world of reflective consciousness and morality which it brings in, is a
fact, starting up in the midst of a universe of anterior developments,
such as all Mr. Darwin's solvents utterly fail to touch, a phenomenon
which remains as far from explanation as before he wrote his last book,
so it appears to me that the power of human speech is another fact
starting up in the midst of the line of supposed developments which
no hypothesis of evolution can afford any help towards explaining.
Miraculously developed reason, something higher, as it seems to me,
than any development of human reason our race has, in its highest
culture, as yet put forth, must have been necessary in order to the
invention of language by any race even of the most sagacious mammals.
And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument,
in order to the high development of reason. We have some idea what
deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and
kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper,
and affections, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of
man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not indeed deaf, but
congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate
expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. What would the
development of human reason have been under such conditions? How, then,
is it possible to conceive that the wondrous faculty and instrument
of speech was ever invented and perfected by mammals of infra-human
faculty and development, and that they were afterwards through this
invention developed yet more highly, until they attained to the dignity
and advancement of humanity? Such infra-human mammals must have been
more miraculously endowed in order to such an invention than ever man
himself has been.
After all that Mr. Darwin has written, does or can any reasonable
man or woman actually believe in the possibility,--_apart from the
Divine Power and Will and Guidance_,--for that is the point,--of the
self-development, the spontaneous upgrowth of articulate language?
Let us study our quadrupedal familiars, for the sake of illustration
and analogy. We see daily how our noble dogs strain and groan after
speech, do all but speak: we mark their eloquent looks, their speaking
gestures, their wonderfully expressive movements, how they watch us
speak, and seem as if they understood what speech is to us, and as if
they craved most longingly the power for themselves. We cannot but
sympathetically admire the intelligent, the benevolent, the noble, the
sagacious physiognomies which they show. If any creature ever could,
would, or did develop speech in any rudimentary form, are not they
just in the circumstances to do it? And when once rudimentally begun,
however uncouthly and imperfectly, should not their organs continually
improve by the continual effort and the increasing intelligence? Is it
not immensely less hard of belief, and less difficult to imagine, that
dogs should develop speech, than that man should have been developed
from the larvæ of the _ascidiæ_? Yet is there even a beginning made
towards the canine development of articulate language, or does any
living man believe that such a beginning ever could be made?
To me it appears that human speech and human personality are in some
way bound up with each other, that the one, in some sort, implies
the other, and that these two characteristics of our race present an
insuperable obstacle to the acceptance by really scientific thinkers
of any hypothesis of evolution which, leaving God out of nature, would
account for the whole existence and progress of the universe on the
principle of spontaneous development.
But again, let me be allowed to test the development hypothesis in
detail at another point. This hypothesis--and any pantheistic or
atheistic view of the universe which professes to be scientific--is
obliged to confess that all living beings, of whatever sort, have been
developed out of a single primary cell--called often a germ-cell--of
protoplasm. Here they find the beginning of every kind of life. The
plant, the animal, of every sort,--the lichen, the cedar, the sponge,
the bird, the mammal, the minutest entozoon, the most microscopic
infusorium, and man,--have been developed out of these primary
cells. What then do the same men who teach us this, find to be the
constitution of these same cells, when microscopically examined?
They find them to be, for the most part, and indeed always, if
allowance be made for very trivial exceptions, identically the same.
The matter is identically the same, the appearance identically the
same; no difference whatever of constitution, form, or properties,
is to be detected. They cannot tell whether the nettle, or the frog,
or the eagle, or the man, is to be developed out of any given cell:
for anything their science can teach them, any of these might be
developed, as they call it, out of any cell. But if this be so, is it
scientific, is it real or true, is it not altogether misleading, to
speak of _mere development_ in such a case? The flower may be said to
be developed out of the bud because the bud is the flower in miniature,
the flower is really folded up in the bud. But surely here is no
case of mere development; here is no unfolding out of the germ-cell
of what is potentially contained in the cell, regarded as a merely
material organism. Judged by every test of physical experiment, the
primary cells are identically the same; and yet they grow into forms
essentially and infinitely dissimilar. Does it not clearly appear that
here is a matter in which some power above and beyond the mere physical
constitution and nature of the primary cell must be admitted, on every
principle of science, on every ground of pure candour and truth, to
be of necessity present? Is it not evident that with each germ-cell
there must be associated some individual life-power which animates
the cell, which uses it as a unit to multiply, as a foundation to
build upon, which does build and weave and work into it and upon it
continually new material, which, for its own use in its work of weaving
and fabricating, and for the completion of its own distinctive form
and vehicle, takes toll of air and earth and water and heat-power--the
ancient elements--selecting out of them its appropriate pabulum,
in whatever chemical combinations of the primary elements known to
our modern scientific analysis may be fit and needful? Surely not
development, but life, the mystery of individual life, is here. And
if the philosopher will deny the omnipresent creative and sustaining
power of God, it appears to me that he must be prepared to animate
each germ-cell with an individual intelligence which works with divine
power, on a definite and most miraculous plan, and towards a distinct
goal of perfection. To call such various powers and processes, such
diverse and generically different operations, in every sphere of life,
by the same term, appears to me to be unscientific; to speak of them
all alike as processes of unfolding or development, when results the
most infinitely unlike and separate are obtained from beginnings
which are identically alike, appears to be not only unscientific but
altogether misleading.
