PANTHEISM.

"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great,"

he has that in him which unites him to another sphere. To be able to conceive of God at all; to have within him a will and a power of worship, these make him one with God, and assure him against death and darkness. To deny oneself this privilege of viewing the earth in its relation to God, to shut out God artificially from that sphere where the natural understanding has always found Him without assistance, is a pedantry for which we shall surely suffer. God will find us out. There is often a certain irritation in those who would exclude Him from their sphere of view. They lose their philosophic calmness when they speak of religious things. These are the tokens of past conflicts and past quarrels, of a soul that might know more of God if it had not refused. God is reflected in the world, in the man's intelligence, in his conscience, in his will. "Whither shall I go from His presence?" we seem to be saying. It is better to be able to say, "Whom have I in heaven and earth but Thee?"

BY THEREV. J. H. RIGG, D.D.,PRINCIPAL OF WESTMINSTER TRAINING COLLEGE.

A hundred years ago the controversy of Christianity in England was with Deism, and in France with Atheism; while at that time the transcendental infidelity of Germany was as yet undeveloped, and the name of Spinoza was nowhere held in honour. Now, however, deistic infidelity appears to be obsolete, and it is universally felt by those who have entered truly into the thought and controversies of the age, that the question for the present is between Christian Theism and that style of philosophy which recognises an impersonal divinity in all things.

Deism grants too much to the Christian. If a man really believes in a living and personal God, a Divine Maker and Ruler of the universe, with a moral character and will, he finds it hard to deny the possibility and probability of a revelation, and impossible to maintain the impossibility ofmiracles. Having been obliged to yield thus far to the Christian argument, the deist is unable thereafter to withstand the positive evidence in favour of Christianity. Moreover Deism is beset by the same difficulties in effect which surround the Christian revelation, without its lights, its consolations, its blessings. The man, therefore, who rejects Christianity seldom finds his resting-place in Deism. He becomes a pantheist or an atheist.

Naked atheism, however, is a repulsive creed. It is a heart-withering negation. It touches no sympathy; it stimulates no play of intellect; under the deadly chill of its unlighted vacancy, imagination cannot breathe. There is nothing about it refined, or subtle, or profound. It is the barest and hardest form of infidelity, and has been professed by the coarsest minds. It demands no effort to comprehend its one universal negation and it taxes no skill to expound it. It is an arid and barren, a cold and dreary, hypothesis, which no genius, not even that of Lucretius, could make attractive. The old illustration is conclusive as to its absurdity. It would be immensely less monstrous to maintain that the Iliad, in its full perfection, might have been the product of the "fortuitous concourse" of the letters of the Greek alphabet, than that this infinitely wonderful and glorious universe is the result of the "fortuitous concourse of atoms." Stark atheism, therefore, however itmay have flourished in the heartless and hopeless France of a hundred years ago, was never likely to take root in the soil of European scepticism as the alternative of Christianity. In England it has had very few votaries. Nor has atheism, as such, ever found favour in the land of Luther and Melancthon, the favourite soil of mysticism and pietism. English deism and Scottish scepticism did, indeed, produce potent effects in Germany a hundred years ago; but the result was neither deism, nor such scepticism as that of Hume, nor atheism, but a dreamy idealistic pantheism. And now Germany, with a disastrous fidelity, by an infusion into our literature of its pantheistic unbelief, has repaid to Britain the debt which it contracted by its importation of English deism and Scottish scepticism. At the present moment a pantheistic philosophy is the philosophy in which unbelief for the most part invests itself in England.

Hence the task which falls to me to-day cannot but be felt by myself to be one of very grave importance. I could unfeignedly have wished that it had fallen into other and more competent hands. Perhaps, however, I may venture to claim two qualifications which may, in some measure, help to fit me for dealing with the subject on which I have to speak. One is, that the subject of Pantheism is one which has much and frequently exercised my thoughts for many years past, ever since I learnt from the writings ofColeridge, Hare, and others the meaning of what Hare spoke of as the "fascination of Pantheism;" ever since I was led to the study of philosophy and its development, and especially of the thoughts of the early Greek wrestlers with the mysteries of being, of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists, and of the modern thinkers of Germany, who have filled with transcendental exhalations of verbal dialectics the vacuum in speculation which had been created by the destructive logic of Kant. The other qualification which I venture to claim for my task to-day is that I have some knowledge of the difficulties of thought and belief which may lead honest men to become pantheists; that I understand the manner of thought of one who has become entangled in the mazy coil of pantheistic reasonings; at all events, that I know that honest searchers after truth may reluctantly become intellectually pantheists, while yet their heart longs to retain faith and worship towards a personal God. If, therefore, one necessary condition of true success in argument is an intellectual and, as far as possible, a moral sympathy with one's opponents, that condition, I believe, is fulfilled in my case. And I cannot but think that all Christian controversialists ought to feel a tender sympathy towards honest thinkers who are involved in the bewildering confusions of a philosophy which they do not love, even although they may, after many a struggle and in sadness ofheart, have succumbed at length to Pantheism as the only conclusion of controversy in which they are able to abide.

