CHAPTER V

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences had

undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the discovery of

principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate discussion of the

relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was

need of the organisation of the mass of knowledge, largely new and ever

increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the

case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal

with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a

whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages,

had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical

systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had

professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and

metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fashion with the material

world, in the study of which the sciences were now achieving great

results. Indeed, the methods current and authoritative with theologians

and metaphysicians had actually prevented study of the physical

universe. Both of these had invaded areas of fact to which their methods

had no application and uttered dicta which had no relation to truth. The

very life of the sciences depended upon deliverance from this bondage.

The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in

the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment

which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming

victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their

opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with

some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to

which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This

was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an

area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the

theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that,

concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for

example, God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method

of the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's

distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the

sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of

agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind

which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed, if one may

take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the

intent of some of the scientists in their strong assertion of

agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had no disposition to

deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the

phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.

Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was

achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which

Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the

great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of

man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the

social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have

been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those

which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a

science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a

place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The

ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the

same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness

are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and classify the

phenomena of the religious life of the race in all lands and in all

ages. A science of religions is taking its place among the other

sciences. It is as purely an inductive science as is any other. The

history of religions and the philosophy of religion are being rewritten

from this point of view.

In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical sciences,

meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear, however, that

the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have now become

empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience, the experience

of individuals and the experience of masses of men, of ages of

observable human life. They all proceed by the method of observation and

inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as

between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of

which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of

psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to

conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the

psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering

an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs

of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not

by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's

distinction of two reasons and two worlds in the sense of establishing a

city of refuge into which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered

incomparable service by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must

realise how the space between is filled with the gradations of an

absolute continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may

conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other of

these polar fashions. It does operate in infinite variations of degree,

in unity with itself, after both fashions, at all times and upon all

materials.

Positivism was a system. Agnosticism was at least a phase of thought.

The broadening of the conception of science and the invasion of every

area of life by a science thus broadly conceived, has been an influence

less tangible than those others but not, therefore, less effective.

Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity, though, in the mind of

Comte himself and of a few others, it produced a curious substitute,

possessing many of the marks of Roman Catholicism. The name 'agnostic'

was so loosely used that one must say that the contention was hostile to

religion in the minds of some and not of others. The new movement for an

inclusive science is not hostile to religion. Yet it will transform

current conceptions of religion as those others never did. In proportion

as it is scientific, it cannot be hostile. It may at most be

indifferent. Nevertheless, in the long run, few will choose the theme of

religion for the scientific labour of life who have not some interest in

religion. Men of these three classes have accepted the doctrine of

evolution. Comte thought he had discovered it. Spencer and those for

whom we have taken him as type, did service in the elaboration of it. To

the men of our third group, the truth of evolution seems no longer

debatable. Here too, in the word 'evolution,' we have a term which has

been used with laxity. It corresponds to a notion which has only

gradually been evolved. Its implications were at first by no means

understood. It was associated with a mechanical view of the universe

which was diametrically opposed to its truth. Still, there could not be

a doubt that the doctrine contravened those ideas as to the origin of

the world, and more particularly of man, of the relations of species,

and especially of the human species to other forms of animal life, which

had immemorially prevailed in Christian circles and which had the

witness of the Scriptures on their behalf. If we were to attempt, with

acknowledged latitude, to name a book whose import might be said to be

cardinal for the whole movement treated of in this chapter, that book

would be Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which was published in 1859.

Long before Darwin the creation legend had been recognised as such. The

astronomy of the seventeenth century had removed the earth from its

central position. The geology of the eighteenth had shown how long must

have been the ages of the laying down of the earth's strata. The

question of the descent of man, however, brought home the significance

of evolution for religion more forcibly than any other aspect of the

debate had done. There were scientific men of distinction who were not

convinced of the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis. To most Christian

men the theory seemed to leave no unique distinction or spiritual

quality for man. It seemed to render impossible faith in the Scriptures

as revelation. To many it seemed that the whole issue as between a

spiritual and a purely materialistic view of the universe was involved.

Particularly was this true of the English-speaking peoples.

One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view needs to be

dwelt upon. It is less theoretical than those upon which we have dwelt.

It is the influence of socialism, taking that word in its largest sense.

An industrial civilisation has developed both the good and the evil of

individualism in incredible degree. The unity of society which the

feudal system and the Church gave to Europe in the Middle Age had been

destroyed. The individualism and democracy which were essential to

Protestantism notoriously aided the civil and social revolution, but the

centrifugal forces were too great. Initiative has been wonderful, but

cohesion is lacking. Democracy is yet far from being realised. The civil

liberations which were the great crises of the western world from 1640

to 1830 appear now to many as deprived of their fruit. Governments

undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government would

have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too, become a

factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind.

If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain.

That is exactly what it does not mean. It means the attack upon evils

which make charity necessary. It means the taking up into the

idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away

with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as

heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world.

No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to

remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion.

The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social

questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after all,

the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals primarily

with the inner life and the transcendent world. That it has dealt with

the problem of the inner life and transcendent world in such a manner as

to retard, or even only not to further, the other aspects of man's life

is indeed a grave indictment. That it should, however, see ends in the

outer life and present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves,

that it should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that

it should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have

given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and

happiness such as men never have enjoyed. Yet the tragic failure of our

civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and happiness, is the

proof that something more than the outward basis is needed. The success

of our civilisation is its failure.

This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and

civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary,

it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics

are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world.

Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific

contribution to make.

POSITIVISM

The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called itself

Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered

among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry

Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be

said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of

which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be

dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, _Coura de

Philosophie Positive_, appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littré

was his chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist

movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and religious

thought, rather than to that of France.

Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman

Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear

comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents,

dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he

eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy

rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his

genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of

mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He

did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him

against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his

book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific

discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her

death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the

earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the

organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed

extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather the air of a high priest

of humanity, legislating concerning a new religion. It is but fair to

say that at this point Littré and many others parted company with Comte.

He developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in

its devotion to the positivists' religion--the worship of humanity. He

was the friend and counsellor of working-men and agitators, of little

children, of the poor and miserable. He ended his rather pathetic and

turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few disciples about his bed as he

remembered that Socrates had done.

