Part 4

The argument which I have just urged should, as I venture to think, be conclusive even with those who know, and seek to know, nothing more of science than the order and method of its phenomenal processes. I will now bring forward a consideration which will, I hope, be admitted to have weight by those men of science--it is to be greatly lamented that there should be so few of these--who have studied the nature and working of the mind as well as the phenomena of sense. We have seen that protoplasm--that Life--was not developed out of inorganic matter, but appears to have been an entirely new and primary fact on the face of the universe. Life came in and appropriated, put to its own uses, bound up under its own seal, impregnated with its own specific virtue, the raw inorganic materials which it found in nature; but the power of Life itself was altogether new. A fact in some sort analogous to this confronts us in a higher sphere, in the sphere of living intelligence itself. I refer to the emergence of personal consciousness among the world of living creatures. To me it appears that the sense of personality is an altogether new and original fact, one which cannot be conceived as developed or developable out of any pre-existing phenomena or conditions. Whence it comes, or how it arises, I know not. But it appears to be, in and of itself, the assertion of an essential separateness between One's Self and all phenomena, all constituents, all conditions whatever. The sense of an I Myself, of Personality, asserts an antithesis between the Man, and all that the Man uses, takes up into his personality, makes his own. As Life binds up inorganic matter under its seal, but is not developed out of inorganic matter, so the voluntary and responsible Self binds up under the seal of its own personality all that belongs to the manifold life of its complex being. As life brings into the universe a new world of phenomena, higher and more manifold than those of mere inorganic matter, yet embodying and adopting these, so personality brings into the universe a new world of vastly higher and rarer phenomena than those of mere vitality, yet embodies and adopts these:--it introduces all that belongs to reflection and morality, giving birth to an intelligence and a world of thought, in which all the lower and anterior phenomena of the world become matters of cognisance, and are mirrored as objects of thought.

As I venture to think that this sense of personality, with the new world of reflective consciousness and morality which it brings in, is a fact, starting up in the midst of a universe of anterior developments, such as all Mr. Darwin's solvents utterly fail to touch, a phenomenon which remains as far from explanation as before he wrote his last book, so it appears to me that the power of human speech is another fact starting up in the midst of the line of supposed developments which no hypothesis of evolution can afford any help towards explaining. Miraculously developed reason, something higher, as it seems to me, than any development of human reason our race has, in its highest culture, as yet put forth, must have been necessary in order to the invention of language by any race even of the most sagacious mammals. And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument, in order to the high development of reason. We have some idea what deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper, and affections, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not indeed deaf, but congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. What would the development of human reason have been under such conditions? How, then, is it possible to conceive that the wondrous faculty and instrument of speech was ever invented and perfected by mammals of infra-human faculty and development, and that they were afterwards through this invention developed yet more highly, until they attained to the dignity and advancement of humanity? Such infra-human mammals must have been more miraculously endowed in order to such an invention than ever man himself has been.

After all that Mr. Darwin has written, does or can any reasonable man or woman actually believe in the possibility,--_apart from the Divine Power and Will and Guidance_,--for that is the point,--of the self-development, the spontaneous upgrowth of articulate language? Let us study our quadrupedal familiars, for the sake of illustration and analogy. We see daily how our noble dogs strain and groan after speech, do all but speak: we mark their eloquent looks, their speaking gestures, their wonderfully expressive movements, how they watch us speak, and seem as if they understood what speech is to us, and as if they craved most longingly the power for themselves. We cannot but sympathetically admire the intelligent, the benevolent, the noble, the sagacious physiognomies which they show. If any creature ever could, would, or did develop speech in any rudimentary form, are not they just in the circumstances to do it? And when once rudimentally begun, however uncouthly and imperfectly, should not their organs continually improve by the continual effort and the increasing intelligence? Is it not immensely less hard of belief, and less difficult to imagine, that dogs should develop speech, than that man should have been developed from the larvæ of the _ascidiæ_? Yet is there even a beginning made towards the canine development of articulate language, or does any living man believe that such a beginning ever could be made?

To me it appears that human speech and human personality are in some way bound up with each other, that the one, in some sort, implies the other, and that these two characteristics of our race present an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance by really scientific thinkers of any hypothesis of evolution which, leaving God out of nature, would account for the whole existence and progress of the universe on the principle of spontaneous development.