My subject to-day is not the history of Pantheism, but its principles. The history could not be dealt with in one lecture; the principles, I hope, may. And whatever may be the intellectual genesis, the descent and derivation, or the special character, of any particular form of Pantheism, all its forms will be found to coincide in certain respects. The semi-Hegelian of Oxford, and the pantheist who falls back on the lines of Mr. Herbert Spencer's speculations as his place of defence, may both be regarded as standing on common ground for the purpose of my present argument.

In attempting a criticism of the principles of Pantheism, the first thing to be done is to obtain as clear an idea as possible of what is to be understood by Pantheism, as distinguished from Theism on the one hand, and from Atheism on the other. There can be no doubt that the difficulties, both metaphysical and moral, which attach to the conception of a personal God, the Creator and Governor of the universe, have, more than any other cause, constrained thoughtful men who have pondered the problem of the universe, to endeavour to escape from their perplexities and bewilderments by taking refuge in the notion of a diffused impersonal divinity. And it must be confessed that these difficulties are so oppressive and so staggering to our incompetenthuman reason, that they might well tempt the mere reasoner, the mere logician, the mere metaphysician, to give up faith in a personal God, if so to do were not really to involve one's self in more than equivalent difficulties of the very same class, besides many other difficulties, and in truth contradictions, both intellectual and also moral, which are involved in the pantheistic hypothesis. That the alternative is such as I have now stated, that the pantheistic hypothesis is necessarily beset with such difficulties and contradictions, will in part be shown by the inquiry which, as I have intimated, must needs come first of all in the criticism I am to attempt. An investigation of the meaning of Pantheism, of the characteristic idea proper to the intermediate hypothesis which rejects equally A-Theism and Theism, will open to view the metaphysical difficulties and contradictions involved in the hypothesis. I shall afterwards try to show the incompatibility of the principles of Pantheism with the true principles of natural science. The moral considerations belonging to the Christian controversy with Pantheism I shall reserve till the final stage in my argument.

Pantheism agrees with atheism in its denial of a personal Deity. Its divinity of the universe is a divinity without a will and without conscious intelligence. In what respect, then, does Pantheism really differ from atheism? If weeliminate from our idea of the divinity of the universe all consciousness, all sympathy, all will, what sort of a divinity remains, what sense of a present and real divine power is left to the man that shrinks from atheism? Atheism denies that in, or over, or with nature there is anything whatever besides nature. Does not Pantheism do the very same? If not, what is there, let the pantheist tell us, in nature besides nature? What sort of a divinity is that which is separate from conscious intelligence and from voluntary will or power? Is it said that though there be no Deity in the universe, yet there is a harmony, a unity, an unfolding plan and purpose, which must be recognised as transcending all limitation, as unerring, inexhaustible, infinite, and therefore as divine? Let us ask ourselves what unity that can be which is above mere nature, as such, and yet stands in no relation to a personal Lord and Ruler of the universe; what plan and purpose that can be which is the product of no intelligence, which no mind ever planned; what infinite and unerring harmony can mean, when there is no harmonist to inspire and regulate the life and movement of the whole. Do not the points of distinction which the pantheist makes between his philosophy and the bald tenets of the atheist amount in effect to so many admissions that the facts of the universe cannot be stated, that the phenomena of nature cannot be described,with anything like fidelity or accuracy, without the use of language such as has no real meaning unless it implies the existence and operation throughout universal nature of a supreme actuative and providential Mind and Will?

The least and lowest implication which is involved in Pantheism, the most elementary idea which the word pantheism can be held to connote, the barestminimumof meaning which the creed of the pantheist can be presumed to contain, is that there is in the whole of nature—in this universe of being—adivine unity. Let us then look at this wordunity, and consider closely what it must mean.

