Part 2

We may make two separate affirmations: as, for example, that ‘the thermometer is 6° F. below zero,’ and that ‘water has become solid;’ or, again, we may state, ‘my fingers rest upon the key-board of an organ,’ and ‘now they move, and a symphony of Beethoven’s is floating in the air.’ These are ‘sequences;’ but is that enough? No. Instantly the mental act that _interprets_ them is supplied. In both cases, our consciousness and reason are compelled to demand the exercise of power, by means of which one event succeeds the other. We are absolutely and irresistibly certain, in the latter case, that it must be so. A direct act of volition changed the fingers from rest into rhythmic motion, causing the organ to pour out music; and, by an intellectual necessity, we see that a diminished temperature, and frozen water, are not sequences merely; they must be related: and this conviction is not changed, though, by means of research, we find their sequential relation to be the result of the continuity of prior effects; we still retain the unaltered judgment, that, if we go back far enough, we must be in the presence of a cause. The mind cannot dispense with the link of power uniting sequences.

Then, if by long trains of sequential effects and secondary causes we are led up, not by demonstration, but by irresistible moral conviction, to a Primordial Power, a source of all, what is such creative cause? Is it inevitably God? Is the universe, as we know it, infinite? Who dare say? Though we know that the vast looming firmament, in which the ‘milky way’ stretches its depths and winds its awful amplitudes, is beyond all finite power to follow; yet, it may be but a complex particle in a universe of universes, stretching on, and for ever on, over the bourneless immensity of the unknown.

If that be so, we can make no useful inference from our finite universe. We could infer only a finite creator from a finite cosmos. To be finite is to be infinitely less than infinite; and such a being could not be the ineffable majesty of mind and might, which we apprehend, but cannot comprehend, as the Creator.

If such a limited power could be conceived, because it is finite, it of necessity began to be; and therefore its very existence was of necessity caused. We seek _its_ cause, as we do that of all other secondary causes; until at last we reach the only position in which there is mental rest, an infinite cause of all causes, the primordial and ultimate reality of all being.

Concerning even it, the question has arisen, Must not it also have been caused? Is not this question a paradox? It is of finite being only that we can affirm the necessity for causation. What is finite begins to be; what begins to be, must have been caused to be. But if our moral and reasoning faculties bring us at last, face to face, with an inscrutable and infinite primal cause, is there a mental process exercised by us that demands that such a being must have had a cause? Experiment cannot suggest it, for this is neither finite, nor a phenomenon; and can neither be observed nor analyzed; research in it is infinitely impossible; and of experience there can be none. Science is without function in presence of a primal cause. It is powerless, by virtue of its knowledge or its methods, to affirm or to deny an infinite and eternal self-existence. And yet such is not only possible to thought, but has congruity with all the faculties of reason. The principle of causality involves merely that every _finite_ existence must have had a cause for its being; that what is born and dies, what arises and ceases to be, what began in time and flows on in continuous mutation, had an originator. But our consciousness of causality does not and cannot include or apply to an infinite and unsearchable cause of all. We may not with our finite plummet seek to measure the depths of the Infinite, nor with our limited grasp hope to enfold the All. To say nothing of its cause, what do we _know_ of even the universe itself? We write and talk freely of millions of miles, and in a moment reverse the process and write or speak of millionths of a grain or of an inch; we think of tens of thousandths of a second, of millions of years, and duration that is without beginning and without end. Imagination cannot picture these things, though thought can possess them. They involve the two great mysteries ever present to mind, space and time.

Space includes within itself all that can be the subject of our knowledge, yet it is not a phenomenon, not an entity, not an object of sensation. It is a pure abstraction. No space is not thinkable. By no effort of mind can we think of space as non-existent at any period in infinite duration. So far as we can see, without objects with their dimensional relations, space could not be a concept. The contents of space, out of which the mind abstracts space, are the source from whence our concept, space, emerges. An infinite void is mentally nothing; an intellect like man’s, that had never realized extension in the dimensions of material bodies, could not present it in thought, any more than it can conceive correctly the qualities of a fourth dimension.

