Having accepted the very great honour of being allowed to deliver here two lectures, I have chosen as my subject Superstition and Science. It is with Superstition that this first lecture will deal.
The subject seems to me especially fit for a clergyman; for he should, more than other men, be able to avoid trenching on two subjects rightly excluded from this Institution; namely, Theology—that is, the knowledge of God; and Religion—that is, the knowledge of Duty. If he knows, as he should, what is Theology, and what is Religion, then he should best know what is not Theology, and what is not Religion.
For my own part, I entreat you at the outset to keep in mind that these lectures treat of matters entirely physical; which have in reality, and ought to have in our minds, no more to do with Theology and Religion than the proposition that theft is wrong, has to do with the proposition that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.
It is necessary to premise this, because many are of opinion that superstition is a corruption of religion; and though they would agree that as such, “corruptio optimi pessima,” yet they would look on religion as the state of spiritual health, and superstition as one of spiritual disease.
Others again, holding the same notion, but not considering that “corruptio optimi pessima,” have been in all ages somewhat inclined to be merciful to superstition, as a child of reverence; as a mere accidental misdirection of one of the noblest and most wholesome faculties of man.
This is not the place wherein to argue with either of these parties: and I shall simply say that superstition seems to me altogether a physical affection, as thoroughly material and corporeal as those of eating or sleeping, remembering or dreaming.
After this, it will be necessary to define superstition, in order to have some tolerably clear understanding of what we are talking about. I beg leave to define it as—Fear of the unknown.
Johnson, who was no dialectician, and, moreover, superstitious enough himself, gives eight different definitions of the word; which is equivalent to confessing his inability to define it at all:
“1. Unnecessary fear or scruples in religion; observance of unnecessary and uncommanded rites or practices; religion without morality.
“2. False religion; reverence of beings not proper objects of reverence; false worship.
“ 3. Over nicety; exactness too scrupulous.”
Eight meanings; which, on the principle that eight eighths, or indeed eight hundred, do not make one whole, may be considered as no definition. His first thought, as often happens, is the best—“Unnecessary fear.” But after that he wanders. The root-meaning of the word is still to seek. But, indeed, the popular meaning, thanks to popular common sense, will generally be found to contain in itself the root-meaning.
Let us go back to the Latin word Superstitio. Cicero says that the superstitious element consists in “a certain empty dread of the gods”—a purely physical affection, if you will remember three things:
1. That dread is in itself a physical affection.
2. That the gods who were dreaded were, with the vulgar, who alone dreaded them, merely impersonations of the powers of nature.
3. That it was physical injury which these gods were expected to inflict.
But he himself agrees with this theory of mine; for he says shortly after, that not only philosophers, but even the ancient Romans, had separated superstition from religion; and that the word was first applied to those who prayed all dayut liberi sui sibi superstites essent, might survive them. On the etymology no one will depend who knows the remarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients, in consequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive method which has created modern criticism. But if it be correct, it is a natural and pathetic form for superstition to take in the minds of men who saw their children fade and die; probably the greater number of them beneath diseases which mankind could neither comprehend nor cure.
The best exemplification of what the ancients meant by superstition is to be found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle’s great pupil Theophrastus.
The superstitious man, according to him, after having washed his hands with lustral water—that is, water in which a torch from the altar had been quenched—goes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth, to keep off evil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire used, in my youth, to go about with a withe of mountain ash round their necks to keep off the evil eye. If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and either throws three pebbles into the road, or, with the innate selfishness of fear, lets someone else go before him, and attract to himself the harm which may ensue. He has a similar dread of a screech-owl, whom he compliments in the name of its mistress, Pallas Athene. If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets up an altar to it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, he pours oil on it, kneels down, and adores it. If a rat has nibbled one of his sacks he takes it for a fearful portent—a superstition which Cicero also mentions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be assisting at his own funeral. He purifies endlessly his house, saying that Hecate—that is, the moon—has exercised some malign influence on it; and many other purifications he observes, of which I shall only say that they are by their nature plainly, like the last, meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. He assists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits in his own bosom to avert the evil omen.
I have quoted, I believe, every fact given by Theophrastus; and you will agree, I am sure, that the moving and inspiring element of such a character is mere bodily fear of unknown evil. The only superstition attributed to him which does not at first sight seem to have its root in dread is that of the Orphic mysteries. But of them Müller says that the Dionusos whom they worshipped “was an infernal deity, connected with Hades, and was the personification, not merely of rapturous pleasure, but of a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life.” The Orphic societies of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos. And Plato speaks of a lower grade of Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, “who used to come before the doors of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices and expiatory songs, to release them from their own sins, and those of their forefathers;” and such would be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who was afraid of a weasel or an owl.
Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe, will be found at the root of all superstition whatsoever.
