I am not here concerned to argue generally for the shortness or longness of the periods of geological time; let us, for the purposes of argument, admit a very wide margin of centuries and ages; butsomelimit there must be. The sun's light and heat, for one thing, are necessary, and though the bulk of combustible material in the sun is enormous, there must be some end to it. Sir William Thomson has calculated (and his calculations have never been answered) that on purely physical grounds, the existence of life on the earth must be limited to some such period as 100 millions of years; and this is far too short for uncontrolled evolution.
We know from fossils, that species have remained entirely unaltered since the glacial epochs began, and how many generations are included even in that! If no change is visible in all that time, how many more ages must have elapsed before a primitiveAmoebacould have developed into a bird or a Mammal?
In Florida Mr. Agassiz has shown that coral insects exist unchanged, and must have been so for 30,000 years.
When we remember also the enormous destruction of life that takes place, supposing that in a given form a few creatures underwent accidental changes which were beneficial and likely to aid them—still what chances were there that the creatures which began to exhibit the right sort of change should have died before they left offspring! the chances against them are enormous: and the chances have to be repeated at every successive change before the finally perfected or advanced creature took its place in the polity of nature. Moreover, there is the chance of small changes being lost by intercrossing: our own cattle-breeders have most carefully to select the parents, or else the favourable variety soon disappears.
How then, seeing the power of stability which at least some forms are found to exhibit—seeing too the enormous chances against the survival of the particular specimens that begin to vary, and the further chances of the loss of variety by intercrossing; how can we get the millions of millions of years necessary to produce the present extreme divergence of species? The fact is that the force of this objection is likely to be undervalued, from the mere difficulty of bringing home to the mind the immeasurable time really demanded by uncontrolled evolution.
Nor is the question of time left absolutely to be matter of belief or speculation. For here and there in the geological records of the rocks, wehavecertain intermediate forms—or forms which we may fairly argue to be such. But looking at the very considerable differences between the earlier and the later of these forms—differences greater than those which now separate well-defined species, it seems questionable whether any of the divisions of Tertiary time, taking all the circumstances into consideration, could be lengthened out sufficiently to accomplish the change.
At any rate, if any particular example be disallowed, the general objection must be admitted to be weighty.
Now the intervention of any system of created designs of animal form—however little its details be understood—and the production of variations underdivine guidancewhich would lead more directly to the accomplishment of such forms as the complicated flowers of orchids above described, would unquestionably tend to shorten the requisite time. There would, by a process of reasoning easily followed, be an immediate reduction of the ages required, within practicable limits, though the time must still remain long. More than that is not necessary. The Ussherian chronology is not of Divine revelation, though some persons speak of it as if it was. There is not the shadow of a reason to be gleaned from the Bible, nor from any other source, that the commencement of orderly development, the separation of land and water, earth and sky, and the subsequent provision of designs for organic forms of life and the first steps that followed the issue of the design, began six thousand years ago, or anything like it. It can be shown, indeed, thathistoricalman, or the specific origin of the man spoken of as Adam, dates back but a limited time; and it is calculable with some degree of probability how far; but that is all. We are therefore in no difficulty when ample time is demanded; but we are in the greatest straits when the illimitable demands of a slowly and minutely stepping development, perpetually liable to be checked, turned back, and even obliterated, have to be confronted with other weighty probabilities and calculations regarding the sun's light and heat, and the duration of particular geologic eras.
[18]
Second Edition, 1871.
[19]
"He hath made everythingbeautifulin his time" (Eccles. iii. II).
[20]
"Also He hath set the world in their heart, so thatno man can find out the work that God makethfrom the beginning to the end" (Eccles. iii II).
[21]
This species was instanced because the lectures which form the basis of the book were originally delivered at Simla, in the N.W. Himalaya, where, at certain seasons, the plant is a common wayside weed. Mr. Darwin notices a similar and, if possible, more curious structure in a species ofCatasetum.
[22]
See this fully explained by Mivart, "Genesis of Species," pp. 29, 30 (2nd edition).
[23]
See Mivart, p. 61.
[24]
"Quarterly Review," 1861, p. 20.
[25]
Pigeon fanciers know that when they have once obtained, by crossbreeding and selection, a particular form or feather, the utmost care is needed to preserve it. If the parents are not selected the progeny wilt gradually revert towards the original wild pigeon type.
