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Cee S PS ond PPP PI e FVII! gary ene re esr rao Ee : . =< Poe ene ae ~< . eae s Senet = 2 esas are POE RS cn ns Peeeeten IRI RII ER J : ntemnigenes LRA AAS feeess Seer oo a etd OA RS . ate ae “ 4 = SAIS M IS IIAP IIS NID LIAO 3 “ ee oe ; : = a ‘ pence Bence sate rpnsectca em teey FF Spee oe F cnatonn weterdn Sue a Sa Sn ee > 7 . ry. 7a. - - > <0 a, », Ae, > st : : 3 : alee : , SIA P LIRIAS (PEI Re - : : LIBRARY | | OF THE | Theological Seminary; PRINCETON,. N. J. BP 109502 C5 5a Modern scepticism Ap ais rn be ph, MODERN SCEPTICISM. a a eet ta ae MODERN SCEPTICISM. A COURSE OF (LECTURES y Fi DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE fe fr” VY CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE SOCIETY, WITH AN EXPLANATORY PAPER BY THE RIGHT REVEREND Cee LLL CO: bie DD, LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND BRISTOL. SEVENTH EDITION. London: HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER Row. MDCCCLXXII. 1§ 7z Watson and Hazell, Printers, London and Aylesbury. PAR Eee Te THE following Lectures, delivered at the request ot the Christian Evidence Society, are now, for the con- venience of the reader, gathered together into one volume, and earnestly commended to his serious consideration. A short account of the general designs of the Society, of the plan of the Lectures, and the reasons for their appearing in a different order from that in which they were delivered, will be found in an explanatory paper which the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol has been kind enough to draw up at the request of the Committee. Though placed, as last written, at the end of the volume, the attention of the reader should be early directed to this paper. vi PREFACE. an The Committee take this opportunity of offering their best thanks to the eminent. men who have found time, in the midst of their varied and laborious avocations, to lend such able and efficient service to the great cause in hand,—the maintenance of the truth of the Christian Revelation. HARROWBY, Chairman of Committee. CONTENTS. DESICNCINMNATUREY Go'o7 7% cin eau s semen et 9 NF a Most REVEREND THE Lorp ARCHBISHOP OF ORK. / PANTHEISM ; Se : : : : , “33 By THE Rev. J. H. Rice, D.D., Principal of Westminster Training College. ? POSITIVISM . : Ny Sete . . : ° - 79 By THE Rev. W. Jackson, M.A., F.S,A., late Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. SCIENCE AND REVELATION ./ . : . Prd Xe By THE Very Rev. R. Payne Smitu, D.D., Dean of Canterbury ; late Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford. THE NATURE AND VALUE ,OF THE MIRACULOUS TESTI- MONY TO CHRISTIANITY . ons ye - 179 By THE Rev. Joun ‘Stoucuton, D.D. yy THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF REVELATION” 2 229 By THE RIGHT REV. THE LorD BISHOP OF CARLISLE. vili CONTENTS. Page THE ALLEGED HISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS, AND THE LIGHT THROWN ON THEM BY. MODERN DISCOVERIES . . A 1 te BY THE REV. GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., Camden Pro- fessor of Ancient History, Oxford. MYTHICAL THEORIES OF CHRISTIANITY e ° » 305 By THE Rev. CHARLES Row, M.A., of Pembroke College, Oxford. THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES 301 al By THE REv. STANLEY LEATHES, M.A., Professor of Hebrew, King’s College. CHRIST’S TEACHING AND INFLUENCE ON See “WORLD . 409 By THE RIGHT REV. THE LorD BISHOP OF “Ey. THE COMPLETENESS AND ADEQUACY OF THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY | 4 ; : n 457 By THE ReEv. CANON (Cant M.A., Canon of Exeter ; ; Preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, EXPLANATORY PAPER . 4 p e 503 By THE RIGHT REV. nen 4 Lorp BIsHOP OF GLOUCESTER a we AND BRISTOL, yu Ita’ NOTES . e e 5 . ® a $ @ s 529 DESIGN IN@NALOURE; BY THE MOST REVEREND THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK. DESIGN IN NATURE. “ALL things are full of God,” said the father of Greek philosophy. “We have no need of the hypothesis of God,” said a modern French astronomer. It is with the latter saying, which is descriptive of the attitude of modern science at this time, that the present address will have to do. Atheism no doubt exists ; but far more common is the mode of thinking which would dispense with all questions about the Divine nature in dealing with the world and its phenomena; which considers that the introduction of the name of God into scientific research, complicates what is simple, obscures the rules of observation, introduces con- troversies that are useless to science, restrains the free course of inductive reasoning by an apprehension of con- sequences, and entangles physical inquiry which leads to sure and clear results, with mental and with spiritual inquiry which have produced nothing but disputation. Those who hold such views would think it unphilosophical 3 DESIGN IN NATURE. NN a ne to deny, just as they would regard it to affirm, the existence of God. But the popular mind is not equal to nice dis- tinctions; and it seems almost the same thing to most people to deny the existence of God as to exclude the thought of Him when exploring His creation. I am not without hope that a, few words delivered here upon “the argument from design,” as it is called, may tend to diminish the growing estrangement between science and religion, and at the same time to revindicate for religion her legitimate share in matters of scientific interest. I may undertake that the subject, however unworthily treated in other respects, shall be discussed without bitter- ness, and with a fitting respect for those who have done so much for physical science during the present generation. It is necessary to sketch in a few sentences that field of creation with which the argument from design«has to do. The world presents to us four kingdoms or classes of facts. One of these, and the first in point of order, is the mineral kingdom. ever since I spoke of as the “fascination of Pantheism ;’ was led to the study of philosophy and its development, and especially of the thoughts of the early Greek wrestlers with the mysteries of being, of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists, and of the modern thinkers of Germany, who have filed with transcendental exhalations of verbal dialectics the vacuum in speculation which had been created by the de structive logic of Kant. The other qualification which I venture to claim for my task to-day is that I have some knowledge of the difficulties of thought and belief which may lead honest men to become pantheists ; that I understand the manner of thought of one who has become entangled in the mazy coil of pantheistic reasonings ; at all events, that I know that honest searchers after truth may reluctantly become intellectually pantheists, while yet their heart longs to retain faith and worship towards a personal God. If, therefore, one necessary condition of true success in argu- ment is an intellectual and, as far as possible, a moral sympathy with one’s opponents, that condition, I believe, is fulfilled in my case. And I cannot but think that all Christian controversialists ought to feel a tender sympathy towards honest thinkers who are involved am the bewildering confusions of a philosophy which they do not love, even although they may, after many a struggle and in sadness of 38 PANTHEISM. ee heart, have succumbed at length to Pantheism as the only conclusion of controversy in which they are able to abide. My subject to-day is not the history of Pantheism, but its principles. The history could not be dealt with in one lec- ture ; the principles, I hope, may. And whatever may be the intellectual genesis, the descent and derivation, or the special character, of any particular form of Pantheism, all its forms will be found to coincide in certain respects. The semi-Hegelian of Oxford, and the pantheist who falls back on the lines of Mr. Herbert Spencer's speculations as his place of defence, may both be regarded as standing on common ground for the purpose of my present argument. In attempting a criticism of the principles of Pantheism, the first thing to be done is to obtain as clear an idea as possible of what is to be understood by Pantheism, as dis- tinguished from Theism on the one hand, and from Atheism on the other. There can be no doubt that the difficulties, both metaphysical and moral, which attach to the concep- tion of a personal God, the Creator and Governor of the universe, have, more than any other cause, constrained thoughtful men who have pondered the problem of the universe, to endeavour to escape from their perplexities and bewilderments by taking refuge in the notion of a diffused impersonal divinity. And it must be confessed that these difficulties are so oppressive and so staggering to our incom- 39 PANTHEISM. a petent human reason, that they might well tempt the mere reasoner, the mere logician, the mere metaphysician, to give up faith in a personal God, if so to do were not really to involve one’s self in more than equivalent difficulties of the very same class, besides many other difficulties, and in truth contradictions, both intellectual and also moral, which are involved in the pantheistic hypothesis. That the alter- native is such as I have now stated, that the pantheistic hypothesis is necessarily beset with such difficulties and contradictions, will in part be shown by the inquiry which, as I] have intimated, must needs come first of all in the criticism I am to attempt. An investigation of the mean- ing of Pantheism, of the characteristic idea proper to the intermediate hypothesis which rej ects equally A-Theism and Theism, will open to view the metaphysical difficulties and contradictions involved in the hypothesis. I shall after- wards try to show the incompatibility of the principles of Pantheism with the true principles of natural science. The moral considerations belonging to the Christian con- troversy with Pantheism I shall reserve till the final stage in my argument. . Pantheism agrees with atheism in its denial of a personal Deity. Its divinity of the universe is a divinity without a will and without conscious intelligence. In what respect, then, does Pantheism really differ from atheism? if we 40 PANTHE/SM. eliminate from our idea oi the divinity of the universe all consciousness, all sympathy, all will, what sort of a divinity remains, what sense of a present and real divine power is left to the man that shrinks from atheism? Atheism denies that in, or over, or with nature there is anything whatever besides nature. Does not Pantheism do the very same? If not, what is there, let the pantheist tell us, in nature besides nature? What sort of a divinity is that which is separate from conscious intelligence and from voluntary will or power? Is it said that though there be no Deity in the universe, yet there is a harmony, a unity, an unfolding plan and purpose, which must be recognised as transcending all limitation, as unerring, inexhaustible, in- finite, and therefore as divine? Let us ask ourselves what » unity that can be which is above mere nature, as such, and yet stands in no relation to a personal Lord and Ruler of the universe; what plan and purpose that can be which is the product of no intelligence, which no mind ever planned ; what infinite and unerring harmony can mean, when there is no harmonist to inspire and regulate the life and movement of the whole. Do not the points of dis | tinction which the pantheist makes between his philosophy and the bald tenets of the atheist amount in effect to so many admissions that the facts of the universe cannot be stated, that the phenomena of nature cannot be described, « a PANTHEISM. SS ee with anything like fidelity or accuracy, without the use of language such as has no real meaning unless it implies the existence and operation throughout universal nature of a supreme actuative and providential Mind and Will ? The least and lowest implication which is involved in Pantheism, the most elementary idea which the word pan- theism can be held to connote, the barest sznzmum of mean- ing which the creed of the pantheist can be presumed to contain, is that there is in the whole of nature—in this universe of being—a divine unity. Let us then look at this word zzity, and consider closely what it must mean. Those who believe in a divine unity pervading all nature must imply that in the midst of the infinite complexity and variety of the universe there is everywhere to be recognised a grand law and order of nature—a method, plan, and har- mony in the great whole, which must consequently be traceable through all the parts. But whose and whence is this grand law? Isit indeed areality? Are all things fitted te each other, part to part, law to law, force to force, through- out the infinite depths of microscopic disclosures, through- out the infinite exuberance of nature’s grandest provinces, throughout all space and all duration? Do all things work to meet each other? Is every several life-cell, each organic fibre, moving, tending, developing, making escapes or over- tures, as if a separate angel of unerring sympathy and 42 PANTHEISM. ——w insight, of illimitable plastic skill and power, of creative energy and perfect providence, inhabited, inspired, and actuated it? Is it so that the man of science, who enters into communion with nature’s actual life, and movement, and purpose, seems to see and feel divinities, unrestingly, unweariedly, in silent omnipotence, in infinite diffusion, everywhere at work, so that the reverent inquirer and gazer to whom this wondrous spectacle is unveiled, could almost, in his own pantheistic sense, adopt the invocation of Coleridge, and address the powers he sees at work in such words as these: ‘* Spirits that hover o’er The immeasurable fount, Ebullient with creative Deity ! And ye of plastic power that interfused Loll through the grosser and material mass, Ln organizing surge! Holies of God ! (And what if Monads of the Infinite Mind ?)” Is itso? Iask. Then, what does such a real harmony and such universal correspondence and providence as this imply? Surely we must perforce adopt one of two alternatives. If we refuse to believe in One Ruling, Organizing, Creative Mind, One Living, Universal Mind and Will and Providence, which works through all, we must endow each separate be- ing, or at least each form of life, with creative energy, illimit- able and all-answering sensibility and sympathy, unerring 43 PANTHEISM. — dC wisdom, and veritable will. Nay, ultimately, as it seems to me, the alternative must be between accepting the faith in an infinite God, and attributing to even the particles of inor- ganic matter, amenable as these are to the laws of gravi tation and chemical combination, a wisdom, will, and power of their own, the power of intelligence and of self-direction. As to what are called the laws of gravitation and of chemi- cal combination, we know that a law, like “an idol,” is “nothing in the world” but a name. ‘There is no power but of God; the powers that be, are ordained of God.” A law is not a power; the laws of science do but define observed methods of movement or forms of customary relation between thing and thing. Of one thing, at any rate, I think we may be sure, that a mere order of nature, ascertained though it may have been by the truest and surest induction, cannot have made and cannot sustain itself, cannot be self-originated and self- impelled. So also it is certain that a mere plastic universal power, apart from any creative or providential mind, how- ever its products might seem to imply intelligence, could be animated by no conscious purpose, and could not be conceived as working with blind automatic certainty conformably to a grand cosmical plan or towards a provi- dential end. And if the divinity of the pantheist 1s nothing moze than a personified law or order of nature, his personi- 44 .—“_ —- PANTHETISM. fication of this order or law can add nothing to its virtue or potency, can by no means transform it from a phrase into a living power, from a figure of speech into a real and intelli- gent force, can never constitute it into a divinity. The more I reflect upon the subject, the more assured the con- clusion appears to be, that any conception of a real unity in and of nature is self-contradictory and unmeaning, except upon the assumption of a conscious and intelligent Creator. The unity of nature, toa man who denies the existence of a real God, cannot be a unity inherent in nature, cannot be a unity according to which nature itself has been planned, and is really working ; it is an imputed unity, the conception of the pantheistic philosopher's own mind. Unity, indeed, as apprehended by us—and it can only be known through our apprehension of it—is essentially a conception, a relative idea. If one could conceive nature as existing destitute of a mind either to work ona plan, or to recognise a plan in working, in such nature there could be no unity. Unity in action implies a plan of voluntary working, and therefore a regulating mind. Unity of conception and exposition _ implies an intelligent observer. The unity of nature, if it be not the plan and work of the very God, can be nothing more than a scheme and conception which has been invented and imputed by man. But perhaps it may be thought that the word unity, 45 PANTHEISM. —_—_——ooO a as used by pantheists, should be understood rather as referring to the ultimate oneness and identity of all force throughout the universe, than to harmony of universal plan and purpose. Various as are the appearances of nature, and the modes in which the laws of nature operate, it may yet be set forth by the pantheist as his belief,—a belief, he will say, which the modern advance of science tends con- tinually to establish as the true theory of the universe,—that all force is ultimately one, that the different forces of nature are mutually convertible and equivalent, that one energy of nature, Protean, universal, of infinite plasticity and power of variation or adaptation, pervades and actuates all things. It may be called gravitation, or electricity, or light, or heat, or nervous energy, or vital force ; but ultimately and essen- tially it is one and the same; it is, to quote well-worn lines which will be held here strictly to apply— ** Changed thro’ all, and yet in all the same.” It ‘* Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees $ Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent : Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, e * * * * * * 2 To it no high, no low, no great, no small, It fills, it bounds, connects, and equals all.” Now if this be the pantheistic unity which is admitted by 46 PANTHEISM. ———_—_—$_—$—$—$—————————— ls men who deny a personal Deity, I will not stay to object that such a view is hardly consistent with the essential dis- tinction in nature which even Professor Huxley and men of his school unwaveringly and powerfully maintain, between inorganic matter and living forms. It is more to my purpose to remark that it is much simpler and easier to believe in a personal God, than in such an impersonal divinity as this Protean Force. Every difficulty which be- longs to the thought of God’s existence belongs to this also. This force must be self-originated, must have been from everlasting, must be creative, omnipresent, providen- tial, equal to all plans, purposes, contrivances, inspirations, which. have been, or ever will be, in this dedalean and infinite universe; must be the source of all intelligence, though itself unintelligent; of all sympathy, although itself incapable of sympathy ; must have formed the eye, though it cannot see, and the ear, though it cannot hear; must have blossomed and developed into personal intelligences, although personal intelligence is a property | which cannot be attributed to it; must unquestionably be omniscient as well as omnipresent, or it could not, in‘its in- finite convertibility, anticipate all needs, meet all demands, answer in absolute and universal harmony to every faculty, capability, and tendency of all things that are and all things that become. Now is it reasonable to object to the doctrine 47 PANTHEISM. we a of a personal Deity because of its inconceivability and its stupendous difficulties, and yet to believe in such a primal, essential, immaterial, creative, infinite, blind and unintelligent force as this? Surely no contradiction could be greater. The conception of God as from everlasting zs stupendous. But an infinite Protean Force from everlasting, destitute of intelligence and will, yet continually operative as the life, soul, wisdom, and providence, of all things, is nothing less than contradictory and absurd. I can come to no conclusion, accordingly, but that Pan- theism really only differs from atheism, in so far as it confesses that it is impossible to speak with ordinary propriety, or in any such way as to meet the necessities either of science itself or of the common sense and feelings of mankind, without employing theistic language. It has been said that hypo- crisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue. So a profes- sion of Pantheism is the tribute of compliance at least in speech, is the outward language of homage, which theism has power to extort from atheism. “ Pantheism,” as is said by the author of Lothair, “is but atheism 2 domino. Nothing,” -as the same writer adds, “‘can surely be more monstrous than to represent a creator as unconscious of creating.” Yes, Pantheism is but veiled atheism. Strip Pantheism of all involutions of thought and all investitures of language, and in its naked truth it stands forth as mere atheism. 