Part 22

But in what form, it may be asked, or with what limitations, ought the Christian controversialist to avail himself, in this question, of the experience argument? Much ought to depend, I reply, on the position taken up by the opposite side. We find no direct reference made by the author of the “Vestiges” to the anti-miracle argument, first broached by Hume, in a purely metaphysical shape, in his well-known “Inquiry,” and afterwards thrown into the algebraic form by La Place, in his _Essai philosophique sur les Probabilités_. But we do not detect its influences operative throughout the entire work. It is because of some felt impracticability on the part of its author, of attaining to the prevailing belief in the _miracle_ of creation, that he has recourse, instead, to the so-called _law_ of development. The _law_ and the _miracle_ are the alternatives placed before him; and, rejecting the _miracle_, he closes with the _law_. Now, in such circumstances, he can have no more cause of complaint, if, presenting him with the experience argument of Hume and La Place, we demand that he square the evidence regarding the existence of his _law_ strictly according to its requirements, than the soldier of an army that charged its field-pieces with rusty nails would have cause of complaint if he found himself wounded by a missile of a similar kind, sent against him by the artillery of the enemy. You cannot, it might be fairly said, in addressing him, acquiesce in the miracle here, because, as a violation of the laws of nature, there are certain objections, founded on invariable experience, which bear direct against your belief in it. Well, here are the objections, in the strongest form in which they have yet been stated; and here is your hypothesis respecting the development of marine algæ into terrestrial plants. We hold that against that hypothesis the objections bear at least as directly as against any miracle whatever,—nay, that not only is it contrary to an invariable experience, but opposed also to all testimony. We regard it as a mere idle dream. Maillet dreamed it,—and Lamarck dreamed it,—and Oken dreamed it; but none of them did more than merely dream it: its existence rests on exactly the same basis of evidence as that of Whang the miller’s “monstrous pot of gold and diamonds,” of which he dreamed three nights in succession, but which he never succeeded in finding. If we are in error in our estimate, here is the argument, and here the hypothesis; give us, in support of the hypothesis, the amount of evidence, founded on a solid experience, which the argument demands.

But to leave the experience argument in exactly the state in which it was left by Hume and La Place, would be doing no real justice to our subject. It is in that state quite sufficient to establish the fact, that there can be no real escape from belief in _acts of creation_ never witnessed by man, to _processes of development_ never witnessed by man; seeing that a presumed _law_ beyond the cognizance of experience must be as certainly rejected, on the principle of the argument, as a presumed _miracle_ beyond that cognizance. It places the presumed _law_ and the presumed _miracle_ on exactly the same level. But there is a palpable flaw in the anti-miracle argument. It does not prove that miracles _may not have taken place_, but that miracles, whether they have taken place or no, are _not to be credited_, and this simply because they _are_ miracles, _i. e._ violations of the established laws of nature. And if it be possible for events to take place which man, on certain principles, is imperatively required not to credit, these principles must of course serve merely to establish a discrepancy between the actual _state_ of things, and what is to be _believed_ regarding it. And thus, instead of serving purposes of truth, they are made to subserve purposes of error; for the existence of truth in the mind is neither more nor less than the existence of certain conceptions and beliefs, adequately representative of what actually _is_, or what really _has taken place_.

