I: PROLOGUE

[_Controverted Questions_, 1892]

Le plus grand service qu'on puisse rendre à la science est d'y faire

place nette avant d'y rien construire.--CUVIER.

Most of the Essays comprised in the present volume have been written

during the last six or seven years, without premeditated purpose or

intentional connection, in reply to attacks upon doctrines which I

hold to be well founded; or in refutation of allegations respecting

matters lying within the province of natural knowledge, which I

believe to be erroneous; and they bear the mark of their origin in the

controversial tone which pervades them.

Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of warfare, I think it may be

said, that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or

less of an evil. It is useful, when it attracts attention to topics

which might otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes

happen, those who come to see a contest remain to think. It is

necessary, when the interests of truth and of justice are at stake.

It is an evil, in so far as controversy always tends to degenerate

into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue of what is right and

what is wrong to the very small question of who is right and who is

wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary were more

conspicuous than the evil attributes of literary militancy, when these

papers were first published; but I have had some hesitation about

reprinting them. If I may judge by my own taste, few literary dishes

are less appetising than cold controversy; moreover, there is an air

of unfairness about the presentation of only one side of a discussion,

and a flavour of unkindness in the reproduction of "winged words,"

which, however appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find

a still more appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly

ask those who have honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer

lustre on this collection, by permitting me to present their

lucubrations along with my own; and since it would be a manifest wrong

to them to deprive their, by no means rare, vivacities of language of

such justification as they may derive from similar freedoms on my

part; I came to the conclusion that my best course was to leave the

essays just as they were written;[8] assuring my honourable

adversaries that any heat of which signs may remain was generated, in

accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, by the force of

their own blows, and has long since been dissipated into space.

But, however the polemical coincomitants of these discussions may be

regarded--or better, disregarded--there is no doubt either about the

importance of the topics of which they treat, or as to the public

interest in the "Controverted Questions" with which they deal. Or

rather, the Controverted Question; for disconnected as these pieces

may, perhaps, appear to be, they are, in fact, concerned only with

different aspects of a single problem, with which thinking men have

been occupied, ever since they began seriously to consider the

wonderful frame of things in which their lives are set, and to seek

for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies.

Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the

world's stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst

the seeming confusion, and that many events take place according to

unchanging rules. To this region of familiar steadiness and customary

regularity they gave the name of Nature. But, at the same time, their

infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the

playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible,

commonplace, orderly world of Nature was surrounded and

interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more

bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and

passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an

intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They attributed to

the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful region, an

unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events of

which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus came to regard

them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature.

Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to

"Nature"--the primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and

a supernatural, left to the free play of volition--which has pervaded

all later speculation and, for thousands of years, has exercised a

profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory

of the Universe, the successful conduct of life must demand careful

attention to both worlds; and, if either is to be neglected, it may be

safer that it should be Nature. In any given contingency, it must

doubtless be desirable to know what may be expected to happen in the

ordinary course of things; but it must be quite as necessary to have

some inkling of the line likely to be taken by supernatural agencies

able, and possibly willing, to suspend or reverse that course. Indeed,

logically developed, the dualistic theory must needs end in almost

exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that its overruling

strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well with its

denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great schoolmaster,

experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this conclusion. They

have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not answer to

neglect Nature; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid to her

dictates the better men fare.

Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism.

From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and

Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and

struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest

are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those

of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our

own time and people.

These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to

Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed

the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence;

and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality

and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of

discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally

accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of

morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and

more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of

right action.

History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded

its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a

different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of

Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which

natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about

Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of

their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their

interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or

averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have

attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history

indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice,

with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions

are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents

delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with

criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In

singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of

mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more

exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the

greater, the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of

civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there

would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural

knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in

trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and

questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of

action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or

vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition.

Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of

Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress,

of humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life;

is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention

is that the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are

growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the historical

evolution of humanity, which is generally, and I venture to think not

unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being,

accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its

originally large occupation of men's thoughts. The question--How far

is this process to go?--is, in my apprehension, the Controverted

Question of our time.

* * * * *

Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the

weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new

thing to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these

five hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to

establish a _modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which

have had a world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have

proved universally and permanently satisfactory.