[26]
It should be borne in mind that what we call aspeciesas distinct from a mere variety, is a more or less arbitrary or provisional thing dependent on the state of science for the time. Species are constantly being lumped together by some and separated by others. It follows most probably, that while some species are really types—i.e., one can never pass into the other and lose its essentials, unless it is destined to disappear (like the pterodactyle), not being wanted in the whole scheme—other species are really only varieties, and maybe lost or modified without limit.
[27]
We may well regard the mule as a peculiar form just such as the evolutionist would rejoice to see: here is a modified species, which has qualities different from those of either of the parent stock, and well fitted "to struggle for existence." Yet this modified race would, if left to itself, die out.
[28]
The series is thus (Nicholson, p. 702):—1.Eohippus—Lower Eocene of America; fore-feet have four toes and a rudimentary thumb or pollex. 2.Orohippus(about the size of a fox)—Eocene. 3.Anchitherium—Eocene and Lower Miocene; three toes, but 2 and 4 are diminutive. 4.Hipparion—Upper Miocene and Pliocene; still three toes, but 3 more like the modern horse and 2 and 4 still further diminished. 5.Pliohippus—later Pliocene, very like Equus. 6.Equus—Post-Pliocene.
[29]
P. 112
THE DESCENT OF MAN.
We now approach a special objection which always, has been (and I shall be pardoned, perhaps, for sayingalways will be) thecruxof the theory of unaided, uncreated evolution—the advent of reasoning, and not only reasoning, but self-conscious and God-conscious MAN.
Here again the lines of argument are so numerous, and the details into which we might go so varied, that a rigid and perhaps bald selection of a few topics is all that can be attempted.
But I may remark that naturalists are far from being agreed on this part of the subject. Agassiz rejects the evolution of man altogether. Mr. St. G. Mivart, while partly admitting, as every one else now does, the doctrine of evolution, denies the descent of man. Mr. Wallace, the great apostle of evolution, opposes Darwin, and will have none of his views on the descent of man; and Professor Huxley himself says that, while the resemblance of structure is such that if any "process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, the process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of man," still he admits that the gulf is vast between civilized man and brutes, and he is certain that "whetherfromthem or not, man is assuredly notofthem."
The first difficulty I shall mention is, however, a structural one. Supposing that an ape-like ancestor developed into man, on the principles of natural selection; then his development has taken place in a manner directly contrary to the acknowledged law of natural selection. He has developed backwards; his frame is in every way weaker; he is wanting in agility; he has lost the prehensile feet; he has lost teeth fitted for fighting or crushing or tearing; he has but little sense of smell; he has lost the hairy covering, and is obliged to help himself by clothes.[30]If this loss was ornamental it is quite unlike any other development in this respect, since no other creature has the same; for ornamental purposes the fur becomes coloured, spotted, and striped, but not lost. It is easy to reply that man beingintelligent, his brain power enables him to invent clothes, arms, implements, and so forth, which not only supply all deficiencies of structure, but give him a great superiority over all creatures. But how did he get that intelligence? By what natural process of causation (without intelligent direction) is it conceivable that, given a species of monkey, all at once and at a certain stage, structural development should have been retarded and actually reversed, and a development of brain structure alone set in? Nor, be it observed, has any trace ofmanwith a rudimentary brain ever been discovered. Savages have brains far in excess of their requirements, and can consequently be educated and improved. The skull of a prehistoric man found in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf is of average brain capacity, showing that in those remote ages man was very much in capacity what he is at present.
It must, however, be admitted that the special difficulties of the origin of man are not purely structural. We do not know enough of the Divine plan to be able to understand why it is that there is a certain undeniable unity of form, in the two eyes, ears, mouth, limbs and organs generally of the animal and man. Moreover, much is made of the fact, as stated by a recent "Edinburgh Reviewer," that "the physical difference between man and the lowest ape is trifling compared with that which exists between the lowest ape and any brute animal that is not an ape.[31]" This fact no doubt negatives the idea put forward by Bishop Temple and others, that if there was an evolution of man, it must have been in a special branch which was foreseen and commenced very far back in the scale of organic being. For the structural difference might not require such a separate origin; while the mental difference, affording objections of a different class, will not allow ofanysuch evolution at all. That there issomeconnection between man and the animal cannot be denied, and consequently, in the absence of fuller information, very little would be gained by insisting on the purelyphysicaldevelopment question. The Bible states positively that the man Adam (as the progenitor of a particular race, at any rate) was a separate and actual production, on a given part of the earth's surface. All that we need conclude regarding that is that there is nothing known which entitles us to say, "This is not a fact, and therefore is not genuine revelation."
