put in various shapes. We might ask, Can the protest of soul be set
down as a mere sentiment only? If it were no more than an instinct of
our nature, it would deserve consideration; for why should so high and
noble an instinct be aimless and misleading? If we cannot trust our own
souls, what are we to trust? Phenomena themselves are given us within.
Mathematical truths, which Positivists are obliged to exempt from
phenomenal law, have a subjective validity--we cannot help thinking
them, and we cannot think their contradictories.
But suppose that a future state of recompence with its
inferential moralities cannot be denied without denying our own
consciousness--pronouncing the clearest of our intuitions a will o'
the wisp--or, sadder still, a corpse light on the grave of hope--nay,
more, without subverting the law which makes human society to differ
from animal gregariousness, and gives to human action its spring, its
liberty, its life--suppose all this true, what shall, what can we say?
And such is the issue I propose to try this morning.
The plan I have devised for trying it fairly is, first, to get as
clear an idea as short compass will allow of what Positivism says
on our question. Afterwards to state a case for moral law by way of
antithesis. It is through the law of our moral being that we may most
readily look for something to difference our souls from creatures below
them. The strain I shall have to put on your attention lies in this;
after grasping in brief the Positivist attitude, I must ask that you
will not take my facts or arguments on trust, but will verify each
severally by an appeal to your own consciousness. It is always upon the
law deduced from or applied to facts that you ought to exercise your
greatest vigilance. For law interprets facts to us--we might almost say
that under its manipulation they bend like a nose of wax; nothing, you
will remember, so flexible as figures, except facts.
Let me represent these maxims to you under a similitude. Everybody has
looked (when young at least) through a kaleidoscope, and has observed
the beauty of its many-coloured figures, their symmetrical shapes,
and the enchantment of their succession. What magic creates this
phantasmagoria? Some pretty bits of coloured glass, shining gewgaws,
scraps of lace, fripperies, and other odds and ends, are put into a
translucent box, and beheld through a tube fitted with mirrors which
are set at an angle determined by optical law. The broken knick-knacks
represent the facts of everybody's phenomenal kaleidoscope; the
reflecting angle under which they are seen is its law; the coloured
images are everybody's impressions of things, nature, and mankind.
As long as you live, remember that whenever you are contemplating
the world's phenomena--whenever you see facts of life, either great
or small, you are looking at them through some optical instrument or
another. If its law accords with their law, your view is truthful;
but then it will be all the less pretty, the less symmetrical. There
are dark spots in our real world, checks of all sorts, moral evil,
anguish of heart and conscience, foresights, stern accountabilities!
You have lost your childhood's magic glass, and have got a clear
reflecting telescope in its stead! Pity to forego the nice kaleidoscope
where all was so bright, so harmonious, and arrayed in such regular
shapes. Yet the view it gave was worth what most people's views are
worth--precisely nothing!
Comte had his kaleidoscope. Every systematizer who allows no mystery,
no darkness anywhere, must keep the article; in point of fact, most
people enjoy having one. Alas! for the 19th century! It has such a
feverish viewiness, such a fashion of incessantly turning its magic
tube, that life seems little else than a dreamy phantasmagoria!
To construct a steady reflecting instrument for yourself requires
industry, time, and thought, three things which few people care to
bestow upon their beliefs. Therefore the practice is to pick up
kaleidoscopes ready-made at a cheap rate, and to feel as easy as stern
realities will permit on the subject of their truthfulness. Romances
are the kaleidoscopes of one class, cram-books of a second, newspapers
of a third, self-love the optical law of the greatest number. We are
met this morning to break up a grand kaleidoscope, and to look into its
construction. I shall do my endeavour to prevent you all from replacing
it by any instrument of a ready-made sort. The easiest plan for all
lecturers is to display a series of transparent conclusions; but I
shall prefer furnishing you with facts and arguments, letting you put
them together, look at them, and verify their law of true vision for
yourselves.
