An accomplished and thoughtful observer of nature--Hugh Miller, the
geologist--has somewhere remarked, that religion has lost its
dependence on metaphysical theories, and must henceforth maintain
itself upon the domain of physical science. He accordingly exhorts the
guardians of sacred truth to prepare themselves for the approaching
crisis in its history, by exchanging the study of thoughts for the
apprehension of things, and carefully cultivating the habit of
inductive research. The advice is excellent, and proceeds from one
whose own example has amply proved its worth; and unless the clergy
qualify themselves to take part in the discussions which open
themselves with the advance of natural knowledge, they will assuredly
be neither secure in their personal convictions nor faithful to their
public trust. The only fault to be found with this counsel is, that in
recommending one kind of knowledge it disparages another, and betrays
that limited intellectual sympathy which is the bane of all noble
culture. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, so far from succeeding to the
inheritance of metaphysics, do but enrich its problems with new
conceptions and give a larger outline to its range; and should they,
in the wantonness of their young ascendency, persuade men to its
neglect, they will pay the penalties of their contempt by the
appearance of confusion in their own doctrine. The advance of any one
line of human thought demands--especially for the security of
faith--the parallel movement of all the rest; and the attempt to
substitute one intellectual reliance for another, mistakes for
progress of knowledge what may be only an exchange of ignorance. In
particular, the study of external nature must proceed _pari passu_
with the study of the human mind; and the errors of an age too
exclusively reflective will not be remedied, but only reversed, by
mere reaction into sciences of outward fact and observation. These
physical pursuits, followed into their further haunts, rapidly run up
into a series of notions common to them all,--expressed by such words
as _Law_, _Cause_, _Force_,--which at once transfer the jurisdiction
from the provincial courts of the special sciences to the high
chancery of universal philosophy. To conduct the pleadings--still more
to pronounce the judgment--there, other habits of mind are needed than
are required in the museum and the observatory; and the history of
knowledge, past and present, abounds with instances of men who, with
the highest merit in particular walks of science, have combined a
curious incompetency of survey over the whole. Hence, very few natural
philosophers, however eminent for great discoveries and dreaded by the
priesthood of their day, have made any deep and durable impression on
the religious conception of the universe, as the product and
expression of an Infinite Mind; and in tracing the eras of human
faith, the deep thinker comes more prominently into view than the
skilful interrogator of nature. In the history of religion, Plato is a
greater figure than Archimedes; Spinoza than Newton; Hume and Kant
than Volta and La Place; even Thomas Carlyle than Justus Liebig. Our
picture indeed of the system of things is immensely enlarged, both in
space and duration, by the progress of descriptive science; and the
grouping of its objects and events is materially changed. But the
altered scene carries with it the same expression to the soul; speaks
the same language as to its origin; renews its ancient glance with an
auguster beauty; and, in spite of all dynamic theories, reproduces the
very modes of faith and doubt which belonged to the age both of the
old Organon and of the new.
The ultimate problem of all philosophy and all religion is this: "How
are we to conceive aright the origin and first principle of things?"
The answers, it has been contended by a living author of distinguished
merit, are necessarily reducible to two, between which all systems are
divided, and on the decision of whose controversy, all antagonist
speculations would lay down their arms. "In the beginning was FORCE,"
says one class of thinkers; "force, singular or plural, splitting into
opposites, standing off into polarities, ramifying into attractions
and repulsions, heat and magnetism, and climbing through the stages of
physical, vital, animal, to the mental life itself." "On the
contrary," says the other class, "in the beginning was THOUGHT; and
only in the necessary evolution of its eternal ideas into expression
does force arise,--self-realizing thought declaring itself in the
types of being and the laws of phenomena." We need hardly say, that
the former of these two notions coalesces with the creed of Atheism,
and is most frequently met with upon the path of the physical
sciences, while the latter is favored by the mathematical and
metaphysical, and gives the essence of Pantheism. Each of them has
insurmountable difficulties, with which it is successfully taunted by
the other. Start from blind force; and how, by any spinning from that
solitary centre, are we ever to arrive at the seeing intellect? Can
the lower create the higher, and the unconscious enable us to think?