Moreover, as to the question of the possibility of human development generally, there are certain considerations which directly support our belief. For example, directly we look to the characteristic point, the gift of intellect, we can reasonably argue that the action of a Creator is indispensable. The entrance of consciousness and of reason, however elementary, marks something out of all analogy with the development of physical structure, just as much as the entrance of Life marked a new departure in no analogy with the "properties" of inorganic matter.
From the first dawn of what looks likewillandchoicebetween two things, and something like areasonwhich directs the course of the organism in a particular way for a particular object, we have an altogether new departure. The difficulty commences at the outset, and even in the animal creation; it is merely continued and rendered more striking when we take into consideration the higher development of intellect into power of abstract reasoning, self-consciousness and God-consciousness.
It is perfectly true that the difference between the "instinct" of animals and the reason and mind of man, is one of degree rather than kind. As Christians, we have no objection whatever to a development of reason from the lowest reason solely concerned with earthly and bodily affairs to the highest powers searching into deep and spiritual truths. But such a development, though it is parallel to a physical development—as spiritual law appears to be always parallel (as far as the nature of things permits) to physical laws—still is a development which cannot under any possible circumstances dispense with an external spiritual order of existence, and one which cannot be physically caused. Nor is it conceivable that man should develop a consciousness of God, when no God really exists externally to the consciousness.[32]
The main objection, then, that I would press is, that admitting any possibility of the development of man from a purely physical and structural point of view, admitting any inference that may be drawn fairly from the undoubted connection (increasingly great as it is as we go upwards from the lower animal to the ape) between animals and man, that inference never can touch the descent of man as a whole; because no similarity of bodily structure can get over the difficulty of the mental power of man. We have to deal not with a part of man, but with the whole. The difficulty cannot be got over by denyingmindas a thingper se; for all attempts to represent mind as themereproduct of a physical structure, the brain, utterly fail.
Nobody wishes to deny what Dr. H. Maudsley and others have made so plain to us, that mind has (in one aspect, at any rate) a physical basis—that is, that no thought, imagination, or combination of thought, is known to usapart fromchange and expenditure of energy in the brain. Nor can we, by any process of introspection or observation of other subjects, separate the mind from the brain and ascertain the existence of "pure mind," or soul, experimentally. But still, there is no possibility of getting the operations of mind out of mere cell structure, unless an external Power has added the mind power, as a faculty of His endowing; then He may be allowed to have connected that faculty ever so mysteriously with physical structure; we are content. And I must insist on the total failure of all analogy between the development of bones or muscles and the development of mind; and even if we grant a certain stage of instinct to have arisen, we are still in the dark as to how that could develop into intellect such as man possesses, including a belief in God. On this subject let us hear Professor Allman. Between a development of material structure and a development of intellectual and moral features, the Professor says, "there is no conceivable analogy; and the obvious and continuous path, which we have hitherto followed up, in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter to those of living form, here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm betweenunconsciouslife andthoughtis deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena are to be found by which, as by a bridge, we can span it over.[33]"
There can belifeorfunctionwithoutconsciousnessorthought;therefore, even if we go so far as to admit that life is only a property of protoplasm, there can be no ground for saying thatthoughtis only a property of protoplasm.
"If," says Professor Allman, "we were to admit that every living cell were a conscious and thinking thing, are we therefore justified in asserting that its consciousness with its irritability is a property of the matter of which it is composed? The sole argument on which this view is made to rest is analogy. It is argued that because the life phenomena, which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a property of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are accompanied must also be so regarded. The weak point in the argument is the absence of all analogy between the things compared: and as the conclusion rests solely on the argument from analogy, the two must fall to the ground together."
Try and assign to matter all the properties you can think of, its impenetrability, extension, weight, inertia, elasticity, and so forth, by no process of thought (as Mr. Justice Fry observes in an article in "The Contemporary Review[34]") can you get out of them an adequate account of the phenomena of mind or spirit. We just now observed that consciousness, thought, and so forth, are never exhibited apart from the action of the brain; some change in the brain accompanies them all. We do not deny that. But it is obvious that thought being manifested in the presence of cerebral matter or something like it, is a very different thing from thought being apropertyof such matter, in the sense in which polarity is the property of a magnet, or irritability of living protoplasm.