In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was,

whether certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediæval

Christianity were well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of

the problem which, in the course of the following two hundred years,

acquired wide popularity and vast historical importance: Lollards,

Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Socinians, and

Anabaptists, whatever their disagreements, concurred in the proposal

to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits

sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of Protestantism

called in question either the supernatural origin and infallible

authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the

supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford

to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible

was the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to

upset the Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which

they proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to

themselves to make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church,

in respect of the canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words

of the canonical books. Private judgment--that is to say, reason--was

(theoretically, at any rate) at liberty to decide what books were and

what were not to take the rank of "Scripture"; and to determine the

sense of any passage in such books. But this sense, once ascertained

to the mind of the sectary, was to be taken for pure truth--for the

very word of God. The controversial efficiency of the principle of

biblical infallibility lay in the fact that the conservative

adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to contravene it

without entangling themselves in serious difficulties; while, since

both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to

stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count.

The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the

inherent weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the

infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the

infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the

latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by

private judgment, why not the former? Even if the Bible could be

proved anywhere to assert its own infallibility, the value of that

self-assertion to those who dispute the point is not obvious. On the

other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible was rested on that of a

"primitive Church," the admission that the "Church" was formerly

infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its present

infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle

applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible

text, when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially

countenance contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and

confessions as diverse as the quality and the information of the

intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway,

such judgments. Every sect, confident in the derivative infallibility

of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, was ready to supply its

contingent of martyrs; and to enable history, once more, to illustrate

the truth, that steadfastness under persecution says much for the

sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very

little for the objective truth of that which he believes. No martyrs

have sealed their faith with their blood more steadfastly than the

Anabaptists.

Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself

the germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran,

Calvinistic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had

reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical

Scriptures, it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the

canon defined the creed. If the private judgment of Luther might

legitimately conclude that the epistle of James was contemptible,

while the epistles of Paul contained the very essence of Christianity,

it must be permissible for some other private judgment, on as good or

as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the critical process

which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any rate by

people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its

operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got

so far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further

progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of

Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at

the feet of Reason; and, in the hands of latitudinarian and

rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly

converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much

respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised;

and its decrees were valid only so far as they were countersigned by

common sense, the responsible minister.

The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the

Reformation of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason;

but it may be doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while

there is a good deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after

intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement.

Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself

and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from

any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas

of mediæval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to

Münzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any

desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a

proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the

intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more

accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly

shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the

arrogant Cæsaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed, had no more

hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and

judges, than had the old-fashioned Pontiff-papistry.

It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal

system that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was,

essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain

practical deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in

principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of

abolishing transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences,

ecclesiastical infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal

presence mystifications, the bibliolatry, the "inner-light"

pretensions, and the demonology, which are fruits of the same

supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and

temporal support of a new infallibility? One does not free a prisoner

by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles.

It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products

of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included

under the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von

Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist,

Erasmus, fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened

and basely deserted it?

From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they

often forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means

convertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous

reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of

Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the

rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of

Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of

the noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical

learning; the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by

the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold

of mediæval Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture and

of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to

anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the

monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of

weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of

a common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the

protestant; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and,

sooner or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of

the humanists, whether they were aware of it or not, was the

attainment of the complete intellectual freedom of the antique

philosopher, than which nothing could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a

Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.

The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to

lie in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many

weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and

professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory

movement which he originally contemplated; and it was impossible he

should have deserted the specifically Protestant reformation in which

he never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom

radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or, to borrow a still

more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who

refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church

zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and

traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic

remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr

for that in which he does not believe; and a fair consideration of the

circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems

to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted.

Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of

Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual

shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of

Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond

imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to

rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard,

whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and

princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware

of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from

the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than

from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their

oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in

England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most

influential men in each country among his friends, was not likely to

estimate wrongly the enormous forces which were still at the command

of the Papacy. Bad as the churchmen might be, the statesmen were

worse; and a person of far more sanguine temperament than Erasmus

might have seen no hope for the future, except in gradually freeing

the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from the corruptions which

alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as beneficent as it was

powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man of the world

might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of one great

light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however learned and

logical, of others; and to a cautious thinker, by whom, whatever his

shortcomings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sincerely

prized, it really was a fair question, whether it was worth while to

bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no mortal

could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian, and

other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion

of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman.

Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian

movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to

Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of

Anabaptist communism, which opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in

shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England,

with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter

tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the

long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which

devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing

with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere

dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry

triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in

its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his

friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought

this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more

especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know

how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to

bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism

would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus

was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent

Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have

discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but

of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church

Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as

Voltaire by his Deism.

In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left

Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:

while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later.

By this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was

incarnate became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked

Supernaturalism in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants

and Romanists with equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch,"

Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and Calvinism were merely three persons of

the one "Infâme" which it was the object of his life to crush. If he

hated one more than another, it was probably the last; while

D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the free-thinking host, were

disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and Pantheism.