I do not think it arrogant or unwarranted to conclude from such
considerations as I have been trying to set forth, that evolution,
or development, apart from the power and guidance of the Living God,
is an unphilosophical, an unscientific idea, an empty, an unmeaning
word. It is a thing of naught, utterly impotent to solve the mysteries
of the universe, even when expounded and reinforced by Mr. Darwin's
"Natural Selection." I have not a word to say here against the views of
Mr. Darwin, as defined and modified by the requirements of scientific
modesty and precision. If I had any pretensions to be called a student
of natural science, I should sit at the feet of Mr. Darwin when he
speaks, not as a philosophic theorist, but as a scientific observer
and a truly inductive naturalist. But I must say here in respect to
Natural Selection, regarded as, according to Mr. Darwin's hypothesis,
the handmaid of development, that, like development, it is but a
name, and not a power. It describes the order and mode according to
which Providence works; it is not itself a force--a working energy.
Mr. Darwin himself indeed often speaks as if Natural Selection were
itself a power and a providence. I find to my hand in Mr. Kingsley's
fine, suggestive paper on _The Natural Theology of the Future_,
recently published in _Macmillan's Magazine_, a sentence of Mr.
Darwin's in regard to Natural Selection which I will quote. "It may
be metaphorically said," writes Mr. Darwin, "that natural selection
is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation
even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding
up that which is good, silently and necessarily working whenever and
wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being."
"It may be metaphorically said," are Mr. Darwin's words. But in fact
he is using, not a metaphor, but a personification. The distinction
Mr. Darwin does not see. He repeatedly speaks of his personifications
as metaphors. But the distinction notwithstanding is most important.
By personifying Natural Selection Mr. Darwin makes it appear to be a
cause, attributes to it a real power, nay, wisdom and providence, as
well as power. He speaks in one place of "Nature's power of selection;"
contrasting this with the "powers of artificial selection exercised
by feeble man," by which, however, man can do so much; and arguing
that "Nature's power of selection" must be incomparably greater, and
competent to produce incomparably superior effects in respect of "the
beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all
organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions
of life." Language of a similar sort he very frequently uses. He has,
therefore, as a scientific man laid himself open to the reproof of M.
Flourens, whom no one will deny to be a scientific critic. "Either,"
says M. Flourens, "Natural Selection is nothing, or it is nature, but
nature endowed with the attribute of selection--nature personified,
which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has
done with personifications." The nineteenth century ought to have done
with personifications; but with the spirit of Lamarck's speculations
the style of the French atheistic philosophy of the last century
reappears.
Mr. Darwin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Kingsley, describes the
manner in which his Natural Selection may be conceived as operating.
What, if his meaning were expressed with strict scientific truth, he
ought to intend to say, is that such as he describes is the result
of providential working according to the mode and order which he
designates by the phrase Natural Selection. "All we ask," says one of
Mr. Darwin's ablest critics, "is that we may be allowed to believe in a
God and a real Divine Providence, as powerful and wise and good as Mr.
Darwin's Natural Selection."
But, moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is something besides
the mere process of change and growth, of what our philosophers call
development, to be accounted for. There is a fact on which the growth,
the change, the evolution, must be held in a true sense to depend: a
prior fact to be taken account of. The growth proceeds upon a plan,
and fulfils an idea: protoplasm itself embodies a scientific principle.
But as the seal must be before the impression, the original before the
copy, so the principle must be before its embodiment, the plan and the
idea must be before the growth: the end, towards which as its goal the
growth or development proceeds, must have been conceived and set up
as an aim before its fulfilment began. We are bound therefore, if we
would exhaust the problem, nay, if we would truly conceive, and justly
state it, to ask how and whence the principle, the plan, the idea, the
end, had their existence? These are realities; they are the most inner
and essential realities in every instance of growth or development;
to deal only with the development of the physical basis, is to leave
untouched the kernel of the matter, is altogether superficial and
unreal. But principles, plans, types and ideas, ends contemplated in
movement and progress, these at any rate are not physical, are not
matters of sense and organization. They are, as I have said, prior to
what is physical, they are conditions antecedent to organization and
growth. Moreover, they are mental conceptions, not physical affections.
