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Title: The Creator: And what We May Know of the Method of Creation
Author: Dallinger, William Henry
Language: English
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THE CREATOR, AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF
THE METHOD OF CREATION.
THE CREATOR,
AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF THE
METHOD OF CREATION.
THE FERNLEY LECTURE OF 1887.
BY
W. H. DALLINGER, LL.D., F.R.S.
‘For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth.... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
WORDSWORTH.
Seventh Thousand.
LONDON:
T. WOOLMER, 2, CASTLE STREET, CITY ROAD, E.C.,
AND 66, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1887.
TO
JAMES S. BUDGETT, ESQ.,
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
A FRIENDSHIP
WHICH HAS INFLUENCED BENEFICENTLY
MUCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK;
THIS LITTLE VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED BY
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
The following discourse was prepared as a lecture. With the exception
of the insertion of passages which it was found necessary to omit in
delivery, on account of too great length, it is printed as it was
spoken. It addressed, and in its present form addresses, thoughtful and
earnest minds, not concerned specially with questions of philosophy,
metaphysics, and science, but alive to the advanced knowledge and
thought of our times, and anxious to know, so far as in such a form
it could be expressed, how the great foundation of religious belief,
the existence of Deity, is affected by the splendid advance of our
knowledge of nature. To have written more than the following pages
contain, in answering this desire, would have necessitated what I
have earnestly endeavoured to avoid, a change from a discourse into a
treatise. It is hoped that, as it is presented, it may to some extent
be found useful to those who sought it—not so much students, as men
interested in the deeper thought of our age, but whose time is occupied
with the labours and engagements of a busy life.
W. H. DALLINGER.
WESLEY COLLEGE, SHEFFIELD,
_September 1, 1887_.
THE CREATOR, AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF THE METHOD OF CREATION.
In spite of the lucid and far-reaching reasoning of Hume, which aimed
at effacing causality from our conceptions of phenomena, and making
invariable sequence supplant it; in spite of Auguste Comte’s stern
effort to ‘get rid of the vain pretension to investigate the causes
of phenomena,’ and the affirmation that ‘forces are only movements,
produced or tending to produce;’ nay, in spite of all the logical
effort of all the following years, there remains unaltered, that
inalienable property of the human mind, consciousness of power;
the ability to realize ‘I can’ simultaneously with ‘I am.’ In this
originates our universal explanation of external phenomena. Because
we can act and produce phenomena, we infer that all phenomena were
inevitably produced by some transcendent but equivalent act of
conscious power. If we think of a plane surface or a sphere, we can
only think of them as occupants of space: so, if we think of the light
beams of Sirius, or the motion of Mars, we realize the normal necessity
of thinking of them ultimately as caused. This is an inevitable
sequence of our consciousness, reason, and experience. A phenomenon
appearing in time evokes the mental demand for something which is not
that phenomenon, but without which it would not have existed.
In this lies the insatiable desire of mind to peer into the origin of,
and reason for, the existence of this universe. Deepening knowledge
brings broader light and expanding mystery, but this only quickens the
intellectual purpose of the race to seek to solve the problem, why
we are circled with the splendid phenomena of heaven and earth, and
possessed of the mystery of ourselves?
But to meet this mental demand is no part of the business of science.
The study of phenomena, their succession and their classification, is
the essential work of science. It has no function, and is possessed of
no instrument with which to look behind or below the sequence, in quest
of some higher relation. The eye and the mind of the experimentalist
know only of antecedent and consequent. These fill the whole circle
of his research; let him find these, and he has found all. But
since a cause is no more a phenomenon, than a thought is a material
manifestation, that which fills the whole circumference claimed by
science does _not_ fill all the area legitimately held by reason. A
prevision of the order, and the methods of the changes of the universe,
is the ideal of science. But mind in its entirety refuses to be locked
within such limits. It looks deeper than sequences, and farther back
than phenomena; it demands, by the very laws of its existence, their
cause. A continuity of transformed causes undoubtedly explains a wide,
and ever-widening area of sequences. But that cannot annul the demand
of reason for causation. It simply drives it farther back, and higher
up, and indicates that the modes of action and relation originated by
the primal cause are only the more sublimely rhythmic. Count this a
lingering survival of ‘mere metaphysics’ who will, it is withal so
stalwart, so perennial in our consciousness, amidst all vicissitudes of
knowledge and reasoning, that whatever science may do, philosophy must
give it audience.
The researches of science, then, are physical. The observable, finite
contents of space and time are the subjects of its analysis. Existence,
not the cause of existence, succession, not the reason of succession,
method, not the origin of method, are the subjects of physical
research. A primordial cause cannot be the subject of experiment nor
the object of demonstration. It must for ever transcend the most
delicate physical reaction, the profoundest analysis, and the last link
in the keenest logic. Absolute knowledge concerning it can only be the
prerogative of itself.
But human reason is not only, and wholly, concerned with the brilliant
records of physical enquiry: it is conscious of powers within itself
that transcend and elude all the processes of physics, and the analyses
of mathematics. The activities of the mind are not exhausted, the
demands of the mind are not met, the persistent questions of reason
are not answered, by all the processes, all the products, and all the
possibilities of physical research combined.
Science refuses absolutely to recognise mind as the primal cause of
the sequences of matter. This is just;—within the strict region of its
research; for phenomena, their sequences and classification, are its
sole domain. But observe, science, universally, puts _force_ where the
reason asks for cause. The forces affecting matter are tacitly assumed
to be competent to account for every activity, every sequence, every
phenomenon, and all the harmonies of universal being. A nexus for the
infinite diversities and harmonies, a basis for all the equilibrium of
nature, is found by modern science in force. But force is as absolutely
inscrutable as mind. Force can never be known in itself; it is known by
its manifestations. It is not a phenomenon; it produces phenomena. We
cannot know it; but we know nothing without it.
Then the ultimate analysis of physical science is the relations of
force and matter. But force is a subject of knowledge to science
only in its manifestations; that is, motion. In irreducible terms,
therefore, the final analysis of science is _matter as affected by
motion_. These—matter and motion—are held by many advanced physicists
to be the primary elements of all phenomena; the most minute, subtile,
and occult reaction, and the most majestic cosmic manifestation are
held to be explained by these. Thus the whole cosmos, with its infinite
complexities and harmonies, arose in space, and is in space, because of
the affections of matter by motion. To search out the motions on which
all changes are based, to reduce all the activities of the universe,
from the awful movement of a constellation, to the rhythmic swing of
an atom; from the origin of mind, and the writing of Faust, to the
building of a snow crystal, or the production of a flower, to sheer
mechanics—matter affected by motion—is held to be the chief mission of
science.
But examine for a moment the nature of the problem. The matter with
which analysis is thus finally concerned cannot be matter as we know
it. It is the existing _properties_ or _qualities_ of matter that
affect us. Matter is hard, it is yellow, it is sweet. Now the very
qualities that _make_ matter as we know it are demonstrated by modern
science to be but ‘modes of motion;’ matter is hot because the ultimate
atoms of it vibrate in a special manner. The yellowness of an object is
not in _it_, but in our percipient faculty. That which is yellow emits
certain light vibrations only; these affect the retina in a special
manner, and this affection we call the perception of yellowness. It is
thus with all the qualities of matter.
Then what can that ‘matter’ be with which the physicist must ultimately
and in the beginning deal? When matter is divested of all its
qualities, divested in thought of all the ‘modes of motion’ by which
it manifests itself to us, what is it? Is it mass, wholly incapable
of affecting our senses? Matter _sine perceptione_? That cannot be a
thing, it is an abstraction, and he must be something more than a bold
man, who would logically infer an actual factor, corresponding to the
abstract conception.
Manifestly, then, physical science and its methods cannot illuminate
and explain all the dilating area of space, and flow of time, with
which our consciousness and reason are concerned. Shapes and motion,
form and number, are not data that can carry us to the origin of the
universe. You must import an unacknowledged factor. Force stands
ready: if you endow _it_, in imagination equipped in the uniform of
science, with the very qualities of mind, no doubt you may cross
the boundary of experimental science, and see in matter affected by
motion the possibility of all that is. But, says Professor Huxley,
‘_Kraft und Stoff_—force and matter—are paraded as the Alpha and
Omega of existence. This, I apprehend, is the fundamental article of
the faith materialistic, and whosoever does not hold it is condemned
by the more zealous of the persuasion (as I have some reason to know)
to the Inferno appointed for fools and hypocrites. But all this,’ he
continues, ‘I heartily disbelieve; and ... I will briefly give my
reasons for persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, ... it
seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe,
to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my heart or head, I
cannot see to be matter, or force, or any conceivable modification
of either, however intimately the manifestations of the phenomena of
consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as matter
and force. In the second place, the arguments used by Descartes and
Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend beyond our
states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now as
they did when I first became acquainted with them, some half-century
ago. All the materialistic writers I know of, who have tried to bite
that file, have simply broken their teeth. But if this is true, our
one certainty is the existence of the mental world; and that of
_Kraft und Stoff_ falls into the rank of, at best, a highly probable
hypothesis.’[1]
[Footnote 1: _Fortnightly Review_, No. ccxl., new series, December
1886, p. 794.]
Look, then, at the striking incongruity. With no explanation of matter
without qualities; with no indication of how motion could arise and
become rhythmic and infinitely harmonious; with the distinct knowledge
that, when the physicist wants to demonstrate matter, he is compelled
to do it in terms of motion; and, when he would prove the presence of
motion, he can only do it in terms of matter; with all these fetters
to our mental movement, and clouds before our eyes, it is argued that,
by carrying the discoverable and apparently self-acting affections
of matter by motion far enough back, we can explain the origin and
structure of the universe.
I would repeat, that in such a mental effort, it is vain to seek
logical aid from the employment of the word ‘force.’ We have seen that
the only scientific idea of force we can ever have, is motion. Motion
is the result of ever-varying relations, borne to each other by matter,
space, and time. At a given instant a body is here; in a measurable
interval after, it is not here, but yonder. ‘Motion’ carries with it no
occult constructive power. It is change of place, and no more.
Is it not inevitable, then, that the mind should refuse its sanction
to the claim, that ‘the problem of the universe’ is solved by these
feeble factors? ‘If I were forced,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘to choose
between Materialism and Idealism, I should elect for the latter;’[2]
and truly, if our choice must be between them, this is the normal
alternative.
[Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, December 1886, p. 796.]
The loftiest object of human thought is to discover how far the
material universe is en expression of supreme unity, of rhythmic
activity, and of rational order. But for this, the mind must take a
range that transcends, without limit, all physical sequences, laws,
phenomena. Taking the broad basis of our consciousness and reasoning
faculties, we must _relate_ sequences, _interpret_ phenomena, and,
however remotely and imperfectly, endeavour to account for ‘laws.’ But
in doing this we must remember that we have pushed our way beyond
the last outpost of _physical_ research. We have passed beyond the
region where ‘quod erat demonstrandum’ is used. We have threaded our
mental path into solitudes where no electrometer will be responsive, no
spectroscope analytical, no lens revealing. We have come to the edge
of all that we _know_ and can _demonstrate_; and then, impelled by the
moral and rational light within us, we judge and balance all that we
know, and all that we are, and we reach, not a demonstration, for that
cannot be, but a conviction, a moral and intellectual certainty, of
the being of a primordial cause, which is second, in its firmness and
security, to nothing within the area of mind.
Since the time of Newton and Leibnitz the laws of ordinary dynamics
have been settled; but between dynamics, and the so-called
‘imponderable forces,’ by which it was assumed that an explanation was
furnished of heat, chemical action, electricity, magnetism and the
rest, there was a great gulf. That has been bridged over by a common
measure of value, giving rise to a general dynamic law of all the
forces of the universe. This is known as the ‘Conservation of Energy.’
It demonstrates, with more or less completeness, that all physical
phenomena are the different appearances resulting from different
groupings of matter by force. Both matter and force are eternally
changeless in quantity. They can be neither diminished nor increased,
neither created nor destroyed. The ‘modes of motion’ that produce the
varied phenomena are interchangeable. Light may become heat, heat
may become electricity; but there is no loss. When motion seems to
disappear, it is only transferred into another mode. The phenomena
of light, heat, electricity, result from changes wrought in matter
by motion. Every ray of sunshine, for instance, is an interwoven
group of powerful energies. Whence do they come? From changes in the
matter of the sun. For every measure of sunshine received by the
earth an equivalent measure of solar matter has been changed. Through
the sunbeam the varied forms of energy produced in the sun have been
received, and stored up on this earth. For incalculable centuries
the world has been clothed with abundant vegetation. This will only
grow in sunlight. The energies in the sunbeam act on living matter,
as on a spore or a seed, causing it to grow. That is to say, under
the influence of vital action, the forces of the sunbeam are changed
into wood. A section from a pine mast, or an oak trunk, stands for
a measurable quantity of sunshine. But coal is wood; forests buried
and carbonized. Coal then has, as it were, fixed the energies of the
sunbeams that poured upon the earth millions of years ago. Put coal
where it will be in contact with oxygen and heat, and what follows?
You get heat, light, chemical action; that is to say, the locked-up
energies of the sunbeams of a measureless past are set free.
Here then, all the activity of the universe, every phenomenon, and
every vibration of every atom, from the centre to the margin of the
immeasurable whole, is directly related to a unity of primal power.
Nothing has happened to-day in the remotest or nearest part of
creation, but was linked in an unbroken chain to the first throb that
thrilled the incipient universe in the mystery of ‘the beginning.’
Nothing is isolated through all duration and all space. Because,
everywhere and always, the resulting phenomena are self-acting and
rhythmic to our mode of research, shall we say that they have no cause,
or that they have determined their own condition? because we find that
the self-adjustments and sublimity of Nature, transcend infinitely all
the conceptions of earlier generations, will it be logical to argue,
that therefore Nature may be the more readily explained as causeless
and devoid of mind? that, being self-adjusting and self-acting, it
needed no cause? or shall we not the rather realize that this unbroken
line of physical continuity and interaction through all duration to
‘the beginning’ brings us _there_, face to face, with the inscrutable
Power, by which that unchanging unity and continuity of purposeful
action was caused?
