others) the commonest self-control for one's own benefit — that power of sacrificing a present desire to a distant object or a general purpose which is indis- pensable for making the actions of the individual ac- cord with his own notions of his individual good ; even this is most unnatural to the undisciplined Imman being : as may be seen by the long apprentice- ship which children serve to it ; the very imper- fect manner in which it is acquired by persons born to power, whose will is seldom resisted, and by all who have been early and much indulged; and the marked absence of the quality in savages, in soldiers and sailors, and in a somewhat less degree in nearly the whole of the poorer classes in this and many other countries. The principal difference, on the point under consideration, between this virtue and others, is that although, like them, it requires a course of teach- NATURE 51 ir> ino, it is more susceptible than most of them of bein self-taught. The axiom is trite that self-control is only learnt by experience : and this endowment is only thus much nearer to being natural than the others we have spoken of, inasmuch as personal experience, without external inculcation, has a certain tendency to eno-ender it. Nature does not of herself bestow this, any more than other virtues ; but nature often administers the rewards and punishments which cul- tivate it, and which in other cases have to be created artificially for the express purpose. Veracity might seem, of all virtues, to have the^ most plausible claim to being natural, since in the ab- sence of motives to the contrary, speech usually con- forms to, or at least does not intentionally deviate from, fact. Accordingly this is the virtue with which writers like Rousseau delight in decorating savage life, and setting it in advantageous contrast with the treachery and trickery of civilization. Unfortunately this is a mere fancy picture, contradicted by all the realities of savage life. Savages are always liars. They have not the faintest notion of truth as a virtue. They have a notion of not betraying to their hurt, as of not hurting in any other way, persons to whom they are bound by some special tie of obligation; their chief, their guest, perhaps, or their friend: these feelings of obligation being the taught morality of the savage state, growing out of its characteristic cir- E 52 NATlJJEtE cum stances. But of any point of honour respecting Iruth for truth's siike, they have not the remotest idea; no more ttian tlie whole East, and the greater part of Europe : and iu the few countries which are sufficiently improved to have such a point of honour, it is con- fined to a small minority, who alone, under any cir- cumstances of real temptation practise it. From the general use of the expression " natural justice," it must be presumed that justice is a virtue generally thought to be directly implanted by nature, I believe, however, thab the sentiment of justice is entirely of artificial origin ; the idea of natural justice not preceding but following that of conventional ju^^tice. The farther we look back into the early modes of thinking of the human race, whether we consider ancient times (including those of the Old Testament) or the portions of mankind who are still in no more advanced a condition than that of ancient times, the more completely do we find men's notions of justice defined and bounded by the express ap- pointment of law. JA man's just rights, meant the rights which the Taw gave him : a just man, was he who never infringed, nor sought to infringe, the legal property or other legal rights of others. The notion of a higher justice, to which laws themselves are amenable, and by which the conscience is bound with- '^ut a positive prescription of law, is a later extension of the idea, suggested by, and following the analogy/ NATURE 53 of, legal justice, to which it maintains a parallel direction through all the shades and varieties of the sentiment, and from which it borrows nearly the whole of its phraseology. The very words Jiistm and justitia are derived from jus, law. Courts of justice, administration of justice, always mean the tribunals. \ If it be said, that there must be the germs of all these \ virtues in human nature, otherwise mankind would > be incapable of acquiring them, I am ready, with a certain amount of explanation, to admit the fact. But the weeds that dispute the ground with these beneficent germs, are themselves not germs but rankly luxuriant growths, and would, in all but some one case in a thousand, entirely stifle and destroy the former, were it not so strongly the interest of man- kind to cherish the good germs in one another, that tliey always do so, in as far as their degree of intelligence (in this as in other respects still very imperfect) allowsTA It is through such fostering, commenced early, and""*"^ not counteracted by unfavourable influences, that, in some happily circumstanced specimens of the human race, the most elevated sentiments of which humanity is capable become a second nature, stronger than the firsthand not so much subduing the original nature as merging it into itself Even those gifted organiza- tions which have attained the like excellence by self- culture, owe it essentially to the same cause ; for what self-culture would be possible without aid from E 2 54 NATURE the general sentiment of mankind delivered tlirough books, and from the contemplation of exalted characters real or ideal? This artificially created or at least \ artificially perfected nature of the best and noblest human beings, is the only nature which it is ever com- mendable to follow. It is almost superfluous to say that even this cannot be erected into a standard of con- duct, since it is itself the fruit of a training and culture the choice of which, if rational and not accidental, must have been determined by a standard already chosen. ■ This brief survey is amply suflBcient to prove that the duty of man is the same in respect to his own j7nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, /[namely not to follow but to amend it. Some people however who do not attempt to deny that instinct ought to be subordinate to reason, pay deference to nature so far as to maintain that every natural incli- nation must have some sphere of action granted to it, some opening left for its gratification. 'All natural wishes, they say, must have been implanted for a purpose : and this argument is carried so far, that we olten hear it maintained that every wish, which it is supposed to be natural to entertain, must have a corresponding provision in the order of the universe for its gratification : insomuch (for instance) that the ,; desire of an indefinite prolongation of existence, is believed by many to be in itself a sufficient proof of the reality of a future life. NATUr.E I conceive that there is a radical absurdity in all these attempts to discover, in detail, what are the designs of Providence, in order when they are. dis- covered to help Providence in bringing them about. Those who argue, from particular indications, that Providence intends this or that, either believe that th§:Greator can do all that he will or that he cannot. If the first supposition is adopted — ^if Providence is omnipotent, Providence intends whatever happens, and the fact of its happening proves that Providence intended it. If so, everything which a human being can do, is predestined by Providence and is a fulfil- ment of its designs. But if as is the more religious theory. Providence intends- not all which happens, but only v/hat is good, then indeed man has it in his power, by his voluntary actions, to aid the intentions j of Providence ; but he can only learn those intentions ^ by considering what tei^ds to promote the general good, and not what man has a natural inclination to ; for, limited as, on this showing, the divine power must be, by inscrutable but insurmountable obstacles, who knows that man could have been created without desires which never are to be, and even which never ought to be, fulfilled? The inclinations with which\ man has been endowed, as well as any of the other con- ' trivances which we observe in Nature, may be the expression not of the divine will, but of the fetters which impede its free action ; and to take hints from 53 NATUKE these for the guidance of our own conduct may bo falling into a trap laid by the enemy. The assump. tion that everything which infinite goodness can desire, actually comes to pass in this universe, or at least that we must never say or suppose that it does not, is worthy only of those whose slavish fears make them offer the homage of lies to a Being who, they profess to think, is incapable of being deceived and holds all falsehood in abomination. With regard to this particular hypothesis, that all patural impulses, all propensities sufficiently universal md sufficiently spontaneous to be capable of passing ■or instincts, must exist for good ends, and ought to DC only regulated, not repressed ; this is of course true of the majority of them, for the species could not have continued to exist unless most of its inclinations had been directed to things needful or useful for its preservation. But unless the instincts can be reduced to a very small number indeed, it must be allowed that we have also bad instincts which it should be the aim of education not simply to regulate but to extirpate, or rather (what can be done even to an instinct) to starve them by disuse. Those who are inclined to multiply the number of instincts, usually include among them one which they call destructive- ness : an instinct to destroy for destruction's sake. I can conceive no good reason for preserving this, no more than another propensity which if not an instinct KATUHE / is very like one, what has been called the Instinct of j domination; a delight in exercising despotism, in/ holding other beings in subjection to our will. The man who takes pleasure in the mere exertion of authority, apart from the purpose for which it is to be employed, is the last person in whose hands one would willingly entrust it. Again, there are persons j who are cruel by character, or, as the phrase is, n^^turally„.cruel ; who have a real pleasure in inflicting, or seeing the infliction of pain. This kind of cruelty is not mere hardheartedness, absence of pity or re- morse ; it is a positive thing ; a particular kind of voluptuous excitement. Thfe East, and Southern Europe, have afforded, and probably still afford, abundant examples of this hateful propensity, I sup- pose it will be granted that this is not one of the natural inclinations which it would be wrong to suppress. The only question would be whether it is not a dutyr to suppress the man himself along with it. VBut even if it were true that every one of thej elementary impulses of human nature has its good side, j and may by a sufficient amount of artificial training; be made more useful than hurtful; how little would this amount to, when it must in any case b^ admitted j that without such training all of them, even those which are necessary to our preservation, would fill the world with misery, making human life an exaggerated likeness of the odious scene of violence and tyranny 58 NATURE which is exhibited by the rest of the animal kingdom, except in so far as tamed and disciplined by man"^^ There, indeed, those who flatter themselves with the notion of reading the purposes of the Creator in his works, ought in consistency to have seen grounds for inferences from which they have shrunk. \ If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large ■^proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. I They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments \ necessary for that purpose ; their strongest instincts impel them to it, and many of them seem to have been constructed incapable of supporting themselves by any * other food. If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature, had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an exception, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves ! If we are not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we need not sup- pose it to have been made by a Being of infinite powei'. But if imitation of the Creator's will as re- vealed in nature, were applied as a rule of action in NJVTURE ov this case, the most atrocious enormities of the worsts men would be more than justified by the apparent intention of Providence that throughout all animated nature the strong should prey upon the weak. The preceding observations are far from having exhausted the almost infinite variety of modes and occasions in which the idea of conformity to nature is introduced as an element into the ethical appre- ciation of actions and dispositions. The same favour- able prejudgment follow:^? the word nature through the numerous acceptations, in which it is employed as a distinctive term for certain parts of the constitution of humanity as contrasted with other parts. We have hitherto confined ourselves to one of these accep- tations, in which it stands as a general designation for those parts of our mental and moral constitution which are supposed to be innate, in contradistinction to those which are apquired; as when nature is eontrasted with education; or when a savage state, without laws, arts, o^vknowledge, is called a state of nature ; or when the question is asked whether benevolence, or the moral sentiment, is natural or acquired; or whether some persons are poets or orators by nature and others not. But in another and a more lax sense, any manifesta- tions by human beings are often termed natural, when it is merely intended to say that they are not stadied or designedly assumed in the particular case ; as when a person is said to move or speak with natural grace ; 60 NATURE or when it is said that a person's natural manner or character is so and so ; meaning that it is so when he does not attempt to control or disguise it. In a still looser acceptation, a person is said to be naturally, that which he was until some special cause had acted upon him, or which it is supposed he would be if some such cause were withdrawn. Thus a person is said to be naturally dull, but to have made himself intel- ligent by study and perseverance; to be naturally cheerful, but soured by misfortune ; natui'ally ambi- tious, but kept down by want of opportunity. Finally, the word natural, applied to feelings or conduct, often seems to mean no more than that they are such as are ordinarily found in human beings; as when it is said that a person acted, on some particular occasion, as it was natural to do ; or that to be affected in a parti- cular . way by some sight, or sound, or thought, or incident in life, is perfectly natural. In all these senses of the term, the quality called na- tural is very often confessedly a worse quality than the one contrasted with it ; but whenever its beinsr so is not too obvious to be questioned, the idea seems to be entertained that by describing it as natural, something has been said amounting to a considerable presump- tion in its favour. For my part I can perceive only one sense in which nature, or naturalness, in a human being, are really terms of praise; and then the prai-se is only negative: namely when used to denote the NATURE 61 fl.hspnfip! of affectatio n. Affectation may be defined, the effort to appear what one is not, when the motive or the occasion is not such as either to excuse the attempt, or to stamp it with the more odious name of hypocrisy. It must be added that the deception is often attempted to be practised on the deceiver him- self as well as on others ; he imitates the external signs of qualities which he would like to have, in hopes to persuade himself that he has them. Whether in the form of deception or of self-deception, or of something hovering between the two, affectation is very rightly accounted a reproach, and naturalness, understood as the teverse of affectation, a merit. But'^ a more proper term by which to express this estimable: quality would be sincerity ; a term which has fallen from its original elevated meaning, and popularly de- notes only a subordinate branch of the cardinal virtue it once designated as a whole. . Sometimes also, in cases where the term affectation would be inappropriate, since the conduct or demeanour spoken of is really praiseworthy, people say in dis- paragement of the person concerned, that such conduct or demeanour is not natural to him ; and make uncom- plimentary comparisons between him and some other person, to whom it is natural : meaning that what in the one seemed excellent was the effect of temporary ex.citement, or of a great victory over himself, while in the other it is the result to be expected from the 62 NATURE habitual cliaracter. This mode of speech is not open to censure, since nature is here simply a term for the person's ordinary disjDosition, and if he is praised it is not for being natural^ but for being naturally gopd. \\ Conformity to nature, has no connection whatever r with right and wrong. The idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all, except, oc- casionally and partially, into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point, let us con- sider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature — the word unnatural. That a thing is unnatural, in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word, is no argument for its being fblamable; since the most criminal actions are to a being like man, not more unnatural than most of the jvirtues. The acquisition of virtue has in all ages been accounted a work of labour and difficulty, while the descensus Averni on the contrary is of proverbial facility: and it assuredly requires in most persons a greater conquest over a greater number of natural in- clinations fco become, eminently virtuous than tran- scendently vicious. But if an action, or an inclination, has been decided on other grounds to be blaraable, it may be a circumstance in aggravation that it is unnatural, that is, repugnant to some strong feeling usually found in human beings ; since the bad pro- NATURE 63 pensity, whatever it be, has afforded evidence of being both strong and deeply rooted, by having overcome that repugnance. This presumption of course fails if the individual never had the repugnance : and the argument, therefore, is not fit to be urged unless the feeling which is violated by the act, is not only justi- fiable and feasonable, but is one which it is blamable to be without. The corresponding plea in extenuation of a culpable act because it was natural, or because it was prompted by a natural feeling, never, I t'link, ought to be admitted. There is hardly a bad action ever perpe- trated which is not perfectly natural, and the motives i to which are not perfectly natural feelings. In the eye of reason, therefore, this is no excuse, but it is quite " natural " that it should be so in the eyes of the multitude ; because the meaning of the expression is, that they h;ive a fellow feeling with the offender. When they say that something which they cannot help admitting to be blamable, is nevertheless natural, they mean that they can imagine the possibility of their being themselves tempted to commit it. Mostpeo^ole have a considerable amount of indulgence towards all acts of Tvhj^hjtheyjeel^^ source within them- selves, reserving their rigourfoF~t1ra?re-which, though perhaps really less bad, they cannot in any way under- stand how it is possible to commit. If an action convinces them (which it oitens does on very inadequate G4 NATUUE grounds) that the person who does it must be a being, totally unlike themselves, they are seldom particular in examining the precise degree of blame due to it, or even if blame is properly due to it at all. They measure the degree of guilt by the strength of their antipathy ; and hence differences of opinion, and even differences of taste, have been objects of as intense moral abhorrence as the most atrocious crimes. "'" It will be useful to sum up in a few words the leading conclusions of this Essay. The word Nature has two principal meanings: it either denotes the entire system of things, with the aggregate of all their properties, or it denotes things as they would be, apart from human intervention. In the first of these senses, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature is unmeaning ; since man has no power to do anything else than follow nature; all his actions are done through, and in obedience to, some one or many of nature's physical or mental laws. In the other sense of the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature, or in other words, ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions, is equally irrational and im- moral. Irrational, because all human action whatever, con- sists in altering, and all useful action in improving, the spontaneous course of nature : NATUItE 65 Immoral, because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men. The scheme of Nature regarded in its whole extent, cannot have had, for its sole or even principal object, the good of human or other sentient beings. What good it brings to them, is mostly the result of their own exertions. Whatsoever, in nature, gives indica- tion of beneficent design, proves this beneficence to be armed only with limited power ; and the duty of man is to co-operate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating but by perpetually striving to amend the course of nature — and bringing that part of it over which we can exercise control, more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness. UTILITY OF KELIGION UTILITY OF RELIGION TT lias sometimes been remarked how much has been written, both by friends and enemies, concerning the truth of religion, and how little, at least in the way of discussion or controversy, concerning its use- fulness. This, however, might have been expected ; for the truth, in matters which so deeply affect us, is our first concernment. If religion, or any particular form of it; is true, its usefulness follows without other proof. If to know authentically in what order of things, under what government of the universe it is our destiny to live, were not useful, it is difficult to imagine what could be considered so. Whether a person is in a pleasant or in an unpleasant place, a palace or a prison, it cannot be otherwise than useful to him to know where he is. So long, therefore, as men accepted the teachings of their religion as posi- tive facts, no more a matter