To all this I have seen no answer. The way in which the opponents of Christian beliefs meet such considerations appears to be to ignore or minimize them, so as to pass over to what seems to them a satisfactory if not an easy series of transitions. If Life is after all only a "property" of matter, then given life, a brain may be produced; and as mind is always manifested in the presence of (and apparently indissolubly united with) brain structure, it is not a much greater leap to acceptlifeas a property ofmatterthan it is to takethoughtas a property of a certainspecialized physical structure. It is true that the distance is great between the instinct of an animal and the abstract reasoning power of a Newton or a Herbert Spencer; but (as we are so often told) the difference is of degree not of kind, and as the brain structure develops, so does the power and degree of reason. As to the difference in man, that he is the only "religious" animal—the one creature that has the idea of God—that is a mere development of the emotions in connection with abstract reasoning as to the cause of things. No part of our mental nature is more common to the animal and the man than the emotional; and if in the one it is mere love and hatred, joy and grief, confidence and fear, in the other the emotions are developed into the poetic sense of beauty, or the awe felt for what is grand and noble; and this insensibly passes intoworship, the root of the whole being fear of the unknown and the mysterious. That is the general line of argument taken up.
Even accepting the solution (if such it maybe called) of the two first difficulties—life added spontaneously or aboriginally to matter, and thought and consciousness added to organism—still the rest of the path is by no means so easy as might at the first glance appear. Development in brain structure certainly does not always proceedpari passuwith a higher and more complex reasoning. In actual fact we find high "reasoning" power, quite unexpectedly here and there, up and down the animal kingdom. Someinsects, with very little that can be called a brain at all, exhibit high intelligence; and some animals with smaller brains are more docile and intelligent than others with a much larger development. The ape, in spite of his close physical approach to the structure of man, and his still greater relative distance from the other animal creation, is not superior (if he is not decidedly inferior) in reason or intelligence to several animals lower down in the scale.
Savages, again, have a brain greatly in excess of their actual requirements (so to speak). Hence the mere existence of brain, however complex, does not indicate the possession of mental power.
There is reason to believe that all thought and exercise of the mind—in fact, every step in the process of "Education," whereby an ignorant person is brought at last to apprehend the most abstract propositions—is accompanied by some molecular (or other) change. So that a person who has been carefully educated has the brain in a different state from that of an exactly similarly constituted person whose brain has been subjected to no such exercise. But even if this action could be formulated and explained, it would not follow that thought is theproductof the molecular change; or that,vice versâ, if we could artificially produce certain changes, in the brain, certain thoughts and perceptions would thereon coexist with the changes, and arise in the mind of the subject forthwith. And if not, then no process of physical development accounts for grades of intellect; we have only mind developing as mind. But the theory of evolution will have nothing to do with any development but physical; or at any rate with mental development except as the result of physical: it knows nothing of pure mind, or spiritual existence, or anything of the sort.
In the nature of things we can have neither observation nor experiment in this stage. We cannot by any process develop the lower mind of an animal into the higher mind of man, and prove the steps of the evolution.[35]It is important to remember that the power ofdirecting the attention by a voluntary process of abstraction, is one that distinctively belongs to man. It is an effort of will, of a kind that no animal has any capacity for. By it alone have we any power of abstract reasoning, and it is intimately concerned with our self-consciousness and memory, and with our language. I am quite aware that animals possess something analogous to a language of their own; they can indicate certain emotions and give warning, and so forth, to their fellows. But that language could never develop into human language, or the animal will (such as it is) ever rise to a human will, or animals become endowed with self-consciousness, unless they could acquire the power of voluntarily abstracting the mind from one subject or part of a subject and fixing the attention on another. We cannot formulate any process of change whereby the lower state could pass on to or attain to the higher in this respect.
Therefore again we conclude that the higher reason is a giftab externo.
If we take a step further to the "spiritual" or "moral" faculties of man, we have the same difficulty intensified, if indeed it does take a new departure. To examine the question adequately would require us to go into the deep waters of psychology; and here we should encounter many matters regarding which there may be legitimate doubt and difference of opinion, which would obscure and lead us away from our main line of thought.