Every phenomenon is motion; motion can only begin in force. Within the
range of human experience and thought, as it has been long without
answer contended, there is no force known but _will_: could any other
cause than the volition of a mind, have primarily directed force to
affect matter so as to produce, for ever, the infinite harmonies and
self-adjusting interactions of this vast Universe?
The very intellect, which finds so noble a vocation in the researches
of science, and which is so brilliantly employed in penetrating into,
and opening up, the _intelligibility_ of the physical universe; and
by that means demonstrating the _congruousness_ of the cosmos; is the
same intellect that is conscious of _itself_, and of its _power_;
which knows itself as possessed of causative capacity; and which
has absolutely no other source of knowledge concerning power, save
that which arises in itself. The very rationality of the Creation,
in our deepest analysis and broadest survey of it, leads the mind,
by the conditions inseverable from its reasoning faculties, to see
in its perfect relations the inevitable congruity of an intelligent
cause. And all this, be it observed, results _after_ science has
disclosed the splendid treasures of its knowledge, the beauty and
indisputable accuracy of its methods, and the new senses with which
it has endowed itself by its instruments. Yes; the mind goes out to
this conclusion, not defiant of science, but gratefully paying toll to
it for an infinitely enlightening and ennobling passage through the
marvels of phenomena, and the splendour of Nature’s methods, right
to the very margin, beyond which science herself declares she cannot
go; and although the physicist may declare he does not need it, and
the mathematician that he can dispense with it, although all their
immediate problems can be worked without it, yet the mind goes forth
on the wings of its rational powers, its moral consciousness, its
judgment; and leaving the margin of matter, it seeks audience, as it
were, with the very mystery that enshrouds the universe; and it rises
to the conviction that its quest has not been vain; it has realized,
dimly, imperfectly, and, as it were, faint with awe, the necessity of
the presence and action of Eternal Mind.
No search into the relations of matter and motion can ever affect our
consciousness of causality. We cannot be conscious of our own being
without being simultaneously conscious that whatever begins to be, must
have a cause, a reason, for its being. The very validity of our mental
acts is imperilled, if the congruity of the principle of causality
be doubted. Permit an illustration: a minute and beautiful crystal
of unknown nature is before us. By a mental necessity we know—we
cannot free ourselves from the conviction—that this crystal occupied a
measurable time to become a crystal, and that being such, it occupies
a measurable portion of space. May we rely on this fundamental act of
mind? Is it truth? If not, there is not a mental act that ever was,
or ever can be, veritable. But if it be true, then, since for man to
produce a physical effect involves (1) the consciousness of _power_ to
do it, and (2) the volitional exercise of that power; and since the
human mind is absolutely without a trace of knowledge of any other
way in which power can be exercised, in earth or heaven; is not the
insistence of reason that there must be a cause for cosmic phenomena, a
mental act of the _same order_ as that which insists on time and space
as inseverable factors in the origin and existence of a crystal?
Causality in its mere mechanical relations may be considered for
convenience, and translated as, ‘mechanical law:’ contemplated in its
relation to a living organism, we may render it by such an expression
as a ‘law of life’. But carry causality to its spring, trace it back to
consciousness and thought, and it admits of no disguise; it is power,
it is volition; there is no halting in its phrase; it is, ‘I can,’ ‘I
will.’
Herbert Spencer himself affirms, ‘The force by which we ourselves
produce changes, and which serves to symbolize the causes of changes in
general, is the final disclosure of analysis.’[3] ‘I can,’ ‘I am able,’
is a knowledge that emerges within us simultaneously with ‘I am.’ It
involves a consciousness of power, which is the essence of causality.
We possess it, in precisely the same way as we possess ourselves, or
our thoughts. Our knowledge of power is not even derived from effort
or resistance. We know as clearly what we mean by ‘I am able,’ as we
do when we affirm ‘I am here.’ Being able, and _knowing_ we are able,
are absolutely different. A telephone is mechanically able to transmit
vocal sounds and language. But how different to man, who is not only
able, but knows that he is able. This knowledge of our power to act is
the immutable foundation of our belief in causation.
[Footnote 3: _First Principles_, §50, pp. 169, 170.]
We may make two separate affirmations: as, for example, that ‘the
thermometer is 6° F. below zero,’ and that ‘water has become solid;’
or, again, we may state, ‘my fingers rest upon the key-board of an
organ,’ and ‘now they move, and a symphony of Beethoven’s is floating
in the air.’ These are ‘sequences;’ but is that enough? No. Instantly
the mental act that _interprets_ them is supplied. In both cases, our
consciousness and reason are compelled to demand the exercise of power,
by means of which one event succeeds the other. We are absolutely
and irresistibly certain, in the latter case, that it must be so. A
direct act of volition changed the fingers from rest into rhythmic
motion, causing the organ to pour out music; and, by an intellectual
necessity, we see that a diminished temperature, and frozen water, are
not sequences merely; they must be related: and this conviction is
not changed, though, by means of research, we find their sequential
relation to be the result of the continuity of prior effects; we still
retain the unaltered judgment, that, if we go back far enough, we must
be in the presence of a cause. The mind cannot dispense with the link
of power uniting sequences.
Then, if by long trains of sequential effects and secondary causes we
are led up, not by demonstration, but by irresistible moral conviction,
to a Primordial Power, a source of all, what is such creative cause?
Is it inevitably God? Is the universe, as we know it, infinite? Who
dare say? Though we know that the vast looming firmament, in which
the ‘milky way’ stretches its depths and winds its awful amplitudes,
is beyond all finite power to follow; yet, it may be but a complex
particle in a universe of universes, stretching on, and for ever on,
over the bourneless immensity of the unknown.
If that be so, we can make no useful inference from our finite
universe. We could infer only a finite creator from a finite cosmos.
To be finite is to be infinitely less than infinite; and such a
being could not be the ineffable majesty of mind and might, which we
apprehend, but cannot comprehend, as the Creator.
If such a limited power could be conceived, because it is finite, it
of necessity began to be; and therefore its very existence was of
necessity caused. We seek _its_ cause, as we do that of all other
secondary causes; until at last we reach the only position in which
there is mental rest, an infinite cause of all causes, the primordial
and ultimate reality of all being.
Concerning even it, the question has arisen, Must not it also have been
caused? Is not this question a paradox? It is of finite being only that
we can affirm the necessity for causation. What is finite begins to be;
what begins to be, must have been caused to be. But if our moral and
reasoning faculties bring us at last, face to face, with an inscrutable
and infinite primal cause, is there a mental process exercised by
us that demands that such a being must have had a cause? Experiment
cannot suggest it, for this is neither finite, nor a phenomenon; and
can neither be observed nor analyzed; research in it is infinitely
impossible; and of experience there can be none. Science is without
function in presence of a primal cause. It is powerless, by virtue of
its knowledge or its methods, to affirm or to deny an infinite and
eternal self-existence. And yet such is not only possible to thought,
but has congruity with all the faculties of reason. The principle of
causality involves merely that every _finite_ existence must have had a
cause for its being; that what is born and dies, what arises and ceases
to be, what began in time and flows on in continuous mutation, had an
originator. But our consciousness of causality does not and cannot
include or apply to an infinite and unsearchable cause of all. We may
not with our finite plummet seek to measure the depths of the Infinite,
nor with our limited grasp hope to enfold the All. To say nothing of
its cause, what do we _know_ of even the universe itself? We write and
talk freely of millions of miles, and in a moment reverse the process
and write or speak of millionths of a grain or of an inch; we think of
tens of thousandths of a second, of millions of years, and duration
that is without beginning and without end. Imagination cannot picture
these things, though thought can possess them. They involve the two
great mysteries ever present to mind, space and time.
Space includes within itself all that can be the subject of our
knowledge, yet it is not a phenomenon, not an entity, not an object of
sensation. It is a pure abstraction. No space is not thinkable. By no
effort of mind can we think of space as non-existent at any period in
infinite duration. So far as we can see, without objects with their
dimensional relations, space could not be a concept. The contents of
space, out of which the mind abstracts space, are the source from
whence our concept, space, emerges. An infinite void is mentally
nothing; an intellect like man’s, that had never realized extension in
the dimensions of material bodies, could not present it in thought, any
more than it can conceive correctly the qualities of a fourth dimension.
In like manner time is not a thing, an entity, to be accounted for as a
creation, a thing caused; it is a consequence of existences; duration
measured by sequences. If there were no succession of events, there
would be no time. Space and time are mental abstractions, respectively,
of the relations of dimensions and duration.
But with what mystery and majesty, with what proportions and powers,
with what mass and movement is space full! and of what sequences and
phenomena has time been the unconscious recorder! It is into these
that the mind of man intently peers; it is across the bourneless area
of uncharted space that he would carry his mental vision; it is into
all the vicissitudes that have arisen, since the succession of cosmic
phenomena marked off a section of duration, that the mind of man is
ever struggling to thread its way; and if possible, to find the meaning
and origin of it all.
That which is the most impressive outcome of all modern physical
investigation, is the apparent mechanical automatism of all cosmic
sequences and phenomena within our reach. As a result, the most
powerful philosophies are directed to an endeavour to establish a
mechanical—that is, a mindless or purposeless—_origin_ of the universe.
But granted a universe, fully understood, exhaustively known, purely
mechanical in all its _present_ activities; even this, surely, only
makes more absolute the certainty that the very conditions of its
present existence, involved at its beginning, a more majestic design
than all the thinkers of the past had ever dreamed.
There is no alternative; either chance, or mental purpose, gave primal
origin to all that is. Nothing within the reach of intellect could
express the infinite improbability of the first suggestion. That _one_
vast harmony, one _perfect_ method, should fall out by chance, through
the operation of uncounted millenniums of ages, is almost inexpressibly
improbable; but that a system of harmonies, practically infinite in
number and measureless in extent, should all be locked together in
one vast uniting harmony, making all creation a chorus, to which all
its parts from the centre to the margin contribute their flowing and
concerted strains, without a discord to the unity of thought; to
say that _that_ arose by chance, sprang from fortuity, fell out by
accident, is surely to trifle with the fundamental principles of our
moral faculties and reasoning powers.
Hence, nothing but philosophical ruin can be the end of materialism
when enunciated in its grosser form. But our age is distinguished by
the existence of a brilliant philosophical materialism, which has
arrested, and is swaying, the deepest thought of our age, by the
opulence of its learning and resource, by the scientific accuracy and
insight of its abounding and perfect illustrations, and by the subtile,
but stately method and breadth of its generalizations; but beyond all,
by the fact that its world-famed author, Mr. Herbert Spencer, repels,
with warmth, persistence, and manifest integrity, the very suspicion of
‘materialism’!
Yet we are compelled to ask, of what value, of what real service,
are all the ideal and spiritual assumptions of his splendid and
fascinating philosophy? It acknowledges a _something_ beyond the
matter and the mechanism that fills the amplitudes of space; it even
designates this something a ‘power,’ But that power is declared, for
ever and infinitely, beyond the circumference of knowledge: it is the
‘absolute,’ the ‘unknowable;’ it can take no part, and become no agent
in, no factor of, any philosophy of the origin of the universe which we
construct. On the very terms of the philosophy itself, all in heaven
and earth, through all the past and all the future, can be accounted
for and explained without it. If the admission into its phraseology
of the existence of a ‘power,’ which is a name only, be taken as
sufficient reason, then this philosophy is not materialistic. But if it
be remembered that this ‘power’ is absolutely without function in this
philosophy of the construction of the universe,—if it be true to its
formula,—and that only matter and motion are asked for, its ultimate
materialism is a certainty, and, from its very subtilty, a peril.
To philosophical Theism the coarser Materialism can bring no lasting
danger. It ignores too much, and assumes too much; and treats with a
too manifest disdain the fundamental basis of our reasoning faculties.
It has many brilliant exponents; but foremost amongst them is Haeckel
of Jena, a man of large scientific attainments, a biologist of the
highest repute, and possessed of the keenest acumen. But these are not
the only, nor the essential factors, of a philosophic mind.
He has no hesitancy, no scruple. A Creator for him is a conception
for scorn, and he pours unceasing contempt upon the thought that he
or any of us are more than material organisms, alive for our little
day and then dead for ever. There is a future only for the race. The
universe is declared to be without purpose; it is moving matter, which,
by self-operation through immeasurable duration, has issued in laws
that exist without reason, and devoid of an originator, act, with the
deafness of the rock and the unconsciousness of the sea; producing
in the realm of life the weaker and the stronger, but only for that
unceasing war in which the stronger win.
That for man there is nothing nobler, nothing higher, than to study
the grinding laws which compel him; which laws are the summaries of
natural methods which began in nothing, and have been for ever vacant
of thought or purpose.
We need have no anxiety concerning the influence of such a scheme; from
its own incoherence it enfolds its intellectual death-warrant in its
very form.
But the philosophy of Spencer is of another order. It is a philosophy
that scorns the idealism of Berkeley, and that with the fervour of
conviction, indignantly repudiates ‘Materialism.’ He contends for
the equal and independent reality of self and not-self, of subject
and object, of mind and matter. He affirms that the ‘co-existence of
subject and object is a deliverance of consciousness.... and is a
truth transcending all others in certainty.’[4] Yet, in the progress
of the philosophy, we discover that from matter in motion, and nothing
else, the whole universe is supposed to arise; life emerges; and mind,
in its most transcendent forms comes forth. And it is this fallacy
pervading the philosophy that is the essence of its power. Repudiating
‘Materialism’ as philosophically untenable, it yet exists as a
philosophy to endeavour to show that mind is an outcome of matter.
[Footnote 4: _Principles of Psychology_, vol. i. p. 209.]
