In spite of the lucid and far-reaching reasoning of Hume, which aimed
at effacing causality from our conceptions of phenomena, and making
invariable sequence supplant it; in spite of Auguste Comte’s stern
effort to ‘get rid of the vain pretension to investigate the causes
of phenomena,’ and the affirmation that ‘forces are only movements,
produced or tending to produce;’ nay, in spite of all the logical
effort of all the following years, there remains unaltered, that
inalienable property of the human mind, consciousness of power;
the ability to realize ‘I can’ simultaneously with ‘I am.’ In this
originates our universal explanation of external phenomena. Because
we can act and produce phenomena, we infer that all phenomena were
inevitably produced by some transcendent but equivalent act of
conscious power. If we think of a plane surface or a sphere, we can
only think of them as occupants of space: so, if we think of the light
beams of Sirius, or the motion of Mars, we realize the normal necessity
of thinking of them ultimately as caused. This is an inevitable
sequence of our consciousness, reason, and experience. A phenomenon
appearing in time evokes the mental demand for something which is not
that phenomenon, but without which it would not have existed.
In this lies the insatiable desire of mind to peer into the origin of,
and reason for, the existence of this universe. Deepening knowledge
brings broader light and expanding mystery, but this only quickens the
intellectual purpose of the race to seek to solve the problem, why
we are circled with the splendid phenomena of heaven and earth, and
possessed of the mystery of ourselves?
But to meet this mental demand is no part of the business of science.
The study of phenomena, their succession and their classification, is
the essential work of science. It has no function, and is possessed of
no instrument with which to look behind or below the sequence, in quest
of some higher relation. The eye and the mind of the experimentalist
know only of antecedent and consequent. These fill the whole circle
of his research; let him find these, and he has found all. But
since a cause is no more a phenomenon, than a thought is a material
manifestation, that which fills the whole circumference claimed by
science does _not_ fill all the area legitimately held by reason. A
prevision of the order, and the methods of the changes of the universe,
is the ideal of science. But mind in its entirety refuses to be locked
within such limits. It looks deeper than sequences, and farther back
than phenomena; it demands, by the very laws of its existence, their
cause. A continuity of transformed causes undoubtedly explains a wide,
and ever-widening area of sequences. But that cannot annul the demand
of reason for causation. It simply drives it farther back, and higher
up, and indicates that the modes of action and relation originated by
the primal cause are only the more sublimely rhythmic. Count this a
lingering survival of ‘mere metaphysics’ who will, it is withal so
stalwart, so perennial in our consciousness, amidst all vicissitudes of
knowledge and reasoning, that whatever science may do, philosophy must
give it audience.
The researches of science, then, are physical. The observable, finite
contents of space and time are the subjects of its analysis. Existence,
not the cause of existence, succession, not the reason of succession,
method, not the origin of method, are the subjects of physical
research. A primordial cause cannot be the subject of experiment nor
the object of demonstration. It must for ever transcend the most
delicate physical reaction, the profoundest analysis, and the last link
in the keenest logic. Absolute knowledge concerning it can only be the
prerogative of itself.
But human reason is not only, and wholly, concerned with the brilliant
records of physical enquiry: it is conscious of powers within itself
that transcend and elude all the processes of physics, and the analyses
of mathematics. The activities of the mind are not exhausted, the
demands of the mind are not met, the persistent questions of reason
are not answered, by all the processes, all the products, and all the
possibilities of physical research combined.
Science refuses absolutely to recognise mind as the primal cause of
the sequences of matter. This is just;—within the strict region of its
research; for phenomena, their sequences and classification, are its
sole domain. But observe, science, universally, puts _force_ where the
reason asks for cause. The forces affecting matter are tacitly assumed
to be competent to account for every activity, every sequence, every
phenomenon, and all the harmonies of universal being. A nexus for the
infinite diversities and harmonies, a basis for all the equilibrium of
nature, is found by modern science in force. But force is as absolutely
inscrutable as mind. Force can never be known in itself; it is known by
its manifestations. It is not a phenomenon; it produces phenomena. We
cannot know it; but we know nothing without it.
Then the ultimate analysis of physical science is the relations of
force and matter. But force is a subject of knowledge to science
only in its manifestations; that is, motion. In irreducible terms,
therefore, the final analysis of science is _matter as affected by
motion_. These—matter and motion—are held by many advanced physicists
to be the primary elements of all phenomena; the most minute, subtile,
and occult reaction, and the most majestic cosmic manifestation are
held to be explained by these. Thus the whole cosmos, with its infinite
complexities and harmonies, arose in space, and is in space, because of
the affections of matter by motion. To search out the motions on which
all changes are based, to reduce all the activities of the universe,
from the awful movement of a constellation, to the rhythmic swing of
an atom; from the origin of mind, and the writing of Faust, to the
building of a snow crystal, or the production of a flower, to sheer
mechanics—matter affected by motion—is held to be the chief mission of
science.