But be it so. Fear is a natural passion, and a wholesome one. Without the instinct of self-preservation, which causes the sea-anemone to contract its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its hover, species would be extermined wholesale by involuntary suicide.
Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as it is controlled by reason. But what if the fear be not rational, but irrational? What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of the unknown, simply because it is unknown? Is it not likely, then, to be afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as to man? Any one will confess that, who has ever seen, a horse inflict on himself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to escape from a quite imaginary danger. I have good reasons for believing that not only animals here and there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often destroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, for instance, as cause a whole herd of buffaloes to rush over a bluff, and be dashed to pieces. And remark that this capacity of panic, fear—of superstition, as I should call it—is greatest in those animals, the dog and the horse for instance, which have the most rapid and vivid fancy. Does not the unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when he attributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength of these very manifestations of fear, the capacity of seeing ghosts and fairies before he can see them himself?
But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself: it makes him a source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states. It transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caught in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understand that you wish to release her: and, in the madness of terror, bites and tears at the hand which tries to do her good. Yes; very cruel is blind fear. When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what. When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately. When he dreads beyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason. He has no law of guidance left, save the lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yet his intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him into terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can—what the lower animals, happily for them, cannot—organise his folly; erect his superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that—Woe to the weak! For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the “Malleus Maleficarum,” and the rest of the witch literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and most fairly.
But, fear of the unknown? Is not that fear of the unseen world? And is not that fear of the spiritual world? Pardon me: a great deal of that fear—all of it, indeed, which is superstition—is simply not fear of the spiritual, but of the material; and of nothing else.
The spiritual world—I beg you to fix this in your minds—is not merely an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible world which is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of right and wrong. And spiritual fear—which is one of the noblest of all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest—is, if properly defined, nothing less or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.
But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy which conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for yourselves. What difference is there between a savage’s fear of a demon, and a hunter’s fear of a fall? The hunter sees a fence. He does not know what is on the other side, but he has seen fences like it with a great ditch on the other side, and suspects one here likewise. He has seen horses fall at such, and men hurt thereby. He pictures to himself his horse falling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with possibly a broken limb; and he recoils from the picture he himself has made; and perhaps with very good reason. His picture may have its counterpart in fact; and he may break his leg. But his picture, like the previous pictures from which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression on the brain, just as much as those in dreams.
Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the broken leg, being unseen and unknown, make them a spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, a spiritual broken leg? And does the fact of the demon and his doings, being as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or the harm that he may do, a spiritual harm? What does the savage fear? Lest the demon should appear; that is, become obvious to his physical senses, and produce an unpleasant physical effect on them. He fears lest the fiend should entice him into the bog, break the hand-bridge over the brook, turn into a horse and ride away with him, or jump out from behind a tree and wring his neck—tolerably hard physical facts, all of them; the children of physical fancy, regarded with physical dread. Even if the superstition proved true; even if the demon did appear; even if he wrung the traveller’s neck in sound earnest, there would be no more spiritual agency or phenomenon in the whole tragedy than there is in the parlour-table, when spiritual somethings make spiritual raps upon spiritual wood; and human beings, who are really spirits—and would to heaven they would remember that fact, and what it means—believe that anything has happened beyond a clumsy juggler’s trick.
You demur? Do you not see that the demon, by the mere fact of having produced physical consequences, would have become himself a physical agent, a member of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he and his doings, by physical laws? If you do not see that conclusion at first sight, think over it till you do.
It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow basis; that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that, considering the numberless, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has assumed, bodily fear is too simple to explain them all.
But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that my base is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every man is capable of fear. And they will see, too, that the cause of superstition must be something like fear, which is common to all men: for all, at least as children, are capable of superstition; and that it must be something which, like fear, is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbaric kind; for the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is still superstitious, often to a very ugly degree. Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone-weapons, the earliest method of asserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to that utterly abnormal and fantasticlusus naturæcalled man.
Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of that same savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself; whether or not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been, indeed must have been, the result of that ignorance and fear which he carried about with him, every time he prowled for food through the primeval forest.
A savage’s first division of nature would be, I should say, into things which he can eat and things which can eat him: including, of course, his most formidable enemy, and most savoury food—his fellow-man. In finding out what he can eat, we must remember, he will have gone through much experience which will have inspired him with a serious respect for the hidden wrath of nature; like those Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says, that as they know every poisonous plant, they must have tried them all—not always with impunity.
So he gets at a third class of objects—things which he cannot eat, and which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems to him, out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents. There are natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category, stones, floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill him, surely for ends of their own. If a rock falls from the cliff above him, what more natural than to suppose that there is some giant up there who threw it at him? If he had been up there, and strong enough, and had seen a man walking underneath, he would certainly have thrown the stone at him and killed him. For first, he might have eaten the man after; and even if he were not hungry, the man might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to prevent that by doing him a mischief first. Besides, the man might have a wife; and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient law common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor. Such is the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the ανθρωπος φυχικος of St. Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very acute animal passions—hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with the working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.