Look at the problem it sets for solution. ‘Philosophy,’ says Spencer,
‘is _completely unified_ knowledge;’ and adds, ‘... a philosophy stands
self-convicted of inadequacy, if it does not formulate the whole
series of changes passed through by every existence.... If it begins
its explanations with existences that already have concrete forms ...
then manifestly they had preceding histories ... of which no account
is given. And as such preceding ... histories are subjects of possible
knowledge, a philosophy which says nothing about them falls short of
the required unification.’[5]
Then, on the very terms of the philosophy, we are to contemplate
‘the beginning’ with absolutely nothing anterior or unaccounted for.
There must be no ‘concrete forms,’ no ‘preceding histories,’ to be
encountered.
Now observe, it is clearly recognised in this philosophy that the
ultimate nature of all that constitutes the universe is infinitely
beyond the reach of the human mind; that in their final nature time,
space, matter, motion, rest, the transfer of motion, the exercise of
force, the nature and operation of consciousness and thought, are all
equally, that is, infinitely, inscrutable. Knowledge is inexorably
limited to, and co-extensive with, phenomena; yet from these phenomena
alone we are to obtain exhaustive accounts of their own origin and
existence, in spite of the admitted inscrutable mysteries of which they
are the manifestations.
[Footnote 5: _First Principles_, pp. 541-42.]
If we can obtain so complete a knowledge of matter and motion, by a
scientific study of them, as will enable us, with that knowledge alone,
to explain their origin and account for the sequences they involve,
then there is no more mystery. There are no ‘ultimates’ to explain.
Our knowledge covers all that is, in space and time. The ‘Absolute’
itself is a meaningless superfluity, and the mysterious ‘power’ that is
philosophically invoked can have no true place, for all is explicable
without it.
A beginning is inevitable to a philosophy of material evolution. Then
‘in the beginning’ what? How in the zero, in which there were no
‘concrete forms’ and no ‘preceding histories,’ did the first movement
towards the plenished arch of heaven and the fruitful earth arise?
Concentration and diffusion, it is affirmed, are universally observed
physical processes. The latest science in tracing back the genealogies
of various objects finds that ‘their components were once in diffused
states, and, pursuing their histories forwards, finds diffused states
will be again assumed by them.’[6] Clearly, then, ‘matter’ is assumed
to exist at the ‘beginning.’ It certainly _may_ have had a ‘preceding
history;’ and to ignore this is to come, at the outset, perilously near
to a philosophy ‘that stands self-convicted of inadequacy.’
[Footnote 6: _First Principles_, p. 280.]
A diffused state of matter is, it thus appears, the earliest point of
the beginning that physical evolution can descry. This is the nebular
hypothesis of Laplace; without doubt a majestic theory, but a theory
still. Science has welcomed it to work with; and it explains, or aids
in the interpretation of, much; but, that it should be taken so for
granted as to be considered a demonstrated or even undisputed and
established fact of modern science, we may be permitted to doubt; and
it must have had a ‘preceding history.’ It takes us to a point in
measureless past duration, where all that is now concrete matter is
assumed to have been in a gaseous state. It is not even contended that
it is an original condition. Such an almost infinite mass of nebulous
matter must have been due, if existent, to heat, and to heat of an
intensity that defies our range of conception.
But whence did such heat come? ‘Heat’ is demonstrated to us now as
a rhythmic ‘mode of motion;’ one of the phenomena of nature to be
accounted for. Verily, heat is a phenomenon with a ‘preceding history,’
and yet at the outset its presence is assumed in the cosmic cloud.
But, further complexity still, how does heat act in this primordial
nebula? If heat is a ‘mode of motion,’ by what were the heat vibrations
wrought? You must have _then_, for the phenomenon of heat, what is
indispensable to the physical theory of it now:—the inconceivable but
indispensable ether of modern physics. But how came the ether in, and
beyond, the cosmic cloud? It is an ‘existence,’ manifestly; more, it
is ‘matter;’ but matter that transcends the range of the action of
gravity; it is without weight, and differentiated from all matter that
we know in a manner that thought cannot follow.
How did this ‘existence’ pass from the imperceptible to the
perceptible? and by its own requirement should not a complete
philosophy furnish its past history?
Let us come more closely into contact with the actual formula of this
philosophy. ‘Evolution,’ says Spencer, ‘is an integration of matter
and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes
from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent
heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a
parallel transformation.’[7]
Here, then, are the factors of the potential universe. By definition
they are the sole structural essentials. Beyond them nothing should
be asked, required, or assumed. What are these irreducible factors of
the formula? ‘Matter’ and ‘motion.’ But we have clearly seen that we
are cognizant of matter as such only by its ‘modes of motion’. It is
_these_ for which evolution has to account. ‘Matter’ denuded of the
qualities by which we now are cognizant of it, can be no other than
dimensions without qualities, spatial presence undiscoverable by sense.
On the other hand, pure motion, motion by itself, is impossible to
thought. Motion is only known as an affection of matter. ‘It becomes
manifest,’ says Spencer, ‘that our experience of _force_ is that out
of which our idea of matter is built’.[8] But, in the terms of the
formula, force can be nothing but matter affected by motion. What,
then, was this primary matter on which motion first acted, and before
motion had by various ‘modes’ produced in it a single quality? No
answer is possible; but, nevertheless, as the philosophy unfolds itself
we find that ‘we need not refrain ... from dealing with matter as made
up of extended and resistant atoms,’[9] and henceforth we are led to
consider the cosmic nebula as not only homogeneous, but as being, in
its homogeneity, atomic.
[Footnote 7: _First Principles_, p. 396.]
[Footnote 8: _First Principles_, p. 167.]
[Footnote 9: _First Principles_, p. 176.]
No lover of physical and chemical science can do other than profoundly
admire the atomic theory of modern physics. But there is no sound
physicist or chemist but is sufficiently alive to its difficulties
to know that in every form in which it has been presented, it is, to
say no more, tentative and hypothetic. In Mr. Spencer’s philosophy it
becomes a fundamental fact of the beginning. But the existence of atoms
being granted, how did they arise? ‘If you ask the materialist,’ says
Professor Tyndall, ‘whence is this matter ... who or what divided it
into molecules ... he has no answer.’[10] So that here, in spite of the
claim made, no philosophy can be ‘complete;’ and even the doctrine of
an eternally automatic evolution is philosophically inadequate.
But these atoms of the primordial haze are ‘resistant;’ such a quality
can only result from a special affection of matter by motion; whence
came or how arose such an affection of matter? Its existence in the
atoms of the nebula inevitably implies ‘preceding history,’ but it is
not given; and this pregnant atomic haze is, so far as we can see,
without colour, without chemical affinity or reaction, without light,
electricity, or magnetism, and devoid of all cohesion.
Clearly, these are not the atoms of the chemical elements known to us.
They are not the atoms of Dalton nor of Clark Maxwell. The atoms of the
cosmic mist are, by the very terms of the formula, naked of quality;
and, by the limiting conditions of the definition of the cloud as
homogeneous, are, throughout all the abysms of space, alike in size, in
shape, and in motions. Equal extensions of space moving at equal rates.
[Footnote 10: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. p. 396.]
By these conditions, then, it is manifest that primordial matter is
in itself infinitely powerless and inert. Motion can affect it; but
can there be motion of any _new_ kind originated without a power to
cause it? If that can be, the fundamental acts of human reason are
untrustworthy; and man is incapable of knowledge or deduction, which
is absurd. Then what was the power that determined new motions in the
primordial homogeneous matter?
It could not by any demand in the formula be even gravity, if that were
competent. Modern thought and knowledge cannot allow gravitation to
be a property of matter. Ether is matter, but it does not gravitate.
Gravity is therefore an occult affection of matter by motion, that has
a history ‘to be accounted for.’
In this almost infinite primal nebula, a certain class of motion is
assumed. How it originated is unexplained. But what is the atomic
motion of this primal homogeneous matter? From the terms given it
must be as I have said. Motion of absolute likeness throughout all
the profounds of space it filled; equalized motion in every atom;
no difference of rate; no difference of mode. The motion of one
atom is identic with the motion of all. It could never be lost; it
could never increase; it could never alter. It is homogeneous, and
_therefore_ changeless—balanced for ever—in itself. Says Mr. Spencer:
‘Any finite mass of diffused matter, even though vast enough to form
our whole sidereal system,’ if it were of ‘absolute sphericity,
absolute uniformity of composition, and absolute symmetry of relation
to all forces external to it,’[11] would be homogeneous and eternally
incapable of change.
[Footnote 11: _First Principles_, p. 407.]
And that ‘homogeneity’ is the very condition laid down for the
beginning, from which mechanical evolution is to educe the universe.
In the Spencerian formula there is no qualification of the term
homogeneous. It postulates ‘an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity,’
that is, an indefinite cloud, with balanced motion in all its atoms
which neither attracts nor repels, and is in itself infinitely
incapable of change.
Now, shall we not ask _how_ the first pulse, that caused the
stupendously vast homogeneity to throb into the heterogeneous, arose?
whence did it come? Infinite incapacity could not, unless reason
be mendacious, render _itself_ capable. Then how came that _first_
movement that, it is argued, ended in revolving systems, a bountiful
earth, the throat of the nightingale, and the tragedy of Macbeth!
There is no answer. This philosophy, to get the first progressive
movement in its balanced nebula, bids its formula stand aside, that
it may advance. At a critical moment it changes the very meaning of
the homogeneous. ‘The condition of homogeneity is a condition of
unstable equilibrium!’[12] ‘The phrase ... is one used in mechanics to
express a balance of forces of such kind that the interference of any
further force, however minute, will destroy the arrangement previously
subsisting, and bring about a totally different arrangement.’[13]
[Footnote 12: _First Principles_, p. 401.]
[Footnote 13: _Ibid._ p. 401-402.]
Note, then, the homogeneous cosmic cloud is, by the terms given, in
equilibrium. But some ‘further force,’ some small influence _outside_
itself, acts upon it, and it breaks up.
But what is the _outside_ influence? What is this ‘further force,’
and from whence? We have a cloud composed of atoms in balanced
motion—nothing more. Outside influence, ‘further force,’ is an
intrusion. It has no right there. It has not on the wedding garment of
the formula.
Surely an outside influence must be caused? If it involved no more
energy than is wielded by a may-fly’s wing, how came it there? It is
as easy to admit the _self-origination_ of a divinity of power, as the
_self-creation_ of power to lift a grain. It is not in the philosophy;
‘outside influence’ has no credentials, and the admission of inability
to evolve the universe without it, is an admission that the mechanical
philosophy fails at the outset. Nor can it serve the emergency to
invoke ‘force.’
A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the
Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the
Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force _does_, but
it can no more find what force _is_, than what an infinite mind is.
Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but
its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science.
It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern
chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the
beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. Let us remember this, while for
the purposes of argument we allow it. There may have been secured,
added, and perhaps altered, motion by the surreptitious ‘outside
influence;’ but it can be nothing more. The atoms are still without
property, and are only affected by motion. Have we any _experience_
to induce us to believe that atoms without property, even affected
by thermal vibrations and pushed by gravity, will build themselves
up into the seventy ‘elements’ of chemistry with their specific and
inalienable qualities? That, through vibrations of heat and pushings
of gravity, they could become hydrogen and mercury, carbon and gold,
chlorine and phosphorus! And these properties being thus acquired, by
their sheer interactions that all the chemistry, the physics, and the
_order_ of all the area of space within the galaxy arose? This is what
the formula of the most brilliant philosophy of any age would lead us
to infer.
In this relation I do not forget the recent and splendid service done
by Mr. Crooks to the philosophical side of chemistry in the record of
his researches on ‘The Genesis of the Elements.’ It is a most subtile
and exquisite means of endeavouring to deduce the _method_, the ‘_law_’
according to which what we know as the ‘chemical elements’ were built
up. He obtains indications of a primitive element—a something out of
which the elements were evolved. He calls it _protyle_ or first stuff,
and from its presence he concludes that the elements, as we know them,
‘are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance,
or been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been
evolved from simpler matter—or perhaps indeed from one sole kind of
matter.’[14]
[Footnote 14: Reprint of a Lecture at the Royal Institution by Mr.
Crooks, p. 2.]
But this reduction of matter, as we know it, to a simpler but still
highly differentiated condition, only causes reason the more earnestly
to demand how the rhythmic and complex method, which we express by the
word ‘law,’ came into operation, and was established for ever.
The ‘protyle’ is infinitely more complex than the atoms of the
homogeneous nebula. It makes no philosophical difference whether the
ultimate atoms of the bodies known as elementary are all alike, or in
each instance special. In either case there is infinitely more in the
matter they severally make, than can be deduced from motion affecting
the primitive atoms.
But not only have we by the formula and constructive method of this
philosophy to obtain protyle from the mere effects of motion on
primitive atoms; but, by the same means alone, we have to change
protyle into the seventy ‘elements;’ above all, without an added factor
or a change in the method, we have to rise to life!
Let us reflect. By life in this relation is meant that which lives, an
organism endowed with life’s properties. Are these properties unique?
Or is there some point of fluxion where the properties of life at their
minima arise in the activities of not-life at some undiscovered maxima?
A point at which some occult molecular complexities arise, changing
matter dead into matter living?
The answer must come, not through our abstract logic, but from our
laboratories.
Life, it is well known, has its phenomena inherent in, and strictly
confined to, a highly complex compound, with fixed chemical
constituents. This compound, in its living state, is known as
protoplasm. It is clear, colourless, and, to our finest optical
resources, devoid of discoverable structure. There is not a living
thing on earth but possesses its life in protoplasm, from a microscopic
fungus to man.
