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We now stand face to face with the final problem. It is this: Are the brain, and the moral and intellectual processes known to be associated with the brain — and, as far as our experience goes, indissolubly associated — subject to the laws which we find paramount in physical nature? Is the will of man, in other words, free, or are it and nature equally 'bound fast in fate'? From this latter conclusion, after he had established it to the entire satisfaction of his understanding, the great German thinker Fichte recoiled. You will find the record of this struggle between head and heart in his book, entitled 'Die Bestimmung des Menschen' — The Vocation of Man.[Footnote: Translated by Dr. William Smith of Edinburgh; Truebner, 1873.]Fichte was determined at all hazards to maintain his freedom, but the price he paid for it indicates the difficulty of the task. To escape from the iron necessity seen everywhere reigning in physical nature, he turned defiantly round upon nature and law, and affirmed both of them to be the products of his own mind. He was not going to be the slave of a thing which he had himself created. There is a good deal to be said in favour of this view, but few of us probably would be able to bring into play the solvent transcendentalism whereby Fichte melted his chains.
Why do some regard this notion of necessity with terror, while others do not fear it at all? Has not Carlyle somewhere said that a belief in destiny is the bias of all earnest minds? 'It is not Nature,' says Fichte, 'it is Freedom itself, by which the greatest and most terrible disorders incident to our race are produced. Man is the cruellest enemy of man.' But the question of moral responsibility here emerges, and it is the possible loosening of this responsibility that so many of us dread. The notion of necessity certainly failed to frighten Bishop Butler. He thought it untrue even absurd — but he did not fear its practical consequences. He showed, on the contrary, in the 'Analogy,' that as far as human conduct is concerned, the two theories of free-will and necessity would come to the same in the end.
What is meant by free-will? Does it imply the power of producing events without antecedents? — of starting, as it were, upon a creative tour of occurrences without any impulse from within or from without? Let us consider the point. If there be absolutely or relatively no reason why a tree should fall, it will not fall; and if there be absolutely or relatively no reason why a man should act, he will not act. It is true that the united voice of this assembly could not persuade me that I have not, at this moment, the power to lift my arm if I wished to do so. Within this range the conscious freedom of my will cannot be questioned. But what about the origin of the 'wish'? Are we, or are we not, complete masters of the circumstances which create our wishes, motives, and tendencies to action? Adequate reflection will, I think, prove that we are not. What, for example, have I had to do with the generation and development of that which some will consider my total being, and others a most potent factor of my total being — the living, speaking organism which now addresses you? As stated at the beginning of this discourse, my physical and intellectual textures were wovenforme, notbyme. Processes in the conduct or regulation of which I had no share have made me what I am. Here, surely, if anywhere, we are as clay in the hands of the potter. It is the greatest of delusions to suppose that we come into this world as sheets of white paper on which the age can write anything it likes, making us good or bad, noble or mean, as the age pleases. The age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre-existent capacities, but it cannot create them. The worthy Robert Owen, who saw in external circumstances the great moulders of human character, was obliged to supplement his doctrine by making the man himself one of the circumstances. It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste. How many disorders, ghostly and bodily, are transmitted to us by inheritance? In our courts of law, whenever it is a question whether a crime has been committed under the influence of insanity, the best guidance the judge and jury can have is derived from the parental antecedents of the accused. If among these insanity be exhibited in any marked degree, the presumption in the prisoner's favour is enormously enhanced, because the experience of life has taught both judge and jury that insanity is frequently transmitted from parent to child.
I met, some years ago, in a railway carriage the governor of one of our largest prisons. He was evidently an observant and reflective man, possessed of wide experience gathered in various parts of the world, and a thorough student of the duties of his vocation. He told me that the prisoners in his charge might be divided into three distinct classes. The first class consisted of persons who ought never to have been in prison. External accident, and not internal taint, had brought them within the grasp of the law, and what had happened to them might happen to most of us. They were essentially men of sound moral stamina, though wearing the prison garb. Then came the largest class, formed of individuals possessing no strong bias, moral or immoral, plastic to the touch of circumstances, which could mould them into either good or evil members of society. Thirdly came a class — happily not a large one — whom no kindness could conciliate and no discipline tame. They were sent into this world labelled 'incorrigible', wickedness being stamped, as it were, upon their organisations. It was an unpleasant truth, but as a truth it ought to be faced. For such criminals the prison over which he ruled was certainly not the proper place. If confined at all, their prison should be on a desert island where the deadlycontagiumof their example could not taint the moral air. But the sea itself he was disposed to regard as a cheap and appropriate substitute for the island. It seemed to him evident that the State would benefit if prisoners of the first class were liberated; prisoners of the second class educated; and prisoners of the third class put compendiously under water.
It is not, however, from the observation of individuals that the argument against 'free-will,' as commonly understood, derives its principal force. It is, as already hinted, indefinitely strengthened when extended to the race. Most of you have been forced to listen to the outcries and denunciations which rang discordant through the land for some years after the publication of Mr. Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' Well, the world — even the clerical world — for the most part settled down in the belief that Mr. Darwin's book simply reflects the truth of nature: that we who are now 'foremost in the files of time' have come to the front through almost endless stages of promotion from lower to higher forms of life.