The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific

noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but

cool judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of

the later rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to

furnish permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry.

However worthy of admiration may be the acuteness, the common sense,

the wit, the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best

of the free-thinkers; there is rarely much to be said for their work

as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult

investigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that,

from this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries.

It must be admitted that they share to the full the fatal weakness of

_a priori_ philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to

their age; while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the

record of the moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted

them to resort to preposterous theories of imposture, in order to

account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of that

evolution.

For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the

free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and

with vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one

great Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the

free-thinking array, and turned their batteries upon themselves.

Speculative "infidelity" of the eighteenth century type was mortally

wounded by the _Analogy_; while the progress of the historical and

psychological sciences brought to light the important part played by

the mythopoeic faculty; and, by demonstrating the extreme readiness of

men to impose upon themselves, rendered the calling in of sacerdotal

cooperation, in most cases, a superfluity.

Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and

political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_,

who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as

they did to _L'Infâme_, were credited with the responsibility for all

the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much

justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants'

revolt, or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our

_ancien régime_ was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was

never in such a bad way as in France; it was still capable of being

repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until

that operation could be safely performed, rather than pull it all down

about their ears, in order to build a philosophically planned house on

brand-new speculative foundations. Under these circumstances, it is

not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the

gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while enough

of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and

support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical

supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the

indifference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth

century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which

submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time,

to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which that work was an

imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier,

free-thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or

later, to return to the surface.

* * * * *

My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the

nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and

the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the

neighbourhood of Oxford; but when nevertheless, bibliolatry was

rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of

God, the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural

sequence, the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.

In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without

my authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the

vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some

preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and

even of theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school,

poured forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives

against those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark

allusions to "sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the

existence of people who trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously

doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that the

deluge was universal; perhaps even went so far as to question the

literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of Balaam's ass;

and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I

should have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash

men belonged to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were

more directly responsible for providing me with the knowledge

essential to the right guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to

do so), imagined they were discharging that most sacred duty by

impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain of reprobation

in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in the strict

and literal sense, every statement contained in the Protestant Bible.

I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt about any of them

was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I suppose that,

out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at least, had

their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of the God

of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years

later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of

any part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the Gospels, had to

expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the

other disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run

counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.

My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the

perusal of a remarkable document,[9] signed by as many as thirty-eight

out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It

does not appear that the signataries are officially accredited

spokesmen of the ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but

I feel bound to take their word for it, that they are "stewards of the

Lord, who have received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept

this memorial as evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early

days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the

colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of

Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it

did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to

offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to

God," imperilling his salvation.

It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they

discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They

are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been

discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the

supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate

myself upon such weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have

had the fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the

credit of the courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight

that they should go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of

the Old and New Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual

historical truth in all records, both of past events and of the

delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to

the coming generation to decide.

The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think,

be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of

which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put

forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary

character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical

body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare

themselves "stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In

fact, the stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I

have briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even

the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to

swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican

establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are

as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there

were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago.

Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual

historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives.

University professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical

decision that the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of

Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly

demonstrable as it might be; highly placed Divines tell us that the

pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored; that the book of

Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of the second century

B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always

to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus.

Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages,

some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations.

An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility

seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to

substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my

old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding

Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I

should have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no

less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more

anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the

Protestant Reformation and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic."

Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down

into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, inspired; but they

contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human element"; and this

unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping

boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical,

proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame; while the

divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of

reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour

inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat

the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal, forty

years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop

Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical

ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of

the scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will

ne'er consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific

criticism which the memorialists renounce and denounce.

A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to

assume even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may

well find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities

perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention

to either, until the question of precedence between them is settled.

And this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more

closely the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.

"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on

literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical,

criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere

with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once

ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity."[10]

Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which

guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and

New Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet,

according to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary testimony" has to be

"ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." But "ascertainment

and verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be

conducted according to the strict rules of scientific investigation,

or be self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set

about the appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully

vague term must be defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include

any number of centuries, great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to

comprise the Council of Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of

Nicæa, or to come to an end in the time of Irenænus, or in that of

Justin Martyr, are knotty questions which can be decided, if at all,

only by those critical methods which the signataries treat so

cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is fundamental,

for as the limits of the canonical scriptures vary, so may the dogmas

deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing, if

the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles,

and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly

true; and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said,

whoso defines the canon defines the creed.

Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as

the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and

the Western Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither

the one branch nor the other can have considered its judgment

infallible, since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which

each gave up its objection to the book patronised by the other.

