CHAPTER IX.

_On the Impression produced by considering the Nature and Prospects of Science; or, on the Impossibility of the Progress of our Knowledge ever enabling us to comprehend the Nature of the Deity._

If we were to stop at the view presented in the last chapter, it might be supposed that--by considering God as eternal and omnipresent, conscious of all the relations, and of all the objects of the universe, instituting laws founded on the contemplation of these relations, and carrying these laws into effect by his immediate energy,--we had attained to a conception, in some degree definite, of the Deity, such as natural philosophy leads us to conceive him. But by resting in this mode of conception, we should overlook, or at least should disconnect from our philosophical doctrines, all that most interests and affects us in the character of the Creator and Preserver of the world;--namely, that he is the lawgiver and judge of our actions; the proper object of our prayer and adoration; the source from which we may hope for moral strength here, and for the reward of our obedience and the elevation of our nature in another state of existence.

We are very far from believing that our philosophy alone can give us such assurance of these important truths as is requisite for our guidance and support; but we think that even our physical philosophy will point out to us the necessity of proceeding far beyond that conception of God, which represents him merely as the mind in which reside all the contrivance, law, and energy of the material world. We believe that the view of the universe which modern science has already opened to us, compared with the prospect of what she has still to do in pursuing the path on which she has just entered, will show us how immeasurably inadequate such a mode of conception would be: and that if we take into our account, as we must in reason do, all that of which we have knowledge and consciousness, and of which we have as yet no systematic science, we shall be led to a conviction that the Creator and Preserver of the material world must also contain in him such properties and attributes as imply his moral character, and as fall in most consistently with all that we learn in any other way of his providence and holiness, his justice and mercy.

1. The sciences which have at present acquired any considerable degree of completeness, are those in which an extensive and varied collection of phenomena, and their proximate causes, have been reduced to a few simple general laws. Such are Astronomy and Mechanics, and perhaps, so far as its physical conditions are concerned, Optics. Other portions of human knowledge can be considered as perfect sciences, in any strict sense of the term, only when they have assumed this form; when the various appearances which they involve are reduced to a few principles, such as the laws of motion and the mechanical properties of the luminiferous ether. If we could trace the endless varieties of the forms of crystals, and the complicated results of chemical composition, to some one comprehensive law necessarily pointing out the crystalline form of any given chemical compound, Mineralogy would become an exact science. As yet, however, we can scarcely boast of the existence of any other such sciences than those which we at first mentioned: and so far therefore as we attempt to give definiteness to our conception of the Deity, by considering him as the intelligent depositary and executor of laws of nature, we can subordinate to such a mode of conception no portion of the creation, save the mechanical movements of the universe, and the propagation and properties of light.

2. And if we attempt to argue concerning the nature of the laws and relations which govern those provinces of creation whither our science has not yet reached, by applying some analogy borrowed from cases where it has been successful, we have no chance of attaining any except the most erroneous and worthless guesses. The history of human speculations, as well as the nature of the objects of them, shows how certainly this must happen. The great generalizations which have been established in one department of our knowledge, have been applied in vain to the purpose of throwing light on the other portions which still continue in obscurity. When the Newtonian philosophy had explained so many mechanical facts, by the two great steps,--of resolving the action of a whole mass into the actions of its minutest particles, and considering these particles as centres of force,--attempts were naturally soon made to apply the same mode of explanation to facts of other different kinds. It was conceived that the whole of natural philosophy must consist in investigating the laws of force by which particles of different substances attracted and repelled, and thus produced motions, or vibrations _to_ and _from_ the particles. Yet what were the next great discoveries in physics? The action of a galvanic wire upon a magnet; which is not to attract or repel it, but to turn it to the _right_ and _left_; to produce motion, not to or from, but _transverse_ to the line drawn to the acting particles; and again, the undulatory theory of light, in which it appeared that the undulations must not be longitudinal, as all philosophers, following the analogy of all cases previously conceived, had, at first, supposed them to be, but _transverse_ to the path of the ray. Here, though the step from the known to the unknown was comparatively small, when made conjecturally it was made in a direction very wide of the truth. How impossible then must it be to attain in this manner to any conception of a law which shall help us to understand the whole government of the universe!