Let us see Comte's law first. It was, strictly speaking, a law of
succession and resemblance. You will guess at once that were this
all we could see in the phenomenal world, our insight would be very
limited. And Comte's object was to limit us. We can never know,
Positively speaking, final causes; those which make up the common
notion of design, purpose, intention. Nor yet any efficient causes;
nothing truly productive of an effect, as men usually say. All we can
know is the middle of a chain of successive phenomena. The two ends are
absolutely hidden from our eyes. It was in this sense that Comte denied
causation--his language was vigorous; he denounced it as metaphysical,
and when Comte nicknames anything metaphysical or theological, he
means, as everybody knows, Anathema maranatha.
The difficulty here is palpable. A law of averages--a statistical law,
as it is often called, does not profess to account for anything; it
merely generalizes crude material, and gets it ready for scientific
thought to work out the true law. But a law of succession has an
imposing sound, and it does in the worst sense impose. The fallacy may
be shown in an instant. Day and night succeed each other regularly.
Does either _account_ for the other? The rotation of the earth is
simultaneous with both--it accounts for both. Its effect is to expose
the earth's two hemispheres alternately to the sun's rays. This
rotation coincides again with other laws of our planetary system, and
they account for it. It is on these laws, and not on such grounds as
Hume, Comte's great Positive antecedent, alleged, that we look for
sunset and sunrise. When they fail, the system of which our globe forms
part will have collapsed.
Such then was the original kaleidoscope of Positivism. It was condemned
for reasons which will have plainly appeared to you. Other eyes have
swept the field of vision this world offers, and other instruments to
aid our insight have been adopted.
You will not have failed already to remark the extreme vagueness of
that word "law." There are very few English words more vague: it
is applied to almost every sort of formula, force, principle, idea;
besides being misused in ways almost innumerable. You must therefore,
when busy with questions like the present, fix your attention upon
the adjectives added to it, and the examples selected by way of
illustration.
The Positive system is, according to Littré, of immeasurable extent,
embracing the whole universe. Thus, whatever was conceived in dark
preparatory ages, theological or metaphysical; whatsoever persons, who
philosophize in either of those antiquated ways may even now dream;--if
the conception cannot be reduced under Positive laws, it must be
regarded as non-existent. All that really exists is included within
such laws, the definition of which, therefore, becomes a subject of
the greatest possible importance. They are, he says, immanent causes.
The room we are in contains intelligent and educated people, but how
many here could define this word "immanent"? It and its correlative,
transcendent, are in truth metaphysical terms. If you will turn to
Mellin's Encyclopædic Word-Book (favourably known to metaphysicians for
purposes of pillage), you will find _immanent_ explained, under the
German _einheimisch_, into ten shades of usage. Probably, in common
English Littré might have said "inherent." "The universe," he writes,
"now appears to us as a whole, having its causes within itself,
causes which we name its laws. The long conflict between immanence
and transcendence is touching its close. Transcendence is theology or
metaphysic, explaining the universe by causes outside it; immanence is
science, explaining the universe by causes within itself."[13] Now,
one stock-in-trade example is that a stone falls to the ground by
virtue of an immanent cause. In plainer words, the stone belongs to
universal matter of which gravity is an inherent law. Next, we find
this same example Positively applied to the human will. Volition is
free just as a falling stone is free; it obeys its own inherent law.
Further, we read of "the rigorous fatalities which make the world
what it is." Comte, Littré, and others object against calling these
fatalities materialistic, because they distinguish gradations of law.
Yet they limit all human knowledge within the materialistic circle,
and Janet, who refuses to acquit them of Materialism, dwells on the
point that, instead of defining mind as an unknown cause of thought,
emotion, and will, it is said to be, "when anatomically considered,
the sum of the functions of brain and spinal cord; and when considered
physiologically, the sum of the functions of brain in consciously
receiving impressions."[14] We need not wish to dispute about words.
But suppose it had been stated in plain French or English that all
known or knowable objects in the universe are placed by Positivism
under the rule of laws as rigorous in their fatality as the laws
of matter, would not the ultimate point in question have been more
tangible, more intelligible? People might indeed have said, "Why, after
all Positivism comes to the same thing as Fatalism, or Materialism;"
and with certain writers this risk may very possibly be held a decisive
objection.