Moreover, the "fathers" argue (in a more or less rational manner)

about the canonicity of this or that book, and are by no means above

producing evidence, internal and external, in favour of the opinions

they advocate. In fact, imperfect as their conceptions of scientific

method may be, they not unfrequently used it to the best of their

ability. Thus it would appear that though science, like Nature, may be

driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes

back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in fact, an appeal to

science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to determine

what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity; thirdly, to prove

that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the

shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this appeal, and has

shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and

imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants, and

demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science

should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry

it out efficiently.

But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius,

Origen, Tertullian, Irenæus, to argue for the reception of this book

into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds,

"antiquity" admitted the whole principle of modern criticism. If

Irenæus produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four,

it was open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them)

for cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the

Eastern branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and

accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to

accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth

century, any other branch would have an equal right, on cause shown,

to reject both, or, as the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to

accept both.

Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own

petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a

round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of

which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian

supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and

furnished the elephant with standing ground on the tortoise of

"antiquity," they, like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been

content to look no further; and have thereby been spared the horror of

discovering that the tortoise rests on a grievously fragile

construction, to a great extent the work of that very intellectual

operation which they anathematise and repudiate.

Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course

true that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not,

depends on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the

Christian scriptures; and that the infallibility of these depends upon

the infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the

books of which they are composed, out of the mass of literature

current among the early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine

showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on

that of the Church to which he belonged.[11] But it is no less true

that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of

the Old Testament books existed before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth;

and that their divine authority is presupposed by, and therefore can

hardly depend upon, the religious body constituted by his disciples.

As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is purely

Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic prophecies

vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a

matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the

writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised

as the highest court of appeal of the Christian.

The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the

infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority

vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are

erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if

a claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should

offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the

will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory,

argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the

infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible

Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it remains permissible to

ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its

infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has

officially decreed the "actual historical truth of all records" in the

Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he denied the actual

historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father Suarez,

standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that he

was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal

to that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part,

to say so.

* * * * *

Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view

with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of

Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged

along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the

sublime from the ridiculous--from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light

mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the

same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of

these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms

of Supernaturalism have deep roots in human nature, and will

undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days, they have to cope

with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning to be put

out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are hemming

them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of

systematized natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries,

has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is

confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which the

Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.

When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic

Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of

authorship of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific

literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after

exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar

system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks,

circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite

space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the

earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its

relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic

gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian

records would be treated in the same manner; that the authorship of

the Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested; and that

the evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found

in the Scriptures would have to be strong indeed, if they were to be

opposed to the conclusions of physical science. In point of fact, so

far as I can discover, no one competent to judge of the evidential

strength of these conclusions, ventures now to say that the biblical

accounts of the creation and of the deluge are true in the natural

sense of the words of the narratives. The most modern Reconcilers

venture upon is to affirm, that some quite different sense may he put

upon the words; and that this non-natural sense may, with a little

trouble, be manipulated into some sort of noncontradiction of

scientific truth.

My purpose, in the essay (XVI.) which treats of the narrative of the

Deluge, was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as

that described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character

of the narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to

account for its origin, by producing a form of those ancient legends

of pagan Chaldæa, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly

derived. I have yet to learn that the main propositions of this essay

can be seriously challenged.

In the essays (II., III.) on the narrative of the Creation, I have

endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports,

either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any

interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the

narrative, quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of

Genesis teaches the supernatural creation of the present forms of

life; modern science teaches that they have come about by evolution.

The first chapter of Genesis teaches the successive origin--firstly,

of all the plants, secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals,

thirdly, of all the terrestrial animals, which now exist--during

distinct intervals of time; modern science teaches that, throughout

all the duration of an immensely long past so far as we have any

adequate knowledge of it (that is as far back as the Silurian epoch),

plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial animals have co-existed; that

the earliest known are unlike those which at present exist; and that

the modern species have come into existence as the last terms of a

series, the members of which have appeared one after another. Thus,

far from confirming the account in Genesis, the results of modern

science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in detail, hopelessly

discordant with it.

Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient

Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and

friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter

themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the

two most important of all events, the origin of things and the

palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any

serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of

the Fall, of the commerce between the _Bene Elohim_ and the daughters

of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends?

And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what becomes of the

infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have

accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic

conclusions upon their historical accuracy?

It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to

try to hide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable

connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked.

The question will still be asked, if the first nine chapters of the

Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the

remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of

the Exodus than that of the Deluge, to belief? If God did not walk in

the Garden of Eden, how can we be assured that he spoke from Sinai?

* * * * *

In some other of the following essays (IX., X., XI., XII., XIV., XV.)