48 PANTHEISM. ——_— ee Te Every form which Pantheism takes, every disguise which it assumes, to hide from itself and from the world its real cha- racter, is a testimony borne by atheism to the necessity which all men feel for assuming the existence of Deity ; What Robespierre is reported to have said with reference to political government and national well-being, that if there : were not a God, it would be necessary to invent one, is felt by pantheistic philosophers to be true in regard to nature. So monstrous a conception is that of this universe without a governing mind; so clearly and directly to the common sense of mankind do the infinite harmonies of the universe seem to imply a designing and governing Intelligence; so indubitably does the might and life of the universe, ever coming forth anew, ever springing up afresh, ever unfolding and advancing, imply a central living Power, One with the infinite governing Intelligence ; that pantheists, in order to speak and write intelligibly, are compelled to invest nature with the qualities which they deny to the Deity, to attribute a spirit and intelligence to the whole machine, because they deny the existence of the great Mechanist ; to personify a harmony and unity which is but an abstraction, which, on their own hypothesis, is but a grand accident, a result with- out a cause, because they refuse to believe in a personal God. I am very far indeed from wishing to come under the 49 4 PANTHEISM. definition of what Mr. Hutton has spoken of as the “ Hard Church,” or to carry my positions merely by the use of the dilemma, yet I cannot refrain from saying, parenthetically, that the argument of the dilemma, carefully and truly ap- plied, is not only always legitimate but often necessary, and I must affirm that it applies very closely in the present in- stance. The pantheist cannot maintain his position mid- way between atheism and theism. If he absolutely refuses to be a theist, it is necessary to show him that he will have to yield to the cruel necessity of acknowledging himself to be an atheist. Standing midway, his position is altogether untenable, from whichever side it is assailed. On the one side, the pantheist is condemned by the same arguments which condemn atheism; on the other side, the atheist may justly allege against the position of the pantheist the self- same difficulties which both pantheist and atheist urge against theism. | But if pantheism be in reality only atheism, I may hence- forth disregard the verbal distinction between the two, and bring forward considerations and arguments which apply indifferently to either. In pursuing the discussion I shall take up in detail some points of argument already, as to their general scope, more or less distinctly intimated in the preliminary considerations which I have advanced. To explode any view of the world which excludes from it 50 PANTHETSM. the presence and government of a personal God, nothing | more is needed than to realize and truly understand the atheistic view in its various aspects. Let us try the atheist’s theory on the history of the universe, and see whether it can be made to fit, or must be broken in the attempt to fit it, The will and interference of God, as the Lord and Ruler of the universe, is excluded. The universe is held to have been from the beginning without a shaping and ruling intel- ligence and will, No mind has presided over its destinies, has aminated its energies; no providence of Divine power and wisdom has guided its changes and progress, has re- newed and replenished and sustained it. It follows that no power or will from beyond itself has ever touched the uni- verse. Its own unaided and unguided powers have done all. If the universe did not make itself, it has developed itself: all that has been, or is to be, was included potentially in that which was at the beginning, and has unfolded in necessary order. The vision presented is to certain minds very fasci- nating: it is a vision of vast unbroken progress, of continual and infinite self-development. But let it be worked out, and let us consider what it really means. Such an hypothesis must lead us back, in the infinite dim distance of the original and indistinguishable past, into a universe-mist of germinal powers from which all has since developed.—But stay. Was this mist and expanse of universal nature in its origines all 51 PANTIFEISM. De eR aI TaN a A 2 rT ————— homogeneous and at one stage of existence? Then I have to ask, whence came it? What, going ever further and fur- ther back, where were the infinitely earlier, fainter, evanish- ing entities or powers, into which infinite creative force and potentiality was diffused? and what the one life and grand har- mony of influences and impulses, tending towards an infinite goal of progress and perfection, which pervaded the whole? What does all this mean? Is this easier, simpler, more ra- tional, than to believe in God from everlasting? Is anything gained in simplicity, comprehensibility, probability, or in scientific character, by denying that in the “increasing pur- pose” which “runs through the ages” there is any guidance of a divine intelligence or working of a divine will; and call- ing the whole process from first to last, from everlasting to everlasting, “development”? What is this word development but a name? Does the use of the word explain anything? © Does the use of the word reduce the mystery of the universe to the simplicity of an axiom? Does the use of the word provide a simple equivalent for all that divine wisdom, power, and providence, have ever been imagined to do for the uni- verse? Men call the mystery of being and becoming by the name of development, and then say that all things are effected by development, and that development explains all ! Whereas this development of which they talk so familiarly, as though they understood all its secrets, and were privy to 52 PANTHEISM. its infinitely various and mighty workings, and could unfold its source and meaning, is itself all the time the very mystery to be resolved and explained. Development is in truth as amazing and incomprehensible a mystery as creation. It seems to be but another word for creation. Only they who affect its use instead of the word creadion, insist upon crea- tion without a creator. The unintelligent and unconscious universe, on their view, is continually creating itself. The hypothesis of development, however, is not only un- intelligible and utterly devoid of reality, when criticized in its general principle; as might be expected, it altogether breaks down when it is tested in detail. Professor Huxley’s protoplasm breaks it down. All the scientific evidence, as _that eminent teacher of science showed at Liverpool last autumn, is opposed to the idea that protoplasm was deve- loped out of inorganic matter. The hypothesis of sponta- neous life-generation appears to be exploded. Science, at any rate, on its own positive principles, has no right what- ever to pretend that life has ever been developed out of what was not living. Here, then, a great and, so far as science can help us to form a judgment, an altogether impassable barrier rises to view against any development hypothesis. At a certain stage in the history of the universe protoplasm, organized life, made its appearance on the scene, starting up as a perfectly new, an original, an undeveloped 53 PANTHEISM. ) phenomenon. Before, all had been inorganic and dead ; now Life was abroad in the world, destined to increase and multiply, and replenish the universe. Let those who deny divine and creative will and government, inform us whence came this life. It was not developed. Must it not have been created. If not, then whence, I ask, whence did it spring? The argument which I have just urged should, as I ven- ture to think, be conclusive even with those who know, and | seek to know, nothing more of science than the order and method of its phenomenal processes. I will now bring forward a consideration which will, I hope, be admitted to have weight by those men of science—it is to be greatly lamented that there should be so few of these—who have studied the nature and working of the mind as well as the phenomena of sense. We have seen that protoplasm—that Life—was not developed out of inorganic matter, but ap- pears to have been an entirely new and primary fact on the face of the universe. Life came in and appropriated, put to its own uses, bound up under its own seal, impreg- nated with its own specific virtue, the raw inorganic materials which it found in nature; but the power of Life itself was altogether new. A fact in some sort analogous to this confronts us in a higher sphere, in the sphere of living intelligence itself. I refer to the emergence of personal 54 ee SS ee eee PANTHEISM. 1 ey EE HS consciousness among the world of living creatures. To me it appears that the sense of personality is an altogether new and original fact, one which cannot be conceived as de- veloped or developable out of any pre-existing phenomena or conditions. Whence it comes, or how it arises, I know not. But it appears to be, in-and of itself, the assertion of an essential separateness between One’s Self and all pheno- mena, all constituents, all conditions whatever. The sense of an I Myself, of Personality, asserts an antithesis between the Man, and all that the Man uses, takes up into his person- ality, makes his own. As Life binds up inorganic matter under its seal, but is not developed out of inorganic matter, so the voluntary and responsible Self binds up under the seal of its own personality all that belongs to the manifold life of its complex being. As life brings into the universe a new world of phenomena, higher and more manifold than those of mere inorganic matter, yet embodying and adopt- ing these, so personality brings into the universe a new world of vastly higher and rarer phenomena than those of mere vitality, yet embodies and adopts these :—it intro- duces all that belongs to reflection and morality, giving birth to an intelligence and a world of thought, in which all the lower and anterior phenomena of the world become matters of cognisance, and are murored as objects of thought. As I venture to think that this sense of personality, with 55 PANTHEISM. the new world of reflective consciousness and morality which it brings in, is a fact, starting up in the midst of a aniverse of anterior developments, such as all Mr. Darwin’s solvents utterly fail to touch, a phenomenon which remains as far from explanation as before he wrote his last book, so it appears to me that the power of human speech is another fact starting up in the midst of the line of supposed develop- ments which no hypothesis of evolution can afford any help towards explaining. Miraculously developed reason, something higher, as it seems to me, than any development of human reason our race has, in its highest culture, as yet put forth, must have been necessary in order to the inven- tion of language by any race even of the most sagacious mammals. And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument, in order to the high development of rea- son. We have some idea what deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper, and :affec- tions, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not in- deed deaf, but congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. What would the development of human reason have been under such conditions? How, then, is it possible to conceive that the wondrous faculty and instrument of 56 PANZHEISM. —— os —— speech was ever invented and’ perfected by mammals ot infra-human faculty and development, and that they were afterwards through this invention developed yet more highly, until they attained to the dignity and advancement of humanity? Such infra-human mammals must have been more miraculously endowed in order to such an invention than ever man himself has been. After all that Mr. Darwin has written, does or can any reasonable man or woman actually believe in the possibility, — apart from the Divine Power and Will and Guidance,—tor that is the point,—of the self-development, the spontaneous upgrowth of articulate language? Let us study our quadru- pedal familiars, for the sake of illustration and analogy. We see daily how our noble dogs strain and groan after speech, do all but speak: we mark their eloquent looks, their speaking gestures, their wonderfully expressive move- ments, how they watch us speak, and seem as if they understood what speech is to us, and as if they craved most longingly the power for themselves. We cannot but sympathetically admire the intelligent, the benevolent, the noble, the sagacious physiognomies which they show. If any creature ever could, would, or did develop speech in any rudimentary form, are not they just in the circumstances to do it? And when once rudimentally begun, however uncouthly and imperfectly, should not their organs continu- 57 PANTHEISM. ally improve by the continual effort and the increasing intelligence? Is it not immensely less hard of belief, and less difficult to imagine, that dogs should develop speech, than that man should have been developed from the larve of the ascidie? Yet is there even a beginning made to- wards the canine development of articulate language, or does any living man believe that such a beginning ever could be made ? _ To me it appears that human speech and human per- sonality are in some way bound up with each other, that the one, in some sort, implies the other, and that these two characteristics of our race present an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance by really scientific thinkers of any hypothesis of evolution which, leaving God out of nature, would account for the whole existence and progress of the universe on the principle of spontaneous development. But again, let me be allowed to test the development hypothesis in detail at another point. This hypothesis— and any pantheistic or atheistic view of the universe which professes to be scientific—is obliged to confess that all living beings, of whatever sort, have been developed out of a single primary cell—called often a germ-cell—of proto- plasm. Here they find the beginning of every kind of life. The plant, the animal, of every sort,—the lichen, the cedar, the sponge, the bird, the mammal, the minutest entozoon, 58 ——— PANTHEISM. —————— a che most microscopic infusorlum, and man,—have been developed out of these primary cells. What then do the same men who teach us this, find to be the constitution of these same cells, when microscopically examined? They find them to be, for the most part, and indeed always, if allowance be made for very trivial exceptions, identically the same. ‘The matter is identically the same, the appear- ance identically the same; no difference whatever of con- stitution, form, or properties, is to be detected. They can- not tell whether the nettle, or the frog, or the eagle, or the man, is to be developed out of any given cell: for anything their science can teach them, any of these might be de- veloped, as they call it, out of any cell. But if this be so, is it scientific, is it real or true, is it not altogether mislead- ing, to speak of mere development in such a case? ‘The flower may be said to be developed out of the bud because the bud is the flower in miniature, the flower is really folded up in the bud. But surely here is no case of mere develop- ment; here is no unfolding out of the germ-cell of what is potentially contained in the cell, regarded as a merely material organism. Judged by every test of physical experiment, the primary cells are identically the same; and yet they grow into forms essentially and infinitely dissimilar. Does it not clearly appear that here is a matter in which some power above and beyond the mere physical constitution and nature 59 PANTHEISM. of the primary cell must be admitted, on every principle of science, on every ground of pure candour and truth, to be of necessity present? Is it not evident that with each germ- cell there must be associated some individual life-power which animates the cell, which uses it as a unit to multiply, as a foundation to build upon, which does build and weave and work into it and upon it continually new material, which, for its own use in its work of weaving and fabricating, and for the completion of its own distinctive form and vehicle, takes toll of air and earth and water and heat- power—the ancient elements—selecting out of them its ap- propriate pabulum, in whatever chemical combinations of the primary elements known to our modern scientific analysis may be fit and needful? Surely not development, but life, the mystery of individual life, is here. And if the philoso- pher will deny the omnipresent creative and sustaining power of God, it appears to me that he must be prepared to animate each germ-cell with an individual intelligence which works with divine power, on a definite and most miraculous plan, and towards a distinct goal of perfection. To call such various powers and processes, such diverse and generically different operations, in every sphere of life, by the same term, appears to me to be unscientific ; to speak of them all alike as processes of unfolding or development, when results the most infinitely unlike and separate are ob- 60 PANTHEISM. tained from beginnings which are identically alike, appears to be not only unscientific but altogether misleading. I do not think it arrogant or unwarranted to conclude from such considerations as I have been trying to set forth, that evolution, or development, apart from the power and guidance of the Living God, is an unphilosophical, an un- scientific idea, an empty, an unmeaning word. It is a thing of naught, utterly impotent to solve the. mysteries of the uni- verse, even when expounded and reinforced by Mr. Darwin’s “Natural Selection.” I have not a word to say here against the views of Mr. Darwin, as defined and modified by the requirements of scientific modesty and precision. If I had any pretensions to be called a student of natural science, I should sit at the feet of Mr. Darwin when he speaks, not as a philosophic theorist, but as a scientific observer anda truly inductive naturalist. But I must say here in respect to Natural Selection, regarded as, according to Mr. Dar- win’s hypothesis, the handmaid of development, that, like development, it is but a name, and not a power. It de- scribes the order and mode according to which Providence works ; it is not itself a force—a working energy. Mr. Darwin himself indeed often speaks as if Natural Selection were itself a power and a providence. I find to my hand in Mr. Kingsley’s fine, suggestive paper on Zhe Natural Theology of the Future, recently published in Macmillan’s 61 PANTHEISM. — eee oa ne ee Magazine, a sentence of Mr. Darwin’s in regard to Natural Selection which I will quote. “It may be metaphorically said,” writes Mr. Darwin, “that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation even the slightest ; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good, silently and necessarily working whenever and wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being.” “It may be meta- phorically said,” are Mr. Darwin’s words. But in fact he is using, not a metaphor, buta personification. The distinction Mr. Darwin does not see. He repeatedly speaks of his personifications as metaphors. But the distinction notwith- standing is most important. By personifying Natural Selec- tion Mr. Darwin makes it appear to be a cause, attributes to it a real power, nay, wisdom and providence, as well as power. He speaks in one place of “ Nature’s power of selec- tion ;” contrasting this with the “powers of artificial selec- tion exercised by feeble man,” by which, however, man can do so much ; and arguing that “Nature’s power of selec- tion’ must be incomparably greater, and competent to produce incomparably superior effects in respect of “the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations be- tween all organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions of life.” Language of a similar sort he very frequently uses. He has, therefore, as a scientific man 62 PANTHETISM. a laid himself open to the reproof of M. Flourens, whom no one will deny to be a scientific critic. “Either,” says M. Flourens, “ Natural Selection is nothing, or it is nature, but nature endowed with the attribute of selection—nature per- sonified, which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has done with personifications.” The nineteenth century ought to have done with personifications ; but with the spirit of Lamarck’s speculations the style of, the French atheistic philosophy of the last century reappears. Mr. Darwin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Kingsley, describes the manner in which his Natural Selection may be conceivedas operating. What, if his meaning were expressed with strict scientific truth, he ought to intend to say, is that such as he describes is the result of providential working according to the mode and order which he designates by the phrase Natural Selection. ‘ All we ask,” says one of Mr. Darwin’s ablest critics, ‘‘is that we may be allowed to believe in a God and a real Divine Providence, as powerful and wise and good as Mr. Darwin’s Natural Selection.” But, moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is some- thing besides the mere process of change and growth, of what our philosophers call development, to be accounted for. There is a fact on which the growth, the change, the evolution, must be held in a true sense to depend : a prior fact to be taken account of. The growth proceeds upon a 63 PANTHEISM. a plan, and fulfils an idea: protoplasm itself embodies a scientific principle. But as the seal must be before the im- pression, the original before the copy, so the principle must be before its embodiment, the plan and the idea must be before the growth: the end, towards which as its goal the growth or development proceeds, must have been conceived and set up as an aim before its fulfilment began. We are bound therefore, if we would exhaust the problem, nay, if we would truly conceive, and justly state it, to ask how and whence the principle, the plan, the idea, the end, had their existence ? These are realities; they are the most inner and essential reali- ties in every instance of growth or development ; to deal only with the development of the physical basis, is to leave un- touched the kernel of the matter, is altogether superficial and unreal. But principles, plans, types and ideas, ends contem- plated in movement and progress, these at any rate are not physical, are not matters of sense and organization. They are, as I have said, prior to what is physical, they are conditions antecedent to organization and growth. Moreover, they are mental conceptions, not physical affec- tions. They are only possible, they have no meaning, except as the thoughts of some mind. Here, then, we are brought back by an inevitable necessity to an antecedent mind, the seat and origin of all the principles, the plans the ideas, the ends, embodied in organized beings, and ful- 64 PANTHEISM. SS SRE TRE RINE RT EOE ORT GRRE TE ALT ATT wre em omaccmecena = merece err re Ee ee filled in their existence, growth, and perfection. In short, from whatever side we contemplate the problems of nature, and whencesoever we take our point of departure in their investigation, we find ourselves brought face to face with creative mind. ‘The things which are “seen and temporal” lead us always inwards to “the things which are unseen and eternal ;” man and creaturely existence conduct us to the living God. If any one would escape from the pressure of this argu- ment by hardily denying that living organization involves principle or plan, type or idea, purpose or end, it can only follow that the living forms of the universe are an infinite congeries of accidental combinations, that in reality there are no such things as organs, that there can be no such thing as development, and that there is no such thing as law. What men call law is mere sequence that happens to follow regularly. The whole universe has been constituted and regulated by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. Against such a conclusion as this I do not need to argue. It is the naked and repulsive atheism of which I spoke in the intro- duction to this lecture. The line of argument which I have been pursuing seems to force us to the conclusion that there is no logical resting-place between such theism as Christianity teaches and such Democritean atheism as that of which we have now had a glimpse. PANTHEISM. ee eee But if this be so, it follows that it is impossible to deny design and final causes in creation, and the sway and over- sight of a universal Divine Providence, the providence of a living God, except by denying all law. To the Christian theist, science is living science indeed ; to the pantheist, no less than the atheist, science is hardly better than a dead register. He may talk of the wisdom, the power, the order, the benevolence, of nature. But such expressions on the lips of a pantheist are utterly illusive. All the wisdom, all the marvellous adjustments of nature, are but the happy conjunctures, the exquisite chance unisons, of he knows not what. When