So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the cliff, who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes in like wise concerning most other natural phenomena. There is something in them which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him; and if he cannot destroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear of them grows quite boundless. There are hundreds of natural objects on which he learns to look with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look on the useless and poisonousEuphorbia canariensis. It is to them—according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth—a demon who would kill them, if it could only run after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt it with volleys of stones, “screeching with elfin joy, and using worse names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised stalks.”
And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the permanent terrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are sudden and seemingly capricious?—towards storms, earthquakes, floods, blights, pestilences? We know too well what it has been—one of blind, and therefore often cruel, fear. How could it be otherwise? Was Theophrastus’s superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on every round stone? I think there was a great deal to be said for him. This worship of Bætyli was rational enough. They were aerolites, fallen from heaven. Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from above?—to testify by homage to them due awe of the being who had thrown them at men, and who though he had missed his shot that time might not miss it the next? I think if we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy, or Christianity, saw an Armstrong bolt fall within five miles of London, we should be inclined to be very respectful to it indeed. So the aerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinct race, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the heaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image of Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was the Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days of Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several more became notable for ages.
Why not? The uneducated man of genius, unacquainted alike with metaphysics and with biology, sees, like a child, a personality in every strange and sharply-defined object. A cloud like an angel may be an angel; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a man turned into wood—perhaps to be turned back again at its own will. An erratic block has arrived where it is by strange unknown means. Is not that an evidence of its personality? Either it has flown hither itself, or some one has thrown it. In the former case, it has life, and is proportionally formidable; in the latter, he who had thrown it is formidable.
I know two erratic blocks of porphyry—I believe there are three—in Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which—so I was always informed as a boy—were the stones which St. Kevern threw after St. Just when the latter stole his host’s chalice and paten, and ran away with them to the Land’s End. Why not? Before we knew anything about the action of icebergs and glaciers, that is, until the last eighty years, that was as good a story as any other; while how lifelike these boulders are, let a great poet testify; for the fact has not escaped the delicate eye of Wordsworth:
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lieCouched on the bald top of an eminence;Wonder to all who do the same espy,By what means it could thither come, and whence,So that it seems a thing endued with sense;Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelfOf rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.
To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful simile; to a savage poet, it would have become a material and a very formidable fact. He stands in the valley, and looks up at the boulder on the far-off fells. He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes up his mind. It is alive. As the shadows move over it, he sees it move. May it not sleep there all day, and prowl for prey all night? He had been always afraid of going up those fells; now he will never go. There is a monster there.
Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the savage is always a child. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and policed as ourselves—children from the cradle to the grave. But of them I do not talk; because, happily for the world, their childishness is so overlaid by the result of other men’s manhood; by an atmosphere of civilisation and Christianity which they have accepted at second-hand as the conclusions of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner of reasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason at all, save the passion of imitation. Not in them, but in the savage, can we see man as he is by nature, the puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural slave of his own fears.
But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five passions? I do not say that. I should be most unphilosophical if I said it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him than that. Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only the noblest part of humanity, but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to be counted as one of the roots of superstition. For in the savage man, in whom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is still merely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact. It has not come out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to be treated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions and senses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; avera causafor all its phenomena. And if we seem to have found a sufficient explanation already, it is unphilosophical to look farther, at least till we have tried whether our explanation fits the facts.
Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I have already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher vertebrates—fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of external objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory—if, indeed, all memory be not physical—or in its sleeping form of dreaming. Upon this last, which has played so very important a part in superstition in all ages, I beg you to think a moment. Recollect your own dreams during childhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child. Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult it must be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or realities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes he grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions. But, moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children’s dreams are wont to be, of a painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always painful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under the influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. And so, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he will have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific kind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a shudder—Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped out upon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow and unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten—but let us draw a veil before the larder of a savage—his chin is pinned down on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himself again at that cavern’s mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him: and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe. It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at home all the while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the contrary. He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods. When we remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no better explanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and wandered free, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory.
Now, I submit that in these simple facts we have a group of “true causes” which are the roots of all the superstitions of the world.
And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I shall answer, that I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to eliminate and get rid of that which is material, animal, and base; in order that that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct and clear, in its divine and eternal beauty.
To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my hypothesis, let me give you an example—fictitious, it is true, but probable fact nevertheless; because it is patched up of many fragments of actual fact: and let us see how, in following it out, we shall pass through almost every possible form of superstition.
Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable wasps of the tropics have built for ages. The average savage hurries past the spot in mere bodily fear; for if they come out against him, they will sting him to death; till at last there comes by a savage wiser than the rest, with more observation, reflection, imagination, independence of will—the genius of his tribe.
The awful shade of the great tree, added to his terror of the wasps, weighs on him, and excites his brain. Perhaps, too, he has had a wife or a child stung to death by these same wasps. These wasps, so small, yet so wise, far wiser than he: they fly, and they sting. Ah, if he could fly and sting; how he would kill and eat, and live right merrily. They build great towns; they rob far and wide; they never quarrel with each other: they must have some one to teach them, to lead them—they must have a king. And so he gets the fancy of a Wasp-King; as the western Irish still believe in the Master Otter; as the Red Men believe in the King of the Buffaloes, and find the bones of his ancestors in the Mammoth remains of Big-bone Lick; as the Philistines of Ekron—to quote a notorious instance—actually worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies.
If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course. If he, the savage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at home and make others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king.
And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of the wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else. He will go to the tree, and watch for him to come out. The wasps will get accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till the new fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this wasp-king: and at last he will find himself grovelling before the tree, saying—“Oh great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not to sting me, and I will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers to eat, and I will flatter you, and worship you, and you shall be my king.”
And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new mysterious bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would believe him, and fear him; and fear him still more when he began to say, as he surely would, not merely—“I can ask the wasp-king, and he will tell his children not to sting you:” but—“I can ask the wasp-king, and he will send his children, and sting you all to death.” Vanity and ambition will have prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie. The man will more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe them when he has repeated them a dozen times.
And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the fetish of their tribe.
And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The wasp will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy. The new chief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting like wasps, revenge like wasps, hold altogether like wasps, build like wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies. Soon they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast that their king’s father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole tribe was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once theireponymhero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.
Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this epoch, the new thought—Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled. The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before. He never pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; and as for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still. What makers or builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full? Of course, he sees it now. A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely new guess might become an integral part of his tribe’s creed. That would be their cosmogony. And if, a generation or two after, another savage genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions. It would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the astronomy of his tribe henceforth. Absurd enough: but—as every man who is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know—no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabæus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?
This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship, which had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.
But times might come for it in which it would go through various changes, through which every superstition in the world, I suppose, has passed or is doomed to pass.
The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger tribe than themselves. What would be the result? They would fight valiantly at first, like wasps. But what if they began to fail? Was not the wasp-king angry with them? Had not he deserted them? He must be appeased; he must have his revenge. They would take a captive, and offer him to the wasps. So did a North American tribe, in their need, some forty years ago; when, because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a captive girl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with their corn. I would not tell the story, for the horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force on my argument. What were those Red Men thinking of? What chain of misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a device for making the crops grow? Who can tell? Who can make the crooked straight, or number that which is wanting? As said Solomon of old, so must we—“The foolishness of fools is folly.” One thing only we can say of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that means of ridding themselves of their fear.
But what if the wasp tribe had no captives? They would offer slaves. What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the wasps? They would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their daughters, to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like strait, offered in one day 200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-god, whose worship they had brought out of Syria; whose original meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom they only knew that he was a dark and devouring being, who must be appeased with the burning bodies of their sons and daughters. And so the veil of fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand forth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.
But more: the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and carry their wasp-fetish into a new land. But if they became poor and weakly, their brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies, would degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it meant. Away from the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which were not so large or formidable, they would require a remembrancer of the wasp-king; and they would make one—a wasp of wood, or what not. After a while, according to that strange law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may see at work in every child who plays with a doll, the symbol would become identified with the thing symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp with all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the live wasps of the tree; and after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree, the wasp-prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp—ay, even of their defeat and flight—had vanished from their songs and legends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to a little ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence, and meant they knew not what, save that it was a very “old fetish,” a “great medicine,” or some such other formula for expressing their own ignorance and dread. Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and the Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence—unless the ancient Irish were Buddhists, like the Himalayans—tie just the same scraps of rag on the bushes round just the same holy wells, as do the Negros of Central Africa upon their “Devil’s Trees;” they know not why, save that their ancestors did it, and it is a charm against ill-luck and danger.
