Part 67

Most heartily do I recognise and admire the spiritual radiance, if I may use the term, shed by religion on the minds and lives of many personally known to me. At the same time I cannot but observe how signally, as regards the production of anything beautiful, religion fails in other cases. Its professor and defender is sometimes at bottom a brawler and a clown. These differences depend upon primary distinctions of character which religion does not remove. It may comfort some to know that there are amongst us many whom the gladiators of the pulpit would call 'atheists' and 'materialists,' whose lives, nevertheless, as tested by any accessible standard of morality, would contrast more than favourably with the lives of those who seek to stamp them with this offensive brand. When I say 'offensive,' I refer simply to the intention of those who use such terms, and not because atheism or materialism, when compared with many of the notions ventilated in the columns of religious newspapers, has any particular offensiveness for me. If I wished to find men who are scrupulous in their adherence to engagements, whose words are their bond, and to whom moral shiftiness of any kind is subjectively unknown; if I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honourable neighbour, and a just citizen--I should seek him, and find him among the band of 'atheists' to which I refer. I have known some of the most pronounced among them not only in life but in death seen them approaching with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no dread of a 'hangman's whip,' with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still as mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of them, as if their eternal future depended upon their latest deeds.

In letters addressed to myself, and in utterances addressed to the public, Faraday is often referred to as a sample of the association of religious faith with moral elevation. I was locally intimate with him for fourteen or fifteen years of my life, and had thus occasion to observe how nearly his character approached what might, without extravagance, be called perfection. He was strong but gentle, impetuous but self-restrained; a sweet and lofty courtesy marked his dealings with men and women; and though he sprang from the body of the people, a nature so fine might well have been distilled from the flower of antecedent chivalry. Not only in its broader sense was the Christian religion necessary to Faraday's spiritual peace, but in what many would call the narrow sense held by those described by Faraday himself as 'a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if known at all, as Sandemanians,' it constituted the light and comfort of his days.

Were our experience confined to such cases, it would furnish an irresistible argument in favour of the association of dogmatic religion with moral purity and grace. But, as already intimated, our experience is not thus confined. In further illustration of this point, we may compare with Faraday a philosopher of equal magnitude, whose character, including gentleness and strength, candour and simplicity, intellectual power and moral elevation, singularly resembles that of the great Sandemanian, but who has neither shared the theologic views nor the religious emotions which formed so dominant a factor in Faraday's life. I allude to Mr. Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men--a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God. I cannot therefore, as so many desire, look upon Faraday's religious belief as the exclusive source of qualities shared so conspicuously by one uninfluenced by that belief. To a deeper virtue belonging to human nature in its purer forms I am disposed to refer the excellence of both.

Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence. We may admit, with Fichte, 'that superstition has unquestionably constrained its subjects to abandon many pernicious practices and to adopt many useful ones;' the real loss accompanying its decay at the present day has been thus clearly stated by the same philosopher: 'In so far as these lamentations do not proceed from the priests themselves--whose grief at the loss of their dominion over the human mind we can well understand--but from the politicians, the whole matter resolves itself into this, that government has thereby become more difficult and expensive. The judge was spared the exercise of his own sagacity and penetration when, by threats of relentless damnation, he could compel the accused to make confession. The evil spirit formerly performed without reward services for which in later times judges and policemen have to be paid.'

No man ever felt the need of a high and ennobling religion more thoroughly than this powerful and fervid teacher, who, by the way, did not escape the brand of 'atheist.' But Fichte asserted emphatically the power and sufficiency of morality in its own sphere. 'Let us consider,' he says, 'the highest which man can possess in the absence of religion--I mean pure morality. The moral man obeys the law of duty in his breast absolutely, because it is a law unto him; and he does whatever reveals itself to him as his duty simply because it is duty. Let not the impudent assertion be repeated that such an obedience, without regard for consequences, and without desire for consequences, is in itself impossible and opposed to human nature.' So much for Fichte. Faraday was equally distinct. 'I have no intention,' he says, 'of substituting anything for religion, but I wish to take that part of human nature which is independent of it. Morality, philosophy, commerce, the various institutions and habits of society, are independent of religion and may exist without it.' These were the words of his youth, but they expressed his latest convictions. I would add, that the muse of Tennyson never reached a higher strain than when it embodied the sentiment of duty in AEnone:

And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of human nature been built up. The power which has moulded us thus far has worked with stern tools upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done cannot be so readily undone; and it has endowed us with moral constitutions which take pleasure in the noble, the beautiful, and the true, just as surely as it has endowed us with sentient organisms, which find aloes bitter and sugar sweet. That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers--hunger and thirst, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe--such were the forces whose interaction and adjustment throughout an immeasurable past wove the triplex web of man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will be effectual to the end.

