Part 6

But it is not towards heaven that the earth would march if it followed the path in which the adversaries of the Supernatural are impelling it. It is this peculiarity, they say, of the Supernatural, that being incredible, it is in its very essence anti-human. Now it is precisely to something not anti-human but superhuman that the human soul aspires, and there seeks to realize these aspirations in the Supernatural. We should be never weary of repeating it; the whole finite world in its entirety, with all its facts and all its laws, comprising indeed man himself, suffices not for the soul of man; it requires something grander and more perfect for the subject of its contemplation, the object of its love; it desires to fix its trust in something more stable; to lean upon something less fragile. {96} This supreme and sublime ambition it is to which religion, in its widest sense, gives birth and supplies nourishment; and this supreme and sublime ambition it is also that the religion of Christ more particularly responds to and satisfies. Let those, therefore, who flatter themselves that although abolishing the belief in the Supernatural, they leave Christians still Christians, undeceive themselves; what they are abolishing, destroying, is very religion, for their arguments assail all religion in general, and Christianity in particular. It may be that they do not inflict upon themselves all this evil, and that in retaining a sincere religious sentiment they really believe themselves nearly Christians; the soul struggles against the errors of the thought, and a moral suicide is a rare spectacle. But the evil even in spreading unveils more plainly its nature and increases in intensity; besides men, in masses, draw from error far more logical conclusions than the man ever did in whom the error had its origin. The people are not the learned, neither are they philosophers, and only once succeed in destroying in them all faith in the Supernatural, and you may consider it certain that the faith in Christ must have previously disappeared. {97} Have you well weighed all this? Have you pictured to yourself what a man, what mankind, what the soul of man, what human society itself would become if religion were in effect abolished, if religious faith entirely disappeared? I will not give way to anguish of soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hesitate to affirm that no imagination can represent with adequate fidelity what would take place in us and around us if the place at present occupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to become vacant, and its empire annihilated. No one could pronounce to what degree of disorder and degradation humanity would be precipitated. But awful indeed would be the result if all faith in the Supernatural were extinct in the soul, and if man had in a supernatural state neither trust nor hope.

It is not my design, however, to confine myself here to the question regarded merely in its moral, practical light; I approach the Supernatural as viewed with the eyes of free and speculative reason.

{98}

It is condemned for its very name's sake. Nothing is or can be, it is said, beyond and above nature. Nature is one and complete; everything is comprised in it; in it, of necessity, all things cohere, enchain, and develop themselves.

We are here in thorough pantheism--that is to say, in absolute atheism. I do not hesitate to give to pantheism its real name. Amongst the men who at the present day declare themselves the opponents of the Supernatural, most, certainly, do not believe that they are nor do they desire to be atheists. But let me tell them that they are leading others whither they neither think nor wish themselves to go. The negation of the Supernatural, and that in the name of the unity and universality of nature, is pantheism, and pantheism is nothing more nor less than atheism. {99} In the sequel of these Meditations, when I come to speak particularly of the actual state of the Christian religion, and of the different systems which combat it, I will in this respect justify my assertion; at present, I have to repel direct attacks upon the Supernatural--attacks less fundamental than those of pantheism, but not less serious, for in truth, whether men know it or not, and whether they mean it or not, all attacks in this warfare reach the same object, and as soon as the Supernatural is the aim it is religion itself that receives the shaft.

The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed to; that, say they, is the palpable and incontestable fact established by the experience of mankind, and upon which rests the conduct of human life. In presence of the permanent order of nature and the immutability of its laws, we cannot admit any partial, any momentary infractions; we cannot believe in the Supernatural, in miracles.

True, general and constant laws do govern nature. Are we, therefore, to affirm that those laws are necessary, and that no deviation from them is possible in nature? Who is there that does not discern an essential, an absolute difference between what is general and what is necessary? {100} The permanence of the actual laws of nature is a fact established by experience, but it is not the only fact possible, the only fact conceivable by reason; those laws might have been other laws, they may change. Several of them have not always been what they now are, for science itself proves that the condition of the universe has been different from what it is at present; the universal and permanent order of which we form part, and in which we confide, has not always been what we now see it; it has had a beginning; the creation of the actual system of nature and of its laws is a fact as certain as the system itself is certain. And what is creation but a supernatural fact, the act of a Power superior to the actual laws of nature, and which has power to modify them just as much as it has had power to establish them? The first of miracles is God himself.