But examine for a moment the nature of the problem. The matter with
which analysis is thus finally concerned cannot be matter as we know
it. It is the existing _properties_ or _qualities_ of matter that
affect us. Matter is hard, it is yellow, it is sweet. Now the very
qualities that _make_ matter as we know it are demonstrated by modern
science to be but ‘modes of motion;’ matter is hot because the ultimate
atoms of it vibrate in a special manner. The yellowness of an object is
not in _it_, but in our percipient faculty. That which is yellow emits
certain light vibrations only; these affect the retina in a special
manner, and this affection we call the perception of yellowness. It is
thus with all the qualities of matter.
Then what can that ‘matter’ be with which the physicist must ultimately
and in the beginning deal? When matter is divested of all its
qualities, divested in thought of all the ‘modes of motion’ by which
it manifests itself to us, what is it? Is it mass, wholly incapable
of affecting our senses? Matter _sine perceptione_? That cannot be a
thing, it is an abstraction, and he must be something more than a bold
man, who would logically infer an actual factor, corresponding to the
abstract conception.
Manifestly, then, physical science and its methods cannot illuminate
and explain all the dilating area of space, and flow of time, with
which our consciousness and reason are concerned. Shapes and motion,
form and number, are not data that can carry us to the origin of the
universe. You must import an unacknowledged factor. Force stands
ready: if you endow _it_, in imagination equipped in the uniform of
science, with the very qualities of mind, no doubt you may cross
the boundary of experimental science, and see in matter affected by
motion the possibility of all that is. But, says Professor Huxley,
‘_Kraft und Stoff_—force and matter—are paraded as the Alpha and
Omega of existence. This, I apprehend, is the fundamental article of
the faith materialistic, and whosoever does not hold it is condemned
by the more zealous of the persuasion (as I have some reason to know)
to the Inferno appointed for fools and hypocrites. But all this,’ he
continues, ‘I heartily disbelieve; and ... I will briefly give my
reasons for persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, ... it
seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe,
to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my heart or head, I
cannot see to be matter, or force, or any conceivable modification
of either, however intimately the manifestations of the phenomena of
consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as matter
and force. In the second place, the arguments used by Descartes and
Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend beyond our
states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now as
they did when I first became acquainted with them, some half-century
ago. All the materialistic writers I know of, who have tried to bite
that file, have simply broken their teeth. But if this is true, our
one certainty is the existence of the mental world; and that of
_Kraft und Stoff_ falls into the rank of, at best, a highly probable
hypothesis.’[1]
[Footnote 1: _Fortnightly Review_, No. ccxl., new series, December
1886, p. 794.]
Look, then, at the striking incongruity. With no explanation of matter
without qualities; with no indication of how motion could arise and
become rhythmic and infinitely harmonious; with the distinct knowledge
that, when the physicist wants to demonstrate matter, he is compelled
to do it in terms of motion; and, when he would prove the presence of
motion, he can only do it in terms of matter; with all these fetters
to our mental movement, and clouds before our eyes, it is argued that,
by carrying the discoverable and apparently self-acting affections
of matter by motion far enough back, we can explain the origin and
structure of the universe.
I would repeat, that in such a mental effort, it is vain to seek
logical aid from the employment of the word ‘force.’ We have seen that
the only scientific idea of force we can ever have, is motion. Motion
is the result of ever-varying relations, borne to each other by matter,
space, and time. At a given instant a body is here; in a measurable
interval after, it is not here, but yonder. ‘Motion’ carries with it no
occult constructive power. It is change of place, and no more.
Is it not inevitable, then, that the mind should refuse its sanction
to the claim, that ‘the problem of the universe’ is solved by these
feeble factors? ‘If I were forced,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘to choose
between Materialism and Idealism, I should elect for the latter;’[2]
and truly, if our choice must be between them, this is the normal
alternative.
[Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, December 1886, p. 796.]
The loftiest object of human thought is to discover how far the
material universe is en expression of supreme unity, of rhythmic
activity, and of rational order. But for this, the mind must take a
range that transcends, without limit, all physical sequences, laws,
phenomena. Taking the broad basis of our consciousness and reasoning
faculties, we must _relate_ sequences, _interpret_ phenomena, and,
however remotely and imperfectly, endeavour to account for ‘laws.’ But
in doing this we must remember that we have pushed our way beyond
the last outpost of _physical_ research. We have passed beyond the
region where ‘quod erat demonstrandum’ is used. We have threaded our
mental path into solitudes where no electrometer will be responsive, no
spectroscope analytical, no lens revealing. We have come to the edge
of all that we _know_ and can _demonstrate_; and then, impelled by the
moral and rational light within us, we judge and balance all that we
know, and all that we are, and we reach, not a demonstration, for that
cannot be, but a conviction, a moral and intellectual certainty, of
the being of a primordial cause, which is second, in its firmness and
security, to nothing within the area of mind.
Since the time of Newton and Leibnitz the laws of ordinary dynamics
have been settled; but between dynamics, and the so-called
‘imponderable forces,’ by which it was assumed that an explanation was
furnished of heat, chemical action, electricity, magnetism and the
rest, there was a great gulf. That has been bridged over by a common
measure of value, giving rise to a general dynamic law of all the
forces of the universe. This is known as the ‘Conservation of Energy.’