They are only possible, they have no meaning, except as the thoughts of
some mind. Here, then, we are brought back by an inevitable necessity
to an antecedent mind, the seat and origin of all the principles, the
plans the ideas, the ends, embodied in organized beings, and fulfilled
in their existence, growth, and perfection. In short, from whatever
side we contemplate the problems of nature, and whencesoever we take
our point of departure in their investigation, we find ourselves
brought face to face with creative mind. The things which are "seen and
temporal" lead us always inwards to "the things which are unseen and
eternal;" man and creaturely existence conduct us to the living God.
If any one would escape from the pressure of this argument by hardily
denying that living organization involves principle or plan, type or
idea, purpose or end, it can only follow that the living forms of the
universe are an infinite congeries of accidental combinations, that in
reality there are no such things as organs, that there can be no such
thing as development, and that there is no such thing as law. What men
call law is mere sequence that happens to follow regularly. The whole
universe has been constituted and regulated by the fortuitous concourse
of atoms. Against such a conclusion as this I do not need to argue. It
is the naked and repulsive atheism of which I spoke in the introduction
to this lecture. The line of argument which I have been pursuing seems
to force us to the conclusion that there is no logical resting-place
between such theism as Christianity teaches and such Democritean
atheism as that of which we have now had a glimpse.
But if this be so, it follows that it is impossible to deny design and
final causes in creation, and the sway and oversight of a universal
Divine Providence, the providence of a living God, except by denying
all law. To the Christian theist, science is living science indeed; to
the pantheist, no less than the atheist, science is hardly better than
a dead register. He may talk of the wisdom, the power, the order, the
benevolence, of nature. But such expressions on the lips of a pantheist
are utterly illusive. All the wisdom, all the marvellous adjustments
of nature, are but the happy conjunctures, the exquisite chance
unisons, of he knows not what. When lost in admiration of marvellous
organizations, complexly apt and beautiful contrivances, of what seem
like the most studied and beneficent provisions, the soul that is
beginning to glow with wonder at this seeming wisdom, and to swell with
thankfulness because of this seeming love, must be chilled into blank
confusion and amazement by the thought that there is no Being of Wisdom
and Benevolence Who is to be thanked and adored because of these His
marvellous works. Surely this is enough to darken the universe to the
explorer of nature's mysteries, and to fill his soul with perpetual
melancholy. Nor is it easy to understand how any man of true science,
any real inductive philosopher, who comes into contact with nature's
living processes and hears the perpetual whisper of her living voice,
can be ensnared into the acceptance of such a hard mystery of sceptical
belief as this.
Surely, then, on purely scientific grounds,--the grounds not only of
metaphysical but also of natural science, on every ground which can be
appealed to by high and pure philosophy, we are at liberty, I should
say we are bound, to reject the hypothesis which attempts to expound
nature and to solve its mysteries, without the admission of a divine
mind. Sense and matter and the observed order of phenomena do not
constitute the whole of our science. There are some words written by a
poet, too much neglected at the present time, which I cannot forbear
from quoting here.
"How should matter occupy a charge
Dull as it is, and satisfy a law,
So vast in its demands, unless impelled
To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
And under pressure of some conscious cause?
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains, and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God. He feeds the secret fire
By which the mighty process is maintained,
Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight
Slow circling ages are as transient days;
Whose work is without labour; whose designs
No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts;
And whose beneficence no charge exhausts."
Surely, if I may here quote some words of Mr. Kingsley's in the
lecture to which I have already referred, this is what men of science
"are finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena
which the scalpel and the microscope can show, a something nameless,
invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent,
retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve, that
which the old schoolmen called 'forma formativa,' the mystery of that
unknown and truly miraculous element in nature which is always escaping
them, though they cannot escape it, that of which it was written of
old, 'Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee
from Thy Spirit?'"
The observations which I have thus far offered are directed wholly to
the philosophical and scientific aspect of the argument respecting
Pantheism. I cannot bring this lecture to an end without referring to
the moral branch of the argument. The existence of evil in the universe
is alleged as an argument against the existence of God and divine
government. Doubtless, the existence of evil is a painful mystery.