In like manner time is not a thing, an entity, to be accounted for as a creation, a thing caused; it is a consequence of existences; duration measured by sequences. If there were no succession of events, there would be no time. Space and time are mental abstractions, respectively, of the relations of dimensions and duration.

But with what mystery and majesty, with what proportions and powers, with what mass and movement is space full! and of what sequences and phenomena has time been the unconscious recorder! It is into these that the mind of man intently peers; it is across the bourneless area of uncharted space that he would carry his mental vision; it is into all the vicissitudes that have arisen, since the succession of cosmic phenomena marked off a section of duration, that the mind of man is ever struggling to thread its way; and if possible, to find the meaning and origin of it all.

That which is the most impressive outcome of all modern physical investigation, is the apparent mechanical automatism of all cosmic sequences and phenomena within our reach. As a result, the most powerful philosophies are directed to an endeavour to establish a mechanical—that is, a mindless or purposeless—_origin_ of the universe. But granted a universe, fully understood, exhaustively known, purely mechanical in all its _present_ activities; even this, surely, only makes more absolute the certainty that the very conditions of its present existence, involved at its beginning, a more majestic design than all the thinkers of the past had ever dreamed.

There is no alternative; either chance, or mental purpose, gave primal origin to all that is. Nothing within the reach of intellect could express the infinite improbability of the first suggestion. That _one_ vast harmony, one _perfect_ method, should fall out by chance, through the operation of uncounted millenniums of ages, is almost inexpressibly improbable; but that a system of harmonies, practically infinite in number and measureless in extent, should all be locked together in one vast uniting harmony, making all creation a chorus, to which all its parts from the centre to the margin contribute their flowing and concerted strains, without a discord to the unity of thought; to say that _that_ arose by chance, sprang from fortuity, fell out by accident, is surely to trifle with the fundamental principles of our moral faculties and reasoning powers.

Hence, nothing but philosophical ruin can be the end of materialism when enunciated in its grosser form. But our age is distinguished by the existence of a brilliant philosophical materialism, which has arrested, and is swaying, the deepest thought of our age, by the opulence of its learning and resource, by the scientific accuracy and insight of its abounding and perfect illustrations, and by the subtile, but stately method and breadth of its generalizations; but beyond all, by the fact that its world-famed author, Mr. Herbert Spencer, repels, with warmth, persistence, and manifest integrity, the very suspicion of ‘materialism’!

Yet we are compelled to ask, of what value, of what real service, are all the ideal and spiritual assumptions of his splendid and fascinating philosophy? It acknowledges a _something_ beyond the matter and the mechanism that fills the amplitudes of space; it even designates this something a ‘power,’ But that power is declared, for ever and infinitely, beyond the circumference of knowledge: it is the ‘absolute,’ the ‘unknowable;’ it can take no part, and become no agent in, no factor of, any philosophy of the origin of the universe which we construct. On the very terms of the philosophy itself, all in heaven and earth, through all the past and all the future, can be accounted for and explained without it. If the admission into its phraseology of the existence of a ‘power,’ which is a name only, be taken as sufficient reason, then this philosophy is not materialistic. But if it be remembered that this ‘power’ is absolutely without function in this philosophy of the construction of the universe,—if it be true to its formula,—and that only matter and motion are asked for, its ultimate materialism is a certainty, and, from its very subtilty, a peril.

To philosophical Theism the coarser Materialism can bring no lasting danger. It ignores too much, and assumes too much; and treats with a too manifest disdain the fundamental basis of our reasoning faculties.

It has many brilliant exponents; but foremost amongst them is Haeckel of Jena, a man of large scientific attainments, a biologist of the highest repute, and possessed of the keenest acumen. But these are not the only, nor the essential factors, of a philosophic mind.

He has no hesitancy, no scruple. A Creator for him is a conception for scorn, and he pours unceasing contempt upon the thought that he or any of us are more than material organisms, alive for our little day and then dead for ever. There is a future only for the race. The universe is declared to be without purpose; it is moving matter, which, by self-operation through immeasurable duration, has issued in laws that exist without reason, and devoid of an originator, act, with the deafness of the rock and the unconsciousness of the sea; producing in the realm of life the weaker and the stronger, but only for that unceasing war in which the stronger win.

That for man there is nothing nobler, nothing higher, than to study the grinding laws which compel him; which laws are the summaries of natural methods which began in nothing, and have been for ever vacant of thought or purpose.

We need have no anxiety concerning the influence of such a scheme; from its own incoherence it enfolds its intellectual death-warrant in its very form.

But the philosophy of Spencer is of another order. It is a philosophy that scorns the idealism of Berkeley, and that with the fervour of conviction, indignantly repudiates ‘Materialism.’ He contends for the equal and independent reality of self and not-self, of subject and object, of mind and matter. He affirms that the ‘co-existence of subject and object is a deliverance of consciousness.... and is a truth transcending all others in certainty.’[4] Yet, in the progress of the philosophy, we discover that from matter in motion, and nothing else, the whole universe is supposed to arise; life emerges; and mind, in its most transcendent forms comes forth. And it is this fallacy pervading the philosophy that is the essence of its power. Repudiating ‘Materialism’ as philosophically untenable, it yet exists as a philosophy to endeavour to show that mind is an outcome of matter.

[Footnote 4: _Principles of Psychology_, vol. i. p. 209.]

Look at the problem it sets for solution. ‘Philosophy,’ says Spencer, ‘is _completely unified_ knowledge;’ and adds, ‘... a philosophy stands self-convicted of inadequacy, if it does not formulate the whole series of changes passed through by every existence.... If it begins its explanations with existences that already have concrete forms ... then manifestly they had preceding histories ... of which no account is given. And as such preceding ... histories are subjects of possible knowledge, a philosophy which says nothing about them falls short of the required unification.’[5]

Then, on the very terms of the philosophy, we are to contemplate ‘the beginning’ with absolutely nothing anterior or unaccounted for. There must be no ‘concrete forms,’ no ‘preceding histories,’ to be encountered.

Now observe, it is clearly recognised in this philosophy that the ultimate nature of all that constitutes the universe is infinitely beyond the reach of the human mind; that in their final nature time, space, matter, motion, rest, the transfer of motion, the exercise of force, the nature and operation of consciousness and thought, are all equally, that is, infinitely, inscrutable. Knowledge is inexorably limited to, and co-extensive with, phenomena; yet from these phenomena alone we are to obtain exhaustive accounts of their own origin and existence, in spite of the admitted inscrutable mysteries of which they are the manifestations.

[Footnote 5: _First Principles_, pp. 541-42.]

If we can obtain so complete a knowledge of matter and motion, by a scientific study of them, as will enable us, with that knowledge alone, to explain their origin and account for the sequences they involve, then there is no more mystery. There are no ‘ultimates’ to explain. Our knowledge covers all that is, in space and time. The ‘Absolute’ itself is a meaningless superfluity, and the mysterious ‘power’ that is philosophically invoked can have no true place, for all is explicable without it.

A beginning is inevitable to a philosophy of material evolution. Then ‘in the beginning’ what? How in the zero, in which there were no ‘concrete forms’ and no ‘preceding histories,’ did the first movement towards the plenished arch of heaven and the fruitful earth arise? Concentration and diffusion, it is affirmed, are universally observed physical processes. The latest science in tracing back the genealogies of various objects finds that ‘their components were once in diffused states, and, pursuing their histories forwards, finds diffused states will be again assumed by them.’[6] Clearly, then, ‘matter’ is assumed to exist at the ‘beginning.’ It certainly _may_ have had a ‘preceding history;’ and to ignore this is to come, at the outset, perilously near to a philosophy ‘that stands self-convicted of inadequacy.’