If to any one of us were given the privilege of looking back through the aeons across which life has crept towards its present outcome, his vision, according to Darwin, would ultimately reach a point when the progenitors of this assembly could not be called human. From that humble society, through the interaction of its members and the storing up of their best qualities, a better one emerged; from this again a better still; until at length, by the integration of infinitesimals through ages of amelioration, we came to be what we are to-day. We of this generation had no conscious share in the production of this grand and beneficent result. Any and every generation which preceded us had just as little share. The favoured organisms whose garnered excellence constitutes our present store owed their advantages, first, to what we in our ignorance are obliged to call accidental variation;' and, secondly, to a law of heredity in the passing of which our suffrages were not collected. With characteristic felicity and precision Mr. Matthew Arnold lifts this question into the free air of poetry, but not out of the atmosphere of truth, when he ascribes the process of amelioration to 'a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' If, then, our organisms, with all their tendencies and capacities, are given to us without our being consulted; and if, while capable of acting within certain limits in accordance with our wishes, we are not masters of the circumstances in which motives and wishes originate; if, finally, our motives and wishes determine our actions — in what sense can these actions be said to be the result of free-will?
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Here, again, we are confronted with the question of moral responsibility, which, as it has been much talked of lately, it is desirable to meet. With the view of removing the fear of our falling back into the condition of 'the ape and tiger,' so sedulously excited by certain writers, I propose to grapple with this question in its rudest form, and in the most uncompromising way. 'If,' says the robber, the ravisher, or the murderer, 'I act because I must act, what right have you to hold me responsible for my deeds?' The reply is, 'The right of society to protect itself against aggressive and injurious forces, whether they be bond or free, forces of nature or forces of man.' 'Then,' retorts the criminal, 'you punish me for what I cannot help.' 'Let it be granted,' says society, 'but had you known that the treadmill or the gallows was certainly in store for you, you might have "helped." Let us reason the matter fully and frankly out. We may entertain no malice or hatred against you; it is enough that with a view to our own safety and purification we are determined that you and such as you shall not enjoy liberty of evil action in our midst. You, who have behaved as a wild beast, we claim the right to cage or kill as we should a wild beast. The public safety is a matter of more importance than the very limited chance of your moral renovation, while the knowledge that you have been hanged by the neck may furnish to others about to do as you have done the precise motive which will hold them back. If your act be such as to invoke a minor penalty, then not only others, but yourself, may profit by the punishment which we inflict. On the homely principle that "a burnt child dreads the fire," it will make you think twice before venturing on a repetition of your crime. Observe, finally, the consistency of our conduct. You offend, you say, because you cannot help offending, to the public detriment. We punish, is our reply, because we cannot help punishing, for the public good. Practically, then, as Bishop Butler predicted, we act as the world acted when it supposed the evil deeds of its criminals to be the products of free-will.'[Footnote: An eminent Church dignitary describes all this, not unkindly, as 'truculent logic.' I think it worthy of his Grace's graver consideration.]
'What,' I have heard it argued, 'is the use of preaching about duty, if a man's predetermined position in the moral world renders him incapable of profiting by advice?' Who knows that he is incapable? The preacher's last word is a factor in the man's conduct, and it may be a most important factor, unlocking moral energies which might otherwise remain imprisoned and unused. If the preacher thoroughly feel that words of enlightenment, courage, and admonition enter into the list of forces employed by Nature herself for man's amelioration, since she gifted man with speech, he will suffer no paralysis to fall upon his tongue. Dung the fig-tree hopefully, and not until its barrenness has been demonstrated beyond a doubt let the sentence go forth, 'Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?'
I remember when a youth in the town of Halifax, some two-and-thirty years ago, attending a lecture given by a young man to a small but select audience. The aspect of the lecturer was earnest and practical, and his voice soon rivetted attention. He spoke of duty, defining it as a debt owed, and there was a kindling vigour in his words which must have strengthened the sense of duty in the minds of those who heard him. No speculations regarding the freedom of the will could alter the fact that the words of that young man did me good. His name was George Dawson. He also spoke, if you will allow me to allude to it, of a social subject much discussed at the time — the Chartist subject of levelling.' Suppose, he says, two men to be equal at night, and that one rises at six, while the other sleeps till nine next morning, what becomes of your levelling? And in so speaking be made himself the mouthpiece of Nature, which, as we have seen, secures advance, not by the reduction of all to a common level, but by the encouragement and conservation of what is best.
It may be urged that, in dealing as above with my hypothetical criminal, I am assuming a state of things brought about by the influence of religions which include the dogmas of theology and the belief in freewill — a state, namely, in which a moral majority control and keep in awe an immoral minority. The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Withdraw, then, our theologic sanctions, including the belief in free-will, and the condition of the race will be typified by the samples of individual wickedness which have been above adduced. We shall all, that is, become robbers, and ravishers, and murderers. From much that has been written of late it would seem that this astounding inference finds house-room in many minds. Possibly, the people who hold such views might be able to illustrate them by individual instances.
The fear of hell's a hangman's whip,To keep the wretch in order.
The fear of hell's a hangman's whip,To keep the wretch in order.