This I would willingly avoid. But it is quite intelligible, and touches on no dangerous ground, when we assert that there is a distinct ascent—an interval again raising developmental difficulties, directly we pass from the intellectual to the moral. We may wonder at the high degree of intelligence possessed by some animals; but we are unable to conceive any animal possessing a power of abstract reasoning, having ideas of beauty (as such), or of manifesting what we call the poetic feeling. And still more is this so when we look at the further interval that lies between any perception of physical phenomena, any reasoning in the abstract, or investigation of mathematical truth, and the overmastering sense of obligation to the "moral law," or the action of the soul in its instinctive possession of the conception of a Divine Existence external to itself. It is because of this felt difference that we talk of the "spiritual" as something beyond and above the "mental."
The distinction is real, though we must not allow ourselves to be led too far in attempting to scan the close union that, from another point of view, exists between the one and the other.
In a recent number of "The Edinburgh Review,[36]" the author complains of Bishop Temple thus: "He uses the word spiritual in such a way that he might be taken to imply that we had some other faculty for the perception of moral truths, in addition to, and distinct from, our reason." And the writer goes on to make an "uncompromising assertion of reason as the one supreme faculty of man. To depreciate reason (he says) to the profit of some supposed 'moral' illative sense, would be to open the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the imagination."
On the other hand, some writers (claiming to derive their argument from the Scriptures) have supposed they could assert three distinct natures in man—a spiritual, a mental (or psychic), and a bodily. Now there is no doubt that, rightly or wrongly (I am not now concerned with that), the Bible does distinctly assert that a "breath of lives"[37]was specially put into the bodily form of man, and adds that thereby "man became a living soul." But it is also stated of the animal creation that the breath of life was given to them,[38]and animals are said to have a "soul" (nephesh).[39]So that neither in the one case nor the other have we more than the two elements: a body, and a life put into it; though of course the man's "life" (as the plural indicates, and other texts explain) was higher in kind than that of the animal.
St. Paul, it is true, speaks of the "whole spirit, and soul, and body.[40]" But our Lord Himself, in a very solemn passage (where it would be most natural to expect the distinction, if it were absolute and structural, to be noticed), speaks of the "soul and body" only.[41]
The fact is that we are only able to argue conclusively that, besides the physical form, we have a non-material soul, or a self. And our Lord, whose teaching was always eminently practical, went no further. We are conscious of a "self"—something that remains, while the body continually grows and changes.
There was inPunch, some time ago, a picture of an old grandfather, with a little child looking at a marble bust representing a child. "Who is that?" asks the little one; and the old man replies, "That is grandfather when he was a little boy." "And who is it now?" rejoins the child. One smiles at the picture, but in reality it conceals a very important and a very pathetic truth. Nothing could well be greater than the outward difference between the grey hairs and bowed figure and the little cherub face; and yet there was a "self"—a soul, that remained the same throughout. In Platonic language, while theeidvlonperpetually changes, theeidoVremains. We have, therefore, evidence as positive as the nature of the subject admits that we are right in speaking of thebody and the soul, or self. And as we cannot connect the higher reasoning, and, above all, conscience and the religious belief, as a "property" of physical structure, we conclude that the Scripture only asserts facts when it attributes both to the soul, as a spiritual element or nature belonging to the body. Man is essentially one;[42]but there is both a material and a non-material, a physical and a spiritual element, in the one nature. But, being a spiritual element, that part of our nature necessarily has two sides (so to speak). It has its point of contact with self and the world of sense, and its point of contact with the world of spirit and with the Great Spirit of all, from whom it came.Becauseof that higher "breath of lives" given by the Most High, man possesses the faculty ofconsciousness of God(i.e., the higher spiritual faculties), besides the consciousness of self, or merely intellectual power regarding self and the external world. Therefore, when an Apostle desires to speak very forcibly of something that is to affect a man through and through, in every part and in every aspect of his nature, he speaks of the "whole spirit, soul, and body." To sum up: all that we know from the Bible is that God gave a "soul" (nephesh) to the animals, in consequence of which (when united to the physical structure) the functions of life and the phenomena of intelligence are manifested. So God gave a non-material, and therefore "spiritual," element to human nature; and this being of a higher grade and capacity to that of the animal world, not only in its union with physical structure, makes the man a "living soul"—gives him an intelligence and a certain reason such as the animals have, but also gives him, as a special and unique endowment; the consciousness of self (involving—which is very noteworthy—a consciousness of its own limitations) and the consciousness of God. Hence man's power of improvement. If the man cultivates only the self-consciousness and the reason that is with it, the Scriptures speak of him as the "natural or psychic man;" if he is enabled by Divine grace to develop the higher moral and spiritual part of his nature, and to walk after the Spirit, not after the flesh, he is a "spiritual man."