You may retort that even on my own showing 'the power which makes for righteousness' has dealt in delusions; for it cannot be denied that the beliefs of religion, including the dogmas of theology and the freedom of the will, have had some effect in moulding the moral world. Granted; but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter. Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are primary, and not derived?--that they are not the products, instead of being the creators, of man's moral nature? I think it is in one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the nobility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in heaven is derived from the nobility of man. The bird's instinct to weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as typical of the force which built cathedrals, temples, and pyramids:

Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nest Of leaves and feathers from her breast, Or how the fish outbuilt its shell, Painting with morn each annual cell? Such and so grew these holy piles While love and terror laid the tiles; Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone; And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky As on its friends with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air, And nature gladly gave them place, Adopted them into her race, And granted them an equal date With Andes and with Ararat.

Surely, many utterances which have been accepted as descriptions ought to be interpreted as aspirations, or, as having their roots in aspiration instead of in objective knowledge. Does the song of the herald angels, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men,' express the exaltation and the yearning of a human soul? or does it describe an optical and acoustical fact--a visible host and an audible song? If the former, the exaltation and the yearning are man's imperishable possession--a ferment long confined to individuals, but which may by-and-by become the leaven of the race. If the latter, then belief in the entire transaction is wrecked by non-fulfilment. Look to the East at the present moment as a comment on the promise of peace' on earth and goodwill toward men. That promise is a dream ruined by the experience of eighteen centuries, and in that ruin is involved the claim of the 'heavenly host' to prophetic vision. But though the mechanical theory proves untenable, the immortal song and the feelings it expresses are still ours, to be incorporated, let us hope, in purer and less shadowy forms in the poetry, philosophy, and practice of the future.

Thus, following the lead of physical science, we are brought without solution of continuity into the presence of problems which, as usually classified, lie entirely outside the domain of physics. To these problems thoughtful and penetrative minds are now applying those methods of research which in physical science have proved their truth by their fruits. There is on all hands a growing repugnance to invoke the supernatural in accounting for the phenomena of human life; and the thoughtful minds just referred to, finding no trace of evidence in favour of any other origin, are driven to seek in the interaction of social forces the genesis and development of man's moral nature. If they succeed in their search--and I think they are sure to succeed--social duty will be raised to a higher level of significance and the deepening sense of social duty will, it is to be hoped, lessen, if not obliterate, the strifes and heartburnings which now beset and disfigure our social life. Towards this great end it behoves us one and all to work; and devoutly wishing its consummation, I have the honour, ladies and gentlemen, to bid you a friendly farewell.

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XV. PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION.

THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate; through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding power so strong. This general need--this hunger for the ideal and wonderful--led eventually to the differentiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his capacities and needs. As time advanced--in other words, as the savage opened out into civilised man--these forms were purified and ennobled until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:

Where still the magic robe of Poesy Wound itself lovingly around the Truth.

[Footnote:

Da der Dichtung zauberische Huelle Sich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'--Schiller.]

As poets, the priesthood would have been justified, their deities, celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or those among them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objective validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man. It is against this objective rendering of the emotions--this thrusting into the region of fact and positive knowledge of conceptions essentially ideal and poetic--that science, consciously or unconsciously, wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on its subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling makes claims which traverse our knowledge of nature, science, as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than against the life and substance of religion, that Science enters her protest. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be taken for what it is worth--as an effort on the part of man to bring the mystery of life and nature within the range of his capacities; as a temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms of knowledge of that which transcends all knowledge, and admits only of ideal approach.

The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. It is, for example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold to protect, amid the wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of religion. And it is to be remembered that under the circumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In other influential quarters a similar spirit is at work. In a remarkable article published by Professor Knight of St. Andrews in the September number of the 'Nineteenth Century,' amid other free utterances, we have this one: 'If matter is not eternal, its first emergence into being is a miracle beside which all others dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been pointed out, the process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a material world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined; [Footnote: Professor Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of whose Collects begins thus: 'O God, who by thy mighty power halt made all things of nothing.] its emergence into order out of chaos when "without form and void" of life, is merely a poetic rendering of the doctrine of its slow evolution.' These are all bold words to be spoken before the moral philosophy class of a Scotch university, while those I have underlined show a remarkable freedom of dealing with the sacred text. They repeat in terser language what I ventured to utter four years ago regarding the Book of Genesis. 'Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. _It is a poem, not a scientific treatise._ In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful.' My agreement with Professor Knight extends still further. 'Does the vital,' he asks, 'proceed by a still remoter development from the non-vital? Or was it created by a fiat of volition? Or'--and here he emphasises his question--'has it always existed in some form or other as an eternal constituent of the universe? I do not see,' he replies, 'how we can escape from the last alternative.' With the whole force of my conviction I say, Nor do I, though our modes of regarding the 'eternal constituent' may not be the same.

