Part 4

Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passed and treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can give us a history of religion or of religions. But there is something underlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evades all attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attempts to explain away our conviction of our own personal identity have invariably failed and will for ever fail to satisfy human consciousness, so too the strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot be got out of phenomena at all. No analysis succeeds in obliterating the fundamental distinction between moral and physical law; or in enabling us to escape the ever increasing sense of the dignity of the former, or in shutting our ears to the still small voice which is totally unlike every other voice within or without. To bring the Moral Law under the dominion of Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing more than one of the phenomena of human nature, it is necessary to treat the sentiment of reverence which it excites, the remorse which follows on disobedience to its commands, the sense of its supremacy, as delusions. It is always possible so to treat these things; but only at the cost of standing lower in the scale of being.

But we have one step further to take. For as the spiritual faculty is the recipient directly or indirectly of that original revelation which God has made of Himself to His rational creatures, so too this appears to be the only faculty which can take cognizance of any fresh revelation that it might please Him to make. If He commands still further duties than those commanded by the supreme Moral Law, if He bids us believe what our reason cannot deduce from the primal belief in that Law and in Himself, it is to that faculty that the command is issued. If over and above the original religion as we may call it there is a revealed religion, it is the spiritual faculty that can alone accept it. Such a revelation may be confirmed by signs or proofs in the world of phenomena. He who is absolute over all nature may compel nature to bear witness to His teaching. The spiritual may burst through the natural on occasion, and that supremacy, which underlies all nature and which is necessarily visible to intelligences that are capable of seeing things as they are in themselves, may force itself into the world of phenomena and show itself in that manner to us. But this always is and must be secondary. The spiritual faculty alone can receive and judge of spiritual truth, and if that faculty be not reached a truly religious belief is not yet attained.

External evidences of revealed religion must have a high place but cannot have the highest. A revealed religion must depend for its permanent hold on our obedience and our duty on its fastening upon our spiritual nature, and if it cannot do that no evidences can maintain it in its place.

This account of the fundamental beliefs of Religion when compared with the fundamental postulates of Science shows that the two begin with the same part of our nature but proceed by opposite methods. Both begin with the human will as possessing a permanent identity and exerting a force of its own. But from this point they separate. Science rests on phenomena observed by the senses; Religion on the voice that speaks directly from the other world. Science postulates uniformity and is excluded wherever uniformity can be denied, but compels conviction within the range of its own postulate. Religion demands the submission of a free conscience, and uses no compulsion but that imposed by its own inherent dignity. Science gives warnings, and if you are capable of understanding scientific argument, you will be incapable of disbelieving the warnings. Certain things will poison you; certain neglects will ruin your health; disregard of scientific construction will bring your roof down on your head; to enter a burning building will risk your life; some of these things you may learn by ordinary experience, some of them by that combination of experience which is called Science. But if you are capable of the necessary reasoning you cannot doubt, however much you may wish to do so. And yet to defy these warnings and take the inevitable consequences of that defiance may be your highest glory. Religion also gives warnings; it assures you that the Eternal Moral Law is supreme; that, sooner or later, those who disobey will find their disobedience is exactly and justly punished; that no appearance to the contrary presented by experience can be trusted. But Religion will not compel you to believe any more than Science will compel you to obey. Disbelieve if you choose and Religion will do nothing but perpetually repeat its warnings and add that your disbelief has lowered you in the scale of being. So too Science gives promises; it promises, to the race rather than to the individual, life on easier conditions, and of greater length; fewer pains, fewer diseases; perpetually increasing comforts; perpetually increasing power over nature. And Science is sure to keep the promises. And yet we may refuse to accept the promises, and it is conceivable that the refusal may be far nobler than the acceptance. And Religion promises also. It promises stainless purity in the soul; and truth and justice and unfailing love; and tenderness to every creature that can feel; and a government of all that is under our dominion with a single eye to the service of God. And we may refuse to believe these promises or to care whether they are kept or not. But the refusal or pursuit of such aims as these determines our position in the judgment of the Supreme and in the court of our own conscience.

God has made man in His own image: that is, He has given man power to understand His works and to acknowledge Himself. And it is in acknowledging God that man finds himself divine. He is a partaker of the divine nature in proportion as he recognises the Supreme Law and makes it the law of his own will. And therefore has his will been made free as well as his mind rational: he has the power to choose as well as the power to know. And our choice lays hold on God Himself and makes us one with Him.

LECTURE III.

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL.

Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler's examination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution. Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interference of the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixed nature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life.

LECTURE III.

APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL.

'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him.' _Genesis_ i. 27.

Religion and Science both begin with the human will. The will is to Science the first example of power, the origin of the conception of cause; the bodily effort made by the will lies at the root of the conception of force. It is by comparing other forces with that force that Science begins its march. And the will is to religion the recipient of the Divine command. To the will the inner voice addresses itself, bidding it act and believe. It is because we have a will that we are responsible. In a world in which there were no creatures endowed with a will, there could be no right-doing or wrong-doing; no approval by conscience and no disapproval; no duty and no faith.