Once more,--another explanation given by Littré is, that Positivism
lies strictly within the "relative." Many here are aware how,
since Kant's time, England, France, and Germany have been flooded
with metaphysic, good, bad, and indifferent, on the relative and
the conditioned. Pity that Littré should have plunged into these
whirlpools! Ravaisson refers to Herbert Spencer and Sophie St. Germain
for the point that this conception, the relative, must always imply
the existence of an absolute, known or unknown.[169] I cannot follow
him now, but any one interested in doing so will find the subject
commenced at page 66 of his "Philosophie en France," (one of the
Imperial Reports), and continued through sections 9 and 10. It is a
very important discussion. Ravaisson stands out amongst Frenchmen as a
consummate master of his science; and he inclines to infer that Comte
tended, and that Positivism generally now tends, towards a final
return to metaphysic. However this may be, I fear I have tired you,
and am glad to quit this dry part of my lecture, and get away to more
common-sense ground.
By way of introducing our most interesting topic, let me draw one
common-sense conclusion from the difficult tract just shot over. During
our passage, a thought may have flashed upon you which I remember
hearing in a Bampton Lecture, somewhat to this effect--"Positivism is
the most negative system of all." It appears hard to avoid this idea;
for Positivism denies in express terms that human beings have any
knowledge outside those generalized laws of experience which make up
the Positive sciences. It denies (in a word) the most essential part of
what was formerly held to be a knowledge of mind, both human and Divine.
Positive thinkers rebut the charge of negativism this way. We confine
ourselves, they say, to what we know; we do not venture, like
Pantheists and Atheists, into the unknowable. We do not deny God, we
only ignore Him. We do not ask about the first cause of the world,
or whether it has a constructural final end. Such questions as these
are "disedifying." "The Positive philosophy," says Littré, "does not
busy itself with the beginning of the universe, if the universe had a
beginning--nor yet with what happens to living things, plants, animals,
men, after their death, or at the consummation of the ages, if the
ages have a consummation."[15] Littré's sentence, which I have rendered
_verbatim_, reminds one of the prayer told to Bishop Atterbury, as
offered by soldier on the eve of battle: "O God, if there be a God,
save my soul, if I have a soul!" I am sorry to repeat ill-sounding
words again; but is not this really the exact religious attitude of an
honest Positivist, who feels sometimes touched by visions of possible
life after death,
"Of all the nurse and all the priest have taught;"
that is, if we conceive his attitude according to the _least_ negative
interpretation put upon the system?
Continuing this least negative interpretation, let us view under its
light the Positive cosmology or theory of the world's existence; of
creation,--that is to say, if there ever was a creation. A stone
falls to the ground. Trying to account for the phenomenon, we grasp a
law inherent in the material world. Other phenomena lead us to other
laws. We contemplate the material world with its laws in operation,
a magnificent spectacle of moving forces; an organic whole, shining
through its own intrinsic glory of never-ceasing development. If we
turn and pursue the reverse road, and trace evolution back to its
elementary principles, we may dissolve worlds into primordial force, or
we may, as Professor Tyndall suggested at Liverpool, find the All in
a fiery cloud occupying space. Then comes the complex question,[170]
What beyond? What before? Whence, and How produced? a Positivist
thinker may return one of two answers. He may either say, "We do not
know," or he may say, "Nothing can be known." Take the least negative
first, as we proposed; it surely deserves this rejoinder: If you plead
ignorance, but surmise that knowledge is possible, you ought not, for
reasons valid with every true lover of wisdom, to stop here. You are
substituting for the ideas of creation and first cause, what you call
a primordial universe, a material condition of some kind, producing
phenomena regulated by inherent laws, successive, perishable, and
nothing more! All once believed beyond, a blank! Even the very name of
philosophy consecrated by consent of ages to the First and to the Last,
admonishes you. Renounce your vocation, deny your name, or proceed. We
demand a Positive result in the highest sense, not a fog of ignorance,
not a slough of despond. But if the second answer be the true one, if
the teaching of Positivism is that nothing more can be known, let us be
told so in plain words. Let no one be charmed into the Positive circle
by false allurements; for of all vices treachery and hypocrisy are the
most cowardly. Are you really wiser than the pagan Lucretius? If not,
why boast of 19th century discoveries in wisdom, insight, happiness?