I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and

literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the

canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare incontrovertibly

the actual historical truth in all records." We are told that the

Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world--a

proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I should not

think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to signify that

everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is

infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology which

constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess

belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive

people--it is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be

unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from

the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged

wonderful occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence

for the Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply

three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive

form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely

nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good

as that for any other.

Elsewhere, I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to

declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted

tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian

faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality; still less to brand

them with the question-begging vituperative appellation of

"infidelity." The point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether,

from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably

true. If they are, they will be accepted in time, whether they are

wicked, or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have been able to attain

to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes

for righteousness by very round-about paths. And, at any rate,

whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and

less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of

ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by

daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any

matter. But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific

methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their

daily professional and business needs, is increasing and will

continually increase. The phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on

men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who

listens with devout attention to the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a

witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday, dismisses, as intrinsically

absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman;

the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for

rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office;

even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as

the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence sends men, not

to the churches, but to the drains. In spite of prayers for the

success of our arms and _Te Deums_ for victory, our real faith is in

big battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge of the science

of warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all

other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "_Laborare est

orare_"; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable

worship; and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, our business

is with Nature.

* * * * *

It is important to note that the principle of the scientific

Naturalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the

intellectual movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was

first clearly formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the

existence of any Supernature;[12] but simply to the denial of the

validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant

form of Supernaturalism.

Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view,

the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through

endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than

man's as his is greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with

powers of influencing the course of nature as much greater than his,

as his is greater than a snail's seems to me not merely baseless, but

impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is

known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending

scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from

omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can,

in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago

and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly

within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of

the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole

future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature

that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun,

an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant

knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience

may confer indefinably greater power. Finally, if evidence that a

thing may be, were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might

justify the construction of a naturalistic theology and demonology not

less wonderful than the current supernatural; just as it might justify

the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms to which

terrestrial biology offers no parallel. Until human life is longer and

the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not think that wise

men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural history;

and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in respect

of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic confession,

which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to

say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know. As to

the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind

could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of

life, a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet

seen; an approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic

religion has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in

effecting.

* * * * *

I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Naturalism chiefly in its

critical and destructive aspect. But the present incarnation of the

spirit of the Renascence differs from its predecessor in the

eighteenth century, in that it builds up, as well as pulls down.

That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it is already

raising the superstructure, is the doctrine of evolution. But so many

strange misconceptions are current about this doctrine--it is attacked

on such false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that

is disputable by some of its friends, that I think it well to define

as clearly as I can, what I do not and what I do understand by the

doctrine.

I have nothing to say to any "Philosophy of Evolution." Attempts to

construct such a philosophy may be as useful, nay, even as admirable,

as was the attempt of Descartes to get at a theory of the universe by

the same _a priori_ road; but, in my judgment, they are as premature.

Nor, for this purpose, have I to do with any theory of the "Origin of

Species," much as I value that which is known as the Darwinian theory.

That the doctrine of natural selection presupposes evolution is quite

true; but it is not true that evolution necessarily implies natural

selection. In fact, evolution might conceivably have taken place

without the development of groups possessing the characters of

species.

For me, the doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a

generalisation of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who

will take the necessary trouble. These facts are those which are

classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of

Palæontology. Embryology proves that every higher form of individual

life becomes what it is by a process of gradual differentiation from

an extremely low form; palæontology proves, in some cases, and renders

probable in all, that the oldest types of a group are the lowest; and

that they have been followed by a gradual succession of more and more

differentiated forms. It is simply a fact, that evolution of the

individual animal and plant is taking place, as a natural process, in

millions and millions of cases every day; it is a fact, that the

species which have succeeded one another in the past, do, in many

cases, present just those morphological relations, which they must

possess, if they had proceeded, one from the other, by an analogous

process of evolution.

The alternative presented, therefore, is: either the forms of one and

the same type--say, _e.g._, that of the Horse tribe[13]--arose

successively, but independently of one another, at intervals, during

myriads of years; or, the later forms are modified descendants of the

earlier. And the latter supposition is so vastly more probable than

the former, that rational men will adopt it, unless satisfactory

evidence to the contrary can be produced. The objection sometimes put

forward, that no one yet professes to have seen one species pass into

another, comes oddly from those who believe that mankind are all

descended from Adam. Has any one then yet seen the production of

negroes from a white stock, or _vice versâ_? Moreover, is it

absolutely necessary to have watched every step of the progress of a

planet, to be justified in concluding that it really does go round the

sun? If so, astronomy is in a bad way.