Those who believe in a divine unity pervading all nature must imply that in the midst of the infinite complexity and variety of the universe there is everywhere to be recognised a grand law and order of nature—a method, plan, and harmony in the great whole, which must consequently be traceable through all the parts. But whose and whence is this grand law? Is it indeed a reality? Are all things fitted to each other, part to part, law to law, force to force, throughout the infinite depths of microscopic disclosures, throughout the infinite exuberance of nature's grandest provinces, throughout all space and all duration? Do all things work to meet each other? Is every several life-cell, each organic fibre, moving, tending, developing, making escapes or overtures, as if a separate angel of unerring sympathy andinsight, of illimitable plastic skill and power, of creative energy and perfect providence, inhabited, inspired, and actuated it? Is it so that the man of science, who enters into communion with nature's actual life, and movement, and purpose, seems to see and feel divinities, unrestingly, unweariedly, in silent omnipotence, in infinite diffusion, everywhere at work, so that the reverent inquirer and gazer to whom this wondrous spectacle is unveiled, could almost, in his own pantheistic sense, adopt the invocation of Coleridge, and address the powers he sees at work in such words as these:

"Spirits that hover o'erThe immeasurable fount,Ebullient with creative Deity!And ye of plastic power that interfusedRoll through the grosser and material mass,In organising surge! Holies of God!(And what if Monads of the Infinite Mind?)"

Is it so? I ask. Then, what does such a real harmony and such universal correspondence and providence as this imply? Surely we must perforce adopt one of two alternatives. If we refuse to believe in One Ruling, Organizing, Creative Mind, One Living, Universal Mind and Will and Providence, which works through all, we must endow each separate being, or at least each form of life, with creative energy, illimitable and all-answering sensibility and sympathy, unerringwisdom, and veritable will. Nay, ultimately, as it seems to me, the alternative must be between accepting the faith in an infinite God, and attributing to even the particles of inorganic matter, amenable as these are to the laws of gravitation and chemical combination, a wisdom, will, and power of their own, the power of intelligence and of self-direction. As to what are called the laws of gravitation and of chemical combination, we know that a law, like "an idol," is "nothing in the world" but a name. "There is no power but of God; the powers that be, are ordained of God." A law is not a power; the laws of science do but define observed methods of movement or forms of customary relation between thing and thing.

Of one thing, at any rate, I think we may be sure, that a mere order of nature, ascertained though it may have been by the truest and surest induction, cannot have made and cannot sustain itself, cannot be self-originated and self-impelled. So also it is certain that a mere plastic universal power, apart from any creative or providential mind, however its products might seem to imply intelligence, could be animated by no conscious purpose, and could not be conceived as working with blind automatic certainty conformably to a grand cosmical plan or towards a providential end. And if the divinity of the pantheist is nothing more than a personified law or order of nature, his personificationof this order or law can add nothing to its virtue or potency, can by no means transform it from a phrase into a living power, from a figure of speech into a real and intelligent force, can never constitute it into a divinity. The more I reflect upon the subject, the more assured the conclusion appears to be, that any conception of a real unity in and of nature is self-contradictory and unmeaning, except upon the assumption of a conscious and intelligent Creator. The unity of nature, to a man who denies the existence of a real God, cannot be a unity inherent in nature, cannot be a unity according to which nature itself has been planned, and is really working; it is an imputed unity, the conception of the pantheistic philosopher's own mind. Unity, indeed, as apprehended by us—and it can only be known through our apprehension of it—is essentially a conception, a relative idea. If one could conceive nature as existing destitute of a mind either to work on a plan, or to recognise a plan in working, in such nature there could be no unity. Unity in action implies a plan of voluntary working, and therefore a regulating mind. Unity of conception and exposition implies an intelligent observer. The unity of nature, if it be not the plan and work of the very God, can be nothing more than a scheme and conception which has been invented and imputed by man.

But perhaps it may be thought that the word unity,as used by pantheists, should be understood rather as referring to the ultimate oneness and identity of all force throughout the universe, than to harmony of universal plan and purpose. Various as are the appearances of nature, and the modes in which the laws of nature operate, it may yet be set forth by the pantheist as his belief,—a belief, he will say, which the modern advance of science tends continually to establish as the true theory of the universe,—that all force is ultimately one, that the different forces of nature are mutually convertible and equivalent, that one energy of nature, Protean, universal, of infinite plasticity and power of variation or adaptation, pervades and actuates all things. It may be called gravitation, or electricity, or light, or heat, or nervous energy, or vital force; but ultimately and essentially it is one and the same; it is, to quote well-worn lines which will be held here strictly toapply—

"Changed thro' all, and yet in all the same."

"Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent,Spreads undivided, operates unspent:Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,

*****

To it no high, no low, no great, no small,It fills, it bounds, connects, and equals all."

Now if this be the pantheistic unity which is admitted bymen who deny a personal Deity, I will not stay to object that such a view is hardly consistent with the essential distinction in nature which even Professor Huxley and men of his school unwaveringly and powerfully maintain, between inorganic matter and living forms. It is more to my purpose to remark that it is much simpler and easier to believe in a personal God, than in such an impersonal divinity as this Protean Force. Every difficulty which belongs to the thought of God's existence belongs to this also. This force must be self-originated, must have been from everlasting, must be creative, omnipresent, providential, equal to all plans, purposes, contrivances, inspirations, which have been, or ever will be, in this dædalean and infinite universe; must be the source of all intelligence, though itself unintelligent; of all sympathy, although itself incapable of sympathy; must have formed the eye, though it cannot see, and the ear, though it cannot hear; must have blossomed and developed into personal intelligences, although personal intelligence is a property which cannot be attributed to it; must unquestionably be omniscient as well as omnipresent, or it could not, in its infinite convertibility, anticipate all needs, meet all demands, answer in absolute and universal harmony to every faculty, capability, and tendency of all things that are and all things that become. Now is it reasonable to object to the doctrineof a personal Deity because of its inconceivability and its stupendous difficulties, and yet to believe in such a primal, essential, immaterial, creative, infinite, blind and unintelligent force as this? Surely no contradiction could be greater. The conception of God as from everlastingisstupendous. But an infinite Protean Force from everlasting, destitute of intelligence and will, yet continually operative as the life, soul, wisdom, and providence, of all things, is nothing less than contradictory and absurd.

I can come to no conclusion, accordingly, but that Pantheism really only differs from atheism, in so far as it confesses that it is impossible to speak with ordinary propriety, or in any such way as to meet the necessities either of science itself or of the common sense and feelings of mankind, without employing theistic language. It has been said that hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue. So a profession of Pantheism is the tribute of compliance at least in speech, is the outward language of homage, which theism has power to extort from atheism. "Pantheism," as is said by the author ofLothair, "is but atheismin domino. Nothing," as the same writer adds, "can surely be more monstrous than to represent a creator as unconscious of creating."

Yes, Pantheism is but veiled atheism. Strip Pantheism of all involutions of thought and all investitures of language, and in its naked truth it stands forth as mere atheism.Every form which Pantheism takes, every disguise which it assumes, to hide from itself and from the world its real character, is a testimony borne by atheism to the necessity which all men feel for assuming the existence of Deity; What Robespierre is reported to have said with reference to political government and national well-being, that if there were not a God, it would be necessary to invent one, is felt by pantheistic philosophers to be true in regard to nature. So monstrous a conception is that of this universe without a governing mind; so clearly and directly to the common sense of mankind do the infinite harmonies of the universe seem to imply a designing and governing Intelligence; so indubitably does the might and life of the universe, ever coming forth anew, ever springing up afresh, ever unfolding and advancing, imply a central living Power, One with the infinite governing Intelligence; that pantheists, in order to speak and write intelligibly, are compelled to invest nature with the qualities which they deny to the Deity, to attribute a spirit and intelligence to the whole machine, because they deny the existence of the great Mechanist; to personify a harmony and unity which is but an abstraction, which, on their own hypothesis, is but a grand accident, a result without a cause, because they refuse to believe in a personal God.

I am very far indeed from wishing to come under thedefinition of what Mr. Hutton has spoken of as the "Hard Church," or to carry my positions merely by the use of the dilemma, yet I cannot refrain from saying, parenthetically, that the argument of the dilemma, carefully and truly applied, is not only always legitimate but often necessary, and I must affirm that it applies very closely in the present instance. The pantheist cannot maintain his position midway between atheism and theism. If he absolutely refuses to be a theist, it is necessary to show him that he will have to yield to the cruel necessity of acknowledging himself to be an atheist. Standing midway, his position is altogether untenable, from whichever side it is assailed. On the one side, the pantheist is condemned by the same arguments which condemn atheism; on the other side, the atheist may justly allege against the position of the pantheist the self-same difficulties which both pantheist and atheist urge against theism.