lost in admiration of marvellous organizations, complexly apt and beautiful contrivances, of what seem like the most studied and beneficent provisions, the soul that is beginning to glow with wonder at this seeming wisdom, and to swell with thankfulness because of this seeming love, must be chilled into blank confusion and amazement by the thought that there is no Being of Wisdom and Benevolence Who is to be thanked and adored because of these His marvellous works. Surely this is enough to darken the uni- verse to the explorer of nature’s mysteries, and to fill his soul with perpetual melancholy. Nor is it easy to under- stand how any man of true science, any real inductive philosopher, who comes into contact with nature’s living processes and hears the perpetual whisper of her living voice, 66 PANTHETSM. can be ensnared into the acceptance of such a hard mystery of sceptical belief as this. Surely, then, on purely scientific grounds,—the grounds not only of metaphysical but also of natural science, on every ground which can be appealed to by high and pure philosophy, we are at liberty, I should say we are bound, to reject the hypothesis which attempts to expound nature and to solve its mysteries, without the admission of a divine mind. Sense and matter and the observed order of pheno- | mena do not constitute the whole of our science. There are some words written by a poet, too much neglected at the present time, which I cannot forbear from quoting here. ‘* How should matter occupy a charge Dull as it is, and satisfy a law, So vast in its demands, unless impelled To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force, And under pressure of some conscious cause ? The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused, Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire By which the mighty process is maintained, Who sleeps not, is not weary ; in whose sight Slow circling ages are as transient days ; Whose work is without labour ; whose designs No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts ; And whose beneficence no charge exhausts.” Surely, if I may here quote some words of Mr. Kingsley’s 67 PANTHEISM. in the lecture to which I have already referred, this is ——— what men of science “are finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show, a something nameless, invisible, im- ponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve, that which the old schoolmen called ‘forma forma- tiva,’ the mystery of that unknown and truly miraculous element in nature which is always escaping them, though they cannot escape it, that of which it was written of old, ‘Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee from Thy Spirit ?’” The observations which I have thus far offered are directed wholly to the philosophical and scientific aspect of the argument respecting Pantheism. I cannot bring this lecture to an end without referring to the moral branch of the argument. The existence of evil in the uni- verse is alleged as an argument against the existence of God and divine government. Doubtless, the existence of evil is a painful mystery. Many good Christians have felt it to be an oppressive and almost an overwhelming mystery. It is one of the difficulties attendant on the Christian’s belief; it is, in fact, the one moral difficulty. But difficul- ties and mysteries cannot annul the positive necessities of thought and argument. If such arguments as I have en- 68 PANTHEISM. deavoured to state make all science to be contradictory and unintelligible which speaks, in one breath, of the laws and wisdom of nature, and, in the next, denies the existence of a God, then we are bound to accept theism with its inevi- table consequences, notwithstanding the mysteries, whether metaphysical or moral, which our faith may involve. Mys- teries are not contradictions, and, in whichever direction we move, we shall find it impossible to escape from them. Mysteries surround the position of the sceptic or the atheist, no less than that of the Christian theist; not only mysteries, but, as we have seen, contradictions, beset him round, in whichever direction he turns. The Christian theist, by his faith in God, accepts the mysteries which are involved in the thought of God, but, unlike the unbeliever, he escapes from contradictions and absurdities. It appears that the morality of man—his great glory—that his sense of responsibility and of voluntary moral power, that eh most peculiarly constitutes him man, involves the law of moral influence as between man and man. _ It appears further that the power and faculty of moral influence for good must needs involve the law of moral influence for evil. From the fact of man’s own moral nature and moral re- ponsibility, and the consequent fact of his moral influence over his fellow-men, is derived, not only the possibility of moral evil in the case of a solitary individual, but the possi- 69 PANTHEISM. — bility, perhaps I may say the naturalness, the probability, of a contagion of moral evil spreading throughout the race, the effect of which can only be counteracted or limited by moral arrangements and influences specially constituted for that end. So much I may perhaps say in general, although the subject is one on which I think it wiser, as a rule, to say nothing. I feel it to bea profound and perilous mystery, however gloriously it may have been made the occasion for the manifestation in Christ Jesus our Lord of the Divine superabounding wisdom, mercy, and power. But if we admit the subject to be involved in profound, even terrible mystery, is that a reason why, making shipwreck at one plunge of all that belongs to humanity, faith and hope and philosophy should commit suicide, and descend together into the gulf of everlasting darkness and despair! Reason may reel and grow dizzy while it looks too long and too absorbedly down the fearful and fathomless depths of the mystery of-sin, but that is no sufficient cause why reason should cast itself headlong into the abyss. Pantheism has only one way in which to escape from the mystery of evil, and that is to deny all distinction between right and wrong, between moral good and moral evil. Of course there can be no such thing as sin for the pantheist, because all, according to his creed, is nature and develop- ment and necessity. Holiness is a matter of taste or senti- 70 PANTHEISM. —- — ment. Conscience is an illusive development; what we regard as divine morality is but utilitarianism sentimentalized and exalted into sacred law under the influence of unen- lightened impulse and antique superstition, a mere affair of the association of ideas which science will some day explain away. The ontology and ethics of Pantheism may be sum- med up in one sentence, “Whatever is, is; and there is neither right nor wrong, but all is fate and nature.” Pan- theism—lI say Pantheism just as truly and completely as atheism, for the difference between the two, as we have seen, is but one of name and phrase, and both alike deny God and conscience—Pantheism thus does cruel violence to every better instinct of our nature, outrages all the demands of religion and government, whether human or divine, and makes itself the direst foe of human progress and wellbeing. Many pantheists, doubtless, have been and are virtuous, even noble, men ; some, I am prepared to believe, may a in a certain sense, be religious men. But the direct tendency of the pantheistic philosophy is confessedly what I have now stated. When moral and pure, its pure morality can be nothing more, at least in theory, than a refined utilitarianism. Only as such can any pantheist pretend to impose morality as law. To sum up, may I not say that Pantheism, whether in its metaphysical or its moral aspect, is the dream of men who 7I PANTHEISM. will not admit that there is in the universe anything beyond what their senses immediately reveal to them? Its philoso- phy was represented in the last century in its lower and more popular form by Condorcet; the basis of whose system was laid in the principle, “penser c’est sentir,” — thought is nothing more than sense or feeling ; in its higher and more intellectual form it was represented by the sceptical sense-idealism of Hume. At the present day Bain and Mill have endeavoured to develop the principle of Condorcet in harmony with the higher and more subtle philosophy of Hume. The result appears to be a sort of nihilistic sense-idealism. Matter is probably nothing dif- ferent from our mental ideas—so far Berkeley, no less than Hume, is followed ; our ideas, however developed, are yet essentially only the combination and interfusion of our sensations and sense-associations; meantime there is no evi- dence of the real and substantial existence either of the world outside us, or of ourselves as true and separate selves or persons, or of God. Such at least would seem to be the metaphysics of the distinctively English school of Pantheism, z.é., Of Pantheism rendered into philosophic system by the English mind. The German Pantheism has infected the ten- dencies of English thought and criticism, but, notwithstanding the influence of Hegel at Oxford, has not been reproduced in any English system of egoistic Pantheism, In theiraspects 72 PANTHEISM. _ and results, in relation to theism and Christian faith, the German egoistic Pantheism and the English sense-idealistic Pantheism strictly coincide. Such then is the highest philosophy to- He of those who, refusing td be called atheists, nevertheless reject all faith in God ; of those who, rejecting Christian theism, claim to be positively neither more nor less than the men of science. Men of science though they be, their philoso- phy is the philosophy of nescience and the philosophy of despair. We need be under no apprehension that such a philosophy will ever be generally accepted. It is too strong, too sorrowful, too nauseous a composition to,suit the com- mon taste. It not only dissolves morality and its foundations, but it precludes all hope of immortality. The race indeed may be immortal and progressively great and glorious, al- though how even so much can be known is more than I can see; but the individual man by man, woman by woman, child by child, perishes each one for ever. Men and women with yearning, loving hearts, with tender and passionate affections, who have buried their dead out of their sight, and who could not endure to live if they were doomed tc sorrow without hope, cannot but reject with loathing and horror such doctrines as these. Men of various culture, of manifold intellectual resources, who live in the midst o refined and accomplished society, and who are not sufferin: fie PANTHEISM. from the pang of immedicable anguish and irreparable bereavement, may possibly live so merely intellectual and speculative a life, may be so wholly absorbed in mere science, may have so far separated themselves from all that belongs to the heart’s affections and the trembling religious sensibilities of human nature, as to adopt the philosophy of nihilism with hardy calmness, although I confess that it passes my power to understand or conceive this ; such men may be content to follow their speculative conclusions into the “blackness of darkness” for ever, and may thus, if not less, be more than the common crowd of humanity. But such a philosophy will not content those who share the ordinary wants and sensibilities of our race. The working, sorrowing, loving, hoping men and women of this human race will no more be able to satisfy themselves with any atheistic or, if any should prefer so to call it, pantheistic philosophy, than they can “feast upon the east wind.” They will cleave to that Christian truth and faith which has “brought life and immortality to light,” and which, in “show- ing” to the craving heart of needy, sorrowing, sinful man “the Father” reconciled in Christ, has blessedly “ sufficed”’ a longing world. | Indeed, it would seem that, when it comes to the point, even distinguished leaders in the ranks of those against whose views I have been arguing, find it impossible to give 74 PANTHEISM. — ap their faith, at least in immortality. Rénan is unquestion- ably one of the most distinguished leaders among those men of learning and culture who deny the existence of a creative will and Personal God. Yet Rénan cannot make up his mind that he has lost for ever his beloved sister ; that she has passed into the night of nothingness into which he must soon follow her. In the dedication to her memory of his “Life of Jesus,” he addresses an invocation to “the pure soul of his sister Henriette, who died at Byblos, Sept. 24th, 1861;” and appeals to her “to reveal to him, from the bosom of God in which she rests, those truths which are mightier than death, and take away the fear of death.” Rénan, then, after all, cannot give up his sister, nor, if it were only for her sake, his belief in immortality. And yet how utterly unscientific is such a belief, if science is to be defined and limited in accordance with the principles of the anti-theistic philosophy. Where can our men of mere sense- science find any physical basis of immortality? There is no hope, no instinct or faith, at once so indissolubly bound up with our nature, so necessary to the development of all that is best in man, and so utterly destitute of evidence and basis in merely natural science, as our assurance of immortality. If we are to retain our belief in immortality, we must main- tain our faith in realities above and apart from sense, in realities which cannot be tested or investigated by any 7) PANTHEISM. appliances of natural science. If immortality be tru Pan- theism cannot be true. What, then, have we found respecting the seductive and too fashionable illusion which has led astray so manyminds, especially of speculative, restless, and daring intelligace, in the present age? We have found that Pantheism i essen- tially only atheism in disguise, and occupies a pation in which it combines against itself the arguments whic theists have to allege against atheism, and atheists against‘heism ; that, while it dethrones the true God, it sets up in is place Development and Natural Selection as its divinitt, cloth- ing them with the attributes which it denies to dy; that its development hypothesis will not bear the test Science, of the natural science to which it professes to veal; that the origin of protoplasm, the attributes of mz.and the growth and transformation of germ-cells, alikrefuse to- accord with the hypothesis; that the very naturif science itself, as recognizing law and organization, is :ompatible with any philosophy which denies theism ; tI the moral difficulties which rise up as a barrier against anial of the Christian theism are no less insurmountable ti the meta- physical and scientific difficulties ; that moraliconscience, natural affection, immortal hope, every deepesiost tender and sacred, most blessed and humanising, inct of our nature is violated by the denial of a personal | holy Ged 76 PANTHEISM. —_ ——— J and Judge; in a word, that our whole humanity revolts " against it. May I venture to hope that the views which I have now endeavoured to set forth may have some weight with young and inquiring spirits? No more terrible suffering can there be, than for an honest, loving, and virtuous nature to be- come involyed in the meshes of pantheistic doubt and unbelief. We must make up our minds. to bear with many profound and painful mysteries which are not to be solved by man; but may the good Spirit of God save us each and all from losing our childlike faith in His almignty, omnipresent, and absolutely good and holy government and providence! 77 POSITIVISM. BY THE REV. W. JACKSON, M.A, FSA, LATE FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD. BPeOs ci eV ohio: VL EvERYBODY in this room has, I suppose, heard of the “ posi- tive” sciences, or “ Positivism” in some shape or other. What does “ Positivism” mean? A system based on Josifive facts. But what are facts? They are (says the Positivist) observed phenomena. As for metaphysical conceptions of all sorts, these are negatives with nothing real, nothing positively true in them. Truth must be sought amongst observed phenomena. It is worth our while to examine this last proposition. Take a ‘‘ phenomenon.” You have all observed colour,— what is it? A physicist, if you ask him, will tell you of a modification in a ray of light variously produced—by refraction, for ex- ample—as when sunlight breaks a dark cloud into many- tinted beauty. But how if all the world of men and animals were blind ? The physiologist will step in and speak to you of the SI 6 POSITIVISM. - structure of the eye—the susceptibility of its retina for special impressions ; there he says you may find colour. Put both accounts together, and they appear as part- causes, each a factor helping to make up a result ; which result physicist and physiologist would agree to call colour. Yet again: Suppose the human and animal world were deprived of all consciousness, all which in the widest mean- ing we call mind—their eyes remaining like mirrors, tele- scopes, microscopes ; perfect instruments, only every kind of intelligence, instinctive or rational, gone. Where would colour then be? The sun might play upon cloud or rain, the light of a rainbow be reflected in the eye. Were there but perceiving mind, the impression would exist. But we are supposing the impressible to be wanting; there is no sensation, no percipient; colour must remain unknown, for there is nothing capable of observing it. Now this shows you, first, how important it is to emphasize the word observed added to phenomenon. It shows you, secondly, z/ere the ultimate seat of every observation really lies; each observed phenomenon, each positive fact, is at last neither more nor less than a mental state. The evi- dence for each fact is the condition of your own mind, your consciousness as it is called. You may sift the thing wit- nessed, verify, examine, and cross-examine ; but after all, your own consciousness is the first real evidence you have got. 82 POSITIVISM. It would seem, then, that the most positive of all sciences would be the science of mind; and the next most positive the sciences which enable us to draw conclusions from our positively existing mental states; the statements, we may call them, which our minds make to us. Yet, strange to say, the very first thing Positivism does is to dispense with a science of mind, as mind, altogether. Mr. Mill makes it a severe reproach against Comte, that he ignores both psychology and logic; recognizes no power in the mind, even of self-observation ; accepts no theory even of the in- ductive process. Mr. Mill characterises Comte’s want of mental science as “a grave aberration.”* It is indeed so. This appears plainly enough in the example just adduced from our commonest sensation, the every-day phenomenon of colour. It was made up, you saw, of three factors, a phy- sical antecedent, a condition of the sensitive apparatus, and a mind which received into its consciousness the impression instrumentally conveyed to it. This last, you will remem- ber, was the frst fact to us. It is ¢he fact: the revelation of an outward world, its changes and its continuing presence, its rest and its constant motion. Without this fact of in- ward consciousness, nature would have possessed no more significance than pictures seen in the eyes of the newly dead. Such being the case, it needs no argument to show the * See Mill on Comte, p. 62, seg, 83 POSITIVISM. importance of, making quite sure that our interpretation of nature is correct. If there be any unobserved illusion in our sensory instruments, or what must evidently be much worse, in our percipient mind, truth is at an end, and false- hood received in its stead. Hence the necessity of observ- ing our own observations, subjecting our consciousness to scrutiny, and being acquainted with the criteria, not only of our perceptions, but of our judgments. It is this process of analysis and criticism which forms a large part of the method of verification, —a method the value of which did not escape the great Greek philosophers, though some recent writers seem to fancy it a modern discovery. Inexperienced observers are often so little aware of the pre-eminent importance of this critical process, that I will detain you with an illustration of it for the benefit of my younger auditors. My example shall be taken from per- ception par excellence—our eyesight, ‘te sense pronounced surest both in poetry and prose. You will remember your Horace Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, Quam que sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quae Ipse sibi tradit spectator. And almost everybody else has said the same, as witness the old proverb, “Seeing is believing.” Now I will men- tion five instances in which people believe they see some- 84 POSITIVISM. thing, and do not see it; in other words, the objective antecedent is wanting, and the impression is produced partly by the sensory apparatus, partly by the mind itself. As I describe these instances one by one, let my hearers ask themselves, How does this illusion come about? Is it produced by our optic instrument or by our mental activity ? First, then, Take a lighted stick, and whirl it rapidly round and round. You believe you see a circle of sparks—in reality it is no more than a simple train, and on a like illu- sion the Catherine-wheel is constructed. Again, put yourself in the hands of an optically inclined friend, and let him ope- rate upon you thus. He shall place a cardboard down the middle axis of your face, quite close against your nose—one . side of his board, say the right, coloured a brilliant red, the left a vivid green. After an instant or two let him sud- denly substitute another board, white on both sides. Do my young friends guess what will follow? Your right eye will see green, your left red—the reverse of what they saw be- fore ; yet neither will see correctly, for both eyes are lookinz at uncoloured surfaces. Thirdly, Watch the full moon rising—how large and round she looks, resting as it were upon that eastern hill, and seen amidst the tops of its forest trees! How much larger and broader than when she hangs aloft in upper sky! 85 POSTITIVISM. Has every one here learned the true reason why? If not, look at her through a slit in a card, and her diameter will be the same. Fourthly, A schoolboy is crossing his bedroom in the deep dark night, anxiously hoping that his head may not come into collision with the bed-post. Though carefully and successfully avoiding it, he imagines of a sudden that the blow isimminent. Quick as thought he stops to save his head, and, behold, the room is as quickly filled with sparks or flames of fire. Another moment, and all becomes dark once more. I have heard many a schoolboy exclaim over this pheno- menon, but never knew one who could explain it. Finally, did you ever, on opening your eyes ina morning, close them quickly again, and keep them shut, directing them as if to look straight forwards? Most persons of active nervous power, after a few trials—say a dozen, or a score—are surprised to see colours appear and flit before the sight. Some years ago, Germany’s greatest poet tried, at the suggestion of her great- est physiologist, a series of experiments on these coloured images. He found that by an effort of will he could cause them to come and go, govern their movement, march, and succession. And this took place under no conditions of impaired sensation, nor any hallucination of a diseased mind. A thoroughly healthy will succeeded in impressing itself upon physical instruments, controlling their law, and creating at its own pleasure an unfailingly bright phantasmagoria. 