When matter was defined by Descartes, he deliberately excluded the idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition. Extension only was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impotence of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions were referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, gave the impulse. In this connection the argument in Young's 'Night Thoughts' will occur to most readers:

Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain Shot through vast masses of enormous weight? Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assume Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?

Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose ashes lie unmarked in Putney Churchyard, strenuously contended. He affirmed motion to be an inherent attribute of matter--that no portion of matter was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were animated by a motion of their ultimate particles. The success of his contention, according to the learned and laborious Dr. Berthold, [Footnote: 'John Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart,' Heidelberg, Carl Winter.] entitles Toland to be regarded as the founder of that monistic doctrine which is now so rapidly spreading.

It seems to me that the idea of vitality entertained in our day by Professor Knight, closely resembles the idea of motion entertained by his opponents in Toland's day. Motion was then virtually asserted to be a thing sui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter. Hence the obvious inference when matter was observed to move. It was the vehicle of an energy not its own--the repository of forces impressed on it from without--the purely passive recipient of the shock of the Divine. The logical form continues, but the subject-matter is changed. 'The evolution of nature,' says Professor Knight, 'may be a fact; a daily and hourly apocalypse. But we have no evidence of the non-vital passing into the vital. Spontaneous generation is, as yet, an imaginative guess, unverified by scientific tests. And matter is not itself alive. Vitality, whether seen in a single cell of protoplasm or in the human brain, is a thing sui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter.' It may be, however, that, in process of time, vitality will follow the example of motion, and, after the necessary antecedent wrangling, take its place among the attributes of that 'universal mother' who has been so often misdefined.

That 'matter is not itself alive' Professor Knight seems to regard as an axiomatic truth. Let us place in contrast with this the notion entertained by the philosopher Ueberweg, one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced. 'What occurs in the brain' says Ueberweg 'would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these latter possessed by the first pair, is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last must feel more feebly than the first. The sensations and feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale it is true, and not concentrated as they are in the brain.' [Footnote: Letter to Lange: 'Geschichte des Materialismus,' zweite Aufl, vol. ii. p. 521.] We may not be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling, pre-existing, but diluted in the food.

'Definitions,' says Mr. Holyoake, [Footnote: 'Nineteenth Century,' September 1878.] 'grow as the horizon of experience expands. They are not inventions, but descriptions of the state of a question. No man sees all through a discovery at once.' Thus Descartes's notion of matter, and his explanation of motion, would be put aside as trivial by a physiologist or a crystallographer of the present day. They are not descriptions of the state of the question. And yet a desire sometimes shows itself in distinguished quarters to bind us own to conceptions which passed muster in the infancy of knowledge, but which are wholly incompatible with our present enlightenment. Mr. Martineau, I think, errs when he seeks to hold me to views enunciated by 'Democritus and the mathematicians.' That definitions should change as knowledge advances is in accordance both with sound sense and scientific practice. When, for example, the undulatory theory was started, it was not imagined that the vibrations of light could be transverse to the direction of propagation. The example of sound was at hand, which was a case of longitudinal vibration. Now the substitution of transverse for longitudinal vibrations in the case of light involved a radical change of conception as to the mechanical properties of the luminiferous medium. But though this change went so far as to fill space with a substance, possessing the properties of a solid, rather than those of a gas, the change was accepted, because the newly discovered facts imperatively demanded it. Following Mr. Martineau's example, the opponent of the undulatory theory might effectually twit the holder of it on his change of front. 'This aether of yours,' he might say, 'alters its style with every change of service. Starting as a beggar, with scarce a rag of 'property' to cover its bones, it turns up as a prince when large undertakings are wanted. You had some show of reason when, with the case of sound before you, you assumed your aether to be a gas in the last extremity of attenuation. But now that new service is rendered necessary by new facts, you drop the beggar's rags, and accomplish an undertaking, great and princely enough in all conscience; for it implies that not only planets of enormous weight, but comets with hardly any weight at all, fly through your hypothetical solid without perceptible loss of motion.' This would sound very cogent, but it would be very vain. Equally vain, in my opinion, is Mr. Martineau's contention that we are not justified in modifying, in accordance with advancing knowledge, our notions of matter.