Remove the fear, and the wretch, following his natural instinct, may become disorderly; but I refuse to accept him as a sample of humanity. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die' is by no means the ethical consequence of a rejection of dogma. To many of you the name of George Jacob Holyoake is doubtless familiar, and you are probably aware that at no man in England has the term 'atheist' been more frequently pelted. There are, moreover, really few who have more completely liberated themselves from theologic notions. Among working-class politicians Mr. Holyoake is a leader. Does he exhort his followers to 'Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'? Not so. In the August number of the 'Nineteenth Century' you will find these words from his pen: 'The gospel of dirt is bad enough, but the gospel of mere material comfort is much worse.' He contemptuously calls the Comtist championship of the working man, 'the championship of the trencher.' He would place 'the leanest liberty which brought with it the dignity and power of self-help' higher than 'any prospect of a full plate without it.' Such is the moral doctrine taught by this 'atheistic' leader; and no Christian, I apprehend, need be ashamed of it.
Most heartily do I recognise and admire the spiritual radiance, if I may use the term, shed by religion on the minds and lives of many personally known to me. At the same time I cannot but observe how signally, as regards the production of anything beautiful, religion fails in other cases. Its professor and defender is sometimes at bottom a brawler and a clown. These differences depend upon primary distinctions of character which religion does not remove. It may comfort some to know that there are amongst us many whom the gladiators of the pulpit would call 'atheists' and 'materialists,' whose lives, nevertheless, as tested by any accessible standard of morality, would contrast more than favourably with the lives of those who seek to stamp them with this offensive brand. When I say 'offensive,' I refer simply to the intention of those who use such terms, and not because atheism or materialism, when compared with many of the notions ventilated in the columns of religious newspapers, has any particular offensiveness for me. If I wished to find men who are scrupulous in their adherence to engagements, whose words are their bond, and to whom moral shiftiness of any kind is subjectively unknown; if I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honourable neighbour, and a just citizen — I should seek him, and find him among the band of 'atheists' to which I refer. I have known some of the most pronounced among them not only in life but in death seen them approaching with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no dread of a 'hangman's whip,' with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still as mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of them, as if their eternal future depended upon their latest deeds.
In letters addressed to myself, and in utterances addressed to the public, Faraday is often referred to as a sample of the association of religious faith with moral elevation. I was locally intimate with him for fourteen or fifteen years of my life, and had thus occasion to observe how nearly his character approached what might, without extravagance, be called perfection. He was strong but gentle, impetuous but self-restrained; a sweet and lofty courtesy marked his dealings with men and women; and though he sprang from the body of the people, a nature so fine might well have been distilled from the flower of antecedent chivalry. Not only in its broader sense was the Christian religion necessary to Faraday's spiritual peace, but in what many would call the narrow sense held by those described by Faraday himself as 'a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if known at all, as Sandemanians,' it constituted the light and comfort of his days.
Were our experience confined to such cases, it would furnish an irresistible argument in favour of the association of dogmatic religion with moral purity and grace. But, as already intimated, our experience is not thus confined. In further illustration of this point, we may compare with Faraday a philosopher of equal magnitude, whose character, including gentleness and strength, candour and simplicity, intellectual power and moral elevation, singularly resembles that of the great Sandemanian, but who has neither shared the theologic views nor the religious emotions which formed so dominant a factor in Faraday's life. I allude to Mr. Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men — a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God. I cannot therefore, as so many desire, look upon Faraday's religious belief as the exclusive source of qualities shared so conspicuously by one uninfluenced by that belief. To a deeper virtue belonging to human nature in its purer forms I am disposed to refer the excellence of both.
Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence. We may admit, with Fichte, 'that superstition has unquestionably constrained its subjects to abandon many pernicious practices and to adopt many useful ones;' the real loss accompanying its decay at the present day has been thus clearly stated by the same philosopher: 'In so far as these lamentations do not proceed from the priests themselves — whose grief at the loss of their dominion over the human mind we can well understand — but from the politicians, the whole matter resolves itself into this, that government has thereby become more difficult and expensive. The judge was spared the exercise of his own sagacity and penetration when, by threats of relentless damnation, he could compel the accused to make confession. The evil spirit formerly performed without reward services for which in later times judges and policemen have to be paid.'
No man ever felt the need of a high and ennobling religion more thoroughly than this powerful and fervid teacher, who, by the way, did not escape the brand of 'atheist.' But Fichte asserted emphatically the power and sufficiency of morality in its own sphere. 'Let us consider,' he says, 'the highest which man can possess in the absence of religion — I mean pure morality. The moral man obeys the law of duty in his breast absolutely, because it is a law unto him; and he does whatever reveals itself to him as his duty simply because it is duty. Let not the impudent assertion be repeated that such an obedience, without regard for consequences, and without desire for consequences, is in itself impossible and opposed to human nature.' So much for Fichte. Faraday was equally distinct. 'I have no intention,' he says, 'of substituting anything for religion, but I wish to take that part of human nature which is independent of it. Morality, philosophy, commerce, the various institutions and habits of society, are independent of religion and may exist without it.' These were the words of his youth, but they expressed his latest convictions. I would add, that the muse of Tennyson never reached a higher strain than when it embodied the sentiment of duty in AEnone :—
And, because right is right, to follow rightWere wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
And, because right is right, to follow rightWere wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of human nature been built up. The power which has moulded us thus far has worked with stern tools upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done cannot be so readily undone; and it has endowed us with moral constitutions which take pleasure in the noble, the beautiful, and the true, just as surely as it has endowed us with sentient organisms, which find aloes bitter and sugar sweet. That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers — hunger and thirst, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe — such were the forces whose interaction and adjustment throughout an immeasurable past wove the triplex web of man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will be effectual to the end.
