[1887]
Next to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending
investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most
hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is
the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors
recorded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at
the present day, there is more excuse than at any former time for such
neglect. No small labour is needed to raise one's self to the level of
the acquisitions already made; and able men, who have achieved thus
much, know that, if they devote themselves body and soul to the
increase of their store, and avoid looking back, with as much care as
if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon them,
such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the
discoverer and the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less
elevated character.
So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse _inter mortuos
quærere vivum_; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our
intellectual ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the
evil example set us, not only by Bacon but by almost all the men of
the Renaissance, in pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate
spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. It is
accepted as a truth which is indisputable, that, for seven or eight
centuries, a long succession of able men--some of them of transcendent
acuteness and encyclopædic knowledge--devoted laborious lives to the
grave discussion of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of
intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a little modesty, a
little impartial pondering over personal experience might suggest a
doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy method of dealing with
a large chapter of the history of the human mind. Even an acquaintance
with popular literature which had extended so far as to include that
part of the contributions of Sam Slick which contains his weighty
aphorism that "there is a great deal of human nature in all mankind,"
might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that epoch, who,
take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly in much the
same proportion as ourselves, were likely to display nothing better
than the qualities of energetic idiots, when they devoted their
faculties to the elucidation of problems which were to them, and
indeed are to us, the most serious which life has to offer. Speaking
for myself, the longer I live the more I am disposed to think that
there is much less either of pure folly, or of pure wickedness, in the
world than is commonly supposed. It may be doubted if any sane man
ever said to himself, "Evil, be thou my good," and I have never yet
had the good fortune to meet with a perfect fool. When I have brought
to the inquiry the patience and long-suffering which become a
scientific investigator, the most promising specimens have turned out
to have a good deal to say for themselves from their own point of
view. And, sometimes, calm reflection has taught the humiliating
lesson, that their point of view was not so different from my own as I
had fondly imagined. Comprehension is more than half-way to sympathy,
here as elsewhere.
If we turn our attention to scholastic philosophy in the frame of mind
suggested by these prefatory remarks, it assumes a very different
character from that which it bears in general estimation. No doubt it
is surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny logomachies and obscured by
the dust-clouds of a barbarous and perplexing terminology. But suppose
that, undeterred by much grime and by many scratches, the explorer
has toiled through this jungle, he comes to an open country which is
amazingly like his dear native land. The hills which he has to climb,
the ravines he has to avoid, look very much the same; there is the
same infinite space above, and the same abyss of the unknown below;
the means of travelling are the same, and the goal is the same.
That goal for the schoolmen, as for us, is the settlement of the
question how far the universe is the manifestation of a rational
order; in other words, how far logical deduction from indisputable
premisses will account for what which has happened and does happen.
That was the object of scholasticism, and, so far as I am aware, the
object of modern science may be expressed in the same terms. In
pursuit of this end, modern science takes into account all the
phenomena of the universe which are brought to our knowledge by
observation or by experiment. It admits that there are two worlds to
be considered, the one physical and the other psychical; and that
though there is a most intimate relation and interconnection between
the two, the bridge from one to the other has yet to be found; that
their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two parallel lines.
To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a
different aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless
we clearly apprehend the fact that they did really believe in
dogmatic Christianity as it was formulated by the Roman Church. They
did not give a mere dull assent to anything the Church told them on
Sundays, and ignore her teachings for the rest of the week; but they
lived and moved and had their being in that supersensible theological
world which was created, or rather grew up, during the first four
centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their thoughts far more
than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was cast.
For the most part, we learn history from the colourless compendiums or
partisan briefs of mere scholars, who have too little acquaintance
with practical life, and too little insight into speculative problems,
to understand that about which they write. In historical science, as
in all sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory
practice is indispensable; and the laboratory practice of historical
science is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political
life, and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and
operations of the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and
theological systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our
own time, Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by
direct contact with social and political history in the making, the
secret of understanding how such history is made. Our notions of the
intellectual history of the middle ages are, unfortunately, too often
derived from writers who have never seriously grappled with
philosophical and theological problems: and hence that strange myth of
a millennium of moonshine to which I have adverted.