Here is the first possibility of collision between Science and Religion. Science postulates uniformity; Religion postulates liberty. Science cannot ever hope to reduce all phenomena to unity if a whole class of phenomena, all those that belong to the action of human will, are to be excluded from the postulate of invariable sequence. The action of the will is in this case for ever left outside. The evidence for the absolute uniformity of nature seems to be shaken, when it is found that there is so important a part of phenomena to which this law of uniformity cannot be applied. If a human will can thus interfere with the law of uniformity, there enters the possibility that behind some phenomena may lurk the interference of some other will. Religion, on the other hand, tells every man that he is responsible, and how can he be responsible if he is not free? If his action be determined by something which is not himself, how can the moral burden of it be put on him? To tell a man that he is to answer for it if he does something which he is tempted to do, is unmeaning, if he has no power to prevent himself from doing it.

But this is not all. For besides the sense of responsibility we have a direct consciousness of being free, a consciousness which no reasoning appears to extinguish. We sharply distinguish between that which goes on within us in regard to which we are free and that in regard to which we are not free. We cannot help being angry, but we can control our anger. We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain our indulgence or our pursuit of them. We cannot directly determine our affections, but we can cherish or discourage them. There are extreme cases in which our wills seem powerless, but even here we are conscious of our power to struggle for self-assertion and self-control. There is very much in us which is not free; nay, there is much in us which impels us to action which is not free. But we never confound this with our wills, and when our wills are overpowered by passion or appetite, we call the act no longer a perfectly free act, and do not consider the responsibility for it to be quite the same.

This question of the freedom of the will was considered by Bishop Butler in the Analogy. He contented himself with proving that, make what theory we would concerning the necessity of human action, all men in practice acted on the theory of human freedom. We promise; we accept promises; we punish; we reward; we estimate character; we admire; we shun; we deal with ourselves; we deal with others; as if we and all others were free. And this was enough for his purpose. For he had to reconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense of justice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishments were plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealings with one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with that sense of justice in God's dealings with us.

But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that for two reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was most often in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divine foreknowledge arranging everything by supreme Will, not from the conception of a blind mechanical rule holding all in its unrelaxing grasp. And though to the cold reason it may make no difference how the will is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the two kinds of compulsion differ as life and death. To have no liberty because of being absolutely in the hands of Almighty God is quite another thing from having no liberty, as being under the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seems possible to accept the one and call it an unfathomable mystery; but to accept the other is to call life a delusion and the moral law a dream. And in the second place, the doctrine of necessity advanced as a theory and based on arguments not resting on facts, is a very different antagonist from the same doctrine advanced as a conclusion of science, and as deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observations. We may dismiss the mere theory after showing that it has not substance enough to hold its ground in ordinary life. We cannot so treat what claims to be a scientific inference.

The modern examination of the question begins with Hume, who maintains that the doctrine of liberty and that of necessity are both true and of course compatible with each other. But his arguments touch only the broad question whether they are true for practical purposes, not whether either is true in the strict sense and without exception or modification. To Kant's system, on the contrary, it was essential that both doctrines should be true in the strictest sense. Holding that invariable sequence was a law of Nature known independently of experience and applicable to all phenomena in the minutest detail, he could not allow that any act of the human will lay outside the range of this law. Such an act being a phenomenon must, in his view, be subject to the law which the constitution of our minds imposed on all phenomena apparent to us. And yet, on the other hand, holding that the eternal Moral Law made us responsible for all our acts, he could not but maintain that in the doing of those acts we must be free. His mode of reconciling the two opposites amounted to this, that our action throughout life considered as a whole is free, but that each separate act considered by itself is bound to the preceding acts by the law of invariable sequence. We may illustrate this by the familiar instance of a prism acting on a ray of light. The ray has or may have a colour of its own before it passes through the prism. The prism spreads it out and shows a series of colours. The order in which this series is arranged is determined by the character of the prism acting on the nature of the ray. The colours when combined give the colour of the ray; when separated by the prism each has its own distinct character, and the order of the colours is determined, and invariably determined, by the prism. So too in Kant's view the character of a man in itself may be free, but when it passes through the prism of time into the world of phenomena and is spread over many years it shows a number of separate actions, no one of which taken by itself exhibits the man, though all put together are the true representation of him to human perception. The man is free. His life represents his free choice. But his separate acts are what that free choice becomes when translated into a series of phenomena, and are bound each to the preceding by the law of invariable sequence. It is plain at once that this does not satisfy our consciousness. We are not conscious of freedom as regards our life as a whole; we are conscious of freedom as regards our separate actions. Our life as a whole embraces our past which is absolutely unchangeable, and our future which is not yet within our reach; we are conscious of no present power over either. Our separate acts are perceptibly subject to our own control; nay, it is by the use of our free-will in our separate acts that we are able to change the character of our life or to preserve it from change; and with this corresponds our responsibility. We hold ourselves responsible for each act as it is done; we hold ourselves responsible for the character of our lives only so far as we might have changed it by our acts. The solution leaves the difficulty where it was.