You may retort that even on my own showing 'the power which makes for righteousness' has dealt in delusions; for it cannot be denied that the beliefs of religion, including the dogmas of theology and the freedom of the will, have had some effect in moulding the moral world. Granted; but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter. Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are primary, and not derived? — that they are not theproducts, instead of being thecreators, of man's moral nature? I think it is in one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the nobility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in heaven is derived from the nobility of man. The bird's instinct to weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as typical of the force which built cathedrals, temples, and pyramids :—
Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nestOf leaves and feathers from her breast,Or how the fish outbuilt its shell,Painting with morn each annual cell?Such and so grew these holy pilesWhile love and terror laid the tiles;Earth proudly wears the ParthenonAs the best gem upon her zone;And Morning opes with haste her lidsTo gaze upon the Pyramids;O'er England's abbeys bends the skyAs on its friends with kindred eye;For out of Thought's interior sphereThese wonders rose to upper air,And nature gladly gave them place,Adopted them into her race,And granted them an equal dateWith Andes and with Ararat.
Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nestOf leaves and feathers from her breast,Or how the fish outbuilt its shell,Painting with morn each annual cell?Such and so grew these holy pilesWhile love and terror laid the tiles;Earth proudly wears the ParthenonAs the best gem upon her zone;And Morning opes with haste her lidsTo gaze upon the Pyramids;O'er England's abbeys bends the skyAs on its friends with kindred eye;For out of Thought's interior sphereThese wonders rose to upper air,And nature gladly gave them place,Adopted them into her race,And granted them an equal dateWith Andes and with Ararat.
Surely, many utterances which have been accepted as descriptions ought to be interpreted as aspirations, or, as having their roots in aspiration instead of in objective knowledge. Does the song of the herald angels, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men,' express the exaltation and the yearning of a human soul? or does it describe an optical and acoustical fact — a visible host and an audible song? If the former, the exaltation and the yearning are man's imperishable possession — a ferment long confined to individuals, but which may by-and-by become the leaven of the race. If the latter, then belief in the entire transaction is wrecked by non-fulfilment. Look to the East at the present moment as a comment on the promise of peace' on earth and goodwill toward men. That promise is a dream ruined by the experience of eighteen centuries, and in that ruin is involved the claim of the 'heavenly host' to prophetic vision. But though the mechanical theory proves untenable, the immortal song and the feelings it expresses are still ours, to be incorporated, let us hope, in purer and less shadowy forms in the poetry, philosophy, and practice of the future.
Thus, following the lead of physical science, we are brought without solution of continuity into the presence of problems which, as usually classified, lie entirely outside the domain of physics. To these problems thoughtful and penetrative minds are now applying those methods of research which in physical science have proved their truth by their fruits. There is on all hands a growing repugnance to invoke the supernatural in accounting for the phenomena of human life; and the thoughtful minds just referred to, finding no trace of evidence in favour of any other origin, are driven to seek in the interaction of social forces the genesis and development of man's moral nature. If they succeed in their search — and I think they are sure to succeed — social duty will be raised to a higher level of significance and the deepening sense of social duty will, it is to be hoped, lessen, if not obliterate, the strifes and heartburnings which now beset and disfigure our social life. Towards this great end it behoves us one and all to work; and devoutly wishing its consummation, I have the honour, ladies and gentlemen, to bid you a friendly farewell.
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XV. PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION.
THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate; through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding power so strong. This general need — this hunger for the ideal and wonderful — led eventually to the differentiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his capacities and needs. As time advanced — in other words, as the savage opened out into civilised man — these forms were purified and ennobled until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:—
Where still the magic robe of PoesyWound itself lovingly around the Truth.[Footnote:Da der Dichtung zauberische HuelleSich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'— Schiller. ]
Where still the magic robe of PoesyWound itself lovingly around the Truth.
[Footnote:Da der Dichtung zauberische HuelleSich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'— Schiller. ]
As poets, the priesthood would have been justified, their deities, celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or those among them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objective validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man. It is against this objective rendering of the emotions — this thrusting into the region of fact and positive knowledge of conceptions essentially ideal and poetic — that science, consciously or unconsciously, wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on its subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling makes claims which traverse our knowledge of nature, science, as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than against the life and substance of religion, that Science enters her protest. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be taken for what it is worth — as an effort on the part of man to bring the mystery of life and nature within the range of his capacities; as a temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms of knowledge of that which transcends all knowledge, and admits only of ideal approach.
The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. It is, for example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold to protect, amid the wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of religion. And it is to be remembered that under the circumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In other influential quarters a similar spirit is at work. In a remarkable article published by Professor Knight of St. Andrews in the September number of the 'Nineteenth Century,' amid other free utterances, we have this one :— 'If matter is not eternal, its first emergence into being is a miracle beside which all others dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been pointed out, the process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a material world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined;[Footnote: Professor Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of whose Collects begins thus: `O God, who by thy mighty power halt made all things of nothing.]its emergence into order out of chaos when "without form and void" of life,is merely a poetic rendering of the doctrine of its slow evolution.' These are all bold words to be spoken before the moral philosophy class of a Scotch university, while those I have underlined show a remarkable freedom of dealing with the sacred text. They repeat in terser language what I ventured to utter four years ago regarding the Book of Genesis. 'Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions.It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful.' My agreement with Professor Knight extends still further.' Does the vital,' he asks, 'proceed by a still remoter development from the non-vital? Or was it created by a fiat of volition? Or' — and here he emphasises his question — 'has it always existed in some form or other as an eternal constituent of the universe?I do not see,' he replies, 'how we can escape from the last alternative.' With the whole force of my conviction I say, Nor do I, though our modes of regarding the 'eternal constituent' may not be the same.