Start from pure thinking, and how then can you get any force for the
production of objective effects? How metamorphose a passage of dialect
into the power of gravitation, and a silent corollary into a flash of
lightning? In taking the intellect as the type of God, this difficulty
must always be felt. We are well aware that it is not in _this_
endowment that our dynamic energy resides. The _activity_ which we
ascribe to our intellect is not a power going out into external
efficiency, but a mere passage across the internal field of successive
thoughts as spontaneous phenomena. Nor have we, as thinking beings
only, any _option_ with respect to the thoughts thus streaming over
the theatre of rational consciousness; our constitution legislates for
us in this particular, and the order of suggestion is determined by
laws having their seat in us. Finally, we are not, by mere thinking
capacity, constituted _persons_, any more than a sleeper who should
never wake, yet always be engaged with rational and scientific dreams,
would be a person. Without some further endowment, we should only be a
_logical life_ and development. All these characters are imported into
the conception of God, when he is represented as conforming to the
type of reason. The activity of intellect being wholly internal, the
phenomena of the Universe could not be referred to Him as a thinking
being, were they not gathered up into the interior of his nature, and
conceived, not as objective effects of his power, but as purely
subjective successions within the theatre of his infinitude. Intellect
again having no option, the God of this theory is without freedom, and
is represented as the eternal necessity of reason. And lastly, in
fidelity to the same analogy, He is not a divine _Person_, but rather
a _Thinking Thing_, or the thinking function of the universe; we may
say, _universal science in a state of self-consciousness_. The
necessity under which Pantheism lies, of fetching all that is to be
referred to God into the _interior_ of his being, and dealing with it
as not less a necessary manifestation of his mental essence than are
our ideas of the mind that has them, explains the unwillingness of
this system to allow any motives to God, any field of objective
operation, any special relation to individuals, any revealing
interposition, any _supernatural_ agency.
Is it however true, that human belief can only choose between these
two extremes, and must oscillate eternally between the Atheistic
homage to Force, and the Pantheistic to Thought? Far from it; and it
is curiously indicative of the state of the philosophic atmosphere in
Germany, that one of her most discerning and wide-seeing authors
should find no third possibility within the sphere of vision. In any
latitude except one in which moral science has altogether melted away
in the universal solvent of metaphysics, it would occur as one of the
most obvious suggestions, that the intellect is not the only element
of human nature which may be taken as type of the Divine, and as
furnishing a possible solution to the problem of origination. Quitting
the two poles of extreme philosophy, confessedly incompetent in their
separation, we submit that WILL presents the middle point which takes
up into itself Thought on the one hand and Force on the other; and
which yet, so far from appearing to us as a _compound_ arising out of
them as an effect, is more easily conceived than either as the
originating prefix of all phenomena. It has none of the
disqualifications which we have remarked as flowing from the others
into their respective systems of doctrine. It carries with it, in its
very idea, the co-presence of Thought, as the necessary element within
whose sphere it has to manifest itself. Its phenomena cannot exist
_alone_; it acts on preconceptions, which stand related to it,
however, not as its source, but as its conditions, and are its
co-ordinates in the effect rather than its generating antecedents. If
therefore all things are issued by Will, there is Mind at the
fountain-head, and the absurdity is avoided of deriving intelligence
from unintelligence. While it thus escapes the difficulty of passing
from mere Force to Thought, it is equally clear of the opposite
difficulty of making mere Thought supply any Force. The activity of
Will is not, like that of Intellect, a subjective transit of
regimented ideas, but an _objective_ power _going out_ for the
production of effects; nay, it is a _free_ power, exercising
_preference_ among data furnished by internal or external conditions
present in its field; and it thus constitutes proper _Causality_,
which always implies control over an alternative. We need hardly add,
that all the requisites are thus complete for the true idea of a
_Person_; and an Infinite Being contemplated under this type is
neither a fateful nor a logical principle of necessity, but a living
God, out of whose purposed legislation has sprung whatever necessity
there is, except the self-existent beauty of his holiness. Thus,
between the Force of the physical Atheist, and the Thought of the
metaphysical Pantheist, we fix upon the fulcrum of Will as the true
balance-point of a moral Theism.
It would be impossible, perhaps, to find anywhere a finer instance of
perspicuity in condensation, than is given in the following reference to