of doubt than their own existence or the existence o^ the objects around them. 70 UTILITY OF RELIGION to ask the use of believing it could not possibly occur )^ to them. The utility of religion did not need to he asserted until the arguments for its truth had in a great measure ceased to convince. People must either have ceased to believe, or have ceased to rely on the belief of others, before they could take that inferior ground of defence without a consciousness of lowering I what they were endeavouring to raise. vAn argument for the utility of religion is an appeal to uiib^ievers, |to induce them to practise a well meant hypocrisy, or to semi-believers to make them avert their eyes from what might possibly shake their unstable belief, or finally to persons in general to abstain from express- ing any doubts they may feel, since a fabric of im- mense importance to mankind is so insecure at its foundations, that men must hold their breath in its neisrhbourhood for fear of blowino^ it down. In the present period of history, however, we seem to have arrived at a time when, among the arguments for and against religion, those which relate to its use- fulness assume an important place. We are in an age of weak beliefs, and in which such belief as men 'have is much more determined by their wish to be- lieve than by any mental appreciation of evidence. The wish to believe does not arise only from selfish but often from the most disinterested feelings ; and though it cannot produce the unwavering and perfect ^•eiiance which once existed, it fences round all that UTILITY OF RELIGION ' 71 reinains of the impressions of early education ; it often causes direct misgivings to fade away by disuse ; and above all, it induces people to continue laying out their lives according to doctrines which have lost part of their hold on the mind, and to maintain towards the world the same, or a rather more demonstrative attitude of belief, than they thought it necessary to exhibit when their personal conviction was more complete. \ If religimas belief be indeed so necessary to man- kind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding. Such a state of things is most uncomfortable even for those who may, without actual insincerity, describe themselves as be- lievers ; and still worse as regards those who, having consciously ceased to find the evidences of religion convincing, are withheld from saying so lest they should aid in doing an irreparable injury to mankind. It is a most painful position to a conscientious and! cultivated mind, to be drawn in contrary directions! by the two noblest of all objects of pursuit, truth, and \ the general good. Such a conflict inust inevitably 1 produce a growing indifference to one or other of these objects, most probably to both. Many who could render giant's servi9e both to truth and to mankind if they believed that they could serve the 72 UTILITY O'F RELIGION one without loss to the other, are either totally para- lysed, or led to confine their exertions to matters of minor detail, by the apprehension that any real free- dom of speculation, or any considerable strengthening or enlargement of the thinking faculties of mankind at large, might, by making them unbelievers, be the surest way to render them vicious and miserable. Many, again, having observed in others or experienced in themselves elevated feelings which they imagine incapable of emanating from any other source than religion, have an honest aversion to anything tending, as they think; to dry up the fountain of such feelings. They, therefore, either dislike and disparage all philo- sophy, or addict themselves with intolerant zeal to those forms of it in which intuition usurps the place of evidence, and internal feeling is made the test of objective truth. The whole of the prevalent meta- physics of the present century is one tissue of suborned evidence in favour of religion; often of Deism only, but in any case involving a misapplica- tion of noble impulses and speculative capacities, among the most deplorable of those wretched wastes of human faculties which make us wonder that enough is left to keep mankind progressive, at however slow a pace. It is time to consider, more impartially and therefore more deliberately than is usually done, whether all this straining to prop up beliefs which require so great an expense of intellectual toil and UTILITY OF RELIGION" 73 in'::^enuity to keep tliem standing, yields any sufficient return in human well being ; and whether that end would not be better served by a frank .recognition that certain subjects are inaccessible to our faculties, and by the application of the same mental powers to the stren^rthenin^ and enlar-^ement of those other sources of virtue and happiness which stand in no need of* the support or sanction of>upernatural beliefs and inducements. "" ^ Neither, on the other hand, can the difficulties of the question be so promptly disposed of, as sceptical pliilosophers are sometimes inclined to believe. It is not enough to aver, in general terms, that there never can be an^^ conflict between truth and utility ; that if religion be false, nothing but good can be the consequence of rejecting it. For, though the know- ledge of every positive truth is an useful acquisition, this doctrine cannot without reservation be applied to negative truth. When the only truth ascertainable is that nothing can be known, we do not, by this knowledge, gain any new fact by which to guide ourselves; we are, at best, only disabused of our trust in some former guide-mark, which, though" itself fallacious, may have pointed in the same direction with the best indications we have, and ir' it happens to be more conspicuous and legible, may have kept us right when they might have been over- looked. It is, in short, perfectly conceivable that 74 UTILITY OF RELIGION religion may be morally useful without being intel- lectually sustainable: and it would be a proof of ; great prejudice in any unbeliever to deny, that there have been ages, and that there are still both nations ■ and individuals, with regard to whom this is actually , the case. Whether it is the case generally, and with- reference to the future, it is the object.of this paper to examine, i; We propose to inquire whether the belief in religion, considered as a mere persuasion, , apart from the question of its truth, is really indis- pensable to the temporal welfare of mankind ; whether the usefulness of the belief is intrinsic and universal, or local, temporary, and, in some sense, accidental; and whether the benefits which it yields might not be obtained otherwise, without the very large alloy of evil, by which, even in the best form of the belief, those benefits are qualified. \ With the arguments on one side of the question we all are familiar : religious writers have not neglected to celebrate to the utmost the advantages both of religion in general and of their own religious faith in particular. But those who have held the contrary opinion have generally contented them- selves with insisting on the more obvious and flagrant of the positive evils which have been engen- dered by past and present forms of religious belief. ^ And, in truth, mankind have beep_scuunremittingly [occupied in doing evil to one another in the name UTILITY OF RELIGION 75 of religion, from the sacrifice of Ipliigenia to the ; Dragonnades of Louis XIV. (not to descend lower), I that for any immediate purpose there was little need; to seek arguments lurther off. These odious con-j sequences, however^ do not belong to religion in' itself, but to particular forms of it, and aflbrd no argument against the usefulness of any religions ■ except those by which such enormities are encou- raged. Moreover, the worst of these evils are already', in a great measure extirpated from the more im- proved forms of religion; and as mankind advance^ in ideas and in feelings, this process of extirpation continually goes on : the immoral, or otherwise mis-, chievous consequences which have been drawn from; religion, are, one by one, abandoned, and, after having been long fought for as of its very essence, are dis- covered to be easily separable from it. These mis- chiefs, indeed, after they are past, though no longer*' arguments against religion, remain valid as large abatements from its beneficial influence, by showing that some of the greatest improvements ever made in the moral sentiments of mankind have taken place without it and in spite of it, and that what we are taught to regard as the chief of all improving influ- ences, has in practice fallen so far short of such a character, that one of the hardest burdens laid upon, the other good influences of human nature has been that of improving religion itself. The improvement. 76 UTILITY OF RELIGION however, has taken place ; it is still proceeding, and for the sake of fairness it should be assumed to be complete. We ought to suppose religion to have accepted the best Imman morality which reason and goodness can work out, from philosophicah christian, or any other elements. When it has thus freed itself from the pernicious consequences which result from iLs identification with any bad moral doctrine, the ground is clear for considering whether its useful properties are exclusively inherent in it, or their benefits can be obtained without it. This essential portion of the inquiry into the tem- poral usefulness of rehgion, is the subject of the present Essay. It is a part which has been littJe treated of by sceptical writers. The only, direct discussion of it Avith which 1 am acquainted, is in a short treatise, understood to have been partly compiled from manu- scripts of Mr. Bentham,'^ and abounding in just aiid profound views; but which, as it appears to me, presses many parts of the argument too hard. This treatise, and the incidental remarks scattered through the writings of M. Comte, are the only sources known to me from which anything very pertinent to the subject can be made available for the sceptical side of the argument. I shall use both of them freely in the sequel of the present discourse. .^— * "Analysis of the Iiiflaence of ISTatural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankhid." By Philip Beaucliamp. U iJLJjiX i V-'-L' j.va:jj_(Xv:*-» v-/-t.i The inquiry divides itself into two parts, cor- responding to the double aspect of the subject; its social, and its individual aspect. What does religion do for society, and what for the individual? Wlmt amoant of benefit to social interests, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, arises from religious belief? And what influence has it in improving and ennobling indi- vidual human nature? The first question is interesting to everybody; the latter only to the best ; but to them it is, if there be any diflerence, the more important of the two. We shall begin with the former, as being that which best admits of being easily brought to a precise issue. To speak first, then, of religious belief as an instru- ment of social good. We must commence by drawing a distinction most commonly overlooked. It is usual to credit religion as suck with the whole of the power inherent in an?/ system of moral duties inculcated by education and enforced by opinion. Undoubtedly mankind would be in a deplorable state if no prin- ciples or precepts of justice, veracit}^, beneficence, were taught publicly or privately, and if these virtues v/ere not encouraged, and the opposite vices repressed, by the praise and blame, the favourable and unfavour- able sentiments, of mankind. And since nearly every- thing of this sort which does take place, takes place in the name of religion ; since almost all who are tiught any morality whatever, have it taught to them as religion, and inculcated on them through life prin- UXlJ-iii I WJP J.X1i,1jJ.U±»J1> cipally in that character \ the effect which the teaching produces as teaching, it is supposed to produce as reh- gious teaching, and religion receives the credit of all the influence in human affairs which belongs to any generally accepted system of rules for the guidance and government of human life. Few persons have sufficiently considered how great an influence this is; what vast efficacy belongs natu- rally to any doctrine received with tolerable unanimity as true, and impressed on the mind from the earliest childhood as duty. A little reflection will, I think, lead us to the conclusion that it is this which is the great moral power in human affairs, and that religion only seems so powerful because this mighty power has been under its command. Consider first, the enormous influence of authority on the human mind. I am now speaking of involuntary influence ; effect on men's conviction, on their per- suasion, on their involuntary sentiments. Authority is the evidence on which the mass of mankind believe, everything which they are said to know/except facts of which their own senses have taken cognizance. It is the evidence on which even the wisest receive all those truths of science, or facts in history or in life, of which they have not personally examined the proofs. Over the immense majority of human beings, the general concurrence of mankind, in any matter of opinion, is all powerful. Whatever is thus certified to UTILITY OF r.ELIGlON 79 them, they believe with a fulness of assurance which they do not accord even to the evidence of their senses when the general opinion of mankind stands in opposition to it. When, therefore, any rule of life and duty, whether grounded or not on rehgion, has/ conspicuously received the general 'assent, it obtains a hold on the belief of every individual, stronger than it would have even if he had arrived at it by the in-| herent force of his own understanding. If Novalis could say, not witliout a real meaning, "My belief has gained infinitely to me from the^moment when one other human being has began to believe the same," how much more when it is not one otherL person, but all the human beings whom one knows of.| Some may urge it as an objection, that no scheme of; morality has this universal assent, and that none, therefore, can be indebted to this source for whatever power it possesses over the mind. So far as relates to the present age, the assertion is true, and strengthens the argument which it might at first seem to contro- vert; for exactly in proportion as the received systems of belief have been contested, and it has become known that they have many dissentients, their hold on the general belief has been loosened, and their practical influence on conduct has declined : and since this has happened to them notwithstanding the re- - ligious sanction which attached to them, there can be no stronger evidence that they were powerful not aa 80 UTILITY OF RELIGION i^eljgion, but as beliefs generally accepted by manldnd. To find people who believe their religion as a person believes that fire will burn his hand when thrust into it, we must seek them in those Oriental countries where Europeans do not yet predominate, or in the European world when it was still universally Catholic. Men often disobeyed their religion in those times, because their human passions and appetites were too strong for it, or because the religion itself afforded means of indulgence to breaches of its obligations; but though they disobeyed, they, for the most part; did not doubt. There was in those days an absolute and unquestioning completeness of belief, never since general in Europe. / -^ Such being the^empire exercised over mankind by simple authority, the mere belief and testimony of their fellow creatures ; consider next how tremendous is the power of education; how unspeakable is the effect of bringing people up from infancy in a belief, and in habits founded on it. Consider also that in all countries, and from tlie earliest ages down to the present, not merely those who are called, in a re- stricted sense of the term, the educated, but all or nearly all who have been brought up by parents, or by any one interested in them, have been taught from their earliest years some kind of religious belief, and some precepts as the commands of the lieavenly powers to them and to mankihd. And as«.it cannot UTILITY OF KELIGIOISr 81 be imagined that the commands of God are to young children anything more than the commands of their parents, it is reasonable to think that any system of social duty which mankind might adopt, even though divorced from religion, would have the same advan- tage of being inculcated from childhood, and would have it hereafter much more perfectly than any doc- trine has it at present, society being far more disposed than formerly to take pains for the moral tuition of^ those numerous classes- whose education it has hitherto left very much to chance. Now it is especially cha- racteristic of the impressions of early education, that they possess what it is so much more difficult for later convictions to obtain — command over the feel- ings. We see daily how powerful a hold these first impressions retain over the feelings even of those, who have given ug^jthe opinions which they were early taught. yWhile on the other hand, it is only persons of a much higher degree of natural sensibility and intellect combined than it is at all common to meet with, whose feelings entwine them- selves with anything like the same force round opinions which they have adopted from their own in- vestigations later in life ; and even when they do, we may say with truth that it is because the strong sense of jn-m^^d duty, the sincerity, courage and self-devotionj which enabled them to do so, were themselves thi fruits of early impressions. 3:^ UTILITY OF RELIGION Tlie power of education is almost boundless : there s not one natural inclination which it is not strong :^nough to coerce, and, if needful, to destroy by disuse, [n the greatest recorded victory which education has 3ver achieved over a whole host of natural inclinations in an entire people — the maintenance through cen- turies of the institutions of Lycurgus, — it was very [ittle, if even at all, indebted to religion : for the Gods 3f the Spartans were the same as those of other Greek states ; and though, no doubt, every state of Greece believed that its particular polity had at its first establishment, some sort of divine sanction (mostly that of the Delphian oracle), there w^as seldom any difficulty in obtaining the same or an equally power- ful sanction for a change. It was not religion which Formed the strength of the Spartan institutions : the root of the system was devotion to Sparta, to the ideal of the country or State : which transformed into ideal devotion to a greater country, the world, would be equal to that and far nobler achievements. Among bhe Greeks generally, social morality was extremely Independent of religion. The inverse relation was rather that which existed between them ; the worship of the Gods was inculcated chiefly as a social duty, in- asmuch as if they were neglected or insulted, it was believqd that their displeasure would fall not more upon the ofl'ending individual than upon the state or com- munitv which bred and tolerated him. Such moral UTILITY OF RELIGION 83 teaching as existed in Greece had very little to do with religion. The Gods were not supposed to con- cern themselves much with men's conduct to one another, except when men had contrived to make the Gods themselves an interested party, by placing an assertion or an engagement under the sanction of a solemn appeal to them, by oath or vow. I grant that the sophists and philosophers, and even popular orators, did their best to press religion into the service^ of their special objects, and to make it be thought that the sentiments of whatever kind, which they were engaged in inculcating, were particularly acceptable to the Gods, but this never seems the primary con-. sideration in any case save those of direct offence to the 1 dignity of the Gods themselves. For the enforcement cf human moralities secular inducements were almost exclusively relied on. The case of Greece is, I believe, the only one in which any teaching, other than religious, has had the unspeakable advantage of form- ing the basis of , education : and though much may be said against the quality of some part of the teaching, very little can be said against its effectiveness. The most memorable example of the power of education over conduct, is afforded (as I have just remarked) by this exceptional case ; constituting a strong presunip tion that in other cases, early religious teaching has owed its power over mankind rather to its being ga.ii than to its being religious. 82 TJTILITY OF RELIGION Tlie power of education is almost boundless : there is not one natural inclination which it is not strong enough to coerce, and, if needful, to destroy by disuse. In the greatest recorded victory which education has ever achieved over a whole host of natural inclinations in an entire people — the maintenance through cen- turies of the institutions of Lycurgus, — it was very little, if even at all, indebted to religion : for the Gods of the Spartans were the same as those of other Greek states ; and though, no doubt, every state of Greece believed that its particular polity had at its first establishment, some sort of divine sanction (mostly that of the Delphian oracle), there was seldom any difficulty in obtaining the same or an equally power- ful sanction for a change. It was not religion which formed the strength of the Spartan institutions : the root of the system was devotion to Sparta, to the ideal of the country or State : which transformed into ideal devotion to a greater country, the world, would be equal to that and far nobler achievements. Among the Greeks generally, social morality was extremely independent of religion. The inverse relation was rather that which existed between them ; the worship of the Gods was inculcated chiefly as a social duty, in- asmuch as if they were neglected or insulted, it was believqd that their displeasure would fall not more upon the oflending individual than upon the state or com- munitv which bred and tolerated him. Such moral UTILITY OF RELIGION 83 teaching as existed in Greece had very little to do with religion. The Gods were not supposed to con- cern themselves much with men*s conduct to one another, except when men had contrived to make the Gods themselves an interested party, by placing an assertion or an engagement under the sanction of a solemn ap}>eal to them, by oath or vow. I grant that the sophists and philosophers, and even popular orators, did their best to press religion into the servica of their special objects, and to make it be thought that, the sentiments of whatever kind, which they were engaged in inculcating, were particularly acceptable to the Gods, but this never seems the primary con-, sideration in any case save those of direct offence to the dignity of the Gods themselves. For the enforcement i of human moralities secular inducements were almost exclusively relied on. The case of Greece is, I believe, j the only one in which any teaching, other than religious, has had the unspeakable advantage of form- ing the basis of .education : and though much may be said against the quality of some part of the teaching, very little can be said against its effectiveness. The most memorable example of the power of education over conduct, is afforded (as I have just remarked) by this exceptional case ; constituting a strong presump- tion that in other cases, early religious teaching hasi owed its power over mankind rather to its being early j than to its being religious. 