When matter was defined by Descartes, he deliberately excluded the idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition.Extensiononly was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impotence of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions were referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, gave the impulse. In this connection the argument in Young's 'Night Thoughts' will occur to most readers :—
Motion foreign to the smallest grainShot through vast masses of enormous weight?Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assumeSuch various forms, and gave it wings to fly?
Motion foreign to the smallest grainShot through vast masses of enormous weight?Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assumeSuch various forms, and gave it wings to fly?
Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose ashes lie unmarked in Putney Churchyard, strenuously contended. He affirmed motion to be an inherent attribute of matter — that no portion of matter was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were animated by a motion of their ultimate particles. The success of his contention, according to the learned and laborious Dr. Berthold,[Footnote: 'John Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart,' Heidelberg, Carl Winter. ]entitles Toland to be regarded as the founder of thatmonisticdoctrine which is now so rapidly spreading.
It seems to me that the idea of vitality entertained in our day by Professor Knight, closely resembles the idea of motion entertained by his opponents in Toland's day. Motion was then virtually asserted to be a thingsui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter. Hence the obvious inference when matter was observed to move. It was the vehicle of an energy not its own — the repository of forces impressed on it from without — the purely passive recipient of the shock of the Divine. The logical form continues, but the subject-matter is changed. 'The evolution of nature,' says Professor Knight, 'may be a fact; a daily and hourly apocalypse. But we have no evidence of the non-vital passing into the vital. Spontaneous generation is, as yet, an imaginative guess, unverified by scientific tests. And matter is not itself alive. Vitality, whether seen in a single cell of protoplasm or in the human brain, is a thingsui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter.' It may be, however, that, in process of time, vitality will follow the example of motion, and, after the necessary antecedent wrangling, take its place among the attributes of that 'universal mother' who has been so often misdefined.
That 'matter is not itself alive' Professor Knight seems to regard as an axiomatic truth. Let us place in contrast with this the notion entertained by the philosopher Ueberweg, one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced. 'What occurs in the brain' says Ueberweg 'would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these latter possessed by the first pair, is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last must feel more feebly than the first. The sensations and feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale it is true, and not concentrated as they are in the brain."[Footnote: Letter to Lange: 'Geschichte des Materialismus,' zweite Aufl, vol. ii. p. 521.]We may not be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling, pre-existing, but diluted in the food.
'Definitions,' says Mr. Holyoake,[Footnote: 'Nineteenth Century,' September 1878.]'grow as the horizon of experience expands. They are not inventions, but descriptions of the state of a question. No man sees all through a discovery at once.' Thus Descartes's notion of matter, and his explanation of motion, would be put aside as trivial by a physiologist or a crystallographer of the present day. They are not descriptions of the state of the question. And yet a desire sometimes shows itself in distinguished quarters to bind us own to conceptions which passed muster in the infancy of knowledge, but which are wholly incompatible with our present enlightenment. Mr. Martineau, I think, errs when he seeks to hold me to views enunciated by 'Democritus and the mathematicians.' That definitions should change as knowledge advances is in accordance both with sound sense and scientific practice. When, for example, the undulatory theory was started, it was not imagined that the vibrations of light could be transverse to the direction of propagation. The example of sound was at hand, which was a case of longitudinal vibration. Now the substitution of transverse for longitudinal vibrations in the case of light involved a radical change of conception as to the mechanical properties of the luminiferous medium. But though this change went so far as to fill space with a substance, possessing the properties of a solid, rather than those of a gas, the change was accepted, because the newly discovered facts imperatively demanded it. Following Mr. Martineau's example, the opponent of the undulatory theory might effectually twit the holder of it on his change of front. 'This aether of yours,' he might say, 'alters its style with every change of service. Starting as a beggar, with scarce a rag of 'property' to cover its bones, it turns up as a prince when large undertakings are wanted. You had some show of reason when, with the case of sound before you, you assumed your aether to be a gas in the last extremity of attenuation. But now that new service is rendered necessary by new facts, you drop the beggar's rags, and accomplish an undertaking, great and princely enough in all conscience; for it implies that not only planets of enormous weight, but comets with hardly any weight at all, fly through your hypothetical solid without perceptible loss of motion.' This would sound very cogent, but it would be very vain. Equally vain, in my opinion, is Mr. Martineau's contention that we are not justified in modifying, in accordance with advancing knowledge, our notions of matter.