If you have examined the relics of a primæval world, explored the races
of living and thinking creatures, if you have ascended to the starry
firmament, and traversed its shining hosts, to come back with shame and
disappointment, and tell us this is _your_ all, _our_ all, then indeed
the wages of your science is death. While you speak your final verdict
at least cover your faces,
"And, sad as angels for a good man's sin,
Weep to record, and blush to give it in!"
These thoughts have brought us to the most essential considerations
of this lecture. Whether the Positive _savant_ puts in a plea of
ignorance or of blank negation, we care not. We will treat it as a
challenge thrown down, and do our best to meet it. Succeed or not,
we will take no refuge in ambiguities, but maintain a truly positive
assertion. We say that the world we live in is not one world, but
two,[171] distinguishable through the laws by which each is governed.
There exists such a thing as phenomenal law; we accept the fact. But
distinct, broadly distinct, apart in its working, its elements, and its
final result, is moral law. An appeal lies to facts, and we shall try
to justify our assertion.
The mode of proof now to be adopted is not metaphysical. I mention
the circumstance because investigations into mind are apt to be
confounded with metaphysic, and are then supposed too difficult to
deserve attention. My argument will demand nothing beyond a hearing
and a scrutiny. It will consist of just so much mental dissection as
may be needful to show, first, a structural law of our inward nature,
and, secondly, to illustrate its workings and effects. These two sets
of facts will be placed side by side, in order that each may check
the other, and that their coincidence may also (as I hope it will)
furnish a fresh and sufficient proof of the contrast between moral and
material law. Everybody knows how convincing are, and ought to be,
facts separately ascertainable, yet converging into one and the same
conclusion.
One form of speech almost unavoidable ought to be remarked beforehand.
I mean the word freedom as applied to the human will and its volitions.
When compelled to use it, I shall do so only in the sense of
philosophic as contrasted with theological free will. By philosophic
freedom I understand that sort and degree of active choice free from
constraint which is required for the idea of responsibility, an
idea universally agreed on by divines opposed to each other on the
point of theological freewill. By this last-named idea I understand
supposed powers of spiritual attainment, which go to make up a notion
of self-sufficing moral strength. With it the present lecture, being
purely philosophical, can have nothing whatever to do, but I should
much deplore misconception, because any theory of self-sufficingness
would be repugnant to my own personal convictions.
Look now at the life of an animal, with senses often more
instrumentally accurate than ours. Survey the world around, which
furnishes the objects of his perception and his intelligence. The
mode in which that intelligence acts is held to be more or less under
the absolute rule of instinct, and creatures below man are commonly
described as those "that nourish a blind life within the brain."
Whether this be or be not perfectly correct makes no difference to
our present purpose. The point I want you to fix your thoughts upon
is the _directness_ of relation between the feeling or intelligent
principle of mere animal life, and the object perceived, felt, or
apprehended. Perhaps it may give vividness to your thought, if you
figure this relation under the similitude of a right line connecting
two points--object without, apprehension within. The line itself will
then represent the impulsive activity of a creature, as, for example,
when a hungry tiger leaps upon his prey.
Now this directness of action is _not_ the thing most marked in our own
proper human existence. What is really marked is the exact reverse;
the more truly _human_ any action appears, the farther is it away from
resemblance to that animal characteristic. Suppose a man acts like a
tiger, he is simply brutal; if he be governed by his feelings, however
amiable, we pronounce him weak or unreasoning.
