Chapter 2

The necessarian theory, which in this connection is still advanced or implied, largely accepted as it has been, I cannot help thinking is really traceable to an oversight. If in action there were only one factor, that is to say, the motive, the action would seem to be necessary and to be traceable in its origin apparently back to the nebula. But surely there are two factors, the motive and the volition. Of the second factor in actions which are matters of course we are not conscious; where there is a conflict of motives or hesitation of any kind, we are. Huxley at one time held that man was an automaton. I believe my illustrious friend afterward receded from that position. Yet on the necessarian theory automatons we must apparently be.

February 10th, 1907.

IV.

THE LIMIT OF EVOLUTION.

Your last correspondent on the subject of my letters treats the question lightly. Perhaps he is young, enjoying the morning of life and thinking little of its close. On the mind of a student of history is deeply impressed the sadness of its page; the record of infinite misery and suffering as well as depravity, all apparently to no purpose if the end is to be a physical catastrophe. Comtism, while it bids us devote and sacrifice ourselves to the future of humanity, can apparently hold out nothing more.

I accept evolution, if it is the verdict of science as to the origin of physical species, the human species included; though it certainly seems strange that, the chances being so numerous as they are, no distinct ease of evolution should have taken place within our ken. But the theory apparently does not pretend to account for the development of man's higher nature. That there is a gap in the continuity of development or any supernatural intervention has never been suggested by me; but it does appear that there is an ascent such as constitutes an essential difference and calls for other than physical explanation.

In matter, said Tyndall, is the potentiality of all life. Matter is what we discern by our bodily senses. What assurance have we that the account of the universe and of our relations to it given us by our bodily senses is exhaustive, or that the moral conscience may not have another source?

Apart from anything more distinctly spiritual, where do we get the faculty of idealization? Is it traceable to physical sense?

Unless the moral conscience has a source higher than mere physical evolution, what is to deter a man in whom criminal propensities are strong from indulging them so long as he can do so with impunity? Eccelino had a lust of cruelty. Was he wrong in indulging it, so long as he had the power, which he might have had, with common prudence, to the end of his life?

I speak, as I have always said, from the ranks; and I am not presuming to criticise Darwin's theory as an explanation of the origin and nature of the physical man. But if the theory is to be carried farther, and we are to be told that man's higher attributes and his moral conscience have no source or authority other than physical evolution, we may fairly ask to see our way.

March 17th, 1907.

V.

EXPLANATIONS.

Interest is evidently felt in questions which I have been permitted to treat in _The Sun_, and after the notices and the queries which I have received there are points on which I should like, if you will allow me, to set myself right.

I. The leaning to orthodoxy with which I am gently reproached goes not beyond a conviction, drawn from the study not of theology but of history, that of all the types of character hitherto produced the Christian type, founded on a belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, appears to be the happiest and the best. At its birth it encountered alien and hostile influences; Alexandrian theosophy, Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism. Later it encountered the worst influence of all, that of theocracy engendered by the ambition of the monk Hildebrand. Theocracy, not Catholicism or anything spiritual, has been the source of the crimes of the Papacy; of the Norman raids upon England and Ireland; the civil wars kindled by Papal intrigue in Germany; the extermination of the Albigenses; the Inquisition; Alva's tribunal of blood in the Netherlands; the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the persecution of the Huguenots; Jesuitism and the evils, moral and political, as well as religious, which Jesuitism has wrought. Through all this, and in spite of it all, Christian character has preserved itself, and it is still the basis of the world's best civilization. Much that is far outside the Christian creed is still Christian in character and traceable to a Christian source.

II. I fully admit that society can be regulated by a law framed for mutual protection and general well-being without the religious conscience or other support than temporal interest. But if individual interest or passion can break this law with impunity, as often they can, what is there to withhold them from doing it? What is the value of a clean breast?

III. The fatherhood of God seems to be implied in the Christian belief in the brotherhood of man. By that phrase I meant to characterise Christianity, not to embark upon the question of Theism. It does not seem possible that we should ever have direct proof through human observation and reasoning of the existence of Deity or of the divine aim and will. To some power, and apparently to some moral power, we must owe our being. We can hardly believe that creation planned itself or that the germ endowed itself with life and provision for development. But what can have been the aim of creation? What can have led to the production of humanity, with all the evil and suffering which Omniscience must have foreseen? What was there which without such a process mere fiat, so far as we can see, could not produce? The only thing that presents itself is character, which apparently must be self-formed and developed by resistance to evil. We have had plenty of "evidences" in the manner of Paley or the Bridgewater Treatises, met by sceptical argument on the other side; but has inquiry yet tried to fathom the mystery of human existence?