84^^ UTILITY OF RELIGION T We have now considered two powers, that of au- ' thority, and that of early education, which operate through men's involuntary beliefs, feelings and desires, and which religion has hitherto held as its almost exclusive appanage. Let us now consider a third power which operates directly on their actions, whether their involuntary sentiments are carried with it or not. This is the pojver^ of public opinion; of the praise and blame, the favour and disfavour, of their fellow creatures ; and is a source of strength inherent in any system of moral, belief which is generally adopted, whether connected with religion or not. Men are so much accustomed to give to the motives that decide their actions, more flattering names than justly belong to them, that they are generally quite unconscious how much those parts of their conduct which they most pride themselves on (as well as some : which they are ashamed of), are determined by the I motive of public opinion. Of course public opinion for the most part enjoins the same things which are enjoined by the received social morality ; that morality being, in truth, the summary of the conduct which each one of the multitude, whether he himself ob- serves it with any strictness or not, desires that others should observe towards him. People are therefore easily able to flatter themselves that they ai-e actinp- from the motive of conscience when they are doing UTILITY OF RELIGION 85 in oLeclience to tlie inferior motive, things whiclitlieir conscience approves. We continually see how great is the power of opinion in opposition to conscience ; how men '' follow a multitude to do evil ;" how often opinion induces them to do what their conscience dis- approves, and still oftener prevents them from doing what it commands. But when the motive of public opinion acts in the same direction with conscience, which, since it has usually itself made the conscience: in the first instance, it for the most part naturally does; it is then, of all motives which operate on the , bulk^ ofjQankind, the most overpowering. J J The names of all the strongest passions (except the merely animal ones) manifested by human nature, are each of them a name for some one part only of the motive derived from whciL I here call public opinion. The love of glory; the love of praise; the love of admiration; the love of respect and deference; even' the love of sympathy, are portions of its attractive power. Vanity is a vituperative name for its attrac- tive influence generally, when considered excessive in! degree. The fear of shame, the dread of ill repute or of being disliked or hated, are the direct and simple forms of its deterring power. But the deterring force of the unfavourable ,sentiments of mankind does not consist solely in the painfulness of knowing oneself to 'be the object of those sentinlents; it includes all the penalties which they can inflict : exclusion from social a2 86 UTILITY OF RELIGION intercourse and from the innumeraLle good offices whicli human beings require from one another; the forfeiture of all tiiat is called success in life ; often the great diminution or total loss of means of sub- sistence \ positive ill offices of various kinds, sufficient to render life miserable, and reaching in some states of society as far as actual persecution to death, ^nd again the attractive, or impelling influence of public opinion, includes the whole range of what is com- monly meant by ambition: for, except in times of lawless military violence, the objects of social ambition can only be attained by means of the good opinion and favourable disposition of our fellow- creatures ; nor, in nine cases out of ten, would those objects be even desired, "were Tt not for the power they confer over the sentiments of mankind^. Even fhe pleasure of self-approbation, in the great majority, is mainly dependent on tlie opinion of others. Such is the involuntary influence of authority on ordinary minds, that persons must be of a better than ordinary mould to be capable of a full assurance that they are in the right, when the world, that is, when their world, thinks them wrong : nor is there, to most men, any proof so demonstrative of their own virtue or talent as that people in general seem to believe in it. Through all departments of human affairs, regard for the sentiments of our fellow-creatures is in one shape or other^ in nearly all characters, the pervadhig UTILITY OF RELIGION 87 motive. And we ought to note that this motive is naturally strongest in the most sensitive natures, which are the most promising material for the for- mation of great virtues. How far its power reaches is known by too familiar experience to require either proof or illustration here. When once the means of living have been obtained, the far greater part of the remaining labour and effort which takes place on the j earth, has for its object to acquire the respect or the favourable reo;ard of mankind ; to be looked up to, , or at all events, not to be looked down upon by them. The industrial and commercial activity which advance • civilization, the frivolity, prodigality, and selfish thirst of aggrandizement which retard it, flow equally from that source. While as an instance of the power exercised by the terrors derived from public opinion,! we know how many murders have been committed; merely to remove a witness who knew and was likely: to disclose some secret that would bring disgrace upon' his murdei:^ Cny one who fairly and impartially considers the ibject, will see reason to believe that those great effects on human conduct, which are commonly ascribed to motives derived directly from religion, have mostly for their proximate cause the influence of human opinion. Religion has been powerful not; by its intrinsic force, but because it has wielded that additional and more mighty power. The effect of 88 UTILITY OF RELIGION religion has been immense in giving a direction to public opinion: which has, in many mcst important respects, been wholly determined by it. But without the sanctions superadded by public ojDinion, its own proper sanctions have never, save in exceptional cha- racters, or in peculiar moods of mind, exercised a veiy potent influence, after the times had gone by, in which divine agency was supposed habitually to employ temporal rewards and punishmen ts. i When a man firmly believed that if he violated the sacred- ness of a particular sanctuary he would be struck dead, on the spot, or smitten suddenly with a m^ortal disease, he doubtless took care not to incur the penalty : but when any one had had the courage to defy the danger, and escaped with impunity, the spell was broken. If ever any people were taught that they were under a divine government, and. that unfaithfulness to their religion and law would be visited from above with temporal chastisements, the Jews were so. Yet their history was a mere succession of lapses into Paganism. Their prophets^'' and his- torians, who held fast to the ancient beliefs (though they gave them so liberal an interpretation as to think it a sufficient manifestation of God's displeasure towards a king if any evil happened to his great grandson), never ceased to complain that their coun- trymen turned a deaf ear to their vaticinations; and hence, with the faith they held in a divine govern- UTILITY OF RELIGIO:^ 89 ment operating by temporal pemlties, tlicy could not fail to anticipate (as Mirabeau's faxber vvitbout sucb prompting, was able to do on the eve of the French Revolution) la culbute generale; an expectation which, luckily for the credit of their prophetic powers, was fulfilled; unlike that of the Apostle John, who in the only intelligible prophecy in the Revelations, foretold to the city of the seven hills a fate like that of Nineveh and Babylon ; which prediction remains to this hour unaccomplished. Unquestionably the con- viction which experience in time forced on all but the very ignorant, that divine punishments were not to be confidently expected in a temporal form, contributed much to the downfall of the old religions, and the general adoption of one which without abso- lutely excluding providential interferences in this life for the punishment of guilt or the reward of merit, removed the principal scene of divine retribution to a world after death. But rewards and punishments postponed to that distance of time, and never seen by the eye, are not calculated, even when infinite and eternal, to have, on ordinary minds, a very powerful effect in opposition to strong temptation. Their remoteness alone is a prodigious deduction from their efficacy, on such minds as those which most require the restraint of punishment. A still greater abate- ment is their uncertainty, which belongs to them from the very nature of the case : for rewards and 90 UTILITY OF r.rLIGIOlS" pimisbments aclministered after death, must be awarded not definite!}^ to particular actions, but on a general /survey of tbe person's whole life, and he easily per- I suades himself that whatever may have been his ; peccadilloes, there will be a balance in his favour at tbe last. All positive religions aid this self-delusion. Bad religions teach that divine vengeance may be bought off, by offerings, or personal abasement; tbe better religions, not to drive sinners to despair, dwell ,' so much on the divine mercy, that hardly any one ; is compelled to think himself irrevocably condemned. The sole quality in these punishments which might seem calculated to make them efficacious, tl^eir over- powering magnitude, is itself a reason why nobody (except a hypochondriac here and there) ever really believes that he is in any very sei'ious danger of incurring them. Even the worst malefactor is hardly able to think that any crime he has had it in his power to commit, any evil he can have. inflicted in this short space of existence, can have deserved torture extending through an eternity. Accordingly religious writers an:ht at death by the act of Grod making perfect every one whom it is his will to include among his elect, might be justified by an express revelation duly authenticated, but is utterly opposed to every presumption that can be deduced from the light of Nature, PAET lY REVEL A.TION rpHE discussion in the preceding pages respecting the evidences of Theism has been strictly con- fined to those which are derived from the light of Nature. It is a different question what addition has been made to those evidences, and to what extent the conclusions obtainable from them have been amplified or modified, by the establishment of a direct communi- cation with the Supreme Being. It would be beyond the purpose of this Essay, to take into consideration the positive evidences of the Christian, or any other belief, which claims to be a revelation from Heaven. But such general considerations as are applicable not to a particular system, but to Revelation generally, may properly find a place here, and are indeed ne- cessary to give a sufficiently practical bearing to the results of the preceding investigation. In the first place, then, the indications of a Creator and of his attributes which we have been REVELATION 213 able to find in Nature, though so much slighter and less conclusive even as to his existence than the pious mind would wish to consider them, and still more unsatisfactory in the information they afford as to his attributes, are yet sufficient to give to the supposition of a Eevelation a standing point which it would not otherwise have had. The alleged Reve- lation is not obliged to build up its case from the foundation; it has not to prove the very existence of the Being from whom it professes to come. It claims ^ to be a message from a Being whose existence, whose,' power, and to a certain extent whose wisdom and: goodness, are, if not proved, at least indicated with more or less of probability by the phenomena of Natm'e. The sender of the alleged message is not a sheer invention ; there are grounds independent of the message itself for belief in his reality ; grounds which, though insufficient for proof, are sufficient to take away all antecedent improbability from the sup- position that a message may really have been received from him. It is, moreover, much to the purpose to take notice, that the very imperfection^ of the evidences which Natural Theology can produce of the Divine attributes, removes some of the chief stum- bling blocks to the belief of a Revelation ; since the objections grounded on imperfections in the Revelation itself, however conclusive against it if it is considered as a record of the acts or an expression of the wisdom p 9. 214 THEISM of a Being of infinite power combined with infinite wisdom and goodness, are no reason whatever against its having come from a Being such as the course of nature points to, whose wisdom is possibly, his power certainly, limited, and whose goodness, though real, is not likely to have been the only motive which actuated him in the work of Creation. The argument of Butler's Analogy, is, from its own point of view, conclusive : the Christian religion is open to no objec- tions, either moral or intellectual, which do not apply at least equally to the common, theory of Deism ; the morality of the Gospels is far higher and better than that which shows itself in the order of Nature ; and what is morally objectionable in the Christian theory of the world, is objectionable only when taken in con- junction with the doctrine of an omnipotent God; and (at least as understood by the most enlightened Christians) by no means imports any moral obliquity in a Being whose power is supposed to be restricted by real, though unknown obstacles, which prevented him from fully carrying out his design. The grave error of Butler was that he shrank from admitting the hypothesis of limited powers ; and his appeal con- sequently amounts to this : The belief of Chris- tians is neither more absurd nor more immoral thar the belief of Deists who acknowledge an Omnipoteni Creator, let us, therefore, in spite of the absurdity anc immorality, believe both. He ought to have said, lei REVELATION 215 US cut clown our belief of either to what does not in- volve absurdity or immora,lity ; to what is neither intellectually self-contradictory nor morally perverted. To return, however, to the main subject : on the hypothesis of a God, who made the world, and in making it had regard, however that regard may have been limited by other considerations, to the happiness ^ of his sentient creatures, there is no antecedent impro- bability in the supposition that his concern for their good would continue, and that he mi ght once or oftener gi ve pro of of it by_comirLunicating_ to them some knowledge of himself beyond what they were able to make out by their unassisted faculties, and some knowledge or precepts useful for guiding them through the difficulties of life. Neither on the only tenable hypothesis, that of limited power, is it open to us to object that these helps ought to have been greater, or in any way other than they are. The only question to be entertained, and which we cannot dis- pense ourselves from entertaining, is that of evidence. Can any evidence suflBce to prove a Divine Revela- tion? And of what nature, and what amount, must that evidence be ? Whether the special evidences of Christianity, or of any other- alleged revelation, do or do not come up to the mark, is a different question, into which I do not propose directly to eiiter. The question I intend to consider, is, w hat e vidence is re- quired ; what general conditions it ought to satisfy! 216 THEISM and whether they are such as, according to the known constitution of things, ca7i be satisfied. I The evidences of Revelation are commonly dis- tinguished as external or ^ internal. E xtern al evi- dences_arejfclie-testimony of the senses or of witnesses. By the internal evidences are meant the indications I which jfche EeTelation itself is thought to furnish of i its .-divine, origin ; indications supposed to consist chiefly in the excellence of its precepts, and its general suitability jo the circumstances and needs of human nature. The consideration of these internal evidences is very important, but their importance is principally negative ; they may be conclusive grounds for re- jecting a Revelation, but cannot of themselves warrant jthe acceptance of it as divine. If the moral charact er of the doctrines o f a n alleg^ed Revelation is bad and I pe rverting, we ought to reject it fro m whomsoever it I comes ; for it cannot come from a good and wise ' Bein^y. But the excellence of their morality can ne ver entitle us to ascribe to them a supernatural origin : for we cannot have conclusive reason for believing that the hu man faculties were incompetent to find out, moral doctrines of which the human facul- ties can perceive and recogniz e t he excellence. A ^_ , ^ _ . . . — ;- >*— — Revelat ion, therefore, cannot be pro ved divine unless by external evidence ; that is, by the e xhibition of supernatural facts. And we have to consider, whether PvEVELATION 217 it is possible to prove supernatural facts, and if it is, what evidence is required to prove them. Tliis question has only, so far as I know, been seriously r.aised on the sceptical side, by Hume. It is the question involved in his famous argument against Miracles : an argument which goes down to the depths of the subject, but the exact scope and e ffect of wh ich, (perhaps n^t conceived jwith perfect correctne ss by that gre at thinker himself), have in general been utterly misconceived by those who have attempted to answer him. Dr. Campbell, for example, one of the acutest of his antagonists, has thought himself obliged, in order to support the credibility of miracles, to lay down doctrines which virtually go the length of maintaining that antecedent im- probability is never a sufficient ground for refusing credence to a statement, if it is well attested. Dr. Campbell's fallacy lay in overlooking a double meaning of the word improbability; as I luive pointed out in my Logic, and, still earlier, in an editorial note to Bentham's treatise on Evidence. Taking the question from the very beginning ; it ^is. evidently impossible to maintain that if a super- natural fact really occurs, proof of its occurrence cannot be accessible to the human faculties. The evidence of our senses could prove this as it can l)rove other things. To put the most extreme case : suppose that I actually saw and heard a Bein-^, either 218 THEISM of the human form, or of some form previously un- known to me, commanding a world to exist, and a new world actually starting into existence and com- mencing a movement through space, at his command. There can be no doubt that this evidence would onvert the creation of worlds from a speculation into a fact of experience. It may be said, I could not know that so singular an appearance was any- thing more than a hallucination of my senses. True; but the same doubt exists at first respecting every unsuspected and surprising fact which comes to light in our physical researches. That our senses have been^_dgjC£dx^, is a possibility which has to be met, and dealt with, and we do deal with it, by several means. If we repeat the experiment, and again with the same result; if at the time of the observation the impressions of our senses are in all other respects the same as usual, rendering the supposition of their being morbidly affected in this one particular, ex- tremely improbable ; above all, ifotb^r people's senses confirm the testimon^._--of-oux— o:^!V^n ; we con- clude, with reason, that we may trust our senses. , Indeed our senses are all that we have to trust to. We depend on them for the ultimate premises even of our reasonings. There is no other appeal against their decision than an appeal from the senses without precautions to the senses with all due precautions. When the evidence, on which an opinion rests, is REVELATION 219 equal to tliat upon which the whole conduct and safety of our lives is founded, we need ask no further. Objections which apply equally to all evidence are vahd against none. They only prove abstract falli- bility. But the _^idence^.Q£... miracles, at least to Protestant ^ Christians, is not, in our own day, of this cogent -description. It is no t the evidence o f our senses, but of witnesses, and even this not atfirstjiand^but restini^ on the attestation of books and traditions. And even in the case of the original eye-witnesses, the super- natural facts asserted on their alleged testimony, are not of the transcendant character supposed in our example, about the nature of which, or the impossi- bility of their having had a natural origin, there could be little room for doubt. On the contrary, thoi recorded miracles are, in the first place, generally such \ as it would have been extremely difficult to verify as matters of fact, and in the next place, are hardly ever i beyond the possibility of having been brought about .by human means or by the spontaneous agencies of 1 nature. It is to casesjD£4h4s-bi-B'd~that Hume's ai'gu- men t against t he credibility of miracles was meant to app]^;* — His argument is : The evidence of miracles consists of testimony. The ground of our reliance on testimony is our experience that certain conditions being supposed, testimony is generally veracious. But the same ex- 220 THEISM perience tells us that even under the best conditions testimony is frequently either intentionally or un- intentionally, false^ When, therefore, the fact to which