I do not, for a moment, presume to suggest that some one, far better

acquainted than I am with astronomy and physics; or that a master of

the new chemistry, with its extraordinary revelations; or that a

student of the development of human society, of language, and of

religions, may not find a sufficient foundation for the doctrine of

evolution in these several regions. On the contrary, I rejoice to see

that scientific investigation, in all directions, is tending to the

same result. And it may well be, that it is only my long occupation

with biological matters that leads me to feel safer among them than

anywhere else. Be that as it may, I take my stand on the facts of

embryology and of palæontology; and I hold that our present knowledge

of these facts is sufficiently thorough and extensive to justify the

assertion that all future philosophical and theological speculations

will have to accommodate themselves to some such common body of

established truths as the following:--

1. Plants and animals have existed on our planet for many hundred

thousand, probably millions, of years. During this time, their forms,

or species, have undergone a succession of changes, which eventually

gave rise to the species which constitute the present living

population of the earth. There is no evidence, nor any reason to

suspect, that this secular process of evolution is other than a part

of the ordinary course of nature; there is no more ground for

imagining the occurrence of supernatural intervention, at any moment

in the development of species in the past, than there is for supposing

such intervention to take place, at any moment in the development of

an individual animal or plant, at the present day.

2. At present, every individual animal or plant commences its

existence as an organism of extremely simple anatomical structure; and

it acquires all the complexity it ultimately possesses by gradual

differentiation into parts of various structure and function. When a

series of specific forms of the same type, extending over a long

period of past time, is examined, the relation between the earlier and

the later forms is analogous to that between earlier and later stages

of individual development. Therefore, it is a probable conclusion

that, if we could follow living beings back to their earlier states,

we should find them to present forms similar to those of the

individual germ, or, what comes to the same thing, of those lowest

known organisms which stand upon the boundary line between plants and

animals. At present, our knowledge of the ancient living world stops

very far short of this point.

3. It is generally agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the

contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they

neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution

of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along

the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of

vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though

certainly widely different from the present flora, in the evolution of

which animals have played so great a part. But the living world thus

constituted would be simply an admirable piece of unconscious

machinery, the working out of which lay potentially in its primitive

composition; pleasure and pain would have no place in it; it would be

a veritable Garden of Eden without any tree of the knowledge of good

and evil. The question of the moral government of such a world could

no more be asked, than we could reasonably seek for a moral purpose in

a kaleidoscope.

4. How far down the scale of animal life the phenomena of

consciousness are manifested, it is impossible to say. No one doubts

their presence in his fellow-men; and, unless any strict Cartesians

are left, no one doubts that mammals and birds are to be reckoned

creatures that have feelings analogous to our smell, taste, sight,

hearing, touch, pleasure, and pain. For my own part, I should be

disposed to extend this analogical judgment a good deal further. On

the other hand, if the lowest forms of plants are to be denied

consciousness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the

lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule,

a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in

spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the

"poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing

when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a

fowl feels; that the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it

chirps within the egg may possibly feel; what is to be said of it on

the fifth day, when the bird is there, but with all its tissues

nascent? Still more, on the first day, when it is nothing but a flat

cellular disk? I certainly cannot bring myself to believe that this

disk feels. Yet if it does not, there must be some time in the three

weeks, between the first day and the day of hatching, when, as a

concomitant, or a consequence, of the attainment by the brain of the

chick of a certain stage of structural evolution, consciousness makes

its appearance. I have frequently expressed my incapacity to

understand the nature of the relation between consciousness and a

certain anatomical tissue, which is thus established by observation.

But the fact remains that, so far as observation and experiment go,

they teach us that the psychical phenomena are dependent on the

physical.

In like manner, if fishes, insects, scorpions, and such animals as the

pearly nautilus, possess feeling, then undoubtedly consciousness was

present in the world as far back as the Silurian epoch. But, if the

earliest animals were similar to our rhizopods and monads, there must

have been some time, between the much earlier epoch in which they

constituted the whole animal population and the Silurian, in which

feeling dawned, in consequence of the organism having reached the

stage of evolution on which it depends.

5. Consciousness has various forms, which may be manifested

independently of one another. The feelings of light and colour, of

sound, of touch, though so often associated with those of pleasure and

pain, are, by nature, as entirely independent of them as is thinking.

An animal devoid of the feelings of pleasure and of pain, may

nevertheless exhibit all the effects of sensation and purposive

action. Therefore, it would be a justifiable hypothesis that, long

after organic evolution had attained to consciousness, pleasure and

pain were still absent. Such a world would be without either happiness

or misery; no act could be punished and none could be rewarded; and it

could have no moral purpose.