86 POSITIVISM, Some here may, others may not, have apprehended the distinctions between our five cases. The first two are due to the sensory apparatus, its optical laws of continued im- pression and complementary colour. In the latter three, mind intervenes. The enlarged size of the moon occurs through rapid comparison, the fiery lights in a dark room through instinctive apprehension, both influences of mind on the sensory system. The fifth and most Interesting of all is no bad example of interference between moral and material law. The will truly causative (you may remark) overrules the natural process of physical impression, alters it, and creates a designed effect. I wish I could induce my young friends to devise a number of experiments on similar mixed cases, and, having tried them, to dissect out their real laws. These sharpenings of the critical faculty are exceedingly useful—they cultivate clearness; and most people know that two-thirds among our mistakes in life are caused by confusion of thought. Besides all other uses, such lessons teach at once the necessity, as we said before, of observing your own obser- vations. And as, first, the real witness of every observation is our mind ; every fact*which comes through our bodily senses being to us a mental impression, it seems but common sense to hear above all things what mind has to say for and about itself, Then, secondly, where would be the benefit 87 POSTTIVISM. derived from our observations, if we could not reason upon them, or could place no confidence in our own reason- ings? Yet the art of reasoning is so purely a mental pro- cess, that it can be represented by symbols as abstract and free from material meaning as if they were bare algebraic signs. ‘Thirdly, in the most accurate of sciences mind extends our knowledge far beyond the circle of observation, and gives us axiomatic assurance of its own accuracy. Who ever Saw, Or ever can see, all straight tines in all conceivable positions, yet who doubts that throughout the whole universe no two straight lines ever did inclose or can inclose a space? And, fourthly, can it be a matter of indifference to any of us what evidence the mind offers concerning its ‘own moral nature, and what is the value of that evidence, and the laws deducible therefrom? How true it thus appears that “know thyself” lies at the root of all knowledge, and that the man who receives no witness from within can know nothing as he ought to know it! Comte swept away all these and the like considerations by a neat little fiction of his own. We cannot observe our- selves observing, he said, we cannot observe ourselves reasoning. So, then, logic becomes a chimera, and psycho- logy a word of contempt. Respecting this fallacy, Mr. Mill thinks the only wonder is that it should impose on any one. Clearly it imposed on Comte himself. But, “what 88 POSITIVISM. —— —— organon,” asks Mill, “for the study of our moral and intel- lectual functions does M. Comte offer in lieu of the direct mental observation which he repudiates? We are almost ashamed to say it is phrenology!” Mill regards this state- ment as a reductio ad absurdum, but the actual organon substituted is more absurd still. Comte’s phrenology was not the phrenology of Gall or Spurzheim, but a funny small bantling of his own, a sort of “infant phenomenon,” called into existence not without a Positive purpose. In plain words, mind was no longer to give evidence respecting itself. We must study its laws in brain. How any true correspond- ence of brain and mind could be known unless both were studied, does not appear. Comte overlooked the question in his anxiety to substitute for psychology and its laws a bodily function and z¢s laws. Yet his motive appears to have been excellent! He regarded this dwarfed superficial phrenology, Mr. Mill tells us, “as extricating the mental study of man from the metaphysical stage, and elevating it to the positive.” The chief gist of which sentence, bewilder- ing to the uninitiated, opens up the very core and centre of the Positive system—a subject for dissection of some con- siderable human interest. | Each science is brought into the positive stage when it is co-ordinated according to positive laws—“ systematized,” Comte would say. He has a perfect mania for systematiza- 89 POSITIVISM. tion; system is with him almost an equivalent for truth. Of course, the real value of every system turns entirely on its co-ordinating method, or principle of formation; and Comte’s, we see, was one of positive laws. The nature of these laws is, therefore, the essence and turning-point of the whole matter. I cannot impress upon you too strongly the paramount importance of keeping this truth steadily in view. But if any one inquires exactly what these laws are, he asks, I fear, a puzzling question. Puzzling, for this reason that, say what one will—employ any words, however care- fully selected—one may become lable to the charge of raising a false impression. Positivist sevans themselves do not use any uniform phraseology, and many phrases they do use are necessarily derived from philosophies most dis- edifying to Positive ears. Examples showing what sort of law is really meant are therefore always welcome ; and few could be more instruct- ive than this way of making mind Positive. Comte did not falter in his purpose. Later on he explained the necessity (for his system, you understand) of bringing our intellectual and moral phenomena under the same law with other phe- nomena of animal life; and reduced them, not to brain action pure and simple, but to cerebral functions, controlled by the viscera and vegetative movements of our bodily existence. go POSITIVISM. — = Let us look.at the meaning of all this. Soul used to be conceived of as different in Amd from body. ‘The brain, the nervous system, the body, were its organs, allies, machines. Sometimes they, especially the instruments through which the soul more immediately works, exercised reaction on their sovereign employer; they impeded or suspended her functions, and troubled her serenity. But though they might cloud the manifestation, they could not destroy the essence of a living soul. What they did was temporal and transitory; but they shall pass away and -be dissolved, while soul will endure for ever. The word mind has been much used to signify soul, as acting in and through body. There is, however, some vagueness in its employment. Yet we constantly speak of the laws of mind, because soul is in this life the partner of body; and therefore known to us as mind, and as mind is studied through its laws. One psychological task has always been to separate. the pure activity of soul from the mixed workings of mind, by examination and cross-examination of our internal consciousness. You will now easily understand how vast the change Comte intended by his physiological organon for the study of our moral and intellectual functions. You will see what is meant by elevating mental science to the Positive stage, and systematizing it under laws which people Seon OI POSITIVISM. eed describe as phenomenal, mechanical, or material; adjectives all roughly used to express the same general idea. What we took for a spiritual essence is only a developed animal nature, the difference between men and beasts of the field is not one of Aid, but of degree. MankiInp is a misnomer. Humanity is (as Comte thought) a higher degree of ani- mality. We have no right to suppose a personal immor- tality. Man may be said to live after death in the memory of his fellow-men, but the truly Positive philosopher believes in no other deathless existence. What we really can see and investigate is a vast moving mechanism, our universe. Beyond this all knowledge is a blank. We know of nothing which set this mechanism in motion; it may have moved from all eternity ; it may go on moving everlastingly ; or it may wear itself out. Philosophy can teach us no more than distinctions and degrees in the phenomenal law which per- vades and rules a universe without a God. Yet Comte said that he was no Atheist. He even de- nounced Atheism, and declared it as bad as theology. He did not wish to deny, only to ignore God. Neither did he desire to appear ungrateful ; (pardon words which sound in your ears profanity ;) God was a really useful hypothesis once; in the days when men had recently issued from their primeval forests. Thanking the Deity for His provisional services, Comte courteously dismissed Him from His throne. o2 POSITIVISM. All this will have seemed to you a most monstrous tissue of negations. But Comte held it to be a code of Positive faith ; a faith firmly grounded on the self-sufficingness of human nature, read according to his version of course— void of belief in a personality which survives the grave, without knowledge of, trust in, or prayer to God. The blessings of this advanced faith he desired to extend far and wide. At the present moment his desire is realizing itself ; for the like attitude of thought has become a favourite posi- tion among the savans of our Western world. When it penetrates the more active classes, we shall discern it easily by its fruits / what those fruits will be, is a qnestion for statesmen and for us all. | The chief hindrance opposing its spread amongst unso- phisticated minds has been a point much dwelt upon of old by Plato, and by Cicero after him. It is the protest which that irrepressible entity called soul perseveres in alleging. We are all apt to shrink from the picture of bodily dissolution : *¢ To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot $ This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod !” But what if the “delighted spirit ” has been developed by brain, and with brain must be dissolved ? Our whole distinct- ive human life, our mind, moral, intellectual, spiritual, rebels 93 POSITIVISM. — — against a doom of subjection to that crass material law! Yet can we establish a difference? Can we show that the law of our true being differs from the law of things outside us ? This question, unspeakably interesting to every one of us, might be put in various shapes. We might ask, Can the protest of soul be set down as a mere sentiment only? If it were no more than an instinct of our nature, it would deserve consideration ; for why should so high and noble an instinct be aimless and misleading? If we cannot trust our own souls, what are we to trust? Phenomena themselves are given us within. Mathematical truths, which Positiv- ists are obliged to exempt from phenomenal law, have a subjective validity—we cannot help thinking them, and we cannot think their contradictories. But suppose that a future state of recompence with its inferential moralities cannot be denied without denying our own consciousness—pronouncing the clearest of our intul- tions a will o’ the wisp—or, sadder still, a corpse light on the grave of hope—nay, more, without subverting the law which makes human society to differ from animal gregarious- ness, and gives to human action its spring, its liberty, its life—suppose all this true, what shall, what can we say? And such is the issue I propose to try this morning. The plan I have devised for trying it fairly is, first, to get as clear an idea as short compass will allow of what 94 — ° °° POSITIVISM. Positivism says on our question. Afterwards to state a case for moral law by way of antithesis. It is through the law of our moral being that we may most readily look for something to difference our souls from creatures below them. The strain I shall have to put on your attention lies in this; after grasping in brief the Positivist attitude, I must ask that you will not take my facts or arguments on trust, but will verify each severally by an appeal to your own conscious- ness. It is always upon the law deduced from or applied to facts that you ought to exercise your greatest vigilance. For law interprets facts to us—we might almost say that under its manipulation they bend like a nose of wax: nothing, you will remember, so flexible as figures, except facts. Let me represent these maxims to you under a similitude. Everybody has looked (when young at least) through a kaleidoscope, and has observed the beauty of its many- coloured figures, their symmetrical shapes, and the enchant- ment of their succession. What magic creates this phantas- magoria? Some pretty bits of coloured glass, shining gewgaws, scraps of lace, fripperies, and other odds and ends, are put into a translucent box, and beheld through a tube fitted with mirrors which are set at an angle determined by optical law. The broken knick-knacks represent the facts of everybody’s phenomenal kaleidoscope ; the reflect- 95 | POSITIVISM. Meee nee ee eee are TR ERE TEE REE en ing angle under which they are seen is its law; the coloured images are everybody’s impressions of things, nature, and mankind. As long as you live, remember that whenever you are contemplating the world’s phenomena—whenever you see facts of life, either great or small, you are looking at them through some optical instrument or another. If its” law accords with their law, your view is truthful; but then it will be all the less pretty, the less symmetrical. There are dark spots in our real world, checks of all sorts, moral evil, anguish of heart and conscience, foresights, stern ac- countabilities! You have lost your childhood’s magic glass, and have got a clear reflecting telescope in its stead! Pity to forego the nice kaleidoscope where all was so bright, so harmonious, and arrayed in such regular shapes. Yet the view it gave was worth what most people's views are worth—precisely nothing ! : Comte had his kaleidoscope. Every systematizer who allows no mystery, no darkness anywhere, must keep the article; in point of fact, most people enjoy having one. Alas! for the 19th century! It has sucha feverish viewi- ness, such a fashion of incessantly turning its magic tube, that life seems little else than a dreamy phantasmagonia ! To construct a steady reflecting instrument for yourselt requires industry, time, and thought, three things which few people care to bestow upon their beliefs. Therefore the 96 POSTTIVISM. practice is to pick up kaleidoscopes ready-made at a cheap rate, and to feel as easy as stern realities will permit on the subject of their truthfulness. Romances are the kaleido- scopes of one class, cram-books of a second, newspapers of a third, self-love the optical law of the greatest number. We are met this morning to break up a grand kaleidoscope, and to look into its construction. I shall do my endeavour to prevent you all from replacing it by any instrument of a ready-made sort. The easiest plan for all lecturers is to display a series of transparent conclusions ; but I shall pre- fer furnishing you with facts and arguments, letting you put them together, look at them, and verify their law of true vision for yourselves. Let us see Comte’s law first. It was, strictly speaking, a law of succession and resemblance. You will guess at once that were this all we could see in the phenomenal world, our insight would be very limited. And Comte’s object was to limit us. We can never know, Positively speaking, final causes ; those which make up the common notion of design, purpose, intention. Nor yet any efficient causes; nothing truly productive of an effect, as men usually say. All we can know is the middle of a chain of successive phenomena. The two ends are absolutely hidden from our eyes. It was in this sense that Comte denied causation—his language was vigorous ; he denounced it as metaphysical, and when Comte 97 7 POSITIVISM. — nicknames anything metaphysical or theological, he means, as everybody knows, Anathema maranatha. The difficulty here is palpable. A law of averages—a statistical law, as it is often called, does not profess to account for anything ; it merely generalizes crude material, and gets it ready for scientific thought to work out the true law. But a law of succession has an imposing sound, and *t does in the worst sense impose. The fallacy may be shown in an instant. Day and night succeed each other regularly. Does either account for the other? The rotation of the earth is simultaneous with both—it accounts for both. Its effect is to expose the earth’s two hemispheres alternately to the sun’s rays. This rotation coincides again with other laws of our planetary system, and they account for itaeele is on these laws, and not on such grounds as Hume, Comte’s great Positive antecedent, alleged, that we look for sunset and sunrise. When they fail, the system of which our globe forms part will have collapsed. Such then was the original kaleidoscope of Positivism. It was condemned for reasons which will have plainly ap- peared to you. Other eyes have swept the field of vision this world offers, and other instruments to aid our insight - have been adopted. You will not have failed already to remark the extreme vagueness of that word “law.” ‘There are very few English 98 POSITIVISM. words more vague: it is applied to almost every sort of formula, force, principle, idea; besides being misused in ways almost innumerable. You must therefore, when busy ‘with questions like the present, fix your attention upon the adjectives added to it, and the examples selected by way of illustration. The Positive system is, according to Littré, of immeasur- able extent, embracing the whole universe. Thus, whatever was conceived in dark preparatory ages, theological or meta- physical ; whatsoever persons, who philosophize in either of those antiquated ways may even now dream ;—if the concep- tion cannot be reduced under Positive laws, it must be re- garded as non-existent. All that really exists is included within such laws, the definition of which, therefore, becomes a subject of the greatest possible importance. They are, he’ says, immanent causes. The room we are in contains intelligent and educated people, but how many here could define this word “immanent”? It and its correlative, transcendent, are in truth metaphysical terms. If you will turn to Mellin’s Encyclopedic Word-Book (favourably known to metaphysicians for purposes of pillage), you will find immanent explained, under the German einheimisch, into ten shades of usage. Probably, in common English Littré might have said “inherent.” “The universe,” he writes, “now appears to us as a whole, having its causes within 99 POSITIVISM. TALUS SCRE Uh Oe ee PS er tari itself, causes which we name its laws. The long conflict between immanence and transcendence is touching its close. Transcendence is theology or metaphysic, explaining the universe by causes outside it ; immanence is science, ex- plaining the universe by causes within itself.”* Now, one stock-in-trade example is that a stone falls to the ground by virtue of an immanent cause. In plainer words, the stone belongs to universal matter of which gravity is an inherent law. Next, we find this same example Positively applied to the human will. Volition is free just as a falling stone is free; it obeys its own inherent law. Further, we read of “the rigorous fatalities which make the world what it is.” Comte, Littré, and others object against calling these fatalities materialistic, because they distinguish gradations of law. Yet they limit all human knowledge within the materialistic circle, and Janet, who refuses to acquit them of Material- ism, dwells on the point that, instead of defining mind as an unknown cause of thought, emotion, and will, it is said to be, ‘‘ when anatomically considered, the sum of the func- tions of brain and spinal cord; and when considered physiologically, the sum of the functions of brain in con- sciously receiving impressions.”+ We need not wish to dis- * Paroles de Philosophie Positive, p. 54. + Janet refers to Nysten’s Dictionnaire de Médecine, etc., by Littre and Robin. 109 POSTITIVISM. pute about words. But suppose it had been stated in plain French or English that all known or knowable objects in the universe are placed by Positivism under the rule of laws as rigorous in their fatality as the laws of matter, would not the ultimate point in question have been more tangible, more intelligible? People might indeed have said, “ Why, after all Positivism comes to the same thing as Fatalism, or Materialism ;” and with certain writers this risk may very possibly be held a decisive objection. Once more,—another explanation given by Littré is, that Positivism lies strictly within the “relative.” Many here are aware how, since Kant’s time, England, France, and Ger- many have been flooded with metaphysic, good, bad, and indifferent, on the relative and the conditioned. Pity that Littré should have plunged into these whirlpools! Ra- vaisson refers to Herbert Spencer and Sophie St. Germain for the point that this conception, the relative, must always imply the existence of an absolute, known or unknown. ? I cannot follow him now, but any one interested in doing so will find the subject commenced at page 66 of his “ Philo- sophie en F rance,” (one of the Imperial Reports), and con. tinued through sections 9 and ro. It is a very important discussion. Ravaisson stands out amongst Frenchmen as a consummate master of his science; and he inclines to infer that Comte tended, and that Positivism generally now tends, IOI POSITIVISM. (eee ota towards a final return to metaphysic. However this may — be, I fear I have tired you, and am glad to quit this dry part of my lecture, and get away to more common-sense ground. By way of introducing our most interesting topic, let me draw one common-sense conclusion from the difficult tract just shot over. During our passage, a thought may have flashed upon you which I remember hearing in a Bampton Lecture, somewhat to this effect—“ Positivism is the most negative system of all.” It appears hard to avoid this idea; for Positivism denies in express terms that human beings have any knowledge outside those generalized laws of ex- perience which make up the Positive sciences. It denies (in a word) the most essential part of what was formerly held to be a knowledge of mind, both human and Divine. Positive thinkers rebut the charge of negativism this way. We confine ourselves, they say, to what we know; we do not venture, like Pantheists and Atheists, into the unknow- able. We do not deny God, we only jenore Him. We do not ask about the first cause of the world, or whether it has a constructural final end. Such questions as these are “ dis- edifying.” “The Positive philosophy,” says Littré, “does not busy itself with the beginning of the universe, if the universe had a beginning—nor yet with what happens to living things, plants, animals, men, after their death, or at [O02 POSITIVISM. the consummation of the ages, if the ages have a con- summation.”