CHAPTER IV.

_On the Impression produced by the Contemplation of Laws of Nature; or, on the Conviction that Law implies Mind._

The various trains of thought and reasoning which lead men from a consideration of the natural world to the conviction of the existence, the power, the providence of God, do not require, for the most part, any long or laboured deduction, to give them their effect on the mind. On the contrary, they have, in every age and country, produced their impression on multitudes who have not instituted any formal reasonings upon the subject, and probably upon many who have not put their conclusions in the shape of any express propositions. The persuasion of a superior intelligence and will, which manifests itself in every part of the material world, is, as is well known, so widely diffused and deeply infixed, as to have made it a question among speculative men whether the notion of such a power is not universal and innate. It is our business to show only how plainly and how universally such a belief results from the study of the appearances about us. That in many nations, in many periods, this persuasion has been mixed up with much that was erroneous and perverse in the opinions of the intellect or the fictions of fancy, does not weaken the force of such consent. The belief of a supernatural and presiding power runs through all these errors: and while the perversions are manifestly the work of caprice and illusion, and vanish at the first ray of sober inquiry, the belief itself is substantial and consistent, and grows in strength upon every new examination. It was the firmness and solidity of the conviction of _something_ Divine which gave a hold and permanence to the figments of so many false divinities. And those who have traced the progress of human thought on other subjects, will not think it strange, that while the fundamental persuasion of a Deity was thus irremovably seated in the human mind, the developement of this conception into a consistent, pure, and steadfast belief in one Almighty and Holy Father and God, should be long missed, or never attained, by the struggle of the human faculties; should require long reflection to mature it, and the aid of revelation to establish it in the world.

The view of the universe which we have principally had occasion to present to the reader, is that in which we consider its appearances as reducible to certain fixed and general laws. Availing ourselves of some of the lights which modern science supplies, we have endeavoured to show that the adaptation of such laws to each other, and their fitness to promote the harmonious and beneficial course of the world, may be traced, wherever we can discover the laws themselves; and that the conceptions of the Divine Power, Goodness and Superintendence which we thus form, agree in a remarkable manner with the views of the Supreme Being, to which reason, enlightened by the divine revelation, has led.

But we conceive that the general impressions of mankind would go further than a mere assent to the argument as we have thus stated it. To most persons it appears that the mere existence of a law connecting and governing any class of phenomena, implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established the law. When events are regulated by precise rules of time and space, of number and measure, men conceive these rules to be the evidence of thought and mind, even without discovering in the rules any peculiar adaptations, or without supposing their purpose to be known.

The origin and the validity of such an impression on the human mind may appear to some matters of abstruse and doubtful speculation: yet the tendency to such a belief prevails strongly and widely, both among the common class of minds whose thoughts are casually and unsystematically turned to such subjects, and among philosophers to whom laws of nature are habitual subjects of contemplation. We conceive therefore that such a tendency may deserve to be briefly illustrated; and we trust also that some attention to this point may be of service in throwing light upon the true relation of the study of nature to the belief in God.

1. A very slight attention shows us how readily order and regularity suggest to a common apprehension the operation of a calm and untroubled intelligence presiding over the course of events. Thus the materialist poet, in accounting for the belief in the Gods, though he does not share it, cannot deny the habitual effect of this manifestation.

Præterea cœli rationes _ordine certo_ Et _varia_ annorum cernebant _tempora_ vorti; Nec poterant quibus id fieret cognoscere caussis. Ergo perfugium sibi habebant Omnia Divis Tradere et illorum nutu facere omnia flecti. LUCRET. v. 1182.

They saw the skies in constant order run, The varied seasons and the circling sun, Apparent rule, with unapparent cause, And thus they sought in Gods the source of laws.

The same feeling may be traced in the early mythology of a large portion of the globe. We might easily, taking advantage of the labours of learned men, exemplify this in the case of the oriental nations, of Greece, and of many other countries. Nor does there appear much difficulty in pointing out the error of those who have maintained that all religion had its _origin_ in the worship of the stars and the elements; and who have insinuated that all such impressions are unfounded, inasmuch as these are certainly not right objects of human worship. The religious feeling, the conviction of a supernatural power, of an intelligence connecting and directing the phenomena of the world, had not its _origin_ in the worship of sun, or stars, or elements; but was itself the necessary though unexpressed foundation of all worship, and all forms of false, as well as true, religion. The contemplation of the earth and heavens called into action this religious tendency in man; and to say that the worship of the material world formed or suggested this religious feeling, is to invert the order of possible things in the most unphilosophical manner. Idolatry is not the source of the belief in God, but is a compound of the persuasion of a supernatural government, with certain extravagant and baseless conceptions as to the manner in which this government is exercised.