3. Still, however, in the laws of the luminiferous ether, and of the other fluid, (if it be another fluid) by which galvanism and magnetism are connected, we have something approaching nearly to mechanical action, and, possibly, hereafter to be identified with it. But we cannot turn to any other part of our physical knowledge, without perceiving that the gulf which separates it from the exact sciences is yet wider and more obscure. Who shall enunciate for us, and in terms of what notions, the general law of _chemical_ composition and decomposition? sometimes indeed we give the name of _attraction_ to the affinity by which we suppose the particles of the various ingredients of bodies to be aggregated; but no one can point out any common feature between this and the attractions of which alone we know the exact effects. He who shall discover the true general law of the forces by which elements form compounds, will probably advance as far beyond the discoveries of Newton, as Newton went beyond Aristotle. But who shall say in what direction this vast flight shall be, and what new views it shall open to us of the manner in which matter obeys the laws of the Creator?

4. But suppose this flight performed;--we are yet but at the outset of the progress which must carry us towards Him. We have yet to begin to learn all that we are to know concerning the ultimate laws of organized bodies. What is the principle of _life_? What is the rule of that action of which assimilation, secretion, developement, are manifestations? and which appears to be farther removed from mere chemistry than chemistry is from mechanics. And what again is the new principle, as it seems to be, which is exhibited in the _irritability_ of an animal nerve? the existence of a sense? How different is this from all the preceding notions! No efforts can avoid or conceal the vast but inscrutable chasm. Those theorists, who have maintained most strenuously the possibility of tracing the phenomena of animal life to the influence of physical agents, have constantly been obliged to suppose a mode of agency altogether different from any yet known in physics. Thus Lamarck, one of the most noted of such speculators, in describing the course of his researches, says, “I was soon persuaded that the _internal sentiment_ constituted a power which it was necessary to take into account.” And Bichat, another writer on the same subject, while he declares his dissent from Stahl, and the earlier speculators, who had referred every thing in the economy of life to a single principle, which they called the _anima_, the _vital principle_, and so forth, himself introduces several principles, or laws, all utterly foreign to the region of physics; namely, _organic sensibility_, _organic contractility_, _animal sensibility_, _animal contractility_, and the like. Supposing such principles really to exist, how far enlarged and changed must our views be before we can conceive these properties, including the faculty of perception, which they imply, to be produced by the will and power of one supreme Being, acting by fixed laws. Yet without conceiving this, we cannot conceive the agency of that Deity, who is incessantly thus acting, in countless millions of forms and modes.

How strongly then does science represent God to us as incomprehensible! his attributes as unfathomable! His power, his wisdom, his goodness, appear in each of the provinces of nature which are thus brought before us; and in each, the more we study them, the more impressive, the more admirable do they appear. When then we find these qualities manifested in each of so many successive ways, and each manifestation rising above the preceding by unknown degrees, and through a progression of unknown extent, what other language can we use concerning such attributes than that they are _infinite_? What mode of expression can the most cautious philosophy suggest, other than that He, to whom we thus endeavour to approach, is infinitely wise, powerful, and good?

5. But with sense and consciousness the history of living things only begins. They have instincts, affections, passions, will. How entirely lost and bewildered do we find ourselves when we endeavour to conceive these faculties communicated by means of general laws! Yet they are so communicated from God, and of such laws he is the lawgiver. At what an immeasurable interval is he thus placed above every thing which the creation of the inanimate world alone would imply; and how far must he transcend all ideas founded on such laws as we find there!

6. But we have still to go further and far higher. The world of reason and of morality is a part of the same creation, as the world of matter and of sense. The will of man is swayed by rational motives; its workings are inevitably compared with a rule of action; he has a conscience which speaks of right and wrong. These are laws of man’s nature no less than the laws of his material existence, or his animal impulses. Yet what entirely new conceptions do they involve? How incapable of being resolved into, or assimilated to, the results of mere matter, or mere sense! Moral good and evil, merit and demerit, virtue and depravity, if ever they are the subjects of strict science, must belong to a science which views these things, not with reference to time or space, or mechanical causation, not with reference to fluid or ether, nervous irritability or corporeal feeling, but to their own proper modes of conception; with reference to the relations with which it is possible that these notions may be connected, and not to relations suggested by other subjects of a completely extraneous and heterogeneous nature. And according to such relations must the laws of the moral world be apprehended, by any intelligence which contemplates them at all.

There can be no wider interval in philosophy than the separation which must exist between the laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws of free moral action. Yet the tendency of men to assume, in the portions of human knowledge which are out of their reach, a similarity of type to those with which they are familiar, can leap over even this interval. Laplace has asserted that “an intelligence which, at a given instant, should know all the forces by which nature is urged, and the respective situation of the beings of which nature is composed, if, moreover, it were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would include in the same _formula_, the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the slightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to such an intelligence, and the future, no less than the past, would be present to its eyes.” If we speak merely of mechanical actions, this may, perhaps, be assumed to be an admissible representation of the nature of their connexion in the sight of the supreme intelligence. But to the rest of what passes in the world, such language is altogether inapplicable. A _formula_ is a brief mode of denoting a rule of calculating in which numbers are to be used: and numerical measures are applicable only to things of which the relation depend on time and space. By such elements, in such a mode, how are we to estimate happiness and virtue, thought and will? To speak of a formula with regard to such things, would be to assume that their laws must needs take the shape of those laws of the material world which our intellect most fully comprehends. A more absurd and unphilosophical assumption we can hardly imagine.

