dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few
of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but
renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific
men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the
fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The
establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more
justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of
the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith
sufficiently robust to stand the--surely very slight--strain of
admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the sun need
have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic
scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of
evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much
propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation.
Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by
one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm has been done
by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which,
in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to
explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed
in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers--such masters not
only of philosophy but of material science--as William James, Émile
Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks
of Alfred Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor
Haeckel’s dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to
the absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable
mind that is the power within and behind and around nature many of
us have the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded
dogmatism of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially
when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to
conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight
is emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as
he does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught
“a new and sufficient gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there
is any truth “in the boast of infidel science that she and she alone
has all that is worth having.” He could go even further than he does
in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that
evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true
evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less
than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after
having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again
happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after
having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight’s view of religion is that it
is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically
right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to
mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance
of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the
adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who
adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.
In the same way I heartily sympathize with his condemnation of the men
who stridently proclaim that “science has disposed of religion,” and
with his condemnation of the scientific men who would try to teach
the community that there is no real meaning to the words “right”
and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and accountability.
Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he
calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his theory of
group development has opened a new biological and even sociological
field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical
accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and
whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows
that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist
can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of
the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence
can not understand it. Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward
the scientific men who thus assume that there is no freedom of the
will because on a material basis it is not explicable. Whenever any
so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory
in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct
the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise
attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory,
instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary,
scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his
theory, answered: “So much the worse for the facts.” M. Bergson, in
his “Creative Evolution,” has brought out with convincing clearness
the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely
material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought
is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily
narrow limitations--limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never
to be made really broad by mere intellect--when it comes to grasping
any part of the great principle of life. Reason can deal effectively
only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to
allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where
experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly,
then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience,
and bid reason be humble--just as under like conditions it would
bid theology be humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was
able to prove logically that there was not, and could not be, any
such thing as motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite
impossible logically for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing
creature which was going at inferior speed; but all that was really
accomplished by this teaching was to prove the need of much greater
intellectual humility on the part of those who believed that they were
capable of thinking out an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard
ought not to have been caught in such a dilemma, because of the very
fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass materialists;
for he admits that there are many things we do not know, that there
is much which our intelligence--necessarily functioning in material
fashion--can not understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to
explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he
is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp
to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp
materialism. Not only would it be quite impossible to conduct even
the lowest form of civil society without practical acknowledgment of
free-will and accountability--an acknowledgment always made in practice
by every single individual of those who deny it in theory--but even
in their writings the very men who deny free-will and accountability
inevitably and continually use language which has no meaning except on
the supposition that both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance,
on the same page on which he denies freedom of the will, makes an
impatient plea for just laws, and explains that by “just laws” he
means laws that are in accordance with the highest conceptions of
human relationships; he complains that the legal idea of justice is
invariably far behind that of our psychic perceptions; and elsewhere,
as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties” of man and of his “moral
perceptions,” and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community,
so that “social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will
at once rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All
of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the
will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and
original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the
pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson’s pregnant
saying that “pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense,
which is an altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part,
of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint
Augustine in insisting that “the truths of love are as valid as the
truths of reason.”
Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought are similar to his
perform a real service when they keep people from being led astray by
the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to each passing and
evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a dogmatic value;
and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in the least
hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the advance in
scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such priceless
worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but only by the
bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered freedom of
soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of
truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search
to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable
piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the
wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T.
Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation the
investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth
wherever they may lead.”
It is always a difficult thing to state a position which has two sides
with such clearness as to bring it home to the hearers. In the world
of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and
no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but
difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress
combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of
extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. So in
the world of the intellect it is easy to take the position of the hard
materialists who rail against religion, and easy also to take the
position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all
action by men of independent mind in the search for scientific truth;
but it is not so easy to make it understood that we both acknowledge
our inestimable debt to the great masters of science, and yet are
keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our judgment to
theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave
their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon our adherence
to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without better security
than the more radical among the new prophets can offer us. The very
blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency
is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which
unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of
man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon,
these mysteries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men
of this stamp. No one has criticised with greater incisiveness what he
properly calls “the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions
of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific
superiority to these men by his entire realization of the limitations
of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking
that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when
we use such terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to
cover our ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of
MM. Boutroux and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the
attitude of the more serious among the younger present-day scientific
investigators--of the stamp of Professor Osborn, of the American
Museum of Natural History--in his readiness to acknowledge that the
materialistic and mechanical explanations of the causes of evolution
have broken down, and that science itself furnishes an overwhelming
argument for “creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose” in
the process of evolution.