To depict the properties of life in irreducible simplicity, take one
of the lowliest instances within the present range of science. Let
it be one of the exquisitely minute, almost infinitely prolific,
and universally diffused living forms that set up and carry on
putrefaction. The lesser of them may, when considered as solid specks,
vary from the fifty thousand millionth of a cubic inch to the twenty
billionth of a cubic inch. I select one that is oval in shape. It moves
with the agility of the grayling and the grace of a swallow, the motion
resulting from the rhythmic action of two motile fibres.
This free and self-originating action is its first vital quality.
Its mission as an organism, is to break up and set free the chemical
elements that had been locked up in dead organic compounds. Its own
substance wears out by this and other means; and it has the power to
renovate the waste from the dead decomposition in which it lives;
constructing, in the laboratory of its protoplasm, new living matter.
This is the second characteristic of that alone which lives. By
it, living matter is _sui generis_. Every instant, and at the same
temperature, this inconceivably minute speck, without discoverable
structure, effects analyses and complicated syntheses which either
baffle all the synthetic chemistry of man, or else, where he is able to
accomplish the simplest of the organic syntheses, it is by processes
and at temperatures that make all life impossible.
But more, this vital and inconceivably minute speck multiplies with
astounding rapidity in two ways; by the first and common process, in
the course of a minute and a half the entire body is divided into two
precisely similar bodies, each one being perfect; almost immediately
these again divide, and so on in geometric ratio through all the
populated fluid; the rapidity of this intense and wonderful vital
action transcending all thought. By this process alone a single form
may in three hours give rise to a population of organisms as great as
the human population of the globe.
But this is not all; at certain stages of the organism self-division
ceases. The final divisions result in strikingly modified forms of the
organism; these approach each other and melt together. They are then
shining globules without action, but at the end of a given time they
open, and pour out a continuous cloud of minutest spore or ova, which
are as countless as the sands; and from these arise again another host
of the organisms, which pass again through all the mystery and marvel
of this vital cycle.
And this is the third of the qualities that make what lives absolutely
unique amidst the things of earth.
This is life—whether vegetable or animal none can determine—in the
simplest form in which it can be known; life that is possessed only of
the irreducible properties which are inalienable, and which distinguish
it for ever and everywhere from what is not-life.
It is true that the philosopher, by the common consent of mind,
occupies the throne of intellect; but it is not, for all that, to
the esoteric philosopher, not to the deep mental seer, who girdles
all space, all duration, all phenomena with his thought, that nature
reveals her latest, her subtlest, her profoundest secrets. It is to
the patient student—nature’s loving learner, whose eye and ear are
trained to read her faintest writing and catch her lowest whisper—that
her deepest truths in all their strength and immediate bearing are
disclosed. Yet the fates of philosophies are determined by these.
Then what is the testimony of students and searchers as to the mode in
which life takes its origin to-day? Does life originate _in_ life? or
do we find that in our laboratories, and in the observed processes of
nature _now_, the not-living can be, without the intervention of living
things, changed into that which lives?
Biology, as a science, answers ‘no.’ Says the greatest master of
all the facts, Professor Huxley: ‘The properties of living matter
distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and,’ he
continues, ‘the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no
link between the living and the not-living.’[15]
Then what lives is, in its qualities, utterly unlike—sharply marked off
from—what is not living. Yet the elements that make up the living stuff
are the most common on the earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen:
we know them each and all; we know their properties and reactions on
each other, and on all the minor elements of the living matter; but
that knowledge only complicates the nature of the problem. The mystery
of life is, not that any occult elements compose the matter in which
it dwells; the mystery of life consists solely in the question, _how_
the elements that make up protoplasm can be so combined, as, by their
combination, to acquire the splendid and solitary properties of that
which lives.
Manifestly, then, there was a time in the past history of the globe,
when its matter was without life, and therefore there must have been a
time, perhaps at a point of intense activity in the not-living matter
of the globe, when it became endowed with the properties of life.
[Footnote 15: _Ency. Brit._ art. ‘Biology,’ vol. iii. p. 679.]
By what agency that transcendent upward movement was wrought, science
claims no vocation to inquire. But let the earth, and air, and sea,
with all their teeming denizens, attest,—that power was competent.
Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the
properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will
vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to
direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living
matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid
geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately
measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion?
All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions.
Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster
molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies
defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not
life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement;
it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of
matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind _ad libitum_.
And yet Mr. Spencer begins by taking what no mental manipulation of
the naked formula of his philosophy could provide, the ‘elements’ of
our present chemistry; and by imagining higher and higher complexities
of atomic structure a complicated molecule is reached; and then, by a
change in name, which is justified by no change in the facts, he calls
the complex substance organic matter; and by simply continuing this
process, thinks he sees it become living.[16]
[Footnote 16: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 481.]
The justification of all this is the affirmation ‘that organic matter
was not produced all at once,’ and that there is in the laboratory
of the chemist ‘what we may literally call artificial evolution.’
Mr. Spencer instances a laboratory product of what is counted a
sufficiently typical organic compound.[17] But to obtain it the chemist
has to employ no less than twenty distinct chemical and physical
processes, involving many varying temperatures, from a red heat to the
intensity of the electric arc, and between thirty and forty reagents
and their products, are employed in the process. Compare this with the
silent and impenetrable simplicity of the chemistry of life, and vivid
and striking is the contrast. And yet when this product of the chemist
lies before you, produced by the tremendous relative labours of the
laboratory, it is as far off from dead white of egg, to say nothing
of living protoplasm, as the qualities of a flint pebble are from the
qualities of the diamond.
[Footnote 17: The Butyrate of dimethylamin.]
The _facts_ of nature—surely our safest guide—declare that the
transition from not-life to life is abrupt. The break is absolute and
clear. A ‘complex molecule’ is a molecule of atoms in motion,—nothing
more. More atoms and more motion cannot, by themselves, as Mr. Spencer
would teach, make it ‘organic;’ much less can any further addition of
atoms and tremors make it live. It is in vain for Haeckel to call the
simplest moneron that lives ‘primeval slime,’ or to call numbers of
them ‘individualized lumps of albumen.’ It is a travesty. Under the
same lens place ‘a lump of albumen’ and the lowest _living_ infusorian,
and a voiceless contradiction of Haeckel’s phrase which none can ever
question is indubitably given. The infusorian lives; the albumen is
dead. The infusorian constructs the vital matter of its own body from
the heterogeneous matter in which it lives; the albumen decomposes
as it lies there. The infusorian has soon multiplied by millions,
while the albumen disappears by decadence. To write of living monera
as ‘albumen,’ or of ‘complex molecules’ with nothing more than their
complexity, as _living_, is to contradict, in the name, the essential
and distinguishing qualities of both.
This impropriety may be yet more manifest by another quotation from
Haeckel. His aim is to endeavour by the use of vague language to
reduce the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living,
and he writes of the animal _ovum_, as ‘a little lump of albumen in
which another albuminous body is enclosed—the nucleus.’ What profound
trifling is this! Think of, say a human ovum, an invisible particle
less than the hundredth of an inch in diameter; it _lives_; and there
lies coiled up in the mystery of its minuteness all the potentiality
of the highest manhood; all the possible power of Socrates, or Homer,
or Goethe. Is that simply ‘a lump of albumen’? Not unless a man can
be justly described as such, by the bottles of chemical substances to
which his body can be reduced.
Even Mr. Spencer pleads that ‘the lowest living things are not,
properly speaking, organisms at all, for they have no distinctions of
parts, no traces of organization.’ If it were true that our lenses
cannot reveal organization in the lowliest and smallest organisms, does
it follow that there _is_ none? Will Mr. Spencer risk the validity of
the doctrine of material atoms on the ability of our lenses to show the
atom? Surely not.
But the affirmation is not supported by facts. The splendid increase of
microscopical lens power during the past decade has not only enabled
us to see that there is complexity and structure in both the animal
and vegetable cell, which bisects by an elaborate process; but even
the minute nucleus of the minutest organisms, often not more than one
tenth part of the infinitesimal body itself, is now proved to undergo
profound structural changes, which precede all the great cyclic changes
of the organism as a whole. The nucleus is the centre, in fact, of all
the higher activities of the least and lowest infusoria; and is the
centre of most delicate but clearly demonstrable structural changes.[18]
[Footnote 18: _Jour. Roy. Micro. Soc._, President’s Address, 1886.]
We cannot reduce the mystery of life by treating contemptuously its
ultimate cells. They are as defiant of interpretation by our present
methods as the more complex structures they compose. The mystery of
life, _per se_, is as great and as deep, in a monad and a mildew, as
in a man. Every attempt to argue away the meaning of vital function
and property, on the basis of the organic simplicity of unicellular
organisms, is wholly fallacious. It is knowledge, not speculation,
which affirms that the least and lowest, as well as the largest and
most complex of living forms, are distinguished absolutely from all
other kinds of things. There is ‘no link’ between matter living
and matter without life. To attempt to build up ‘life’ by slow
increments of added complexity, in atomic or molecular structure, is a
philosophical ingenuity; but it expresses no natural truth within the
horizon of our knowledge. A higher number of primal, or even chemical
atoms, arranged in the most complex ratios, and affected by the most
rhythmic movements, are not the data from which to deduce a living
organism. And to affirm of the lowest living things that ‘they are not,
properly speaking, organisms at all,’[19] because the instruments used
at a given date did not reveal structure, is, at best, an _argumentum
a silentio_; while simultaneously it contradicts the facts of biology,
and assumes the whole point at issue.
[Footnote 19: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 482.]
On the other hand, there is not a single fact within the present range
of our knowledge that indicates, or even suggests, that the quarternary
compounds approximate, under any known conditions, to the state of
matter living.
As the sheets of this Lecture are passing through the press, Sir
Henry Roscoe, as President of the British Association, has delivered
a brilliant and essentially scientific address. On the subject of
chemistry none can speak with a voice more authoritative: and on this
very question he writes as follows: ‘But now the question may well be
put—Is any limit set to this synthetic power of the chemist? Although
the danger of dogmatizing as to the progress of science has already
been shown in too many instances, yet one cannot help feeling that the
barrier which exists between the organized and unorganized worlds is
one which the chemist sees no chance of breaking down. It is true that
there are those who profess to foresee that the day will arrive, when
the chemist, by a succession of constructive efforts, may pass beyond
albumen, and gather the elements of lifeless matter into a living
structure. Whatever may be said regarding this from other standpoints,
the chemist can only say that at present no such problem lies within
his province. Protoplasm, with which the simplest manifestations of
life are associated, is not a compound, but a structure built up of
compounds. The chemist may successfully synthesize any of its component
molecules, but he has no more reason to look forward to the synthetic
production of the structure than to imagine that the synthesis of
gallic acid leads to the artificial production of gall-nuts.’[20]
To assume, then, that by starting with atoms in equilibriated motions,
uncounted millenniums of ages ago, and that by adding atoms and groups
of atoms, with altered and re-altered motions as the ages roll away,
with the result that at last, with these factors and no others, we
shall get organism and life, is, surely, as fallacious as to explain
Millais’s picture of the Huguenots as having been brought about by a
skilful arrangement of palettes and brushes, easels and pigments.
Now let it be clearly recalled that Charles Darwin involved himself
in none of this philosophic ambiguity. To him life was more than a
complexity of elementary atoms affected by motion. It was something he
could not ‘explain.’ He postulated, therefore, the unexplained presence
of ‘primordial living germs,’ endowed with the properties, which,
experience teaches, are possessed by living matter to-day.
How, in the great past, mineral and gaseous matters on this earth were,
as a question of scientific method, so affected as to become living
matter is, to our present resources at least, impenetrable.
[Footnote 20: The _Times_ report of the address of Sir H. E. Roscoe
before the British Association at Manchester.—_Times_, September 1,
1887.]
‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower.—But _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.’
I merely contend that whatever were the means by which dead matter
first lived, they were higher, infinitely higher, than matter and
motion; they could only have been the resources of a _competent_ power.
I adopt gladly the language of Professor Huxley: ‘Belief, in the
scientific sense of the word,’ he says, ‘is a serious matter, and
needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence
of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which existing
forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense.
But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were
given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the
still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical
and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can
recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of
living protoplasm from not-living matter.’[21] So should I.
[Footnote 21: _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 239.]
By what other means than by the operation of natural ‘laws’ can we
think of the Infinite Power, extending through all extent, as the
fountain of all being, as acting? Every process of nature that ever
man has investigated throughout all space and all time, results from a
perfect and unalterable method which we call a ‘law’ of nature. Then
why should the primal process, by which not-living matter became,
once for all, living, be brought about by any other means than the
predetermined action of competent natural laws? Because life—living
matter—does not _now_ arise directly from that which is not-life,
does it follow that the creative method was discontinuous? that the
primordial creative laws willed into operation ‘in the beginning’ were
only competent to evolve the inorganic and not-living? and that at this
point a supernatural ‘interference,’ a ‘miraculous interposition,’ had
to be effected to endow what was dead with the transcendent properties
of life? The whole line of human experience, interpreted in the light
of modern scientific knowledge, compels the conclusion that the
‘primordial germs’ in which life on earth began, arose by the operation
of natural creative laws. That an energy, not now operating within the
area of our experience, was at work, when not-living matter progressed
into living structure, is certain. But there is nothing, within the
range of our knowledge, that permits the inference that it was brought
about by any other means, than such as, if we could have seen them in
operation, we should have called ‘laws’ of nature. This view surely
ennobles without limit our fatally humanized view of creative action.
‘The beginning’ was thus, by the unsearchable mystery of a creative
mind and will, the _potentiality_ of all the universe through all its
duration; which it only required ‘time’ in which the potential powers
and modes should operate, to make actual, in the universe we see.
As the highest mental powers and products of the most gifted of our
race, were originally potential in the primitive ovum from which each
took his origin, so, it is congruous, and capable of being grasped by
our thought although it cannot be portrayed by our imagination, that
the mind and will of the inscrutable Creator prevised and preordered
the whole series of conditions which, by their immutable action,
interaction, and rhythmic concurrence as ‘laws,’ evolved the universe.