* Littré’s sentence, which I have rendered verbatim, reminds one of the prayer told to Bishop Atterbury, as offered bya soldier on the eve of battle: “‘O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul!” Iam sorry to repeat ill-sounding words again; but is not this really the exact religious attitude of an honest Positivist, who feels sometimes touched by visions of possible life after death, *¢ Of all the nurse and all the priest have taught ;” that is, if we conceive his attitude according to the least negative interpretation put upon the s,stem. Continuing this least negative interpretation, let us view under its light the Positive cosmology or theory of the world’s existence ; of creation,—that is to say, if there ever was a creation. A stone falls to the ground. Trying to account for the phenomenon, we grasp a law inherent in the material world. Other phenomena lead us to other laws. We contemplate the material world with its laws in opera- tion, a magnificent spectacle of moving forces; an organic whole, shining through its own intrinsic glory of never- ceasing development. If we turn and pursue the reverse road, and trace evolution back to its elementary principles, we may dissolve worlds into primordial force, or we may, * Paroles de Philosophie Positive, p. 53. C3 POSITIVISM. ee ae on — as Protessor ‘I'yndall suggested at Liverpool, find the All in a fiery cloud occupying space. Then comes the com- plex question,*What beyond? What before? Whence, and How produced? a Positivist thinker may return one of two — answers. He may either say, “ We do not know,” or he may say, “Nothing can be known.” Take the least negative first, as we proposed ; it surely deserves this rejoinder: If you plead ignorance, but surmise that knowledge is possi- ble, you ought not, for reasons valid with every true lover of wisdom, to stop here. You are substituting for the ideas of creation and first cause, what you call a primordial uni- verse, a material condition of some kind, producing pheno- mena regulated by inherent laws, successive, perishable, and nothing more! All once believed beyond, a blank! Even the very name of philosophy consecrated by consent of ages to the First and to the Last, admonishes you. Re- nounce your vocation, deny your name, or proceed. We demand a Positive result in the highest sense, not a fog of ignorance, not,a slough of despond. But if the second answer be the true one, if the teaching of Positivism is that nothing more can be known, let us be told so in plain words. Let no one be charmed into the Positive circle by false allurements ; for of all vices treachery and hypocrisy are the most cowardly. Are you really wiser than the pagan Lucretius? If not, why boast of 19th century discoveries 104 POSTTIVISM. in wisdom, insight, happiness? If you have examined the relics of a primeval world, explored the races of living and thinking creatures, if you have ascended to the starry firma- ment, and traversed its shining hosts, to come back with shame and disappointment, and tell us this is your all, our all, then indeed the wages of your science is death. While you speak your final verdict at least cover your faces, ** And, sad as angels for a good man’s sin, Weep to record, and blush to give it in 1” These thoughts have brought us to the most essential consi- derations of this lecture. Whether the Positive savant? puts in a plea of ignorance or of blank negation, we care not. We will treat it as a challenge thrown down, and do our best to meet it. Succeed or not, we will take no refuge in ambiguities, but maintain a truly positive assertion. We say that the world we live in is not one world, but two," distinguishable through the laws by which each is governed. There exists such a thing as phenomenal law ; we accept the fact. But distinct, broadly distinct, apart in its working, its — elements, and its final result, is moral law. An appeal lies | to facts, and we shall try to justify our assertion. The mode of proof now to be adopted is not metaphy- sical. I mention the circumstance because investigations into mind are apt to be confounded with metaphysic, and 105 POSITIVISM. - — are then supposed too difficult to deserve attention. My argument will demand nothing beyond a hearing and a scru- tiny. It will consist of just so much mental dissection as may be needful to show, first, a structural law of our inward nature, and, secondly, to illustrate its workings and effects. These two sets of facts will be placed side by side, in order that each may check the other, and that their coincl- dence may also (as I hope it will) furnish a fresh and suffi- cient proof of the contrast between moral and material law. Everybody knows how convincing are, and ought to be, facts separately ascertainable, yet converging into one and the same conclusion. One form of speech almost unavoidable ought to be re- marked beforehand. I mean the word freedom as applied to the human will and its volitions. When compelled to use it, I shall do so only in the sense of philosophic as con- trasted with theological free will. By philosophic freedom I understand that sort and degree of active choice free from constraint which is required for the idea of responsibility, an idea universally agreed on by divines opposed to each other on the point of theological freewill. By this last- named idea I understand supposed powers of spiritual attainment, which go to make up a notion of self-sufficing moral strength. With it the present lecture, being purely philosophical, can have nothing whatever to do, but I 109 POSTTIVISM., ee SO should much deplore misconception, because any theory of self-sufficingness would be repugnant to my own personal convictions. Look now at the life of an animal, with senses often more instrumentally accurate than ours. Survey the world around, which furnishes the objects of his perception and his intel- ligence. The mode in which that intelligence acts is held to be more or less under the absolute rule of instinct, and creatures below man are commonly described as those “that nourish a blind life within the brain.” Whether this be or be not perfectly correct makes no difference to our present purpose. The point I want you to fix your thoughts upon is the directness of relation between the feel- ing or intelligent principle of mere animal life, and the object perceived, felt, or apprehended. Perhaps it may give vividness to your thought, if you figure this relation under the similitude of a right line connecting two points— object without, apprehension within. The line itself will then represent the impulsive activity of a creature, as, for example, when a hungry tiger leaps upon his prey. Now this directness of action is zo¢ the thing most marked in our own proper human existence. . What is really marked 1s the exact reverse ; the more truly Avman any action appears, the farther is it away from resemblance to that animal charac- teristic. Suppose aman acts like a tiger, he is simply brutal ; 107 POSITIVISM. See eae ee ree if he be governed by his feelings, however amiable, we pro- nounce him weak or unreasoning. Absolutely impulsive doings, such as the indulgence of an appetite, blows struck in passion, or even in self-defence, we separate from our volitions proper, and call them irrational and instinctive. In educating children we check displays of impulse, we bid them pause and reflect. And it is obvious that education presupposes an educable power or principle, which principle self-education (the most important training of all) will place in a clear light before you. In- terrogate yourselves, then. You will see that the mental power you most wish to train and augment is distinguishable enough even in the commonest affairs of life. Takeacase of feeling. Some object—no matter what—kindles an emotion within you—anger, wish affection, pursuit, dislike, avoid- ance—and you feel strongly impelled to take action there- upon. This would be the movement which was imaged to our minds as a simple line. But to launch along it incon- siderately you would feel neither proper fer se—nor yet doing what is due to yourself, because it is your human pre- rogative to act, not according to impulse, but according to reason. And observe, to do, or to forbear doing, is a ques- tion by no means determined by finding whether another emotion be or be not stronger than the first. What reason demands is that the impulse you feel, or it may chance the 108 POSITIVISM. _- strongest of a dozen, impulses, shall become to you an object of careful scrutiny. You are bound in honesty to scrutinize it; not only because it exists as an incitement felt within yourself, but much, much more because it is: felt to be your actual self. It is your character which gave the spring, and lives in the movement to action. Perchance this point of character is a hidden nook, an unknown depth of feeling or desire, undiscovered, unsuspected by your fellow-creatures—a secret of your inner self. Nevertheless | it is amenable to the tribunal of a more inward self still, to be brought before it as an object that shall be examined and cross-examined, sentenced either to vivid freedom or present suppression—it may be even to extinction ever- more! Each human being possesses this wonderful self- objectivizing power. He is able to look at himself as a notT-self—a something partitioned off, and external; to be thought about, felt about, reasoned about ; to be controlled, chastened, corrected. This power is our inalienable heri- tage; we cannot resign it if we would; we cannot finally suspend its exercise. Mountains could not crush, nor oceans drown it; flames of fire never burned it out from the breast of one single martyr. Whether we use our birth- right for good or for evil, it still remains with us; when we act, our will is not a feeling, an appetition, travelling’ simply from one point to another. It is a movement of 109 POSITIVISM. our world within, a movement of that microcosm called Man. Suppose a person resolves to employ this power aright. Some wish or feeling, such as might drive a lower creature to instinctive action, stirs within him, and becomes the object of his contemplation. To the sessions of silent thought he summons whatever assistants he can get; the witnesses of experience, prudence, duty, the golden rules of the Gospel ; whatever seems most proper to determine the question at issue,—fitness or unfitness, to act or to ab- stain from acting. He says to himself (as all here have done a thousand times), “This longing, thought, state of mind, is wise or foolish, good or bad, right or wrong ; nay, tis I myself that am so!” And in thus saying he is con- scious of that sort of freedom to will or not to will, which makes up responsibility. He does not deny—contrariwise, with the might of his whole essential humanity he asserts— that the act of will is thus taken out of the direct line of inevitable antecedency, away from the physico-mechanical series, and enabled to commence a series of its own. In a word, his consciousness evidences to him that functional law which makes the human soul a thing more wonderful than all the inorganic or all the animated universe besides. And the law thus evidenced is the law of moral causation. I said that our own soul thus becomes to tus more wonder- IIo POSITIVISM. ful than all the known universe besides. I might have said more mysterious; so truly sw generis and different from all things not ensouled, as to be inexplicable by human sciences, an enigma to itself, dwelling alone in its own awful isola- tion. Do but think what cause is—nothing less than origin ating power; what then must it be in stern and sad reality for a soul to originate a sin! Yet we cannot deny the fact. We confess it every day, not only in our hearts and deeper utterances, but in the commonest though most tremendous of words, the word responsibility. Ifa man were in no true sense the cause of his own actions, he could never be held responsible either by God or Man. But as long as Justice maintains her seat, each criminal will be so held, so judged, so recompensed. And the only principle under which Justice can justify her judgments is the reality of moral causation. If, then, this law be established, we have proved our point. Just as we recognize a material world by mechanical law— and indeed our knowledge of matter itself is only a know- ledge of its laws—so in like manner, and fart passu, we recognize a moral world by its distinctive law. We live, therefore, not in one world, but in two: *¢ Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him.” The point is of surpassing importance! Upon it turns III POSITIVISM. RELL fp MEN AMS ba SNS wile enn eb OE A Soe the whole issue. ‘Can mechanism—or, as it is vaguely called, materialism—be or be not accepted, with its attendant theories, as the truth ; that is, or whole truth, all we have to live by and to die by?” Infinitely important issue! having much to do at this very moment with the happiness and real good of millions amongst our fellow-creatures and fellow- countrymen. It is for this reason we must not spare pains to demonstrate our moral law, for this reason also we will give some passing sentences to show how worthless in argu- ment is the sophism most commonly circulated against it. Men speak of a “law of motives,” with complete assurance, and without seeming to be aware of the twofold fallacy underlying “it. Writers on the subject furnish statistics of suicide, murder, and the like; and then ask how the free- dom of moral cause can be compatible with so BANE: a law? But what sort of a law is this? Clearly not a law upon which the results are conditioned, as sunrise on the earth’s rotation; but a mere generalization, like the laws of average before mentioned. Such a law does not govern the acts, but the acts the law, or, in plain words, they are the law. It is an epitomized result, inferring no more consequence to our free moral causation, than a life assur- ance infers to the contingency of our individual life or death. The sophism would be readily detected if it were not for that unfortunate word “motive.” People forget that POST TIVISM. — a motive is not a power that compels us, but an object which we choose to seek. “Will,” we are seriously told, “must be determined by the strongest motive.” Now if, in thus speak- ing, the strongest motive objectively be meant, that is the motive essentially and in its own nature the strongest, then indeed we may exclaim, “Would that this were true!” For are not right, justice, goodness, absolutely and in them- selves the strongest? Yet men in general fail to pursue them ; they are chosen by those of whom the world is not worthy. But if, on the other hand, the phrase “ strongest motive” is to be understood subjectively, and means that which on each occasion is fet to be the strongest ; what form of sounding words has ever yielded a more barren sense, a simpler truism? “Will must be determined by the choice of will.” It means this, and nothing more. We may sum the whole matter of motive in a single sentence. Motives do not make the man, but the man his motives. To conceive it otherwise would be to imagine each man a mere bundle of instincts, such instincts as we calculate with certainty in the brute animals we wish to allure, to subdue, or to destroy. ‘¢ Be not like dumb driven cattle,” says the Psalm of Life, and old Herbert exhorts— “ Not rudely, as a beast, To run into an action.” 113 8 POSITIVISM. Sy ised Du NE ne eee Ke aT The beast feels an incitement, and rushes direct upon the pitfall. Itis the prerogative of a true man to subsume (as logicians speak) each line of impulse into the circle of his own soul; to deliberate in the secret chambers of a being impenetrable even to his own understanding, and to put in force the result which becomes as it were the free manifesta- tion of himself. When therefore you examine the actions of a fellow-creature, and discern his motives, you praise or blame what? not the motives, but the man. Permit me to close this discussion by an example of the manner in which we make and unmake our own motives. No one present is so young, Or SO careless, as never to have felt the pains of self-reproach. Some light or shade of life projects before us the outline of ourself. By virtue of the law described, we view and review it, as if it were the picture of another being. In contrast with it, we place our own ideal, all that our boyhood fondly fancied our manhood would become; the semblances of those we have loved and lost; of the father, who taught us to prize truth and virtue above earthly wealth and distinction; of the mother, at whose knee we knelt in prayer, and whose up- raised eye imaged the serenity of that heaven to which she implored us to aspire. These beloved forms, robed in the unfading freshness of a love stronger than death, stir our heart of hearts, with accents unmistakable. They remind 114 POSITIVISM. a reer gee = ars Danone Mon rere RAE: SoG i) us of what we resolved and trusted one day to be found, in thought, in feeling, and in life. But, close to the glowing portrait of our purposed self stands the dwindled figure of what we actually are; and, oh, the shame, the anguish of that stern, disappointing comparison! _ Among the lower creatures (we ask in passing) what is there to resemble this selfreforming principle? In the domesticated animal, both beast and bird, we see wounded affection, grief under a master’s anger, and desire to win back his love. In the gregarious tribes we find respect for a common bond of what we almost may call utility ; but has any sense of wrong as wrong, or sin as sin, ever been found educable? Man shows the mighty strength of this principle within him, even when he shows it in its most repulsive shapes. The remorseful wretch who throws himself beneath the wheel of Juggernaut, is a different Aind of being from the horse or dog. And considering the self-interest, self- flattery, and self-indulgence arrayed against it, may we not say that the root of such passionate remorse has something sound in it, else it would long ago have been trodden out from the life and heart of mankind? For now, as always, our honest anguish and shai SOW - the appointed seed of our noblest attainments. Those steps by which we climb our steep ascent are hewn in the trayai] of our souls. David found it so, when he heard the voice 115 POSITIVISM. CELE ety rye, ip SY Rane ae ae of Nathan saying, ‘‘’Thou art the man!” and wrote words which have come down near three thousand years ;—* The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.” “ Of all acts,” asks Mr. Carlyle, “is not, for a man, repentance the most divine ? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious con- sciousness of no sin; that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact ; is dead ; it is ‘pure’ as dead dry sand is pure. David’s life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man’s moral progress and warfare here below.” Truest emblem indeed! In it, we see, as in a glass, how living in two worlds we cannot but have a sympathy with each ; insomuch that every man feels: himself to be two Selves, notone ; 4 spiritual and a psychical man, ‘There is,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “another man within me, that’s angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me.” A double consciousness which grows upon many a soul, until its truer choice and better motives are attained : ‘‘ The life which is, and that which is to come, Suspended hang in such nice equipoise A breath disturbs the balance ; and that scale | : | : . : In which we throw our hearts preponderates. “ This lecture started from the question, what is a pheno menon, and how do we know of its existence? Seeing thag | | 116 POSITIVISM. — -- our knowledge rests primarily on the evidence of our own mind, we drew the inference that Comte committed a fatal error when he banished the science of mind, as mind, from his cycle. Reviewing his various devices, and some devices of his successors, for eliminating psychology, and reducing the study of mind to a study of bodily functions, we approached the stronghold of Positivism,—law. And, after discussing the theories maintained respecting it, we boldly threw down our challenge to this effect: law phenomenal or mechanical admitted, we assert, the existence of another kind of law. We say that the freedom of human choice between evil and good is utterly unlike the freedom of a stone which falls by mechanical law, and cannot choose but fall. The inference from phenomenal law is the existence of a phenomenal world. The inference from another existent law is that there is another existent world. Man, we affirm, lives in both; has sympathies with both; and, by virtue of his double nature, is a true citizen of both. The ultimate principle of man’s higher nature is to us inscrutable ; for, even as the eye sees not itself, so neither does the spirit of a man discern that which makes it spirit. But, though we cannot know the soul, we can know much and many things about it; things most important—nay, all-important for us to know, since they distinguish the spirit that burns within us from matter, from mechanism, and from mere animality. 117 POST ZVISM. Hence we do not, with the Positivist, ignore the unknowable. Contrariwise, confessing our ignorance, where we are igno- rant, we strive to observe and gather all we can. One thing that can be thus known is the principle | of moral causation; and this we have inductively investi- gated. We began by observing a process in our own minds, a process or law of self-objectivity. JI am sorry to use such an uncouth word ; but it saves a long description, and you will all remember the fact. That process carries, on the very face of it, adaptation to the purposes of moral choice, free from the material necessity which governs a falling stone, and disengaged from the control of such impulses as the incitement of ruling instincts. We next verify this law by observing its operation; frst, in single acts of the Will accompanied, as you will recollect, by distinct consciousness of choice and responsibility. It was in respect of this con- scious certainty that Dr. Johnson said, “We zow we are free, and there ends the matter.” We verified, a second time, the self-objectivising law, by its working and effects upon our motives, which it makes and unmakes; eliminat- ing some, adopting others, so as to modify and alter our whole real character. Any one who is happy enough to re- call the slow advances of successful self-education, or a less ordinary process by which old things passed away and all things became new, may recollect with pleasure how this law 118 POSTITIVISM. served as an instrument of change; how it placed himself before his own inward eye, even daily, in freshly instructive lights, awakening new self-questionings, emotions, aversions, desires, hopes, and stimulating to new exertions; how it opposed itself to the mastery of any single dominant passion, under which we say a man acts mechanically, because he has already surrendered himself a slave to its sway ; how it became a check upon all day-dreaming or drifting with the tide, when again we are said to act mechanically be- cause we yield to circumstances as they flow, and live a blind life, like creatures that cannot escape the chain ot Instinct, For, observe: let any instinct, even the noblest, be ever so nobly developed, if we act from its impulse only, and not from a reflective choice of the prompting which it gives, we are living below the image of our true nature, because we are not striving to become a law unto ourselves. You may verify our moral law in numberless ways among the common walks of life; and it really is a task of no great difficulty, if you take with you the truth that the whole issue is summed in one word—Responsibility. A falling stone cannot choose but fall; were a man subject to material law, he could have no choice whatever. Neither would it make any real difference, if the Will were impelled by overpower- mg motive, and did not make its motive to itself. The IIg POSITIVISM. ——— = slate which slides from a roof, and kills a child, we do not accuse of murder; we do not attach moral accountability to the hungry tiger. It is because man is not impelled like stones or tigers, that we hold him responsible. And we praise or blame in the highest degree his most deliberate acts. The wrong he does with malice aforethought is a crime in the strongest sense; the good he works with con- siderate purpose we esteem his highest well-doing. In our time the wills of individual men have changed the destinies of nations ; and any one who reads books, reviews, or news- papers sees a vigorous use of that word responsibility. No one doubts that these powerful wills are the true causes of effects felt throughout all Europe, effects which will remain when those who caused them are in the grave; nay, even when generations—perchance dynasties—shall have passed away. In lower life, we honour the truly causative man who conquers a habit of intemperance or any evil passion : it is greater to overcome one’s self than to conquer many cities. We deem every one accountable for what he allows, or dis- - allows, in relation to his God, his fellows, or himself. In a word, we consider each man so far the true cause of his own conduct, as to load him with responsibility Yes, responsibility! Do not shrink from the thought ; it is wholesome for all.. Do but practise self-control enough I20 POSITIVISM. RT A sn SE eR TE ew cae to look yourself with honest purpose in the face when you are about to act, you will never suppose that you act mechanically, and you will seldom act amiss. If you wish to benefit your countrymen, inculcate the grand lesson oi responsibility ; for what well-informed person doubts that one main root of our present social and religious ailments lies in compromise with known immoralities, indolent ac- quiesence in hollow words, and lifeless outside shows, where ought to be heard and seen the rigid truths of account- ability, duty, consistency ?