Comte begins with the natural sciences and postulates the doctrine of

evolution. To the definition of this doctrine he makes some interesting

approaches. The discussion of the order and arrangement of the various

sciences and of their characteristic differences is wonderful in its

insight and suggestiveness. He asserts that in the study of nature we

are concerned solely with the facts before us and the relations which

connect those facts. We have nothing to do with the supposed essence or

hidden nature and meaning of those facts. Facts and the invariable laws

which govern them are the only legitimate objects of pursuit. Comte

infers that because we can know, in this sense, only phenomena and their

relations, we should in consequence guard against illusions which creep

in again if we so much as use the words principle, or cause, or will, or

force. By phenomena must be understood objects of perception, to the

exclusion, for example, of psychological changes reputed to be known in

self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that

there is no knowing except by perception--this is ever reiterated as

self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the

observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or

even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must

take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing

subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By

invincible necessity the human mind can observe all phenomena except its

own. Commenting upon this, James Martineau observed: 'We have had in the

history of thought numerous forms of idealism which construed all

outward phenomena as mere appearances within the mind. We have hitherto

had no strictly corresponding materialism, which claimed certainty for

the outer world precisely because it was foreign to ourselves.' Man is

the highest product of nature, the highest stage of nature's most mature

and complex form. Man as individual is nothing more. Physiology gives us

not merely his external constitution and one set of relations. It is the

whole science of man. There is no study of mind in which its actions and

states can be contemplated apart from the physical basis in conjunction

with which mind exists.

Thus far man has been treated only biologically, as individual. We must

advance to man in society. Almost one half of Comte's bulky work is

devoted to this side of the inquiry. Social phenomena are a class

complex beyond any which have yet been investigated. So much is this the

case and so difficult is the problem presented, that Comte felt

constrained in some degree to change his method. We proceed from

experience, from data in fact, as before. But the facts are not mere

illustrations of the so called laws of individual human nature. Social

facts are the results also of situations which represent the accumulated

influence of past generations. In this, as against Bentham, for example,

with his endless recurrence to human nature, as he called it, Comte was

right. Comte thus first gave the study of history its place in

sociology. In this study of history and sociology, the collective

phenomena are more accessible to us and better known by us, than are the

parts of which they are composed. We therefore proceed here from the

general to the particular, not from the particular to the general, as in

research of the kinds previously named. The state of every part of the

social organisation is ultimately connected with the contemporaneous

state of all the other parts. Philosophy, science, the fine arts,

commerce, navigation, government, are all in close mutual dependence.

When any considerable change takes place in one, we may know that a

parallel change has preceded or will follow in the others. The progress

of society is not the aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a

single impulse acting through all the partial agencies. It can therefore

be most easily traced by studying all together. These are the main

principles of sociological investigation as set forth by Comte, some of

them as they have been phrased by Mill.

The most sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to, as to

parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three states of

civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole historical evolution

can be summed up. It is as certain as the law of gravitation. Everything

in human society has passed, as has the individual man, through the

theological and then through the metaphysical stage, and so arrives at

the positive stage. In this last stage of thought nothing either of

superstition or of speculation will survive. Theology and metaphysics

Comte repeatedly characterises as the two successive stages of

nescience, unavoidable as preludes to science. Equally unavoidable is it

that science shall ultimately prevail in their place. The advance of

science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will

ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this confidence

in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial of any

knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond external facts, which ill comports

with the pretensions of positivism to be a philosophy. For its final

claim is not that it is content to rest in experimental science. On the

contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine

which is able to explain everything in the universe. This is but a _tour

de force_. The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of

everything which science cannot explain. Comte was never willing to face

the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal as well as

a phenomenal side. The reasonableness of the universe is certainly a

conception which we bring to the observation of nature. If we did not

thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature would ever give it

to us. It is impossible for science to get rid of the conception of

force, and ultimately of cause. There can be no phenomenon which is not

a manifestation of something. The very nomenclature falls into hopeless

confusion without these conceptions. Yet the moment we touch them we

transcend science and pass into the realm of philosophy. It is mere

juggling with words to say that our science has now become a philosophy.

The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently Comte

meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit

research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and

succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the

sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that the inquiry into

causes deals with that which has no reality, is to beg the question.

This is not a premise with which he may set out in the evolution of his

system.

Comte denied the accusation of materialism and atheism. He did the first

only by changing the meaning of the term materialism. Materialism the

world has supposed to be the view of man's condition and destiny which

makes these to begin and end in nature. That certainly was Comte's view.

The accusation of atheism also he avoids by a mere play on words. He is

not without a God. Humanity is God. Mankind is the positivist's Supreme.

Altruism takes the place of devotion. The devotion so long wasted upon a

mere creature of the imagination, to whom it could do no good, he would

now give to men who sorely need it and can obviously profit by it.

Surely the antithesis between nature and the supernatural, in the form

in which Comte argues against it, is now abandoned by thoughtful people.

Equally the antithesis of altruism to the service of God is perverse. It

arouses one's pity that Comte should not have seen how, in true religion

these two things coalesce.

Moreover, this deification of mankind, in so far as it is not a sounding

phrase, is an absurdity. When Comte says, for example, that the

authority of humanity must take the place of that of God, he has

recognised that religion must have authority. Indeed, the whole social

order must have authority. However, this is not for him, as we are

accustomed to say, the authority of the truth and of the right. There is

no such abstraction as the truth, coming to various manifestations.

There is no such thing as right, apart from relatively right concrete

measures. There is no larger being indwelling in men. Society, humanity

in its collective capacity, must, if need be, override the individual.

Yet Comte despises the mere rule of majorities. The majority which he

would have rule is that of those who have the scientific mind. We may

admit that in this he aims at the supremacy of truth. But, in fact, he

prepares the way for a doctrinaire tyranny which, of all forms of

government, might easily turn out to be the worst which a long-suffering

humanity has yet endured.

In the end, we are told, love is to take the place of force. Humanity is

present to us first in our mothers, wives and daughters. For these it is

present in their fathers, husbands, sons. From this primary circle love

widens and worship extends as hearts enlarge. It is the prayer to

humanity which first rises above the mere selfishness of the sort to get

something out of God. Remembrance in the hearts of those who loved us

and owe something to us is the only worthy form of immortality. Clearly

it is only the caricature of prayer or of the desire of immortality

which rises before Comte's mind as the thing to be escaped. For this

caricature religious men, both Catholic and Protestant, without doubt,

gave him cause. There were to be seven sacraments, corresponding to

seven significant epochs in a man's career. There were to be priests for

the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the

doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording

opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was

to be set up the symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty

years with her little son in her arms. Littré spoke bitterly of the

positivist religion as a lapse of the author into his old aberration.

This religion was certainly regarded as negligible by many to whom his

system as a whole meant a great deal. At least, it is an interesting

example, as is also his transformation of science into a philosophy, of

the resurgence of valid elements in life, even in the case of a man who

has made it his boast to do away with them.

NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM

We may take Spencer as representative of a group of men who, after the

middle of the nineteenth century, laboured enthusiastically to set forth

evolutionary and naturalistic theories of the universe. These theories

had also, for the most part, the common trait that they professed

agnosticism as to all that lay beyond the reach of the

natural-scientific methods, in which the authors were adept. Both Ward

and Boutroux accept Spencer as such a type. Agnosticism for obvious

reasons could be no system. Naturalism is a tendency in interpretation

of the universe which has many ramifications. There is no intention of

making the reference to one man's work do more than serve as

introduction to the field.

Spencer was eager in denial that he had been influenced by Comte. Yet

there is a certain reminder of Comte in Spencer's monumental endeavour

to systematise the whole mass of modern scientific knowledge, under the

general title of 'A Synthetic Philosophy.' He would show the unity of

the sciences and their common principles or, rather, the one great

common principle which they all illustrate, the doctrine of evolution,

as this had taken shape since the time of Darwin. Since 1904 we have an

autobiography of Herbert Spencer, which, to be sure, seems largely to

have been written prior to 1889. The book is interesting, as well in the

light which it throws upon the expansion of the sciences and the

development of the doctrine of evolution in those years, as in the

revelation of the personal traits of the man himself. Concerning these

Tolstoi wrote to a friend, apropos of a gift of the book: 'In

autobiographies the most important psychological phenomena are often

revealed quite independently of the author's will.'

Spencer was born in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of

Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His early education

was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the age of seventeen his

reading had been immense. He worked with an engineer in the period of

the building of the railways in the Midlands. He always retained his

interest in inventions. He wrote for the newspapers and magazines and

definitely launched upon a literary career. At the age of thirty he

published his first book, on _Social Statics_. He made friends among the

most notable men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the

victim of a disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his

recovery from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which

henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and incorporating

them into what he called a synthetic philosophy. There was immense

increase in actual knowledge and in the power of his reflection on that

knowledge, as the years went by. A generation elapsed between the

publication of his _First Principles_ and the conclusion of his more

formal literary labours. There is something captivating about a man's

life, the energy of which remains so little impaired that he esteems it

better to write a new book, covering some untouched portion of his

scheme, than to give to an earlier volume the revision which in the

light of his matured convictions it may need. His philosophical

limitations he never transcended. He does not so naïvely offer a

substitute for philosophy as does Comte. But he was no master in

philosophy. There is a reflexion of the consciousness of this fact in

his agnosticism.

That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great, and on the

whole salutary, few would deny. Spencer's own later work shows that his

declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the universe is

unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a

relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's

death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the

discussion of all aspects of life, including that of religion. There

seemed no longer any reason for the barrier between science and religion

which Spencer had once thought requisite.

The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific

mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made,

now by theology and now by speculative philosophy. It is hardly

descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined the rather

fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing

sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into

more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this

illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The

continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of

ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of

ignorance. The author of _Ecce Coelum_ has declared: 'Things die out

under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see,

unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our

most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has

become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more

rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.

They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure

and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised scepticism as

to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of

these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth

century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which

Carlyle described as an everlasting No. This was but a preparatory

stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.

In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming

modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our

thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has

administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that

precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one

might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that

phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been

guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of

the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself

unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and

difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information

concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine

authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious

investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the

innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of

a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves

within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which

is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that

religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended

more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much

ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. _Exeunt omnia in

mysterium_. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of

religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to

say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these

with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward

religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has

taught us toward all truth whatsoever.

The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has taken so

kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something beyond the

phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this relation of the

phenomenal to the noumenal. His _Synthetic Philosophy_ opens with an

exposition of this non-relative or absolute, without which the relative

itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's

doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute, indefinite

as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the absolute cannot in

any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing, yet we

find that its positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness.

The belief which this datum of consciousness constitutes has a higher

warrant than any other belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or

noumenal, according to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or

relative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that

the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense

inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without

which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that

ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a

phenomenon, and the source and secret of most complex and interesting

phenomena. It has always been of the greatest importance in the history

of mankind. It has been able to hold its own in face of the attacks of

science. It must contain an element of truth. All religions, however,

assert that their God is for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a

great mystery. The higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this.

It is by the flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular

religiosity offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the next

street. It does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into

the truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally,

the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of

the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are

consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and

are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results of modern

physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in all phenomena,

force. This manifests itself in various forms which are interchangeable,

while amid all these changes the force remains the same. This latter

must be regarded as the reality, and basis of all that is relative and

phenomenal. The entire universe is to be explained from the movements of

this absolute force. The phenomena of nature and of mental life come

under the same general laws of matter, motion, and force.

Spencer's doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account for the

world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a

reconciliation of science and religion. It does not carry us beyond

materialism. Spencer's real intention was directed to something higher

than that. If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is as a

necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. If we get the idea of

force from the experience of our own power of volition, is it not

natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical force, and not

the reverse? Accordingly, the absolute force, basis of all specific

forces, would be mind and will. The doctrine of evolution would

harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it would have to become

idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in

Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of

law and order to a first cause. He says that this first cause is

incomprehensible. Yet he further says, when the question of attributing

personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not

between personality and something lower. It is between personality and

something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much

transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion.

It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to

lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again,

in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will be

to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests

itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the

power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The conception to

which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a

universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.'

Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had at

first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological.

It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says

Huxley, in one of his essays:--'What do we know of this terrible matter,

except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our

own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose

threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen,

except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of

states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable

apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter.

He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an

ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a

physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed

disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had

been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical world being

primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not

altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.

Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system whose parts,

be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by universal laws.

Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable condition of that control of

nature upon which human welfare in so large degree depends. But this

reign of law is an hypothesis. It is not an axiom which it would be

absurd to deny. It is not an obvious fact, thrust upon us whether we

will or no. Experiences are possible without the conception of law and

order. The fruit of experience in knowledge is not possible without it.

That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a

connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are

self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion

of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must

eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science

perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the

history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords

the interesting spectacle of the rise of an hallucination, the growth of

a habit of mythological speech, which is truly surprising. We begin to

hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in

fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently

assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical

shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear

that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of

myth-making and fetish worship--the homage to the fetish of law. Even

the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,'

says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we

do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no

causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If

we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of

rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and

independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such

language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak

of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive

does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as

the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the

movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the

planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that

this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of

speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a

smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which

it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and

self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and

lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have

given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural

agencies, palpable and ready to hand for the explanation of everything,

in the myth-making period of science which living men can still

remember, have by this time paled. They have become simply various

manifestations of one underlying spiritual energy, which is indeed

beyond our perception.[6] When Comte said that the universe could not

rest upon will, because then it would be arbitrary, incalculable,

subject to caprice, one feels the humour and pathos of it. Comte's

experience with will, his own and that of others, had evidently been too

largely of that sad sort. Real freedom consists in conformity to what

ought to be. In God, whom we conceive as perfect, this conformity is

complete. With us it remains an ideal. Were we the creatures of a blind

mechanical necessity there could be no talk of ideal standards and no

meaning in reason at all.