{101}

There is a second miracle--man. I resume what I have already said; by his title as a moral being and free agent, man lives beyond and above the influence of the general and permanent laws of nature; he creates by his will effects which are not at all the necessary consequence of any pre-existent law; and those effects take their place in a system absolutely distinct and independent from the visible order which governs the universe. The moral liberty of man is a fact as certain, and natural, as the order of nature, and it is at the same time a supernatural fact--that is to say, essentially foreign to the order of nature and to its laws.

God is the being moral and free _par excellence_, that is to say, the being excellently capable of acting as first cause beyond the influence of causation. By his title as a moral being and free agent, man is in intimate relation with God. Who shall define the possible contingencies, or fathom the mysteries of this relation? Who dare to say that God cannot modify, that He never does modify, according to his plans with respect to the moral system and to man, the laws which He has made and which He maintains in the material order of nature?

{102}

Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the possibility of supernatural facts; and so their attack is indirect. If those facts, say they, are not impossible, they are incredible, for no particular testimony of man in favour of a miracle can give a certitude equal to that which, on the opposite side, results from the experience which men have of the fixity of the laws of nature.

"It is experience only," says Hume, "which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience which assures us of the laws of nature. When therefore these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do, but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principles here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation: and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion." [Footnote 19]

[Footnote 19: Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by David Hume; Essay on Miracles, vol. iii. p. 119-145, Bâle, 1793. [Same work, p. 91, London, 16mo, 1860.--TRANSLATOR.]] {103}

It is in this reasoning of Hume that the opponents of miracles shut themselves up as in an impregnable fortress to refuse them all credence.

What confusion of facts and ideas! What a superficial solution of one of the grandest problems of our nature! What! a simple operation of arithmetic, with respect to two experimental observations, estimated in ciphers, is to decide the question whether the universal belief of the race of man in the Supernatural is well-founded or simply absurd; whether God only acts upon the world and upon man by laws established once for all, or whether He still continues to make, in the exercise of his power, use of his liberty! {104} Not only does the sceptic Hume here show himself unconscious of the grandeur of the problem; he mistakes even in the motives upon which he founds his shallow conclusion; for it is not from human experience alone that human testimony draws her authority: this authority has sources more profound, and a worth anterior to experience: it is one of the natural bonds, one of the spontaneous sympathies which unite with one another men and the generations of men. Is it by virtue of experience that the child trusts to the words of its mother, that it has faith in all she tells it? The mutual trust that men repose in what they say or transmit to each other is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous, which experience confirms or shakes, sets up again or sets bounds to, but which experience does not originate.

I find in the same essay of Hume, [Footnote 20] this other passage: "The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived."

[Footnote 20: Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 128, _ubi supra_.]

{105}

Thus, if we are to credit Hume, it is merely for his pleasure, for the diversion of the imaginative faculty, that man believes in the Supernatural; and beneath this impression--though real, still only of a secondary nature--which does no more than skim the surface of the human soul, the philosopher has no glimpse at all of the profound instincts and superior requisitions which have sway over him.

But why an attack of this character, so indirect and little complete? Why should Hume limit himself to the proposition that miracles can never be historically proved, instead of at once affirming the impossibility of miracles themselves? This is what the opponents of the Supernatural virtually think; and it is because they commence by regarding miracles as impossible that they apply themselves to destroy the value of the evidences by which they are supported. {106} If the evidence which surrounds the cradle of Christianity, if the fourth, if even the tenth part of it were adduced in support of facts of a nature extra-ordinary, unexpected, or unheard of, but still not having a character positively supernatural, the proof would be accepted as unexceptionable: the facts for certain. In appearance, it is merely the proof by witnesses of the Supernatural that is contested; whereas, in reality, the very possibility of the thing is denied that is sought to be proved. The question ought to be put as it really is, instead of such a solution being offered as is a mere evasion.