testimony is produced is one the happening of which would be more at variance with experience than the falsehj^ed -of testimony, we ought not to believe it. And this rule all prudent persons observe in the conduct of life. Those who do not, are sui-e to suffer for their credulity. Now a miracle (the argument goes on to say) is, in the highest possible degree, contradictory to experience : for if it were not contradictory to experience it would not be a miracle. The very reason for its being regarded as a miracle is that it is a breach of a law of nature, that is, of an otherwise invariable and inviolable uniformity in the succession of natural events. There is, therefore, the very strongest reason for disbelieving it, that experience can give for disbelieving anything. But the mendacity or error of witnesses, even though numerous and of fair character, is quite within the bounds of even common experience. That supposition, therefore, ought to be ^ preferred. There are two apparently weak points in this argument. One is, that the evidence of exper ience to which its appeal is made is only negatlve-evidenQe, which is not so conclusive as positive ; since facts of which there had been no previous experience are^Heh REVELATTO]^ 221 discm^ered^ and proved ^^MZ^sitive^^^xperience to be true. The other seemingly vulnerable point is this. The argument has the appearance of assuming that the testunony^of^^experien a gainst jniraclesj.s mideyiating..jli^^ as it would be if the whole question was about the probability of future miracles, none ^a^illgl^vken place in the past ; whereas the very thing asserted on the other side is that , ther e have been _m ij:acles,- and^ that the testimony of expedaac©-is-e©%--whoHy-on the negative side. All the evidence alleged in favour of any miracle ought to be reckoned as counter evidence in refutation of the p-round on which it is asserted that miracles ought to be disbelieved. The question can only be stated fairly as depending on a balance of evidence: a certain^ amount of positive evidence in favour of miracles, and a negative presumption from the genera] course of human experience against them. ;(^ In order to support the argument under this double correction, it has to be shown that the negative pre- sumption against a miracle is very much stronger than that against a merely new and surprising fact. This, however, is evidently the case. A ^ new physical discovery even if it consists in the defeating of a well established law of nature, is but the discovery of another law previously unknown. There is nothing, in this but what is familiar to our experience : we wen^ aware that we did not know all the laws of nature, 222 THEISM and we were aware that one such Jaw is liable to be counteracted by others. The new phenomenon, when brought to light, is found still to depend on law ; it is always exactly reproduced when the same circuiiH^ stances are repeated. Its occurrence, therefore, is within the limits of variation in experience, which experience itself discloses. But a miracle, in the very fact of being a miracle, declares itself to be a super- session not of one natural law by another, but of the law which includes all others, which experience shows to be universal for all phenomena, viz., that they depend on some law; that they are always the same when there are the same phenomenal antecedents, and neither take place in the absence of their phenomenal causes, nor ever fail to take place when the phenomenal conditions are all present. \ It is evident that this argument against belief in miracles had very little to rest upon until a com- paratively modern stage in the progress of science. A few generations ago the uuiyersal _ dependence of pJianj^niena on iiTvan^ laws was not only not recog- nized by mankind in general but could not be regarded by the instructed as a scientifically established truth. There were many phenomena which seemed quite irregular in their course, without dependence on any known antecedents : and though, no doubt, a certain regularity in the occurrence of the most fami- liar phenomena must always have been recognized, REVELATION 223 yet, even in these, the exceptions which were constantly occurring had not yet, by an investigation and generali- zation of the circumstances of their occurrence, been reconciled with the general rule. The heavenly bodies were from of old the most conspicuous types of regular and unvarying order : yet even among them comets were a phenomenon apparently originating without any law, and eclipses, one which seemed to take place in violation of law. Accordingly both comets and. eclipses long continued to be regarded as of a miracu- lous nature, intended as signs and omens of human fortunes. It would have been impossible in those days to prove to anyone that this supposition was an- tecedently improbable. It seemed more conformable to appearances than the hypothesis of an unknown law. Now, however, when, in the progress of science, all phenomena have been shown, by indisputable evidence, to be amenable to law, and even in the cases in which those laws have not yet been exactly ascertained, delay in ascertaining them is fully accounted for by the special difficulties of the subject; the defenders of miracles have adapted their argument to this altered state of things, by maintaining that a miracle need not necessarily be a violation of law. It may, they say, take place in fulfilment of a more recondite law, to us unknown. If by this it be only meant that the Divine Being, in the exercise of his power of interfering with and 224 THEISM suspending iiis ovv^n laws, guides himself by some general jDi'inciple or rule of action, this, of course, cannot be disproved, and is in itself the most probable supposition. But if the argument means that a miracle may be the fulfilment of a law in the same sense in which the ordinary events of Nature are fulfilments of laws, it seems to indicate an imperfect conception of what is meant by a law, and of what constitutes a miracle. When we say that an ordinary physical fact always takes place according to some invariable law, we mean that it is connected by uniform sequence or coexist- ence with some definite set of physical antecedents ; that whenever that set is exactly reproduced the same phenomenon will take place, unless counteracted by the similar laws of some other physical antecedents ; and that whenever it does take place, it would always be found that its special set of antecedents (or one of its seta if it has more than one) has pre-existed. Now, an event, which takes place in this manner, is I not a miracle. To make it a miracle it must be pro- duced by a dire3t volition, without the use of means ; or at least, of any means which if simply repeated jw^ould produce it. To constitute a miracle a pheno- [menon must take place without having been preceded by any antecedent phenomenal conditions sufficient again to reproduce it; or a phenomenon for the pro-' duction of which the antecedent conditions existed/ EEVELATION 225 must be arrested or prevented without the interven- tion of any phenomenal antecedents which would arrest or prevent it in a future case. The test of a miracle is: Were there present in the case such ex-^ ternal conditions, such second causes we may call/ them, that whenever these conditions or causes re-' appear the event will be reproduced? If there were] it is not a miracle ; if there were not, it is a miracle] [ but it is not accarding to law : it is an event produced, without, or in spite of law. It will perhaps be said that a miracle does not necessarily exclude the intervention of secohd causes. If it were the will of God to raise a thunderstorm by miracle, he might do it by means of winds and clouds. Undoubtedly ; but the winds and clouds were either sufficient when produced to excite the thunderstorm without other divine assistance, or they were not. If the)^ were not, the storm is not a fulfilment of law, but a violation of it. If they were sufficient, there is a miracle, but it is not the storm ; it is the production of the winds and clouds, or whatever link in the chain of causation it was at which the influence of physical antecedents was dispensed with. If that influence was never dispensed with, but the event called mira- culous was producedby natural means, and those again by others, and so on from the beginning of tliin<>*s ; if the event is no otherwise the act of (jod than in having been foreseen and ordained by him as the 226 THEISM consequence of the forces put in action at the Creation ; til en there is no miracle at all, nor anything different from the ordinary working of God's providence. For another example : a person professing to be divinely commissioned, cures a sick person, by some apparently insignificant external application. Would this application, administered by a person not spe- cially commissioned from above, have effected the cure ? If so, there is no miracle ; if not, there is a miracle, but there is a violation of law. It will be said, however, that if these be violations of law, then law is violated every time that any out- ward effect is produced by a voluntary act of a human being. Human volition is constantly modi- fying natural phenomena, not by violating their laws, but by using their laws. "Why may not divine volition do the same ? The power of volitions over phenomena is itself a law, and one of the earliest known and acknowledged laws of nature. It is true, the human will exercises power over objects in general indirectly, through the direct power which it possesses only over the human muscles. God, however, has direct power not merely over one thing, but over all the objects which he has made. There is, therefore, no more a supposition of violation of law in supposing bhat events are produced, prevented, or modified by aod's action, than in the supposition of their being :)roduced, prevented, or modified by man's action. REVELATION" 227 Both are equally in the course of nature, both equallyl\ consistent with what we know of the government of all things by law. Those who thus argue are mostly believers in Free Will, and maintain that every human volition ori- g^'nates a new chain of causation, of which it is itself the commencing link, not connected by invariable sequence with any anterior fact. Even, therefore, if a divine interposition did constitute a breaking-in upon the connected chain of events, by the introduc- tion of a new originating canse without root in the past, this would be no reason for discrediting it, since every human act of volition does precisely the same. If the one is a breach of law, so are the others. In fact, the reign of law does not extend to the origina- tion of volition. Those who dispute the Free Will theory, and regard volition as no exception to the Universal law of Cause and Effect, may answer, that volitions do not interrupt the chain of causation, but carry it on, the connection of cause and effect being of just the same nature be- tween motive and act as between a combination of physical antecedents and a physical consequent. But this, whether true or not, does not really affect the argument: for the interference of human will with the course of nature is only not an exception to law when we include among laws the relation of motive to volition; and by the same rule interference by the a 228 THEISM Divine will would not be an exception either; since ;ve cannot but suppose the Deity, in every one of his lets, to be determined by motives. The alleged analogy therefore holds good : but svhat it proves is only what I have from the first maintained — that divine interference with nature 3ould be proved if we had the same sort of evidence For it which we have for buman interferences. The question of antecedent improbability only arises be- cause divine interposition is not certified by the iirect evidence of perception, but is always matter 3f inference, and more or less of speculative inference. And a little consideration will show that in these circumstances the antecedent presumption against bhe truth of the inference is extremely strong. When the human will interferes to produce any physical phenomenon, except the movements of the human body, it does so by the employment of means: and is obliged to employ such means as are by their own physical properties sufficient to bring about the effect. Divine interfereiice, by hypothesis, proceeds in a different manner from this : it produces its effect without means, or with such as are in themselves insufficient. In the first case, all the physical phenomena except the first bodily movement are produced in strict conformity to physical causation; while that fi.rst movement is traced by positive observation, to the cause (the volition) which pro- REVELATION 229 duced it. In the other case, the event is supposed not to have been produced at all through physical causation, while there is no direct evidence to con^^ nect it with any volition. The ground on which, it is ascribed to a volition is only negative, because 1 there is no other apparent way of accounting for its existence. But in this merely speculative explanation there is always another hypothesis possible, viz., that the event may have been produced by physical causes, in a manner not apparent. It may either be due to a law of physical nature not yet known, or to the un- known presence of the conditions necessary for pro- ducing it according to some known law. Supposing even that the event, supposed to be miraculous, does not reach us through the uncertain medium of human testimony but rests on the direct evidence of our own senses ; even then so long as there is no direct evidence of its production by a divine volition, like that we have for the production of bodily move- ments by human volitions — so long, therefore, as the miraculous character of the event is but an inference from the supposed inadequacy of the laws of physical nature to account for it, — so long will the hypothesis of a natural origin for the phenomenon be entitled to preference over that of a supernatural one. The commonest principles of sound judgment forbid us to suppose for any effect a cause of which we have o 2 230 THEISM absolutely no experience, unless all those of which we have experience are ascertained to be absent. Now there are few things of which we have more frequent experience than of physical facts which our knowledge does not enable us to account for, because they depend either on laws which observation, aided by science, has not yet brought to light, or on facts the presence of which in the particular case is un- suspected by us. Accordingly w^hen we hear of a prodigy we always, in these modern times, believe that if it really occurred it was neither the work of God nor of a demon, but the consequence of some unknown natural law or of some hidden fact. Nor is either of these suppositions precluded when, as in the case of a miracle properly so called, the wonderful event seemed to depend upon the will of-^ human being. It is always possible that there may be at work some undetected law of nature which the wonder-worker may have acquired, consciously or un- consciously, the power of calling into action ; or that the wonder may have been wrought (as in the truly extraordinary feats of jugglers) by the employment, unperceived by us, of ordinary laws : which also need not necessarily be a case of voluntary deception ; or, lastly, the event may have had no corinection with the volition at all, but the coincidence between them may be the effect of craft or accident, the miracle- worker having seemed or affected to produce by his BEVEL A.TION 231 will that which was already about to take place, as if one were to command an eclipse of the sun at the moment when one knew by astronomy that an eclipse was on the point of taking place. In a case of this description, the miracle might be tested by a challenge to repeat it ; but it is worthy of remark, that recorded miracles were seldom or never put to this test. No miracle-worker seems ever to hav made a practice of raising the dead : that and the other most signal of the miraculous operations are reported to have been performed only in one or a few isolated cases, which may have been either cunningly selected cases, or accidental coincidences. There isj in short, nothi ng^ to exclude the finppnsition that^ every alleged miracle was due t o natura,l causes : and as long as that supposition remains possible, no 'Scientific observer, and no man of ordinary practical judgment, would assume by conjecture a cause which no reason existed for supposing to be real, save the necessity of accounting for something which is sufficiently accounted for without it. Were we to stop here, the case against miracles might seem to be complete. But on further inspec- tion it will be seen that we cannot, from the above considerations, conclude absolutely that the miracu- lous theory of the production of a phenomenon ought to be at once rejected. We can conclude only that no extraordinary powers which have ever been alleged 232 THEISM to be exercised by any human being over nature, can be evidence of miraculous gifts to any one to whom the existence of a supernatural Being, and his inter- ference in human affairs, is not already a vera causa. The existence of God cannot possibly be proved by miracles, for unless a (iod is already recognized, the_ apparent miracle can always be accounted for_ jm a^ m ore probable hypothesis than that of the inter- fer ence of a Being of whose vBiy existence it is * supposed to be the sole evidence. Thus far Hjiinfils argument^is—ctymrlusive. But it is far from being eqtially so when^_,the existence of a Being who created the present order^of_JNature, and, therefore, may well be thought to have power to modify it, is accepted as a fact, or even as a probability resting on independent evidence. Once admi t a G od, and the production by his direct volition of an effect which in any case owed its origin to his creative will, is no longer a purely arbitrary hypothesis to account for the fact; but^ must be reckoned with as a serious possibility. * The question then changes its character, and the decision of it must now__rest_upim-w-liat is known or reasonably surmised_aia-to tlie manner of God's government, of . the ..uni-Kaxse : whether this knowledge or surmise makes it the more probable supposition that the event was brought about by the agencies by which his government is ordinarily carried on, or that it is the result of a special and REVELATION 233 extraordinary interposition of his will in supersession of those ordinary agencies. In the first place, then, assuming as a fact the existence and providence of God, the whole of our observation of Nature proves to us by incontrover- tible evidence that the rule of his government is by means of second causes : that all facts, or at least all physical facts, follow uniformly upon given physical conditions, and never occur but when the appropriate collection of physical conditions is realized. I limit the assertion to physical facts, in order to leave the case of human volition an open question : though indeed I need not do so, for if the human will is free, it has been left free by the Creator, and is not controlled by him either through second causes or directly, so that, not being governed, it is not a spe- cimen of his mode of government. Whatever he does govern, he governs by second causes. This was not obvious in the infancy of science ; it was more and more recognized as the processes of nature were more carefully and accurately examined, until there now remains no class of phenomena of which it is not positively known, save some cases which from their obscurity and complication our scientific pro- cesses have not yet been able completely to clear up and disentangle, and in which, therefore, the proof that they also are governed by natural laws could not, in the present state of science, be more complete. 