[Footnote 6: Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. p. 248.]

EVOLUTION

In the progress of the thought of the generation, say, from 1870 to the

present day, the conception of evolution has been much changed. The

doctrine of evolution has itself been largely evolved within that

period. The application of it has become familiar in fields of which

there was at first no thought. The bearing of the acceptance of it upon

religion has been seen to be quite different from that which was at

first supposed. The advocacy of the doctrine was at first associated

with the claims of naturalism or positivism. Wider applications of the

doctrine and deeper insight into its meaning have done away with this

misunderstanding. Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as

possible from suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant

primarily the gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic

beginning to its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded

not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of

growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the

force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and

directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends

controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly

also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end

and of cause looked at askance. They are regarded an outside the pale of

the natural sciences. In a very definite sense that is true. The logical

consequence of this admission should be merely the recognition that the

idea of evolution as developed in the natural sciences cannot be the

whole idea.

The entire history of anything, Spencer tells us, must include its

appearance out of the imperceptible, and its disappearance again into

the imperceptible. Be it a single object, or the whole universe, an

account which begins with it in a concrete form, or leaves off with its

concrete form, is incomplete. He uses a familiar instance, that of a

cloud appearing when vapour drifts over a cold mountain top, and again

disappearing when it emerges into warmer air. The cloud emerges from the

imperceptible as heat is dissipated. It is dissolved again as heat is

absorbed and the watery particles evaporate. Spencer esteems this an

analogue of the appearance of the universe itself, according to the

nebular hypothesis. Yet assuredly, as the cloud presupposes vapours

which had previously condensed, and the vapour clouds that had

previously evaporated, and as clouds dissolve in one place even at the

moment that they are forming in another, so we are told of nebulæ which

are in every phase of advance or of decline. To ask which was first,

solid masses or nebulous haze, is much like recurring to the riddle of

the hen and the egg. Still, we are told, we have but to extend our

thought beyond this emergence and subsidence of sidereal systems, of

continents, nations, men, to find a permanent totality made up of

transient individuals in every stage of change. The physical assumption

with which Spencer sets out is that the mass of the universe and its

energy are fixed in quantity. All the phenomena of evolution are

included in the conservation of this matter and force.

Besides the criticism which was offered above, that the mere law of the

persistence of force does not initiate our series, there is a further

objection. Even within the series, once it has been started, this law of

the persistence of force is solely a quantitative law. When energy is

transformed there is an equivalence between the new form and the old. Of

the reasons for the direction evolution takes, for the permanence of

that direction once it has been taken, so that the sequence of forms is

a progression, the explication of a latent nature--of all this, the mere

law of the persistence of force gives us no explanation whatever. The

change at random from one form of manifestation to another might be a

striking illustration of the law of the persistence of force, but it

would be the contradiction of evolution. The very notion of evolution is

that of the sequence of forms, so that something is expressed or

achieved. That achievement implies more than the mere force. Or rather,

it involves a quality of the force with which the language of mechanism

does not reckon. It assumes the idea which gives direction to the force,

an ideal quality of the force.

Unquestionably that which men sought to be rid of was the idea of

purpose in nature, in the old sense of design in the mind of God,

external to the material universe, of force exerted upon nature from

without, so as to cause nature to conform to the design of its 'Great

Original,' in Addison's high phrase. In this effort, however, the

reducing of all to mere force and permutation of force, not merely

explains nothing, but contradicts facts which stare us in the face. It

deprives evolution of the quality which makes it evolution. To put in

this incongruous quality at the beginning, because we find it necessary

at the end, is, to say the least, naïve. To deny that we have put it in,

to insist that in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration

of mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse. We passed

through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God;

everything was accounted for by evolution. In so far as they meant that

they did not believe in the God of deism and of much traditional

theology, they did not stand alone in this claim. In so far as they

meant by evolution mere mechanism, they explained nothing and destroyed

the notion of evolution besides. In so far as they meant more than mere

mechanism, they lapsed into the company of the scientific myth-makers to

whom we alluded above. They attributed to their abstraction, evolution,

qualities which other people found in the forms of the universe viewed

as the manifestation of an immanent God. Only by so doing were they able

to ascribe to evolution that which other people describe as the work of

God. At this level the controversy becomes one simply about words.

Of course, the great illumination as to the meaning of evolution has

come with its application to many fields besides the physical. Darwin

was certainly the great inaugurator of the evolutionary movement in

England. Still, Darwin's problem was strictly limited. The impression is

widespread that the biological evolutionary theories were first

developed, and furnished the basis for the others. Yet both Hegel and

Comte, not to speak of Schelling, were far more interested in the

intellectual and historical, the ethical and social aspects of the

question. Both Hegel and Comte were, whether rightly or wrongly, rather

contemptuous of the appeal to biology and organic life. Both had the

sense that they used a great figure of speech when they spoke of society

as an organism, and compared the working of institutions to biological

functions. This is indeed the question. It is a question over which

Spencer sets himself lightly. He passes back and forth between organic

evolution and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are

described by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly

safe analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle.

Much that is already archaic in Spencer's economic and social, his

historical and ethical, not to say his religious, chapters is due to the

influence of this fact. Of his own mind it was true that he had come to

the doctrine of evolution from the physical side. He brought to his

other subjects a more or less developed method of operating with the

conception. He never fully realised how new subjects would alter the

method and transform the conception. Spencerian evolution is an

assertion of the all-sufficiency of natural law. The authority of

conscience is but the experience of law-abiding and dutiful generations

flowing in our veins. The public weal has hold over us, because the

happiness and misery of past ages are inherited by us.

It marked a great departure when Huxley began vigorously to dissent from

these views. According to him evolutionary science has done nothing for

ethics. Men become ethical only as they set themselves against the

principles embodied in the evolutionary process of the world. Evolution

is the struggle for existence. It is preposterous to say that man became

good by succeeding in the struggle for existence. Instead of the old

single movement, as in Spencer, straight from the nebula to the saint,

Huxley has place for suffering. Suffering is most intense in man

precisely under conditions most essential to the evolution of his nobler

powers. The loss of ease or money may be gain in character. The cosmical

process is not only full of pain. It is full of mercilessness and of

wickedness. Good has been evolved, but so has evil. The fittest may have

survived. There is no guarantee that they are the best. The continual

struggle against our fellows poisons our higher life. It will hardly do

to say with Huxley that the ethical struggle is the reverse of the

cosmical process. Nevertheless, we have here a most interesting

transformation in thought.

These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated and

advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond's _Ascent of Man_, 1894.