Absolutely impulsive doings, such as the indulgence of an appetite,
blows struck in passion, or even in self-defence, we separate from
our volitions proper, and call them irrational and instinctive. In
educating children we check displays of impulse, we bid them pause
and reflect. And it is obvious that education presupposes an educable
power or principle, which principle self-education (the most important
training of all) will place in a clear light before you. Interrogate
yourselves, then. You will see that the mental power you most wish
to train and augment is distinguishable enough even in the commonest
affairs of life. Take a case of feeling. Some object--no matter
what--kindles an emotion within you--anger, wish affection, pursuit,
dislike, avoidance--and you feel strongly impelled to take action
thereupon. This would be the movement which was imaged to our minds
as a simple line. But to launch along it inconsiderately you would
feel neither proper _per se_--nor yet doing what is due to yourself,
because it is your human prerogative to act, not according to impulse,
but according to reason. And observe, to do, or to forbear doing, is
a question by no means determined by finding whether another emotion
be or be not stronger than the first. What reason demands is that the
impulse you feel, or it may chance the strongest of a dozen impulses,
shall become to you an object of careful scrutiny. You are bound in
honesty to scrutinize it; not only because it exists as an incitement
felt within yourself, but much, much more because it is felt to be your
actual self. It is your character which gave the spring, and lives in
the movement to action. Perchance this point of character is a hidden
nook, an unknown depth of feeling or desire, undiscovered, unsuspected
by your fellow-creatures--a secret of your inner self. Nevertheless it
is amenable to the tribunal of a more inward self still, to be brought
before it as an object that shall be examined and cross-examined,
sentenced either to vivid freedom or present suppression--it may
be even to extinction evermore! Each human being possesses this
wonderful self-objectivizing power. He is able to look at himself as
a NOT-self--a something partitioned off, and external; to be thought
about, felt about, reasoned about; to be controlled, chastened,
corrected. This power is our inalienable heritage; we cannot resign it
if we would; we cannot finally suspend its exercise. Mountains could
not crush, nor oceans drown it; flames of fire never burned it out from
the breast of one single martyr. Whether we use our birthright for good
or for evil, it still remains with us; when we act, our will is not a
feeling, an appetition, travelling simply from one point to another. It
is a movement of our world within, a movement of that microcosm called
Man.
Suppose a person resolves to employ this power aright. Some wish or
feeling, such as might drive a lower creature to instinctive action,
stirs within him, and becomes the object of his contemplation. To
the sessions of silent thought he summons whatever assistants he can
get; the witnesses of experience, prudence, duty, the golden rules
of the Gospel; whatever seems most proper to determine the question
at issue,--fitness or unfitness, to act or to abstain from acting.
He says to himself (as all here have done a thousand times), "This
longing, thought, state of mind, is wise or foolish, good or bad, right
or wrong; nay, 'tis I myself that am so!" And in thus saying he is
conscious of that sort of freedom to will or not to will, which makes
up responsibility. He does not deny--contrariwise, with the might of
his whole essential humanity he asserts--that the act of will is thus
taken out of the direct line of inevitable antecedency, away from the
physico-mechanical series, and enabled to commence a series of its own.
In a word, his consciousness evidences to him that functional law which
makes the human soul a thing more wonderful than all the inorganic or
all the animated universe besides. And the law thus evidenced is the
law of moral causation.
I said that our own soul thus becomes to us more wonderful than all
the known universe besides. I might have said more mysterious; so truly
_sui generis_ and different from all things not ensouled, as to be
inexplicable by human sciences, an enigma to itself, dwelling alone in
its own awful isolation. Do but think what _cause_ is--nothing less
than originating power; what then must it be in stern and sad reality
for a soul to originate a sin! Yet we cannot deny the fact. We confess
it every day, not only in our hearts and deeper utterances, but in the
commonest though most tremendous of words, the word responsibility.
If a man were in no true sense the cause of his own actions, he could
never be held responsible either by God or Man. But as long as Justice
maintains her seat, each criminal will be so held, so judged, so
recompensed. And the only principle under which Justice can justify her
judgments is the reality of moral causation.