pragmatically definable particulars. Whether, apart from these
verifiable facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely
curious speculation. Locke, compromiser that he was, passively tolerated
the belief in a substantial soul behind our consciousness. But his
successor Hume, and most empirical psychologists after him, have denied
the soul, save as the name for verifiable cohesions in our inner life.
They redescend into the stream of experience with it, and cash it into
so much small-change value in the way of 'ideas' and their peculiar
connexions with each other. As I said of Berkeley's matter, the soul is
good or 'true' for just SO MUCH, but no more.
The mention of material substance naturally suggests the doctrine of
'materialism,' but philosophical materialism is not necessarily knit
up with belief in 'matter,' as a metaphysical principle. One may
deny matter in that sense, as strongly as Berkeley did, one may be a
phenomenalist like Huxley, and yet one may still be a materialist in the
wider sense, of explaining higher phenomena by lower ones, and leaving
the destinies of the world at the mercy of its blinder parts and forces.
It is in this wider sense of the word that materialism is opposed to
spiritualism or theism. The laws of physical nature are what run things,
materialism says. The highest productions of human genius might be
ciphered by one who had complete acquaintance with the facts, out of
their physiological conditions, regardless whether nature be there only
for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would
have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating
through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day
materialism, which may better be called naturalism. Over against it
stands 'theism,' or what in a wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.'
Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things, but
also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its
lower, but by its higher element.
Treated as it often is, this question becomes little more than a
conflict between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass,
muddy; spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant
with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what
appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To
treat abstract principles as finalities, before which our intellects
may come to rest in a state of admiring contemplation, is the great
rationalist failing. Spiritualism, as often held, may be simply a
state of admiration for one kind, and of dislike for another kind,
of abstraction. I remember a worthy spiritualist professor who always
referred to materialism as the 'mud-philosophy,' and deemed it thereby
refuted.
To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer
makes it effectively. In some well-written pages at the end of the
first volume of his Psychology he shows us that a 'matter' so infinitely
subtile, and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those
which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of
grossness left. He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals
hitherto have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite
tenuity of nature's facts. Both terms, he says, are but symbols,
pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions
cease.
To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far as
one's opposition to materialism springs from one's disdain of matter as
something 'crass,' Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one. Matter is
indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked
on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD
have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred
ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be,
material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself
to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's
possibilities.
But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant
intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the
question. What do we MEAN by matter? What practical difference can it
make NOW that the world should be run by matter or by spirit? I think we
find that the problem takes with this a rather different character.
And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact. It makes not
a single jot of difference so far as the PAST of the world goes, whether
we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine
spirit was its author.
Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all
irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have
no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival
explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it; the
materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it
resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to
choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if the world
is already completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into
experience with, things to make us look for differences. But by
hypothesis there is to be no more experience and no possible differences
can now be looked for. Both theories have shown all their consequences
and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are identical. The
pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of
their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that
the dispute is purely verbal. [I am opposing, of course, that the
theories HAVE been equally successful in their explanations of what is.]
For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the WORTH
of a God if he WERE there, with his work accomplished and his world run
down. He would be worth no more than just that world was worth. To that
amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power
could attain, but go no farther. And since there is to be no future;
since the whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in
and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now
go with it in the ending; since it draws no supplemental significance
(such as our real world draws) from its function of preparing something
yet to come; why then, by it we take God's measure, as it were. He
is the Being who could once for all do THAT; and for that much we
are thankful to him, but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary
hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter following their laws could
make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to
them? Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an
hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any
special deadness, or crassness, come in? And how, experience being what
is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any more living or
richer?
Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question. The
actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details
on either hypothesis, "the same, for our praise or blame," as Browning
says. It stands there indefeasibly: a gift which can't be taken back.
Calling matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that
have made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them. They are
the God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world. The
God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do--appearing in the
character of atoms, so to speak--and earning such gratitude as is due to
atoms, and no more. If his presence lends no different turn or issue to
the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would
indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only
actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down,
you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its
author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.
Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from
our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite
idle and insignificant. Matter and God in that event mean exactly the
same thing--the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make
just this completed world--and the wise man is he who in such a case
would turn his back on such a supererogatory discussion. Accordingly,
most men instinctively, and positivists and scientists deliberately,
do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the
line of definite future consequences can be seen to follow. The verbal
and empty character of philosophy is surely a reproach with which we
are, but too familiar. If pragmatism be true, it is a perfectly sound
reproach unless the theories under fire can be shown to have alternative
practical outcomes, however delicate and distant these may be. The
common man and the scientist say they discover no such outcomes, and if
the metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are
in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous
trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be
silly.
Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue,
however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert
with me to our question, and place yourselves this time in the world we
live in, in the world that HAS a future, that is yet uncompleted whilst
we speak. In this unfinished world the alternative of 'materialism or
theism?' is intensely practical; and it is worth while for us to spend
some minutes of our hour in seeing that it is so.
How, indeed, does the program differ for us, according as we consider
that the facts of experience up to date are purposeless configurations
of blind atoms moving according to eternal laws, or that on the other
hand they are due to the providence of God? As far as the past facts
go, indeed there is no difference. Those facts are in, are bagged, are
captured; and the good that's in them is gained, be the atoms or be the
God their cause. There are accordingly many materialists about us
to-day who, ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects of the
question, seek to eliminate the odium attaching to the word materialism,
and even to eliminate the word itself, by showing that, if matter could
give birth to all these gains, why then matter, functionally considered,
is just as divine an entity as God, in fact coalesces with God, is what
you mean by God. Cease, these persons advise us, to use either of these
terms, with their outgrown opposition. Use a term free of the clerical
connotations, on the one hand; of the suggestion of gross-ness,
coarseness, ignobility, on the other. Talk of the primal mystery, of the
unknowable energy, of the one and only power, instead of saying either
God or matter. This is the course to which Mr. Spencer urges us; and if
philosophy were purely retrospective, he would thereby proclaim himself
an excellent pragmatist.
But philosophy is prospective also, and, after finding what the world
has been and done and yielded, still asks the further question 'what
does the world PROMISE?' Give us a matter that promises SUCCESS, that is
bound by its laws to lead our world ever nearer to perfection, and any
rational man will worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer
worships his own so-called unknowable power. It not only has made for
righteousness up to date, but it will make for righteousness forever;
and that is all we need. Doing practically all that a God can do, it is
equivalent to God, its function is a God's function, and is exerted in
a world in which a God would now be superfluous; from such a world a God
could never lawfully be missed. 'Cosmic emotion' would here be the right
name for religion.
But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process of cosmic evolution is
carried on any such principle of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed
it is not, for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing or
system of things is foretold by science to be death and tragedy; and
Mr. Spencer, in confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the
practical side of the controversy, has really contributed nothing
serious to its relief. But apply now our principle of practical results,
and see what a vital significance the question of materialism or theism
immediately acquires.
Theism and materialism, so indifferent when taken retrospectively,
point, when we take them prospectively, to wholly different outlooks of
experience. For, according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the
laws of redistribution of matter and motion, tho they are certainly to
thank for all the good hours which our organisms have ever yielded
us and for all the ideals which our minds now frame, are yet fatally
certain to undo their work again, and to redissolve everything that they
have once evolved. You all know the picture of the last state of the
universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better
than in Mr. Balfour's words: "The energies of our system will decay, the
glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert,
will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its
solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will
perish. The uneasy, consciousness which in this obscure corner has for
a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at
rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and
'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as
though they had never been. Nor will anything that is, be better or be
worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man
have striven through countless generations to effect." [Footnote: The
Foundations of Belief, p. 30.]
That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings of the cosmic
weather, tho many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted
cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as our
world now lingers, for our joy-yet when these transient products are
gone, nothing, absolutely NOTHING remains, of represent those particular
qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined.
Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of
being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught
that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter
final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism
as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the
eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of
evolution which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes this as much
as anyone; so why should he argue with us as if we were making silly
aesthetic objections to the 'grossness' of 'matter and motion,' the
principles of his philosophy, when what really dismays us is the
disconsolateness of its ulterior practical results?
No the true objection to materialism is not positive but negative. It
would be farcical at this day to make complaint of it for what it IS for
'grossness.' Grossness is what grossness DOES--we now know THAT. We make
complaint of it, on the contrary, for what it is NOT--not a permanent
warrant for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our remotest
hopes.