Even the title was a happy and suggestive one. Struggle for life is a

fact, but it is not the whole fact. It is balanced by the struggle for

the life of others. This latter reaches far down into the levels of what

we call brute life. Its divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the

real nature of humanity. It is the living with men which develops the

moral in man. The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had

to do with the development of moral nature. So only that we hold a

sufficiently deep view of reason, provided we see clearly that reason

transforms, perfects, makes new what we inherit from the beast, we need

not fear for morality, though it should universally be taught that

morality came into being by the slow and gradual fashioning of brute

impulse.

Benjamin Kidd in his _Social Evolution_, 1895, has reverted again to

extreme Darwinism in morals and sociology. The law is that of unceasing

struggle. Reason does not teach us to moderate the struggle. It but

sharpens the conflict. All religions are præter-rational, Christianity

most of all, in being the most altruistic. Kidd, not without reason,

comments bitterly upon Spencer's Utopia, the passage of militarism into

industrialism. The struggle in industrialism is fiercer than ever.

Reason affects the animal nature of man for the worse. Clearly conscious

of what he is doing, man objects to sacrificing himself for his family

or tribe. Instinct might lead an ape to do that. Intelligence warns a

man against it. Reason is cruel beyond anything dreamed of in the beast.

That portion of the community which loves to hear the abuse of reason,

rejoiced to hear this phrase. They rejoiced when they heard that

religion was the only remedy, and that religion was ultra-rational,

contra-rational, supernatural, in this new sense. How one comes by it,

or how one can rationally justify the yielding of allegiance to it, is

not clear. One must indeed have the will to believe if one believes on

these terms.

These again are but examples. They convey but a superficial impression

of the effort to apply the conception of evolution to the moral and

religious life of man. All this has taken place, of course, in a far

larger setting that of the endeavour to elaborate the evolutionary view

of politics and of the state, of economics and of trade, of social life

and institutions, of culture and civilisation in every aspect. This

elaboration and reiteration of the doctrine of evolution sometimes

wearies us. It is but the unwearied following of the main clue to the

riddle of the universe which the age has given us. It is nothing more

and nothing less than the endeavour to apprehend the ideal life, no

longer as something held out to us, set up before us, but also as

something working within us, realising itself through us and among us.

To deny the affinity of this with religion would be fatuous and also

futile. Temporarily, at least, and to many interests of religion, it

would be fatal.

MIRACLES

It must be evident that the total view of the universe which the

acceptance of the doctrine of evolution implies, has had effect in the

diminution of the acuteness of the question concerning miracles. It

certainly gives to that question a new form. A philosophy which asserts

the constant presence of God in nature and the whole life of the world,

a criticism which has given us a truer notion of the documents which

record the biblical miracles, the reverent sense of ignorance which our

increasing knowledge affords, have tended to diminish the dogmatism of

men on either side of the debate. The contention on behalf of the

miracle, in the traditional sense of the word, once seemed the bulwark

of positive religion, the distinction between the man who was satisfied

with a naturalistic explanation of the universe and one whose devout

soul asked for something more. On the other hand, the contention against

the miracle appeared to be a necessary corollary of the notion of a law

and order which are inviolable throughout the universe. Furthermore,

many men have come of themselves to the conclusion for which

Schleiermacher long ago contended. Whatever may be theoretically

determined concerning miracles, yet the miracle can never again be

regarded as among the foundations of faith. This is for the simplest of

reasons. The belief in a miracle presupposes faith. It is the faith

which sustains the miracle, and not the miracle the faith. Jesus is to

men the incomparable moral and spiritual magnitude which he is, not on

the evidence of some unparalleled things physical which it is alleged he

did. Quite the contrary, it is the immediate impression of the moral and

spiritual wonder which Jesus is, that prepares what credence we can

gather for the wonders which it is declared he did. This is a transfer

of emphasis, a redistribution of weight in the structure of our thought,

the relief of which many appreciate who have not reasoned the matter

through for themselves.

Schleiermacher had said, and Herrmann and others repeat the thought,

that, as the Christian faith finds in Christ the highest revelation,

miracles may reasonably be expected of him. Nevertheless, he adds, these

deeds can be called miracles or esteemed extraordinary, only as

containing something which was beyond contemporary knowledge of the

regular and orderly connexion between physical and spiritual life.

Therewith, it must be evident, that the notion of the miraculous is

fundamentally changed. So it comes to pass that we have a book like

Mackintosh's _Natural History of the Christian Religion_, 1894, whose

avowed purpose is to do away with the miraculous altogether. Of course,

the author means the traditional notion of the miraculous, according to

which it is the essence of arbitrariness and the negation of law. It is

not that he has less sense for the divine life of the world, or for the

quality of Christianity as revelation. On the other hand, we have a book

like Percy Gardner's _Exploratio Evangelica_, 1899. With the most

searching criticism of the narratives of some miracles, there is

reverent confession, on the author's part, that he is baffled by the

reports of others. There is recognition of unknown possibilities in the

case of a character like that of Jesus. It is not that Gardner has a

less stringent sense of fact and of the inexorableness of law than has

Mackintosh or an ardent physicist. The problem is reduced to that of the

choice of expression. We are not able to withhold a justification of the

scholar who declares: We must not say that we believe in the miraculous.

This language is sure to be appropriated by those who still take their

departure from the old dualism, now hopelessly obsolete, for which a

breach of the law of nature was the crowning evidence of the love of

God. On the other hand, the assertion that we do not believe in the

miraculous will easily be taken by some to mean the denial of the whole

sense of the nearness and power and love of God, and of the unimagined

possibilities of such a moral nature as was that of Christ. It is to be

repeated that we have here a mere difference as to terms. The debate is

no longer about ideas.

The traditional notion of the miracle arose out of the confusion of two

series of ideas which, in the last analysis, have nothing to do with

each other. On the one hand, there is the conception of law and order,

of cause and effect, of the unbroken connexion of nature. On the other

hand is the thought of the divine purpose in the life of the world and

of the individual. By the aid of that first sequence of thoughts we find

ourselves in the universe and interpret the world of fact to ourselves.

Yet in the other sequence lies the essence of religion. The two

sequences may perfectly well coexist in the same mind. Out of the

attempt to combine them nothing clear or satisfying can issue. If one

should be, to-day, brought face to face with a fact which was alleged to

be a miracle, his instinctive effort would be, nevertheless, to seek to

find its cause, to establish for it a connexion in the natural order. In

the ancient world men did not argue thus, nor in the modern world until

less than two hundred years ago. The presumption of the order of nature

had not assumed for them the proportions which it has for us. For us it

is overwhelming, self-evident. Therewith is not involved that we lack

belief in a divine purpose for the world and for the individual life.