It is idle to speculate whether the "nephesh" of the animals, or the "living self" of the man, is an entity separate from the body, and capable of existingper se—of its own inherent nature—apart from it. We do not know that animal forms are the clothing of a lower-graded but separate spiritual form, or that such an animal soul or spirit can exist separately from the body; and we do notknow(from the Bible)—whatever may be the current language on the subject—that man's spirit is in its nature capable of anything like permanent separate existence.[43]Man is essentially one; and when the physical change called death passes over him, it does not utterly obliterate the whole being. The non-material element is not affected any more than it is by the sleep of every night; and the man will be ultimately raised, not a spiritual or immaterial form, but provided, as before, with a body, only one of a higher capacity and better adapted to its higher environments—the "spiritual body" of St. Paul, in a word. The original union of mind and matter is, on any possible theory, mysterious; and the separation of them for a time is neither less so, nor more. All this is perfectly true, whether the non-material element in man's nature isnecessarily, inherently andby nature, immortal or not—a question which I do not desire to enter on.
Hence it is that a certain element of truth is recognized in the protest of the Edinburgh Reviewer. On the other hand, as we have not only intelligence, emotions (which are possessed in lower degree by animals), self-consciousness, the power of abstract reasoning, and the higher faculties of the imagination,[44]but also the consciousness of God and the commanding sense of right and wrong; and seeing that the last-named are different in kind from the former, we give them a separate name, and speak of the moral or spiritual nature or capacity of man, as well as the intellectual or mental. Some (by the way) choose "moral" to include both, holding that ethical perceptions arise out of (or are intimately connected with) our sense of God. Others would make a further distinction, and confine "moral" to the (supposed) bare ethical perception of duty or of right and wrong, and add "spiritual" to distinguish the highest faculty of all, whereby man holds communion with his Maker and recognizes his relation to Him.
Whether this further distinction is justified or not, there is a distinction between the moral and the purely intellectual; and we are justified in using different terms for things that arepracticallydifferent. This the Edinburgh Reviewer seems to have forgotten.
It was necessary to my argument to enter on this somewhat lengthy examination of the spiritual nature of man, because, while we acknowledge the unity of man, we are compelled to recognize in his religious sense and aspirations and capacities something quite disparate—something that we could not get by a natural process of growth from such beginnings of reason as are observed in the lower animals.
I am aware that Dr. Darwin conceived that the religious feeling of man might have grown out of the natural emotions of fear,[45]love, gratitude, &c., when once men began to question as to the explanation of the phenomena of life, and to ascribe the forces of nature to the possession of a spirit such as he himself was conscious of: and with much more positive intent, Mr. H. Spencer has also, after most painstaking inquiries, formulated what he conceives to be the origin of religious belief in man. He refers us to the early belief in a "double" of self, which double could be projected out of self, and remained in some way after death, so as to become the object of fear, and ultimately of worship. When this ancestor-worship resulted in the worship of a multitude of "genii" (whose individuality, as regards their former earthly connection, is more or less forgotten), then the idea of attaching the numerous divinities or ancestor-souls to the ocean, the sky, the sun, the mountains, and the powers of nature, arises; whence the poetic systems of ancient polytheistic mythology. Gradually men began to reason and to think, and they refined the polytheism into the "higher" idea of one great, central, immaterial all-pervading power, which they called God.