The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be
in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical
philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it
guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world
with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze,
but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to
bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is
only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the
absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one
of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and
Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that
fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here
then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these
adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all
the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the
real meanings of materialism and spiritualism--not in hair-splitting
abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical
attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral
order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism
means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of
hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for anyone who feels
it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious
philosophic debate.
But possibly some of you may still rally to their defence. Even whilst
admitting that spiritualism and materialism make different prophecies
of the world's future, you may yourselves pooh-pooh the difference as
something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing for a sane mind. The
essence of a sane mind, you may say, is to take shorter views, and to
feel no concern about such chimaeras as the latter end of the world.
Well, I can only say that if you say this, you do injustice to human
nature. Religious melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of
the word insanity. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping
things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel
seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the
mind of the more shallow man.
The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough
conceived by us at present. But spiritualistic faith in all its forms
deals with a world of PROMISE, while materialism's sun sets in a sea of
disappointment. Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral
holidays. Any religious view does this. It not only incites our more
strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful
moments, and it justifies them. It paints the grounds of justification
vaguely enough, to be sure. The exact features of the saving future
facts that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out
by the interminable methods of science: we can STUDY our God only by
studying his Creation. But we can ENJOY our God, if we have one, in
advance of all that labor. I myself believe that the evidence for God
lies primarily in inner personal experiences. When they have once given
you your God, his name means at least the benefit of the holiday. You
remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and
try to 'down' each other. The truth of 'God' has to run the gauntlet of
all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it.
Our FINAL opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths
have straightened themselves out together. Let us hope that they shall
find a modus vivendi!
Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the QUESTION of
DESIGN IN NATURE. God's existence has from time immemorial been held to
be proved by certain natural facts. Many facts appear as if expressly
designed in view of one another. Thus the woodpecker's bill, tongue,
feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid
in their bark to feed upon. The parts of our eye fit the laws of light
to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina. Such
mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held;
and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity.
The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed.
Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being
co-adapted. Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-uterine darkness,
and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other.
They are evidently made FOR each other. Vision is the end designed,
light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.
It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force
of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph
of the darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of
chance-happenings to bring forth 'fit' results if only they have time
to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in
producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. He also
emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue
an evil rather than a good designer. Here all depends upon the point
of view. To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the
woodpecker's organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical
designer.
Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace
the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine
purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of
one OR the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently
designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have
been produced by machinery." We know that they are both: they are made
by a machinery itself designed to fit the feet with shoes. Theology need
only stretch similarly the designs of God. As the aim of a football-team
is not merely to get the ball to a certain goal (if that were so, they
would simply get up on some dark night and place it there), but to get
it there by a fixed MACHINERY OF CONDITIONS--the game's rules and the
opposing players; so the aim of God is not merely, let us say, to make
men and to save them, but rather to get this done through the sole
agency of nature's vast machinery. Without nature's stupendous laws and
counterforces, man's creation and perfection, we might suppose, would be
too insipid achievements for God to have designed them.
This saves the form of the design-argument at the expense of its old
easy human content. The designer is no longer the old man-like deity.
His designs have grown so vast as to be incomprehensible to us humans.
The WHAT of them so overwhelms us that to establish the mere THAT of a
designer for them becomes of very little consequence in comparison.
We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose
purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of goods and evils
that we find in this actual world's particulars. Or rather we cannot by
any possibility comprehend it. The mere word 'design' by itself has,
we see, no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of
principles. The old question of WHETHER there is design is idle.
The real question is WHAT is the world, whether or not it have a
designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's
particulars.
Remember that no matter what nature may have produced or may be
producing, the means must necessarily have been adequate, must have been
FITTED TO THAT PRODUCTION. The argument from fitness to design would
consequently always apply, whatever were the product's character. The
recent Mont-Pelee eruption, for example, required all previous history
to produce that exact combination of ruined houses, human and animal
corpses, sunken ships, volcanic ashes, etc., in just that one hideous
configuration of positions. France had to be a nation and colonize
Martinique. Our country had to exist and send our ships there. IF God
aimed at just that result, the means by which the centuries bent their
influences towards it, showed exquisite intelligence. And so of any
state of things whatever, either in nature or in history, which we
find actually realized. For the parts of things must always make SOME
definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what
has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed
to ensure it. We can always say, therefore, in any conceivable world, of
any conceivable character, that the whole cosmic machinery MAY have been
designed to produce it.