It demonstrates, with more or less completeness, that all physical
phenomena are the different appearances resulting from different
groupings of matter by force. Both matter and force are eternally
changeless in quantity. They can be neither diminished nor increased,
neither created nor destroyed. The ‘modes of motion’ that produce the
varied phenomena are interchangeable. Light may become heat, heat
may become electricity; but there is no loss. When motion seems to
disappear, it is only transferred into another mode. The phenomena
of light, heat, electricity, result from changes wrought in matter
by motion. Every ray of sunshine, for instance, is an interwoven
group of powerful energies. Whence do they come? From changes in the
matter of the sun. For every measure of sunshine received by the
earth an equivalent measure of solar matter has been changed. Through
the sunbeam the varied forms of energy produced in the sun have been
received, and stored up on this earth. For incalculable centuries
the world has been clothed with abundant vegetation. This will only
grow in sunlight. The energies in the sunbeam act on living matter,
as on a spore or a seed, causing it to grow. That is to say, under
the influence of vital action, the forces of the sunbeam are changed
into wood. A section from a pine mast, or an oak trunk, stands for
a measurable quantity of sunshine. But coal is wood; forests buried
and carbonized. Coal then has, as it were, fixed the energies of the
sunbeams that poured upon the earth millions of years ago. Put coal
where it will be in contact with oxygen and heat, and what follows?
You get heat, light, chemical action; that is to say, the locked-up
energies of the sunbeams of a measureless past are set free.
Here then, all the activity of the universe, every phenomenon, and
every vibration of every atom, from the centre to the margin of the
immeasurable whole, is directly related to a unity of primal power.
Nothing has happened to-day in the remotest or nearest part of
creation, but was linked in an unbroken chain to the first throb that
thrilled the incipient universe in the mystery of ‘the beginning.’
Nothing is isolated through all duration and all space. Because,
everywhere and always, the resulting phenomena are self-acting and
rhythmic to our mode of research, shall we say that they have no cause,
or that they have determined their own condition? because we find that
the self-adjustments and sublimity of Nature, transcend infinitely all
the conceptions of earlier generations, will it be logical to argue,
that therefore Nature may be the more readily explained as causeless
and devoid of mind? that, being self-adjusting and self-acting, it
needed no cause? or shall we not the rather realize that this unbroken
line of physical continuity and interaction through all duration to
‘the beginning’ brings us _there_, face to face, with the inscrutable
Power, by which that unchanging unity and continuity of purposeful
action was caused?
Every phenomenon is motion; motion can only begin in force. Within the
range of human experience and thought, as it has been long without
answer contended, there is no force known but _will_: could any other
cause than the volition of a mind, have primarily directed force to
affect matter so as to produce, for ever, the infinite harmonies and
self-adjusting interactions of this vast Universe?
The very intellect, which finds so noble a vocation in the researches
of science, and which is so brilliantly employed in penetrating into,
and opening up, the _intelligibility_ of the physical universe; and
by that means demonstrating the _congruousness_ of the cosmos; is the
same intellect that is conscious of _itself_, and of its _power_;
which knows itself as possessed of causative capacity; and which
has absolutely no other source of knowledge concerning power, save
that which arises in itself. The very rationality of the Creation,
in our deepest analysis and broadest survey of it, leads the mind,
by the conditions inseverable from its reasoning faculties, to see
in its perfect relations the inevitable congruity of an intelligent
cause. And all this, be it observed, results _after_ science has
disclosed the splendid treasures of its knowledge, the beauty and
indisputable accuracy of its methods, and the new senses with which
it has endowed itself by its instruments. Yes; the mind goes out to
this conclusion, not defiant of science, but gratefully paying toll to
it for an infinitely enlightening and ennobling passage through the
marvels of phenomena, and the splendour of Nature’s methods, right
to the very margin, beyond which science herself declares she cannot
go; and although the physicist may declare he does not need it, and
the mathematician that he can dispense with it, although all their
immediate problems can be worked without it, yet the mind goes forth
on the wings of its rational powers, its moral consciousness, its
judgment; and leaving the margin of matter, it seeks audience, as it
were, with the very mystery that enshrouds the universe; and it rises
to the conviction that its quest has not been vain; it has realized,
dimly, imperfectly, and, as it were, faint with awe, the necessity of
the presence and action of Eternal Mind.
No search into the relations of matter and motion can ever affect our
consciousness of causality. We cannot be conscious of our own being
without being simultaneously conscious that whatever begins to be, must
have a cause, a reason, for its being. The very validity of our mental
acts is imperilled, if the congruity of the principle of causality
be doubted. Permit an illustration: a minute and beautiful crystal
of unknown nature is before us. By a mental necessity we know—we
cannot free ourselves from the conviction—that this crystal occupied a
measurable time to become a crystal, and that being such, it occupies
a measurable portion of space. May we rely on this fundamental act of
mind? Is it truth? If not, there is not a mental act that ever was,
or ever can be, veritable. But if it be true, then, since for man to
produce a physical effect involves (1) the consciousness of _power_ to
do it, and (2) the volitional exercise of that power; and since the
human mind is absolutely without a trace of knowledge of any other
way in which power can be exercised, in earth or heaven; is not the
insistence of reason that there must be a cause for cosmic phenomena, a
mental act of the _same order_ as that which insists on time and space
as inseverable factors in the origin and existence of a crystal?