So far as the finest and keenest researches in chemistry and physics
carry us, especially such researches as those of Crooks and Lockyer, it
is powerfully indicated that the creative method in the inorganic world
was a sublime progressive plan, a building up by law, of the dome of
heaven and the floor of earth, and all that goes with both. But behind
the matter and the motion, above the energies and the force, there
surely was, as we have been constrained to see, what we can only think
of as the conception, the purpose, and the will by which the evolving
order, marked in high, and higher sublimity, the upward and onward
movement of the ripening and uncounted ages.
But when the highest point of the inorganic, the not-living, was
reached, and a new factor had to appear in the world to crown some of
its matter with _life_ and all its wonders, what was it that ensued? If
‘law’ did not cease to act; if there were no break in the continuity
of evolution, and yet a factor of power, not now operating within
the range of our knowledge, was absolutely necessary to change the
not-living matter of the earth into matter that lived, how was it
brought about?
Our inability to reply, does not invalidate the facts on the one
hand, nor justify attempts at explanations that find no sanction in
experience and knowledge on the other.
Suggestion by analogy, feeble as it is, is the nearest approach that
we can make to the solution of what must, perhaps, remain for ever a
splendid mystery.
If creation be, then, the expression of the mind and will of a Creator,
uttered in method and issuing in phenomena, he must see the end from
the beginning: his resource is infinite. The human mathematician,
of the highest order, can devise, with all the adaptations and
prearrangements that are needed, an instrument or machine, which shall
continue for a number of motions, without necessary limit, according to
a primal law, but which by such prevised and preordered arrangements
would, suddenly, at the required point of time, undergo change, and
operate henceforth after a law entirely new.
An instrument has actually been made which was competent to effect the
solution of quadratic equations whose roots are real. One has also
been made capable of effecting the determination of the real roots of
any equation. It is perfectly conceivable that an instrument could be
made which should go on finding the real roots only, for a measured
time, and then by a prearranged and provided method should suddenly, by
the very laws and principles of its construction, so change, that for
another period, or for evermore, it should also determine the imaginary
roots.
Is it not conceivable that infinite resource, infinite wisdom, infinite
prevision and power could in a manner which this illustration only
suggests have caused the non-vital universe to become in some parts
vital? Could not infinite power, infinite wisdom, the originator of
all that we call material phenomena, have prevised and preordered, in
the impenetrable mystery of ‘the beginning,’ that the creative laws of
evolution for an inorganic world, should, as they brought about the
completion of their perfect purpose, have carried with them from that
‘beginning’ preordered potentialities, that should, by the primal
volition of the Creator, emerge, as an inevitable and orderly sequence,
into the operation of higher activities and new laws?
If that may not be, it is not a divine being that is in our thought.
But if that may be, then the self-acting laws of nature are
self-acting, as the products of eternal mind and will. Each self-acting
phenomenon is, to us, an embodied thought of God; emerging in matter
now, as a consequence of the sublimity and perfection of the methods
divinely willed ‘in the beginning.’
Let this illustration weigh for what it will; this at least is clear,
that the mechanical philosophy, whether or not it refuses to be called
‘material,’ has proved its formula incompetent. Atomic matter without
property, affected by motion, with persistent relations between the
matter and the motion, can no more account for the universe even up to
the point of the origin of the lowest life, than the vibrations of a
musical chord can account for the joy begotten of music.
But how stands the problem of its origin, when, in that which lives,
we include the presence of mind? None more firmly contends for the
absolute disparity, the entire and unqualified difference between mind
and matter, than Mr. Spencer. To him there can be nothing within the
whole realm of thought severed by a wider interval than consciousness
and thought on the one hand, and matter on the other. ‘Just,’ he says,
‘in the same way that the object is the unknown permanent _nexus_
which is never itself a phenomenon, but is that which holds phenomena
together, so is the subject the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is
never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of
consciousness together.’[22] Mind and matter, then, are here admitted
to be infinitely unlike, but absolutely equal realities. This is
boldly reaffirmed; he says: ‘No effort of imagination enables us to
think of a shock, however minute, except as undergone by an entity.
We are compelled, therefore, to postulate a substance of mind that is
affected, before we can think of its affections.’[23]
[Footnote 22: _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 484.]
[Footnote 23: _Ibid._ vol. i. p. 627.]
This is as clear as a geometric definition. Mind and matter are
admitted to be the two opposite termini of thought; they are divided by
an interval beyond which thought cannot go. They are symbolized as _x_
and _y_, two equally unknown, but absolutely unlike, quantities. Beyond
the common fact of existence, there is not a quality of the one that is
not infinitely unlike all the qualities of the other.
What this disparity is we all know: enough, that matter is inert,
absolutely without perceiving power, and unable in itself to move or
to produce motion. But mind is conscious, knows that it exists; and,
however mysteriously, originates motion. Matter has mass; mind is
absolutely without it. Matter cannot be thought of save as an occupant
of space. Mind has no extension.
Is it conceivable, then, that we should be required by this philosophy,
which thus admits the utter disparity of mind and matter, to make mind
a function of matter? that we should be asked to mentally follow a
process by which _y_ shall be changed into _x_? This verily is so!
I must repeat the formula of this philosophy of evolution. ‘Evolution
is an integration of matter, and concomitant dissipation of motion,
during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent
homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the
retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.’
Matter and motion, these are the all; no suggestion of aught besides.
Then, if on that formula the philosophy is built, the rhythmic
vicissitudes through which matter has passed during limitless
millenniums of time, are supposed to be able to change matter’s
unconsciousness into self-perception and thought; to cause extended
and gravitating mass to pass into an unextended realization of its own
being, unyoked to gravity; to emerge from space relations involving
motion produced by outside forces, to an absolute independence of space
relations which makes motion impossible. If we make our _knowledge_
of phenomena and the processes and methods of Nature the basis of our
judgment, is it not manifest, that such a change is incapable of being
thought?
The unknown _y_, that is, matter, must, by sheer physical vicissitudes,
actually abnegate its own qualities, and emerge, no longer _itself_,
_y_, but another entity, infinitely unlike itself, that is, _x_!
If mind and matter are divergent from each other by infinite unlikeness
of quality, the mind refuses assent, that any process, based on the
foundation of accurate human knowledge, would sanction the emergence
of mind by physical processes from matter. Mind is the antithesis, and
cannot be a function, of matter.
The mind is intimately linked with cerebral action. We do not know mind
apart from brain; but there is no discovered correlation between the
_work_ of the brain, and consciousness. Dr. Tyndall, whose keen and
instructed intellect has addressed itself to this deep problem from
the position of a physicist, says, amongst many similar utterances:
‘But when we endeavour to pass ... from the phenomena of physics to
those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable
expansion of the powers which we now possess. We may think over the
subject again and again, but it eludes all intellectual presentation.
We stand at length face to face with the incomprehensible. The
territory of physics is wide, but it has its limits, from which we look
with vacant gaze into the region beyond, ... and thus it will ever
loom, compelling the philosophies of successive ages to confess that—
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our life
Is rounded by a sleep.”’[24]
[Footnote 24: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. pp. 393, 394.]
The same thinker asks, ‘What is the causal connexion ... between
molecular motions and states of consciousness?’ And he answers that
neither he nor any other can know; and adds: ‘It is no explanation
to say that the objective and subjective are two sides of one and
the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This
is the very core of the difficulty. There are plenty of molecular
motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or
feel when it runs into frost ferns upon a window pane? If not, why
should the molecular motion of the brain be yoked to this mysterious
companion—consciousness?’[25]
[Footnote 25: _Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 410.]
Says Professor Tait, one of our most distinguished physicists: ‘There
are ... things associated with living beings which, of course, no one
in his senses can regard as physical. Even such things as consciousness
and volition we have absolutely no reason, however vague, for
classifying even in the smallest degree under the head of physics.’[26]
[Footnote 26: _Recent Advances in Physical Science_, p. 70.]
‘I,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘know nothing whatever, and never hope
to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular
movement to states of consciousness is effected.’[27] And again, ‘All
our knowledge is a knowledge of states of consciousness. “Matter” and
“force” are, so far as we can know, mere names for certain forms of
consciousness.‘[28]
[Footnote 27: _Contemporary Review_, Nov. 1871: ‘Mr. Darwin and his
Critics.’]
[Footnote 28: _Lay Sermons_, p. 373.]
Such disparity is there, then, between matter and mind, that it would
be apparently as congruous to conceive of a thought as solidifying
itself into a material object, as to conceive of any affection of
material molecules as being the sole cause of thought. Hence, it
follows that the Spencerian philosophy, which affirms the absolute
distinctness of mind from matter, on the one hand; but, having no other
structural elements _than_ matter in motion, on the other hand, seeks
to educe mind from these, is surely incongruous, and fails.
The demand is, that the primal atoms of the cosmic cloud, without
a single logically added agent besides, have, by combining and
recombining, by changing size and shape and intensifying the complexity
of their motions, at last emerged into ‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought;’ that
in effect they have written Faust and Hamlet, produced philosophies,
discovered gravitation, calculated eclipses, realized the eternal
nobility of right and the eternal baseness of wrong: in brief, have
brought about the moral and intellectual manhood that is ours. What we
_know_ by scientific evidence is this: that the persistence of force
makes the relations of matter and force permanent. Says Faraday: ‘A
particle of oxygen is ever a particle of oxygen, nothing can in the
least wear it. If it enters into combination and reappears as oxygen—if
it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral—if
it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved—it is oxygen with
its first qualities, neither more nor less. It has all its original
force, and only that.’[29]
[Footnote 29: _Philosophical Mag._, iv. 13, p. 235.]
Then, in all the area of the universe as we know it, that is, within
the range of our experience and experiment, infinite vicissitude leaves
what we know as an elementary body, with its first qualities intact,
neither more nor less. But we must transcend experience, disregard the
evidence before us, and _believe_ that if we give the primal atoms with
their inalienable motion _time enough_, they will emerge at last, not
only as life, but as intellect!
Can it avail to repudiate materialism, and yet to philosophically
conjure mind out of matter? We must indeed recast our definition of
matter to do this; but how? Says Professor Max Müller: ‘Mill declares
in one place (_Logic_ v. 3, 3) that it is a mere fallacy to say that
matter cannot think. Here again he ought to define first of all what
he means by matter, and according to his definition it may or may not
be a fallacy to say that matter cannot think. If we say that matter
cannot think, we do not say so because we cannot conceive thought to be
annexed to any arrangement of material particles ... the reason why
we are justified in saying “matter cannot think” is our having in our
language and thought separated matter from thought, our having called
and conceived what is without thought matter, and what is without
matter thought. Having done this, we are as certain that our matter
cannot think as that A=A and not =B.‘[30]
[Footnote 30: _The Science of Thought_, p. 616.]
The verdict of consciousness is the immovable base of all mental
action. Our consciousness affirms our personality and insists on our
identity. The Ego is conscious of itself as the hidden thread of unity
on which are strung all the past and present states of consciousness
and thought. Separate ‘states of consciousness’ as affections of matter
we have seen are impossible. But even if they could exist, _to_ whom
is their existence? A pang of unutterable remorse, a thrill of keenest
pleasure, do not feel themselves. I feel them; what is that I, to whom
the feeling is? It is always there, and in the language of Spencer
already quoted ‘is the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is never itself
a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of consciousness
together.’ Then it is as real and more absolute than the ‘states of
consciousness’ themselves.
The personal pronouns are as plentiful in the language of modern
materialists as in the language of sentiment or theology. What do they
represent?
Looking back and looking forward, thinking of ‘what might have been’
and anticipating what will be; and being absolutely conscious that
it is ‘I’ in unchanged and unchanging identity that am looking back
upon myself, and looking forward to myself, is unthinkable, unless
_something_ to which all successive states of consciousness have been,
are, and shall be, is admitted. If I deny the separate existence of the
Ego, I to all intents and purposes deny that I am, and yet it is I that
am there, perjuring myself by the denial.
Not only is there consciousness and thought, memory and prevision,
power and volition; but the person, the identity that is conscious and
thinks, that remembers and anticipates, that is able and that wills, is
an inextinguishable factor of being. And for this there is no provision
in the formula of the Spencerian Philosophy.
True, as we have seen, it is fain to admit, outside its formula, the
existence of a permanent somewhat lying beneath and outlasting all the
flow of mental states; that it has always existed, that it must exist
for evermore; that it is a ‘power’ sometimes identified with ‘force;’
but it is contended that this is infinitely and for ever unknowable.
With this we cannot be concerned; in practice it is an abstraction
equal to nothing. But it is no element of our analysis; it is no
factor of the formula which contained the only data required by this
philosophy to construct the universe. We cannot assume that this power
was the cause of matter, or the cause of motion; for we are shown that
we can know nothing concerning it. But this also is of no moment; for
matter, motion, and the combinations they bring about, over countless
millenniums of time, clearly understood, and fully interpreted, are
supposed to contain in themselves, the explanation of all that is. But
surely the promise of this philosophy is unfulfilled, its pledge is
broken; it left its formula at the very outset of its career, and has
employed structural principles, which to _it_ are absolutely alien.
Then to affirm that mind does not exist is impossible; to affirm
that matter gave origin to mind is a contradiction. There is but one
alternative: it is, that in the beginning, mind, acting through and in
matter, by immutable and perfect modes, through unmeasured time, caused
matter to assume its forms and display its phenomena; and, being mind,
imparted mind to the universe wherever it is found: crowning all, in
the moral and intellectual nature of man.
Thus the ultimate demand of thought, of reason, and of consciousness,
is that when we are unravelling the modes of phenomena, pushing our
inquiries into the conditions of all existences, generalizing vast
areas of knowledge, expressing in formula of geometry and numbers
the splendid rhythm and order of all things in heaven and earth,
we are simply finding, and expressing, the thoughts of an Infinite
Intelligence; discovering the modes by which His immutable perfections
were caused to take form in matter and mind.