We will quote a passage from an author who has illustrated at considerable length the hypothesis that all religious belief is derived from the worship of the elements.

“Light, and darkness its perpetual contrast; the succession of days and nights, the periodical order of the seasons; the career of the brilliant luminary which regulates their course; that of the moon his sister and rival; night, and the innumerable fires which she lights in the blue vault of heaven; the revolutions of the stars, which exhibit them for a longer or a shorter period above our horizon; the constancy of this period in the fixed stars, its variety in the wandering stars, the planets; their direct and retrograde course, their momentary rest; the phases of the moon waxing, full, waning, divested of all light; the progressive motion of the sun upwards, downwards; the successive order of the rising and setting of the fixed stars, which mark the different points of the course of the sun, while the various aspects which the earth itself assumes mark, here below also, the same periods of the sun’s annual motion; * * * all these different pictures, displayed before the eyes of man, formed the great and magnificent spectacle by which I suppose him surrounded at the moment when _he is about to create his gods_.”[31]

What is this (divested of its wanton levity of expression) but to say, that when man has so far traced the course of nature as to be irresistibly impressed with the existence of order, law, variety in constancy, and fixity in change; of relations of form and space, duration and succession, cause and consequence, among the objects which surround him; there springs up in his breast, unbidden and irresistibly, the thought of superintending intelligence, of a mind which comprehended from the first and completely that which he late and partially comes to know? The worship of earth and sky, of the host of heaven and the influences of nature, is not the ultimate and fundamental fact in the early history of the religious impressions of mankind. These are but derivative streams, impure and scanty, from the fountain of religious feeling which appears to be disclosed to us by the contemplation of the universe, as the seat of law and the manifestation of intellect. Time suggests to man the thought of eternity; space of infinity; law of intelligence; order of purpose; and however difficult and long a task it may be to develope these suggestions into clear convictions, these thoughts are the real parents of our natural religious belief. The only relation between true religion and the worship of the elemental world is, that the latter is the partial and gross perversion, the former the consistent and pure developement of the same original idea.

2. The connexion of the laws of the material world with an intelligence which preconceived and instituted the law, which is thus, as we perceive, so generally impressed on the common apprehension of mankind, has also struck no less those who have studied nature with a more systematic attention, and with the peculiar views which belong to science. The laws which such persons learn and study, seem, indeed, most naturally to lead to the conviction of an intelligence which originally gave to the law its form.

What we call a general law is, in truth, a form of expression including a number of facts of like kind. The facts are separate; the unity of view by which we associate them, the character of generality and of law, resides in those relations which are the object of the intellect. The law once apprehended by us, takes in our minds the place of the facts themselves, and is said to _govern_ or determine them, because it determines our anticipations of what they will be. But we cannot, it would seem, conceive a law, founded on such intelligible relations, to govern and determine the facts themselves, any otherwise than by supposing also an intelligence by which these relations are contemplated, and these consequences realized. We cannot then represent to ourselves the universe governed by general laws otherwise than by conceiving an intelligent and conscious Deity, by whom these laws were originally contemplated, established, and applied.

This perhaps will appear more clear, when it is considered that the laws of which we speak are often of an abstruse and complex kind, depending upon relations of space, time, number, and other properties, which we perceive by great attention and thought. These relations are often combined so variously and curiously, that the most subtle reasonings and calculations which we can form are requisite in order to trace their results. Can such laws be conceived to be instituted without any exercise of knowledge and intelligence? Can material objects apply geometry and calculation to themselves? Can the lenses of the eye, for instance, be formed and adjusted with an exact suitableness to their refractive powers, while there is in the agency which has framed them, no consciousness of the laws of light, of the course of rays, of the visible properties of things? This appears to be altogether inconceivable.

Every particle of matter possesses an almost endless train of properties, each acting according to its peculiar and fixed laws. For every atom of the same kind of matter these laws are invariably and perpetually the same, while for the different kinds of matter the difference of these properties is equally constant. This constant and precise resemblance, this variation equally constant and equally regular, suggest irresistibly the conception of some cause, independent of the atoms themselves, by which their similarity and dissimilarity, the agreement and difference of their deportment under the same circumstances, have been determined. Such a view of the constitution of matter, as is observed by an eminent writer of our own time, effectually destroys the idea of its eternal and self-existent nature, “by giving to each of its atoms the essential characters, at once, of a _manufactured article_ and a _subordinate agent_.”[32]

That such an impression, and the consequent belief in a divine Author of the universe, by whom its laws were ordained and established, does result from the philosophical contemplation of nature, will, we trust, become still more evident by tracing the effect produced upon men’s minds by the discovery of such laws and properties as those of which we have been speaking; and we shall therefore make a few observations on this subject.