IV. One thing for which I have earnestly pleaded is the abolition of clerical tests, which are in fact renunciations of absolute loyalty to truth. Would this involve the dissolution of the Churches? Nothing surely can put an end to the need of spiritual association or to the usefulness of the pastorate so long as we believe in spiritual life. I think I have seen the most gifted minds, such as might have done us the highest service in the quest of truth, condemned to silence by the tests.

May 5th, 1907.

VI.

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

There appeared the other day in the Washington _Herald_ a notable letter by Mr. Paul Chamberlain on Immortality. It took the same line as an essay on the same question by Mr. Chamberlain's late father, which I had read in manuscript. Both the letter and the essay are on the negative side of the question, which, in the essay at least, is pronounced the happier and better view, as conducive to unselfishness. Unselfishness, it must surely be, of a supreme kind. Annihilation is not a cheerful word. Bacon has a highly rhetorical passage flouting the fear of death. His was probably not a very loving nature, nor does he seem to have thought of the parting from those we love.

The life of the late Mr. Chamberlain was evidently happy as well as good. That of his son, I have no doubt, is the same. But of the lot of the myriads whose lives, through no fault of their own, are, or in the course of history have been, unhappy, often most miserable, what is to be said? If for them there is no compensation, can we believe that benevolence and justice rule the world? If the world is not ruled by benevolence and justice, what is our ground of hope?

The negative conclusion rids us, it is true, of the Dantean Hell, which paints the Deity as incomparably worse than the worst Italian tyrant, and, as it is to be everlasting, concedes the final victory to evil.

We discard all ghost stories and spiritualist apparitions as at most signs of a general craving. We resign all reasoning like that of Butler, who describes the soul as indiscerptible, assuming that it exists separately from the body. Nor can we be said to have anything that bears the character of Revelation. That the Founder of Christianity looked for a future life, with its rewards and punishments, is evident. But he brought no special message, lifted not the curtain of mystery, did nothing to clear our minds upon the subject. His apologue of Dives and Lazarus shows that to Him as to us the other world was a realm of the imagination.

Is there anything in man not physical, or apparently explained and limited by the transient conditions and necessities of his present state, anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarian morality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But is there not an aspiration to character which points to something more spiritual and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroism and self-sacrifice are not utilitarian.

We can hardly allow the investigation to be closed by the mere mention of the talismanic formulary Evolution. There may be something still to be said on that subject. Evolution cannot have evolved itself, nor does it seem capable of infallible demonstration. It no doubt postulates vast spaces of time for its action. But within the space of time of which we in any way have knowledge, apparently no case of spontaneous evolution has taken place. Rudimentary likeness between the frame of the ape and that of man seems hardly in itself a proof of the generation of man from the ape.

On no subject, however, does one who is not a man of science or a philosopher feel more intensely his deficiency, and his need of having his paths lighted by the perfectly free while reverent inquiry, to pray for which has been the object of these letters.

August 11th, 1907.

VII.

IS THERE TO BE A REVOLUTION IN ETHICS?

A revolution in theology and in our conception of the government of the universe such as we are undergoing is sure to draw with it a revolutionary movement in ethics. There lies before me a review article giving an account of a number of books on ethics which are widely at variance, it appears, with the ethics of Christianity. The general tendency of the authors seems to be to reject altogether the Christian type of character as artificial and weak, and to aim at substituting for it something more robust and, it is assumed, more in accordance with nature. One theorist is represented as regarding humanity in its present form only as transient material out of which is to be wrought the "Superman." In what respect, so far as our conceptions extend, has Christian ethic failed? It has given birth to the patriot as well as to the martyr, to the virtues of the softer as well as to those of the stronger sex. Communities which have kept its rules, as well as individuals, have been happy.

The Christian ideal of character and life went essentially unchanged through the violence of the Middle Ages and the vices of the Papacy. It was somewhat perverted by asceticism; but it was radically the same character in Anselm or in St. Louis, as it is in their counterparts now. Nor does it seem to lose by renunciation of theological dogma. The moral principles and aspirations of good free thinkers or Positivists remain still essentially Christian.

The ethical ideal which is now being set up against the Christian apparently, is that of the Greeks. In literature and art Greece, or rather Athens, or, to speak still more correctly, a limited number of free citizens in Athens, was pre-eminent: but its pre-eminence, if we may trust its own moralists, hardly extended to morals.

May 3rd, 1908.