Causality in its mere mechanical relations may be considered for
convenience, and translated as, ‘mechanical law:’ contemplated in its
relation to a living organism, we may render it by such an expression
as a ‘law of life’. But carry causality to its spring, trace it back to
consciousness and thought, and it admits of no disguise; it is power,
it is volition; there is no halting in its phrase; it is, ‘I can,’ ‘I
will.’
Herbert Spencer himself affirms, ‘The force by which we ourselves
produce changes, and which serves to symbolize the causes of changes in
general, is the final disclosure of analysis.’[3] ‘I can,’ ‘I am able,’
is a knowledge that emerges within us simultaneously with ‘I am.’ It
involves a consciousness of power, which is the essence of causality.
We possess it, in precisely the same way as we possess ourselves, or
our thoughts. Our knowledge of power is not even derived from effort
or resistance. We know as clearly what we mean by ‘I am able,’ as we
do when we affirm ‘I am here.’ Being able, and _knowing_ we are able,
are absolutely different. A telephone is mechanically able to transmit
vocal sounds and language. But how different to man, who is not only
able, but knows that he is able. This knowledge of our power to act is
the immutable foundation of our belief in causation.
[Footnote 3: _First Principles_, §50, pp. 169, 170.]
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.
Surely an outside influence must be caused? If it involved no more
energy than is wielded by a may-fly’s wing, how came it there? It is
as easy to admit the _self-origination_ of a divinity of power, as the
_self-creation_ of power to lift a grain. It is not in the philosophy;
‘outside influence’ has no credentials, and the admission of inability
to evolve the universe without it, is an admission that the mechanical
philosophy fails at the outset. Nor can it serve the emergency to
invoke ‘force.’
A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the
Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the
Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force _does_, but
it can no more find what force _is_, than what an infinite mind is.
Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but
its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science.
It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern
chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the
beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. Let us remember this, while for
the purposes of argument we allow it. There may have been secured,
added, and perhaps altered, motion by the surreptitious ‘outside
influence;’ but it can be nothing more. The atoms are still without
property, and are only affected by motion. Have we any _experience_
to induce us to believe that atoms without property, even affected
by thermal vibrations and pushed by gravity, will build themselves
up into the seventy ‘elements’ of chemistry with their specific and
inalienable qualities? That, through vibrations of heat and pushings
of gravity, they could become hydrogen and mercury, carbon and gold,
chlorine and phosphorus! And these properties being thus acquired, by
their sheer interactions that all the chemistry, the physics, and the
_order_ of all the area of space within the galaxy arose? This is what
the formula of the most brilliant philosophy of any age would lead us
to infer.
In this relation I do not forget the recent and splendid service done
by Mr. Crooks to the philosophical side of chemistry in the record of
his researches on ‘The Genesis of the Elements.’ It is a most subtile
and exquisite means of endeavouring to deduce the _method_, the ‘_law_’
according to which what we know as the ‘chemical elements’ were built
up. He obtains indications of a primitive element—a something out of
which the elements were evolved. He calls it _protyle_ or first stuff,
and from its presence he concludes that the elements, as we know them,
‘are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance,
or been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been
evolved from simpler matter—or perhaps indeed from one sole kind of
matter.’[14]
[Footnote 14: Reprint of a Lecture at the Royal Institution by Mr.
Crooks, p. 2.]
But this reduction of matter, as we know it, to a simpler but still
highly differentiated condition, only causes reason the more earnestly
to demand how the rhythmic and complex method, which we express by the
word ‘law,’ came into operation, and was established for ever.
The ‘protyle’ is infinitely more complex than the atoms of the
homogeneous nebula. It makes no philosophical difference whether the
ultimate atoms of the bodies known as elementary are all alike, or in
each instance special. In either case there is infinitely more in the
matter they severally make, than can be deduced from motion affecting
the primitive atoms.
But not only have we by the formula and constructive method of this
philosophy to obtain protyle from the mere effects of motion on
primitive atoms; but, by the same means alone, we have to change
protyle into the seventy ‘elements;’ above all, without an added factor
or a change in the method, we have to rise to life!
Let us reflect. By life in this relation is meant that which lives, an
organism endowed with life’s properties. Are these properties unique?
Or is there some point of fluxion where the properties of life at their
minima arise in the activities of not-life at some undiscovered maxima?
A point at which some occult molecular complexities arise, changing
matter dead into matter living?
The answer must come, not through our abstract logic, but from our
laboratories.
Life, it is well known, has its phenomena inherent in, and strictly
confined to, a highly complex compound, with fixed chemical
constituents. This compound, in its living state, is known as
protoplasm. It is clear, colourless, and, to our finest optical
resources, devoid of discoverable structure. There is not a living
thing on earth but possesses its life in protoplasm, from a microscopic
fungus to man.