234 THEISM The evidence, though merely negative, which these circumstances afford that government by second causes is universal, is admitted for all except directly religious purposes to be conclusive. When either a man of science for scientific or a man of the world for practical purposes inquires into an event, he asks himself what is its cause? and not, has it any natural cause? A man would be laughed at who set down as one of the alternative suppositions that there is no other cause for it than the will of God. Against this weight of negative evidence we have to set such positive evidence as is produced in attes- tation of exceptions ; in other words, thep^isiti^^e evidences of liviracles. And I have already admitted that this evidence might conceivably have been such as to make the exception equally certain with the rule. If we had the direct testimony of our senses to a supernatural fact, it might be as completely authenticated and made certain as any natural one. But we never have. The supernatural character of the fact is always, as I have said, matter of inference and speculation : and the mystery always admits the possibility of a solution not supernatural. To those who already believe in supernatural power, the supernatural hypothesis may appear more probable than the natural one ; but only if it accords with what w^e know or reasonably surmise respecting the ways of the supernatural agent. Now. all that we REVELATION" 235 know, from the evidence of nature, concerning his ways, is in harmony with the natural theory and repugnant to the supernatural. There is, therefore, a vast preponderaiice_o£..pxotah4-l-ity- aga^^ a miracle, to counterbalance which would require a very extra- ordinary and indisputable congruity in the supposed miracle and its circumstances with something which we conceive ourselves to know, or to have grounds for believing, with regard to the divine attributes. This extraordinary congruity is supposed to exist when the purpose of the miracle is extremely beneficial to mankind, as when it serves to accredit some highly important belief. The goodness of Grod, it is supposed, affords a high degree of antecedent probability that he would make an exception to his general rule of govern- ment, for so excellent a purpose. For reasons, how- ever, which have already been entered into, any inference drawn by us from the goodness of God to what he has or has not actually done, is to the last degree precarious. If we reason directly from Grod'sl goodness to positive facts, no misery, nor vice nor crime ought to exist in the world. We can see no' reason in God's goodness why if he deviated once from tlie ordinary system of his government in order to do good to man, he should not have done so on a hundred other occasions ; nor why, if the benefit aimed at by some given da^'iation, such as the revelation of Christianity^ was transcendent and unique, that 236 THEISM precious gift should only have been vouchsafed after the lajDse of many ages ; or why, when it was at last given, the evidence of it should have been left open to so much doubt and difficulty. Let it be remembered also that the goodness of God afibrds no presumption in favour of a deviation from his general system ol government unless the good purpose could not have been attained without deviation. If God intended that mankind should receive Christianity or any other gift, it would have agreed better with all that we know of his government to have made provision in the scheme of creation for its arising at the appointed time by natural development; which, let it be added, all the knowledge we now possess concerning the history of the human mind, tends to the conclusion that it actually did. To all these considerations ought to be added the extremely imperfect nature of the testimonyitsgl which we possess- for.jl ie mir acleSj real or supposed w^hich accompanied the foundation of Christianity anc of every other revealed religion. Take it at the best it is the uncross-examined testimony of extremeh ignorant people, credulous as such usually are, honour ably credulous when the excellence of the doctrine o just reverence for the teacher makes them eage to belieA^e ; unaccustomed to draw the line betweei the perceptions of sense, and what is superinduced upoi them by the suggestions of a lively imagination ; un REVELATION" 237 vei*sed in the difficult art of deciding between appear- ance and reality, and between the natural and the supernatural; in times, moreover, when no one thought it worth while to contradict any alleged miracle, because it was the belief of the age that miracles in themselves proved nothing, since they could be worked by a lying spirit as well as by the spirit of Grod. Such were the witnesses ; and even of them we do not possess the direct testimony; the documents, of date long subsequent, even on the orthodox theory, which contain the only history of these events, very often do not even name the supposed eye-witnesses. They put down (it is but just to admit), the best and least absurd of the wonderful stories such multitudes of which were current among the early Christians.; but when they do, exceptionally, name any of the persons who were the subjects or spectators of the miracle, they doubtless draw from tradition, and mention those names with which the story was in the popular mind, (perhaps accidentally) connected : for whoever has observed the way in which even now a story grows up from some small foundation, taking on additional details at every step, knows well how from being at first anonymous, it gets names attached to it ; the name of some one by whompefEagsiBe story has been told, being brought into the story itself fircit as a witness, and still later as a party concerned. It is also noticeable and is a very important con- 238 THEISM sideration, that stories of miracles only grow up among the ignorant and are adopted, if ever, by the educated wlien they have already become the belief of multitudes. Those which are believed by Protestants all originate in ages and nations in which there was hardly any canon of probabiHty, and miracles were thought to be i among the commonest of all phenomena. Tl\e Catholic ICliurch, indeed, holds as an article of faith that piracies have never ceased, and new ones continue to be now and then brought forth and believed, even in the present incredulous age — yet if in an incredulous generation certainly not among the incredulous portion of it, but always among people who, in addition to the , most childish ignorance, have grown up (as all do who are educated by the Catholic clergy) trained in the per- suasion that it is a duty to believe and a sin to doubt; that it is dangerous to be sceptical about an3''thing which is tendered for belief in the name of the true religion ; and that nothing is so contrary to piety as in- credulity. But these miracles which noone but aEomaii Catholic, and by no means every Roman Catholic believes, rest frequently upon an amount or testinionj c^reatly surpassing that which we possess for any o: the early miracles ; and superior especially in one o the most essential points, that in many cases th( alleged eye-witnesses are known, and we have thei: 1 story at first hand. Til us, then, stands the balance of evidence in respec to the' reality of miracles, assuming the exi.-!tence anc KEVELATION" 239 goverBment of God to be proved by other evidence. On the one side, the greatjiey^itive_^£re^im^^^ arising from the whole of what- the Gonrse of -nature dis^'5K^ri:n''uf^fI.the divine^ g as carried on through second causes and by invariable sequences of physical effects upon^onstant antecedents. On the otheFsTdeTa few exceptio_nal instances, attested by evidence not of a- character to warrant .belief in any fac^slnThe smallest degree unusual or improbable ;| | the eye-witnesses in most cases unknown, in nonej coT^etent by character^or education to scrutinize thd I real nature~orthe^ppearances which they may have^l secn,^' and moved -moreover by a union of the strongest motives which can inspire human beings to persuade, first themselves, and then others, that what they had seen was a miracle. The facts, too, even if faith- fully reported, are never incompatible with the sup- position that they were either mere coincidences, or I were produced by natural means; even when no' specific conjecture can be made as to those means, which in general it can. The conclusion I draw is: that miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidences; of any revelation. What can be said with truth on the side of miracles * St. Paiil, the only known exception to the ignorance and want of education o£ the first generation of Christians, attests no miracle but that of his own conversion, which of all the miracles of the New Testament is the one which admits of the easiest explanation from natural causes. 240 THEISM amounts only to thisj) Considering that the order of Tmtnre"--affi7rds^"^OTne evidence of the reality of a Creator, and of his bearing good will to his creatures though not of its being the sole prompter of his con- duct towards them : considering, again, that all the evidence of his existence is evidence also that he is not all-powerful, and considering that in our igno- rance of the limits of his power we cannot positively decide that he was able to provide for us by the original plan of Creation all the good which it entered into his intentions to bestow upon us, or even to bestow any part of it at any earlier period than that at which we actually received it — considering these things, when we consider further that a gift, extremely precious, came to us which though facilitated was not apparently necessitated by what had gone before, but was due, as far as appear- ances go, to the peculiar mental and moral endow- ments of one man, and that man openly proclaimed that it did not come from himself but from God through him, then we are entitled t^_saythat there is nothing so inherently impossible or absolutely in- credible in this supposition as to' preclude anj^ one from hoping that it . may perhaps be true. I say from hoping; I go no further; for I cannot attach any evidentiary value to the testimony even of Christ on such a subject, since he is never said to have declared any evidence of his mission (unless his own REVELATION 241 interpretations of the Prophecies be so considered) except internal conviction ; and everybody knows that in prescientific times men always supposed that any unusual faculties which came to them they knew not how, were an inspiration from God ; the best men always being the readiest to ascribe any honourable peculiarity in themselves to that higher source, ratherl than to their own merits. cC^' /*j PAET y GENEEAL EESULT T?EOM the result of the preceding examination of the -^ evidencesof Theism, and (Theismbeingpresupposed) of the evidences of anj'- Eevelation, i t follows that t he ratio nal attitude of a thinking mind towards the super natural, whether in natural or in revealed religion , i s that of scepticism as distinguished from belie f_on the one hand, and from atheism on the other : in- cluding, in the present case, under atheism, the nega- tive as well as the positive form of disbelief in a God, viz., not only the dogmatic denial of his existence, but the denial that there is any evidence on either side, which for most practical purposes amounts to the same thing as if the existence of a God had been disproved. If we are right in the conclusions to which we have been led by the preceding inquiry there is evidence, but insufficient for proof, and amounting only to one of the lower degrees of probability. The indication given by such evidence GENERAL RESULT ^-^'i as there is, points to the creation, not indeed of the universe, but of the present order of it by an In- telligent Mind, whose power over the materials was not absolute, whose love for his creatures was not liis | sole actuating inducement, but who nevertheless j desired their good, i The notion of a providential '' government by an omnipotent Being for the good of his creatures must be entirely dismissed. Even of the continued, existence of the Creator we have no other guarantee than that he cannot be subject to the law of death which affects terrestrial beings, since the conditions that produce this liability wherever it is known to exist are of his creating. That this Being, not being omnipotent^ may have produced a machinery falling short of his intentions, and which may require the occasional interposition of the Maker's hand, is a supposition not in itself absurd nor impossible, though in none of the cases in which such interposition is believed to have occurred is the evidence such as could possibly prove it ; it . remains a simple possibility, which those may dwell on to whom it yields comfort to suppose that blessinn>s wliich ordinary human power is inadequate to attain, may come not from extraordinary human power, but from the bounty of an intelligence beyond tlie human, and which continuously cares for man. The pos- sibility of a life after death rests on the same footing — of_a__boon which this powerful Being who wishes R /well to man, may havd the power td gf^hi, and which if the message alleged to have been sent by him was really sentj he has actually promised. The whole domain of the supernatural is_thus r emoved from the re.c^ion of Belief intQ jhat^of_^j3afi]g Hope j and in that, for anything we can see, it is likely always to remain ; for we can hardly anti- cipLite either that any positive evidence will be acquired of the direct agency of Divine Benevolence in human destiny, or that any reason will be dis- covered for considering the realization of human hopes on that subject as beyond the pale of possibility. I It is now to be considered whether the in dulgenc e i fi[_ hop^j ^^ a region of imagination merely, in which there is no prospect that any probable grounds of ' expectation will ever be obtained,, is irrational, and o ug'ht to be discoa iaged— as a departure from the rational principle of regulating our feelings as well as opinions strictly by evidence. This is a point which different thinkers are likely, for a long time at least, to decide differently, accord- ing to their individual temperament. The principles which ought to govern the cultivation and the regu- lation of the imagination — with a view on the one hand of preventing it from disturbing the rectitude of the intellect and the right direction of the actions and will, and on the other hand of employing it as a GENERAL RESULT 245 power for increasiui^ the happiness of life and giving elevation to the character — are a subject which has never yet engaged the serious consideration of philo- sophers, though some opinion on it is implied in almost all modes of thinking on human character and education. And, I expect, that this will hereafter be regarded as a very important branch of study for practical purposes, and the more, in proportion as the weakening of positive beliefs respecting states of ex- istence superior to the human, leaves the imagination of higher things less provided with material from the domain of supposed reality. To me it seems that human life, small and confined as it is, and as, con- sidered merely in the present, it is likely to remain even when the progress of material and moral im- provement may have freed it from the greater part of its present calamities, stands greatly in need of any wider range and greater height of aspiration for itself and its destination, which the exercise of imagination can yield to it without running counter to the evi- dence of fact ; and that it is a part of wisdom to make the most of any, even small, probabilities on this subject, which furnish imagination with any footing to support itself upon. And I am satisfied^^ that the cultivation of such a~ tendency in the imagi- nation, provided it goes on pari passu with the culti- vation of severe reason, has no necessary tendency to pervert the judgment; but that it is possible to form Z4D THEISM a perfectly sober estimate of tlie evidences on both sides of a question and yet to let the imagination dwell by preference on those possibilities, which are at once the most comforting and the most improving, without in the least degree overrating the solidity of the grounds for expecting that these rather than any others will be the possibilities actually realized. Though this is not in the number of the practical maxims handed down by tradition and recognized as I rules for the conduct of life, a great part of the hap- j piness of life depends upon the tacit observance of it. What, for instance, is the meaning of that which is always accounted one of the chief blessings of life, a cheerful disposition? What but the tendency, either from constitution or habit, to dwell chiefly on the brighter side both of the present and of the future ? If every aspect, whether agreeable or odious of every thing, ought to occupy exactly the same place in our imagination which it fiUs in fact, and therefore ought to fill in our deliberate reason, what we call a cheer- ful disposition would be but one of the forms of folly, on a par except in agreeableness with the opposite disposition in which the gloomy and painful view of all things is habitually predominant. But it is not found in practice that those who take life cheerfully are less alive to rational prospects of evil or danger and more careless of making due provision against them, than other people. The tendency is rather the GENERAL RESULT 247 other way, for a hopeful disposition gives a spur to the faculties and keeps all the active energies in good working order. When imagination and reason re- ceive each its appropriate culture they do not succeed in usurping each other's prerogatives. It is not necessary for keeping up our conviction that we must die, that we should be always brooding over death. It is far better that we should think no further about what we cannot possibly avert, than is required for observing the rules of prudence in regard to our own hfe and that of others, and fulfilling whatever duties devolve upon us in contemplation of the ine- vitable event. The way to secure this is not to think perpetually of death, but to think perpetually , of oui-d uties, a nd of the rule of life. The true rule practical wisdoni^ not that of makiug all the aspe"ct§" of -things -Bqually prominent in our habitual contemplations, but of giving the greatest prominence to those of their aspects which depend on, or can be modified by, our own conduct. In things which do not depend on us, it is not solely for the sake of a more enjoyable life that the habit is desirable of looking at things and at mankind by preference on their pleasant side; it is also in order that we may be able to love them better and work with more heart for their improvement. To what purpose, in- deed, should we feed our imagination with the un- lovely aspect of persons and things ? All unaecesmry 248 THEISM dwelling upon the evils of life is at best a useless expenditure of nervous force: and when I say un- necessary I mean all that is not necessary either in the sense of being unavoidable, or in that of being needed for the performance of our duties and for preventing our sense of the reality of those evils from becoming speculative and dim. But if it is often [waste of strength to dwell on the evils of life, it is worse than waste to dwell habitually on its mean- 'nesses and basenesses. It is necessary to be aware of them ; but to live in their contemplation makes it scarcely possible to keep up in oneself a high tone of mind. The imagination and feelings become tuned to a lower pitch; degrading instead of elevating asso- ciations become connected with the daily objects and incidents of life, and give their colour to the thoughts, just as 'associations of sensuality do in those who in- dulge freely in that sort of contemplations. Men have often felt what it is to have had their imagi- nations corrupted by one class of ideas, and I think they must have felt with the same kind of pain how the poetry is taken out of the things fullest of it, by mean associations, as when a beautiful air that had been associated with highly poetical words is heard sung with trivial and vulgar ones. All these { things are said in mere illustration of the principle that in the regulation of the imagination literal truth ' of facts is not the only thing to be considered. GENERAL RESULT 249 Truth is the province of reason, and it is by the^ cultivation of the rational faculty that provision is made for its being known always, and thought of as! often as is required by duty and the circumstances of human life. But when the reason is strongly cul- tivated, the imagination may safely follow its own end, and do its best to make life pleasant and lovely inside the castle, in reliance on the fortifications raised and maintained by Eeason round the outward bounds. ( On these principles it appears to me that the indul- o-PTiPft ^f jinpft wifli rfrri^v|^ jo the g^ovemmeut of the univei^se and the destiny of manjifter death, while we recognize as a clear truth that we have no ground for more than a hope, is legitimate and philo so phically defensible. T he beneficial effect o£ such a hope is far from trifling. It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings, and gives, greater strength as well as greater solemnity to all the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures and by mankind at large. It allays the sense of that irony of Nature which is so pain- fully felt when we see the exertions and sacrifices of a life culminating in the formation of a wise and noble mind, only to disappear from the world when the time has just arrived at which the v/orld seems about to begin reaping the benefit of it. The truth that life is short and art is long is from of old one of the most discouraging parts of our condition; this 250 IHEISM hope admits the possibility that the art employed in improving and beautifying the soul itself may avail for good in some other life, even when seemingly useless for this. But the benefit consists less in the presence of any specific hope than in the enlargement of the general scale of the feelings ; the loftier aspira- tions being no longer in the same degree checked and kept down by a sense of the insignificance of human life — by the disastrous feeling of ' not worth while.' The gain obtained in the increased inducement to cultivate the improvement of character up to the end of life, is obvious without being specified. There is another and a most important exercise of imagination which, in the past and present, has beon kept up principally by means of religious belief and which is infinitely precious to mankind, so much so that human excellence greatly depends upon the sufficiency of the provision made for it. This con- sists of the familiarity of the imagination with the conception of a morally perfect Being, and the habit of taking the approbation of such a Being as the norma or standard to which to refer and by which to regulate our own characters and lives. This idealiza- tion of our standard of excellence in a Person is quite possible, even when that Person is conceived as merely imaginary. But religion, since the birth of Christianity, has inculcated the belief that our highest conceptions of combined wisdom and goodness exist GENERAL RESULT 251 in the concrete in a living Being who has his eyes on us and cares for our good. Through the darkest and most corrupt periods Christianity has raised this torch on high — has kept this object of veneration and imitation before the eyes of man. True, the image of perfection has been a most imperfect, and, in many respects a perverting- and corrupting one, not only from the low moral ideas of the times, but from the mass of moral contradictions which the deluded worshipper was compelled to swallow by the sup- i posed necessity of complimenting the Good Principle { with the possession of infinite power. But it is one of the most universal as well as of the most surprising characteristics of human nature, and one of the most speaking proofs of the low stage to which the reason of mankind at large has ever yet advanced, that they are capable of overlooking any amount of either moral or intellectual contradictions and receiviner into their minds propositions utterly inconsistent with one another, not only without being shocked by the contradiction, but without preventing both the contradictory beliefs from producing a part at least of their natural consequences in the mind. Pious men and women have s^one on ascribinir to God particular acts and a general course of will and conduct incompatible with even the most ordinary and limited conception of moral goodness, and have had their own ideas of morality, in many important 252 THEISM particulars, totally warped and distorted, and notwith- standing this have continued to conceive their God as clothed with all the attributes of the highest ideal goodness which their state of mind enabled them to conceive, and have had their aspirations towards goodness stimulated and encouraged by that concep- tion. And, it cannot be questioned that the un- doubting belief of the real existence of a Being who realizes our own best ideas of perfection, and of our being in the hands of that Being as the ruler of the universe, gives an increase of force (to these feelings beyond what they can receive from reference to a merely ideal conception. This particular advantage it is not possible for those to enjoy, who take a rational view of the nature and amount of the evidence for the existence and attributes of the Creator, On the other hand, they are not encumbered with the moral contradictions which beset every form of religion which aims at justifying in a moral point of view the whole govern- ment of the world. They are, therefore, enabled to form a far truer and more consistent conception of Ideal Goodness, than is possible to any one who thinks it necessary to find ideal goodness iii an omni- potent ruler of the world. The power of the Creator once recognized as limited, there is nothing to dis- prove the supposition that his goodness is complete and that the ideally perfect character in whose like- GENERAL KESULT 253 ness we should wish to form ourselves and to whose supposed approbation we refer our actions, may have a real existence in a Being to whom we owe all such good as we enjoy. Above all, the most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced by, holding up in a Divine Person a standard of excellence/ and a model for imitation, is available even to thel absolute unbeliever and can never more be lost ta humanity. For it is Christ, rather than God, whom! Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of\ perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, | more than the God of the Jews or of Nature, who being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind. And whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left ; a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers suffices to insert any num- ber of marvels, and may have inserted all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. But who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus or of imagining the life and character revealed in the 254 THEISM Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort ; still less the early Christian writers in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source. What could be added and interpolated by a disciple we may see in the mystical parts of the Gospel of St. John, matter im- ported from Philo and the Alexandrian Platonists and put into the mouth of the Saviour in long speeches about himself such as the other Gospels contain not the slightest vestige of, though pretended to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest and when his principal followers were all present ; most prominently at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen any quantity of this poor stuff, as the multitudinous Oriental sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and say- iugs of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality \ combined with profundity of insight, which if we abandon the. idle expectation -of finding scientific precision where something very difi'erent was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspira- tion, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. "When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of GENERAL RESULT 255 probably tbe greatest moral reformer, and martyr to I that mission, who ever existed upon earth, religion ' cannot be said to have made a bal choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor, even now, would- it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into tbe concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life. When to tbis we add that, to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be — not Grod,- for he never made the smallest pretension to that character and wonld probably have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as it seemed to the men who condemned him — but a man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue; we may we]l conclude that the influences of religion on the character which will remain after rational criticism has done its ut most against the evidences of religion, are well w oxth pre serving, and that what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a firmer belief, is more than compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the m oi^ality^ they sanction. , Impressions such as these, though not in them- selves amounting to what can properly be called a religion, seem to me excellently fitted to aid and fortify that real, though purely human religion, which 256 THEISM soraetimes calls itself the Eeligion of Humanitjr and sometimes that of Duty. To the other inducements for cultivating a religious devotion to the welfare of our fellow-creatures as an obligatory limit to every selfish aim, and an end for the direct promotion of which no sacrifice can be too great, it superadds the feeling that in making this the rule of our life, we may be co-operating with the unseen Being to whom we owe all that is enjoyable in life. One elevated feeling this form of rehgious idea admits of, v/hich is' not open to those who believe in the omnipotence of the 'good principle in the universe, the feeling of helping jGod — of requiting the good he has given by a volun- :tary co-operation which he, not being omnipotent, really needs, and by which a somewhat nearer ap- proach may be made to the fulfilment of his purposes. The conditions of human existence are highly favour- able to the growth of such a feeling inasmuch as a battle is constantly going on, in which the humblest human creature is not incapable of taking some part, between the powers of good and those of evil, and in which every even the smallest help to the right side has its value in promoting the very slow and often almost insensible progress by which good is gradually gain- ing ground from evil, yet gaining it so visibly at con- siderable intervals as to promise the very distant but not uncertain final victory of Good. To do something during life, on even the humblest scale if nothing GENERAL RESULT 257 more is within reacH, towards bringing this con- summation ever so little nearer, is the most animating and invigorating thought which can inspire a human creature; and that it is destined, with or without supernatural sanctions, to be tbe religion of the Future I cannot entertain a doubt. But it appears to me that supernatural hopes, in the degree and kind in which wlia!t i Jiave called rational scepticism does- not refuse to sanction them, may still con- tribute not a little to give to this religion its due ascendancy over the human mind. BERKELEY'S LIFE AND WRITINGS. BERKELEY'S LIFE AID WRITINGS.^ Peofessor Fkaser and the University of Ox- ford, have done a good service to philosopliy, in recalling the attention of students to the writings of a great man, by the publication of a new, and the first complete, edition of his works. Every tyro in metaphysics is familiar with the name of Berkeley, and thinks himself perfectly well acquainted with the Berkeleian doctrines: but they are known, in most cases, so far as known at all, not from what theii' author, but from what other people, have said of them, and are consequently, by the majority of those who think they know them, crudely conceived, and their most characteristic features misunder- stood. Though he was excelled by none who ever wrote on philosophy in the clear expression of his meaning, and discrimination of it from what he did 1 *' The Works of George Berkeley, D.I)., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, including many of his writings hitherto unpublished. With Prefaces, An- notations, his Life and Letters, and an Account of his Philosophy." By Alexander Campbell Fraser, M.A., Professor of Logic and Meta- physics in the University of Edinburgh. In four vols., 8vo. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. 1871. 262 beekelet''s not mean, scarcely any thinker has been more per- severingly misapprehended, or has been the victim of such persistent ignoratio elenclii ; Ms numerous adversaries liaving generally occupied themselves in proving vphat lie never denied, and denying what he never asserted. If the facilities afforded by Pro- fessor Fraser's labours induce those who are inter- ested in philosophy or in the history of philosophy to study Berkeley's speculations as they issue from his own mind, we think it will be recognised that of all who, from the earliest times, have applied the powers of their minds to metaphysical inquiries, he is the one of greatest philosophic genius: though among these are included Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, and Hume ; Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant. For, greatly as all these have helped the progress of philosophy, and important as are the contributions of several of them to its positive truths, of no one of them can it be said as of Berkeley, that we owe to him three first-rate philosophical discoveries, each sufiicient to have constituted a revolution in psychology, and which by their combination have determined the whole course of subsequent philosophical speculation ; discoveries, too, which were not, like the achieve- ments of many other distinguished thinkers, merely refutations of error, aad removal of obstacles to sound thinking, but were this and much more also. LIFE AKD 'WKITESrGS. 263 being all of them entitled to a permanent place among positive truths. These discoveries are — 1. The doctrine of the acquired perceptions of sight: that the most important part of what our eyes inform us of, and in particular externality, dis- tance, and magnitude, are not direct perceptions 5f the sense of sight, but judgments or inferences, ar- rived at by a rapid interpretation of natural signs ; the signification of which signs is taught to us neither by instinct nor reason, but by experience. 2. The non-existence of abstract ideas; and the fact that all the general or class notions by means of which we think or reason, are really, whether we know it or not, concrete ideas of individual objects. 3. The true nature and meaning of the externality which we attribute to the objects of our senses : that it does not consist in a substratum supporting a set of sensible qualities, or an unknown some- what, which, not being itself a sensation, gives us our sensations, but consists in the fact that our sen- sations occur in groups, held together by a perma- nent law, and which come and go independently of our volitions or mental processes. The first-mentioned of these three speculations was the earliest great triumph of analytic psy- chology over first appearances (dignified in some systems by the name of Natural Beliefs) ; and at 264 beekelet'3 once afforded a model and set an example to subse- quent analysts. The second corrected a misconception wHch darkened the whole theory of the higher operations of intellect, making impossible any real progress in the analysis of those operations until the error had been got rid of. The Conceptualists stopped the way in philosophy, as at an earlier period the Eeal- ists had done. Berkeley refuted them, and, while adopting what was true in the doctrines of Nomi- nalism, laid the foundation of a theory of the action of the mind in general reasoning, far ahead of any- thing which the Nominalists had arrived at. Thirdly and lastly, the speculations of Berkeley concerning our notion of the external world, besides their psychological importance as an analysis of perception, were the most memorable lesson ever given to mankind in the great iatellectual attain- ment of not believing without evidence. From that time a new canon of belief, and standard of proof, were given to thinkers, on all the abstruser subjects of philosophical inquiry. The three together have made Berkeley the turn- ing-point of the higher philosophy in modern times. As a matter of historical fact, this admits of no dispute. Psychology and metaphysics before and after Berkeley differ almost like ancient and modern history, or ancient and modern physics. LIFE ATSTD WRTTITiTGS. 265 His first two discoveries have beea the starting- point of the true analytic method of studying the human mind, of which they alone have rendered possible the subsequent development; while his reasonings on Matter have confessedly decided the direction of all succeeding metaphysical thought, alike in those who accepted, wholly or partially, the doctrine of Berkeley, and in those who fought against it. When to all this it is added that, in mere literary style, he can take rank among the best writers of an age not unjustly regarded as in that respect the great age of English prose literature, there is rea- son enough that a knowledge of his doctrines should be sought in his own works, and that the present edition of them should not rest idly on library shelves, but should be part of the familiar reading of all serious students of the philosophy or history of the human mind. In reading Berkeley's writings as a connected whole, one is forcibly struck with the completeness with which all his characteristic doctrines had been wrought out in his mind, before he gave publicity to any of them. In the very interesting common- place book (or rather note-book) kept by Berkeley when a student at the University of Dublin, and which Professor Eraser has had the good fortune and merit of bringing to light, every oj)inion distinctive 266 Berkeley's of Berkeley is already found, even down to his points of dispute with the mathematicians; and found, not in germ merely, but almost as complete in point of mei'e thought, as in any of his subse- quent writings. What is called his idealism, or dis- belief in Matter, had not only been reached by him, but had become a fixed habit of thought at that early age. This fact is not without psychological interest, as explaining the sincere astonishment man- ifested in many passages of his writings, that his interpretation of sensible phenomena should not, as soon as understood, be seen to be the self-evident and common-sense view of them. Such examples of the mental law — that a mode of representing things to ourselves with which we have grown familiar, however opposed it may be to common opinion, tends to become, in our own minds, appar- ently self-evident — should not, when they come before us, be dismissed as the eccentricities of an individual, but should make us reflect how much more likely it is that the common opinion itself may also be indebted for its apparent self-evidence to its still greater degree of familiarity, often unbroken by the suggestion, even to fancy, of anything con- tradictory to it. The doctrine of Berkeley's first psychological work, the "Essay towards a new Theory of Vir- ion," seems, and indeed is, quite independent of ) ) ) ) ) LIFE AITD T7RTTI1S"GS. 2G7 immaterialism; and has been accepted ])j the great majority of subsequent psychologists, most of whom have adopted a hostile attitude towards his idealism. But, though he published the theory of the acquired perceptions of sight before his main doctrine (which it only preceded by a year), in his own mind there was an intimate connection between them. For, the form in which he liked to represent to himself those visual appearances of linear and aerial perspective, and those muscular sensations at- tending movements of the globes of the eyes, which, being interpreted, inform us of tangible distance and magnitude, was that of a language in which God speaks to us, and the meaning of which, de- rived solely fi'om his will, is taught to us, not by direct instruction, but by experience. Now, Berke- ley's idealism was an extension of this notion to the whole of our bodily sensations. As considered by him, all these are the direct act of God, who by His divine power impresses them on oui- minds without the intervention of any passive external substance, and who has established among them those constant relations of co-existence and successions required for our guidance in life, which suggest to us the un- founded idea of objects external to us, other than minds or spirits. The doctrine of the Essay on Vision might be conceived as a first step towards this system, and derived, no doubt, an additional 268 Berkeley's recommendation to Berkeley fronl fitting So well into it ; but in itself it rests on evidence strictly its own, and is equally comj)atible with either opinion as to the externality and substantiality of physical nature. Accordingly^ it received almost unanimous assent from philosophers of both opin- ionSj until, in our time, some unsuccessful attempts have been made to overthrow it. Among physi- ologists, indeed, many have remained strangers to it ; for physiologists have had in full measure the failing common to specialists of all classes : they have been bent upon finding the entire theory of the phenomena they investigate WT-thin their own speciality, and have too often turned a deaf ear to any explanation of them drawn from other sources. And here, since the question of the acquired per- ceptions of sight has of late been called up for re- hearing, it is pertinent to remark, that the evidence of the doctrine is of that positive and irrefragable character which cannot often be obtained in psy- chology; it amounts to a complete induction. In general, the analytic argument by which states of con- sciousness, supposed to be original, are proved to be acquired, is of the nature of negative evidence. It is shown that mental laws exist which would account for their being acquired ; that the known facts are consistent with the supposition of their having been LIFE AND WRITINGS. ■ 269 SO acquired ; and it is maintained, with reason, that when a phenomenon may have been, and was even antecedently likely to be, produced by known causes, there is no warrant for ascribing their existence to a distinct principle in nature. But the case of the acquired perceptions of sight does not require this negative argument. It rests on positive experiment. It did so, even before its corroboration by the direct evidence of Cheselden's and Nunneley's pa- tients. The signs by which, according to the theory, we judge of distance and magnitude, are the pro- portion of the visual field which the image occupies, the clearness or indistinctness of its outline, the brightness or faintness of its colours, the number of visible objects which seem to intervene, and the amount of muscular sensation experienced in mak- ing the eyes converge so that they both point to the object. Now the connection of all these things with our perceptions of distance and magni- tude by the eye, is proved by the same evidence which proves the connection between other causes and their effects : viz., when the causes are present, the effects follow ; when the causes are absent, the effects do not take place ; and when the causes are altered, the effects are altered. Thus, when we look at a terrestrial object through a telescope, the merely optical effect of the instrument is, that the image occupies a larger f)ortion of the field of vision 270 Berkeley's than when we look at the object with the naked eye ; and because of this, we cannot help thinking that we see it larger, and because lax'ger, therefore nearer, than with the unassisted sight. In a hazy atmosphere, when the image of a mountain reaches us fainter in colour and with a less definite outline than at other times, we seem to see it farther off, and therefore (since the size of the image is the same as usual) more lofty, than we know it to be. The reverse takes place in a peculiarly clear atmos- phere, when all distant objects appear nearer and smaller than at other times. When none of the criteria supposed in the theory are present, we do not see distance from us at all ; as in the case of the heavenly bodies, of the distances of which we have no perception, and all of which, therefore, ap- pear equally distant. We are also without percep- tion of their magnitude, saving that those which produce the lai'gest image in the eye appear the largest, and that all of them appear larger when near the horizon than when at a greater elevation, partly because the images are less bright, and partly because they are seen across a multitude of objects, while in the more elevated position no object of known distance intervenes between us and them.^ ^ Berkeley, by the way, does not admit this last element in our judg- ment — the number of interjacent objects; thong-h this is certainly one of the criteria by which we estimate the compirative distances of different LIFE AIS^D WlUTmGS. 271 In all these cases, the difference is not in our con- scious judgments, but in oui' apparent perceptions. The conscious judgment often does not share in the illusion. The man or the tree that we look at through the l;elescope is of a size and distance which may be accurately, and is always approximately, known; and the knowledge is not in the least shaken by any number of observations with the telescope. Yet we cannot express what we know to be an untrue appearance, in any less strong terms than by saying that we seem to see the things as we know them not to be. These experiments fulfil the conditions of a true induction. That what seems perception is a rapid interpretation of signs, is not a matter of doubtful argument, but rests on the same evidence, both in kind and in degree, as the truths of physical science. The only part of this subject which is still really open to discussion, is the precise nature of the visual signs by which we discern extension terrestrial objects. The reason given by Berkeley is that the illusion by which the moon, for instance, seems larger when near the horizon, is equally experienced when the intervening things are concealed from sight. This does not accord with the. experience of the present writer, who has found, on many trials, that the concealment of the interjacent objects greatly diminishes the apparent size of the horizontal moon. Doubtless it does not always reduce it to the apparent dimensions of the moon when at its greatest height ; but that is because the other cause of the illusive appearance, the only cause acknowledged by Berkeley, still remains ; the diminution of brightness caused by the greater extent of intervening atmosphere, and by the variable amount of untransparent vapour with which it is loaded. 