But again, let me be allowed to test the development hypothesis in detail at another point. This hypothesis--and any pantheistic or atheistic view of the universe which professes to be scientific--is obliged to confess that all living beings, of whatever sort, have been developed out of a single primary cell--called often a germ-cell--of protoplasm. Here they find the beginning of every kind of life. The plant, the animal, of every sort,--the lichen, the cedar, the sponge, the bird, the mammal, the minutest entozoon, the most microscopic infusorium, and man,--have been developed out of these primary cells. What then do the same men who teach us this, find to be the constitution of these same cells, when microscopically examined? They find them to be, for the most part, and indeed always, if allowance be made for very trivial exceptions, identically the same. The matter is identically the same, the appearance identically the same; no difference whatever of constitution, form, or properties, is to be detected. They cannot tell whether the nettle, or the frog, or the eagle, or the man, is to be developed out of any given cell: for anything their science can teach them, any of these might be developed, as they call it, out of any cell. But if this be so, is it scientific, is it real or true, is it not altogether misleading, to speak of _mere development_ in such a case? The flower may be said to be developed out of the bud because the bud is the flower in miniature, the flower is really folded up in the bud. But surely here is no case of mere development; here is no unfolding out of the germ-cell of what is potentially contained in the cell, regarded as a merely material organism. Judged by every test of physical experiment, the primary cells are identically the same; and yet they grow into forms essentially and infinitely dissimilar. Does it not clearly appear that here is a matter in which some power above and beyond the mere physical constitution and nature of the primary cell must be admitted, on every principle of science, on every ground of pure candour and truth, to be of necessity present? Is it not evident that with each germ-cell there must be associated some individual life-power which animates the cell, which uses it as a unit to multiply, as a foundation to build upon, which does build and weave and work into it and upon it continually new material, which, for its own use in its work of weaving and fabricating, and for the completion of its own distinctive form and vehicle, takes toll of air and earth and water and heat-power--the ancient elements--selecting out of them its appropriate pabulum, in whatever chemical combinations of the primary elements known to our modern scientific analysis may be fit and needful? Surely not development, but life, the mystery of individual life, is here. And if the philosopher will deny the omnipresent creative and sustaining power of God, it appears to me that he must be prepared to animate each germ-cell with an individual intelligence which works with divine power, on a definite and most miraculous plan, and towards a distinct goal of perfection. To call such various powers and processes, such diverse and generically different operations, in every sphere of life, by the same term, appears to me to be unscientific; to speak of them all alike as processes of unfolding or development, when results the most infinitely unlike and separate are obtained from beginnings which are identically alike, appears to be not only unscientific but altogether misleading.

I do not think it arrogant or unwarranted to conclude from such considerations as I have been trying to set forth, that evolution, or development, apart from the power and guidance of the Living God, is an unphilosophical, an unscientific idea, an empty, an unmeaning word. It is a thing of naught, utterly impotent to solve the mysteries of the universe, even when expounded and reinforced by Mr. Darwin's "Natural Selection." I have not a word to say here against the views of Mr. Darwin, as defined and modified by the requirements of scientific modesty and precision. If I had any pretensions to be called a student of natural science, I should sit at the feet of Mr. Darwin when he speaks, not as a philosophic theorist, but as a scientific observer and a truly inductive naturalist. But I must say here in respect to Natural Selection, regarded as, according to Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, the handmaid of development, that, like development, it is but a name, and not a power. It describes the order and mode according to which Providence works; it is not itself a force--a working energy. Mr. Darwin himself indeed often speaks as if Natural Selection were itself a power and a providence. I find to my hand in Mr. Kingsley's fine, suggestive paper on _The Natural Theology of the Future_, recently published in _Macmillan's Magazine_, a sentence of Mr. Darwin's in regard to Natural Selection which I will quote. "It may be metaphorically said," writes Mr. Darwin, "that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good, silently and necessarily working whenever and wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being." "It may be metaphorically said," are Mr. Darwin's words. But in fact he is using, not a metaphor, but a personification. The distinction Mr. Darwin does not see. He repeatedly speaks of his personifications as metaphors. But the distinction notwithstanding is most important. By personifying Natural Selection Mr. Darwin makes it appear to be a cause, attributes to it a real power, nay, wisdom and providence, as well as power. He speaks in one place of "Nature's power of selection;" contrasting this with the "powers of artificial selection exercised by feeble man," by which, however, man can do so much; and arguing that "Nature's power of selection" must be incomparably greater, and competent to produce incomparably superior effects in respect of "the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions of life." Language of a similar sort he very frequently uses. He has, therefore, as a scientific man laid himself open to the reproof of M. Flourens, whom no one will deny to be a scientific critic. "Either," says M. Flourens, "Natural Selection is nothing, or it is nature, but nature endowed with the attribute of selection--nature personified, which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has done with personifications." The nineteenth century ought to have done with personifications; but with the spirit of Lamarck's speculations the style of the French atheistic philosophy of the last century reappears.