To depict the properties of life in irreducible simplicity, take one
of the lowliest instances within the present range of science. Let
it be one of the exquisitely minute, almost infinitely prolific,
and universally diffused living forms that set up and carry on
putrefaction. The lesser of them may, when considered as solid specks,
vary from the fifty thousand millionth of a cubic inch to the twenty
billionth of a cubic inch. I select one that is oval in shape. It moves
with the agility of the grayling and the grace of a swallow, the motion
resulting from the rhythmic action of two motile fibres.
This free and self-originating action is its first vital quality.
Its mission as an organism, is to break up and set free the chemical
elements that had been locked up in dead organic compounds. Its own
substance wears out by this and other means; and it has the power to
renovate the waste from the dead decomposition in which it lives;
constructing, in the laboratory of its protoplasm, new living matter.
This is the second characteristic of that alone which lives. By
it, living matter is _sui generis_. Every instant, and at the same
temperature, this inconceivably minute speck, without discoverable
structure, effects analyses and complicated syntheses which either
baffle all the synthetic chemistry of man, or else, where he is able to
accomplish the simplest of the organic syntheses, it is by processes
and at temperatures that make all life impossible.
But more, this vital and inconceivably minute speck multiplies with
astounding rapidity in two ways; by the first and common process, in
the course of a minute and a half the entire body is divided into two
precisely similar bodies, each one being perfect; almost immediately
these again divide, and so on in geometric ratio through all the
populated fluid; the rapidity of this intense and wonderful vital
action transcending all thought. By this process alone a single form
may in three hours give rise to a population of organisms as great as
the human population of the globe.
But this is not all; at certain stages of the organism self-division
ceases. The final divisions result in strikingly modified forms of the
organism; these approach each other and melt together. They are then
shining globules without action, but at the end of a given time they
open, and pour out a continuous cloud of minutest spore or ova, which
are as countless as the sands; and from these arise again another host
of the organisms, which pass again through all the mystery and marvel
of this vital cycle.
And this is the third of the qualities that make what lives absolutely
unique amidst the things of earth.
This is life—whether vegetable or animal none can determine—in the
simplest form in which it can be known; life that is possessed only of
the irreducible properties which are inalienable, and which distinguish
it for ever and everywhere from what is not-life.
It is true that the philosopher, by the common consent of mind,
occupies the throne of intellect; but it is not, for all that, to
the esoteric philosopher, not to the deep mental seer, who girdles
all space, all duration, all phenomena with his thought, that nature
reveals her latest, her subtlest, her profoundest secrets. It is to
the patient student—nature’s loving learner, whose eye and ear are
trained to read her faintest writing and catch her lowest whisper—that
her deepest truths in all their strength and immediate bearing are
disclosed. Yet the fates of philosophies are determined by these.
Then what is the testimony of students and searchers as to the mode in
which life takes its origin to-day? Does life originate _in_ life? or
do we find that in our laboratories, and in the observed processes of
nature _now_, the not-living can be, without the intervention of living
things, changed into that which lives?
Biology, as a science, answers ‘no.’ Says the greatest master of
all the facts, Professor Huxley: ‘The properties of living matter
distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and,’ he
continues, ‘the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no
link between the living and the not-living.’[15]
Then what lives is, in its qualities, utterly unlike—sharply marked off
from—what is not living. Yet the elements that make up the living stuff
are the most common on the earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen:
we know them each and all; we know their properties and reactions on
each other, and on all the minor elements of the living matter; but
that knowledge only complicates the nature of the problem. The mystery
of life is, not that any occult elements compose the matter in which
it dwells; the mystery of life consists solely in the question, _how_
the elements that make up protoplasm can be so combined, as, by their
combination, to acquire the splendid and solitary properties of that
which lives.
Manifestly, then, there was a time in the past history of the globe,
when its matter was without life, and therefore there must have been a
time, perhaps at a point of intense activity in the not-living matter
of the globe, when it became endowed with the properties of life.
[Footnote 15: _Ency. Brit._ art. ‘Biology,’ vol. iii. p. 679.]
By what agency that transcendent upward movement was wrought, science
claims no vocation to inquire. But let the earth, and air, and sea,
with all their teeming denizens, attest,—that power was competent.
Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the
properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will
vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to
direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living
matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid
geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately
measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion?
All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions.
Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster
molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies
defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not
life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement;
it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of
matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind _ad libitum_.
And yet Mr. Spencer begins by taking what no mental manipulation of
the naked formula of his philosophy could provide, the ‘elements’ of
our present chemistry; and by imagining higher and higher complexities
of atomic structure a complicated molecule is reached; and then, by a
change in name, which is justified by no change in the facts, he calls
the complex substance organic matter; and by simply continuing this
process, thinks he sees it become living.[16]
[Footnote 16: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 481.]
The justification of all this is the affirmation ‘that organic matter
was not produced all at once,’ and that there is in the laboratory
of the chemist ‘what we may literally call artificial evolution.’
Mr. Spencer instances a laboratory product of what is counted a
sufficiently typical organic compound.[17] But to obtain it the chemist
has to employ no less than twenty distinct chemical and physical
processes, involving many varying temperatures, from a red heat to the
intensity of the electric arc, and between thirty and forty reagents
and their products, are employed in the process. Compare this with the
silent and impenetrable simplicity of the chemistry of life, and vivid
and striking is the contrast. And yet when this product of the chemist
lies before you, produced by the tremendous relative labours of the
laboratory, it is as far off from dead white of egg, to say nothing
of living protoplasm, as the qualities of a flint pebble are from the
qualities of the diamond.
[Footnote 17: The Butyrate of dimethylamin.]
The _facts_ of nature—surely our safest guide—declare that the
transition from not-life to life is abrupt. The break is absolute and
clear. A ‘complex molecule’ is a molecule of atoms in motion,—nothing
more. More atoms and more motion cannot, by themselves, as Mr. Spencer
would teach, make it ‘organic;’ much less can any further addition of
atoms and tremors make it live. It is in vain for Haeckel to call the
simplest moneron that lives ‘primeval slime,’ or to call numbers of
them ‘individualized lumps of albumen.’ It is a travesty. Under the
same lens place ‘a lump of albumen’ and the lowest _living_ infusorian,
and a voiceless contradiction of Haeckel’s phrase which none can ever
question is indubitably given. The infusorian lives; the albumen is
dead. The infusorian constructs the vital matter of its own body from
the heterogeneous matter in which it lives; the albumen decomposes
as it lies there. The infusorian has soon multiplied by millions,
while the albumen disappears by decadence. To write of living monera
as ‘albumen,’ or of ‘complex molecules’ with nothing more than their
complexity, as _living_, is to contradict, in the name, the essential
and distinguishing qualities of both.
This impropriety may be yet more manifest by another quotation from
Haeckel. His aim is to endeavour by the use of vague language to
reduce the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living,
and he writes of the animal _ovum_, as ‘a little lump of albumen in
which another albuminous body is enclosed—the nucleus.’ What profound
trifling is this! Think of, say a human ovum, an invisible particle
less than the hundredth of an inch in diameter; it _lives_; and there
lies coiled up in the mystery of its minuteness all the potentiality
of the highest manhood; all the possible power of Socrates, or Homer,
or Goethe. Is that simply ‘a lump of albumen’? Not unless a man can
be justly described as such, by the bottles of chemical substances to
which his body can be reduced.
Even Mr. Spencer pleads that ‘the lowest living things are not,
properly speaking, organisms at all, for they have no distinctions of
parts, no traces of organization.’ If it were true that our lenses
cannot reveal organization in the lowliest and smallest organisms, does
it follow that there _is_ none? Will Mr. Spencer risk the validity of
the doctrine of material atoms on the ability of our lenses to show the
atom? Surely not.
But the affirmation is not supported by facts. The splendid increase of
microscopical lens power during the past decade has not only enabled
us to see that there is complexity and structure in both the animal
and vegetable cell, which bisects by an elaborate process; but even
the minute nucleus of the minutest organisms, often not more than one
tenth part of the infinitesimal body itself, is now proved to undergo
profound structural changes, which precede all the great cyclic changes
of the organism as a whole. The nucleus is the centre, in fact, of all
the higher activities of the least and lowest infusoria; and is the
centre of most delicate but clearly demonstrable structural changes.[18]
[Footnote 18: _Jour. Roy. Micro. Soc._, President’s Address, 1886.]
We cannot reduce the mystery of life by treating contemptuously its
ultimate cells. They are as defiant of interpretation by our present
methods as the more complex structures they compose. The mystery of
life, _per se_, is as great and as deep, in a monad and a mildew, as
in a man. Every attempt to argue away the meaning of vital function
and property, on the basis of the organic simplicity of unicellular
organisms, is wholly fallacious. It is knowledge, not speculation,
which affirms that the least and lowest, as well as the largest and
most complex of living forms, are distinguished absolutely from all
other kinds of things. There is ‘no link’ between matter living
and matter without life. To attempt to build up ‘life’ by slow
increments of added complexity, in atomic or molecular structure, is a
philosophical ingenuity; but it expresses no natural truth within the
horizon of our knowledge. A higher number of primal, or even chemical
atoms, arranged in the most complex ratios, and affected by the most
rhythmic movements, are not the data from which to deduce a living
organism. And to affirm of the lowest living things that ‘they are not,
properly speaking, organisms at all,’[19] because the instruments used
at a given date did not reveal structure, is, at best, an _argumentum
a silentio_; while simultaneously it contradicts the facts of biology,
and assumes the whole point at issue.
[Footnote 19: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 482.]
On the other hand, there is not a single fact within the present range
of our knowledge that indicates, or even suggests, that the quarternary
compounds approximate, under any known conditions, to the state of
matter living.