We do not deny that there are laws of nature of which we have no

experience, facts which we do not understand, events which, if they

should occur, would stand before us as unique. Still, the decisive thing

is, that in face of such an event, instead of viewing it quite simply as

a divine intervention, as men used to do, we, with equal simplicity and

no less devoutness, conceive that same event as only an illustration of

a connexion in nature which we do not understand. There is no inherent

reason why we may not understand it. When we do understand it, there

will be nothing more about it that is conceivably miraculous. There will

be then no longer a unique quality attaching to the event. Therewith

ends the possible significance of such an event as proof of divine

intervention for our especial help. We have but a connexion in nature

such that, whether understood or not, if it were to recur, the event

would recur.

The miracles which are related in the Scripture may be divided for our

consideration into three classes. To the first class belong most of

those which are related in the Old Testament, but some also which are

conspicuous in the New Testament. They are, in some cases, the poetical

and imaginative representation of the profoundest religious ideas. So

soon as one openly concedes this, when there is no longer any necessity

either to attack or to defend the miracle in question, one is in a

position to acknowledge how deep and wonderful the thoughts often are

and how beautiful the form in which they are conveyed. It is through

imagination and symbolism that we are able to convey the subtlest

meanings which we have. Still more was this the case with men of an

earlier age. In the second place, the narratives of miracles are, some

of them, of such a sort that we may say that an event or circumstance in

nature has been obviously apprehended in naïve fashion. This by no means

forbids us to interpret that same event in quite a different way. The

men of former time, exactly in proportion as they had less sense of the

order of nature than have we, so were they also far readier to assume

the immediate forthputting of the power of God. This was true not merely

of the uneducated. It is difficult, or even impossible, for us to find

out what the event was. Fact and apprehension are inextricably

interwoven. That which really happened is concealed from us by the tale

which had intended to reveal it. In the third place, there are many

cases in the history of Jesus, and some in that of the apostles and

prophets, in which that which is related moves in the borderland between

body and soul, spirit and matter, the region of the influence of will,

one's own or that of another, over physical conditions. Concerning such

cases we are disposed, far more than were men even a few years ago, to

concede that there is much that is by no means yet investigated, and the

soundest judgment we can form is far from being sure. Even if we

recognise to the full the lamentable resurgence of outworn superstitions

and stupidities, which again pass current among us for an unhappy

moment, if we detect the questionable or manifestly evil consequences of

certain uses made or alleged of psychic influence, yet still we are not

always in a position to say, with certainty, what is true in tales of

healing which we hear in our own day. There are certain of the

statements concerning Jesus' healing power and action which are

absolutely baffling. They can be eliminated from the narrative only by a

procedure which might just as well eliminate the narrative. In many of

the narratives there may be much that is true. In some all may be as

related. In Jesus' time, on the witness of the Scripture itself, it was

assumed as something no one questioned, that miraculous deeds were

performed, not alone by Jesus and the apostles, but by many others, and

not always even by the good. Such deeds were performed through the power

of evil spirits as well as by the power of God. To imagine that the

working of miracles proved that Jesus came from God, is the most patent

importation of a modern apologetic notion into the area of ancient

thought. We must remember that Jesus himself laid no great weight upon

the miracles which we assume that he believed he wrought, and some of

which we may believe that he did work. Many he performed with hesitation

and desired so far as possible to conceal.

Even if we were in a position at one point or another in the life of

Jesus to defend the traditional assumptions concerning the miraculous,

yet it must be evident how opposed it is to right reason, to lay stress

on the abstract necessity of belief in the miraculous. The traditional

conception of the miraculous is done away for us. This is not at all by

the fact that we are in a position to say with Matthew Arnold: 'The

trouble with miracles is that they never happen.' We do not know enough

to say that. To stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of

so-called miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of

their actuality. The connexion of nature is only an induction. This can

never be complete. The real question is both more complex and also more

simple. The question is whether, even if an event, the most unparalleled

of those related in the Gospels or outside of them, should be proved

before our very eyes to have taken place, the question is whether we

should believe it to have been a miracle in the traditional sense, an

event in which the actual--not the known, but the possible--order of

nature had been broken through, and in the old sense, God had

arbitrarily supervened.

Allowed that the event were, in our own experience and in the known

experience of the race, unparalleled, yet it would never occur to us to

suppose but that there was a law of this case, also, a connexion in

nature in which, as work of God, it occurred, and in which, if the

conditions were repeated, it would recur. We should unceasingly

endeavour through observation, reflexion, and new knowledge, to show how

we might subordinate this event in the connexion of nature which we

assume. We should feel that we knew more, and not less, of God, if we

should succeed. And if our effort should prove altogether futile, we

should be no less sure that such natural connexion exists. This is

because nature is for us the revelation of the divine. The divine, we

assume, has a natural order of working. Its inviolability is the

divinest thing about it. It is through this sequence of ideas that we

are in a position to deny, not facts which may be inexplicable, but the

traditional conception of the miracle. For surely no one needs to be

told that this is not the conception of the miracle which has existed in

the minds of the devout, and equally of the undevout, from the beginning

of thought until the present day.

However, there is nothing in all of this which hinders us from believing

with a full heart in the love and grace and care of God, in his holy and

redeeming purpose for mankind and for the individual. It is true that

this belief cannot any longer retain its naïve and childish form. It is

true that it demands of a man far more of moral force, of ethical and

spiritual mastery, of insight and firm will, to sustain the belief in

the purpose of God for himself and for all men, when a man believes that

he sees and feels God only in and through nature and history, through

personal consciousness and the personal consciousness of Jesus. It is

true that it has, apparently, been easier for men to think of God as

outside and above his world, and of themselves as separated from their

fellows by his special providence. It is more difficult, through glad

and intelligent subjection to all laws of nature and of history, to

achieve the education of one's spirit, to make good one's inner

deliverance from the world, to aid others in the same struggle and to

set them on their way to God. Men grow uncertain within themselves,

because they say that traditional religion has apprehended the matter in

a different way. This is true. It is also misleading. Whatever miracles

Jesus may have performed, no one can say that he performed them to make

life easier for himself, to escape the common lot, to avoid struggle, to

evade suffering and disgraceful death. On the contrary, in genuine human

self-distrust, but also in genuine heroism, he gave himself to his

vocation, accepting all that went therewith, and finished the work of

God which he had made his own. This is the more wonderful because it lay

so much nearer to him than it can lie to us, to pray for special

evidence of the love of God and to set his faith on the receiving of it.

He had not the conception of the relation of God to nature and history

which we have.

We may well view the modern tendency to belief in healings through

prayer, suggestion and faith, as an intelligible, an interesting, and in

part, a touching manifestation. Of course there is mingled with it much

dense ignorance, some superstition and even deception. Yet behind such a

phenomenon there is meaning. Men of this mind make earnest with the

thought that God cares for them. Without that thought there is no

religion. They have been taught to find the evidence of God's love and

care in the unusual. They are quite logical. It has been a weak point of

the traditional belief that men have said that in the time of Christ

there were miracles, but since that time, no more. Why not, if we can

only in spirit come near to Christ and God? They are quite logical also

in that they have repudiated modern science. To be sure, no

inconsiderable part of them use the word science continually.

But the very esoteric quality of their science is that it means

something which no one else ever understood that it meant. In reality

their breach with science is more radical than their breach with

Christianity. They feel the contradiction in which most men are bound

fast, who will let science have its way, up to a certain point, but who

beyond that, would retain the miracle. Dimly the former appreciate that

this position is impossible. They leave it to other men to become

altogether scientific if they wish. For themselves they prefer to remain

religious. What a revival of ancient superstitions they have brought to

pass, is obvious. Still we shall never get beyond such adventurous and

preposterous endeavours to rescue that which is inestimably precious in

religion, until the false antithesis between reason and faith, the lying

contradiction between the providence of God and the order of nature, is

overcome. Some science mankind apparently must have. Altogether without

religion the majority, it would seem, will never be. How these are

related, the one to the other, not every one sees. Many attempt their

admixture in unhappy ways. They might try letting them stand in peace as

complement and supplement the one to the other. Still better, they may

perhaps some day see how each penetrates, permeates and glorifies the

other.

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

We said that the last generation had been characterised by an unexampled

concentration of intellectual interest upon problems presented by the

social sciences. With this has gone an unrivalled earnestness in the

interpretation of religion as a social force. The great religious

enthusiasm has been that of the application of Christianity to the

social aspects of life. This effort has furnished most of the watchwords

of religious teaching. It has laid vigorous, not to say violent, hands

on religious institutions. It has given a new perspective to effort and

a new impulse to devotion. The revival of religion in our age has taken

this direction, with an exclusiveness which has had both good and evil

consequences. Yet, before all, it should be made clear that it

constitutes a religious revival. Some are deploring the prostrate

condition of spiritual interests. If one judged only by conventional

standards, they have much evidence upon their side. Some are seeking to

galvanise religious life by recurrence to evangelistic methods

successfully operative half a century ago. The outstanding fact is that

the age shows immense religious vitality, so soon as one concedes that

it must be allowed to show its vitality in its own way. It is the age of

the social question. One must be ignorant indeed of the activity of the

churches and of the productivity of religious thinkers, if he does not

own that in Christian circles also no questions are so rife as these.

Whether the panaceas have been all wise or profitable may be questioned.

Whether the interest has not been even excessive and one-sided, whether

the accusation has not been occasionally unjust and the self-accusation

morbid, these are questions which it might be possible in some quarters

to ask. This is, however, only another form of proof of what we say. The

religious interest in social questions has not been aroused primarily by

intellectual and scientific impulses, nor fostered mainly by doctrinaire

discussion. On the contrary, the initiative has been from the practical

side. It has been a question of life and service. If anything, one often

misses the scientific note in the flood of semi-religious literature

relating to this theme, the realisation that, to do well, it is often

profitable to think. Yet there is effort to mediate the best results of

social-scientific thinking, through clerical education and directly to

the laity. On the other hand, a deep sense of ethical and spiritual

responsibility is prevalent among thinkers upon social topics.

Often indeed has the quality of Christianity been observed which is here

exemplified. Each succeeding age has read into Christ's teachings, or

drawn out from his example, the special meaning which that generation,

or that social level, or that individual man had need to draw. To them

in their enthusiasm it has often seemed as if this were the only lesson

reasonable men could draw. Nothing could be more enlightening than is

reflexion upon this reading of the ever-changing ideals of man's life

into Christianity, or of Christianity into the ever-advancing ideals of

man's life. This chameleonlike quality of Christianity is the farthest

possible remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to

religion. It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity possesses.

It is precisely because of the recognition of this capacity for change

that one may safely argue the continuance of Christianity in the world.

Yet also because of this recognition, one is put upon his guard against

joining too easily in the clamour that a past apprehension of religion

was altogether wrong, or that a new and urgent one, in its exclusive

emphasis and its entirety, is right. Our age is haunted by the sense of

terrific social and economic inequalities which prevail. It has set its

heart upon the elimination of those inequalities. It is an age whose

disrespect for religion is in some part due to the fact that religion

has not done away with these inequalities. It is an age which is

immediately interested in an interpretation of religion which will make

central the contention that, before all things else, these inequalities

must be done away. If religion can be made a means of every man's

getting his share of the blessings of this world, well and good. If not,

there are many men and women to whom religion seems utterly meaningless.

This sentence hardly overstates the case. It is the challenge of the age

to religion to do something which the age profoundly needs, and which

religion under its age-long dominant apprehension has not conspicuously

done, nor even on a great scale attempted. It is the challenge to

religion to undertake a work of surpassing grandeur--nothing less than

the actualisation of the whole ideal of the life of man. Religious men

respond with the quickened and conscientious conviction, not indeed that

they have laid too great an emphasis upon the spiritual, but that under

a dualistic conception of God and man and world, they have never

sufficiently realised that the spiritual is to be realised in the

material, the ideal in and not apart from the actual, the eternal in and

not after the temporal. Yet with that oscillatory quality which belongs

to human movements, especially where old wrongs and errors have come

deeply to be felt, a part of the literature of the contention shows

marked tendency to extremes. A religion in the body must become a

religion of the body. A Christianity of the social state runs risk of

being apprehended as merely one more means for compassing outward and

material ends. Religion does stand for the inner life and the

transcendent world, only not an inner life through the neglect of the

outer, or a transcendent world in some far-off star or after an æon or

two. There might be meaning in the argument that, exactly because so

many other forces in our age do make for the realisation of the outer

life and present world with an effectiveness and success which no

previous age has ever dreamed, there is the more reason, and not the

less, why religion should still be religion. Exactly this is the

contention of Eueken in one of the most significant contributions of

recent years to the philosophy of religion, his _Wahrheitsgehalt der

Religion_, 1901, transl. Jones, 1911. The very source and cause of the

sure recovery of religion in our age will be the experience of the

futility, the bankruptcy, of a civilisation without faith. No nobler

argument has been heard in our time for the spiritual meaning of

religion, with the fullest recognition of all its other meanings.

The modern emphasis on the social aspects of religion may be said to

have been first clearly expressed in Seeley's _Ecce Homo_, 1867. The

pith of the book is in this phrase: 'To reorganise society and to bind

the members of it together by the closest ties was the business of

Jesus' life.' Allusion has been made to Fremantle's _The World as the

Subject of Redemption_, 1885. Worthy of note is also Fairbairn's

_Religion in History and Modern Life_, 1894; pre-eminently so is

Bosanquet's _The Civilisation of Christendom_, 1893. Westcott's

_Incarnation and Common Life_, 1893, contains utterances of weight.