6. Suppose, for argument's sake, that all mammals and birds are

subjects of pleasure and pain. Then we may be certain that these forms

of consciousness were in existence at the beginning of the Mesozoic

epoch. From that time forth, pleasure has been distributed without

reference to merit, and pain inflicted without reference to demerit,

throughout all but a mere fraction of the higher animals. Moreover,

the amount and the severity of the pain, no less than the variety and

acuteness of the pleasure, have increased with every advance in the

scale of evolution. As suffering came into the world, not in

consequence of a fall, but of a rise, in the scale of being, so every

further rise has brought more suffering. As the evidence stands it

would appear that the sort of brain which characterizes the highest

mammals and which, so far as we know, is the indispensable condition

of the highest sensibility, did not come into existence before the

Tertiary epoch. The primordial anthropoid was probably, in this

respect, on much the same footing as his pithecoid kin. Like them he

stood upon his "natural rights," gratified all his desires to the best

of his ability, and was as incapable of either right or wrong doing

as they. It would be as absurd as in their case, to regard his

pleasures, any more than theirs, as moral rewards, and his pains, any

more than theirs, as moral punishments.

7. From the remotest ages of which we have any cognizance, death has

been the natural and, apparently, the necessary concomitant of life.

In our hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing but plants, death

must have very early resulted from the struggle for existence: many of

the crowd must have jostled one another out of the conditions on which

life depends. The occurrence of death, as far back as we have any

fossil record of life, however, needs not to be proved by such

arguments; for, if there had been no death there would have been no

fossil remains, such as the great majority of those we met with. Not

only was there death in the world, as far as the record of life takes

us; but, ever since mammals and birds have been preyed upon by

carnivorous animals, there has been painful death, inflicted by

mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it.

8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural

relations between the human organisation and that of the mammals which

come nearest to him, on the one hand; and with the palæontological

history of such animals as horses and dogs, on the other; will not be

disposed to question the origin of man from forms which stand in the

same sort of relation to _Homo sapiens_, as _Hipparion_ does to

_Equus_. I think it a conclusion, fully justified by analogy, that,

sooner or later, we shall discover the remains of our less specialised

primatic ancestors in the strata which have yielded the less

specialised equine and canine quadrupeds. At present, fossil remains

of men do not take us hack further than the later part of the

Quaternary epoch; and, as was to be expected, they do not differ more

from existing men, than Quaternary horses differ from existing horses.

Still earlier we find traces of man, in implements, such as are used

by the ruder savages at the present day. Later, the remains of the

palæolithic and neolithic conditions take us gradually from the savage

state to the civilizations of Egypt and of Mycenæ; though the true

chronological order of the remains actually discovered may be

uncertain.

9. Much has yet to be learned, but, at present, natural knowledge

affords no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to

a lower state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural

evolution; which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such

localities as the valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the

Nile, reached a relatively high pitch, five or six thousand years ago;

while, in many other regions, the savage condition has persisted down

to our day. In all this vast lapse of time there is not a trace of the

occurrence of any general destruction of the human race; not the

smallest indication that man has been treated on any other principles

than the rest of the animal world.

10. The results of the process of evolution in the case of man, and in

that of his more nearly allied contemporaries, have been marvellously

different. Yet it is easy to see that small primitive differences of a

certain order, must, in the long run, bring about a wide divergence of

the human stock from the others. It is a reasonable supposition that,

in the earliest human organisms, an improved brain, a voice more

capable of modulation and articulation, limbs which lent themselves

better to gesture, a more perfect hand, capable among other things of

imitating form in plastic or other material, were combined with the

curiosity, the mimetic tendency, the strong family affection of the

next lower group; and that they were accompanied by exceptional length

of life and a prolonged minority. The last two peculiarities are

obviously calculated to strengthen the family organisation, and to

give great weight to its educative influences. The potentiality of

language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of

modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of writing, as

the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw; and in

the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing, as

far back as the days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in

tradition, of the experience of more than one generation; with writing

as the record of that of any number of generations; the experience of

the race, tested and corrected generation after generation, could be

stored up and made the starting point for fresh progress. Having these

perfectly natural factors of the evolutionary process in man before

us, it seems unnecessary to go further a-field in search of others.

11. That the doctrine of evolution implies a former state of innocence

of mankind is quite true; but, as I have remarked, it is the innocence

of the ape and of the tiger, whose acts, however they may run counter

to the principles of morality, it would be absurd to blame. The lust

of the one and the ferocity of the other are as much provided for in

their organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other

features that can be named.

Observation and experiment upon the phenomena of society soon taught

men that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence,

certain rules must be observed. Morality commenced with society.