We conceive, therefore, that the laws by which God governs his moral creatures, reside in his mind, invested with that kind of generality, whatever it be, of which such laws are capable; but of the character of such general laws, we know nothing more certainly than this, that it must be altogether different from the character of those laws which regulate the material world. The inevitable necessity of such a total difference is suggested by the analogy of all the knowledge which we possess and all the conceptions which we can form. And, accordingly, no persons, except those whose minds have been biassed by some peculiar habit or course of thought, are likely to run into the confusion and perplexity which are produced by assimilating too closely the government and direction of voluntary agents to the production of trains of mechanical and physical phenomena. In whatever manner voluntary and moral agency depend upon the Supreme Being, it must be in some such way that they still continue to bear the character of will, action, and morality. And, though too exclusive an attention to material phenomena may sometimes have made physical philosophers blind to this manifest difference, it has been clearly seen and plainly asserted by those who have taken the most comprehensive views of the nature and tendency of science. “I believe,” says Bacon, in his Confession of Faith, “that, at the first the soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so that _the ways and proceedings of God with spirits are not included in nature; that is in the laws of heaven and earth_; but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace; wherein God worketh still, and resteth not from the work of redemption, as he resteth from the work of creation; but continueth working to the end of the world.” We may be permitted to observe here, that, when Bacon has thus to speak of God’s dealings with his moral creatures, he does not take his phraseology from those sciences which can offer none but false and delusive analogies; but helps out the inevitable scantiness of our human knowledge, by words borrowed from a source more fitted to supply our imperfections. Our natural speculations cannot carry us to the ideas of “grace” and “redemption;” but in the wide blank which they leave, of all that concerns our hopes of the Divine support and favour, the inestimable knowledge which revelation, as we conceive, gives us, finds ample room and appropriate place.

7. Yet even in the view of our moral constitution which natural reason gives, we may trace laws that imply a personal relation to our Creator. How can we avoid considering _that_ as a true view of man’s being and place, without which, his best faculties are never fully developed, his noblest energies never called out, his highest point of perfection never reached? Without the thought of a God over all, superintending our actions, approving our virtues, transcending our highest conceptions of good, man would never rise to those higher regions of moral excellence which we know him to be capable of attaining. “To deny a God,” again says the great philosopher, “destroys magnanimity and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man; who, to him, is instead of a God, or _melior natura_: which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.”[45]

Such a law, then, of reference to a Supremely Good Being, is impressed upon our nature, as the condition and means of its highest moral advancement. And strange indeed it would be if we should suppose, that in a system where all besides indicates purpose and design, this law should proceed from no such origin; and no less inconceivable, that such a law, purposely impressed upon man to purify and elevate his nature, should delude and deceive him.

8. Nothing remains, therefore, but that the Creator, who, for purposes that even we can see to be wise and good, has impressed upon man this tendency to look to him for support, for advancement, for such happiness as is reconcileable with holiness;--to believe him to be the union of all perfection, the highest point of all intellectual and moral excellence;--IS, in reality, such a guardian and judge, such a good, and wise, and perfect Being, as we thus irresistibly conceive him. It would indeed be extravagant to assert that the imagination of the creature, itself the work of God, can invent a higher point of goodness, of justice, of holiness, than the Creator himself possesses: that the Eternal Mind, from whom our notions of good and right are derived, is not himself directed by the rules which these notions imply.