Mr. Darwin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Kingsley, describes the manner in which his Natural Selection may be conceived as operating. What, if his meaning were expressed with strict scientific truth, he ought to intend to say, is that such as he describes is the result of providential working according to the mode and order which he designates by the phrase Natural Selection. "All we ask," says one of Mr. Darwin's ablest critics, "is that we may be allowed to believe in a God and a real Divine Providence, as powerful and wise and good as Mr. Darwin's Natural Selection."

But, moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is something besides the mere process of change and growth, of what our philosophers call development, to be accounted for. There is a fact on which the growth, the change, the evolution, must be held in a true sense to depend: a prior fact to be taken account of. The growth proceeds upon a plan, and fulfils an idea: protoplasm itself embodies a scientific principle. But as the seal must be before the impression, the original before the copy, so the principle must be before its embodiment, the plan and the idea must be before the growth: the end, towards which as its goal the growth or development proceeds, must have been conceived and set up as an aim before its fulfilment began. We are bound therefore, if we would exhaust the problem, nay, if we would truly conceive, and justly state it, to ask how and whence the principle, the plan, the idea, the end, had their existence? These are realities; they are the most inner and essential realities in every instance of growth or development; to deal only with the development of the physical basis, is to leave untouched the kernel of the matter, is altogether superficial and unreal. But principles, plans, types and ideas, ends contemplated in movement and progress, these at any rate are not physical, are not matters of sense and organization. They are, as I have said, prior to what is physical, they are conditions antecedent to organization and growth. Moreover, they are mental conceptions, not physical affections. They are only possible, they have no meaning, except as the thoughts of some mind. Here, then, we are brought back by an inevitable necessity to an antecedent mind, the seat and origin of all the principles, the plans the ideas, the ends, embodied in organized beings, and fulfilled in their existence, growth, and perfection. In short, from whatever side we contemplate the problems of nature, and whencesoever we take our point of departure in their investigation, we find ourselves brought face to face with creative mind. The things which are "seen and temporal" lead us always inwards to "the things which are unseen and eternal;" man and creaturely existence conduct us to the living God.

If any one would escape from the pressure of this argument by hardily denying that living organization involves principle or plan, type or idea, purpose or end, it can only follow that the living forms of the universe are an infinite congeries of accidental combinations, that in reality there are no such things as organs, that there can be no such thing as development, and that there is no such thing as law. What men call law is mere sequence that happens to follow regularly. The whole universe has been constituted and regulated by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. Against such a conclusion as this I do not need to argue. It is the naked and repulsive atheism of which I spoke in the introduction to this lecture. The line of argument which I have been pursuing seems to force us to the conclusion that there is no logical resting-place between such theism as Christianity teaches and such Democritean atheism as that of which we have now had a glimpse.

But if this be so, it follows that it is impossible to deny design and final causes in creation, and the sway and oversight of a universal Divine Providence, the providence of a living God, except by denying all law. To the Christian theist, science is living science indeed; to the pantheist, no less than the atheist, science is hardly better than a dead register. He may talk of the wisdom, the power, the order, the benevolence, of nature. But such expressions on the lips of a pantheist are utterly illusive. All the wisdom, all the marvellous adjustments of nature, are but the happy conjunctures, the exquisite chance unisons, of he knows not what. When lost in admiration of marvellous organizations, complexly apt and beautiful contrivances, of what seem like the most studied and beneficent provisions, the soul that is beginning to glow with wonder at this seeming wisdom, and to swell with thankfulness because of this seeming love, must be chilled into blank confusion and amazement by the thought that there is no Being of Wisdom and Benevolence Who is to be thanked and adored because of these His marvellous works. Surely this is enough to darken the universe to the explorer of nature's mysteries, and to fill his soul with perpetual melancholy. Nor is it easy to understand how any man of true science, any real inductive philosopher, who comes into contact with nature's living processes and hears the perpetual whisper of her living voice, can be ensnared into the acceptance of such a hard mystery of sceptical belief as this.