It is science alone that can discover and express the _mode_ of action;
it is theology alone that must strive reverently to lead the mind up
from the mode, not to the _conception_, but to the inevitable existence
and thought of the Creator.
In doing this, to suppose that there are no intellectual difficulties
is to manifest narrow mental grasp; but there are no absolute
contradictions; no incongruities intolerable to the mind. True, as
we have seen above, we encounter the inevitable fact of the uncreate
existence of the Infinite. But we have seen that this, though
infinitely impenetrable by us for ever, is still not repugnant to
our reasoning and moral faculties. Indeed the eternal existence of
_matter_ as not requiring proof is one of the assumptions of some
materialists. But surely the self and necessary existence of an
intelligent omnipotence is without measure more congruous. It has been
argued that the eternity of matter is thinkable, because matter is
immutable—retains its properties through every vicissitude conceivable
in time and space. But surely gravity is an indispensable quality of
matter; yet take a bar of iron, weighing a thousand pounds at the sea
level, four miles high, and it loses two pounds of its weight; carry
it to the distance of the moon from the earth, and it weighs but five
ounces; and at a distance which could be computed its gravity would be
absolutely lost. It is conceivable that all the ‘modes of motion’ by
which matter is known to us, might, if we knew enough concerning them,
be found to have conditions in which they would cease to operate. We
must know that matter is unchangeable before the argument is valid. But
even then it is incompetent.
What the mind asks, is power and intelligence, to account for the
majesty of the universe, and the existence of mind; and if their cause,
to be such, must be admitted to be uncaused, the majority of reflective
minds can accept this, and in doing so, can fairly rest, and fully hope.
But, this granted, the question shapes itself afresh, ‘In the beginning
what?’ Had matter a coeval existence, an eternal being like God? or
did He create it? bring, what to our senses is something, directly out
of nothing? None dare answer. Both suggestions refuse to be dealt with
by reason. But the incongruity of both might vanish like starlight
in the dawn, if we knew _what_ that is, which constitutes matter. It
would, perhaps, make the Divine mind more immanent than we could dare
to imagine. But it is easier without measure, judged of by our only
source of knowledge, our own mental experience, to conceive of matter
as a product of mind, than mind as a product of matter.
What, then, is it that the reverent mean by a ‘creative act’? What is
involved in the affirmation, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth’? _Must_ the answer be speculative? or does the evidence
of Nature indicate a method? If the answer must be wholly speculative,
it is without a shred of value. But if the _mode_ of creation be a
question of evidence, who are the witnesses? They are those who are
students and masters of the _facts_ of Nature. Willing or not willing,
in the end, we _must_ accept the facts of Science. What, from the very
nature and constitution of our mind, we are bound to accept as truth,
it would be a travesty of all morality to ignore, much more to reject.
What was gained to morals, or religion, by rejecting Galileo’s
demonstration of a revolving earth and a central sun? When Kepler
demonstrated the laws of planetary motion, in the spirit of his age
he was obliged to suppose that the direct motion of the planets
was brought about by some spirit influence which he denominated
‘immateriate species,’ capable of overcoming the inertia of material
bodies. But the splendid insight of Newton enabled him to perceive,
that the laws of planetary motion, were a consequence of the cosmical
law of gravitation. This took the moving planets out of spirit hands,
and reduced the music of their motions to a method—a mechanical ‘law.’
To thousands that was deemed a truce to ‘atheism;’ but it is an
unalterable truth; and men yet believe in God.
Within the range of living memory it has been held as vital to the
existence of theology that creation, from the stars that fringe the
margin of the universe, to the earth, and the crown of manhood, arose
in six literal days. But science, with no weapon but inexorable fact,
has made this for ever untenable. But the foundations of religion are
unshaken.
Science has removed whole regions and æons of phenomena, from what was
considered the supernatural, to the natural; but to believe that this
is so much lost to theology is a feeble and faithless fallacy.
That conception of the Great Creator which takes its rise in the
majestic law of universal gravitation must be sublimer than that which
thought of Him as telling off spirits to move, and bear up the planets,
in their paths.
Can that be a higher view of an illimitable Creative Mind, which
conceived of Him as a Power who caused the earth to be formed, and the
heavens to be filled, in six literal days, rather than to think of Him
to whom there can be no yesterday and no to-morrow, but an unchanging
now, as determining laws and forces, which, in the slow progression of
uncounted ages, should express His creative will and accomplish His
Divine idea?
I have read in vain, I have thought in vain, to understand what to
later theologians was the method and the meaning of a creative act.
‘Order is heaven’s first law;’ and law—method—is the very pulse of
order. Surely creative action in matter could only have proceeded by
law? It could only have been the prevision and predetermination, by the
inscrutable Creator, of definite affections of matter by force, issuing
in rhythmic motions and cosmic harmonies, which, by their progress
through immeasurable time, should accomplish the creative purpose.
‘Let there be light;’ that is the equivalent, in human thought, of an
incomprehensible Divine volition. ‘And there was light,’ that is, in
human phrase, the affirmation of its historic accomplishment. But to
those who know, as we at present do, the science of light, what time,
what power, what majesty of method, did its perfect accomplishment
involve!
‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven.’ That,
in human phrase, and according to human modes of thought, expresses the
mysterious intent of Almighty Mind to fill space with the splendour
we see; and to people it with intelligence of which we can form no
faintest vision. ‘And it was so,’ that is the record of the realized
intent. But how realized? Not by a material actor who
‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,
And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’
That is impossible to thought; a travesty of the sublimer conceptions
possible, even to finite minds. Then do we conceive them as, in our
human sense, leaping into existence and place and relation and motion
and order? All our knowledge repudiates this merely human conception.
The only conception we can justly form is, that in the awful mystery
of creative action, Divine will determined law, modes of affection of
matter by motion, through force: making the dome of heaven and the
peopled earth the realized will of the Eternal.
‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his
kind.’ That is the utterance of the human conception, which can alone
represent to us the Divine resolve to fill the earth with life—and the
joy of living things. ‘And it was so.’ But what epochs of countless
ages filled the incalculable interval! What life on life, through age
on age, moved in stately march from the lower to the higher, while
the rocks kept imperishable record! The facts of geology, so far as
they carry us, are more accurate and certain than any records of human
history. And the irresistible lesson taught by the accurate study of
the fossil flora and fauna, from the dawn of the Laurentian epoch, is a
persistent and upward unfolding of life-forms by law; and the operation
of the law is as manifest, as the operation of the law of increasing
adaptation is visible, in a historical study of naval architecture,
from the first rude plank, the dangerous raft, right up, through all
increasing adjustments and improved design, to the latest ship with
stately curves and splendid speed.
There is a sense indeed in which creation by evolution or development
is taking place for ever around us. Development is evolution beginning
at a fixed point; evolution is only development _ab initio_.
Every spore that unfolds itself into a fern, every seed that gives
origin to another tenant of the forest, every egg that peoples earth or
air or sea with another life, is an instance of development. It is only
abbreviated evolution; evolution which gives a written record of its
laws in every stage, down to the primitive ovum. There the record of
the organism in itself ceases. The primitive ovum is a simple cell. The
worm, the grayling, the eagle, the man, are evolved from such.
But can the egg unfold itself from this protoplasmic speck by any
process save that of predetermined law and energy? Is not every
law that shall act, and all the unchangeable power to enforce it,
contained potentially in that globule of matter which we cannot see?
Every change that is wrought, from the first that is discoverable,
to the last that ensues, in the evolving egg, is one unbroken stream
of method; force, with mandates, as it were, acting on matter, with
special adaptations. Never did human mechanist strive more visibly to
embody his prescribed purpose than do the progressive activities of the
embryo lead straight to the final result. They did not, as movements,
determine their own actions, or the actions of each other; they all lay
together potentially from the first.
In this, if you will carry back the conception of Divine law and
purpose to the beginning, and apply it to the incomprehensible majesty
of the universe, I can see a miniature of suggestion as to the creative
method.
Can it strip theology of one ray of the splendour of Deity, to find,
from the evidence of nature, that He thought, and willed into action,
the balanced forces and immutable laws, which were so related to each
other, and to the foreseen requirements of onward and upward movement,
that their progress is music, and their products are harmonies?—perfect
adjustments—and, amidst ever-changing circumstances, ever-changing
adaptations and self-adjusted design?
Can there be any splendour of the Infinite mind more ineffable and
effulgent than the evidence, in His works, that in the beginning He
determined the potency and prevision of all the life, and all the
adaptations, that ever have emerged or can emerge?
Will it be urged that this one comprehensive law of creative action,
with all its methods and potentialities complete in the beginning,
must denude history of miracle? must make all things inevitable
sequences, and every outcome in nature through all time only what must
be, when the moment for its emergence had come? And that therefore the
unforeseen would be impossible. I submit that such an inference is not
inevitable. The universe becomes one lasting act of the unsearchable
but immanent Eternal. The power by which the self-adjusting mechanism
of the universe acts, took its rise, and has its continuity, in Him.
A miracle, in its broadest aspect, is a wonderful event; something,
which from the known course of phenomena, science could not previse.
Science would stultify her past and make impossible her future, if
she affirmed that the unprevised and marvellous could not happen.
Says Professor Huxley: ‘A miracle, in the sense of a sudden and
complete change in the customary order of nature, is intelligible,
can be distinctly conceived, implies no contradiction; and therefore,
according to Hume’s own showing, cannot be proved false by any
demonstrative argument.’[31]
[Footnote 31: Huxley’s _Hume_, p. 133.]
Our knowledge of the observed processes of nature erects no mental
barrier to the occurrence of something never before observed.
Miracles are not, it is now broadly admitted, dependent on science,
but on _evidence_ for their possibility and truth. Nay, more, it is
conceivable that, what to us might be profoundly miraculous, might be
the outcome of sheer and unmodified natural law.
If we could annul the interval of time between the great minds of the
long past and bring them into direct and intelligent contact with the
most marked victories of modern research and genius, what would be
the effect? Let it be imagined that Aristotle or Plato could stand by
while Tyndall demonstrated to them in Athens, that they could hold
direct and instant intercourse with a friend in India; or proved to
them, that we can demonstrate the actual constituents of the sun and
stars, and their physical conditions, with the same certainty as we can
determine the analysis of an earthly compound; or bid the sunbeam paint
the portrait of a bird or beast in rapid motion; or let them gaze upon
the marvellous world of the minute unfolded by the modern microscope;
and I do not hesitate to say that if he were the Aristotle or Plato of
his own age, standing before these triumphs of this age, he would be
standing in the presence of absolute miracles. Yet how have these, to
Plato, unforeseen and wonderful events arisen? Only by discovery of,
and absolute obedience to, the _laws of nature_ as they are for ever
and immutably acting. Man has created nothing, interrupted nothing,
violated nothing: he has obeyed; and by obedience conquered.
Then grant that mind, by infinite wisdom and will, gave origin to this
ever-unfolding universe, by methods that are all and for ever known to
Him, as they can never be known to us, is it according to reason to
contend that nothing shall ever happen _even according to the strict
methods of natural phenomena_ which past experience has never known?
That will happen, on the assumption of a Creative Mind as the origin
of all, which is _needful_, to complete the universe; and what happens
need be no interruption, no turning aside, of the course of nature, but
only sublime compliance with it.
But more: one of the gravest conflicts of sheer material philosophy
with Theism and Theology is, that by mechanical evolution design
is swept clean from the universe; that teleology has received its
death-blow.
Science finds that phenomena are self-acting, and self-adjusting. The
energy is competent; the method is perfect for bringing about the
result investigated. Science can find no more; it asks no more; and
materialism says, there is no more. There is no design in it; it is,
because to be at all, it must be that. There is no design in the form
of the river-bed which the mighty waters have engraved for themselves
in their irresistible movement down the mountain slope and along the
windings of the valley to the sea. It is the result of the force of
gravity. Such is the argument.
But while science as such, in strict obedience to its canons, must stop
at the self-adjustment of immediate phenomena, and materialism will
stop there, the reasoning faculties of the race, as we have seen, will
not stop there. They must come at last, by the laws of reason, upon
the power and the intelligence by which the methods of nature were
made self-acting. Gravitation and the properties of water will account
for the perfect adaptation of the river to its bed, and the bed to
the purpose of a river. But how came gravity? How came the properties
of water? There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the
Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design
that caused the great, the cosmic _methods_ of nature so to co-operate
as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The
dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of
research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is the _direction_
of nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time
and space, beneficent and beautiful?
It is only the design, the teleology, of the old school, touched by the
Ithuriel spear of modern knowledge, and changing into a conception of
universal design, that can only have originated in an infinite mind.
The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the
fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower
knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like
gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated
in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that
variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is
true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm
of a tiger _must_ be what they are to accomplish the end of their
being. But that only shows, as we shade our mental eyes, and gaze back
to the beginning, the magnificence of the design that was _in_volved in
nature’s beginning, so as to be _e_volved, by the designed rhythm of
nature’s methods.
Whatever matter may be; whatever force is; or whether or not both
are the one inseverable product of omnipotent volition; the first
affection of matter by force carried with it, potentially, the finished
purpose of the All-wise, whatever that may be. Every instance of what
such writers as Darwin are obliged to write of as ‘contrivance’ or
‘adaptation’ throughout this universe as it now is, or that shall yet
arise in it through all duration, are, and will be, but factors of
related harmony in a stupendously vast interlocked ‘mosaic’ of design,
which in its entirety has a ‘final purpose’ too great for man to see.
It is admitted by the fullest and farthest thinkers, that the
teleological, and the mechanical views, of phenomena and their origin,
are not antagonistic. Instead of mutually excluding each other in
thought, they are the complement of each other.