As the sheets of this Lecture are passing through the press, Sir
Henry Roscoe, as President of the British Association, has delivered
a brilliant and essentially scientific address. On the subject of
chemistry none can speak with a voice more authoritative: and on this
very question he writes as follows: ‘But now the question may well be
put—Is any limit set to this synthetic power of the chemist? Although
the danger of dogmatizing as to the progress of science has already
been shown in too many instances, yet one cannot help feeling that the
barrier which exists between the organized and unorganized worlds is
one which the chemist sees no chance of breaking down. It is true that
there are those who profess to foresee that the day will arrive, when
the chemist, by a succession of constructive efforts, may pass beyond
albumen, and gather the elements of lifeless matter into a living
structure. Whatever may be said regarding this from other standpoints,
the chemist can only say that at present no such problem lies within
his province. Protoplasm, with which the simplest manifestations of
life are associated, is not a compound, but a structure built up of
compounds. The chemist may successfully synthesize any of its component
molecules, but he has no more reason to look forward to the synthetic
production of the structure than to imagine that the synthesis of
gallic acid leads to the artificial production of gall-nuts.’[20]
To assume, then, that by starting with atoms in equilibriated motions,
uncounted millenniums of ages ago, and that by adding atoms and groups
of atoms, with altered and re-altered motions as the ages roll away,
with the result that at last, with these factors and no others, we
shall get organism and life, is, surely, as fallacious as to explain
Millais’s picture of the Huguenots as having been brought about by a
skilful arrangement of palettes and brushes, easels and pigments.
Now let it be clearly recalled that Charles Darwin involved himself
in none of this philosophic ambiguity. To him life was more than a
complexity of elementary atoms affected by motion. It was something he
could not ‘explain.’ He postulated, therefore, the unexplained presence
of ‘primordial living germs,’ endowed with the properties, which,
experience teaches, are possessed by living matter to-day.
How, in the great past, mineral and gaseous matters on this earth were,
as a question of scientific method, so affected as to become living
matter is, to our present resources at least, impenetrable.
[Footnote 20: The _Times_ report of the address of Sir H. E. Roscoe
before the British Association at Manchester.—_Times_, September 1,
1887.]
‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower.—But _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.’
I merely contend that whatever were the means by which dead matter
first lived, they were higher, infinitely higher, than matter and
motion; they could only have been the resources of a _competent_ power.
I adopt gladly the language of Professor Huxley: ‘Belief, in the
scientific sense of the word,’ he says, ‘is a serious matter, and
needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence
of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which existing
forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense.
But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were
given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the
still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical
and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can
recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of
living protoplasm from not-living matter.’[21] So should I.
[Footnote 21: _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 239.]
By what other means than by the operation of natural ‘laws’ can we
think of the Infinite Power, extending through all extent, as the
fountain of all being, as acting? Every process of nature that ever
man has investigated throughout all space and all time, results from a
perfect and unalterable method which we call a ‘law’ of nature. Then
why should the primal process, by which not-living matter became,
once for all, living, be brought about by any other means than the
predetermined action of competent natural laws? Because life—living
matter—does not _now_ arise directly from that which is not-life,
does it follow that the creative method was discontinuous? that the
primordial creative laws willed into operation ‘in the beginning’ were
only competent to evolve the inorganic and not-living? and that at this
point a supernatural ‘interference,’ a ‘miraculous interposition,’ had
to be effected to endow what was dead with the transcendent properties
of life? The whole line of human experience, interpreted in the light
of modern scientific knowledge, compels the conclusion that the
‘primordial germs’ in which life on earth began, arose by the operation
of natural creative laws. That an energy, not now operating within the
area of our experience, was at work, when not-living matter progressed
into living structure, is certain. But there is nothing, within the
range of our knowledge, that permits the inference that it was brought
about by any other means, than such as, if we could have seen them in
operation, we should have called ‘laws’ of nature. This view surely
ennobles without limit our fatally humanized view of creative action.
‘The beginning’ was thus, by the unsearchable mystery of a creative
mind and will, the _potentiality_ of all the universe through all its
duration; which it only required ‘time’ in which the potential powers
and modes should operate, to make actual, in the universe we see.
As the highest mental powers and products of the most gifted of our
race, were originally potential in the primitive ovum from which each
took his origin, so, it is congruous, and capable of being grasped by
our thought although it cannot be portrayed by our imagination, that
the mind and will of the inscrutable Creator prevised and preordered
the whole series of conditions which, by their immutable action,
interaction, and rhythmic concurrence as ‘laws,’ evolved the universe.
So far as the finest and keenest researches in chemistry and physics
carry us, especially such researches as those of Crooks and Lockyer, it
is powerfully indicated that the creative method in the inorganic world
was a sublime progressive plan, a building up by law, of the dome of
heaven and the floor of earth, and all that goes with both. But behind
the matter and the motion, above the energies and the force, there
surely was, as we have been constrained to see, what we can only think
of as the conception, the purpose, and the will by which the evolving
order, marked in high, and higher sublimity, the upward and onward
movement of the ripening and uncounted ages.
But when the highest point of the inorganic, the not-living, was
reached, and a new factor had to appear in the world to crown some of
its matter with _life_ and all its wonders, what was it that ensued? If
‘law’ did not cease to act; if there were no break in the continuity
of evolution, and yet a factor of power, not now operating within
the range of our knowledge, was absolutely necessary to change the
not-living matter of the earth into matter that lived, how was it
brought about?