But if pantheism be in reality only atheism, I may henceforth disregard the verbal distinction between the two, and bring forward considerations and arguments which apply indifferently to either. In pursuing the discussion I shall take up in detail some points of argument already, as to their general scope, more or less distinctly intimated in the preliminary considerations which I have advanced.

To explode any view of the world which excludes from itthe presence and government of a personal God, nothing more is needed than to realize and truly understand the atheistic view in its various aspects. Let us try the atheist's theory on the history of the universe, and see whether it can be made to fit, or must be broken in the attempt to fit it.

The will and interference of God, as the Lord and Ruler of the universe, is excluded. The universe is held to have been from the beginning without a shaping and ruling intelligence and will. No mind has presided over its destinies, has animated its energies; no providence of Divine power and wisdom has guided its changes and progress, has renewed and replenished and sustained it. It follows that no power or will from beyond itself has ever touched the universe. Its own unaided and unguided powers have done all. If the universe did not make itself, it has developed itself: all that has been, or is to be, was included potentially in that which was at the beginning, and has unfolded in necessary order. The vision presented is to certain minds very fascinating: it is a vision of vast unbroken progress, of continual and infinite self-development. But let it be worked out, and let us consider what it really means. Such an hypothesis must lead us back, in the infinite dim distance of the original and indistinguishable past, into a universe-mist of germinal powers from which all has since developed.—But stay. Was this mist and expanse of universal nature in itsoriginesallhomogeneous and at one stage of existence? Then I have to ask, whence came it? What, going ever further and further back, where were the infinitely earlier, fainter, evanishing entities or powers, into which infinite creative force and potentiality was diffused? and what the one life and grand harmony of influences and impulses, tending towards an infinite goal of progress and perfection, which pervaded the whole? What does all this mean? Is this easier, simpler, more rational, than to believe in God from everlasting? Is anything gained in simplicity, comprehensibility, probability, or in scientific character, by denying that in the "increasing purpose" which "runs through the ages" there is any guidance of a divine intelligence or working of a divine will; and calling the whole process from first to last, from everlasting to everlasting, "development"? What is this word development but a name? Does the use of the word explain anything? Does the use of the word reduce the mystery of the universe to the simplicity of an axiom? Does the use of the word provide a simple equivalent for all that divine wisdom, power, and providence, have ever been imagined to do for the universe? Men call the mystery of being and becoming by the name of development, and then say that all things are effected by development, and that development explains all! Whereas this development of which they talk so familiarly, as though they understood all its secrets, and were privy toits infinitely various and mighty workings, and could unfold its source and meaning, is itself all the time the very mystery to be resolved and explained. Development is in truth as amazing and incomprehensible a mystery as creation. It seems to be but another word for creation. Only they who affect its use instead of the wordcreation, insist upon creation without a creator. The unintelligent and unconscious universe, on their view, is continually creating itself.

The hypothesis of development, however, is not only unintelligible and utterly devoid of reality, when criticized in its general principle; as might be expected, it altogether breaks down when it is tested in detail. Professor Huxley's protoplasm breaks it down. All the scientific evidence, as that eminent teacher of science showed at Liverpool last autumn, is opposed to the idea that protoplasm was developed out of inorganic matter. The hypothesis of spontaneous life-generation appears to be exploded. Science, at any rate, on its own positive principles, has no right whatever to pretend that life has ever been developed out of what was not living. Here, then, a great and, so far as science can help us to form a judgment, an altogether impassable barrier rises to view against any development hypothesis. At a certain stage in the history of the universe protoplasm, organized life, made its appearance on the scene, starting up as a perfectly new, an original, an undevelopedphenomenon. Before, all had been inorganic and dead; now Life was abroad in the world, destined to increase and multiply, and replenish the universe. Let those who deny divine and creative will and government, inform us whence came this life. It was not developed. Must it not have been created. If not, then whence, I ask, whence did it spring?