It is difficult to dwell steadily on such thoughts. But they will at least serve to confirm the view which it was our object to illustrate; namely, how incomparably the nature of God must be elevated above any conceptions which our natural reason enables us to form; and we have been led to these reflections, it will be recollected, by following the clue of which science gave us the beginning. The Divine Mind must be conceived by us as the seat of those laws of nature which we have discovered. It must be no less the seat of those laws which we have not yet discovered, though these may and must be of a character far different from any thing we can guess. The Supreme Intelligence must therefore contain the laws, each according to their true dependence, of organic life, of sense, of animal impulse, and must contain also the purpose and intent for which these powers were put in play. But the Governing Mind must comprehend also the laws of the responsible creatures which the world contains, and must entertain the purposes for which their responsible agency was given them. It must include these laws and purposes, connected by means of the notions, which responsibility implies, of desert and reward, of moral excellence in various degrees, and of well-being as associated with right doing. All the laws which govern the moral world are expressions of the thought and intentions of our Supreme Ruler. All the contrivances for moral no less than for physical good, for the peace of mind, and other rewards of virtue, for the elevation and purification of individual character, for the civilization and refinement of states, their advancement in intellect and virtue, for the diffusion of good, and the repression of evil; all the blessings that wait on perseverance and energy in a good cause; on unquenchable love of mankind, and unconquerable devotedness to truth; on purity and self-denial; on faith, hope, and charity;--all these things are indications of the character, will, and future intentions of that God, of whom we have endeavoured to track the footsteps upon earth, and to show his handiwork in the heavens. “This God is our God, for ever and ever.” And if, in endeavouring to trace the tendencies of the vast labyrinth of laws by which the universe is governed, we are sometimes lost and bewildered, and can scarce, or not at all, discern the line by which pain, and sorrow, and vice fall in with a scheme directed to the strictest right and greatest good, we yet find no room to faint or falter; knowing that these are the darkest and most tangled recesses of our knowledge; that into them science has as yet cast no ray of light; that in them reason has as yet caught sight of no general law by which we may securely hold: while, in those regions where we can see clearly, where science has thrown her strongest illumination upon the scheme of creation; where we have had displayed to us the general laws which give rise to all multifarious variety of particular facts;--we find all full wisdom, and harmony, and beauty: and all this wise selection of means, this harmonious combination of laws, this beautiful symmetry of relations, directed, with no exception which human investigation has yet discovered, to the preservation, the diffusion, the well-being of those living things, which, though of their nature we know so little, we cannot doubt to be the worthiest objects of the Creator’s care.

FINIS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Loudon, Encyclopædia of Gardening, 848.

[2] Dec. Phys. vol. ii. 478.

[3] Fleming, Zool. i. 400.

[4] Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme, II. 371.

[5] It will be observed that it is not here asserted that the difference of native products depends on the difference of climate _alone_.

[6] The resemblance consists in this; that we have a strip of greater temperature accompanied by a strip of smaller temperature, these strips arising from the diurnal and nocturnal impressions respectively, and being in motion; as in the waves on a canal, we have a moving strip of greater elevation accompanied by a strip of smaller elevation. We do not here refer to any hypothetical undulations in the fluid matter of heat.

[7] Loudon, 1219.

[8] Loudon, 1214.

[9] Manchester Memoirs, v. 357.

[10] Howard on the climate of London, vol. ii. pp. 216, 217.

[11] Daniell, Meteor. Ess. p. 56.

[12] Daniell. p. 129.

[13] Phil. Trans. 1821.

[14] Mr. Gough in Manch. Mem. vol. v.

[15] The reader who is acquainted with the two theories of light, will perceive that though we have adopted the doctrine of the ether, the greater part of the arguments adduced would be equally forcible, if expressed in the language of the theory of emission.

[16] Or rather through the _focal centre_ of the eye, which is always near the centre of the pupil.

[17] Laplace, Expos. du Syst. du Monde, p. 441.

[18] In this statement of Laplace, however, one remarkable provision for the stability of the system is not noticed. The planets Mercury and Mars, which have much the largest eccentricities among the old planets, are those of which the masses are much the smallest. The mass of Jupiter is more than two thousand times that of either of these planets. If the orbit of Jupiter were as eccentric as that of Mercury is, all the security for the stability of the system, which analysis has yet pointed out, would disappear. The earth and the smaller planets might in that case change their approximately circular orbits into very long ellipses, and thus might fall into the sun, and fly off into remote space.

It is further remarkable that in the newly discovered planets, of which the orbits are still more eccentric than that of Mercury, the masses are still smaller, so that the same provision is established in this case also. It does not appear that any mathematician has even attempted to point out a necessary connexion between the mass of a planet and the eccentricity of its orbit on any hypothesis. May we not then consider this combination of small masses with large eccentricities, so important to the purposes of the world, as a mark of provident care in the Creator?

[19] The _eccentricity_ of a planet’s orbit is measured by taking the proportion of the _difference_ of the greatest and least distances from the sun, to the _sum_ of the same distances. Mercury’s greatest and least distances are as two and three; his eccentricity, therefore, is one-fifth.

[20] The stability of the axis of rotation about which the earth revolves, has sometimes been adduced as an instance of preservative care. The stability, however, would follow necessarily, if the earth, or its superficial parts, were originally fluid; and that they were so is an opinion widely received, both among astronomers and geologists. The original fluidity of the earth is probably a circumstance depending upon the general scheme of creation; and cannot with propriety be considered with reference to one particular result. We shall therefore omit any further consideration of this argument.