272 Berkeley's iu two dimensions, and plane figures, and of the rela- tion between those signs and the facts which they signify. Much argument has been expended, we are far from saying uselessly, in maintaining that we must certainly have, by the mere sense of sight, some perception of superficial extension and figure. But these arguments in no way touch Berkeley's theory; since he admits that we have distinctive impressions of sight corresponding to differences of tactual extension and figure, which impressions we may call, if we please, and he himself often does call (for want of a better designation), visible ex- tention and figure. We could not be made aware by the sign, of differences in the things signified, unless there were concomitant differences in the sign itself. But Berkeley's position is, that visible extension and figure, or what we choose to call by those names, have nothing in common with the tac tual, or what we consider as the real, extension and figure which they serve to indicate ; that the tie be- tween them is entirely arbitrary, derived from the appointment of God; and that, far from visible ex- tension and tactual extension being the same quality, we never should have suspected that there was any connection between them if experience had not dis- closed it. In his opinion, a person born blind, and afterwards, when grown up, made to see, would not at first, on being shown a cube and a sphere, kno^v LIFE AND "WRITINGS. 273 whether the one or the other is the cube or sphere already known to him by touch. And this opinion is borne out by the best recorded instances. But the theory does not need this extreme conclusion ; for though visible extension or figure may have, and indeed can have, no positive resemblance to tactual, there may be between them an analogy, or resemblance of relations — that is, the parts of the one may have mutual relations resembling those be- tween the parts of the other. For example, both the visible and the tangible cube have corners ; a sort of singular points, which do not exist in either the visible or the tangible sphere ; and this similarity of relations might cause a person born blind, and after- wards couched, to suspect (though he could not at first know) that the visible cube, if it corresponds to anything tangible, corresponds to a tangible cube rather than to a tangible sphere. This analogy, however, does not seem to have afforded any guid- ance either to Cheselden's patient or to Nunneley's. The originality of Berkeley is not so complete in this, the first of his three distinctive doctrines, as in the other two. The doctrine has been, by all who .followed him, traced up to his Essay, in which it was for the first time pressed home, and defended against objections, so as to gain it admission among estab- lished truths. But he was not the first thinker to whom the idea had presented itself. As pointed out 274 bekkelet's by Professor Fraser, not only had Malebranche, with whose philosophy Berkeley was familiar, made con- siderable approaches to it, but the fundamental doc- trine is stated, in tei-ms which Bei'keley himself might have subscribed to, in a passage of Locke's essay, first inserted in the fourth edition, and a part of which is quoted by Berkeley in his treatise. Locke himself not imj)robably received the idea from his friend Molyneux, to whom is due even the illustration from the sphere and cube. Berkeley, therefore, has not the merit of the conception; but he has that of raising it from a surmise to a scien- tific truth. It also deserves remark, that the impossibility of seeing distance from the eye (inasmuch as, whether great or small, it projects bat one point on the retina) — though often supposed to be one of the principal novelties in Berkeley's theory — neither was, nor professed to be, a novelty, but was assumed by him, in the very beginning of his Essay, as an admitted truth. The writers on optics had already discerned thus much; but the error into which they had fallen, and which it was the aim of Berkeley to correct, was, that we judge of distances by a neces- sary inference of reason, from geometrical consider- ations which, as Berkeley says with truth, we are totally unconscious of , and which the great majority of mankind know nothing about. The whole stress LIFE AND WRITINGS. 275 of his argument is directed to showing that the inference is not one of reason but of empirical asso- ciation, and that the connection between our im- pressions of sight and the facts they indicate can be discovered only by direct experience. It is this which makes Berkeley's analysis of vision the lead- ing and model example of the analytic psychology. The power of the law of association in giving to artificial combinations the appearance of ultimate facts was then for the first time made manifest. The second of Berkeley's great contributions to philosophy — his theory of general thought — is, that it is carried on, not, as even Locke imagined, by means of general or abstract ideas, but by ideas of individ- uals, serving as representatives of classes. All idea?^, it was maintained by Berkeley, are concrete and in- dividual, which yet is no hindrance to our arriving, by means of them, at truths which are general "When, for example, we prove the properties of tri angles, the idea in our mind is not, as Locke sup posed, the abstract idea of a triangle which is noth ing but a triangle — ;whichis neither equilateral, isos celes, nor scalene — but the concrete idea of some par ticular triangle, from which, nevertheless, we may conclude to all other triangles, if we have taken care to use no premises but such as are true of any trian- gle whatever. This doctrine, which is now generally received, thougb perhaps not always thoroughly 276 BEnKELEY^S comprehended, was imdouljtedly, lite that of the ac- quired perceptions of sight, intimately connected in Berkeley's mind with his ideal theory ; for he re- garded the notion of matter, apart from sensations in a mind, as the sujDreme instance, of that absurdity, an abstract idea. As in the theory of vision, so in this, Berkeley broke the neck of the problem. He for the first time saw to the bottom of the Nomi- nalist and Realist controversy, and established the fact that all our ideas are of individuals ; though he left it to his successors to point out the exact nature of the psychological machinery (if the exj)ression may be allowed) by which general names do their work without the help of general ideas. The solu- tion of this, as of so many other difficulties, lies in the connotation of general names. A name, though common to an indefinite multitude of individual ob- jects, is not, like a proper name, devoid of meaning ; it is a mark for the properties, or for some of the properties, which belong alike to all these objects, and with these common properties it is associated in a peculiarly close and intimate manner. Now — though the name calls up, and cannot help call- ing up, in addition to these properties, others in greater or smaller number which do not be- long to the whole class, but to the one or more in- dividual members of it which, for the time being, are serving as mental types of the class — these other LIFE ANB WRITINGS. 277 ingredients are accidental and changeable ; so that the idea actually called up by the class name, though always that of some individual, is an idea in which ' the properties that the name is a mark of are made artificially prominent, while the others, varying from time to time, and not being attended to, are thrown into the shade. What had been mistaken for an ab- stract idea, was a concrete image, with certain parts of it fluctuating (within given limits) and others fixed, these last forming the signification of the gen- eral name; and the name, by concentrating attention on the class-attributes, prevents the intrusion into our reasoning of anything special to the individual object which in the particular case is pictured in the mind.^ The third of Berkeley's distinctive doctrines, and that by which his name is best known, is his denial of Matter, or rather of Matter as defined by philoso-; phers; for he always maintained that his own opin-i ion is nearer to the common belief of mankind than I the doctrine of philosophers is. Philosophers, hei says, consider matter to be one thing, and our\ sensible impressions, called ideas of sense, another : they believe that what we perceive are only our ideas, while the Matter which lies under them and ^ This subject is more fully elucidated in chap. 17, of " An Examination of Sij Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy," and in the notes to the new edition of Mr. James Mill's " Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind." 278 bekkelet's impresses them upon us is the real thing. The vulgar, on the contrary, believe that the things they perceive are the real things, and do not believe in any hidden thing lying underneath them. And in this I, Berkeley, differ with the philosophers, and agree "with the vulgar, for I believe that the things we perceive are the real things, and the only things, except minds, that are real. But then he held with the philosophers, and not with the vulgar, that what we directly perceive are not external objects, but ^ur own ideas ; a notion which the generality of man!kind never dreamed of. Accordingly, at the conclusion of his fullest and clearest exposition of his own doctrine (the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous), Berkeley says that the truth is at present " shared between the vulgar and philoso- phers : the former being of opinion that those things they immediately perceive are the real things; and the latter, that the things immediately perceived are ideas which exist only in the mind." ^ It was enough for Berkeley to say, and this he was fully justified in saying, that he did not deny the validity of perception, nor of consciousness ; that he affirmed the reality of all that either the vulgar or philosophers really perceive by their senses, and denied only what was not a perception, but a rapid and unconscious inference, like the inference which 1 Vol i. p. 359, of Prof. Eraser's edition. LIFE AND "VVrJTIN'GS. 279 is mistaten for perception when we judge of exter- nality and distance by the eye ; with the difference^ however, that in this last case the inference is legiti- mate, having experience to rest upon, while in the case of matter there is no ground in experience or in anything else for regarding the sensations we are conscious of as signs of the presence of anything, except potentialities of other sensations. Berkeley might say with trath, and in his own language he did say, that he agreed with the common opinion of mankind in all that they distinctly realise to^ them- selves under the notion of matter. For he a^eed in recognising in the impressions of sense a permanent element, which does not cease to exist in the inter- vals between our sensations, and which is entirely independent of our own individual mind (though not all of mind). And he was quite right in main- taining that this is all that goes to make up the pos- itive notion which mankind have of material ob- jects. The point at which he diverged from them -was where they add to this positive notion a nega- tive one— viz., that these objects are not mental, or such as can only exist in a mind. Without includ- ing this, it is impossible to give a correct account of the common notion of matter; and on this point an unmistakable difference existed between Berkeley and the common mind. It was competent to Berke- ley to maintain that this part of the common notion 280 Berkeley's is an illusion ; and lie did maintain this, in our opin- ion successfully. He was not equally successful in showing how the illusion is produced, and in -what manner it grows into a delusion. He gives as a suf- ficient exj)lanation "that men knowing they per- ceived several ideas, whereof they themselves were , not the authors — as not being excited from within, nor depending on the operation of their wills — this made them maintain those ideas or objects of per- ception had an existence independent of and with- out the mind, without ever dreaming that a contra- diction was involved in those words." ^ It is not surprising that this explanation should not be ac- cepted as sufiicient. For our thoughts, also, do not always dej^end on our own will ; and therefore, on this theory, our thoughts, as well as our sense- perceptions, should sometimes be considered to be external to us. Berkeley escapes from this diffi- culty by greatly exaggerating the dependence of the thoughts upon the will. ^ He also adds, as another distinction between sensations and thoughts, that the former are "not excited from within." But the very notions of mthout and within, in reference to our mind, involve belief in externality, and cannot, therefore, serve to account for the belief. Berkeley left this part of his theory to be com- pleted by his successors. It remained for them to ' Vol. i., p. 184. 2 Vol, i.^ p, 170, and elsewhere. LIFE AND r/mTI^^GS. 281 show liow easily and naturallyj when a single sensa- tion of sight or sound indicates the potential presence, at our option, of all the other sensations of a complex group, this latent though present possi- bility of a host of sensations not felt, but guaran- teed by experience, comes to be mistaken for a latent cause of the sensations we actually feel ; es- pecially when the possibilities, unlike the actual sensations, are found to be common to us witli other minds. This has been sliown, perhaps more fully and explicitly than ever before, in the present gen- eration. That it could not be so distinctly pointed out by Berkeley, w^as partly because he had not thor- oughly realised the fact, that the permanent element in our perceptions is only a potentiality of sensations not actually felt. He saw indeed, quite cleai'ly, that to us the external object is nothing but such a potentiality. "The table I write on," he says in the "Principles of Human Knowledge,"^ "I say exists, that is, I see and feel it ; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed — meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit does perceive it." But in itself the object was, in his theory, not merely a present potentiality, but a present actual existence, only its existence was in a mind — in the Divine Mind. This is the positive side of his theory, not so ' Vol, i., p. 157. 282 BEKXELEYS generally known or attended to as the negative side, and which involves, we think, some serious logical errors. It must here be observed, that Berkeley was not content with maintainino; that the existence of a material substratum is neither perceived by the senses, nor proved by reason, nor necessary to ac- count for the phenomena, and is therefore, by the rules of sound logic, to be rejected. He thought that it could be disproved. He considered the notion of matter to involve a contradiction: and it was true that the notion as defined by many philosophers did so. For their definition of mat- ter affirmed it to be purely passive and inert; yet they regarded material objects as the exciting causes of our sensations. There was no refuting Berkeley when he said that what is passive and inert cannot cause or excite anything. To the notion of philoso- phers that the causes of our sensations might be " the configuration, number, motion, and size of cor- puscles," he replied by an appeal to consciousness. Extension, figure, and motion, he said, are ideas, ex- isting only in the mind ; " but whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflection, will not i:)erceive in them any power or activity; there is, therefore, no such thing contained in them. A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness LIJTE AJNTD WRITHN'OS. 283 iu it, insomiicli that it is impossible for an idea to do anything, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of anything. Whence it plainly follows that extension, figure, and motion cannot he the cause of our sensations." ^ From this he deduces that as our sensations must have a cause, and as this cannot be other sensations (or ideas), and as there exists no physical thing except sensations (or ideas), the cause of our sensations must be a spirit. He thus anticipates the doctrine of which so much use has been made by later philosophers of a school opposed to his own ; that nothing can be a cause, or exert j)ower, but a mind. It would have been well if the thinker who was almost the founder and creator of the Experience philosophy of mind, had contented himself with (in the language of Kant) a criticism of experience — with distinguishing what is and wh£|,t is not a sub- ject of it: instead of, as we find him here, dispensing with experience, by an a priori argument from in- tuitive consciousness. For it is in vain to consult consciousness about the existence of a power. Pow- ers are not objects of consciousness. A power is not a concrete entity, which we can perceive or feel, but an abstract name for a possibility; and can only be ascertained by seeing the possibility I'eal- ised. Intuitive perception tells us the colour, texture, ^ Vol. X., p. 1G8. 284 bep.keley's etc.j of gunpowder, but what intuition have we that it can blow up a house ? True it is that all we can observe of physical phenomena is their con- stancies of co-existence, succession, and similitude. Berkeley had the merit of clearly discerning this fundamental truth, and handing down to his succes- sors the true conception of that which alone the study of physical nature can consist in. He saw that the causation we think we see in na- ture is but uniformity of sequence. But this is not what he considers real causation to be. No physical phenomenon, he says, can be an efficient cause ; but our daily experience proves to us that minds, by their volitions, can be, and are, efficient causes. Let us be thankful to Berkeley for the half of the truth which he saw, though the I'emainder was hidden from him by that mist of natural preju- dice from which he had cleared so many other uiental phenomena. No one, before Hume, ven- tured to think that this supposed experience of efficient causation by volitions is as mere an illusion as any of those which Berkeley ex- ploded, and that what we really know of the power of our own volitions is only that certain facts (reducible, when analysed, to muscular movements) immediately follow them. Berkeley proceeded to argue, that since our sensations must be caused by a mind, they must be given to us by the direct action LIFE AND WPvITIJSrOS. 285 of the Divine Mind, without the employment of an unintelligible inert substance as an intermediate link. Having no ejfficacy as a means, this passive substance could only intervene, if at all, not a? a cause, but as an occasion, determining the Divine Being to give us the sensations : a doctrine actually held by Malebranche and other Cartesians, but to Berkeley inadmissible, since what need can the Deity have of such a reminder ? Indeed, Male- branche admitted that on his theory there would l:»e no necessity for believing in this superfluous wheel in the machinery, if its existence had not been, as he supposed it to be, expressly affirmed in Scripture. Therefore, thought Berkeley, all that is termed per- ception of material objects is the direct action of Grod upon our minds, and no substance but spirit has any concern in it. But Berkeley did not stop here. That which is the immediate object of perception according to previous philosophers, and the sole object according to Berkeley, was our ideas — a much-abused term, never more unhappily applied than when it was given as a name to sensations and possibilities of sensation. These ideas (argued Berkeley) are ad- mitted to have a permanent existence, contrasted with the intermittance of actual sensations ; and an idea can have no existence except in a mind. They exist in our own minds only while we perceive them. 286 and in the minds of other men only while those other men perceive them ; how then is their exist- ence sustained when no man jDerceives them ? By their permanently existing in the mind of God. This appeared to Bei^keley so conclusive an argu- ment for the existence of a Snpreme Mind, that it might well take the place of all the other evidences of natural theology. There must l)e a Deity, be- cause, if there were not, there would be no perma- nent lodging-place for physical nature ; since it has no existence out of a mind, and does not constantly and continuously exist in any finite mind. And he sincerely believed that this argument put a final ex- tinguisher upon " atheism and scepticism." All that we jD^^ceive must be in a mind, and when no finite being is perceiving it, there is only the Divine Mind for it to abide in. This quaint theory presents a distant and superficial resemblance to Plato's doctrine of ideas; and in " Siris," which in its metaphysical part contains the latest of Berke- ley's statements of his opinion, he presses Plato and the Platonists (who, as Coleridge says, should rather be called the Plotinists) into the service of his theorj^; leading Professor Eraser to believe that the theoiy itself had undergone modifications, and had been developed in his later years into something more nearly akin to Realism. To our mind the passages in " Siris " do not convey this impression. There is LIFE AND "VVPaXINGS. 