The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious
man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more
and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to
religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with
insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile
itself--and astronomy as well--to a universe only six thousand years
old. The type of theologian who takes such a position occupies much the
same intellectual level with the strutting materialists of the Haeckel
type. To all men of this kind I most cordially commend a capital book,
“Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm, one-time professor of
physics at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.
The great distinguishing feature of the centuries immediately past
has been the extraordinary growth in man’s knowledge of, and power
to understand and command, his own physical nature and his physical
surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so sharply
distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may
roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus’s voyage, from all
preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased
man’s power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also
measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and
command over things spiritual no less than material. This conquest
could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their
longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own
consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. But
no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has taken place,
or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also with great
dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try to remain
stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we leave the
ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always danger
that we shall plunge into some abyss.
Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these extraordinary
material discoveries have often tended to think that there is nothing
to discover or to believe in except what is material. Much of the
growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men whose high
abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain directions.
Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the
remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate
and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so
powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our
knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet;
the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment
of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short,
the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical
universe and of man’s physical place in that universe, has been due to
the labor of students whose special tastes and abilities lay in the
direction of dealing with what is purely material. Their astounding
success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of
their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them
who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not
broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient
materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own
grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside
the realm of the body. This attitude is as profoundly repellent as
that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of
all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and,
moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific
as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The
universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended
unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical
surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just
what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are;
but neither will it ever be understood if the physical and material
explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this
more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the
investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are
psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements
... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character,
quality, element--or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from
mathematics and call it a new ‘dimension’ of our environment, hitherto
three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe
that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional
environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which
hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”
Not only every truly religious, but every truly scientific, man must
turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in materialism to the
profound and lofty thought contained in the writings of William James,
of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of another philosopher of
the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux’s study of William James
gives in brief form--and with a charm of style and expression possible
only for those who work with that delicate instrument of precision,
French prose--the views which men of this stamp hold; and be it
remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly scientific men,
steeped in the teachings of material science, who acknowledge no
outside limitation upon them in their search for truth. They have a
far keener understanding of the world of matter than has been attained
by the purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition,
they also understand that outside of the purely physical lies the
psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the
purely psychic. M. Boutroux’s book on “Science and Religion” has been
translated into English--and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs.
Nield and Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux
and Bergson. There is much talk of the conflict between science and
religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better
expressed than by M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is
the result of our defining both science and religion in an artificial
manner by, on the one hand, identifying science with physical science,
and, on the other hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas
which merely symbolize it.” M. Boutroux’s book, like M. Bergson’s
“Creative Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and
condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with
which these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science
itself, if correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile
dogmatism of many of those who pride themselves upon being, above all
things, scientific. For, as these writers point out, the work of the
scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination
of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in
an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body,
in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the
physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived
of as something always dynamic and never static, as a “stream of
consciousness,” a “becoming.”
As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his
value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating
him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This
philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of
the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution
and of all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those
who profess it are in a position of impregnable strength when they
point out that all this in no shape or way interferes with religion
and with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion
has merely tended to disengage it from its own gross and material
wrapping, and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence.
To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which
humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as M.
Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith
in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need
give no other reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible
disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on
the same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he
says: “The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for
Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing
earth’s duties and living out earth’s full life, and not in abandoning
all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William
James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly
studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively
that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which
all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science
itself teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly
different world, a world ordered by religion--religion which, says M.
Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature
as a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not
from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the
communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion
has nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit to
which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the
universal good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all
high and beneficent activity.
It is striking to see how these two gifted Frenchmen, by their own
road, reach substantially the same conclusion which, by a wholly
different method, and indeed in treating religion from a wholly
different standpoint, is also reached by the president of Bowdoin
College. Mr. Hyde’s short volume combines in high degree a lofty
nobility of ethical concept with the most practical and straightforward
common-sense treatment of the ways in which this concept should be
realized in practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these
matters, and one man’s need will not be wholly met by what does meet
another’s; personally, this book of President Hyde’s gives me something
that no other book does, and means to me very, very much.
We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty
each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this
liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater
or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions,
without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. But the
professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority,
and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual
liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with
self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of
every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting
for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only
relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.”
Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the
case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when
he summed up a notably fine address in defence--as he truly says,
_friendly_ defence--of his own church by enunciating the plea for
“true peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what
he properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give,
the spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely
many earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and
high-minded men of religious convictions may from one side or the other
disagree with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of
philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement
with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we
must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we
ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should
be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with
humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations
both of the mind and the soul. We must stand equally against tyranny
and against irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the firm
conviction that we can all work together for a higher social and
individual life if only, whatever form of creed we profess, we make the
doing of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the prime articles
in our universal faith. To those who deny the ethical obligation
implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens;
and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their
creed or system of philosophy.
THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS