Chapter 20

3. But though Evolution so conceived makes the "argument from adaptability," as well as the arguments for theism, stronger rather than weaker; we must not shut our eyes to the difficulty created by the fact (too little insisted upon by Evolutionists) that there is no solid reason for thinking that progress is all-pervading. We have already said that progress in commerce may be regress in art or in religion or in morality. Also, progress in benevolence may co-exist with regress in fortitude and purity; progress in one point of morality with regress in another; progress in ethical judgment with regress in ethical practice. And in every realm, growth and decay, life and death, seem so to intertwine and oscillate that it is very gratuitous to designate the total process as being one or the other. Spencer confesses that the entire universe oscillates between extremes of integration and disintegration. Why we should consider the universe at present to be rising rather than falling, waxing rather than waning, one cannot say. The easier presumption is that it is equally one and the other, and always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience, surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human mind to pass _per saltum_ from that, to a generalization for all possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive basis in actual experience, and must draw its life from some deeper source.

Why then should we so presume that our moral and religious ideas are really progressive and not regressive, as to regard their interpretation as approximating to the truth? The answer is simply that our argument from adaptability does not require the assumption in question, but only that we should be able to distinguish higher from lower tendencies, progressive from regressive movements, without holding the optimistic view that on the whole the forward tendency is at present prevailing. It is not because we live in the nineteenth century that we consider our moral perceptions truer than those of the ancient Hebrews, but because we at once comprehend and transcend their ideas (in some respects), as the greater does the less. In many points surely the relation is inverted and we feel ourselves transcended (or may at least suspect it), by those who lived or live in ruder conditions than our own. David has perhaps taught us more than we could have taught him; and there are other vices than those proper to semi-barbarism. It is not by reference to date or country, or grade of material progress, that we assess the value of moral judgments, but by that subjective standard with which our own moral attainments supply us in regard to all that is equal or less, similar or dissimilar. To deny this discernment is to throw the doors open to unqualified scepticism; to admit it, is all that we need for the validity of our inference.

4. If Evolution is really of this oscillatory character; if at all times much the same processes have been going on in different parts of this universe as now--one system decaying as another is coming into being; is it not more reasonable to imagine (for it is only a question of imagining) that the primordial datum was not uniform nebula, but matter in all stages of elaboration from the highest to the lowest--the same sort of result as we should get from a cross-section at any subsequent moment in the process? What reason is there for assuming primordial homogeneity, since every backward step would show us, together with the unravelling of what is now in process of weaving, a counter-balancing weaving of what is now in process of disintegration? Were this earth all, we might dream of universal advance by shutting our eyes to a great many incompatible facts; but when our telescopes show us the co-existence of integration and disintegration everywhere, what can we conclude but that in the past as in the future, no alteration is to be looked for beyond the shifting of the waves' crest from side to side of the sea of matter--the total ratio of depressions to elevations remaining exactly constant.

Were the other view of an original universal homogeneity correct, how conies it that we have still co-existent every stage of advance from the lowest to the highest, and that there is not a greater equality?--a difficulty which does not exist if we suppose things to have been _on the whole,_ as they are now, from the very first. But whichever view we take; whether we suppose all things collectively to oscillate between recurring extremes of "sameness" and "otherness;" or every stage of the wave of progress from crest to trough, to be simultaneously manifested in the universe at all times, the old difficulty of "the beginning" will force itself upon us. A process _ab aeterno_ is at least as unimaginable as the process of creation _ex nihilo;_ if it be not altogether inconceivable to boot. And the alternative is, either a primordial state of homogeneous matter which contains the present cosmos in germ, and from which it is evolved without the aid of any environment--such a germ claiming a designer as much as any ready-made perfect world; or else, a primordial state of things like that which we should get at any cross-section of the secular process, in which every stage of life and death, growth and decay, evolution and involution, is represented as now. This would include fossils and remains of past civilizations which (in the hypothesis) would never have existed; and would be in all respects as difficult as the crudest conception of the creation-hypothesis. And if this absurdity drives us back to primordial homogeneity, as before, we must remember that here, too, though not so evidently, we should have all the signs of an antecedent process that was non-existent. Life and death, corruption and integration, are parts of one undulatory process. Cut the wave where you will its curve claims to be finished in both directions and suggests a before as well as an after. If, in the very nature of things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore we are driven back upon a process _ab aeterno_ with every stage of evolution always simultaneously represented in one part or other of the whole. Whatever mitigation such a conception may offer, surely we may be excused for still adhering to that simpler explanation which involves a mystery indeed, but nothing so positively unthinkable as a process without a beginning.

5. This same conception of a process without beginning, favours the notion that since life was possible on our globe all species may well have co-existed in varying proportions. From the sudden spread of population through almost accidental conditions, we can imagine how certain species might have been so scarce as to leave no trace in geological strata, whereas those which enormously preponderated at the same time would have done so. A change of conditions might easily cause the former to preponderate, and their sudden appearance in the strata would look as though they had then first come into being. In a word, we can have good evidence for the extinction of species, but scarcely any for their origination.

This supposition is not adverse to the derivation of species from a common stock, but rather favours the notion that as in the case of the individual the period of plasticity is short compared with that of morphological stability, so if there was such an arboreal branching out of species from a common root, it took place rapidly in conditions as different from ours as those of uterine from extra-uterine life; and that the stage of inflexibility may have been reached before any time of which we have record.

But in truth when we see in the world of chemical substances an altogether similar sedation of species where there can be no question of common descent as its cause, we may well suspend our judgment till the established facts have excluded the many hypotheses other than Evolution by which they may be explained.

As long as Evolution claims to be no more than a working scientific hypothesis, like ether or electric fluid--a sort of frame or subjective category into which observed facts are more conveniently fitted, it cannot justly be pressed for a solution of ultimate problems; but when it claims to be a complete philosophy and as such to extrude other philosophies previously in possession, it must show that it can rest the mind where they leave it restless; or that it has proved their proffered solutions spurious. This, so far, it has absolutely failed to do. At most it may determine more accurately the way in which God works out His Idea in Creation. It can stand as long as it is content to prescind from the question of ends and origins; but then it is no longer a complete philosophy. As soon as it attempts to solve those problems it becomes incoherent and unthinkable. Its true complement is theism and finality, which flow from it as naturally, if not quite so immediately as the "argument from adaptability." _Deus creavit_ is so far the only moderately intelligible, or at least not demonstrably unintelligible, answer given to the problem of _In principio_.

We have then in this second and soberer form of the philosophy of Evolution, an attempt to explain the order of the universe without explicit recourse to the hypothesis of an intelligent authorship and government of the world: that is to say, independently of theism and finality; and so far as this explanation admits all the effects and consequences of an intelligent government, without ascribing them to that cause, it admits among their number the value of the "argument from adaptability," and allows us to infer that the postulates of man's higher moral needs correspond approximately to reality, of which they are in some sense the product; and that the "wish to believe" is less likely to be a source of delusion in proportion as the belief in question is higher in the moral scale.

But it is also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and philosophical bankruptcy; by resolutely refusing to face the problem of the whole--of the ultimate whence and whither. If it would positively exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and adaptation to the persistence of some blind force, subduing all things to itself, to "existence," or to "life" striving to assert and extend itself. It is this conception that seems best to bring the mystery of the universe within the comprehension of the popular mind, and is more in keeping with those "aggregation theories" of our day which regard dust as the one eternal reality whose combination and disguises delude us into believing in soul and intelligence and divinity. But on closer examination the words "life" and "existence" answer to no simple reality or force which can be regarded as governing nature, and from this radical fallacy of language a whole brood of further absurdities spring up which make the popular form of Evolution-philosophy utterly incoherent.

_June, Aug. Sept._ 1899.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: This will perhaps be the most convenient term. In the _Summa of Aquinas_, the elaborate treatise _De vera religione_, called into existence by more recent exigencies, had no place. Still, in so far as it is constructed roughly on the same scheme and presupposes the same philosophy, and (were it not a deepening of the roots rather than an extension of the branches) might almost be regarded as a development of scholasticism, it may rightly be called "scholastic" to distinguish it, say, from such a work as the _Grammar of Assent_.]

[Footnote 2: _Science and a Future Life_, By F. W. Myers.]

[Footnote 3: i.e., If an object be adequately and exhaustively conceived under the predicates A.B.C.D., it is inadequately conceived as A.B.x.x. But if each of these properties be permeated and modified by the rest, then A in this object is not as A in any other combination, but is A as related to and modified by B.C.D.; and similarly, the other properties are each unique. Hence any part is somewhat falsely apprehended till the whole be apprehended, when we are dealing with organic as opposed to mechanical totalities.]

[Footnote 4: Not that the transmutation of one species into another has yet been detected in any instance, or perhaps, even were it a fact, could be detected; but that such a serial graduation has been observed as might be commodiously explained by that supposition,--and also by fifty others.]

[Footnote 5: _Mind_, 1876, p. 185.]

[Footnote 6: _Mind_, 1876, p. 9.]

[Footnote 7: _Appearance and Reality_.]

XXIII.

IDEALISM IN STRAITS.

"Can any good come out of Trinity?" is a question that has been asked and answered in various senses during the recent Catholic University controversies in Ireland; but for whatever other good Catholics might look to that staunchly Elizabethan institution, they would scarcely turn thither for theological guidance. Yet all definition is negative as well as positive; exclusive as well as inclusive; and we always know our position more deeply and accurately in the measure that we comprehend those other positions to which it is opposed. The educative value of comparing notes, quite apart from all prospect of coming to an agreement, or even of flaying our adversaries alive, is simply inestimable; we do not rightly know where we stand, except in so far as we know where others stand--for place is relative.

The Donnellan Lecturer for 1897-8 [1] took for his subject the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity in relation to contemporary idealistic philosophy. The scope of these lectures is, not to prove the doctrine of the Trinity philosophically, but to show that the difficulty besetting the conception of a multiplicity of persons united by a superpersonal bond, is just the same difficulty that brings idealistic philosophy to a dead-lock when it endeavours (1) to escape from solipsism, (2) to vindicate free-will,(3) to solve the problem of evil. He naturally speaks of Idealism as "the only philosophy which can now be truly called living," in the sense in which a language is said to live; that is, which is growing and changing, and endeavouring to bring new tracts of experience under its synthesis; which is current in universities of the day. Of the Realism which survives in the seminaries of the ecclesiastical world he naturally knows nothing; addressing himself to a wholly different public, he speaks to it on its own assumptions, in its own mental language; and indeed he knows no other. But having weighed idealism in the balance of criticism, he finds it far short of its pretensions to be an adequate accounting for the data of experience; he finds that it leads the mind in all directions to impassable chasms which only faith can overleap. It does not demand or suggest the mystery of the Trinity, but reveals a void which, as a fact that doctrine alone does fill. The convinced Realist will not be very interested about the problem of solipsism which for him is non-existent, but the proposed relief from the difficulties of free-will and of the existence of evil may be grateful to all indifferently; or at least may suggest principles adaptable to other systems. In his Trinitarian theology Mr. D'Arcy is in many points at variance with the later conclusions of the schools; and in some instances his argument depends vitally on this variance; but not in the main. For his main point is that as our own personality--the highest unity of which we have experience--takes under itself unities of a lower grade; so the doctrine of the Trinity implies what the hiatuses of philosophy require, namely, that personal unity is not the highest; that, beyond any power of our present conception, the personally many can be really (not only morally or socially) _one thing_. "A wonderfully unspeakable thing it is," says Augustine, "and unspeakably wonderful that whereas this image of the Trinity" _(sc.,_ the human soul), "is one person, and the sovereign Trinity itself, three persons, yet that Trinity of three persons is more inseparable than this trinity" (memory, understanding, and will) "of one person." This "superpersonal" unity is of course a matter of faith and not of philosophy, yet it is a faith without which subjective philosophy must come to a stand-still; it is as much a postulate of the speculative reason as God and immortality are of the practical reason.

"If man is to retain the full endowment of his moral nature, we must make up our minds to accept for ourselves an incomplete theory of things." A philosophy which should unify the sum-total of human experience, including the supernatural facts of Christianity, is impossible; but even excluding these facts there is always need of some kind of non-rational assent, which, however reasonable and prudent in the very interests of thought, is not necessitated by the laws of thought--is not, in the strictest sense philosophical. Idealism, like other philosophies, "is not satisfied with an imperfect knowledge of the greatest things. It must rise to the Divine standpoint and comprehend the concrete universal," and so, of course, it breaks down. "But it would surely be a hasty inference," says Mr. D'Arcy, "that philosophy must needs be exhausted because idealism has done its work and delivered its message to mankind," that is, has explored another blind alley, and has arrived at the _cul de sac_. In fact, if idealism is a living philosophy, it is nevertheless showing signs of age and decay. Ptolemaic astronomy, as an explanation of planetary movements, proved its exhaustion by a liberal recourse to epicycles as the answer to all awkward objections; and philosophies show themselves moribund in an analogous way, by a monotonous pressing of some one hackneyed principle to a degree that makes common-sense revolt and fling the whole theory to the winds--chaff and grain indiscriminately. But philosophy must be distinguished from philosophies, as religion from religions. The imperfection of the various concrete attempts to satisfy either spiritual need, may make the desperate-minded wish to cut themselves free from all connection with any particular system; but the desire and effort to have a knowledge of the whole (_i.e._, a philosophy) is as natural and ineradicable as the desire to live and breathe. In this general sense, philosophy "takes human experience, sets it out in all its main elements, and then endeavours to form a plan of systematic thought which will account for the whole. It has one fundamental postulate, that there is a meaning, or, in other words, that there is an all-pervading unity." This "faith" in the ultimate coherence and unity of everything is the presupposition and motive of the very attempt to philosophize or to determine the nature of that unity. It is not, therefore, itself a product of philosophy; it is an innate conviction that can be denied only from the teeth outwards, but can neither be proved nor disproved by the finite mind.

To "explain" is in one way or another to liken the less known to what is better known; and thus every philosophy is an attempt to express--by means of sundry extensions and limitations--the universe of our experience in the terms of some totality with which we are more familiar; plainly, it is also an endeavour to express the greater in terms of the less, and must therefore be almost infinitely inadequate even at the best. At one time the Whole has been conceived as the unity of a mere aggregate--of a heap of stones; at another, as a mere sand-storm of fortuitous atoms; there has been the egg-theory, and the tortoise-theory, and many others, no less grotesque to our seeming. But, leaving fanciful and poetical philosophies aside, and considering only those which pretend to be strictly rational, we find the objective philosophy and the subjective confronting one another; the former likening the universe to the works of men's hands; the latter likening it to man himself; the former taking its metaphors from the artificer shaping his material according to a preconceived plan for a definite purpose; the latter, from the thinking and willing self considered as the creator of its own personal experience.

There is enough uniformity of plan throughout the animal body to make any one part of the organism a likeness of the whole--the eye, the heart, or the hand. And so, presumably, there is hardly any unity we can think of in our own little corner of experience that does not offer some similitude of the universal unity. But to take this as an adequate explanation; to force the metaphor to its logical consequences, to the exclusion of every other reasonable though non-rational assent, is the commonest but most fatal form of intellectual provincialism and narrowness. Our mind is essentially limited not merely in that it cannot know everything, but in that its mode of knowledge is imperfect and analogical in regard to all that is greater than itself. It is broad only when conscious of its narrowness.

The first difficulty into which idealism gets itself is that of solipsism. According to its rigidly argued principles, "mind is separated from mind by a barrier which is, not figuratively, but literally impassable. It is impossible for any _ego_ to leap this barrier and enter into the experience of any other _ego_." It is not an abstract self-in-general, but my one solitary concrete self for which all experience exists. There is no room for any other person. But this philosophy does not account for our common-sense belief in Nature as existing independently of self and of other selfs; or in those other selfs with their several and distinct spheres of experience.

The unification it effects when treated rigorously as a complete philosophy leaves out of account the best part of what it was bound to account for. In spite of idealism, the idealist goes on _believing_ in other persons or spheres of experience, and in Nature as the experience of a Divine Person. But since, on his principles, persons are mutually exclusive, and none can enter the sphere of another's experience, to see with his eyes, or to feel with his nerves, since,

Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart,

we are thrown back on a disconnected plurality of beings, and God Himself, viewed as personal (in this sense) is but one among many. Albeit immeasurably the greatest, He cannot be regarded as the ground of the possibility and existence of all the rest--the home and bond of union of all other spirits which in Him live and move and have their being.

The belief in the personality of God is all-essential for the satisfaction of our religious cravings, as a presupposition of trust, love, prayer, obedience, and such relationships; as bringing out the transcendence in contrast with the all-pervading immanence of the deity; as checking the pantheistic perversion of this latter truth by which, in turn, its own deistic perversion is checked. God is not only in and through all things; but also outside and above all things; just as Christ is not only the soul of the Church, but also its Head and Ruler. Between these two compensating statements the exact truth is hidden from our eyes.