However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers
who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy,
were learned and enlightened--such men, for example, as Eginhard or
Dante--is necessary to convince one's self, that, for them, the world
of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. From the
centre of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of
angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insignificant
sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the
debasement of their material embodiment and continually solicited to
their perdition by a no less numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy
of devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the pit of
everlasting damnation.[15]
The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, the
traditions of the Fathers, and the authority of the Church, they were
in possession of far more, and more trustworthy, information with
respect to the nature and order of things in the theological world
than they had in regard to the nature and order of things in the
sensible world. And, if the two sources of information came into
conflict, so much the worse for the sensible world, which, after all,
was more or less under the dominion of Satan. Let us suppose that a
telescope powerful enough to show us what is going on in the nebula of
the sword of Orion, should reveal a world in which stones fell
upwards, parallel lines met, and the fourth dimension of space was
quite obvious. Men of science would have only two alternatives before
them. Either the terrestrial and the nebular facts must be brought
into harmony by such feats of subtle sophistry as the human mind is
always capable of performing when driven into a corner; or science
must throw down its arms in despair, and commit suicide, either by the
admission that the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as
that which is truth in one corner of it is absurdity in another, or by
a declaration of incompetency.
In the middle ages, the labours of those great men who endeavoured to
reconcile the system of thought which started from the data of pure
reason, with that which started from the data of Roman theology,
produced the system of thought which is known as scholastic
philosophy; the alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified by
Avicenna and his followers when they declared that that which is true
in theology may be false in philosophy, and _vice versâ_; and by
Sanchez in his famous defence of the thesis "_Quod nil scitur_."
To those who deny the validity of one of the primary assumptions of
the disputants--who decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency
of the evidence, to put faith in the reality of that other world, the
geography and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in
the so-called[16] Christianity of Catholicism--the long and bitter
contest, which engaged the best intellects for so many centuries, may
seem a terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle
for existence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in
that of matter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the
history of scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic
implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the
result of which men thought their eternal, no less than their
temporal, interests were at stake, could have done. When a logical
blunder may ensure combustion, not only in the next world but in this,
the construction of syllogisms acquires a peculiar interest. Moreover,
the schools kept the thinking faculty alive and active, when the
disturbed state of civil life, the mephitic atmosphere engendered by
the dominant ecclesiasticism, and the almost total neglect of natural
knowledge, might well have stifled it. And, finally, it should be
remembered that scholasticism really did thresh out pretty effectually
certain problems which have presented themselves to mankind ever since
they began to think, and which, I suppose, will present themselves so
long as they continue to think. Consider, for example, the controversy
of the Realists and the Nominalists, which was carried on with varying
fortunes, and under various names, from the time of Scotus Erigena to
the end of the scholastic period. Has it now a merely antiquarian
interest? Has Nominalism, in any of its modifications, so completely
won the day that Realism may be regarded as dead and buried without
hope of resurrection? Many people seem to think so, but it appears to
me that, without taking Catholic philosophy into consideration, one
has not to look about far to find evidence that Realism is still to
the fore, and indeed extremely lively.[17]
* * * * *
The other day I happened to meet with a report of a sermon recently
preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. From internal evidence I am inclined
to think that the report is substantially correct. But as I have not
the slightest intention of finding fault with the eminent theologian
and eloquent preacher to whom the discourse is attributed, for
employment of scientific language in a manner for which he could find
only too many scientific precedents, the accuracy of the report in
detail is not to the purpose. I may safely take it as the embodiment
of views which are thought to be quite in accordance with science by
many excellent, instructed, and intelligent people.
The preacher further contended that it was yet more
difficult to realise that our earthly home would become the
scene of a vast physical catastrophe. Imagination recoils
from the idea that the course of nature--the phrase helps to
disguise the truth--so unvarying and regular, the ordered
sequence of movement and life, should suddenly cease.
Imagination looks more reasonable when it assumes the air of
scientific reason. Physical law, it says, will prevent the
occurrence of catastrophes only anticipated by an apostle in
an unscientific age. Might not there, however, be a
suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?
Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied the laws of
gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws
were held in check by others. The flood and the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah were brought about by the operation of
existing laws, and may it not be that in His illimitable
universe there are more important laws than those which
surround our puny life--moral and not merely physical
forces? Is it inconceivable that the day will come when
these royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order
of things which seems so stable and so fair? Earthquakes
were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy,
the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore
witness.... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how
powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their
weakness. The end of human probation, the final dissolution
of organised society, and the destruction of man's home on
the surface of the globe, were none of them violently
contrary to our present experience, but only the extension
of present facts. The presentiment of death was common;
there were felt to be many things which threatened the
existence of society; and as our globe was a ball of fire,
at any moment the pent-up forces which surge and boil
beneath our feet might be poured out ("Pall Mall Gazette,"
December 6, 1886).