And the sacred tree? That, too, might undergo a metamorphosis in the minds of men. The conquerors would see their aboriginal slaves of the old race still haunting the tree, making stealthy offerings to it by night: and they would ask the reason. But they would not be told. The secret would be guarded; such secrets were guarded, in Greece, in Italy, in medieval France, by the superstitious awe, the cunning, even the hidden self-conceit, of the conquered race. Then the conquerors would wish to imitate their own slaves. They might be in the right. There might be something magical, uncanny, in the hollow tree, which might hurt them; might be jealous of them as intruders. They, too, would invest the place with sacred awe. If they were gloomy, like the Teutonic conquerors of Europe and the Arabian conquerors of the East, they would invest it with unseen terrors. They would say, like them, a devil lives in the tree. If they were of a sunny temper, like the Hellenes, they would invest it with unseen graces. What a noble tree! What a fair fountain hard by its roots! Surely some fair and graceful being must dwell therein, and come out to bathe by night in that clear wave. What meant the fruit, the flowers, the honey, which the slaves left there by night? Pure food for some pure nymph. The wasp-gods would be forgotten; probably smoked out as sacrilegious intruders. The lucky seer or poet who struck out the fancy would soon find imitators; and it would become, after a while, a common and popular superstition that Hamadryads haunted the hollow forest trees, Naiads the wells, and Oreads the lawns. Somewhat thus, I presume, did the more cheerful Hellenic myths displace the darker superstitions of the Pelasgis and those rude Arcadian tribes who offered, even as late as the Roman Empire, human sacrifices to gods whose original names were forgotten.
But even the cultus of nymphs would be defiled after awhile by a darker element. However fair, they might be capricious and revengeful, like other women. Why not? And soon, men going out into the forest would be missed for awhile. They had eaten narcotic berries, got sun-strokes, wandered till they lost their wits. At all events, their wits were gone. Who had done it? Who but the nymphs? The men had seen something they should not have seen; done something they would not have done; and the nymphs had punished the unconscious rudeness by that frenzy. Fear, everywhere fear, of Nature—the spotted panther as some one calls her, as fair as cruel, as playful as treacherous. Always fear of Nature, till a Divine light arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but her lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.
And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree. No, it need not end there; it may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition, which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros;{223}which we may hope, will soon be exterminated.
This might happen. For it, or something like it, has happened too many times already.
That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and revenge. Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she has too often gone for comfort and help—and those of the very darkest kind—to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting—there are not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles—wicked old women who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished. Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes; then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison, with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of those witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which were too common of old among the men of our race.
I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it as—what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be—man’s dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.
She is to the barbarous man—she should be more and more to the civilised man—not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his physical being. She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which entangled him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will. He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those habits of secrecy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave. He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many—if not all—barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world. If she turns against him—she, with all her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day by day—what harm can she not, may she not, do? And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. What deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force? Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day. Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.
I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, over the most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideous of all human follies. I have, I think, given you hints enough to show that it, like all other superstitions, is the child—the last born and the ugliest child—of blind dread of the unknown.
I said, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child of Ignorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that Science was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.
But these genealogies—like most metaphors—do not fit exactly, as you may see for yourselves.
If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear; the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread Nature, the less they wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful secrets? It is dangerous; perhaps impious. She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple of old—“I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted.” And why should they try or wish to lift it? If she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It is enough that she does not destroy them. So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing ignorance.
And courage? We may say, and truly, that courage is the child of knowledge. But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child of courage. Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have told you that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special illumination, of reverence, and what not; hiding under grand words their purpose of keeping the masses ignorant, that they might be their slaves. Reverence? I will yield to none in reverence for reverence. I will all but agree with the wise man who said that reverence is the root of all virtues. But which child reverences his father most? He who comes joyfully and trustfully to meet him, that he may learn his father’s mind, and do his will; or he who at his father’s coming runs away and hides, lest he should be beaten for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence, a reverence of courage, which is surely one of the highest forms of reverence. That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare not overlook or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that because it is a fact it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must be a fact of God; a message from God; a voice of God, as Bacon has it, revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a snipe’s pinion, or the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles, believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlying them, which is worth years of thought to solve. That is reverence; a reverence which is growing, thank God, more and more common; which will produce, as it grows more common still, fruit which generations yet unborn shall bless.
But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in pious awe—what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on the sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but that they may not? What is it but cowardice, very pitiable when unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to Nature as to a parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head—Will it bite me?—will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind that it may bite him, and had therefore best be left alone? It is only the man of courage—few and far between—who will stand the chance of a first bite, in the hope of teaching the parrot to talk, or the monkey to fire off a gun. And it is only the man of courage—few and far between—who will stand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which may kill him for aught he knows—for her teeth, though clumsy, are very strong—in order that he may tame her and break her in to his use by the very same method by which that admirable inductive philosopher, Mr. Rarey, used to break in his horses; first, by not being afraid of them; and next, by trying to find out what they were thinking of. But after all, as with animals, so with Nature; cowardice is dangerous. The surest method of getting bitten by an animal is to be afraid of it; and the surest method of being injured by Nature is to be afraid of it. Only as far as we understand Nature are we safe from it; and those who in any age counsel mankind not to pry into the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide for their own life and well-being, or for their children after them.