The argument which I have just urged should, as I venture to think, be conclusive even with those who know, and seek to know, nothing more of science than the order and method of its phenomenal processes. I will now bring forward a consideration which will, I hope, be admitted to have weight by those men of science—it is to be greatly lamented that there should be so few of these—who have studied the nature and working of the mind as well as the phenomena of sense. We have seen that protoplasm—that Life—was not developed out of inorganic matter, but appears to have been an entirely new and primary fact on the face of the universe. Life came in and appropriated, put to its own uses, bound up under its own seal, impregnated with its own specific virtue, the raw inorganic materials which it found in nature; but the power of Life itself was altogether new. A fact in some sort analogous to this confronts us in a higher sphere, in the sphere of living intelligence itself. I refer to the emergence of personalconsciousness among the world of living creatures. To me it appears that the sense of personality is an altogether new and original fact, one which cannot be conceived as developed or developable out of any pre-existing phenomena or conditions. Whence it comes, or how it arises, I know not. But it appears to be, in and of itself, the assertion of an essential separateness between One's Self and all phenomena, all constituents, all conditions whatever. The sense of an I Myself, of Personality, asserts an antithesis between the Man, and all that the Man uses, takes up into his personality, makes his own. As Life binds up inorganic matter under its seal, but is not developed out of inorganic matter, so the voluntary and responsible Self binds up under the seal of its own personality all that belongs to the manifold life of its complex being. As life brings into the universe a new world of phenomena, higher and more manifold than those of mere inorganic matter, yet embodying and adopting these, so personality brings into the universe a new world of vastly higher and rarer phenomena than those of mere vitality, yet embodies and adopts these:—it introduces all that belongs to reflection and morality, giving birth to an intelligence and a world of thought, in which all the lower and anterior phenomena of the world become matters of cognisance, and are mirrored as objects of thought.

As I venture to think that this sense of personality, withthe new world of reflective consciousness and morality which it brings in, is a fact, starting up in the midst of a universe of anterior developments, such as all Mr. Darwin's solvents utterly fail to touch, a phenomenon which remains as far from explanation as before he wrote his last book, so it appears to me that the power of human speech is another fact starting up in the midst of the line of supposed developments which no hypothesis of evolution can afford any help towards explaining. Miraculously developed reason, something higher, as it seems to me, than any development of human reason our race has, in its highest culture, as yet put forth, must have been necessary in order to the invention of language by any race even of the most sagacious mammals. And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument, in order to the high development of reason. We have some idea what deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper, and affections, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not indeed deaf, but congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. What would the development of human reason have been under such conditions? How, then, is it possible to conceive that the wondrous faculty and instrument ofspeech was ever invented and perfected by mammals of infra-human faculty and development, and that they were afterwards through this invention developed yet more highly, until they attained to the dignity and advancement of humanity? Such infra-human mammals must have been more miraculously endowed in order to such an invention than ever man himself has been.

After all that Mr. Darwin has written, does or can any reasonable man or woman actually believe in the possibility,—apart from the Divine Power and Will and Guidance,—for that is the point,—of the self-development, the spontaneous upgrowth of articulate language? Let us study our quadrupedal familiars, for the sake of illustration and analogy. We see daily how our noble dogs strain and groan after speech, do all but speak: we mark their eloquent looks, their speaking gestures, their wonderfully expressive movements, how they watch us speak, and seem as if they understood what speech is to us, and as if they craved most longingly the power for themselves. We cannot but sympathetically admire the intelligent, the benevolent, the noble, the sagacious physiognomies which they show. If any creature ever could, would, or did develop speech in any rudimentary form, are not they just in the circumstances to do it? And when once rudimentally begun, however uncouthly and imperfectly, should not their organs continuallyimprove by the continual effort and the increasing intelligence? Is it not immensely less hard of belief, and less difficult to imagine, that dogs should develop speech, than that man should have been developed from the larvæ of theascidiæ? Yet is there even a beginning made towards the canine development of articulate language, or does any living man believe that such a beginning ever could be made?

To me it appears that human speech and human personality are in some way bound up with each other, that the one, in some sort, implies the other, and that these two characteristics of our race present an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance by really scientific thinkers of any hypothesis of evolution which, leaving God out of nature, would account for the whole existence and progress of the universe on the principle of spontaneous development.