I cannot better illustrate this direct tendency of the anti-miracle argument to destroy truth in the mind, by bringing the mental beliefs into a state of nonconformity with the possible and actual, than by a quotation from La Place himself: “We would not,” he says, “give credit to a man who would affirm that he saw a hundred dice thrown into the air, and that they all fell on the same faces. If we had ourselves been spectators of such an event, we would not believe our own eyes till we had scrupulously examined all the circumstances, and assured ourselves that there was no trick or deception. After such an examination, we would not hesitate to admit it, notwithstanding its great improbability; and no one would have recourse to an inversion of the laws of vision in order to account for it.” Now, here is the principle broadly laid down, that it is impossible to communicate by the evidence of testimony, belief in an event which _might_ happen, and which, if it happened, _ought_ on certain conditions to be credited. No one knew better than La Place himself, that the _possibility_ of the event which he instanced could be represented with the utmost exactitude by figures. The probability, in throwing a single die, that the ace will be presented on its upper face, is as one in six,—six being the entire number of sides which the cube can possibly present, and the side with the ace being one of these;—the probability that in throwing a _pair_ of dice the aces of both will be at once presented on their upper faces, is as one in thirty-six, as against the one sixth chance of the ace being presented by the one, there are also six chances that the ace of the other should not concur with it;—and in throwing _three_ dice, the probability that their three aces should be at once presented is, of course, on the same principle, as one in six times thirty-six, or, in other words, as one in two hundred and sixteen. And thus, in ascertaining the exact degree of probability of the hundred aces at once turning up, we have to go on multiplying by six, for each die we add to the number, the product of the immediately previous calculation. Unquestionably, the number of chances _against_, thus balanced with the single chance _for_, would be very great; but its existence as a definite number would establish, with all the force of arithmetical demonstration, the _possibility_ of the event; and if an eternity were to be devoted to the throwing into the air of the hundred dice, it would occur an _infinite number of times_. And yet the principle of Hume and La Place forms, when adopted, an impassable gulf between this possibility and human belief. The possibility might be embodied, as we see, in an actual occurrence,—an occurrence witnessed by hundreds; and yet the anti-miracle argument, as illustrated by La Place, would cut off all communication regarding it between these hundreds of witnesses, however unexceptionable their character as such, and the rest of mankind. The principle, instead of giving us a right rule through which the beliefs in the mind are to be rendered correspondent with the reality of things, goes merely to establish a certain imperfection of transmission from one mind to another, in consequence of which, realities in fact, if very extraordinary ones, could not possibly be received as objects of belief, nor the mental appreciation of things be rendered adequately concurrent with the state in which the things really existed.

Nor is the case different when, for a _possibility_ which the arithmetician can represent by figures, we substitute the _miracle_ proper. Neither Hume nor La Place ever attempted to show that miracles could not take place; they merely directed their argument against a belief in them. The wildest sceptic must admit, if in any degree a reasonable man, that there _may_ exist a God, and that that God _may_ have given laws to nature. No _demonstration_ of the non-existence of a Great First Cause has been ever yet attempted, nor, until the knowledge of some sceptic extends over all space, ever _can_ be rationally attempted. Merely to _doubt_ the fact of God’s existence, and to give reasons for the doubt, must till then form the highest achievements of scepticism. And the God who _may_ thus exist, and who _may_ have given laws to nature, _may_ also have revealed himself to man, and, in order to secure man’s reasonable belief in the reality of the revelation, _may_ have temporarily suspended in its operation some great natural law, and have thus shown himself to be its Author and Master. Such seems to be the philosophy of miracles; which are thus evidently not only _not_ impossibilities, but even not _improbabilities_. Even were we to permit the sceptic himself to fix the numbers representative of those several _mays_ in the case, which I have just repeated, the chances against them, so to speak, would be less by many thousand times than the chances against the hundred dice of La Place’s illustration all turning up aces. The existence of a Great First Cause is at least as probable—the sceptic himself being judge in the matter—as the _non_-existence of a Great First Cause; and so the probability in this first stage of the argument, instead of being, as in the case of the single die, only one to six, is as one to one. Again,—in accordance with an expectation so general among the human family as to form one of the great instincts of our nature,—an instinct to which every form of religion, true or false, bears evidence,—it is in no degree less probable that this God should have revealed himself to man, than that he should _not_ have revealed himself to man; and here the chances are again as one to one,—not, as in the second stage of the calculation on the dice, as one to thirty-six. Nor, in the third and last stage, is it less probable that God, in revealing himself to man should have given miraculous evidence of the truth of the revelation, so that man “might believe in Him for His work’s sake,” than that He should _not_ have done so; and here yet again the chances are as one to one,—not as one to two hundred and sixteen. No rational sceptic could fix the chances lower; nay, no rational sceptic, so far as the _existence_ of a Great First Cause is concerned, would be inclined to fix them so low: and yet it is in order to annihilate all belief in a possibility against which the chances are so few as to be represented—scepticism itself being the actuary in the case—by three units, that Hume and La Place have framed their argument. Miracles _may_ have taken place,—the probabilities against them, stated in their most extreme and exaggerated form, are by no means many or strong; but we are nevertheless not to believe that they _did_ take place, simply because miracles they were. Now, the effect of the establishment of a principle such as this would be simply, I repeat, the destruction of the ability of transmitting certain beliefs, however well founded originally, from one set or generation of men to another. These beliefs the first set or generation might, on La Place’s own principles, be compelled to entertain. The evidence of the senses, however wonderful the event which they certified, is not, he himself tells us, to be resisted. But the conviction which, on one set of principles, these men were on no account to resist, the men that came immediately after them were, on quite another set of principles, on no account to entertain. And thus the anti-miracle argument, instead of leading, as all true philosophy ought, to an exact correspondence between the realities of things and the convictions received by the mind regarding them, palpably forms a bar to the reception of beliefs, adequate to the possibilities of actual occurrence or event, and so constitutes an imperfection or flaw in the mental economy, instead of working an improvement. And, in accordance with this view, we find that in the economy of minds of the very highest order this imperfection or flaw has had no place. Locke studied and wrote upon the subject of miracles proper, and exhibited in his “Discourse” all the profundity of his extraordinary mind; and yet Locke was a believer. Newton studied and wrote on the subject of miracles of another kind,—those of prophecy; and he also, as shown by his “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse,” was a believer. Butler studied and wrote on the subject of miracles, chiefly in connection with “Miraculous Revelation;” and he also was a believer. Chalmers studied and wrote on the subject of miracles in his “Evidences,” after Hume, La Place, and Playfair had all promulgated their peculiar views regarding it; and he also was a believer. And in none of the truly distinguished men of the present day, though all intimately acquainted with the anti-miracle argument, is this flaw or imperfection found to exist: on the contrary, they all hold, as becomes the philosophic intellect and character, that whatever is possible may occur, and that whatever occurs ought, on the proper evidence, to be believed.