The preacher appears to entertain the notion that the occurrence of a
"catastrophe"[18] involves a breach of the present order of
nature--that it is an event incompatible with the physical laws which
at present obtain. He seems to be of opinion that "scientific reason"
lends its authority to the imaginative supposition that physical law
will prevent the occurrence of the "catastrophes" anticipated by an
unscientific apostle.
Scientific reason, like Homer, sometimes nods; but I am not aware that
it has ever dreamed dreams of this sort. The fundamental axiom of
scientific thought is that there is not, never has been, and never
will be, any disorder in nature. The admission of the occurrence of
any event which was not the logical consequence of the immediately
antecedent events, according to these definite, ascertained, or
unascertained rules which we call the "laws of nature," would be an
act of self-destruction on the part of science.
"Catastrophe" is a relative conception. For ourselves it means an
event which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or
impresses his mind by its magnitude relatively to him. But events
which are quite in the natural order of things to us, may be
frightful catastrophes to other sentient beings. Surely no
interruption of the order of nature is involved if, in the course of
descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an anthill and in
a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a hundred thousand of its
inhabitants. To the ants the catastrophe is worse than the earthquake
of Lisbon. To me it is the natural and necessary consequence of the
laws of matter in motion. A redistribution of energy has taken place,
which is perfectly in accordance with natural order, however
unpleasant its effects may be to the ants.
Imagination, inspired by scientific reason, and not merely assuming
the airs thereof, as it unfortunately too often does in the pulpit, so
far from having any right to repudiate catastrophes and deny the
possibility of the cessation of motion and life, easily finds
justification for the exactly contrary course. Kant in his famous
"Theory of the Heavens" declares the end of the world and its
reduction to a formless condition to be a necessary consequence of the
causes to which it owes its origin and continuance. And, as to
catastrophes of prodigious magnitude and frequent occurrence, they
were the favourite _asylum ignorantiæ_ of geologists, not a quarter of
a century ago. If modern geology is becoming more and more disinclined
to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any _a
priori_ difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with
the universality of order, but because the _a posteriori_ evidence of
the occurrence of events of this character in past times has more or
less completely broken down.
It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of
extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the
hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness. It
is no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and
fractures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and
slow movements through miles of elevation and depression, and its
small and rapid movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived
and unperceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to
the shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus.
Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, conditions
are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more
rapid than it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as
much in accordance with ascertained laws of nature, as the more rapid
cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when
it remains in the air. But much more rapid cooling might entail a
shifting and rearrangement of the parts of the crust of the earth on a
scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about "catastrophes" to
which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle. It is conceivable that
man and his works and all the higher forms of animal life should be
utterly destroyed; that mountain regions should he converted into
ocean depths and the floor of oceans raised into mountains; and the
earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy of the
writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And yet, to the eye of
science, there would he no more disorder here than in the sabbatical
peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of natural causes and
effects would he broken, nowhere would there be the slightest
indication of the "suspension of a lower law by a higher." If a sober
scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild
vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than
the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a
revengeful fanatic, rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid
men love their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict
scientific principles; but because the evidence of their scientific
value does not fulfil the conditions on which weight is attached to
evidence. The imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not
"assume the air of scientific reason."
I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by
science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect
intellectual and æsthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for
suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost
powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him
to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of
time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry
would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the
logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions
which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be
filled with that _Amor intellectualis Dei_, the beatific vision of the
_vita contemplativa_, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages,
Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable
eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if
sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the
bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor
mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and
disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.
The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions
which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the proper
topic of the present essay. It is the use of the word "law" as if it
denoted a thing--as if a "law of nature," as science understands it,
were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the
phenomena expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher asks,
"Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of
a higher?" He tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the
law of gravitation. He asks whether some day certain "royal and
ultimate laws" may not come and "wreck" those laws which are at
present, it would appear, acting as nature's police. It is evident,
from these expressions, that "laws," in the mind of the preacher, are
entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy. And
it would appear that the "royal laws" are by no means to be regarded
as constitutional royalties: at any moment, they may, like Eastern
despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian laws,
which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and, to use
phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning--"make hay" of their
belongings. Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has suggested
this singular theory; and it is thought that high laws may "suspend"
low laws, as a bishop may suspend a curate.
Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to hold
them. All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the nature of
"laws" has nothing to do with modern science. It is scholastic
realism--realism as intense and unmitigated as that of Scotus Erigena
a thousand years ago. The essence of such realism is that it maintains
the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them nowadays,
general propositions. It affirms, for example, that "man" is a real
thing, apart from individual men, having its existence, not in the
sensible, but in the intelligible world, and clothing itself with the
accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we know.
Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific thought, it
really pervades ordinary language. There are few people who would, at
once, hesitate to admit that colour, for example, exists apart from
the mind which conceives the idea of colour. They hold it to be
something which resides in the coloured object; and so far they are as
much Realists as if they had sat at Plato's feet. Reflection on the
facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that "colour"
is--not a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist position--but a
name for that group of states of feeling which we call blue, red,
yellow, and so on, and which we believe to be caused by luminiferous
vibrations which have not the slightest resemblance to colour; while
these again are set afoot by states of the body to which we ascribe
colour, but which are equally devoid of likeness to colour.
In the same way, a law of nature, in the scientific sense, is the
product of a mental operation upon the facts of nature which come
under our observation, and has no more existence outside the mind than
colour has. The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner in
which experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in
fact, move towards one another. But the other facts of observation,
that bodies are not always moving in this fashion, and sometimes move
in a contrary direction, are implied in the words "free to move." If
it is a law of nature that bodies tend to move towards one another in
a certain way; it is another and no less true law of nature that, if
bodies are not free to move as they tend to do, either in consequence
of an obstacle, or of a contrary impulse from some other source of
energy than that to which we give the name of gravitation, they either
stop still, or go another way.
Scientifically speaking, it is the acme of absurdity to talk of a man
defying the law of gravitation when he lifts his arm. The general
store of energy in the universe working through terrestrial matter is
doubtless tending to bring the man's arm down; but the particular
fraction of that energy which is working through certain of his
nervous and muscular organs is tending to drive it up, and more energy
being expended on the arm in the upward than in the downward
direction, the arm goes up accordingly. But the law of gravitation is
no more defied, in this case, than when a grocer throws so much sugar
into the empty pan of his scales that the one which contains the
weight kicks the beam.
The tenacity of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are
agents, instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of
experience, upon which we base our interpretations of that which does
happen, and our anticipation of that which will happen, is an
interesting psychological fact; and would be unintelligible if the
tendency of the human mind towards realism were less strong.
Even at the present day, and in the writings of men who would at once
repudiate scholastic realism in any form, "law" is often inadvertently
employed in the sense of cause, just as, in common life, a man will
say that he is compelled by the law to do so and so, when, in point of
fact, all he means is that the law orders him to do it, and tells him
what will happen if he does not do it. We commonly hear of bodies
falling to the ground by reason of the law of gravitation, whereas
that law is simply the record of the fact that, according to all
experience, they have so fallen (when free to move), and of the
grounds of a reasonable expectation that they will so fall. If it
should be worth anybody's while to seek for examples of such misuse of
language on my own part, I am not at all sure he might not succeed,
though I have usually been on my guard against such looseness of
expression. If I am guilty, I do penance beforehand, and only hope
that I may thereby deter others from committing the like fault. And I
venture on this personal observation by way of showing that I have no
wish to bear hardly on the preacher for falling into an error for
which he might find good precedents. But it is one of those errors
which, in the case of a person engaged in scientific pursuits, do
little harm, because it is corrected as soon as its consequences
become obvious; while those who know physical science only by name
are, as has been seen, easily led to build a mighty fabric of
unrealities on this fundamental fallacy. In fact, the habitual use of
the word "law," in the sense of an active thing, is almost a mark of
pseudo-science; it characterises the writings of those who have
appropriated the forms of science without knowing anything of its
substance.
There are two classes of these people: those who are ready to believe
in any miracle so long as it is guaranteed by ecclesiastical
authority; and those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long
as it has some different guarantee. The believers in what are
ordinarily called miracles--those who accept the miraculous narratives
which they are taught to think are essential elements of religious
doctrine--are in the one category; the spirit-rappers, table-turners,
and all the other devotees of the occult sciences of our day are in
the other: and, if they disagree in most things they agree in this,
namely, that they ascribe to science a dictum that is not scientific;
and that they endeavour to upset the dictum thus foisted on science by
a realistic argument which is equally unscientific.
It is asserted, for example, that, on a particular occasion, water
was turned into wine; and, on the other hand, it is asserted that a
man or a woman "levitated" to the ceiling, floated about there, and
finally sailed out by the window. And it is assumed that the
pardonable scepticism, with which most scientific men receive these
statements, is due to the fact that they feel themselves justified in
denying the possibility of any such metamorphosis of water, or of any
such levitation, because such events are contrary to the laws of
nature. So the question of the preacher is triumphantly put: How do
you know that there are not "higher" laws of nature than your chemical
and physical laws, and that these higher laws may not intervene and
"wreck" the latter?