But how few there have been in any age who have not been afraid of Nature. How few have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what she is thinking of. The mass are glad to have the results of science, as they are to buy Mr. Rarey’s horses after they are tamed; but for want of courage or of wit, they had rather leave the taming process to someone else. And therefore we may say that what knowledge of Nature we have—and we have very little—we owe to the courage of those men—and they have been very few—who have been inspired to face Nature boldly; and say—or, what is better, act as if they were saying—“I find something in me which I do not find in you; which gives me the hope that I can grow to understand you, though you may not understand me; that I may become your master, and not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know; or die in the search.”
It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and very few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature, and looked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe what we call Physical Science.
There have been four races—or rather a very few men of each four races—who have faced Nature after this gallant wise.
First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively from an historical, and not a religious point of view.
These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship. They invaded and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more debased, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped. Their own masses were for centuries given up to nature-worship. Now, among those Jews arose men—a very few—sages—prophets—call them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and philosophers—who assumed towards nature an attitude utterly different from the rest of their countrymen and the rest of the then world; who denounced superstition and the dread of nature as the parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for themselves said boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. They found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed a law which could not be broken; that all things continued to that day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet reverent—identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus’s superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the tempest.
The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my belief that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school of inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded in perpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whose minds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which they have—as an historic fact—slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages.
Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were not the Jews; but first the Chaldæans, next the Greeks, next their pupils the Romans—or rather a few sages among each race. But what success had they? The Chaldæan astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, still prove them to have been men of rare intellect. For a great and a patient genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation. But they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries. They stopped short. They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature. They sank into planet-worship. They invented, it would seem, that fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an incubus on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magicians and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing but evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob as irreverent impious atheists. The wisest of them all, Socrates, was actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed. School after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something like experience, reason, common sense. They were not allowed to prosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the last effort of Græco-Roman thought to explain the universe was Neoplatonism—the muddiest of the muddy—an attempt to apologise for, and organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of the Roman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all her school—they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for they were noble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying those who had; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which they despised: just as—it sometimes seems to me—some folk in these days are like to end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all: as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being. And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood, just where it began.
The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeks and Romans proved that it was possible. It remained for our race, under the teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.
Many causes contributed to give them this power. They were a personally courageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men than the forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or Frank. They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them. Their laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations by land and sea, proved that they were such. They were favoured, moreover, by circumstances, or—as I should rather put it—by that divine Providence which determined their times, and the bounds of their habitation. They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man special fair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last.
But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not. Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and horse, the carcases of human victims. No one acquainted with the early legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them all the prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And to their own superstitions they added those of the Rome which they conquered. They dreaded the Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace’s Canidia, still performed horrid rites in graveyards and dark places of the earth. They dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems. They dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed. They were the work of enchanters. Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were all full of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden. The Cæsars became to them magical man-gods. The poet Virgil became the prince of necromancers. If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they were to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and often came to evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face and interpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in prison. All the medieval sages—even Albertus Magnus—were stigmatised as magicians. One wonders that more of them did not imitate poor Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense, took—vain and sensual—to drinking the laudanum which he himself had discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool dieth, in spite of all his wisdom. For the “Romani nominis umbra,” the shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our forefathers for centuries. And their dread of the great heathens was really a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For when the authority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries, those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its laws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become regarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, and are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of the Middle Ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to think of nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said of her. Aristotle’s dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle’s opinions on violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe—as there certainly were in the days of the immortal “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum”—who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti’s professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so strong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses. The minds of men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not without a certain beauty and use—as let Spenser’s “Faërie Queen” bear witness—till the latter half of the seventeenth century.
After that time a rapid change began. It is marked by—it has been notably assisted by—the foundation of our own Royal Society. Its causes I will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, with theological questions, that they cannot be discussed here. I will only point out to you these facts: that, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, the noblest heads and the noblest hearts of Europe concentrated themselves more and more on the brave and patient investigation of physical facts, as the source of priceless future blessings to mankind; that the eighteenth century which it has been the fashion of late to depreciate, did more for the welfare of mankind, in every conceivable direction, than the whole fifteen centuries before it; that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that this boldness towards facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual emancipation of the human intellect. The connection may not, of course, be one of cause and effect; it may be a mere coincidence. I believe it to be a cause; one of course of very many causes: but still an integral cause. At least the coincidence is too remarkable a fact not to be worthy of investigation.
I said, just now—The emancipation of the human intellect. I did not say—Of science or of the scientific intellect; and for this reason:
That the emancipation of science is the emancipation of the common mind of all men. All men can partake of the gains of free scientific thought, not merely by enjoying its physical results, but by becoming more scientific men themselves.
Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture by defining superstition, I did not begin my second by defining its antagonist, science. For the word “science” defines itself. It means simply knowledge; that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an approximation as can be obtained; knowledge of any natural object, its classification, its causes, its effects; or in plain English, what it is, how it came where it is, and what can be done with it.
And scientific method, likewise, needs no definition; for it is simply the exercise of common sense. It is not a peculiar, unique, professional, or mysterious process of the understanding: but the same which all men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming correct conclusions.
Every one who knows the philosophic writings of Mr. John Stuart Mill, will be familiar with this opinion. But to those who have no leisure to study him, I should recommend the reading of Professor Huxley’s third lecture on the origin of species.
In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some humour, how the man who, on rising in the morning finds the parlour-window open, the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the window-sill, and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to the conclusion that someone has broken open the window, and stolen the plate, arrives at that hypothesis—for it is nothing more—by a long and complex train of inductions and deductions of just the same kind as those which, according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be used for investigating the deepest secrets of Nature.
This is true, even of those sciences which involve long mathematical calculations. In fact, the stating of the problem to be solved is the most important element in the calculation; and that is so thoroughly a labour of common sense that an utterly uneducated mart may, and often does, state an abstruse problem clearly and correctly; seeing what ought to be proved, and perhaps how to prove it, though he may be unable to work the problem out for want of mathematical knowledge.
But that mathematical knowledge is not—as all Cambridge men are surely aware—the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.
There are sciences, again, which do not involve mathematical calculation; for instance, botany, zoology, geology, which are just now passing from their old stage of classificatory sciences into the rank of organic ones. These are, without doubt, altogether within the scope of the merest common sense. Any man or woman of average intellect, if they will but observe and think for themselves, freely, boldly, patiently, accurately, may judge for themselves of the conclusions of these sciences, may add to these conclusions fresh and important discoveries; and if I am asked for a proof of what I assert, I point to “Rain and Rivers,” written by no professed scientific man, but by a colonel in the Guards, known to fame only as one of the most perfect horsemen in the world.
Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. A man—I do not say a geologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman—sees a small valley, say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in the Windsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain its age.
He has, at first sight, a very simple measure—that of denudation. He sees that the glen is now being eaten out by a little stream, the product of innumerable springs which arise along its sides, and which are fed entirely by the rain on the moors above. He finds, on observation, that this stream brings down some ten cubic yards of sand and gravel, on an average, every year. The actual quantity of earth which has been removed to make the glen may be several million cubic yards. Here is an easy sum in arithmetic. At the rate of ten cubic yards a-year, the stream has taken several hundred thousand years to make the glen.
You will observe that this result is obtained by mere common sense. He has a right to assume that the stream originally began the glen, because he finds it in the act of enlarging it; just as much right as he has to assume, if he find a hole in his pocket, and his last coin in the act of falling through it, that the rest of his money has fallen through the same hole. It is a sufficient cause, and the simplest. A number of observations as to the present rate of denudation, and a sum which any railroad contractor can do in his head, to determine the solid contents of the valley, are all that are needed. The method is that of science: but it is also that of simple common sense. You will remember, therefore, that this is no mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fair and simple conclusion from palpable facts; that the probability lies with the belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; that it is not the observer’s business to prove it further, but other persons’ to disprove it, if they can.
But does the matter end here? No. And, for certain reasons, it is good that it should not end here.
The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can disprove his own conclusions; moreover, being human, he is probably somewhat awed, if not appalled, by his own conclusion. Hundreds of thousands of years spent in making that little glen! Common sense would say that the longer it took to make, the less wonder there was in its being made at last: but the instinctive human feeling is the opposite. There is in men, and there remains in them, even after they are civilised, and all other forms of the dread of Nature have died out in them, a dread of size, of vast space, of vast time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space, as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of time. They will not understand that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that if we were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than it is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, to whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. I believe this dread of size to be merely, like all other superstitions, a result of bodily fear; a development of the instinct which makes a little dog run away from a big dog. Be that as it may, every observer has it; and so the man’s conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful: he will reconsider it.
Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he be a modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen can only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred, years old. And he will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own, drawn from facts, but no further.
So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have been produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shorter time.
1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides are identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.
2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at the upper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run in at the upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel-beds of the horizontal moor, without channel or depression.
3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of the sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end spreads out like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.
But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flat behind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens, parted from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the same hypothesis; but they cannot. For there could not have been surface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them. There are no other possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the original theory—the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it all, even as they are doing it this day.
But is not that still a hasty assumption? May not their denuding power have been far greater in old times than now?
Why should it? Because there was more rain then than now? That he must put out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever.