It is now customary with the advocates of the doctrine of necessity to express it by a different word, and call it the doctrine of determinism. The purpose of changing the word is to get rid of all associations with the idea of compulsion; just so in Science it is thought better to get rid of the words cause and effect, and substitute invariable sequence, in order to get rid of the notion of some compulsion recognisable by us in the cause to produce the effect. Determinism does not say to a man 'you will be forced to act in a particular way;' but 'you will assuredly do so.' There will be no compulsion; but the action is absolutely certain. Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse the sun, so in given circumstances you will do the precise thing which it is your character in such circumstances to do. And your sense of freedom is simply the sense that the action proceeds from yourself and not from any force put upon you from without.

But this too does not solve the problem. It is true that in regard to a very large proportion of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be no more than negative. We do what it is our custom, our inclination, our character to do. We are not conscious of any force being put upon us; but neither are we conscious of using any force ourselves. We float as it were down the stream, or hurry along with a determined aim, but having no desire nor purpose to the contrary, the question of freedom or necessity never seems to arise. It is even possible and common for us not to know ourselves as well as others know us, and to do many things which an observer would predict as sure to be our actions, but which we ourselves fancy to be by no means certain. Even in these cases we sometimes awake to the fact that what we are thus allowing in our lives is not consistent with the law of duty, and, do what we may, we cannot then escape the conviction that we are to blame, and that we had power to act otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the power. But it is when a conflict arises between duty and inclination that our inner certainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear and unconquerable. In the great conflicts of the soul between the call of duty and the power of temptation there are two forces at work upon us. We are never for a moment in doubt which is ourselves and which is not ourselves; which is the free agent and which is the blind force; which is responsible for the issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. There is in this case a real sense of compulsion from without, and a real sense of resistance to that compulsion from within. It is impossible in this case to account for the sense of being a free agent, by saying that this merely means that we are conscious of no external force. We are conscious of an external force and we are conscious that this will of ours which struggles against it is not an external force, but our very selves, and this distinction between the will and the forces against which the will is striving is ineffaceable from our minds. That the will is often weak and on that account overpowered, and that after a hard struggle our actions are often determined, not by our wills but by our passions or our appetites, is unquestionable. Often has the believer to pray to God for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and often will he feel that without that strength he must inevitably fall. But he knows that whatever source may supply the strength, it is he that will have to use it, and he that will be responsible for using it or neglecting to do so.

The advocates of determinism urge that every action must have a motive, and that the man always acts on that motive which is the stronger. The first proposition may be granted at once. The freedom of the will is certainly not shown in acting without any motive at all. If there be any human action which appears to be without any motive, it is not in such action that we find human freedom. Such action, if possible at all, must inevitably be mechanical. A man who is acting from mere caprice is even more completely at the mercy of passing inclination than one who is acting from passion or from overpowering temptation. The freedom of the will is not shown in acting without motive, but in choosing between motives. But when it is further said that a man always acts from the stronger motive, the question immediately follows, what determines which is the stronger motive? It cannot be anything in the motives themselves, or all men would act alike in the same circumstances; and it is clear that they do not. It must be therefore something in the man. And if it be something in the man, it must be either his will acting at the moment, which in that case is free, or his character. But if it be his character, then follows the further question, what determines his character? If we are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we must answer by assigning the determination to the sum total of surrounding and preceding circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law of uniformity but this; that, given such and such parents, such and such circumstances of birth and life, there must be such a character and no other. At what point is there room in this case for any responsibility? I did not on this supposition make my character; it was made for me; any one else born in my stead, and living in my stead, would of necessity have acted exactly as I have done; would have felt the same, and aimed at the same, and won the same moral victories, and suffered the same moral defeats. How can I be held responsible for what is the pure result of the circumstances in which I was born? But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedents and surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, and yet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would have altogether differed.

It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty. Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and in regard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchased completeness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to be accounted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spite of all attempts to explain it away, the fact that we think ourselves free and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains unaffected.

But let us examine how far the difference between the scientific view and the religious view of human action extends.

Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of human action, much even of that which appears at first sight to be more especially independent of all law, is really as much regulated by laws of nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed out how often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the man himself, and how often the will is certainly passive and consents instead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to deny that nature and not the will is producing the conduct. And not only so, but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number of suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds, cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for another, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter a university, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) which can be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable as far as it goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for the uniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all the universality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls far short of proving as much uniformity in human action as is proved in the action of inanimate things. The induction which proves the uniformity of the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than the induction which proves the uniformity of human conduct, that it is hardly possible to put the two side by side. When we turn from abstract arguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is unquestionably unproven.