Peabody, in his book, _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, 1905, has

given, on the whole, the best résumé of the discussion. He conveys

incidentally an impression of the body of literature produced in recent

years, in which it is assumed, sometimes with embitterment, that the

centre of gravity of Christianity is outside the Church. Sell, in the

very title of his illuminating little book, _Christenthum und

Weltgeschichte seit der Reformation: das Christenthum in seiner

Entwickelung über die Kirche hinaus_, 1910, records an impression, which

is widespread and true, that the characteristic mark of modern

Christianity is that it has transcended the organs and agencies

officially created for it. It has become non-ecclesiastical, if not

actually hostile to the Church. It has permeated the world in unexpected

fashion and does the deeds of Christianity, though rather eager to avoid

the name. The anti-clericalism of the Latin countries is not

unintelligible, the anti-ecclesiasticism of the Teutonic not without a

cause. German socialism, ever since Karl Marx, has been fundamentally

antagonistic to any religion whatsoever. It is purely secularist in

tone. This is also a strained situation, liable to become perverse. That

part of the Christian Church which understands itself, rejoices in

nothing so much as in the fact that the spirit of Christ is so widely

disseminated, his influence felt by many who do not know what influence

it is which they feel, his work done by vast numbers who would never

call themselves his workers. That part of the Church is not therewith

convinced but that there is need of the Church as institution, and of

those who are consciously disciples of Jesus in the world.

By far the largest question, however, which is raised in this connexion,

is one different from any thus far intimated. It is, perhaps, the last

question one would have expected the literature of the social movement

to raise. It is, namely, the question of the individual. Ever since the

middle of the eighteenth century a sort of universalistic optimism, to

which the individual is sacrificed, has obtained. Within the period of

which this book treats the world has won an enlargement of horizon of

which it never dreamed. It has gained a forecast of the future of

culture and civilisation which is beyond imagination. The access of

comfort makes men at home in the world as they never were at home. There

has been set a value on this life which life never had before. The

succession of discoveries and applications of discovery makes it seem as

if there were to be no end in this direction. From Rousseau to Spencer

men have elaborated the view that the historical process cannot really

issue in anything else than in ever higher stages of perfection and of

happiness. They postulate a continuous enhancement of energy and a

steady perfecting of intellectual and moral quality. As the goal of

evolution appears an ideal condition which is either indefinitely

remote, that is, which gives room for the bliss of infinite progress in

its direction, or else a definitely attainable condition, which would

have within itself the conditions of perpetuity.

The resistlessness with which this new view of the life of civilisation

has won acknowledgment from men of all classes is amazing. It rests upon

a belief in the self-sufficiency and the all-sufficiency of the life of

this world, of the bearings of which it may be assumed that few of its

votaries are aware. In reality this view cannot by any possibility be

described as the result of knowledge. On the contrary, it is a venture

of faith. It is the peculiar, the very characteristic and suggestive

form which the faith of our age takes. Men believe in this indefinite

progress of the world and of mankind, because without postulating such

progress they do not see how they can assume the absolute worth of an

activity which is yet the only thing which has any interest to most of

them. Under this view one can assign to the individual life a definite

significance, only upon the supposition that the individual is the organ

of realisation of a part of this progress of mankind. All happiness and

suffering, all changes in knowledge and manner of conduct, are supposed

to have no worth each for itself or for the sake of the individual, but

only for their relation to the movement as a whole. Surely this is an

illusion. Exactly that in which the characteristic quality of the world

and of life is found, the individual personalities, the single

generations, the concrete events--these lose, in this view, their own

particular worth. What can possibly be the worth of a whole of which the

parts have no worth? We have here but a parallel on a huge scale of that

deadly trait in our own private lives, according to which it makes no

difference what we are doing, so only that we are doing, or whither we

are going, so only that we cease not to go, or what our noise is all

about, so only that there be no end of the noise. Certainly no one can

establish the value of the evolutionary process in and of itself.

If the movement as a whole has no definite end that has absolute worth,

then it has no worth except as the stages, the individual factors

included in it, attain to something within themselves which is of

increasing worth. If the movement achieves this, then it has worth, not

otherwise. We may illustrate this question by asking ourselves

concerning the existence and significance of suffering and of the evil

and of the bad which are in the world, in their relation to this

tendency to indefinite progress which is supposed to be inherent in

civilisation. On this theory we have to say that the suffering of the

individual is necessary for the development and perfecting of the whole.

As over against the whole the individual has no right to make demands as

to welfare or happiness. The bad also becomes only relative. In the

movement taken as a whole, it is probably unavoidable. In any case it is

negligible, since the movement is irresistible. All ethical values are

absorbed in the dynamic ones, all personal values in the collective

ones. Surely the sole intelligent question about any civilisation is,

what sort of men does it produce. If it produces worthless individuals,

it is so far forth a worthless civilisation. If it has sacrificed many

worthy men in order to produce this ignoble result, then it is more

obviously ignoble than ever.

Furthermore, this notion of an inherent necessity and an irresistible

tendency to progress is a chimera. The progress of mankind is a task. It

is something to which the worthy human spirit is called upon to make

contribution. The unworthy never hear the call. Progress is not a

natural necessity. It is an ethical obligation. It is a task which has

been fulfilled by previous generations in varying degrees of

perfectness. It will be participated in by succeeding generations with

varying degrees of wisdom and success. But as to there being anything

autonomous about it, this is sheer hallucination, myth-making again, on

the part of those who boast that they despise the myth,

miracle-mongering on the part of those who have abjured the miracle,

nonsense on the part of those who boast that they alone are sane. There

is no ultimate source of civilisation but the individual, as there is

also no issue of civilisation but in individuals. Men, characters,

personalities, are the makers of it. Men are the product which is made.

The higher stages and achievements of the life of society have come to

pass always and only upon condition that single personalities have

recognised the problem, seen their individual duty and known how to

inspire others with enthusiasm. Periods of decline are always those in

which this personal element cannot make itself felt. Democracies and

periods of the intensity of emphasis upon the social movement, tend

directly to the depression and suppression of personality.[7] Such

reflexions will have served their purpose if they give us some clear

sense of what we have to understand as the effect of the social movement

on religion. They may give also some forecast of the effect of real

religion on the social movement. For religion is the relation of God and

personality. It can be social only in the sense that society, in all its

normal relations, is the sphere within which that relation of God and

personality is to be wrought out.

[Footnote 7: Siebeck, _Religionsphilosophie_, 1893, s. 407.]