Lately, however, men of logical minds and daring spirits have not hesitated to speak more frankly and plainly. "The new dogma, they say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is the negation of the Supernatural. ... Those still disposed to reject this principle have nothing to do with our books, and we, on our side, have no cause to feel disquietude at their opposition and their censure, for we do not write for them. And if this discussion is altogether avoided, it is because it is impossible to enter into it with out admitting an unacceptable proposition, viz., one which presumes that the Supernatural can in any given case be possible. [Footnote 21]

[Footnote 21: Conservation, Involution, et Positivisme, par M. Littré, Preface, p. xxvi, and following pages--M. Havet, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Août, 1863.]

{107}

I do not reproach the disciples of the school of Hume for having evinced greater timidity: if they attacked the Supernatural by a side way, not as being impossible in itself, but as being merely incapable of proof by human testimony, they did not do so designedly and with deceitful purpose. Let us render them more justice, and do them more honour. A prudent and an honest instinct held them back on the declivity upon which they had placed themselves; they felt that to deny even the possibility of the Supernatural, was to enter at full sail into pantheism and fatalism, that is to say, was the same thing as at once dispensing with God and doing away with the free agency of man. Their moral sense, their good sense, withheld them from any such course. {108} The fundamental error of the adversaries of the Supernatural is that they contest it in the name of human science, and that they class the Supernatural amongst facts within the domain of science, whereas the Supernatural does not fall within that domain, and the very attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to its being entirely rejected.

{109}

Fourth Meditation.

The Limits Of Science.

An eminent moralist, who was at the same time not only a theologian, but a philosopher well versed in the physical sciences, I mean Dr. Chalmers, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and corresponding member of the Institute of France, wrote in his work on _Natural Theology_, a chapter entitled: _On man's partial and limited knowledge of divine things._ The first pages are as follows:--

"The true modern philosophy never makes more characteristic exhibition of itself, than at the limit which separates the known from the unknown. It is there that we behold it in a twofold aspect--that of the utmost deference and respect for all the findings of experience within this limit; that, on the other hand, of the utmost disinclination and distrust for all those fancies of ingenious or plausible speculation which have their place in the ideal region beyond it. {110} To call in the aid of a language which far surpasses our own in expressive brevity, its office is '_indagare_' rather than '_divinare_.' The products of this philosophy are copies and not creations. It may discover a system of nature, but not devise one. It proceeds first on the observation of individual facts and if these facts are ever harmonised into a system, this is only in the exercise of a more extended observation. In the work of systematising, it makes no excursion beyond the territory of actual nature--for they are the actual phenomena of nature which form the first materials of this philosophy--and they are the actual resemblances of these phenomena that form, as it were, the cementing principle, to which the goodly fabrics of modern science owe all the solidity and all the endurance that belong to them. {111} It is this chiefly which distinguishes the philosophy of the present day from that of by-gone ages. The one was mainly an excogitative, the other mainly a descriptive process--a description however extending to the likenesses as well as to the peculiarities of things; and, by means of these likenesses, these observed likenesses alone, often realising a more glorious and magnificent harmony than was ever pictured forth by all the imaginations of all the theorists.

"In the mental characteristics of this philosophy, the strength of a full-grown understanding is blended with the modesty of childhood. The ideal is sacrificed to the actual--and, however splendid or fondly cherished a hypothesis may be, yet if but one phenomenon in the real history of nature stand in the way, it is forthwith and conclusively abandoned. To some the renunciation may be as painful as the cutting off a right hand, or the plucking out a right eye--yet, if true to the great principle of the Baconian school, it must be submitted to. {112} With its hardy disciples one valid proof outweighs a thousand plausibilities--and the resolute firmness wherewith they bid away the speculations of fancy is only equalled by the childlike compliance wherewith they submit themselves to the lessons of experience.

"It is thus that the same principle which guides to a just and a sound philosophy in all that lies within the circle of human discovery, leads also to a most unpresuming and unpronouncing modesty in reference to all that lies beyond it. And should some new light spring up on this exterior region, should the information of its before hidden mysteries break in upon us from some quarter that was before inaccessible, it will be at once perceived (on the supposition of its being a genuine and not an illusory light) that, of all other men, they are the followers of Bacon and Newton who should pay the most unqualified respect to all its revelations. {113} In their case it comes upon minds which are without prejudice, because on that very principle, which is most characteristic of our modern science, upon minds without preoccupation. ... The strength of his confidence in all the ascertained facts of the _terra cognita_ is at one or in perfect harmony with the humility of his diffidence in regard to all the conceived plausibilities of the _terra incognita_.

"And let it further be remarked of the self-denial which is laid upon us by Bacon's Philosophy, that, like all other self-denial in the cause of truth or virtue, it hath its reward. In giving ourselves up to its guidance, we have often to quit the fascinations of beautiful theory; but in exchange for them, we are at length regaled by the higher and substantial beauties of actual nature. There is a stubbornness in facts before which the specious imagination is compelled to give way; and perhaps the mind never suffers more painful laceration than when, after having vainly attempted to force nature into a compliance with her own splendid generalizations, she, on the appearance of some rebellious and impracticable phenomenon, has to practise a force upon herself--when she thus finds the goodly speculation superseded by the homely and unwelcome experience. {114} It seemed at the outset a cruel sacrifice, when the world of speculation, with all its manageable and engaging simplicities, had to be abandoned; and on becoming the pupils of observation, we, amid the varieties of the actual world around us, felt as if bewildered, if not lost, among the perplexities of a chaos. This was a period of greatest sufferance; but it has had a glorious termination. In return for the assiduity wherewith the study of nature hath been prosecuted, she hath made a more abundant revelation of her charms. Order hath arisen out of confusion, and in the ascertained structure of the universe there are now found to be a state and a sublimity beyond all that was ever pictured by the mind in the days of her adventurous and unfettered imagination. {115} Even viewed in the light of a noble and engaging spectacle for the fancy to dwell upon, who would ever think of comparing with the system of Newton, either that celestial machinery of Des Cartes, which was impelled by whirlpools of ether, or that still more cumbrous planetarium of cycles and epicycles which was the progeny of a remoter age? It is thus that at the commencement of the observational process there is the abjuration of beauty. But it soon reappears in another form, and brightens as we advance, and at length there arises on solid foundation, a fairer and goodlier system than ever floated in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor is it difficult to perceive the reason of this. What we discover by observation is the product of divine imagination bodied forth by creative power into a stable and enduring reality. What we devise by our own ingenuity is but the product of human imagination. The one is the solid archetype of those conceptions which are in the mind of God: the other is the shadowy representation of those conceptions which are in the mind of man. It is just as with the labourer, who, by excavating the rubbish which hides and besets some noble architecture, does more for the gratification of our taste, than if by his unpractised hand he should attempt to regale us with plans and sketches of his own. {116} And so the drudgery of experimental science, in exchange for that beauty whose fascinations it withstood at the outset of its career, has evolved a surpassing beauty from among the realities of truth and nature. ...

"The views contemplated through the medium of observation, are found not only to have a justness in them, but to have a grace and a grandeur in them far beyond all the visions which are contemplated through the medium of fancy, or which ever regaled the fondest enthusiast in the enchanted walks of speculation and poetry. But neither the grace nor the grandeur alone would, without evidence, have secured acceptance for any opinion. It must first be made to undergo, and without ceremony, the freest treatment from human eyes and human hands. It is at one time stretched on the rack of an experiment, at another it has to pass through fiery trial in the bottom of a crucible. {117} In another it undergoes a long questioning process among the fumes and the filtrations and the intense heat of a laboratory; and not till it has been subjected to all this inquisitorial torture and survived it, is it preferred to a place in the temple of Truth, or admitted among the laws and lessons of a sound philosophy."

No one certainly will contest that this is the language of a fervent disciple of science. It is impossible to have a keener apprehension of its beauty, and to accept more completely its laws. What mathematician, natural philosopher, physiologist, or chemist, could speak in terms of greater respect and submission of the necessity of observation, and of the authority of experience? Dr. Chalmers is not the less for that a true and fervent Christian; his religious faith equals his scientific exactitude: he receives Christ, and professes Christ's doctrine with as firm a voice as he does Bacon and Bacon's method. {118} Not that for him religious belief is the mere result of education, of tradition, of habit; but it, on the contrary, springs as much from reflection and learning, as his acquirements in natural science themselves; in each sphere he has probed the very sources and weighed the motives of his convictions. How did he, in each instance, reach such a haven of repose? Whence in him this harmony between the philosopher and the Christian?

Let us again allow Dr. Chalmers to speak for himself:--