Society is possible only upon the condition that the members of it

shall surrender more or less of their individual freedom of action. In

primitive societies, individual selfishness is a centrifugal force of

such intensity that it is constantly bringing the social organisation

to the verge of destruction. Hence the prominence of the positive

rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by the family or the

tribe in all emergencies; of fulfilling the religious rites,

non-observance of which is conceived to damage it with the

supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest

products of human thought; and of the negative rules which restrain

each from meddling with the life or property of another.

12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the

desire to do what is best for the whole dominates and limits the

action of every member of that society. The more complex the social

organisation the greater the number of acts from which each man must

abstain if he desires to do that which is best for all. Thus the

progressive evolution of society means increasing restriction of

individual freedom in certain directions.

With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of

nations by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which

constitute the common foundation of morality and of law became more

numerous and complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many

of them stronger. In the absence of a clear apprehension of the

natural sanctions of these rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed;

and imagination supplied the motives which reason was supposed to be

incompetent to furnish. Religion, at first independent of morality,

gradually took morality under its protection; and the supernaturalists

have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics

is bound up with that of supernaturalism.

I am not of that opinion. But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it

is very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the

aid of Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality.

It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a

liar from the beginning. If we set out in life with pretending to know

that which we do not know; with professing to accept for proof

evidence which we are well aware is inadequate; with wilfully shutting

our eyes and our ears to facts which militate against this or that

comfortable hypothesis; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve the

same character.

* * * * *

I have not the presumption to imagine that, in spite of all my

efforts, errors may not have crept into these propositions. But I am

tolerably confident that time will prove them to be substantially

correct. And if they are so, I confess I do not see how any extant

supernaturalistic system can also claim exactness. That they are

irreconcilable with the biblical cosmogony, anthropology, and

theodicy is obvious; but they are no less inconsistent with the

sentimental Deism of the "Vicaire Savoyard" and his numerous modern

progeny. It is as impossible, to my mind, to suppose that the

evolutionary process was set going with full foreknowledge of the

result and yet with what we should understand by a purely benevolent

intention, as it is to imagine that the intention was purely

malevolent. And the prevalence of dualistic theories from the earliest

times to the present day--whether in the shape of the doctrine of the

inherently evil nature of matter; of an Ahriman; of a hard and cruel

Demiurge; of a diabolical "prince of this world," show how widely this

difficulty has been felt.

Many seem to think that, when it is admitted that the ancient

literature, contained in our Bibles, has no more claim to

infallibility than any other ancient literature; when it is proved

that the Israelites and their Christian successors accepted a great

many supernaturalistic theories and legends which have no better

foundation than those of heathenism, nothing remains to be done but to

throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper.

I have always opposed this opinion. It appears to me that if there is

anybody more objectionable than the orthodox Bibliolater it is the

heterodox Philistine, who can discover in a literature which, in some

respects, has no superior, nothing but a subject for scoffing and an

occasion for the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he

owes to former generations.

Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of the Bible as an

instrument of popular education, and I venture to repeat what I then

said:

"Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this

book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in

English history; that it has become the national Epic of Britain and

is as familiar to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to

Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is

written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite

beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the

veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant of the

existence of other countries and other civilisations and of a great

past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in

the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much

humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical

procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the

interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses

of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as

they also are earning their payment for their work?"[14]

At the same time, I laid stress upon the necessity of placing such

instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief, that it would thus

gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that

the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight,

while the perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical

contents would come more and more into view.

I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the

attention of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western

world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great

instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and

political despotism. The Bible has been the _Magna Charta_ of the poor

and of the oppressed; down to modern times, no State has had a

constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken

into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges,

of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in

Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that

the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness

of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no

trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of

duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is

somewhat different from struggling for "rights"; on the fraternity of

taking thought for one's neighbour as for one's self.

So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity are included under

the democratic principles which assume the same names, the Bible is

the most democratic book in the world. As such it began, through the

heretical sects, to undermine the clerico-political despotism of the

middle ages, almost as soon as it was formed, in the eleventh century;

Pope and King had as much as they could do to put down the Albigenses

and the Waldenses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the

Lollards and the Hussites gave them still more trouble in the

fourteenth and fifteenth; from the sixteenth century onward, the

Protestant sects have favoured political freedom in proportion to the

degree in which they have refused to acknowledge any ultimate

authority save that of the Bible.

But the enormous influence which has thus been exerted by the Jewish

and Christian Scriptures has had no necessary connection with

cosmogonies, demonologies, and miraculous interferences. Their

strength lies in their appeals, not to the reason, but to the ethical

sense. I do not say that even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive

of others or needs no supplement. But I do believe that the human race

is not yet, possibly may never be, in a position to dispense with it.