[21] Airy on Encke’s Comet, p. 1, note.

[22] Principia, b. iii. prop. x.

[23] Paley.

[24] If the Laws of Motion are stated as _three_, which we conceive to be the true view of the subject, the other two, as applied in mechanical reasonings, are the following:

_Second Law._ When a force acts on a body in motion, it produces the same effect as if the same force acted on a body at rest.

_Third Law._ When a force of the nature of pressure produces motion, the velocity produced is proportional to the force, other things beings equal.

[25] Though Friction is not concerned in any cosmical phenomena, we have thought this the proper place to introduce the consideration of it; since the contrast between the cases in which it does act, and those in which it does not, is best illustrated by a comparison of cosmical with terrestrial motions.

[26] Butler, Serm. 3.

[27] Müller, Infusoria, Preface.

[28] _Monas._ Müller. Cuvier.

[29] _Volvox._

[30] _Vibrio._ Müller. Cuvier.

[31] Dupuis. Origine des Cultes.

[32] Herschel on the Study of Nat. Phil. Art. 28.

[33] Amici me cunctantem atque etiam reluctantem, retraxerunt, inter quos primus fuit Nicolaus Schonbergius, Cardinalis Capuanus, in omni genere literatum celebris; proximus ille vir mei amantissimus Tidemannus Gisius, episcopus Culmensis, sacrarum ut est et omnium bonarum literarum studiosissimus.--_De Revolutionibus. Præf. ad Paulum III._

[34] Lib. i. cx.

[35] Pensées, Art. viii. 1.

[36] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, vol. i. 321.

[37] Manch. Mem. vol. v. p. 346.

[38] “Since all reasoning may be resolved into syllogisms, and since in a syllogism the premises do virtually assert the conclusion, it follows at once, that no truth can be elicited by any process of reasoning.”--_Whately’s Logic_, p. 223.

Mathematics is the _logic of quantity_, and to this science the observation here quoted is strictly applicable.

[39] A l’intérieur le ministre Quinette fut remplacé par Laplace, géomêtre du premier rang, mais qui ne tarda pas à se montrer administrateur plus que médiocre: des son premier travail les consuls s’aperçurent qu’ils s’étaient trompés: Laplace ne saisissait aucune question sous son vrai point de vue: il cherchait des subtilités partout, n’avait que des idées problématiques, et portait enfin l’esprit des infiniment petits dans l’administration.--_Mémoires écrits à Ste Hélène_, i. 3.

[40] Il semble que la nature ait tout disposé dans le ciel, pour assurer la durée du systême planétaire, par des vues semblables à celles qu’elle nous parait suivre si admirablement sur la terre, pour la conservation des individus et la perpétuité des espèces.--_Syst. du Monde_, p. 442.

[41] Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme, i. 299.

[42] De Augment. Sc. ii. 105.

[43] Herschel on the Study of Nat. Phil. Art. 28.

[44] Elem. of Phil. ii. p. 273.

[45] Bacon. Essay on Atheism.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 47: ‘a slendar stalk’ replaced by ‘a slender stalk’. Pg 48: ‘animal motious’ replaced by ‘animal motions’. Pg 54: ‘the raingage’ replaced by ‘the rain gauge’. Pg 67: ‘by Fourrier, and’ replaced by ‘by Fourier, and’. Pg 69: ‘would dimininish’ replaced by ‘would diminish’. Pg 72: ‘is obvitated by’ replaced by ‘is obviated by’. Pg 81: ‘than 1-100dth to’ replaced by ‘than 1-100th to’. Pg 131: ‘are nealy circular’ replaced by ‘are nearly circular’. Pg 139: ‘by one anomally’ replaced by ‘by one anomaly’. Pg 153: ‘would loose its’ replaced by ‘would lose its’. Pg 174: ‘a memoir entited’ replaced by ‘a memoir entitled’. Pg 174: ‘volocity, in’ replaced by ‘velocity, in’. Pg 178: ‘effects take take place’ replaced by ‘effects take place’. Pg 196: ‘and and Director of’ replaced by ‘and Director of’. Pg 200: ‘for for her young’ replaced by ‘for her young’. Pg 205: ‘in his puposes’ replaced by ‘in his purposes’. Pg 224: ‘thus irremoveably’ replaced by ‘thus irremovably’. Pg 228: ‘of knowlege and’ replaced by ‘of knowledge and’. Pg 259: ‘and no othewise’ replaced by ‘and not otherwise’.