But though the experience argument is of no real force, and, as shown by the beliefs of the higher order of minds, of no real effect, when brought to bear against miracles supported by the proper testimony, _it is_ of great force and effect when brought to bear, not against _miracles_, but against some presumed _law_. It is experience, and experience only, that determines what is or is not law, and it is law, and law only, that constitutes the subject-matter of ordinary experience. Experience, in determining what is really miracle, does so simply through its positive knowledge of law: by knowing law, it knows also what would be a violation of it. And so miracle cannot possibly form the subject-matter of experience in the sense of Hume. For did miracle constitute the subject-matter of experience, the law of which the miracle was a violation _could not_: most emphatically, in this case, were there “no law” there could be “no transgression;” and so experience would be unable to recognize, not only the existence of the law transgressed, but also of the miracle, in its character as such, which was a transgression of the law. We determine from experience that there exists a certain fixed law, known among men as the law of gravitation; and that, in consequence of this law, if a human creature attempt standing upon the sea, he will sink into it; or if he attempt rising from the earth into the heavens, he will remain fixed to the spot on which the attempt is made. Such, in these cases, would be the direct effects of this gravitation _law_; and any presumed law antagonistic in its character could not be other than a law contrary to that invariable experience by which the existence of the real law in the case is determined. But certain it is—for the evidence regarding the facts cannot be resisted, and by the greatest minds has not been resisted—that a man _did_ once walk upon the sea without sinking into it, and _did_ once ascend from the earth into the sky; and these _miracles_ ought not to be tested—and by earnest inquirers after truth really never have been tested—by any experience of the uniformity of the law of which they were professed transgressions, seeing it was essentially and obviously necessary that, in order to serve the great moral purpose which God intended by them, the law which they violated should have been a uniform law, and that they should have been palpable violations of it. But while the experience argument is thus of no value when directed against well-attested _miracle_, it is, as I have said, all-potent when directed against presumed _law_. Of law we know nothing, I repeat, except what experience tells us. A miracle contrary to experience in the sense of Hume is simply a miracle; a presumed law contrary to experience is no law at all. For it is from experience, and experience only, that we know any thing of natural law. The argument of Hume and La Place is perfect, as such, when directed against the development visions of the Lamarckian.

THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE. OLDER THAN ITS ALLEGED FOUNDATIONS.