Our inability to reply, does not invalidate the facts on the one
hand, nor justify attempts at explanations that find no sanction in
experience and knowledge on the other.
Suggestion by analogy, feeble as it is, is the nearest approach that
we can make to the solution of what must, perhaps, remain for ever a
splendid mystery.
If creation be, then, the expression of the mind and will of a Creator,
uttered in method and issuing in phenomena, he must see the end from
the beginning: his resource is infinite. The human mathematician,
of the highest order, can devise, with all the adaptations and
prearrangements that are needed, an instrument or machine, which shall
continue for a number of motions, without necessary limit, according to
a primal law, but which by such prevised and preordered arrangements
would, suddenly, at the required point of time, undergo change, and
operate henceforth after a law entirely new.
An instrument has actually been made which was competent to effect the
solution of quadratic equations whose roots are real. One has also
been made capable of effecting the determination of the real roots of
any equation. It is perfectly conceivable that an instrument could be
made which should go on finding the real roots only, for a measured
time, and then by a prearranged and provided method should suddenly, by
the very laws and principles of its construction, so change, that for
another period, or for evermore, it should also determine the imaginary
roots.
Is it not conceivable that infinite resource, infinite wisdom, infinite
prevision and power could in a manner which this illustration only
suggests have caused the non-vital universe to become in some parts
vital? Could not infinite power, infinite wisdom, the originator of
all that we call material phenomena, have prevised and preordered, in
the impenetrable mystery of ‘the beginning,’ that the creative laws of
evolution for an inorganic world, should, as they brought about the
completion of their perfect purpose, have carried with them from that
‘beginning’ preordered potentialities, that should, by the primal
volition of the Creator, emerge, as an inevitable and orderly sequence,
into the operation of higher activities and new laws?
If that may not be, it is not a divine being that is in our thought.
But if that may be, then the self-acting laws of nature are
self-acting, as the products of eternal mind and will. Each self-acting
phenomenon is, to us, an embodied thought of God; emerging in matter
now, as a consequence of the sublimity and perfection of the methods
divinely willed ‘in the beginning.’
Let this illustration weigh for what it will; this at least is clear,
that the mechanical philosophy, whether or not it refuses to be called
‘material,’ has proved its formula incompetent. Atomic matter without
property, affected by motion, with persistent relations between the
matter and the motion, can no more account for the universe even up to
the point of the origin of the lowest life, than the vibrations of a
musical chord can account for the joy begotten of music.
But how stands the problem of its origin, when, in that which lives,
we include the presence of mind? None more firmly contends for the
absolute disparity, the entire and unqualified difference between mind
and matter, than Mr. Spencer. To him there can be nothing within the
whole realm of thought severed by a wider interval than consciousness
and thought on the one hand, and matter on the other. ‘Just,’ he says,
‘in the same way that the object is the unknown permanent _nexus_
which is never itself a phenomenon, but is that which holds phenomena
together, so is the subject the unknown permanent _nexus_ which is
never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of
consciousness together.’[22] Mind and matter, then, are here admitted
to be infinitely unlike, but absolutely equal realities. This is
boldly reaffirmed; he says: ‘No effort of imagination enables us to
think of a shock, however minute, except as undergone by an entity.
We are compelled, therefore, to postulate a substance of mind that is
affected, before we can think of its affections.’[23]
[Footnote 22: _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p. 484.]
[Footnote 23: _Ibid._ vol. i. p. 627.]
This is as clear as a geometric definition. Mind and matter are
admitted to be the two opposite termini of thought; they are divided by
an interval beyond which thought cannot go. They are symbolized as _x_
and _y_, two equally unknown, but absolutely unlike, quantities. Beyond
the common fact of existence, there is not a quality of the one that is
not infinitely unlike all the qualities of the other.
What this disparity is we all know: enough, that matter is inert,
absolutely without perceiving power, and unable in itself to move or
to produce motion. But mind is conscious, knows that it exists; and,
however mysteriously, originates motion. Matter has mass; mind is
absolutely without it. Matter cannot be thought of save as an occupant
of space. Mind has no extension.
Is it conceivable, then, that we should be required by this philosophy,
which thus admits the utter disparity of mind and matter, to make mind
a function of matter? that we should be asked to mentally follow a
process by which _y_ shall be changed into _x_? This verily is so!
I must repeat the formula of this philosophy of evolution. ‘Evolution
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.’
Matter and motion, these are the all; no suggestion of aught besides.
Then, if on that formula the philosophy is built, the rhythmic
vicissitudes through which matter has passed during limitless
millenniums of time, are supposed to be able to change matter’s
unconsciousness into self-perception and thought; to cause extended
and gravitating mass to pass into an unextended realization of its own
being, unyoked to gravity; to emerge from space relations involving
motion produced by outside forces, to an absolute independence of space
relations which makes motion impossible. If we make our _knowledge_
of phenomena and the processes and methods of Nature the basis of our
judgment, is it not manifest, that such a change is incapable of being
thought?
The unknown _y_, that is, matter, must, by sheer physical vicissitudes,
actually abnegate its own qualities, and emerge, no longer _itself_,
_y_, but another entity, infinitely unlike itself, that is, _x_!