Mr. Spencer, in effect, concludes that this "God" is only man's own idea of filling up a blank, of explaining the fact that there must be an ultimate first cause of whatever exists, and there is also a great source of power of some kind external to ourselves.[46]
I am not going here to enter on any special argument as to the validity of these theories in their relation to the direct question of the nature and existence of God. What we are here concerned with is, whether they enable us to exclude the idea of a gift and a giver of spiritual or mental (we will not quarrel about terms) nature to man, and whether, by any fair reasoning from analogy, we can suppose man's reason and his "sensus numinis" to arise by the mere stages of natural growth and development. Dr. Darwin's supposition takes no notice of the moral law and its influence; indeed he adopts[47]the view that conscience is no sense of right and wrong, but only the stored up and inherited social instinct, a sense of convenience and inconvenience to the tribe and to the individual, which at last acts so spontaneously and rapidly in giving its verdict on anything, that we regard it as a special sense. It would of course be possible to expend much time and many words in argument on this subject. There is not, and never will be, any direct evidence as to the origin of conscience; and as that sense (like any other power of our mental nature) is capable of being educated, evoked, enlightened, and strengthened, and may also by neglect and contradiction deteriorate and wither away, there is ample room for allowing a certain part of the theory.[48]But many people who examine their own conscience will feel that the description certainly does not suit them; there are many things which conscience disapproves, of which no great evil consequences to themselves or any one else are felt. Conscience is constantly condemning "the way that seemeth good unto a man."Ultimatelyno doubt, there is real evil at the end of everything that conscience warns a man against; but not such as "inherited experience" is likely to recognize. Is it, for instance, the experience of the mass of men, as men, that the "fleshly mind is death, but the spiritual mind is life and peace"? Is not rather the world at large habitually putting money-making, position-making, and the care of the things of the body, of time, and of sense, in the first place; and is not the moral law perpetually warning us that the fashion of the world passes away, and that what seems gold is in reality tinsel? As far as the condemnation that conscience passes on the broad evils which affect society—"thou shalt not steal," "thou shalt not lie," or so forth—no doubt it is supported by the transmitted sense of inconvenience; but who has told it of the evil of things that do not affect our social state? and who has changed the inconvenient, the painful, into thewrong? It is one thing to instinctively avoid a theft or a falsehood, even if the first origin of such instinct were the fear of consequences or the love of approbation; it is quite another—the inward condemnation of something which "the deceitfulness of sin" is able to excuse, and which the world at large would regard as permissible or at least venial. Even if inherited use has its full play, there is still a something wanted before the one can be got into (or out of) the other. Why, again, are savages prone to imagine natural phenomena to be caused or actuated by "spirits"? Surely it is because thereisconsciously a spirit in man, and a Higher Power, even God, outside, who exists, though man in his ignorance has many false ideas regarding Him.
It is an objection of the same order that applies to the other theory (Mr. Spencer's). There can be little doubt that in many respects it is true: as an account of allhumansystems of religion it is adequate and natural; but it breaks down hopelessly when we try to use it to explain how the conception of God originated in the mind. Just as there is a felt difference—not of degree or in form, but essential and radical in its nature—between theundesirableand thewrong, so there is a difference between the idea of a mysterious thing towards which apprehension or awe is felt, and the conception of God. Granted that man believed in his own spirit or double, and attributed similar immaterial motor powers as a cause for the wind and waves, and so forth; granted that he at last "refined" this into the belief in one Spirit whose power was necessarily great and varied—the origin is still unexplained. How did man get the idea of a personal spirit or double—no such thing,ex hypothesiexisting? How did he get to formulate the idea of aGodwhen he had simplified his group of many spirits into one?
If man is created with a consciousness of his own inner-self,as a self, he is able naturally to imagine a like self in other beings; if he has an idea of God innate in him, he can assimilate the truth when it is at last presented to his mind; and that is why he feels that itisa refinement; a rising from the lower to the higher (because from falsehood to truth), to let the many gods give place to the One God. If the idea of God has been obscured, and the power of its apprehension deadened, the man can only grope about helplessly, fashioning this explanation of nature and that—all more or less false, but all dimly bearing witness to the two absolute facts, that there is an inner non-material self, and an external non-material God.
If then there are insuperable difficulties in connecting thought with matter by any process of unaided development, there are also great difficulties, even when thought in a rudimentary form is given, in conceiving it developed into man's reason, or man's religious belief, by any known process of "natural" causation.
[30]
It is remarkable that the loss of the hairy covering is most complete when it is most wanted: the back, the spine, and the shoulders are in nearly all races unprotected; and yet the want of a covering from the heat or cold is such that the rudest savages have invented some kind of cloak for the back.
[31]
No. 331, July, 1885, p. 223.
[32]
For our consciousness of God is obviously very different from a figment of the imagination, or the sort of reality experienced in a dream. This is not the place to develop such an argument, but it seems to me more than doubtful whether we can evenimaginesomethingabsolutelynon-existent in nature. When the artist's imagination would construct, e.g., a winged dragon, the concept is always made up ofparts which are real—eyes like an alligator, bat-wings, scales of a fish or crocodile, and so forth. All the members or parts are real, put together to form the unreal. I do not believe that any instance of a human conception can be brought forward which on analysis will not conform to this rule.