—all impossible without a practica. law of self-scrutiny and self-control. Yet further: Responsi- bility is also an undeniable witness to a world of life beyond death. Just as even Herbert Spencer himself has remarked, that the idea of relativity involves the correlative idea of an? absolute; even so, in thought, responsibility involves its correlative .belief, a recompence! But, in morality, the evidence is stringent beyond expression. For, the idea of responsibility is fixed in the nature of things ; unchange- able, eternal. And it contains in itself the loftier idea of personality. Leading us to look for a world of righteous recompence, it leads also to belief in a personal Being, before whom we are responsible, and who will award to each of us our recompence. David travelled the same road to the same conclusion, when he looked round upon men, who: lacked mercy because they lacked justice, and said, ‘‘ Unto 121 POSITIVISM. — = thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.” Did I not feel that my strain upon your attention must now cease, I should have liked to show at length how the law by which we discover moral causation, may be verified “everywhere in the whole province of mind. It is difficult, for instance, to look at the perplexing questions raised about language, without perceiving that there runs through its purely human formation the articulate results of an element resembling internal dialogue ; in other words, a law of self- objectivising representation. In art, again, the perpetual efforts of ages is to present our human manifoldness of thought, feeling, and idea, before our one individual self Hence the art formula of multeity in unity. And what is the true bond of society as distinguished from gregarious- ness? Is it not the Gospel’s golden rule? But how can our neighbour be viewed as a second self, unless self has been already objectivised before our moral intuitions ? We might follow the same thread throughout the conditions of all philosophy. The one thing we have to remember in every research concerning man is that education, whether of self or others, implies an educable principle ; a germ, of which education ’ and attainment are the bud, the blossom, and the fruit. Therefore, if we want to know Humanity, we must look to I22 POSITIVISM. the educated human being. The philosopher, the artist, the thinker of every sort, must have risen into clearness ere he can become a typical man. Is it not, therefore, a mistake to appeal for theories of human nature to the statistics (always statistics!) of ignorance and savagery? When modelling our physical form, Buonarotti did not seek his type in hospitals for maimed or distorted limbs, and exclaim, Behold, such is man! Curious too, and contradictory, the way in which appeals to barbarism have worked. In the 18th century we used always to hear of that golden age, ** When free in woods the noble savage ran, And man, the brother, lived the friend of man,” In the roth, savage life is cannibalism, superstition, cruelty, terrible, revolting, loathsome; perchance, time must yet pass before we learn justice to our fellows of any age! Meanwhile, we may feel sure that our human ideal is not to be found in the frost-bitten rickety infant species ; nor yet in its dwarfed and stunted adult; the cretin and the imbecile will not give its lineaments ; and it may be hard to say which is least like a true man, the undeveloped or the perverted creature. For example, what superiority in moral height has the savant, whose self-satisfied science ignores or denies a God, over the poor pigmy barbarian, unskilled in the use of fire, and living upon berries and insects, who props himself against a 123 POSITIVISM, | 6 tree with earthward face, and prays, saying, “‘ Yere, if indeed thou art, why dost thou suffer us to be killed? Thou hast raised us up. Why dost thou cast us down?”* Better perhaps the rude stammering of our race’s childhood than its half-speechless, half-paralyzed old age ! And here the argument of this lecture ends. Of causation in general, and the grand subject of design, it has not been my hint to speak. These vast topics have fallen into higher hands than mine. My aim was limited to finding the differentia of man—the moral characteristic which places him in contrast with physico-mechanical laws, It occurs to me, however, that you may employ ten minutes not unpleasantly, upon what. we can hardly help calling the romance of Positivism. ‘The story, taken from first to last—part comic, part tragic—is as wild and weird as one of the Frenchman Doré’s pictures,—a story too strange to be thought true, if it did not happen to have been true! It has also its stinging lessons, and they follow naturally ; evolved, as it were, from the motley and mystify- ing commencement. Comte’s life has been written by friend and foe. For fulness of detail the right book is by his disciple and executor, Dr. Robinet, who has just figured among those who rule in the Commune of Paris. Robinet is very in- * Harris’s Highlands of CEthiopia, vol. iii. p. 63. 124 et ok | we | POSITIVISM. Gib eDaseks ea a sa a al et a LR teresting, for he thoroughly believes in his master, and accepts the whole Comtist religion, calendar and all, which Littré and others reject. No reproach this to Comte’s biographer, for that same worship is celebrated in our cooler atmosphere of England. The Pail Mall Gazette has, by its notices, made the celebrations widely known. ‘There is an account of the grandest yearly solemnity which will suffice many, and excite the curiosity of more, in its number for January 7th, 1868. It is not hard to see that the worshippers differ from the recusants by a strong feeling that they cannot live upon axioms sounding like negatives. They want senti- ment, emotion, excitement to sustain them. Let us observe how Comte caught the first glimpse of this requirement. His life was sombre—a boy delicate and fractious, dis- liked by his masters, turned out of the Polytechnique, repudiated by his great socialist teacher St. Simon. His family relations not happy, his marriage least of all. We cannot wonder at vagaries, for he had a real fit of rampant insanity, and after release from an asylum had nearly drowned himself in the Seine. His wife found him in- tolerable, and left her home. Mr. Mill speaks of her respect for him ;—it was oddly testified after his death, for she pleads in law that he was a madman, an atheist, and immoral; repudiates his will, and seizes the consecrated relics of his dwelling. Littré supported her against those. 125 POSITIVISM. —-—— - eee who, like Robinet, thought her little less than blasphemous. If she had appeared in an English law court, we should have known more truth than we do. 7 Let us now look at such facts as we have from the more favourable side. The man lived a lonely life, as became a sort of conceptual alchemist, sustained by a belief that he was turning men’s leaden thoughts into his own pure gold. One brilliant projection of his has made him the idol of Positivists. I confess it puzzles me, among many others, to imagine how a qualified critic can treat such a philosophic solvent either as true or as original. It supposes the history of all human thinking to pass necessarily through three stages, theology, metaphysics, positive truth; and that the world makes progress accordingly. We will hope that the thing called theology, a benighted belief in the government and intervention of supreme will, is not altogether extinct in this age of progress ; if it be so, Mr. Froude encourages us to look for a revival. Among lesser matters, the hypothesis of metaphysical cookery is an idea one fails to realise. Was it a banquet with joints cut Laputa-like, after some fashion of concepts, or syllogistic figures? Was it a “feast of reason and a flow of soul,” or, more probably, an abstraction pure and simple, as if a man could ** Cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast”? 126 POSITIVISM. — - Comte’s comicalities strike most people all the more because he writes on, always utterly insensible to his own comedy. If any one wishes for a serious critique in small compass, I may mention Stirling’s appendix to his transla- tion of Schwegler’s Handbook ; Whewell in his Philosophy of Discovery, and elsewhere. Comte was most confiding in his own theory. Littré is not so confident, for he has another theory of his own. But, putting aside the question of its verification, we may remark that in the rough idea Comte showed himself before his age. Positive thinkers have busied themselves with physical evolution ; for example, the development of a brain from an oyster or an eozoon; but Comte was intent upon mental evolution.” Man need not much care about the congeners of a body sprung from earth; but soul is another thing. We trust our own spirit, as carrying some image and super- scription of God ; we feel and conceive it to be different in kind from sensitive life ; we love to think of it in its finality as a spark flowing out from Divine Light; a breath breathed into body from above. In the reverse of this belief there is doubt- less an element unfavourable to happiness; it makes some men cynics, some pessimists, some simply victims. Comte’s infinite self-satisfaction probably saved him from self-torture. But we judge that he felt his condition deeply, from the rap- ture with which he hailed a new and brilliant discovery ! 127 POSITIVISM. Yes, it was the most wonderful of all his discoveries ; he one day found an unsuspected law of life within himself ; he discovered that he had a heart. ) To many, this is the black spot on Comte’s memory ; they cannot receive his love, nay, his frantic adoration, of the lonely wife of a convict, absent in the gallies, as a piece | of pure Platonism. Had Madame Comte’s allegations been sifted fully, we might have known all. As it is, I for my own part like to think him innocent; he was mad from disease, and perhaps from conceit ; a conceit, says Mr. Mill, ~ too colossal to be believed without reading him up; but I trust he was not immoral. His letters are against it, the | lady’s face is against it, and above all, there is against it the lasting effect upon himself. After a year’s happiness to Comte, she died and left him, as he thoroughly supposed, an enlightened and a religious man. Poor Comte! His sweeter life was buried with the dead, who to him could never rise again. His religion was no more than ‘a funereal cult ; a veil thrown over it, no hope, no thought of reunion! The episode of Clotilde was, in itself, one of those touches of nature which make the whole world kin ; the brief, bright, and long sad experience the solitary had of his heart; the love, the loss, the unfor- getting sorrow ! But, did it not prove, beyond the force of reclamation to disprove, that Comte’s system ends, at last, 128 POSTTIVISM in what is commonly called materialism? its faith (or nega- tion of faith) being in effect this, that we look for entire human dissolution coincident with bodily death. ‘And the end flows naturally from the beginning; all we think is phenomenal, all we know is phenomenal, first and last. Our life is only a phenomenon; and death, death joins us to the unreturning past. We are absorbed, all that is’ good of us, into general and generic humanity; an Eidolon, called the Great Being for our comfort ; as if a name (what’s in a name?) could console us! The race we may have tried to serve is to be our Euthanasia, our sepulchre, I had almost said our cenotaph ! Strange thought, not without a kind of serpent-fascina- tion! Epidemic in England now, gaining force from its unhallowed audacity! The consistent pessimist, who rates men at the worst, thinks the worst in himself, and does the worst by all others, and by himself, if he is but fixed in this unbelief, need not fear what the world, man, or God shall do unto him. It is the old whisper, “ Ye shall be as gods!” "Tis superhuman to sit and watch the storm; to have our strong sensations, illusions they are called in France ; blood- poisons which circulate in our life, working hot passion and mischief ; sorrow to many a loving, many a confiding heart ; passion, mischief, sorrow, what matters it? there comes an opiate by-and-by! The man of overwrought brain, used 129 9 POSTITIVISM. up, worn-out feelings; the distempered dreamer ; the reck- less worker of wrongs; the disappointed striver for an earthly crown, all shall have their common slumber at last: unconscious, impervious, unbroken. I will read you three stanzas from a longer piece written by one notunknown always vhere that tree of knowledge grew :— *« Cessation is true rest, And sleep for them opprest ; And not to be,—were blest, Annihilation is A better state than this ; Better than woe or bliss. The name is dread ;—the thing Is death without its sting ; An overshadowing.” If such be the thought to them whose natural heritage stands strong, fringed with luxurious hope to live beloved, | to die regretted ; what will the “ overshadowing” be when it passes, like a plague breath, over the children of toil and anxiety, over them whose life is at best hard, and their lot depressed and without “illusions”? Will they not want their strong sensations? Will they respect any law, human or divine, which stands between them and their enjoyments? Will they not crush all who bar their pleasures, aye, choke them in their own blood? Why not? ‘The opiate comes 130 POSTITIVISM. ga E NR eed ae NERY OO LCE eee gt EAL S Tee to all at last. ’Tis an act of oblivion! The overshadowing will cover all. And this is the coming creed of the roth century. To return to Comte, about whom I might say much, but must not ;—of course, he had no foresight of anything worse than an immediate realization of his crowning ideas—sociality, fraternity, Positivism. Europe split into small states ; women made incapable of property, but held objects of religious worship ; men worked on a communistic principle ; an oligarchy of rich; a spirituality of Positive believers, with a supreme infallible pontiff at their head ; Paris the seat of infallibility and of order. Clotilde had shown Comte a principle antagonistic to, and predominating over, all egoism ; Altruism was to burn out of men all selfish aims, nay, the ordinary feelings of a man! A rigorous rule of life was to aid, and a religion without a God to enforce, this new law. Two hours a day, divided into three private services, were to be spent in the adoration of Humanity under the form of a living or dead woman. The image of _ the fair idol, dress, posture, everything was to be brought distinctly to mind ; and the whole soul to be prostrated in her honour. Comte, it has been said, gave woman every- thing except justice. There is a grave moral in this tale. Theology was ex- tinguished ; but the desire to worship burned on—a fire un- 131 POSITIVISM. quenchable. Is that desire, or is it not, a broad reality, an inalienable truth of our nature? Comte accepted it for him- self, and not for himself alone, but for our whole human race. Along with it he accepted the only principle which could bestow universal validity. Our moral intuitions were ac- knowledged safe guides, and something more ; the rulers of an intellectual world, the revealers of truth higher than all beside. Often and often he asserted the dominion of heart over mind. Probably, if Comte had lived longer he would have acknowledged other revelations of our moral nature. Moral causation, for example. That strange phrase of his—“a modifiable fatality,” self-contradiction in words, suicide in sense, what did it portend? Wasit the first sound of a marriage-bell, freedom and duty once again united? A © change of his system wonderful to contemplate, yet not more wonderful than the state in which he left it. One cannot help here asking how matters would have. stood if Comte had died without knowing his Clotilde. How incomplete according to his own account his philoso- phy! how wanting in that which perfected the whole! A notable fact this, throwing great light on the value of such- like systematization which, after all, much resembles. secre- tion from that interesting viscus, the system-maker’s own particular brain. And there is another fact quite as notable. How curious that Comte should have lived so long without 132 POSITIVISM. — discovering whatever truth his own heart and a strong human affection disclosed to him! Hence we might illus- trate and confirm a previous remark, that any one not living a truly human life—call him undeveloped, uneducated, dwarfed, or immature—is no typical man; and if we believe ancient maxims, scarcely a learner in philosophy, certainly not a judge of its highest and widest problems. The most notable fact and greatest surprise of all is, that Comte’s prayer without petition, his passionate self-mesme- rizing adoration, his religion without a God, should have taken any hold on men. No one can transfer to others his private sorrow or his private joy; it is hard fora man to get his thought understood, harder still to make common pasture of his heart. But Comte devised extraordinary pro- pagandist expedients ; those who consider his developments mere madness, should explain why sane people have ac- cepted them. Comte set no value on Protestantism in any shape. The religion of his own country he carried back to medizval forms, and then travestied it. There were many festivals, a calendar of saints, nine sacraments, and a horri- ble caricature of the Christian Tninity. This idea crowned his sociology, which I need hardly say was communistic - socialism, enfolding (as socialism always must enfold) and scarcely veiling the most iron of despotisms, both temporal and’ spiritual. His mind delighted in contemplating a 133 POSTITIVISM. Fi eS i ice PIR rk BN Bk SN PE etd we a Pree ahaa ronan Secale se en 2 synthesis of the great Fetish, Earth, with the great Being Humanity ; which last somehow assumes on occasion a feminine gender. To Clotilde, symbolizing that supreme object, Clotilde, his noble and tender patroness, he transferred Dante’s hom- age of Beatrice : addresses to the mother of our Lord ; and stranger than all, the prayer of Thomas 4 Kempis to Almighty God, “‘Amem te plusquam me, nec me nisi propter te ”— “May I love Thee more than self, nor self at all except for Thee.” Now consider: when Comte died, sixty-four years had not quite elapsed since goddesses of Reason were wor- shipped in the cathedral and other churches of Paris. Upon each high altar a fair woman, chosen for her faultless beauty, sate enthroned, her feet resting upon the consecrated slab. Gaily clothed in tunic and Greek mantle, she was so dis- played by a torch behind her throne, so elevated above her worshippers, as to attract from Phrygian cap to Italic shoe their passionate gaze and adoration. Low down beneath her footstool lay the broken symbols of a faith then declared effete and passed away; just as half a century afterwards Comte declared theology passed away.’ Music sounded, incense smoked, Bishop Gobel, who assisted at a parody of sacred rites, wept tears of shame, but in fear and trembling he assisted. The object of this mad mockery of religion, this empire of heart over mind, this woman-worship, was 134 POSTITIVISM. to proclaim afresh Fraternity, Progress, Sociality. Sociality, for the supposed law of which final development Comte worshipped humanity and Clotilde—but disowned immor- tality and God. _ These two madnesses, how near akin, how far apart were they? ‘The world is not really made young by destroying old things; yet the path of 18th century madness lay through fire and blood. Its deeds are sometimes spoken of, even now, as great crimes; but no great crime is criminal in the sight of men whose life is godless, dark, and unsubstantial, Horrors pass before them like unrealities. ‘The world,” writes Mercier on the trial of Louis XVI,—“ The world is allan optical shadow.” In our roth century life, ’tis a skil- fully prepared overshadowing, beneath which men beat their brows till their blood-shot eyes see red. “I see red,” ex- claimed Eugene Sue’s ruffian, “and then I strike with the Knife, ”* * While these sheets were passing through the press, I read in the Pall Mall Gazette for April 24th, as follows: One of the Communist papers, the Montagne, writes: ‘*‘ Education has made sceptics of us; the Revolution of 1871 is atheistic ; our Republic wears a bouquet of immor- telles in her bosom, We take our dead to their homes, and our wives to our hearts without a prayer. Priests! throw aside your frocks, turn up your sleeves, lay your hands upon the plough, for a song to the lark in the morning air is better than a mumbling of psalms, and an ode to sparkling wine is preferable toa chanting of hymns. Our dogs that used only to growl when a bishop passed will bite him now, and not a voice will be raised to curse the day which dawns for the sacrifice of the Archbishop of Paris. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the world. 