287 a wide chasm between Berkeley's doctrine and Plato's, and we do not believe tliat Berkeley ever stepped over it. The Platonic Ideas were self- existent and immaterial, but were as much external to the Divine Mind as to the human. The gods, in their celestial circuitSj so imaginatively depicted in the " Phsedrus," lived in the perpetual contemplation of these Ideas, but were neither the authors, nor were their minds the seat and habitation of them ; their sole privilege above mankind was that of never losing sight of them. Moreover Plato's Ideas were not, like Berkeley's, identified with the common objects of sense, but were studi- ously and most broadly distinguished from them, as being the imperishable prototypes of those great and glorious attributes— beaut}^, justice, knowledge, etc. — of which some distant and faint likeness may be perceived in the noblest only of terrestrial things. We see no signs that Berkeley ever drew nearer to these opinions ; and it seems to us that his citations of the Platonists were not an adoption of their doctiines, but an attempt to show that they had, in a certain sense, made an approxi- mation to his, at least to the extent of throwing off the vulgar opinions. The part of Berkeley's theory on which he grounded what he deemed the most cogent argu- ment for a Deity, is obviously the weak and illogi- 288 cal part of it. While showing that our sensations, equally Avith our thoughts, are but phenomena of our o\Yn mind, he recognised, with the rest of the world, a permanent element in the sensations which does not exist in the thoughts; but he had an imper- "■ feet apj)rehension of what that permanent element is. Pie suj)posed that the actual object of a sensible perception, though, on his own showing, only a group of sensations, and suspended so far as we are concerned when we cease to perceive it, comes back literally the same the next time it is perceived by us ; and, being the same, must have been kept in existence in another mind. He did not see clearly that the sensations I have to-day are not the same -as those I had yesterday, which are gone, never to return ; but are only exactly similar ; and that what has been kept in continuous existence is but a potenti- ality of having such sensations, or, to express it in other words, a law or uniformity in nature, by virtue of which similar sensations might and would have re- curred, at any intermediate time, under similar con- ditions. These sensations, which I did not have, but which experience teaches me that I might have had at any time during the intermission of my actual sensa- tions, are not a positive entity subsisting through that time. They did not exist as sensations, but as a guaranteed belief ; implying constancy in the order of phenomena, but not a spiritual substance for the LIFE AND WEITIWGS. 289 phenomena to dwell in when not present to my own mind. Professor Eraser, in several of his annota- tions, expresses the opinion that Berkeley did not mean, when a sensation comes back after an inter- val, that it is numerically the same, but only that it is the same in kind. But if the same only in kind, how can it require to be kept individually in exist- ence during the interval? When the momentary sensation has passed away, the occurrence, after a time, of another and exactly similar sensation, does not imply any permanent object, mental any more than material, to keep up an identity which does not really exist. If Berkeley thought that what we feel is retained in actual, as distinguished from potential, existence, when we are no longer feeling it, he can- not have thought that it is nothing more than a sen- sation. And in trnth, by giving it the ambiguous and misleading name Idea, he does leave an open- ing for supposing it to be more than a sensation. His Ideas, which he supposes to be what we per- ceive by our senses, are nothing different, and are not represented by him as anything different, from our sensations : he frequently uses the words as synonymous : yet he doubtless would have seen the absurdity of maintaining that the sensation of to-day can be really the same as the sensation of yesterday, but he saw no absurdity in affirming this of the idea. By means of this word he gives a 290 beekeley's kind of double existence to the objects of sense : tbey are, according to him, sensations, and contin- gencies, or permanent possibilities, of sensation, and yet they are also something else ; they are our purely mental perceptions, and yet they are inde- pendent objects of perception as well; though im- material, they exist detached from the individual mind which perceives them, and are laid up in the Divine Mind as a kind of repository, from which it almost seems that God must be supi:)osed to de- tach them when it is his will to impress them on us, since Berkeley rejects the doctrine of Malebranche, that we actually contemplate them in the Divine Mind. This illogical side of Berkeley's theory was the part of it to which he himself attached the greatest value; and he would have been much grieved if he had foreseen the utter neglect of his favorite argument for Theism. For it was for this, above all, that he prized his immaterial theory. Indeed, the war against freethinkers was the leading purpose of Berkeley's career as a philosopher. ^ 1 In a passage of the Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonoiia (vol. i., pp. 343-4), Berkeley seems for a moment to be aware of the am- biguity of the word "same." Hylas, the believer in Matter, objects, *' But the same idea which is in my mind cannot be in yours, or in any other mind. Doth it not therefore follow from your principles, that no two can see the same thing ? " But the answer of Philonous to the ob- jection is proof positive that Berkeley had never perceived the real gist of the ambiguity. The thought that those who are not willing " to apply the word same where no distinction or variety is perceived," must be *' philosophers who pretend to v.rx abstracted notion of identity," and that LIFE AKD "vypaTii^Gs. - 291 Besides Berkeley's properly metaphysical writings, some notice must be taken of his strictly polemical performances — his attacks on the freethinkers, and on the mathematicians. The former controversy per- vades more or less all his writings, and is the special object of the longest of them, the series of dialogues entitled " Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher." Of this it may be said with truth, that were it not the production of so eminent a man, it would have little claim to serious attention. As a composition, indeed, it has great merit ; and, together with the dialogues on Matter, entitle Berkeley to be regarded as the writer who, after Plato, has best managed the instrument of controversial dialogue. The opinions, however, which he puts into the mouths ''all fclie dispute is about a word." "Suppose," says Philonous, "a house, wliose walls or outward shell remaining unaltered, the chambers are all pulled down, and new ones built in their place, and that you should call this the same, and I should say it was not the same, house : would we not, for all this, perfectly agree in our thoughts of the house, consid- ered in itself ? and would not all the difference consist in a sound ? If you should say, We differ in our notions, for that you superadded to your idea of the house the simple abstracted idea of identity, whereas I did not ; I would tell you, I know not what you mean by the abstracted idea of identity ; and should desire you to look into your own thoughts, and be sure you understood yourself." Berkeley's usual acuteness has here deserted him y for it is evident that he misses the real double meaning of "same"' — that which is numerically identical, and that which is only exactly similar. In the illustration of the house, there is no question of anything but numerical identity, which does not even imply a close re- semblance, for we hold a man to be the same person at ten years of age as at seventy. To make the parallel exact, the supposition should have been that some one buUt a house an exact copy of the former one, and demanded that it should be called the same house. 292 Berkeley's of freethinkers are mostly such as no one would now think worth refuting, for the excellent reason that nobody holds them; it may be permitted to doubt whether they were even then held by any one worth answering. The fi'eethinkers in the dialogues are two in number — Alciphron, who is intended to represent a disciple of Shaftesbury ; and Lysicles, a follower of Mandeville, or rather a man of pleasure who avails himself of Mandeville in defending his own way of life. Alciphron stands for sentimental, Lysicles for sensual infidelity ; the latter (with whom Alciphron also at first seemed to agree) denying all moral distinctions, and professing a doctrine of pure selfishness. Now Mandeville himself did neither of these, nor are such doctrines known to have been ever openly professed, even by those who, so far as they dared, acted on them.' It is most likely that Berkeley painted freethinkers from no actual acquaintance with them, and in the case of *' sceptics and atheists " without any authentic knowledge of their arguments ; for few, if any, writers in his time avowed either scepticism or atheism, and, before Hume, nobody of note had at- tempted, even as an intellectual exercise, to set out the case on the atheistical side. Like most other ^ A moat powerful and discriminating discussion of the common impu- tations on Mandeville, and of the true scope and character of his book, will be found in Mr. James Mill's ''Fragment on Maqkintosh," a book of rare vigour, and full of important materials for thought. LIFE AND WEITINGS. 293 defenders of religion in his day, though we regret to have it to say of a man of his genius and virtues, Berkeley made no scruple of imputing atheism on mere surmise — to Hobbes, for example, who never speaks otherwise than as a believer in God, and even in Christianity ; and to the " God-intoxicated " Spinoza. We may judge that he replied to what he supposed to be in the minds of infidels, rather than to what they anywhere said ; and, in conse- quence, his replies generally miss the mark. Indeed, with the exception of his own special argument for Theism, already commented upon, he has much more to say for the usefulness of religion than for its truth ; and even on that he says little more than what is obvious on the surface. A noticeable thing, not only in his controversy with the freethinkers, but through all his miscellaneous writings, is the firm persuasion he expresses of the spread and growth not only of religious unbelief, but, in addi- tion to that, of immorality of all kinds, from the dissipations and profligacies of men about town, to robberies on the highway ; and in particular he held that political corruption had surpassed all previous bounds, and that the very idea of public spirit, or regard for the public interest, was treated with contempt. No doubt, the settlement of the old questions which had strongly interested the multi- tude—while the new ones, which date from the 294 beekeley's American and French revolntionSj had not yet come in— made the reigns of the two first Georges a time of political indifference J always favourable to the venality of politicians. Yet, when we carry back our thoughts to the courts and parliaments of the last two StuartSj or further off, to those of James I,, or earlier still, of Henry VIII., we shall not easily believe that such change as had taken place was in any direction but that of improvement. However this be, Berkeley was under a strong belief, more frequent than well-founded in the case of many good men at all periods, that the nation was degenerating; and he felt it his peremptory duty to do what in him lay towards checking that degeneration, by reasserting and fortifying with new arguments the old doctrines of religion and mor- als. It would have greatly astonished him to be told that, as a philosopher, he would in a future age be accounted the father of all subsequent scepti- cism ; while, as a moralist, he would be under the ban of the next spiritualist revival, since, like nearly all the theologians of his time, he was dis- tinctly and absolutely an utilitarian — one of Paley's sort, who believed that God's revealed Word is the safest guide to utility. Berkeley's controversy with the mathematicians has far more pith and substance, and may even now be read with considerable profit. This, too, was con- LIFE AISTD WRITINGS. 295 ieived by himself as part of liis warfare against free- ihinters, being an argument ad Jiominem addressed io " an infidel mathematician," to the effect that as ie,in mathematics, believed mysteries, and things con- rary to reason, it was not open to him to reject Christianity because it contained mysteries above eason. The mathematical mysteries in question vere the doctrines relating to infinites, and specially hose on which the differential or infinitesimal calcu- us was grounded. The conclusions arrived at by his process Berkeley did not dispute, inasmuch as hey were often confirmed by experience, and had lot, in any ease, been contradicted by it ; but le maintained that the rational grounds of the heory were quite untenable, and at variance with he boasted exactness and demonstrative character f mathematical reasoning. And it is difficult to ead, without parti pris^ " The Analyst," and the -dmirable rejoinder to its assailants, entitled "A )efence of Freethinking in Mathematics " (the lat- er one of the finest pieces of philosophic style in the iJnglish language), and not to admit that Berkeley Qade out his case. It was not until later that the lifferential calculus was placed on the foundation it LOW stands on — ^the conception of a limit ; which is he true basis of all reasoning respecting infinitely mall quantities, and, properly apprehended, frees he doctrine from Berkeley's objections. Never- 296 bekkelet's theless, so deeply did those objections go into the heart of the subject, that even after the false theory had been given np, the true one was not (so far as we are aware) worked out completely, in language open to no philosophical objection, by any one ^ who preceded the late eminent Professor De Morgan, who combined, with the attainments of a mathematician, those of a philosophic logician and psychologist. Though whoever had mastered the idea of a limit could see, in a general way, that it was adequate to the solution of all difficulties, the puzzle arising from the conception of different oi- ders of differentials — quantities infinitely small, yet infinitely greater than other infinitely small quanti- ties — had not (to our knowledge) been thoroughly cleared up, and the meaning that lies under those mysterious expressions brought into the full light of reason, by any one before Mr. De Morgan. Berkeley was not solely a speculative philosopher and theologian ; he also wrote on things directly practical, as was to be expected from his keen in- terest in the welfare of mankind, and specially of his own Ireland. The labours and they ears of life which he devoted to the attempt to found a college at Bermuda, chiefly for the- education of mission- * Lagrange is no exception ; for hia rationalisation of the differential calculus consisted in detaching it from the conception of infinitesimals, not in rationalising that conception itself. ' LIFE AND WRITIJSTGS. 297 aries — a scheme wMchj solely througli the influence of his personal character, got so fai' as to obtain a (for the time) large subscription list, and an address from the House of Commons, followed by the grant of a charter and a promise of .£20,000 from the minister, but which, when the fascination of his presence had been removed, was quietly let drop — ^need not here be further dwelt upon. In his writings on practical subjects there is much to commend, and a good deal to criticise. One of them is a vindication of " Passive Obedience, or the Christian doctrine of not resisting the Su- preme Power." It is an impressive lesson of toler- ance, to find so great a man as Berkeley a thor- oughly convinced adherent and defender of a doctrine not only so pernicious, but by that time so thoroughly gone by. The reader of the tract per- ceives that the writer was misled by an exaggerated application of that cardinal doctrine of morality, the importance of general rules. As it was ac- knowledged that the cases in which it is right to disobey the laws or rebel against the Government are not the rule but the exception, Berkeley threw them out altogether, for his moral rules admitted of no exceptions. The most considerable and best known of his writings on practical interests is the "Querist," wherein opinions are propounded in a form to which Berkeley was partial, that of queries. 298 Berkeley's It is in tMs that we find Ms celebrated query, " Whether, if there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom, our natives might not nevertheless live cleanly and comfortably, till the land, and reap the fruits of it." ^ The majority of the queries, like this, are on subjects of political economy. Their chief merits are the strong hold which the author has of the fundamental truths, that the in- dustry of the people is the true source of national wealth, and luxurious expenditure a detriment to it ; and the distinctness with which he perceived, being therein much in advance of his age, that money is not in itself wealth, but a set of counters for comput- ing and exchanging wealth, and, in his own words, "a ticket entitling to power, and fitted to record and transfer this power." Had he followed up this idea, he might have anticipated the work of Adam Smith ; but he held, apparently, to the conclusions of what is called the mercantile system, while re- jecting its premises, and seems to have thought the consumption of foreign luxuries vastly, more injuri- ous to the national wealth than that of luxuries produced at home. • -^ew of Berkeley's writings have been so much heard of, though in our days none, probably, so little read, as " Siris " — originally published under the 1 Vol. iu. p. 366 (134th query). LIFE AND WRITINGS. 299 title of " Philosophical Keflections and Inquiries concerainQ: the virtues of Tar-Watei^, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another " — a work which begins with tar-water and ends with the Trinity, the intermediate space being filled up with the most recondite speculations, phys- ical and metaphysical. It may surprise some per- sons when we say that the part of this which is best worth reading is that which treats of tar-water. Berkeley adduces a mass of evidence, from much ex- perience of his own and of others, to the powers of tar-water both in promoting health and in curing many diseases, and thinks it probable, though with- out venturing to affirm, that it is an universal medi- cine. All this is often supposed to be a mere delu- sion of the philosopher, by those who do not know that the efficacy he ascribes to his remedy is in part real, since creosote, one of the ingredients of tar- water, is used with success both as a tonic and for the relief of pain, not to mention the disinfecting and other virtues of another ingredient, the now much talked-of carbolic acid. In any case, it is a valuable lesson to see how great, and seemingly conclusive, a mass of positive evidence can be produced in support of a medical opinion which yet is not borne out. ex- cept to a very limited extent, by subsequent experi- ence. Having, as he thought, established cb posteri- ori the restorative virtues of tar-water, Berkeley, like 300 Berkeley's a pliilosopher as lie was, endeavoured to investigate the cause, or general principle of these virtues ; but he sought for evidence both of the possibility of a panacea, and of the probability of this being such, in the doctrines of an erroneous, and now thoroughly exploded, chemistry, and through them, in the mixed physical and metaphysical theories of the ancient philosophers. One of the points he strove to make out was, that fire is the vital force, or principle of life; having first, as he thought, established, from his antiquated chemistry, a peculiar connection be- tween tar and the element of fire. But as it was not consistent with Berkeley's philosophy to let it be supposed that fire, or anything except mind, could be a real agent, he ascends through this appar- ently humble subject to his own highest speculations. "It is neither acid, nor salt, nor sulphur, nor air, nor sether, nor visible corporeal fire — much less the phantom fate or necessity — that is the real agent, but, by a certain analysis, a regular connection or climax, we ascend through all those mediums to a glimpse of the First Mover, invisible, incorporeal, unextended, intellectual source of life and being." ' And the ancient philosophers, whom he had already cited in confirmation of his physics, are now in- voked to give what support they can to his the- ology, very unsuccessfully in our opinion. Pro- 1 Vol. iii. p. 479. LIFE A^B WRITINGS. 301 fessor Fraser attaches great value to " SIris," saying/ that " the scanty speculative literature of these islands in last century contains no other work nearly so remarkablcj" and that "every time we open its pages we find fresh seeds of thought. It breathes the spirit of Plato and the Neoplatonists in the least Platonic generation of English history since the revival of letters." We confess we see in it no connection but with what is least valuable in Plato, his mystical cosmogony, that which is really common to him with the Neoplatonists ; and while we do not think it adds anything of the smallest value to Berkeley's thoughts elsewhere expressed, it overloads them with a heap of use- less and mostly unintelligible jargon, not of his own but of the Plotinists. Professor Fraser has fulfilled the duties of an editor with intelligence and fidelity. He has in general contented himself with explaining and elucidating his author, and has been more sparing in comment of his own, even in the way of defence, than might perhaps have been expected from the valuable services of this kind which he has rendered to the Berkeleian doctrines in other writings. The chapter, however, which he has devoted to " The Philosophy of Berkeley," ^ contains much useful 1 Vol. iii. p. 343 ^ Chapter 10 of the Biography, vol iv. pp. 363-416. .^02 Berkeley's life aistd writings, "-'TP matter m esplanation and recommendation of Berkeley's main thoughts, with some hints at what he deems shortcomings, which, to be properly judged, would require much more expansion. The biogra- phy which he has contributed, incorporating a great number of letters of Berkeley not previously known, is a work both of labour and of love, for which thanks are due to Professor Fraser. Un- happily the letters, being mostly to his man of business, Mr. Thomas Prior, do not bring to light anything very novel in the life or character of the philosopher ; but both they and the biography will be always welcome to his admirers, by admitting them to such imperfect acquaintance as is still ob- tainable vsdth the daily life of so excellent and eminent a man. THE Ein>. WORKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. For particulars, see descriptive 'catalogue, which will he sent free to any address. BRINTON'S Myths of the Ne-w Woeld. 8vo $6 00 CONWAY'S Sacked Anthologt. 8vo 4 00 Eahthwaed Pilgrimage. 12mo 1 75 Essays, and Beviews. By Eminent British Churchmen. 12rao 2 50 GOULD'S Legends op the Patriahchs and Phophets. 12mo 2 00 HAWEIS' Thoughts fob the Times. 12rao 1 50 . LESSING'S Nathan THE Wise. 16mo 150 MARTINEAU'S (Jas.) Essays, Philosophical and Theological. 2 vols. 8vo 5 00 ' The New Affinities of Faith. 12mo 25 MILL'S (J. S.) 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