To argue, that because we can by analysis and research, discover and
demonstrate the physical conditions or antecedents, that, apparently
automatically, bring about a manifest contrivance, therefore, we have
excluded the possibility of any universal primal design, is a mode of
reasoning, the fallacy of which, surely, needs no great logical acumen
to lay bare.
Because we discover the molecular shapes and movements that determine
the structure of a beautiful crystal, it would be surely illogical
and unwarranted to say that there was no design, no arrangement in
the primary order of things, out of which these very conditions
arose. It is conceivable that there may be infinitely more mind in
the origination of that which automatically gives rise to a manifest
‘contrivance,’ than in directly originating it.
An ordinary watch is, as a rule, a good timekeeper, under a fixed,
say a temperate meridian; but take it to the arctic circle, and it
goes too fast; or to the torrid zone, and it goes too slow. But in a
chronometer, delicate compensations are made, of a beautiful kind, so
contrived as to counteract the thermal changes. Would it be logical to
think of the more complex contrivance as devoid of design because it is
self-acting?
I grant that there may not be absolute parity of reasoning in the human
as compared with the natural instance; but I only desire the reasoning
to apply to one essential point. If primarily the methods of nature,
which by their rhythmic action automatically produce contrivances,
living or otherwise, took their origin in mind, the contrivances so
produced were so designed to be produced; and this is contrivance of
an infinitely higher order than the self-compensating balance of the
chronometer. It is contrivances brought about by arrangements that are
infinitely complex, transcending all thought; and which include in
their vast sweep, all time, all space, all matter, all motion, and all
their relations, from the most inconceivably minute phenomenon to the
most stupendous that ever has happened, or can happen, as a product of
nature.
We may easily reduce this to a practical form by illustration. The
arm or fore-limb of all mammals is constructed essentially on the
same type. The forearm of the horse is most highly specialized. In
the forearm there is, as in the human skeleton, the _radius_ and the
_ulna_. But the ulna has lost its function, and is fused with the
radius. What we call the knee in the horse’s fore-limb is really the
wrist. There are eight bones in the human wrist. The horse has only
seven. Now, immediately succeeding the wrist bones in the human hand,
are the five bones that form the palm; and these are followed by the
five digits or fingers.
It appears, then, that, unlike the majority of mammal hands, the horse
is peculiar. Instead of five bones corresponding to the palm bones, it
has only one, which is called the ‘cannon bone;’ and this is followed
by but one digit or finger with a huge nail. The horse then walks upon
a single finger, viz. the third, on each fore foot and each hind foot.
Why is this? and can we discover the history of this modification?
Examine the cannon bone of a horse with care; you will find fixed on
either side of it two delicate bones, called ‘splints,’ with actually
no mission in the economy of the extant horse.
Now go steadily back in geological time. There are three great
geological epochs, the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary. The
recent period called the quaternary is a sub-section of the last. Now
in the quaternary and upper tertiary, fossil horses are found. They
correspond with the horses we see. But in the middle of the tertiary
epoch we come upon the horse, not only in Europe, but in India, and
above all in America, with the splint bones, that we find in extant
horses fixed to the cannon bone, as long as that bone itself, and
provided with small spurious or useless hoofs, while the ulna can be
traced for its whole length.
In the earliest miocene deposits the horse is found with these spurious
or partially aborted toes, no longer useless, but having the full
length of the middle toe; making the horse of that epoch a distinctly
three-toed creature, and each toe operative; while the forearm is in a
condition normal to mammals.
Yet another form, found in America, shows, not only the three distinct
and useful toes, but upon the third toe a splint, suggesting a rudiment
of the little or fifth finger; while in the oldest of the tertiary
rocks has again been found a horse with the fourth finger complete.
While finally, in the very earliest tertiary deposits is found a horse
with a foot of four perfect digits, consisting of the second, the
third, the fourth, and fifth fingers, with a rudiment or splint of the
first finger distinctly visible.
Similar facts reveal themselves in relation to the hind feet and
legs; and slow variations palpably affected the entire body of
the successive types of horse; the teeth, for example, undergoing
remarkable successive modifications: and whilst the _Eohippus_ and the
_Orohippus_, the last types of horse, discovered respectively in the
oldest and later of the eocene beds, possess forty-four teeth, as in a
large number of fossil and extant mammalian forms, the recent horse has
the number reduced to forty, and their forms remarkably altered, as the
final outcome of a succession of modifications.
We have here, then, a series of generic types; for the true relations
of which to each other we are indebted to the insight of such workers
as Huxley and Marsh and Lartet, and others. They do not afford us
illustrations of the minute and scarcely observable modifications which
the law of the origin of species involves; they present us rather with
a series of family groups; but the relation between them is such as
to leave the mind accustomed to biological investigations convinced,
that, could we see all the forms that occurred between them, there
could be no question as to the origin of these forms, from _eohippus_
of the oldest eocene beds to _equus_ of to-day. Unlike as in a general
sense they are, they are progressive modifications, with higher and
higher specializations, until, in the extant horse, the highest special
modification is attained.
It will harmonize with no dogma of theology, and no doctrine of
science, to assume that these equine forms, separated by such enormous
epochs of time, were specially created: all accurate knowledge forbids
the supposition; while varieties sufficiently marked, such as the
race-horse, the giant and powerful dray-horse, the Shetland and the
Norman ponies, known to be derived from a common parentage, give the
clearest sanction to the inference, that what we now know of the
geological history of the horse proves it to be a product of the
Darwinian law of evolution; that there has been no total destruction
of equine (or any other) life in the great past; but that there has
been a continuity of it, borne from region to region, and modified
continuously by a thousand changing circumstances. Consequently we
find, in the rocky records of the past, that organic types become
simpler, and liker to each other, as we trace them through the
incomplete geological record to a dim and far off age.
Here, then, we have a series of such generalized types, plainly related
to each other in time, leading us down from the horse of historic times
to less and less specialized forms of it, as the epoch grows more
remote; until in the upper mesozoic or lower eocene beds, we find the
progenitor of the line of the equine types we know, to be an animal
with a splay foot of five toes, adapted to slow movement in a boggy
soil. The slow specialization adapted it to increasing rapidity and
ease of movement, and modified states of soil; acting, without doubt,
as an increasing protection against its enemies, and providing it
with an ever surer means of obtaining abundant and suitable food. And
beneficial variation continued to act until the noble horse, beautiful
in form, exquisitely graceful in action, and swift as the wind, had
been thus created.
Now the most absolutely assured, the most universally accepted truth
within the whole realm of human knowledge and experience is the
immutability of nature’s laws; and the certainty that their action has
been ‘established for ever’ through all space and all time. Great as
was the knowledge of ancient and classic peoples, that of which they
knew relatively least, was nature. This arose from their inability
to perceive the inexpressible vastness of nature, on the one hand,
and the detailed constitution of the earth and its universal flora
and fauna, on the other. The obvious inference as to the origin of
the universe, as they knew it, was, that all that constituted the
world and its occupants and inhabitants, mineral, vegetable, and
animal, were individual direct creations. But, knowing as we now
know, the immutability and universality of the laws of nature, in
relation equally to the organic and living as to the inorganic and
not-living, and knowing as we do the geological and palæontological
history of the earth, and the nature and characteristics of its living
inhabitants, it is as manifest as the axioms of geometry, that the
direct and supra-natural creation of new species, or even new genera,
is absolutely untenable.
Now modern biological science, guided by the splendid genius and
ceaseless research of Darwin, and the whole field of biologists, for
the past quarter of a century, has been able for all practical purposes
to discover and demonstrate a great ‘law’ or method, according to which
all the varieties of living ‘species,’ animal and vegetable, have
arisen; connecting the remotest ages of the life of the globe with the
present flora and fauna in one unbroken continuity, by one unchanging
method. The organic history of any individual becomes an analogue of
the organic history of the world. The individual begins existence as
a minute ovum, and progresses to completeness. The vast series of
organic forms, fossil and extant, began in one or more ‘primordial
germs.’ The law of all living things, and especially the lowliest,
is rapid and abundant reproduction. Variations in individuals so
reproduced are as absolutely universal as reproduction itself. It does
not require the accurate knowledge of the botanist or the zoologist to
discover this. A careful study of any group of living forms, lowly or
highly organized, will make this palpable to any observer. The septic
organisms, for example, which arise from germs (not those which arise
from self-division) constantly vary; and I have been able to make use
of this tendency so as to enable three of these wonderful organic and
vital specks to slowly change, so as to adapt themselves to changed
environments, until, in the course of years, from normally living at a
temperature of 60° Fahr. they lived at last, and multiplied enormously,
at a temperature of 157° Fahr.; and in the slow process of adaptation,
demonstrated fundamental changes were undergone by the organisms.[32]
[Footnote 32: _Journ. Roy. Micro. Soc._ 1887, President’s Address.]
A study of the Desmids, the Diatoms, the Radiolaria, or the
Foraminifera amongst minute organisms will show that variations are
so constant and so numerous, that the determination of what is called
species, is difficult, and at times, impossible.
Who does not know of the varieties that are annually produced from
seed-growths of favourite flowering plants?—the pelargonium, the
primula, the viola, the rose, and hundreds of others.
That this is not confined to forms under cultivation is equally
manifest. Common observation has not noted it perhaps, but there
are no fewer than thirteen distinct forms of the common bramble or
blackberry, with stem, flower, and fruit sufficiently varied to have
induced some botanists to consider them species. Although each when
seen is called by the majority of people ‘the wild rose,’ there are at
the very least seventeen natural varieties. ‘Artificial selection’ has
had no part in these variations and a thousand others that might be
named.
Consider the variations constantly arising in fowls, canaries, dogs,
and cattle. No litter of kittens is ever precisely alike, or precisely
like either parent; and this is true even in human families.
Variation, then, is constant and universal; it acts in all directions
and in every living thing. If, amidst the exigencies of the history of
an organism, some variation in the progeny is beneficial in altered
circumstances, it is by the very nature of things preserved. The
offspring of all living organisms are greatly in excess of the number
that can reach maturity; and with variations in every organism, and in
every part of their organization, for ever occurring; and environments,
during great cycles of time, undergoing constant and enormous changes;
it is palpable that successive modifications must arise, and through
all the countless ages of the past have arisen: resulting always in
the ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘natural selection,’ which ‘signifies
the preservation of favourable individual differences and variations,
and the destruction of those which are injurious.’[33] This is
palpable, for individuals possessed of advantage over others must
have the best chance of surviving and multiplying their kind; hence
arise ‘varieties,’ ‘races,’ and ‘species;’ and if the enormous age
of the period of life upon the globe, and the vicissitudes through
which it has passed, be taken into account, it is impossible for a
biologist to withhold consent to the fact that a ‘law,’ a method,
has been demonstrated, which has been a certain and powerful factor,
in producing the variety of the flora and fauna that have filled the
earth, from the dawn of life upon the globe, up to the extant animals
and vegetables which are the latest outcome of this great law. This is
the conviction of all the experts of the world.
[Footnote 33: Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, 6th ed. p. 63.]
That there are other factors of evolution not yet discovered is almost
inevitable; they, however, will be but added ‘laws;’ supplementary and
co-ordinated methods—giving greater completeness to our knowledge of
the origin of species.
But having reached this conclusion, we are at once compelled to ask,
What is the origin of this unceasing continuity of variation in all
living things? this power to become constantly adapted to change of
environment, and for ever, in the fittest form, to survive? Is not this
palpably a creative method? Is it not the emergence in time and history
of the thought and will of the Creative Power in the beginning?—one of
the processes that lay enfolded in the very purpose of the production
of heaven and earth, and which as a prevised method only awaited ‘the
fulness of time’ to come inevitably into play?
The earth, as is well known, and we have already pointed out, is
constantly subject to minute, as well as to smaller cyclic and great
secular, changes. Nothing but an ability to become adapted through all
duration to current and recurrent changes, could have made a continuity
of the living population of the globe possible. We have found the
principal ‘law’ of those adaptive changes. But because we have learned
the nature of the law or method, by which throughout all time, these
changes have been brought about; and because the method _appears_
self-acting like the balance wheel of a chronometer, must we argue that
there is no design either in the method or its results? That will not
satisfy the constant demands of reason. Finding the law according to
which a projectile moves, must not be confounded with the cause of its
motion.
‘Natural selection’ cannot originate anything. Variation does not
explain itself. Why is it a property of all living things to vary
indefinitely and in all directions? The Darwinian law has no existence
without it; but that ‘law’ no more accounts for this tendency, than the
law of falling bodies explains gravitation, or shows why it acts as it
does.
It is easy to explain the law of the compensations of a chronometer
balance, or a compensating clock pendulum; but that does not account
for their existence.
The law of ‘inheritance,’ the likeness of progeny to parents, is, like
the law of variation, universal. But why is it so? If it were not so,
there could be no survival of the fittest. Yet it is no more explained
by the discovery of that law, than the nature of that which thinks, is
explained by a discovery of the laws of thought.
Selection implies alternatives to select from. The splendid organic
mechanism of all the animals of the earth, with their perfect relations
to their sphere, could as a whole, only have been brought about by
means that started for, and led to, that goal. ‘The law by which
structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted,
directed, or destroyed is another.’[34]
[Footnote 34: _Origin of the Fittest_, by E. D. Cope, p. 225.]
Then, because the horse becomes specialized and adapted to its
circumstances in a remarkable manner, leaving evidence in the rocks of
long severed but successive epochs, of the very manner in which it was
created as we know it; and because we have proof that this method is
practically self-acting, shall we stultify reason by assuming that in
its self-action there is no design? that as a great rhythmic law it had
no origin? that, because to our powers of observation it is automatic,
it explains its own existence? or that it strips the mind, by this
very automatism, of any necessity for, or right of, having its origin
explained? None of these assumptions are congruous; they surely violate
the fundamental principles of thought.