The plain answer to this question is, Why should anybody be called
upon to say how he knows that which he does not know? You are assuming
that laws are agents--efficient causes of that which happens--and that
one law can interfere with another. To us, that assumption is as
nonsensical as if you were to talk of a proposition of Euclid being
the cause of the diagram which illustrates it, or of the integral
calculus interfering with the rule of three. Your question really
implies that we pretend to complete knowledge not only of all past and
present phenomena, but of all that are possible in the future, and we
leave all that sort of thing to the adepts of esoteric Buddhism. Our
pretensions are infinitely more modest. We have succeeded in finding
out the rules of action of a little bit of the universe; we call these
rules "laws of nature," not because anybody knows whether they bind
nature or not, but because we find it is obligatory on us to take them
into account, both as actors under nature, and as interpreters of
nature. We have any quantity of genuine miracles of our own, and if
you will furnish us with as good evidence of your miracles as we have
of ours, we shall be quite happy to accept them and to amend our
expression of the laws of nature in accordance with the new facts.
As to the particular cases adduced, we are so perfectly fair-minded as
to be willing to help your case as far as we can. You are quite
mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the
possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny
that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are
already inclined to think that the bodies, which we have hitherto
called elementary, are really composite arrangements of the particles
of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct,
there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into
alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this
present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such
miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid,
glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes
rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple. If the so-called
"elements," oxygen and hydrogen, which compose water, are aggregates
of the same ultimate particles, or physical units, as those which
enter into the structure of the so-called element "carbon," it is
obvious that alcohol and other substances, composed of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen, may be produced by a rearrangement of some of
the units of oxygen and hydrogen into the "element" carbon, and their
synthesis with the rest of the oxygen and hydrogen.
Theoretically, therefore, we can have no sort of objection to your
miracle. And our reply to the levitators is just the same. Why should
not your friend "levitate"? Fish are said to rise and sink in the
water by altering the volume of an internal air-receptacle; and there
may be many ways science, as yet, knows nothing of, by which we, who
live at the bottom of an ocean of air, may do the same thing.
Dialectic gas and wind appear to be by no means wanting among you, and
why should not long practice in pneumatic philosophy have resulted in
the internal generation of something a thousand times rarer than
hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws,
you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in
quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is
said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to
"still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be there,
for a sluggard? We have not the presumption to deny the possibility of
anything you affirm; only, as our brethren are particular about
evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us from being
roared down by their inextinguishable laughter.
Enough of the realism which clings about "laws." There are plenty of
other exemplifications of its vitality in modern science, but I will
cite only one of them.
This is the conception of "vital force" which comes straight from the
philosophy of Aristotle. It is a fundamental proposition of that
philosophy that a natural object is composed of two constituents--the
one its matter, conceived as inert or even, to a certain extent,
opposed to orderly and purposive motion; the other its form, conceived
as a quasi-spiritual something, containing or conditioning the actual
activities of the body and the potentiality of its possible
activities.
I am disposed to think that the prominence of this conception in
Aristotle's theory of things arose from the circumstance that he was
to begin with and throughout his life, devoted to biological studies.
In fact it is a notion which must force itself upon the mind of any
one who studies biological phenomena, without reference to general
physics, as they now stand. Everybody who observes the obvious
phenomena of the development of a seed into a tree, or of an egg into
an animal, will note that a relatively formless mass of matter
gradually grows, takes a definite shape and structure, and, finally,
begins to perform actions which contribute towards a certain end,
namely, the maintenance of the individual in the first place, and of
the species in the second. Starting from the axiom that every event
has a cause, we have here the _causa finalis_ manifested in the last
set of phenomena, the _causa materialis_ and _formalis_ in the first,
while the existence of a _causa efficiens_ within the seed or egg and
its product, is a corollary from the phenomena of growth and
metamorphosis, which proceed in unbroken succession and make up the
life of the animal or plant.
Thus, at starting, the egg or seed is matter having a "form" like all
other material bodies. But this form has the peculiarity, in
contradistinction to lower substantial "forms," that it is a power
which constantly works towards an end by means of living organisation.