But again, let me be allowed to test the development hypothesis in detail at another point. This hypothesis—and any pantheistic or atheistic view of the universe which professes to be scientific—is obliged to confess that all living beings, of whatever sort, have been developed out of a single primary cell—called often a germ-cell—of protoplasm. Here they find the beginning of every kind of life. The plant, the animal, of every sort,—the lichen, the cedar, the sponge, the bird, the mammal, the minutest entozoon,the most microscopic infusorium, and man,—have been developed out of these primary cells. What then do the same men who teach us this, find to be the constitution of these same cells, when microscopically examined? They find them to be, for the most part, and indeed always, if allowance be made for very trivial exceptions, identically the same. The matter is identically the same, the appearance identically the same; no difference whatever of constitution, form, or properties, is to be detected. They cannot tell whether the nettle, or the frog, or the eagle, or the man, is to be developed out of any given cell: for anything their science can teach them, any of these might be developed, as they call it, out of any cell. But if this be so, is it scientific, is it real or true, is it not altogether misleading, to speak ofmere developmentin such a case? The flower may be said to be developed out of the bud because the bud is the flower in miniature, the flower is really folded up in the bud. But surely here is no case of mere development; here is no unfolding out of the germ-cell of what is potentially contained in the cell, regarded as a merely material organism. Judged by every test of physical experiment, the primary cells are identically the same; and yet they grow into forms essentially and infinitely dissimilar. Does it not clearly appear that here is a matter in which some power above and beyond the mere physical constitution and natureof the primary cell must be admitted, on every principle of science, on every ground of pure candour and truth, to be of necessity present? Is it not evident that with each germ-cell there must be associated some individual life-power which animates the cell, which uses it as a unit to multiply, as a foundation to build upon, which does build and weave and work into it and upon it continually new material, which, for its own use in its work of weaving and fabricating, and for the completion of its own distinctive form and vehicle, takes toll of air and earth and water and heat-power—the ancient elements—selecting out of them its appropriate pabulum, in whatever chemical combinations of the primary elements known to our modern scientific analysis may be fit and needful? Surely not development, but life, the mystery of individual life, is here. And if the philosopher will deny the omnipresent creative and sustaining power of God, it appears to me that he must be prepared to animate each germ-cell with an individual intelligence which works with divine power, on a definite and most miraculous plan, and towards a distinct goal of perfection. To call such various powers and processes, such diverse and generically different operations, in every sphere of life, by the same term, appears to me to be unscientific; to speak of them all alike as processes of unfolding or development, when results the most infinitely unlike and separate are obtainedfrom beginnings which are identically alike, appears to be not only unscientific but altogether misleading.

I do not think it arrogant or unwarranted to conclude from such considerations as I have been trying to set forth, that evolution, or development, apart from the power and guidance of the Living God, is an unphilosophical, an unscientific idea, an empty, an unmeaning word. It is a thing of naught, utterly impotent to solve the mysteries of the universe, even when expounded and reinforced by Mr. Darwin's "Natural Selection." I have not a word to say here against the views of Mr. Darwin, as defined and modified by the requirements of scientific modesty and precision. If I had any pretensions to be called a student of natural science, I should sit at the feet of Mr. Darwin when he speaks, not as a philosophic theorist, but as a scientific observer and a truly inductive naturalist. But I must say here in respect to Natural Selection, regarded as, according to Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, the handmaid of development, that, like development, it is but a name, and not a power. It describes the order and mode according to which Providence works; it is not itself a force—a working energy. Mr. Darwin himself indeed often speaks as if Natural Selection were itself a power and a providence. I find to my hand in Mr. Kingsley's fine, suggestive paper onThe Natural Theology of the Future, recently published inMacmillan'sMagazine, a sentence of Mr. Darwin's in regard to Natural Selection which I will quote. "It may be metaphorically said," writes Mr. Darwin, "that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good, silently and necessarily working whenever and wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being." "It may be metaphorically said," are Mr. Darwin's words. But in fact he is using, not a metaphor, but a personification. The distinction Mr. Darwin does not see. He repeatedly speaks of his personifications as metaphors. But the distinction notwithstanding is most important. By personifying Natural Selection Mr. Darwin makes it appear to be a cause, attributes to it a real power, nay, wisdom and providence, as well as power. He speaks in one place of "Nature's power of selection;" contrasting this with the "powers of artificial selection exercised by feeble man," by which, however, man can do so much; and arguing that "Nature's power of selection" must be incomparably greater, and competent to produce incomparably superior effects in respect of "the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions of life." Language of a similar sort he very frequently uses. He has, therefore, as a scientific manlaid himself open to the reproof of M. Flourens, whom no one will deny to be a scientific critic. "Either," says M. Flourens, "Natural Selection is nothing, or it is nature, but nature endowed with the attribute of selection—nature personified, which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has done with personifications." The nineteenth century ought to have done with personifications; but with the spirit of Lamarck's speculations the style of the French atheistic philosophy of the last century reappears.