Surely, then, on purely scientific grounds,--the grounds not only of metaphysical but also of natural science, on every ground which can be appealed to by high and pure philosophy, we are at liberty, I should say we are bound, to reject the hypothesis which attempts to expound nature and to solve its mysteries, without the admission of a divine mind. Sense and matter and the observed order of phenomena do not constitute the whole of our science. There are some words written by a poet, too much neglected at the present time, which I cannot forbear from quoting here.

"How should matter occupy a charge Dull as it is, and satisfy a law, So vast in its demands, unless impelled To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force, And under pressure of some conscious cause? The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused, Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire By which the mighty process is maintained, Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight Slow circling ages are as transient days; Whose work is without labour; whose designs No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts; And whose beneficence no charge exhausts."

Surely, if I may here quote some words of Mr. Kingsley's in the lecture to which I have already referred, this is what men of science "are finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show, a something nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve, that which the old schoolmen called 'forma formativa,' the mystery of that unknown and truly miraculous element in nature which is always escaping them, though they cannot escape it, that of which it was written of old, 'Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee from Thy Spirit?'"

The observations which I have thus far offered are directed wholly to the philosophical and scientific aspect of the argument respecting Pantheism. I cannot bring this lecture to an end without referring to the moral branch of the argument. The existence of evil in the universe is alleged as an argument against the existence of God and divine government. Doubtless, the existence of evil is a painful mystery. Many good Christians have felt it to be an oppressive and almost an overwhelming mystery. It is one of the difficulties attendant on the Christian's belief; it is, in fact, the one moral difficulty. But difficulties and mysteries cannot annul the positive necessities of thought and argument. If such arguments as I have endeavoured to state make all science to be contradictory and unintelligible which speaks, in one breath, of the laws and wisdom of nature, and, in the next, denies the existence of a God, then we are bound to accept theism with its inevitable consequences, notwithstanding the mysteries, whether metaphysical or moral, which our faith may involve. Mysteries are not contradictions, and, in whichever direction we move, we shall find it impossible to escape from them. Mysteries surround the position of the sceptic or the atheist, no less than that of the Christian theist; not only mysteries, but, as we have seen, contradictions, beset him round, in whichever direction he turns. The Christian theist, by his faith in God, accepts the mysteries which are involved in the thought of God, but, unlike the unbeliever, he escapes from contradictions and absurdities. It appears that the morality of man--his great glory--that his sense of responsibility and of voluntary moral power, that which most peculiarly constitutes him man, involves the law of moral influence as between man and man. It appears further that the power and faculty of moral influence for good must needs involve the law of moral influence for evil. From the fact of man's own moral nature and moral responsibility, and the consequent fact of his moral influence over his fellow-men, is derived, not only the possibility of moral evil in the case of a solitary individual, but the possibility, perhaps I may say the naturalness, the probability, of a contagion of moral evil spreading throughout the race, the effect of which can only be counteracted or limited by moral arrangements and influences specially constituted for that end. So much I may perhaps say in general, although the subject is one on which I think it wiser, as a rule, to say nothing. I feel it to be a profound and perilous mystery, however gloriously it may have been made the occasion for the manifestation in Christ Jesus our Lord of the Divine superabounding wisdom, mercy, and power. But if we admit the subject to be involved in profound, even terrible mystery, is that a reason why, making shipwreck at one plunge of all that belongs to humanity, faith and hope and philosophy should commit suicide, and descend together into the gulf of everlasting darkness and despair! Reason may reel and grow dizzy while it looks too long and too absorbedly down the fearful and fathomless depths of the mystery of sin, but that is no sufficient cause why reason should cast itself headlong into the abyss.