Before parting from Professor Knight, let me commend his courage as well as his insight. We have heard much of late of the peril to morality involved in the decay of religious belief. What Mr. Knight says under this head is worthy of all respect and attention. 'I admit,' he writes, 'that were it proved that the moral faculty was derived as well as developed, its present decisions would not be invalidated. The child of experience has a father whose teachings are grave, peremptory, and august; and an earthborn rule may be as stringent as any derived from a celestial source. It does not even follow that a belief in the material origin of spiritual existence, accompanied by a corresponding decay of belief in immortality, mustnecessarilylead to a relaxation of the moral fibre of the race.[Footnote: Is this really certain? Instead of standing in the relation of cause and effect, may not the 'decay' and 'relaxation' be merely coexistent, both, perhaps, flowing from common historic antecedents?]It is certain that it has often done so.' But it is equally certain that there have been individuals, and great historical communities, in which the absence of the latter belief has neither weakened moral earnestness, nor prevented devotional fervour.' I have elsewhere stated that some of the best men of my acquaintance — men lofty in thought and beneficent in act — belong to a class who assiduously let the belief referred to alone. They derive from it neither stimulus nor inspiration, while — I say it with regret — were I in quest of persons who, in regard to the finer endowments of human character, are to be ranked with the unendowed, I should find some characteristic samples among the noisier defenders of the orthodox belief. These, however, are but 'hand-specimens' on both sides; the wider data referred to by Professor Knight constitute, therefore, a welcome corroboration of my experience. Again, my excellent critic, Professor Blackie, describes Buddha as being 'a great deal more than a prophet; a rare, exceptional, and altogether transcendental incarnation of moral perfection.'[Footnote: 'Natural History of Atheism,' p. 136.]And yet, 'what Buddha preached was a gospel of pure human ethics, divorced not only from Brahma and the Brahminic Trinity, but even from the existence of God.'[Footnote: Natural History of Atheism,' p. 125.]These civilised and gallant voices from the North contrast pleasantly with the barbarous whoops which sometimes come to us along the same meridian.
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Looking backwards from my present standpoint over the earnest past, a boyhood fond of play and physical action, but averse to schoolwork, lies before me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual apathy or want of appetite for knowledge, but simply from the fact that my earliest teachers lacked the power of imparting vitality to what they taught. Athwart all play and amusement, however, a thread of seriousness ran through my character; and many a sleepless night of my childhood has been passed, fretted by the question 'Who made God?' I was well versed in Scripture; for I loved the Bible, and was prompted by that love to commit large portions of it to memory. Later on I became adroit in turning my Scriptural knowledge against the Church of Rome, but the characteristic doctrines of that Church marked only for a time the limits of enquiry. The eternal Sonship of Christ, for example, as enunciated in the Athanasian Creed, perplexed me. The resurrection of the body was also a thorn in my mind, and here I remember that a passage in Blair's 'Grave' gave me momentary rest.
Sure the same power
That rear'd the piece at first and took it downCan reassemble the loose, scatter'd partsAnd put them as they were.
The conclusion seemed for the moment entirely fair, but with further thought, my difficulties came back to me. I had seen cows and sheep browsing upon churchyard grass, which sprang from the decaying mould of dead men. The flesh of these animals was undoubtedly a modification of human flesh, and the persons who fed upon them were as undoubtedly, in part, a more remote modification of the same substance. I figured the self-same molecules as belonging first to one body and afterwards to a different one, and I asked myself how two bodies so related could possibly arrange their claims at the day of resurrection. The scattered parts of each were to be reassembled and set as they were. But if handed over to the one, how could they possibly enter into the composition of the other? Omnipotence itself, I concluded, could not reconcile the contradiction. Thus the plank which Blair's mechanical theory of the resurrection brought momentarily into sight, disappeared, and I was again cast abroad on the waste ocean of speculation.
At the same time I could by no means get rid of the idea that the aspects of nature and the consciousness of man implied the operation of a power altogether beyond my grasp — an energy the thought of which raised the temperature of the mind, though it refused to accept shape, personal or otherwise, from the intellect. Perhaps the able critics of the 'Saturday Review' are justified in speaking as they sometimes do of Mr. Carlyle. They owe him nothing, and have a right to announce the fact in their own way. I, however, owe him a great deal, and am also in honour bound to acknowledge the debt. Few, perhaps, who are privileged to come into contact with that illustrious man have shown him a sturdier front than I have, or in discussing modern science have more frequently withstood him. But I could see that his contention at bottom always was that the human soul has claims and yearnings which physical science cannot satisfy. England to come will assuredly thank him for his affirmation of the ethical and ideal side of human nature. Be this as it may, at the period now reached in my story the feeling referred to was indefinitely strengthened, my whole life being at the same time rendered more earnest, resolute, and laborious by the writings of Carlyle. Others also ministered to this result. Emerson kindled me, while Fichte powerfully stirred my moral pulse.[Footnote: The reader will find in the Seventeenth Lecture of Fichte's course on the 'Characteristics of the Present Age' a sample of the vital power of this philosopher.]In this relation I cared little for political theories or philosophic systems, but a great deal for the propagated life and strength of pure and powerful minds. In my later school-days, under a clever teacher, some knowledge of mathematics and physics had been picked up: my stock of both was, however, scanty, and I resolved to augment it. But it was really with the view of learning whether mathematics and physics could help me in other spheres, rather than with the desire of acquiring distinction in either science, that I ventured, in 1848, to break the continuity of my life, and devote the meagre funds then at my disposal to the study of science in Germany.
But science soon fascinated me on its own account. To carry it duly and honestly out, moral qualities were incessantly invoked. There was no room allowed for insincerity — no room even for carelessness. The edifice of science had been raised by men who had unswervingly followed the truth as it is in nature; and in doing so had often sacrificed interests which are usually potent in this world. Among these rationalistic men of Germany I found conscientiousness in work as much insisted on as it could be among theologians. And why, since they had not the rewards or penalties of the theologian to offer to their disciples? Because they assumed, and were justified in assuming, that those whom they addressed had that within them which would respond to their appeal. If Germany should ever change for something less noble the simple earnestness and fidelity to duty, which in those days characterised her teachers, and through them her sons generally, it will not be because of rationalism. Such a decadent Germany might coexist with the most rampant rationalism without their standing to each other in the relation of cause and effect.