Mr. Darwin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Kingsley, describes the manner in which his Natural Selection may be conceived as operating. What, if his meaning were expressed with strict scientific truth, he ought to intend to say, is that such as he describes is the result of providential working according to the mode and order which he designates by the phrase Natural Selection. "All we ask," says one of Mr. Darwin's ablest critics, "is that we may be allowed to believe in a God and a real Divine Providence, as powerful and wise and good as Mr. Darwin's Natural Selection."

But, moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is something besides the mere process of change and growth, of what our philosophers call development, to be accounted for. There is a fact on which the growth, the change, the evolution, must be held in a true sense to depend: a prior fact to be taken account of. The growth proceeds upon aplan, and fulfils an idea: protoplasm itself embodies a scientific principle. But as the seal must be before the impression, the original before the copy, so the principle must be before its embodiment, the plan and the idea must be before the growth: the end, towards which as its goal the growth or development proceeds, must have been conceived and set up as an aim before its fulfilment began. We are bound therefore, if we would exhaust the problem, nay, if we would truly conceive, and justly state it, to ask how and whence the principle, the plan, the idea, the end, had their existence? These are realities; they are the most inner and essential realities in every instance of growth or development; to deal only with the development of the physical basis, is to leave untouched the kernel of the matter, is altogether superficial and unreal. But principles, plans, types and ideas, ends contemplated in movement and progress, these at any rate are not physical, are not matters of sense and organization. They are, as I have said, prior to what is physical, they are conditions antecedent to organization and growth. Moreover, they are mental conceptions, not physical affections. They are only possible, they have no meaning, except as the thoughts of some mind. Here, then, we are brought back by an inevitable necessity to an antecedent mind, the seat and origin of all the principles, the plans the ideas, the ends, embodied in organized beings, and fulfilledin their existence, growth, and perfection. In short, from whatever side we contemplate the problems of nature, and whencesoever we take our point of departure in their investigation, we find ourselves brought face to face with creative mind. The things which are "seen and temporal" lead us always inwards to "the things which are unseen and eternal;" man and creaturely existence conduct us to the living God.

If any one would escape from the pressure of this argument by hardily denying that living organization involves principle or plan, type or idea, purpose or end, it can only follow that the living forms of the universe are an infinite congeries of accidental combinations, that in reality there are no such things as organs, that there can be no such thing as development, and that there is no such thing as law. What men call law is mere sequence that happens to follow regularly. The whole universe has been constituted and regulated by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. Against such a conclusion as this I do not need to argue. It is the naked and repulsive atheism of which I spoke in the introduction to this lecture. The line of argument which I have been pursuing seems to force us to the conclusion that there is no logical resting-place between such theism as Christianity teaches and such Democritean atheism as that of which we have now had a glimpse.

But if this be so, it follows that it is impossible to deny design and final causes in creation, and the sway and oversight of a universal Divine Providence, the providence of a living God, except by denying all law. To the Christian theist, science is living science indeed; to the pantheist, no less than the atheist, science is hardly better than a dead register. He may talk of the wisdom, the power, the order, the benevolence, of nature. But such expressions on the lips of a pantheist are utterly illusive. All the wisdom, all the marvellous adjustments of nature, are but the happy conjunctures, the exquisite chance unisons, of he knows not what. When lost in admiration of marvellous organizations, complexly apt and beautiful contrivances, of what seem like the most studied and beneficent provisions, the soul that is beginning to glow with wonder at this seeming wisdom, and to swell with thankfulness because of this seeming love, must be chilled into blank confusion and amazement by the thought that there is no Being of Wisdom and Benevolence Who is to be thanked and adored because of these His marvellous works. Surely this is enough to darken the universe to the explorer of nature's mysteries, and to fill his soul with perpetual melancholy. Nor is it easy to understand how any man of true science, any real inductive philosopher, who comes into contact with nature's living processes and hears the perpetual whisper of her living voice,can be ensnared into the acceptance of such a hard mystery of sceptical belief as this.

Surely, then, on purely scientific grounds,—the grounds not only of metaphysical but also of natural science, on every ground which can be appealed to by high and pure philosophy, we are at liberty, I should say we are bound, to reject the hypothesis which attempts to expound nature and to solve its mysteries, without the admission of a divine mind. Sense and matter and the observed order of phenomena do not constitute the whole of our science. There are some words written by a poet, too much neglected at the present time, which I cannot forbear from quoting here.

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