Because the land was more friable originally? Well, there is a great deal to be said for that. The experience of every countryman tells him that bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than land under vegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and sands rose from the sea, they were barren for hundreds of years. He has some measure of the time required, because he can tell roughly how long it takes for sands and shingles left by the sea to become covered with vegetation. But he must allow that the friability of the land must have been originally much greater than now, for hundreds of years.
But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time from his hundreds of thousands of years? For when the land first rose from the sea, that glen was not there. Some slight bay or bend in the shore determined its site. That stream was not there. It was split up into a million little springs, oozing side by side from the shore, and having each a very minute denuding power, which kept continually increasing by combination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the rainfall drained by all these little springs was collected into the one central stream. So that when the ground being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water was least able to do it; and as the denuding power of the water increased, the land, being covered with vegetation, became more and more able to resist it. All this he has seen, going on at the present day in the similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South Hampshire coast; especially round Bournemouth.
So the two disturbing elements in the calculation may be fairly set off against each other, as making a difference of only a few thousands or tens of thousands of years either way; and the age of the glen may fairly be, if not a million years, yet such a length of years as mankind still speak of with bated breath, as if forsooth it would do them some harm.
I trust that every scientific man in this room will agree with me, that the imaginary squire or ploughman would have been conducting his investigation strictly according to the laws of the Baconian philosophy. You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not used a single scientific term, or referred to a single scientific investigation; and has observed nothing and thought nothing, which might not have been observed and thought by any one who chose to use his common sense, and not to be afraid.
But because he has come round, after all this further investigation, to something very like his first conclusion, was all that further investigation useless? No—a thousand times, no. It is this very verification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and destroys the unsound. It is this struggle with all sorts of superstitions which makes science strong and sure, and her march irresistible, winning ground slowly, but never receding from it. It is this buffeting of adversity which compels her not to rest dangerously upon the shallow sand of first guesses, and single observations; but to strike her roots down, deep, wide, and interlaced, into the solid ground of actual facts.
It is very necessary to insist on this point. For there have been men in all past ages—I do not say whether there are any such now, but I am inclined to think that there will be hereafter—men who have tried to represent scientific method as something difficult, mysterious, peculiar, unique, not to be attained by the unscientific mass; and this not for the purpose of exalting science, but rather of discrediting her. For as long as the masses, educated or uneducated, are ignorant of what scientific method is, they will look on scientific men, as the middle age looked on necromancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed of mighty secrets; who may do them great good, but may also do them great harm. Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these persons to instal themselves as the critics of science, though not scientific men themselves: and—as Shakespeare has it—to talk of Robin Hood, though they never shot in his bow. Thus they become mediators to the masses between the scientific and the unscientific worlds. They tell them—You are not to trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand. You are not fit judges of their facts or of their methods. It is we who will, by a cautious eclecticism, choose out for you such of their conclusions as are safe for you; and them we will advise you to believe. To the scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything is discovered unpleasing to them, they will say, imperiously and e cathedrâ—Your new theory contradicts the established facts of science. For they will know well that whatever the men of science think of their assertion, the masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakers are by their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that what they call established facts scientific men call merely provisional conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang were the known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did fresh facts require one.
This has happened too often. It is in the interest of superstition that it should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely is to tell the masses—Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring a peculiar initiation. It is simply common sense, combined with uncommon courage, which includes uncommon honesty and uncommon patience; and if you will be brave, honest, patient, and rational, you will need no mystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and what not to believe; for you will be just as good judges of scientific facts and theories as those who assume the right of guiding your convictions. You are men and women: and more than that you need not be.
And let me say that the man of our days whose writings exemplify most thoroughly what I am going to say is the justly revered Mr. Thomas Carlyle.
As far as I know he has never written on any scientific subject. For aught I am aware of, he may know nothing of mathematics or chemistry, of comparative anatomy or geology. For aught I am aware of, he may know a great deal about them all, and, like a wise man, hold his tongue, and give the world merely the results in the form of general thought. But this I know: that his writings are instinct with the very spirit of science; that he has taught men, more than any living man, the meaning and end of science; that he has taught men moral and intellectual courage; to face facts boldly, while they confess the divineness of facts; not to be afraid of Nature, and not to worship Nature; to believe that man can know truth; and that only in as far as he knows truth can he live worthily on this earth. And thus he has vindicated, as no other man in our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature and the dignity of spirit. That he would have made a distinguished scientific man, we may be as certain from his writings as we may be certain, when we see a fine old horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made a first-class hunter, though he has been unfortunately all his life in harness. Therefore, did I try to train a young man of science to be true, devout, and earnest, accurate and daring, I should say—Read what you will: but at least read Carlyle. It is a small matter to me—and I doubt not to him—whether you will agree with his special conclusions: but his premises and his method are irrefragable; for they stand on the “voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam”—on fact and common sense.