My first really laborious investigation, conducted jointly with my friend Professor Knoblauch, landed me in a region which harmonised with my speculative tastes. It was essentially an enquiry in molecular physics, having reference to the curious, and then perplexing, phenomena exhibited by crystals when freely suspended in the magnetic field. I here lived amid the most complex operations of magnetism in its twofold aspect of an attractive and a repellent force. Iron was attracted by a magnet, bismuth was repelled, and the crystals operated on ranged themselves under these two heads. Faraday and Pluecker had worked assiduously at the subject, and had invoked the aid of new forces to account for the phenomena. It was soon, however, found that the displacement in a crystal of an atom of the iron class by an atom of the bismuth class, involving no change of crystalline form, produced a complete reversal of the phenomena. The lines through the crystal which were in the one case drawn towards the poles of the magnet, were driven, in the other case, from these poles. By such instances and the reasoning which they suggested, magne-crystallic action was proved to be due, not to the operation of new forces, but to the modification of the old ones by molecular arrangement. Whether diamagnetism, like magnetism, was a polar force, was in those days a subject of the most lively contention. It was finally proved to be so; and the most complicated cases of magne-crystallic action were immediately shown to be simple mechanical consequences of the principle of diamagnetic polarity. These early researches, which occupied in all five years of my life, and throughout which the molecular architecture of crystals was an incessant subject of mental contemplation, gave a tinge and bias to my subsequent scientific thought, and their influence is easily traced in my subsequent enquiries. For example, during nine years of labour on the subject of radiation, heat and light were handled throughout by me, not as ends, but as instruments by the aid of which the mind might perchance lay hold upon the ultimate particles of matter.
Scientific progress depends mainly upon two factors which incessantly interact — the strengthening of the mind by exercise, and the illumination of phenomena by knowledge. There seems no limit to the insight regarding physical processes which this interaction carries in its train. Through such insight we are enabled to enter and explore that subsensible world into which all natural phenomena strike their roots, and from which they derive nutrition. By it we are enabled to place before the mind's eye atoms and atomic motions which lie far beyond the range of the senses, and to apply to them reasoning as stringent as that applied by the mechanician to the motions and collisions of sensible masses. But once committed to such conceptions, there is a risk of being irresistibly led beyond the bounds of inorganic nature. Even in those early stages of scientific growth, I found myself more and more compelled to regard not only crystals, but organic structures, the body of man inclusive, as cases of molecular architecture, infinitely more complex, it is true, than those of inorganic nature, but reducible, in the long run, to the same mechanical laws. In ancient journals I find recorded ponderings and speculations relating to these subjects, and attempts made, by reference to magnetic and crystalline phenomena, to present some satisfactory image to the mind of the way in which plants and animals are built up. Perhaps I may be excused for noting a sample of these early speculations, already possibly known to a few of my readers, but which here finds a more suitable place than that which it formerly occupied.
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Sitting, in the summer of 1855, with my friend Dr. Rebus under the shadow of a massive elm on the bank of a river in Normandy, the current of our thoughts and conversation was substantially this :— We regarded the tree above us. In opposition to gravity its molecules had ascended, diverged into branches, and budded into innumerable leaves. What caused them to do so — a power external to themselves, or an inherent force? Science rejects the outside builder; let us, therefore, consider from the other point of view the experience of the present year. A low temperature had kept back for weeks the life of the vegetable world. But at length the sun gained power — or, rather, the cloud-screen which our atmosphere had drawn between him and us was removed — and life immediately kindled under his warmth. But what is life, and how can solar light and heat thus affect it? Near our elm was a silver birch, with its leaves rapidly quivering in the morning air. We had here motion, but not the motion of life. Each leaf moved as a mass under the influence of an outside force, while the motion of life was inherent and molecular. How are we to figure this molecular motion — the forces which it implies, and the results which flow from them? Suppose the leaves to be shaken from the tree and enabled
to attract and repel each other. To fix the ideas, suppose the point of each leaf to repel all the other points and to attract the roots, and the root of each leaf to repel all other roots, but to attract the points. The leaves would then resemble an assemblage of little magnets abandoned freely to the interaction of their own forces. In obedience to these they would arrange themselves, and finally assume positions of rest, forming a coherent mass. Let us suppose the breeze, which now causes them to quiver, to disturb the assumed equilibrium. As often as disturbed there would be a constant effort on the part of the leaves to re-establish it; and in making this effort the mass of leaves would pass through different shapes and forms. If other leaves, moreover, were at hand endowed with similar forces, the attraction would extend to them — a growth of the mass of leaves being the consequence.