135 POSTITIVISM. Let me end by telling you a dream, which is not all a dream. A company of savas were seen, in the visions of the night, busy with a new scientific invention. Earth, they argued, earth has her volcanoes, her burning exhalations ; men have electric lights, fires, gas lamps, furnaces. These make up the world’s proper illumination. The effect in- tended was, therefore, to darken the air we breathe, so that no rays from the upper sky should pass through it. The inventors hoped that a district, a country, nay, even a world, might thus be overshadowed by a gloom impervious to moon and stars by night, to sun by day; and the human eye see no changes, save those which the earth’s activity, or human power and skill, might produce. ‘Terrestrial and artificial alternations excepted, all was to be changeless as winter midnight—deep impenetrable darkness! It was seen slowly, very slowly, to descend. In thirty years the men of science hoped and purposed its perfection. Did those who, had previously known the beautiful light _ of heaven, who had bathed and basked in the life-giving sunbeam, feel happy, or even calm, when they saw their The Commune has promised us an eye for an eye, and has given us Monseigneur Darboy as a hostage. The justice of the tribunals shall commence, said Danton, when the wrath of the people is appeased ; and he was right. Darboy! tremble in your cell, for your day is past, your ,end is close at hand.” 136 a —_ a, = POSITIVISM. ; — ——— children and children’s children robbed of celestial glory and gladness ? Yet there is one,thing worse than a world without a sun— you know what I mean—Humanity without a GOD. POSTSCRIPT, THE Lecturer purposely abstained from reading Professor Huxley’s acute critique on Positivism until this Lecture had gone to press. He now strongly recommends his auditors to read No. viii. of the Lay Sermons. Should any reader find difficulties in pages 23—25 of the foregoing Lecture, he will do well to peruse Littré’s “Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive,” chapter iii, particularly PP. 42, 43. SCIENCE AND REVELATION. BY THE VERY REVEREND R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D., MEAN OF CANTERBURY; LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, OXFORD. SCIENCE AND REVELATION. 22 THE duty which has been imposed upon me to-day by the Christian Evidence Society is, I conceive, to state as clearly as I can, what is our ground for believing that a revelation is not only possible, but is a necessary part of the system of this world. As the programme further joins science and revelation, I conceive that I am debarred from any but a strictly scientific proof. We may reasonably infer the probability of a revelation from God’s necessary attribute of love. We may ourselves feel - morally sure that a creature, approaching so nearly to the spiritual world, and capable of somuch goodasis man, would not be left by his Maker-in that miserable state of vice and misery in which we find ourselves. There are many good and weighty reasons for believing that God would give us a revelation, and that the Christian religion is God’s re- velation—reasons drawn from the nature of God, from the _actual condition in which man is placed, and from the I4I SCIENCE AND REVELATION. direct teachings of Holy Scripture—all these, like a cord of ein threads that cannot easily be broken, serve to confirm the faith of the believer, but I must forego their use. In confining myself to what I conceive to be the strictly scientific basis of a revelation, I would, never- theless, beg you to remember that the evidences of Chris- tianity are cumulative. They cover a vast field, and it is in their united force that their strength lies. ‘The very vastness of the field often invites attack. Some outlying work seems capable of overthrow. Some discovery in the domains of history, of philology, or of physical science, seems to provide new weapons for the assault. Possibly not all the arguments used in defence of Christianity will endure the test of close and accurate examination. Pos- sibly, too, in our views of the nature of Christianity, and in our exegesis of the Scriptures, we have arrived only at — partial truth, and do not distinguish with sufficient accuracy between what is certainly revealed, and what is nothing more that a possible explanation of the Divine word. There are, moreover, I will candidly confess, difficulties in the way of ] faith. However new may be theform of the attack, and how- ever modern the materials which it uses, yet the strength of the attack liesin real difficulties, which areno new matter, but — have ever lain deep in the minds of thoughtfulmen. Ido ~ not believe that belief is a thing easy of attainment, any 142 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. re eae I ay more than virtue is. I believe that both are victories, — gained by a struggle—gained over opposing forces* But as certain as I am that this present state of things was in- tended to train man to virtue, though I cannot answer all the objections brought against the system of the world being exactly what it is, nor solve all the doubts and difficulties, moral and metaphysical, which surround us: so I am convinced, in spite of similar difficulties in the way of re- ligion, that belief, and not unbelief, is the end at which man ought to aim. I believe that man was intended to attain to a higher and more perfect state than that in which he now finds himself, and that he can only attain to it by virtue and faith ; but as the very value of these lies appa- rently in their being won by aneffort, long and earnestly maintained, I am not surprised at the existence of diffi- culties, least of all of such difficulties as arise from our ignorance. Still belief would be unnecessarily * difficult, ’ and we may even say, morally impossible, if the sum of the arguments in defence of a revelation did not largely exceed the sum of the arguments against one. With these arguments I have to-day nothing to do. The evi- dences of Christianity, external and internal, will be treated TT * T use this word because if the value of faith and virtue consists in their being a discipline, while this implies the existence of difficulty, it also limits the degree of the difficulty. 143 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. of by others. My business is to show that a revelation was to be expected; that it was probable, or at all events possible, and, therefore, that the evidences of Christianity have a claim upon the consideration of every right think- ing man. In showing that a revelation was to be expected, I shall at the same time show what is the exact position which it holds, and in what way revealed knowledge differs from all other knowledge, scientific and unscientific. Now the argument which I shall use as my proof of the possibility of a revelation is simply this, that in the present system of things we find no being endowed with any faculties without there being also provided a proper field for their exercise, and a necessity imposed upon that being of using those faculties. In this statement I assume nothing. I do not assume that there is a God who made these beings. I do not assume that they were made or created; still less do I assume that they were in- tended to use their faculties. I put aside all theories of design and causation, not because I do not believe that they possess force, but because the actual facts which I see around me, or which I am taught by scientific men, are enough for my proof. The only thing which I assume is, that the laws of nature are universal q and I assume this simply because it will be readily granted me. The universality of nature’s laws compels us to admit that a law ; 144 SCIENCE ANP REVELATION. which holds good in all known cases, will necessarily hold good in all cases whatsoever. Our whole language is so essentially based upon re- ligious ideas that it would be very difficult for me to use only neutral words. But in using religious words, I wish them to be understood in a neutral sense, If I speak of creatures, [ mean only beings, things which exist now, or have existed. If I speak of them as endowed with faculties, I merely mean that they possess them. By nature, I mean simply the present state of things, - whether designed by an intelligent mind, or a mere come-by-chance. I look simply around me at what is— or at all events appears to be—and I find myself in a world in which there is a very exact correspondence be- tween the endowments and faculties of every existent being, and the state of things in which it happens to be. So exact is this correspondence, that if you give Pro- fessor Owen a bone, he will tell you to what order of animals its owner belonged, what were its habits, the nature of its food, of its habitat, and mode of life. Nature works out this correspondence even to the most minute detail. By looking at the bone of a quadruped we can tell, not merely great things about it, but such trifles as which leg it used first in getting up from the ground. For nature isso undeviating that the outward habits, even in things 145 fe) SCIENCE AND REVELATION. nn nr of no apparent moment, correspond to the internal con- formation. Now, possibly, it will readily be granted that such is the present state of things. Whatever may have been the stages through which we have, or have not, passed, we now find ourselves in a world of apparent cause and effect— full of infinitely varied forms of life, but of which none are purposeless. I cannot upon this point bring forward a better witness than Professor Huxley, who, in his most in- teresting essay on Geological Contemporaneity (Lay Ser- mons, p. 236) speaks as follows :—‘“* All who are competent to express an opinion upon the subject are, at present, agreed that the manifold varieties of animal and vegetable form have not either come into existence by chance, nor result from capricious exertions of creative power; but that they have taken place in a definite order, the statement of which order is what men of science term a natural law.” The whole chain of animal and vegetable life seems to this great authority so perfect and complete, that even the variations which have taken place in it, have been governed, he considers, by a law, that is, a regular and orderly suc- cession. These variations have been the result, apparently, of certain changes in the external state of things, to which the external conformation of the animal has somehow or other been made to correspond, But as Professor Huxley 146 —" ee a -—L_ -, SCIENCE AND REVELATION. ue points out, these variations have been confined to very narrow limits. When people speak of the enormous changes which have taken place in the living population of the globe during geological eras, they refer, he says, to the presence in the later rocks of fossil remains of a vast number of animals not discoverable in the earlier rocks ; but the fossils which you do find in the early rocks differ but little from existing species. (See p. 238.) He thus negatives on sure grounds the idea that a state of things ever existed on this globe essentially unlike what exists now. What then exists now? I answer, first of all a vast chain of vegetable life, fitted in every portion of it to find its own subsistence, and to propagate its species. Its main function is to “manufacture out of mineral substances that protoplasm, upon which, in the long run, all animal life depends.” (Lay Sermons, p- 138.) I need not detain you by enumerating the many various contrivances by which plants are enabled to manufacture food for us out of carbon; hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—substances upon which, in their original state, animals cannot feed—nor the still more curious and elaborate processes by which their fecun- dation, and the propagation of each species is provided for —Processes which seem often to require the intervention of animal life. I need not detain you upon this point: you will readily grant that this correspondence does 147 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. Hatt Say pes eu Eee eM RT UY, ee ae ae SS es exist. If a plant is not suited to its habitat, and cannot use its natural powers, nature imposes upon it the severe penalties—first, of degradation, and then of death. Upon the animal world she imposes just the same penalties. There is neither excess nor defect in her operations.* Whatever she gives must be used, but animals, being governed in the main by instincts, have no choice. They necessarily employ all their living powers, and apparently have no powers beyond those indispensable for their existence. ‘This point, however, I will not press, though it seems to follow from the fact asserted by Pro- fessor Huxley, that no important difference can be observed between the fossil remains found in the earliest strata, and animals of the same species and order existent now. (See pp. 241, 242, and for vegetables, p. 240.) For, as he tells you, facts establish a scientific law—law in the mouths of scientific men, meaning an established order of facts. Well then! I will put this fact of absence of progress, aside, and with it the corollary of the absence of latent *“Rudiments,’”’ so far from disproving, prove this. A rudiment shows that nature might have given more, but has not done so. Why? Because the further gift would have been useless, for instance, man would not have been benefited by being able to feel with his eye-brows. (See Darwin, ‘‘ Descent of Man,” i. 25.) 148 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. powers.* But of actual powers it is evident that animals do use them all, and have to use them all. So close, too, is the agreement between the powers and the external position of every animal, that a change in its external relations will modify its powers to a certain extent. But only to a certain extent; there are fixed limits to the adaptability of those living powers. If the changes are suc ash to occasion a more active exercise of its living powers, the animal increases in strength, size, and beauty ; if unfavourable, but still permitting some use of its powers, it dwindles and decays. But pass the appointed bounds and the animal dies. Nature is exacting the penalty of the non-use of what it has given. Nature exacts a severe penalty for the mis-use, and the last and final penalty, for the violation of her laws. I do not know that an ascidian jelly-bag has any other faculties than those of sucking in © water, and of sticking to a stone.| But this I know, that if it does not use all the powers it possesses and suck in * Professor Huxley’s words are, ‘*In these groups there is abundant evidence of variation—none of what is ordinarily understood as pro- gression ; and if the known geological record is to be regarded as even any considerable fragment of the whole, it is inconceivable that any theory of anecessarily progressive development can stand, for the nume- rous orders and families cited afford no trace of such a process.”’ (p. 245.) + Darwin, ‘‘ Descent of Man,’’i. 205. 8 149 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. ——s —_. _— its water, and stick to its stone, no process of natural selection will ever develop it into a monkey: it will go to the limbo of nonentity.* But what an alarming thought, that at a period separated from us by such vast geologic ages, that, according to the nebular hypothesis, held by so many of our leading astronmeors as a probable ‘heory, this whole universe was a mass of heated vapour ; what an alarming thought that the very existence of man should have depended upon a jelly bag sticking to a stone and sucking up water! Alas! there was then no water, no stones, no jelly bags, and therefore there are now no men! Man escapes, poor thing, from his humble parentage: he need not feel his ears to find the proof there of his monkeyhood :} but his escape costs him dear. What with astronomy and biology, men of science be- tween them have cleared us out of existence. Scientifi- cally, man is no more. My argument, fortunately, depends upon matters of fact: facts for which the believer accounts by holding rr ee *Itis a curious fact that these Ascidians possess a heart and a circulation, but that after the heart has beaten a certain number of times it stops, and then beats the opposite way, so as to reverse the circulation. (Lay Sermons, p. 95.) In what stage of its progress did it so degenerate as to lose this remarkable power P + Darwin, “Descent of Man,” i. 22.9 150 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. nnn that this world is the work of a Being possessed of in- Gnite wisdom and power, and who therefore has endowed all His creatures with those faculties which they needed, and with no others; because to give useless faculties would be a violation of God’s attribute of wisdom. Thestudent of natural science may take another view. It is no part of his business to do so. His office isto discover and tabulate the order of facts, of phenomena, and this order he calls a natural law. Well and good. But teleology, the science of ends, which gives the reason why a thing is what it 1s —teleology belongs to the metaphysician. It is his business to inquire into causes and effects. Still, as a matter of fact, scientific men do try their hand at account- ing for the present state of things, and they say, perhaps, that there is a struggle, a competition in nature, so sharp and close that no creature can continue to exist save by the vigorous exercise of all its necessary faculties, while all useless qualities will be cast away as mere overweight and incumbrance. I need no decision upon this point ; the fact isall I want. I do not want you to decide whether mind preceded matter, and consequently that there is a God: or whether matter and mind came into existence contemporaneously, in which case there is no room for the theory of development, but abundant room for im- possibilities, metaphysical and actual; or, lastly, whether I5I SCIENCE AND REVELATION. matter preceded mind, the latter being simply the result of a high corporeal organisation, slowly attained to by the processes of selection, natural and sexual. Whether this present state of things was worked out intelligently; by a Being possessed of will and understanding, or is the re- sult of blind and unintelligent powers, working fortuitously, this, to my argument, matters not. All I wantis the ad- mitted fact—that every living organisation fully possesses all those faculties which it needs, and must use all its faculties under penalty, first of degradation, and, finally, in the long run, of extinction. But man is a living organization, and must, therefore, come under this law. Let us see whether the fact con- firms this deduction. Now, in all the long line, from the ascidian upwards to man, nature had supplied none but physical wants. Her children need food ; She gives them each thosesensesand that conformation which enables them to get each their own food. They need safety: she uses much ingenuity in providing for their safety. She is, moreover, liberal. Their food is, in general, gained so easily, and their safety so well provided for, that their lives are full of enjoyment. Her care, however, is taken in the main for the species, and not for the individual, He enjoys his food because nature has taken loving care for the whole family to which he belongs ; and she further 152 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. eta IL AA A et takes care that that family shall continue to exist. If it perish, it is because by some change in temperature, or the like, the correspondence is destroyed between its faculties and its external position. Short of this, the in- genuity employed by nature in providing for the con- tinued existence of every species of insect and animal is as wonderful as that employed by her in continuing vege- table life; and, as a rule, the lower the creature is in the scale of being, the more curious the contrivances used for its preservation. Well, when we come to man we find these three leading necessities equally well provided for. Man is provided with the means for obtaining food, for providing for his safety, and for propagating his species. But, though nature’s ends are the same, and reached with equal certainty, her means are, in the main, different. The animals are moved to gain their existence by their senses working upon their instincts. This is a great advance upon vegetable life. You had there neither senses nor instincts, but simply powers. But manrises above the animals as much as they transcend vegetables. He attains to these same ends of food, safety, and continued existence by the use of his reason. Now, I wish you to notice this. Nature is not limited in her resources, nor confined to one method. She is not 153 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. obliged to plant animals im the ground that they may suck up food through their legs; she can and does give them instincts by which they can get their food in a very different way. But perfect as these instincts are, nature can do still better. She can produce an animal capable of reasoning upon causes and effects, and who, therefore, provides for everything which he imagines to be good for him by setting those causes in motion which produce the desired effect.* But with the possession of reason there also goes the possession of what we call mental faculties. Not only can man by the use of his reason obtain food, provide for his safety, and continue his race, but higher ends are made possible for him, to be attained to by the use of this higher endowment. Man has the power of articulate speech, and upon this follows the power of learning to read, to write, and to cypher; and upon the power of doing these three things follows a plenitude of other powers. Now, I shall not stop to enquire how man gained these powers, whether by natural and sexual selection or not; but I venture to point out that there is $$ eee * There is something of this in animals just as, on the other hand, man is not altogether devoid of instincts. Ishould have expected this from the teaching of the first chapter of Genesis, which represents men not as a distinct creation but as the last act of creation. 154 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. ree ens SSS a vast chasm between physical and intellectual powers. The most sensible monkey isa parody rather than an imitation of man, and the difference between the two is enormous.* The points of agreement serve rather to enable us to measure this interval, and see how wide it is, than to bridge it over. Now, let us suppose ourselves philosophers come, we will say, from the planet Jupiter, on a mission intrusted to us by the Jovians, to examine and report upon the nature of the creatures which people the four inferior planets, Terra, Venus, Mercury, and Mars. Of course, we should look upon the inhabitants of such small communities with contempt, but, being philosophers, we should not neglect anything because it was trifling. Well, when we came to Terra we should report that it was a very curious region, inhabited by a long scale of beings, each one fitted to its place, and that at their head there was a rather noxious, troublesome, and uppish creature * Physically the monkey is man’s superior. Anatomists assure us that they can find no very great difference between his brain and ours. His larynx also is as well fitted as ours to produce articulate sounds. Se far weare equal. But he has four hands, and we have but two. Read Sir C. Bell’s ‘‘ Bridgewater Treatise upon the Hand,” and you will see at once that a vast superiority is implied inthis. I can never be- lieve that when, by natural and sexual selection, a creature had been attained possessed of four hands, nature could so degradate in her work as to fall back upon two. No well-bred monkey would have mated with one so deformed." 