We may be enabled no longer to say of any structure that it is a
‘final cause;’ our insight is not deep enough for that; but an equally
powerful weapon in defence of theism takes its place: I designate it
‘CONCURRENT ADAPTATION;’ that is, _fitness_, for ever, throughout all
time and all space; and fitness absolutely constant amidst all changes.
Adaptation is universally concurrent with existence; and whether we
have to account for it by sudden and unexplained action, or by the slow
operation of laws, is a matter of no essential moment: _it is there_.
Nothing, for example, can be more certain, than the powerful influence
exerted on the coloration and morphology of flowers, all over the
earth, by the visits of insects. The insects assiduously visit flowers
for food, or nectar; and by their visits the pollen of one flower
is carried to the stigmatic surface of another: so effecting cross
fertilization. The contrivances for making insect agency efficient, are
so numerous, so palpable, and so exquisitely perfect as to entrance
the observer. One flower has its nectar in a tube, to reach which the
proboscis of the visiting insect must touch and split a delicate tissue
and expose the moist adhesive surfaces of a couple of pollen masses,
which adhere to and are carried away by the insect, in such a position
that, in visiting another flower of the same species, it must deposit
the pollen where alone it can do its fertilizing work.
Another flower is so contrived, that to reach the nectar, the visiting
insect must touch a sensitive surface causing the rupture of a tissue,
which confines a pollen mass; but, on the rupture of the tissue, this
flies out like an arrow at the unbidden guest; and an adhesive end
sticks to the insect, which is startled away; but, visiting another
flower of a like kind, deposits, in the right place, the fertilizing
pollen it unconsciously carries.
Another flower has an ingenious arrangement by which it lures an insect
into its corolla, and then imprisons it, provided with plenty of food,
until its anthers are ripe, when it sheds their pollen over the insect;
after which, by a special organic arrangement, it opens the prison door
and lets its visitor emerge, charged with pollen, to visit another
similar flower, which will inevitably be in a condition to receive
fertilization from its pollen-covered body.
Thousands of other instances might be given.
Now we know perfectly the mutability of flowers. It is highly probable
that the visiting insect and the visited flower were wholly unlike,
in some instances, what they now are, twenty thousand years ago; and
it is equally improbable that they will be what they now are, twenty
thousand years hence. But that which this great biological law affirms,
is, that whatever the changes, and however brought about, past or
future, there never has been, there is not, and there never will be,
an instant’s cessation of concurrent adaptation:—the operation of the
‘law’ that secures to all that lives adjustment to its environments.
That surely must be a method that took its origin in mind; and it must
have had its prevised and preordered place potentially assigned, from
the earliest creative movement; as it must continue to have unceasing
action to the very terminus of all organic existence.
Design, purpose, intention, appear, then, when all the facts of the
universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to
be ineradicable from our view of the creation. Teleology does not now
depend for its existence on Paleyean ‘instances;’ but all the universe,
its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of
teleology. The will and purpose running through it are as incapable of
being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its
phenomena and their modes are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by
our senses.
A ‘mind’ that is not a mind, in any sense as we know it, is, to us,
nothing. Will, to be will, to us, must be such as we know of; though
it be infinite. Intelligence that is infinite cannot cease to be
intelligence. To an infinite intelligence, as to us, in the same
conditions, the properties of conic sections must be what we know
them to be. But an Infinite Mind would differ absolutely from ours in
that there could be nothing tentative, nothing experimental in its
methods, through all time and space. Only the right means would ever be
employed, or the right ends ever be brought about. But, surely, even
an Infinite will, in the realm of matter, must _use_ means. When human
power takes a pebble from a great height and places it at the sea-level
it has only done what gravity could have done. But when human will by
continuity of purpose combines materials to form a calculating machine,
we have an evidence of the action of mind; something, which, while it
is made and exists by the very laws of nature, yet the laws of nature
could not, by themselves, have made.
Similar results must be due, then, to similar conditions. The
teleology, that is the inseverable motive, as it were, of all the
activities and interactions of nature, must be the product of mind.
Then was _man_, as a physical being, the terminal link in the great
progressive chain of living forms that had peopled the earth through
countless ages? Or does he, in physical origin, stand apart? Is he a
being from whose existence a new creative epoch dates? Or is he the
final product of the vast ancestral line of life that ran through all
the ages? Did God make man ‘of the dust of the ground’ by some process
of which we can form no conception, and can discover no trace? Or is
there evidence that the Creator made man of the dust of the ground by
majestic laws, acting over vast epochs, until he had become meet for
the inbreathing of a higher nature?
That is a question of profoundest interest. But if the authoritative
and final demonstration were given either way to-morrow, we, in
ourselves, should remain unaltered. We should be conscious of no
uplifting and of no fall. Immediate or mediate creation, if God be
the author, must be alike Divine. To fear the consequences of honest
truth seeking research on this momentous question, is to manifest
little love of truth for its own sake, on the one hand; and little
stalwartness of personal conviction, as to the security of the
foundation of professed beliefs, on the other. Whether we will or not,
the whole matter will be searched to its deepest depths. But amidst all
the conflict of opinion as to details, in one thing all are agreed,
and that is, that the gulf between man and the noblest apes is such
as to be practically without comparison. Whatever science may be able
to show ultimately as to the relation of man to the anthropoid apes,
there is to-day no biologically demonstrated and direct kinship. That
the anthropoid apes, as we know them, were in any proper sense the
_direct_ ancestors of man, is not a serious contention of even extreme
evolutionists. The facts before us do not justify it. The highest ape
is still an ape; and whilst the oldest human remains, such as the
Eugis and Neanderthal skulls, discovered in association with evidences
of immense antiquity, have remarkable characteristics, pointing in
some respects in the direction of the great apes, they are still the
crania of men. After a critical and exhaustive examination of the two
skulls above referred to, Professor Huxley says concerning the Eugis
skull: ‘Its measurements agree equally well with those of some European
skulls. And assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part
of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which
might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the
thoughtless brains of a savage.’[35] And in summing up the results of
an equally critical examination of the far more remarkable Neanderthal
skull, the same unquestionable authority says: ‘In no sense, then,
can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being
intermediate between men and apes. At most they demonstrate the
existence of a _man_ whose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards
the pithecoid type.... And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of
known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated
as it appears to be at first, but forms in reality the extreme term of
a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed
of human crania.’[36] Nothing has arisen to seriously modify these
authoritative statements. No thorough anatomist practically familiar
with the structure of the anthropoids on the one side, and man on the
other, could attempt to argue that man can be directly a descendant
of chimpanzee, gorilla, or orang. ‘I may say,’ says Huxley, ‘that the
fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us
appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of
which he has probably become what he is.’[37]
[Footnote 35: _Man’s Place in Nature_, Huxley, p. 157.]
[Footnote 36: _Man’s Place in Nature_, Huxley, p. 157.]
[Footnote 37: _Ibid._ p. 159.]
But let us beware of mistaking, or even distorting, the true meaning
of this, as understood by the philosophical evolutionist. It does not
for a moment place the physical nature of man outside the range of the
great creative law of natural selection. No arrangement of the monkeys
can present us with a rational order of development, of which man is
physically the latest and highest outcome. But the precursor of man,
of whose actual existence no direct proof has yet arisen, is assumed,
on the evidence of absolutely innumerable details, the full value of
which is only to be clearly seen by experts, to have ascended, not from
any anthropoid,—chimpanzee, gorilla, nor orang,—but these apes are
found to form the nearest branch existing, produced by the same trunk,
out of which, physically, man’s nature was, by the law of descent,
evolved.
That the embryological and anatomical resemblances between man and the
highest apes are of a profound and striking character, no sane educated
man would attempt to traverse; and that this involves close biological
relationship, and proves the operation on each, of the same organic
laws of development, so far as physical origin is concerned, is also
certain.
That there are evidences of an antiquity of the human race, as such,
immensely disproportionate to that indicated in the absolutely
unreliable and useless ‘received’ chronologies, it would be folly to
doubt and immorality to neglect. It is evidenced by man’s works, which
are shown, without question, to be of indefinitely vast antiquity; and
correspond, in the main, with the works of races of men still living.
It is shown by the enormous antiquity of races of men as we know them;
by the vast age of languages, made evident, by a deep analysis of their
structure, as sister and parent languages; as well as by the great age
of even human remains.
Now all this, taken in connection with the anatomical structure and
embryological development of man, makes it impossible to suppose that
man’s physical nature was not a product of the same great creative
laws, the same vital processes, as those that gave origin to the
chimpanzee or the gorilla; a slow creation, through a long line of
varied life, from ‘the dust of the ground,’ the elements of the earth.
There is in this relation an almost marvellous insight in David’s song:—
‘I will give thanks unto Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Wonderful are Thy works;
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My frame was not hidden from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see mine unperfect substance;
And in Thy book were all my members written,
Which day by day were fashioned,
When as yet there was none of them.’[38]
[Footnote 38: Ps. cxxxix. vers. 14-16.]
By what link man is united physically to the great series below him,
by what line and in what specific manner he arose, it has not yet been
given to science to determine. Biological science sees, with inevitable
certainty, that he must have been in vital union with that series; that
physically he is a part of the majestic organic whole, from the first
dawn of life upon the globe until now.
At the same time it is equally certain that other agencies which
could not have acted on ape or other mammal, nor indeed on any other
living form besides, came into operation, when man, as such, became an
inhabitant of this earth.
Nor is it by any means other than conceivable that science, which
has transformed the face of the world in fifty years, may be able to
demonstrate the actual physical line of man’s origin. But if that be
so, if the line along which man’s physical nature was moulded of the
dust of the ground, by the Creative Mind and will, were made so plain
that none could refuse the evidence, it may leave undisturbed our
mental peace, and unaltered our conviction of the dignity and majesty
of man. It would leave our responsibilities undiminished, our rights
uninfringed, and our hopes unclouded.
The saint is none the less saintly, because he is ancestrally the last,
and prevised outcome, of an inconceivably grand progression of creative
laws, operating through countless cycles, than he would have been, as
the descendant of a man produced by an isolated act of creation. The
song of the nightingale is no iota less rich in fluent melody because
its larynx was modified from less melodious forms; and the martyrdom
of Paul, or the noble sacrifices of heroes and reformers to secure the
sacred rights of liberty and truth for their fellow-men, are none the
less exalted because we must trace their ancestry to the slow operation
of creative laws, which in the great unbroken stream of life upon the
earth gave origin to the monod, the coral-polyp, the mollusc, the
lizard, the aye-aye, and the chimpanzee. Verily, if the researches of
science demonstrate that this was the method of creative action, we may
not murmur.
The sovereignty of man does not depend on a particular view of the
exact manner in which the Creator caused the elements of the earth to
produce his frame. ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground;’ it is not _how_ He so formed him. None has power to affirm
or to deny how, unless with reverent hands he find it written in the
rocks, or woven indelibly with the very structure of man himself. It is
because men have interpreted, without evidence, the stages of creative
action, and welded these non-essentials with iron girdles of dogma,
that faith has again and again been imperilled.
The true crown of manhood, the final majesty and exalted mystery of
creative power, was not man’s _body_, but his soul. ‘And breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul,’ is the
expression of that which gives his unshared dignity to man.
What is meant by this, who shall explain? Who can peer into the depths
of a mystery so profound? It defies all our powers of search; dare
we make a special interpretation or understanding of how this was
brought about, an essential of belief? Is it not enough that it was the
supreme, as it was, so far as our present knowledge will carry us, the
final outcome of creation?
When the Creative Power and wisdom had built man’s physical nature of
the dust of the ground, whether suddenly or slowly, by this method
or by that, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and
he became a living soul. It was the possession of what we call the
soul that gave to the manhood its being. How this was imparted, who
can know? who shall explain? Even if the very _method_ be at last
discovered, or approximated, the unalterable question must remain,
_why_ the method, the law, brought about so sublime a result, and from
whence came the conditions that made the laws direct themselves to
such an exalted end. In fine, how physical laws could so be caused to
act as to give origin to consciousness, thought, and moral faculties.
Plainly, this ‘end’ must have lain in the Divine ‘beginning;’ and we
must go behind and below the mechanics of phenomena and explain their
_vera causa_; we must find our way above matter not-living in the great
past, and fathom the very essence of the cause that made it live,
before we can attempt to explain the origin of that self in man which
looks upon and _knows itself_. We have seen that matter and force will
not, as sole factors, lend themselves to a philosophy of the origin and
explanation of this. A linear arrangement of the ascending mentality of
brutes does not really explain, or even minimize, the difficulties of
the problem. It simply makes the area of the problem the wider.
‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought,’ ‘I think,’ with equal freedom—of an atom or
a universe, of a rosebud or a Deity, of myself or of my race, of the
grandeur of right and the baseness of wrong—these are the impenetrable
mysteries which no property known to us in matter, and no process ever
seen by us in matter and force, can ever _explain_.
No doubt the most profound and active minds amongst men will always
endeavour to correlate the access even of mind, with modifications of
cerebral and neural matter. But if that be approximately done, the real
problem will remain simply untouched. True, we can afford no better
explanations than those which philosophy offers; but we may not blind
ourselves to the true value of these. Mind is inseverably associated
with neural matter; we do not know, and cannot even think of it, as
emerging as a product of neural matter. We must distinguish clearly
between scientific evidence and plausibilities of a philosophical kind
expressed in scientific language. We shall be fascinated again and
again with a brilliant intellectual arrangement of things known, with
things guessed, leading to hypothetical ‘interpretations’ of the most
impenetrable mysteries. But the fact remains, that the activities of
intellect are inexpressible in terms of matter and motion. Mind only
can give origin to mind. Until it is congruous to think that parallel
lines can enclose a space, that 2+2=7, that out of nothing something
can come, it will be incongruous, in spite of subtle and ceaseless
effort, to construct hypotheses by which _y_ shall by its own act
change into _x_, or, in other words, by which mind, with its absolute
disparity to matter, shall come forth as an unaided and necessary
product of matter as affected by motion.
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