Many good Christians have felt it to be an oppressive and almost an
overwhelming mystery. It is one of the difficulties attendant on the
Christian's belief; it is, in fact, the one moral difficulty. But
difficulties and mysteries cannot annul the positive necessities of
thought and argument. If such arguments as I have endeavoured to state
make all science to be contradictory and unintelligible which speaks,
in one breath, of the laws and wisdom of nature, and, in the next,
denies the existence of a God, then we are bound to accept theism with
its inevitable consequences, notwithstanding the mysteries, whether
metaphysical or moral, which our faith may involve. Mysteries are not
contradictions, and, in whichever direction we move, we shall find it
impossible to escape from them. Mysteries surround the position of the
sceptic or the atheist, no less than that of the Christian theist;
not only mysteries, but, as we have seen, contradictions, beset him
round, in whichever direction he turns. The Christian theist, by his
faith in God, accepts the mysteries which are involved in the thought
of God, but, unlike the unbeliever, he escapes from contradictions and
absurdities. It appears that the morality of man--his great glory--that
his sense of responsibility and of voluntary moral power, that which
most peculiarly constitutes him man, involves the law of moral
influence as between man and man. It appears further that the power
and faculty of moral influence for good must needs involve the law of
moral influence for evil. From the fact of man's own moral nature and
moral responsibility, and the consequent fact of his moral influence
over his fellow-men, is derived, not only the possibility of moral evil
in the case of a solitary individual, but the possibility, perhaps
I may say the naturalness, the probability, of a contagion of moral
evil spreading throughout the race, the effect of which can only be
counteracted or limited by moral arrangements and influences specially
constituted for that end. So much I may perhaps say in general,
although the subject is one on which I think it wiser, as a rule, to
say nothing. I feel it to be a profound and perilous mystery, however
gloriously it may have been made the occasion for the manifestation in
Christ Jesus our Lord of the Divine superabounding wisdom, mercy, and
power. But if we admit the subject to be involved in profound, even
terrible mystery, is that a reason why, making shipwreck at one plunge
of all that belongs to humanity, faith and hope and philosophy should
commit suicide, and descend together into the gulf of everlasting
darkness and despair! Reason may reel and grow dizzy while it looks too
long and too absorbedly down the fearful and fathomless depths of the
mystery of sin, but that is no sufficient cause why reason should cast
itself headlong into the abyss.
Pantheism has only one way in which to escape from the mystery of
evil, and that is to deny all distinction between right and wrong,
between moral good and moral evil. Of course there can be no such thing
as sin for the pantheist, because all, according to his creed, is
nature and development and necessity. Holiness is a matter of taste or
sentiment. Conscience is an illusive development; what we regard as
divine morality is but utilitarianism sentimentalized and exalted into
sacred law under the influence of unenlightened impulse and antique
superstition, a mere affair of the association of ideas which science
will some day explain away. The ontology and ethics of Pantheism may be
summed up in one sentence, "Whatever is, is; and there is neither right
nor wrong, but all is fate and nature." Pantheism--I say Pantheism just
as truly and completely as atheism, for the difference between the
two, as we have seen, is but one of name and phrase, and both alike
deny God and conscience--Pantheism thus does cruel violence to every
better instinct of our nature, outrages all the demands of religion and
government, whether human or divine, and makes itself the direst foe of
human progress and well-being. Many pantheists, doubtless, have been
and are virtuous, even noble, men; some, I am prepared to believe, may
even, in a certain sense, be religious men. But the direct tendency
of the pantheistic philosophy is confessedly what I have now stated.
When moral and pure, its pure morality can be nothing more, at least in
theory, than a refined utilitarianism. Only as such can any pantheist
pretend to impose morality as law.
To sum up, may I not say that Pantheism, whether in its metaphysical or
its moral aspect, is the dream of men who will not admit that there is
in the universe anything beyond what their senses immediately reveal
to them? Its philosophy was represented in the last century in its
lower and more popular form by Condorcet; the basis of whose system was
laid in the principle, "penser c'est sentir,"--thought is nothing more
than sense or feeling; in its higher and more intellectual form it was
represented by the sceptical sense-idealism of Hume. At the present day
Bain and Mill have endeavoured to develop the principle of Condorcet
in harmony with the higher and more subtle philosophy of Hume. The
result appears to be a sort of nihilistic sense-idealism. Matter is
probably nothing different from our mental ideas--so far Berkeley, no
less than Hume, is followed; our ideas, however developed, are yet
essentially only the combination and interfusion of our sensations
and sense-associations; meantime there is no evidence of the real and
substantial existence either of the world outside us, or of ourselves
as true and separate selves or persons, or of God. Such at least would
seem to be the metaphysics of the distinctively _English_ school of
Pantheism, _i.e._, of Pantheism rendered into philosophic system by
the English mind. The German Pantheism has _infected_ the _tendencies_
of English thought and criticism, but, notwithstanding the influence
of Hegel at Oxford, has not been reproduced in any English system of
egoistic Pantheism. In their aspects and results, in relation to
theism and Christian faith, the German egoistic Pantheism and the
English sense-idealistic Pantheism strictly coincide.