When Maillet first promulgated his hypothesis, many of the departments of natural history existed as mere regions of fable and romance; and, in addressing himself to the _Muscadins_ of Paris, in a popular work as wild and amusing as a fairy tale, he could safely take the liberty, and he did take it very freely, of exaggerating the marvellous, and adding fresh fictions to the untrue. And in preparing them for his theory of the metamorphoses of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation, he set himself, in accordance with his general character, to show that really the transmutation did not amount to much. “I know you have resided a long time,” his Indian Philosopher is made to say, “at Marseilles. Now, you can bear me witness, that the fishermen there daily find in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these fruits are not so large and so well nourished as those of our earth, yet the species of these plants is in no other respect dubious. They there find clusters of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers. When in that city, I saw, in the cabinet of a curious gentleman, a prodigious number of those sea-productions of different qualities, especially of rose-trees, which had their roses very red when they came out of the sea. I was there presented with a cluster of black sea-grapes. It was at the time of the vintage, and there were two grapes perfectly ripe.”

Now, all this, and much more of the same nature, addressed to the Parisians of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth, passed, I doubt not, wonderfully well; but it will not do now, when almost every young girl, whether in town or country, is a botanist, and works on the algæ have become popular. Since Maillet wrote, Hume promulgated his argument on Miracles, and La Place his doctrine of Probabilities. There can be no doubt that these have exerted a wholesome influence on the laws of evidence; and by these laws, as restricted and amended,—laws to which, both in science and religion, we ourselves conform,—we insist on trying the Lamarckian hypothesis, and in condemning it,—should it be found to have neither standing in experience nor support from testimony,—as a mere feverish dream, incoherent in its parts and baseless in its fabric. Give, we ask, but one well-attested instance of transmutation from the algæ to even the lower forms of terrestrial vegetation common on our sea-coasts, and we will keep the question open, in expectation of more. It will not do to tell us—as Cuvier was told, when he appealed to the fact, determined by the mummy birds and reptiles of Egypt, of the fixity of species in all, even the slightest particulars, for at least three thousand years—that immensely extended periods of time are necessary to effect specific changes, and that human observation has not been spread over a period sufficiently ample to furnish the required data regarding them. The apology is simply a confession that, in these ages of the severe inductive philosophy, you have been dreaming your dream, cut off, as if by the state of sleep, from all the tangibilities of the real waking-day world, and that you have not a vestige of testimony with which to support your ingenious vagaries.

But on another account do we refuse to sustain the excuse. It is _not true_ that human observation has not been spread over a period sufficiently extended to furnish the necessary data for testing the development hypothesis. In one special walk,—that which bears on the supposed transmutation of algæ into terrestrial plants,—human observation _has_ been spread over what is strictly analogous to _millions_ of years. For extent of space in this matter is exactly correspondent with duration of time. No man, in this late period of the world’s history, attains to the age of five hundred years; and as some of our larger English oaks have been known to increase in bulk of trunk and extent of bough for five centuries together, no man can possibly have seen the same huge oak pass, according to Cowper, through its various stages of “treeship,”—

“First a seedling hid in grass; Then twig; then sapling; and, as century rolls Slow after century, a giant bulk, Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root Upheaved above the soil, and sides embossed With prominent wens globose.”

But though no man lives throughout five hundred years of time, he can trace, by passing in some of the English forests through five hundred yards of space, the history of the oak in all its stages of growth, as correctly as if he _did_ live throughout the five hundred years. Oaks, in the space of a few hundred yards, may be seen in every stage of growth, from the newly burst acorn, that presents to the light its two fleshy lobes, with the first tender rudiments of a leaflet between, up to the giant of the forest, in the hollow of whose trunk the red deer may shelter, and find ample room for the broad spread of his antlers. The fact of the development of the oak, from the minute two-lobed seedling of a week’s growth up to the gigantic tree of five centuries, is as capable of being demonstrated by observation spread over five hundred yards of space, as by observation spread over five hundred years of time. And be it remembered, that the sea-coasts of the world are several hundred thousand miles in extent. Europe is by far the smallest of the earth’s four large divisions, and it is bounded, in proportion to its size, by a greater extent of land than any of the others. And yet the sea-coasts of Europe alone, including those of its islands, exceed twenty-five thousand miles. We have results before us, in this extent of space, identical with those of many hundred thousand years of time; and if terrestrial plants were as certainly developments of the low plants of the sea as the huge oak is a development of the immature seedling, just sprung from the acorn, so vast a stretch of sea-coast could not fail to present us with the intermediate vegetation in all its stages. But the sea-coasts fail to exhibit even a vestige of the intermediate vegetation. Experience spread over an extent of space analogous to millions of years of time, does not furnish, in this department, a single fact corroborative of the development theory, but, on the contrary, many hundreds of facts that bear directly against it.