[Footnote 6: _First Principles_, p. 280.]

A diffused state of matter is, it thus appears, the earliest point of the beginning that physical evolution can descry. This is the nebular hypothesis of Laplace; without doubt a majestic theory, but a theory still. Science has welcomed it to work with; and it explains, or aids in the interpretation of, much; but, that it should be taken so for granted as to be considered a demonstrated or even undisputed and established fact of modern science, we may be permitted to doubt; and it must have had a ‘preceding history.’ It takes us to a point in measureless past duration, where all that is now concrete matter is assumed to have been in a gaseous state. It is not even contended that it is an original condition. Such an almost infinite mass of nebulous matter must have been due, if existent, to heat, and to heat of an intensity that defies our range of conception.

But whence did such heat come? ‘Heat’ is demonstrated to us now as a rhythmic ‘mode of motion;’ one of the phenomena of nature to be accounted for. Verily, heat is a phenomenon with a ‘preceding history,’ and yet at the outset its presence is assumed in the cosmic cloud.

But, further complexity still, how does heat act in this primordial nebula? If heat is a ‘mode of motion,’ by what were the heat vibrations wrought? You must have _then_, for the phenomenon of heat, what is indispensable to the physical theory of it now:—the inconceivable but indispensable ether of modern physics. But how came the ether in, and beyond, the cosmic cloud? It is an ‘existence,’ manifestly; more, it is ‘matter;’ but matter that transcends the range of the action of gravity; it is without weight, and differentiated from all matter that we know in a manner that thought cannot follow.

How did this ‘existence’ pass from the imperceptible to the perceptible? and by its own requirement should not a complete philosophy furnish its past history?

Let us come more closely into contact with the actual formula of this philosophy. ‘Evolution,’ says Spencer, ‘is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.’[7]

Here, then, are the factors of the potential universe. By definition they are the sole structural essentials. Beyond them nothing should be asked, required, or assumed. What are these irreducible factors of the formula? ‘Matter’ and ‘motion.’ But we have clearly seen that we are cognizant of matter as such only by its ‘modes of motion’. It is _these_ for which evolution has to account. ‘Matter’ denuded of the qualities by which we now are cognizant of it, can be no other than dimensions without qualities, spatial presence undiscoverable by sense.

On the other hand, pure motion, motion by itself, is impossible to thought. Motion is only known as an affection of matter. ‘It becomes manifest,’ says Spencer, ‘that our experience of _force_ is that out of which our idea of matter is built’.[8] But, in the terms of the formula, force can be nothing but matter affected by motion. What, then, was this primary matter on which motion first acted, and before motion had by various ‘modes’ produced in it a single quality? No answer is possible; but, nevertheless, as the philosophy unfolds itself we find that ‘we need not refrain ... from dealing with matter as made up of extended and resistant atoms,’[9] and henceforth we are led to consider the cosmic nebula as not only homogeneous, but as being, in its homogeneity, atomic.

[Footnote 7: _First Principles_, p. 396.]

[Footnote 8: _First Principles_, p. 167.]

[Footnote 9: _First Principles_, p. 176.]

No lover of physical and chemical science can do other than profoundly admire the atomic theory of modern physics. But there is no sound physicist or chemist but is sufficiently alive to its difficulties to know that in every form in which it has been presented, it is, to say no more, tentative and hypothetic. In Mr. Spencer’s philosophy it becomes a fundamental fact of the beginning. But the existence of atoms being granted, how did they arise? ‘If you ask the materialist,’ says Professor Tyndall, ‘whence is this matter ... who or what divided it into molecules ... he has no answer.’[10] So that here, in spite of the claim made, no philosophy can be ‘complete;’ and even the doctrine of an eternally automatic evolution is philosophically inadequate.