So far as I know, Leibnitz is the only philosopher (at the same time a
man of science, in the modern sense, of the first rank) who has noted
that the modern conception of Force, as a sort of atmosphere
enveloping the particles of bodies, and having potential or actual
activity, is simply a new name for the Aristotelian Form.[19] In
modern biology, up till within quite recent times, the Aristotelian
conception held undisputed sway; living matter was endowed with "vital
force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied
with that explanation was treated to that very "plain
argument"--"confound you eternally"--wherewith Lord Peter overcomes
the doubts of his brothers in the "Tale of a Tub." "Materialist" was
the mildest term applied to him--fortunate if he escaped pelting with
"infidel" and "atheist." There may be scientific Rip Van Winkles
about, who still hold by vital force; but among those biologists who
have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century "vital force"
no longer figures in the vocabulary of science. It is a patent
survival of realism; the generalisation from experience that all
living bodies exhibit certain activities of a definite character is
made the basis of the notion that every living body contains an
entity, "vital force," which is assumed to be the cause of those
activities.
It is remarkable, in looking back, to notice to what an extent this
and other survivals of scholastic realism arrested or, at any rate,
impeded the application of sound scientific principles to the
investigation of biological phenomena. When I was beginning to think
about these matters, the scientific world was occasionally agitated by
discussions respecting the nature of the "species" and "genera" of
Naturalists, of a different order from the disputes of a later time.
I think most were agreed that a "species" was something which existed
objectively, somehow or other, and had been created by a Divine fiat.
As to the objective reality of genera, there was a good deal of
difference of opinion. On the other hand, there were a few who could
see no objective reality in anything but individuals, and looked upon
both species and genera as hypostatised universals. As for myself, I
seem to have unconsciously emulated William of Occam, inasmuch as
almost the first public discourse I ever ventured upon, dealt with
"Animal Individuality," and its tendency was to fight the Nominalist
battle even in that quarter.
Realism appeared in still stranger forms at the time to which I refer.
The community of plan which is observable in each great group of
animals was hypostatised into a Platonic idea with the appropriate
name of "archetype," and we were told, as a disciple of Philo-Judæus
might have told us, that this realistic figment was "the archetypal
light" by which Nature has been guided amidst the "wreck of worlds."
So, again, another naturalist, who had no less earned a well-deserved
reputation by his contributions to positive knowledge, put forward a
theory of the production of living things which, as nearly as the
increase of knowledge allowed, was a reproduction of the doctrine
inculcated by the Jewish Cabbala.
Annexing the archetype notion, and carrying it to its full logical
consequence, the author of this theory conceived that the species of
animals and plants were so many incarnations of the thoughts of
God--material representations of Divine ideas--during the particular
period of the world's history at which they existed. But, under the
influence of the embryological and palæontological discoveries of
modern times, which had already lent some scientific support to the
revived ancient theories of cosmical evolution or emanation, the
ingenious author of this speculation, while denying and repudiating
the ordinary theory of evolution by successive modification of
individuals, maintained and endeavoured to prove the occurrence of a
progressive modification in the divine ideas of successive epochs.
On the foundation of a supposed elevation of organisation in the whole
living population of any epoch, as compared with that of its
predecessor, and a supposed complete difference in species between the
populations of any two epochs (neither of which suppositions has stood
the test of further inquiry), the author of this speculation based his
conclusion that the Creator had, so to speak, improved upon his
thoughts as time went on; and that, as each such amended scheme of
creation came up, the embodiment of the earlier divine thoughts was
swept away by a universal catastrophe, and an incarnation of the
improved ideas took its place. Only after the last such "wreck" thus
brought about, did the embodiment of a divine thought, in the shape of
the first man, make its appearance as the _ne plus ultra_ of the
cosmogonical process.
I imagine that Louis Agassiz, the genial backwoodsman of the science
of my young days, who did more to open out new tracks in the
scientific forest than most men, would have been much surprised to
learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and
simple. According to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with
Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable--without form or
attribute; but the interval between it and the world of sense is
filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar
hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like
immense waves of light, from the divine centre, and, as ten
consecutive zones of Sephiroth, form the universe. The farther away
from the centre, the more the primitive light wanes, until the
periphery ends in those mere negations, darkness and evil, which are
the essence of matter. On this, the divine agency transmitted through
the Sephiroth operates after the fashion of the Aristotelian forms,
and, at first, produces the lowest of a series of worlds. After a
certain duration the primitive world is demolished and its fragments
used up in making a better; and this process is repeated, until at
length a final world, with man for its crown and finish, makes its
appearance. It is needless to trace the process of retrogressive
metamorphosis by which, through the agency of the Messiah, the steps
of the process of evolution here sketched are retraced. Sufficient has
been said to prove that the extremist realism current in the
philosophy of the thirteenth century can be fully matched by the
speculations of our own time.