155 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. ~— called man, whose examination had caused us an infinity of trouble. | In examining this creature we should find that it shared in all the wants of those beneath him, but that it supplied its wants, not by the use of instincts, but of reason. Over and above, however, man’s physical wants, we should find that he had mental wants ; and with these wants faculties also, by which he could supply them. Supply all the phy- sical wants of an animal, and having none besides, it will lie still for hours or days until hunger stirs it to renewed exertion. Supply all man’s physical wants, and his men- tal wants then develop into full activity. Give him the lowest and basest drudgery ; make him work morning, noon, and night in the meanest occupations, for the supply of merely physical necessities, and, though you can infinitely degrade, you cannot destroy his mental powers. He still thinks, still connects causes and effects. But our purpose will be best answered by taking the case of those whose faculties are most highly cultivated. Has nature supplied a proper field for the exercise of the mental powers, not merely of Fuegians, but of the most highly developed man? You know that she has. Take the senses which he has in common with the animals, but see what vast means have been provided by which he can make an intellectual use of them. What arts and sciences, 156 i — SCIENCE AND REVELATION. painting, music, harmony, numbers, eloquence, have grown out of their use. As for our mental powers, think only of the vast number of ologies which are claiming ad- mission into our very normal schools. Think only of all our learned Associations, our Royal Societies, our Social Congresses, our British Museums full of books, which have been written, and are waiting only to be read, and you must own that men do use their mental powers, and have means enough fora more ample use of them. Nature makes us use our mental powers to some extent. She encourages us to use them thoroughly and earnestly. Use them we must. Man is placed is such a position that he must study what passes round him. Man learns by experience. Instincts are but -slightly progressive. Unless brought into contact with man, the animals learn little—perhaps nothing. I do not doubt but that those huge monsters, whose remains we behold in geological museums, were the most dull and stupid creatures possible. Ithink this simply because I suppose that man did not then exist, and, therefore, that these monsters had nothing to waken them up out of theirsluggish torpor. But scientific men* tell me that existing mammals actually have larger brains than their ancient tertiary prototypes of the same * Lartet, quoted by Darwin, “‘ Descent,” i. 51. 157 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. rr order. Let man enter the stage, and the instincts of animals are quickened. Nature did not create man with- out taking care to guard the inferior animals from his des- tructive powers. But man in himself, essentially, is at once progressive and retrogressive. Bound up with him is an infinite possibility of advance and decay. He is never stationary. Both individuals and communities are perpetually either ascending or descending in the scale, morally and intellectually. But this law of nature obliges man to perpetual mental effort under the usual penalty of | degradation. We have not merely to advance, to win new ground. If this were all, at length we should have nothing to do. We have to win back lost ground. Our gains are, I hope, greater than our losses ; but the progress of no community will ever be fast enough, continued enough, and assured enough, to justify the members of it in living in a fooi’s paradise. This, then, was our second point. The first was, that nature has provided us with a proper field for the exercise of our mental faculties ; the second, that she imposes upon us the necessity of using them. We may add, that the law of scientific progress also makes it certain that no advance of science will ever deliver us from the necessity of using our faculties. The valuable part of every science is its theory—the mental part, Facts and fossils are of no value, except as being 158 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. a — the materials for thought. No geologist would care much for a discovery of fossils in agreement with an established theory, but if the theory were still debated, then every discovery that tended to prove or disprove it, would be canvassed with intelligent interest. The pure sciences can grow, I am well aware, only by additions. But then they are simply instrumental. They are to the mixed sciences what arithmetic is to the ordinary business of life. Logarithms, algebra, the integral and differential calcu- luses, are simply easy ways of doing difficult sums. It is a great thing, no doubt, for science to perfect its instru- ments and processes, but scientific progress lies in the mixed sciences themselves, and these are constantly under- going modification, The spectrum analysis is largely modifying the science of astronomy. Deep sea dredging, and other fresh means of information, have so modified geology, that no one holds now that similar strata are neces- sarily of the same date. A vast cretaceous formation is probably going on at this very day in the bed of the At- lantic. (Huxley, ‘‘ Lay Sermons,” p. 206.) The law, then, of scientific progress is constant modification ; fresh facts are discovered, new theories started, old theories revived, existing theories altered, recast, newly shaped. Shoulda science become, practically, complete and perfect, scientific men would care for it no longer. The manufacturer and 159 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. merchant would then seize upon it. In this way what was once a problem in the mind of the student, becomes an article of use, comfort, and enjoyment in our daily lives, Meanwhile, new sciences spring up, and old sciences take new shape, and, as a matter of fact, so large has become the scientific domain, that no one man can master it. Division of labour has become as necessary here as in the manual crafts. We are no longer encyclopzdists, but each one must stick to his own page in the great book of learning. | Many of these sciences relate to our social condition. And of these the importance and value every day rapidly increases. Good government largely depends upon know- ledge of all those natural laws upon which moral and physical well-being depends. Upon good government follow increased wealth, active trade, higher wages, and larger consumption of commodities. Upon these follows increased population, and that population concentrated upon spots favourable for all this activity. And upon this follow new social difficulties ; fresh problems arise to be solved, and new questions to occupy the mind both of the student and of the statesman. Unless solved, society will retrograde ; it will suffer in health, in wealth, and morality ; turbulence will take the place of quiet industry; and that community will decay. Here again nature provides a field for the employ- 160 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. ment of our faculties, and compels us to use them.’ If not there is the same penalty, degradation. I do not know how many geological periods it would take before, by the neglect of our powers, we could retrograde back to our ascidian progenitor ; but I see everywhere around me the proofs that retrogression is as much a law of man’s nature as pro- gress. We can only continue what we are by using all our’ powers. * | But I may have lingered over this part of my subject too long. No one perhaps will deny that man both can and must use his mental powers as thoroughly as an animal must use its instincts, and a plant its vegetative powers, or it will suffer for its neglect. Only remember that my argument has nothing to do with individuals; I am treating of man as a species, and investigating the general laws which regulate his well being. Well, now, has man any other powers than * The body politic is in fact very much like the natural body. There is a constant waste and a constant repair. The waste may be greater than the repair—and in that case the body dwindles—but the repair may be greater than the waste, in which case there is growth, progress. In both alike real growth can only be by assimilation. The new must be taken up into the old, and become part with it. That which is losing vitality must be put away; but that which is to take its place must become one with the old. After a certain time, however, natural bodies lose their powers of assimilation, and old age and death are the result : I cannot enter into the question how far this is also the case with politica] bodies. !2 161 II SCIENCE AND REVELATION. those already described? Has he merely physical powers to enable him to get food, and other bodily necessaries ; and mental powers to enable him to read, write, and cypher? Is this all? You know thatitis not all. There is another broad distinction between man and all the other inhabitants of this earth. He alone distinguishes between right and wrong.* | Now if man possesses this faculty, however acquired, and by whatever name called, then if nature’s laws are uni- versal, he is both bound to use it, will suffer from not using it, and will have a proper field provided for its use. Nature gives no faculty without imposing an obligation of exercising it : an obligation, however, which rests in its full force upon the species, and upon the individual only as belonging to the species. Some powers every individual must use or he would die ; there are other powers which, if he does not use, nature will be content with a lighter penalty. Far be it from me to affirm that every one here uses his reasoning powers. I hope he does ; but if he does not use them, Iam quite sure that nature will exact of him the penalty of stupid- ity. But the species must use them; ifnot, upon degradation * Animals brought into contact with man attain some small share in this power. The influence of man over domesticated animals is most remarkable. Ishould doubt whether a wild animal was at all capable of making such a distinction. 162 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. would soon follow extinction. Nature, for instance, would not let man exist as a mere animal. Ifhe did not use his reason, the instincts of other animals are so superior to his, that while they found food he would be unable to do so. Even if necessity quickened his instincts, he would yet have ceased to be a man, and would be retrograding back to the ascidian. To continue to be a man he must make some low use at all events of his mental powers. Now, can you establish any such difference between man’s intellectual and moral powers, as will justify you, while acknowledging that you must use the one, in neglecting the other? Can you give any reason why you need not use the faculty which un- doubtedly you possess of distinguishing between right and wrong, and the faculty, let us say, of “ using the imagination in matters of science.” J am sure youcannot. By not using your mental powers you will be in an inferior mental position ; by not using your moral powers you will hold an inferior moral position. But you may say the penalty is slight, and we will pay it. We will use our physical powers, and become grand animals and we will use our mental powers, and become grand in- tellectual men. Not men I answer. Add intellectuality to animality, and you merely get an intellectual animal. Your moral powers are an essential part of yourselves. Con- fessedly too, there is ample field for using them. The whole 163 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. — —_— world is so constituted that morning, noon, and night, the question perpetually arises of right and wrong. You cannot take a step in life without conscience intervening. It is so inseparably a part of yourselves that constantly it acts as a mere instinct, and approves or condemns your conduct as spontaneously as your palate distinguishes between sweet and bitter. You may render your palate dull, so that you cannot taste what you eat and drink ; you may render your conscience dull, but it hasa strong recuperative force, and, after years of dullness, will awaken, and exercise again its judicial functions with stern and decisive energy. Struggle as much as you like, but the conclusion cannot be evaded, that you can distinguish between right and wrong, that you ought to do so, and that you must do so. If so, what follows? I answer, the necessity of religion, and therefore of revelation. Resist as men will and do, they have but a choice between two alternatives. » Either all this present state of things, in which every faculty has its appropriate field of exercise, and every external possi- bility has opposite to it an internal faculty; either all this is ‘an illusion and deceit, a purposeless and objectless piece of jugglery;* or if it be a reality, then the existence in man [ have taken these words from the ‘Vedanta Philosophy.” It teaches that the apparent reality of this world is mdyd, i.e., deceit, illusion, 164 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. rer ee of faculties, obliging him to distinguish between right and wrong, constitute him a responsible agent. If he is respon- sible, he is responsible to some one: and certain penalties are necessarily attached to the neglect, the misuse, and the violation of his moral powers. The person to whom man is responsible must be capable of forming an equitable judgment, and therefore must know the motives as well as the outward acts, and for this nothing less than omniscience will suffice. He must have the power of apportioning adequate rewards and punishments to human actions, which will need little less than omnipotence. And as no adequate reward or punishment follows in this life, there must be some other state in which men will be dealt with according . to their true deserts. If not, then there exists in man a whole class of faculties, moral faculties, which seem to find in this present state of things an appropriate field for their exercise, but which man is under no necessity of using. A man who lives in the habitual violation of every moral obligation, but does so with discretion, may have a very large enjoyment of the things of this world: while generally aman whose conscience is tender, and whose life is regu- te Nis Laan Re ee ese” 5 aaa lead Eek, aaa jugglery: ‘naught besides he One exists :”? the world was made out of nothing andis nothing. ‘ All that is real in this visible, is the God who is invisible.” See Ballantyne’s ‘‘ Christianity compared with Hindu Philosophy,” pp. xxxi—xxxvii, 43—50. 165 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. lated by the highest motives, necessarily and voluntarily abandons much, both of pleasure and prosperity. Nature cannot have so bungled her work. The highest possible exercise of the powers which she has given us must necessarily lead to the highest possible good. It does not matter to the argument whether conscience and your other moral faculties be natural or acquired. If nature endowed an ascidian with the power of acquiring moral faculties, it was bound to use them as soon as it had got them. The question whether you are bound to use your mental faculties does not depend in the least upon the question whether man is an improved monkey. You are bound to use them simply because you have them. So you are bound to live as a responsible being simply because you have the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong. You know, too, that you act yourselves upon this principle. If any one were to push one of you out of your seat and take it himself, not only would you be angry, but our chairman would call in a policeman to expel the disturber, and give you your seat back again. Why? Because the man would have been doing wrong, and need not have done it; and because it was wrong you are angry and punish him. But can you stop there ? There are things which we know to be wrong, but which hurt none but ourselves ; things we know to be wrong, but 166 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. which benefit society. A man may liberally support useful institutions from motives of ostentation, or as a bribe, if he is a candidate, let us say, for a seat in parliament. An act may be apparently right, but the inner motive wrong. Now, conscience judges of things absolutely ; it condemns or ap- proves of things, not as they seem, but as they really are: not by results, but by their intrinsic character. What is there which answers to this outside of man? Must there not be a judge who also judges men absolutely? You can find no such judge but God. Either, then, nature is a sham, and her laws not universal, and this present state of things a delusion, or there is a universal judge, and a future state in which reward and punishment will be meted out in strict ac- cordance with the rightness and wrongness of human action. A being omniscient and almighty can alone judge actions absolutely in the same way as conscience judges us, both for our thoughts, words, and deeds. I have chiefly spoken of conscience, but the argument takes in all man’s moral and spiritual powers.* No man * It is the examination of these moral and spiritual faculties which makes it so probable that man possesses something more than a highly organised body and mental powers, which, though superior in degree, are still of the same kind as those possessed by the animals. And it should be remembered that the proof that man possesses a soul, and that the soul is immortal, is entirely independent of revelation. It is based upon the intelligent study of the facts of psychology. If, how- 167 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. oo can doubt but that man has within him powers which ex- actly answer to religion outside of him. The power of faith is as much a faculty as that of sight ; and so also is that instinct, I had almost called it, which makes a man ever turn away in discontent from the present to struggle for the future. And what is more, man’s moral and religious faculties develop with advancing civilization just as his mental faculties do. The mental questions which agitate our minds would be entirely void of interest to a savage ; the social difficulties which occupy the attention of our political economists and statesmen would be mere trash to a peasant : so, too, with religion. I do not see any reason why a race may not sink so low as to lose the very idea of a God; but I am sure that such a race would hold the very lowest place in the scale of humanity. Whatever round in the ladder of human progress you like to examine, I will make bold to say that you will find the religious and moral state of mankind there holding a very close relation to the degree of mental culture and civilization to which it has attained. Now, the only thing that acts powerfully upon man’s tis Ae ee See a) Th lO eg LE Pa ever, itis said that man does not really possess, but only seems to possess these faculties, I answer that then nature is a mere deceiver, and its works a sham: and that, consequently, all physical science would be the study of the illusive. 168 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. moral faculties is religion. I donot say that this ought or ought not to be so; all I assert is that itis so. Call, if you like, the great mass of your fellow men Philistines, and des. pise their low culture, but you will find nothing that acts powerfully upon these Philistines to give them culture, to raise, refine, and purify them, except religion. Conscience, too, holds ‘a most direct and evident relation to religion. You will not find conscience amenable to reasoning. When virtue begins to reason, the proverb tells you it is lost When conscience condemns, it is because the thing con- demned is a sin against God; when it approves, it is be- cause the thing done is absolutely right, and as God com. manded. Conscience never asks whether a thing is a sin against society ; itnever troubles about consequences, knows | nothing about political economy, or political morality either. It judges by a higher and absolute rule. By so doing it makes man a responsible agent absolutely, brings him into direct relation with God as the absolute judge, and renders necessary a more exact apportionment of rewards and punishments than exists at present. There must be some other state of existence in which man will be judged in the- same way as now he judges himself, and in which the natural effects of this judgment will be fully carried out. But, if there is thus a future judgment, and a state in which happiness and misery will follow as the 169 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. natural* results of our actions here, man will require a certain amount of knowledge concerning this judgment. By the possession of conscience and other religious faculties, man holds a definite relation towards God. Plainly the most tremendous results may follow from this relation, and man ought to have some sure knowledge of these results. Now it is conceivably possible that God might have given us this knowledge by means of the light of nature, as we call it. But He has not. Confessedly natural religion is neither clear enough nor certain enough to affect powerfully the masses. Man isnot a quiet, orderly, neutral sort of being ; he bears about with him a nature fraught and fully charged with the most dangerous passions. Reason, with its pru- dential maxims, has never done much to restrain these passions. ‘To take, then, the lowest possible ground. As : nature has given us moral qualities, I suppose that moral excellence is a thing as necessarily to be attained to as physical and mental excellence. But while nature has provided ample means for attaining to the two last, she will not, without a revelation, have provided sufficient means for the attainment of the first. By the aid of religion, about Te * Though we draw a distinction between the natural and the super- natural, this distinction is tenable only when we look at things from below, and not when we look at them from above. We call those pro- cesses natural of which we know or might know the secondary causes. 170 SCIENCE AND REVELATION. as many men probably attain to moral excellence, as by other natural means attain to physical and mental excellence.* Without religion nature will have brokendown. You would have universally a state of things like that in ancient Greece —one Plato, surrounded by the mass leading the most grossly sensual life. Nature cannot develop any being higher than herself, nor endow it with wants which she cannot supply. If nature develops intellect, morality, religion, then that power which developed these faculties must also be intellectual, moral, religious. What, then, can this power in nature be but the working of God? Out of nothing comes nothing. The effect cannot be greater than the cause. The existence of man, with his mental, moral, and religious powers, forbids us to believe that that which caused man to exist can be less possessed of these powers than he is. ee — OOOO * It is no argument against revelation that it does not make us all holy and devout. It is not the law of this present state of things that all men attain to the highest possible physical and mental excellence. 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