But these atoms of the primordial haze are ‘resistant;’ such a quality can only result from a special affection of matter by motion; whence came or how arose such an affection of matter? Its existence in the atoms of the nebula inevitably implies ‘preceding history,’ but it is not given; and this pregnant atomic haze is, so far as we can see, without colour, without chemical affinity or reaction, without light, electricity, or magnetism, and devoid of all cohesion.

Clearly, these are not the atoms of the chemical elements known to us. They are not the atoms of Dalton nor of Clark Maxwell. The atoms of the cosmic mist are, by the very terms of the formula, naked of quality; and, by the limiting conditions of the definition of the cloud as homogeneous, are, throughout all the abysms of space, alike in size, in shape, and in motions. Equal extensions of space moving at equal rates.

[Footnote 10: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. p. 396.]

By these conditions, then, it is manifest that primordial matter is in itself infinitely powerless and inert. Motion can affect it; but can there be motion of any _new_ kind originated without a power to cause it? If that can be, the fundamental acts of human reason are untrustworthy; and man is incapable of knowledge or deduction, which is absurd. Then what was the power that determined new motions in the primordial homogeneous matter?

It could not by any demand in the formula be even gravity, if that were competent. Modern thought and knowledge cannot allow gravitation to be a property of matter. Ether is matter, but it does not gravitate. Gravity is therefore an occult affection of matter by motion, that has a history ‘to be accounted for.’

In this almost infinite primal nebula, a certain class of motion is assumed. How it originated is unexplained. But what is the atomic motion of this primal homogeneous matter? From the terms given it must be as I have said. Motion of absolute likeness throughout all the profounds of space it filled; equalized motion in every atom; no difference of rate; no difference of mode. The motion of one atom is identic with the motion of all. It could never be lost; it could never increase; it could never alter. It is homogeneous, and _therefore_ changeless—balanced for ever—in itself. Says Mr. Spencer: ‘Any finite mass of diffused matter, even though vast enough to form our whole sidereal system,’ if it were of ‘absolute sphericity, absolute uniformity of composition, and absolute symmetry of relation to all forces external to it,’[11] would be homogeneous and eternally incapable of change.

[Footnote 11: _First Principles_, p. 407.]

And that ‘homogeneity’ is the very condition laid down for the beginning, from which mechanical evolution is to educe the universe. In the Spencerian formula there is no qualification of the term homogeneous. It postulates ‘an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity,’ that is, an indefinite cloud, with balanced motion in all its atoms which neither attracts nor repels, and is in itself infinitely incapable of change.

Now, shall we not ask _how_ the first pulse, that caused the stupendously vast homogeneity to throb into the heterogeneous, arose? whence did it come? Infinite incapacity could not, unless reason be mendacious, render _itself_ capable. Then how came that _first_ movement that, it is argued, ended in revolving systems, a bountiful earth, the throat of the nightingale, and the tragedy of Macbeth!

There is no answer. This philosophy, to get the first progressive movement in its balanced nebula, bids its formula stand aside, that it may advance. At a critical moment it changes the very meaning of the homogeneous. ‘The condition of homogeneity is a condition of unstable equilibrium!’[12] ‘The phrase ... is one used in mechanics to express a balance of forces of such kind that the interference of any further force, however minute, will destroy the arrangement previously subsisting, and bring about a totally different arrangement.’[13]

[Footnote 12: _First Principles_, p. 401.]

[Footnote 13: _Ibid._ p. 401-402.]

Note, then, the homogeneous cosmic cloud is, by the terms given, in equilibrium. But some ‘further force,’ some small influence _outside_ itself, acts upon it, and it breaks up.

But what is the _outside_ influence? What is this ‘further force,’ and from whence? We have a cloud composed of atoms in balanced motion—nothing more. Outside influence, ‘further force,’ is an intrusion. It has no right there. It has not on the wedding garment of the formula.