We have strong reason for assuming that the ultimate particles of matter — the atoms and molecules of which it is made up — are endowed with forces coarsely typified by those here ascribed to the leaves. The phenomena of crystallisation load, of necessity, to this conception of molecular polarity. Under the operation of such forces the molecules of a seed, like our fallen leaves in the first instance, take up positions from which they would never move if undisturbed by an external impulse. But solar light and heat, which come to us as waves through space, are the great agents of molecular disturbance. On the inert molecules of seed and soil these waves impinge, disturbing the atomic equilibrium, which there is an immediate effort to restore. The effort, incessantly defeated — for the waves continue to pour in — is incessantly renewed; in the molecular struggle matter is gathered from the soil and from the atmosphere, and built, in obedience to the forces which guide the molecules, into the special form of the tree. In a general way, therefore, the life of the tree might be defined as an unceasing effort to restore a disturbed equilibrium. In the building of crystals Nature makes her first structural effort; we have here the earliest groping of the so-called 'vital force,' and the manifestations of this force in plants and animals, though, as already stated, indefinitely more complex, are to be regarded of the same mechanical quality as those concerned in the building of the crystal.
Consider the cycle of operations by which the seed produces the plant, the plant the flower, the flower again the seed, the causal line, returning with the fidelity of a planetary orbit to its original point of departure. Who or what planned this molecular rhythm? We do not know — science fails even to inform us whether it was ever 'planned' at all. Yonder butterfly has a spot of orange on its wing; and if we look at a drawing made a century ago, of one of the ancestors of that butterfly, we probably find the selfsame spot upon the wing. For a century the molecules have described their cycles. Butterflies have been begotten, have been born, and have died; still we find the molecular architecture unchanged. Who or what determined this persistency of recurrence? We do not know; but we stand within our intellectual range when we say that there is probably nothing in that wing which may not yet find its Newton to prove that the principles involved in its construction are qualitatively the same as those brought into play in the formation of the solar system. We may even take a step further, and affirm that the brain of man — the organ of his reason — without which he can neither think nor feel, is also an assemblage of molecules, acting and reacting according to law. Here, however, the methods pursued in mechanical science come to an end; and if asked to deduce from the physical interaction of the brain molecules the least of the phenomena of sensation or thought, I acknowledge my helplessness. The association of both with the matter of the brain may be as certain as the association of light with the rising of the sun. But whereas in the latter case we have unbroken mechanical connection between the sun and our organs, in the former case logical continuity disappears. Between molecular mechanics and consciousness is interposed a fissure over which the ladder of physical reasoning is incompetent to carry us. We must, therefore, accept the observed association as an empirical fact, without being able to bring it under the yoke ofà priorideduction.
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Such were the ponderings which ran habitually through my mind in the days of my scientific youth. They illustrate two things — a determination to push physical considerations to their utmost legitimate limit; and an acknowledgment that physical considerations do not lead to the final explanation of all that we feel and know. This acknowledgment, be it said in passing, was by no means made with the view of providing room for the play of considerations other than physical. The same intellectual duality, if I may use the phrase, manifests itself in the following extract from an article entitled 'Physics and Metaphysics,' published in the 'Saturday Review' for August 4, 1860:—
'The philosophy of the future will assuredly take more account than that of the past of the dependence of thought and feeling on physical processes; and it may be that the qualities of the mind will be studied through organic combinations as we now study the character of a force through the affections of ordinary matter. We believe that every thought and every feeling has its definite mechanical correlative — that it is accompanied by a certain breaking up and remarshalling of the atoms of the brain. This latter process is purely physical; and were the faculties we now possess sufficiently expanded, without the creation of any new faculty, it would doubtless be within the range of our augmented powers to infer from the molecular state of the brain the character of the thought acting on it, and, conversely, to infer from the thought the exact molecular condition of the brain. We do not say — and this, as will be seen, is all-important — that the inference here referred to would be anà priorione. But by observing, with the faculties we assume, the state of the brain and the associated mental affections, both might be so tabulated side by side that, if one were given, a mere reference to the table would declare the other. Our present powers, it is true, shrivel into nothingness when brought to bear on such a problem, but it is because of its complexity and our limits that this is the case. Thequalityof the problem and of our powers are, we believe, so related, that a mere expansion of the latter would enable them to cope with the former. Why, then, in scientific speculation should we turn our eyes exclusively to the past? May it not be that a time is coming — ages no doubt distant, but still advancing — when the dwellers upon this fair earth, starting from the gross human brain of to-day as a rudiment, may be able to apply to these mighty questions faculties of commensurate extent? Given the requisite expansibility to the present senses and intelligence of man — given also the time necessary for their expansion — and this high goal may be attained. Development is all that is required, and not a change of quality. There need be no absolute breach of continuity between us and our loftier brothers yet to come.
We have guarded ourselves against saying that the inferring of thought from material combinations and arrangements would be an inferenceà priori. The inference meant would be the same in kind as that which the observation of the effects of food and drink upon the mind would enable us to make, differing only from the latter in the degree of analytical insight which we suppose attained. Given the masses and distances of the planets, we can infer the perturbations consequent on their mutual attractions. Given the nature of a disturbance in water, air, or aether — knowing the physical qualities of the medium we can infer how its particles will be affected. In all this we deal with physical laws. The mind runs with certainty along the line of thought which connects the phenomena, and from beginning to end there is no break in the chain. But when we endeavour to pass by a similar process 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. Let us follow matter to its utmost bounds, let us claim it in all its forms — even in the muscles, blood, and brain of man himself — as ours to experiment with and to speculate upon. Casting the term "vital force" from our vocabulary, let us reduce, if we can, the visible phenomena of life to mechanical attractions and repulsions. Having thus exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty Mystery still looms beyond us. We have, in fact, made no step towards its solution. And thus it will ever loom, compelling the philosophies of successive ages to confess that