personal God." If he refers to the Latin conception of a God remote
from the world of phenomena, and manifested only through occasional
interference,--the conception that has until lately prevailed in the
Western world since the time of St. Augustine,--then we may agree with
him; the practical effect of the doctrine of evolution is to abolish
such a conception. But with regard to the Greek conception entertained
by St. Athanasius; the conception of God as immanent in the world of
phenomena and manifested in every throb of its mighty rhythmical life;
the deity that Richard Hooker, prince of English churchmen, had in mind
when he wrote of Natural Law that "her seat is the bosom of God, and her
voice the harmony of the world,"--with regard to this conception the
practical effect of the doctrine of evolution is not to abolish, but to
strengthen and confirm it. For, into whatever province of Nature we
carry our researches, the more deeply we penetrate into its laws and
methods of action, the more clearly do we see that all provinces of
Nature are parts of an organic whole animated by a single principle of
life that is infinite and eternal. I have no doubt Professor Haeckel
would not only admit this, but would scout any other view as
inconsistent with the monism which he professes. But he would say that
this infinite and eternal principle of life is not psychical, and
therefore cannot be called in any sense "a personal God." In an ultimate
analysis, I suspect Professor Haeckel's ubiquitous monistic principle
would turn out to be neither more nor less than Dr. Büchner's mechanical
force (_Kraft_). On the other hand, I have sought to show--in my little
book "The Idea of God"--that the Infinite and Eternal Power that
animates the universe must be psychical in its nature, that any attempt
to reduce it to mechanical force must end in absurdity, and that the
only kind of monism which will stand the test of an ultimate analysis is
monotheism. While in the chapter on Anthropomorphic Theism, in my
"Cosmic Philosophy," I have taken great pains to point out the
difficulties in which (as finite thinkers) we are involved when we try
to conceive the Infinite and Eternal Power as psychical in his nature, I
have in the chapter on Matter and Spirit, in that same book, taken equal
pains to show that we are logically compelled thus to conceive Him.
One's attitude toward such problems is likely to be determined by one's
fundamental conception of psychical life. To a materialist the ultimate
power is mechanical force, and psychical life is nothing but the
temporary and local result of fleeting collocations of material elements
in the shape of nervous systems. Into the endless circuit of
transformations of molecular motion, says the materialist, there enter
certain phases which we call feelings and thoughts; they are part of the
circuit; they arise out of motions of material molecules, and disappear
by being retransformed into such motions: hence, with the death of the
organism in which such motions have been temporarily gathered into a
kind of unity, all psychical activity and all personality are _ipso
facto_ abolished. Such is the materialistic doctrine, and such, I
presume, is what Professor Haeckel has in mind when he asserts that the
belief in an immortal soul is incompatible with the doctrine of
evolution. The theory commonly called that of the correlation of forces,
and which might equally well or better be called the theory of the
metamorphosis of motions, is indispensable to the doctrine of evolution.
But for the theory that light, heat, electricity, and nerve-action are
different modes of undulatory motion transformable one into another, and
that similar modes of motion are liberated by the chemical processes
going on within the animal or vegetal organism, Mr. Spencer's work could
never have been done. That theory of correlation and transformation is
now generally accepted, and is often appealed to by materialists. A
century ago Cabanis said that the brain secretes thought as the liver
secretes bile. If he were alive to-day, he would doubtless smile at this
old form of expression as crude, and would adopt a more subtle phrase;
he would say that "thought is transformed motion."
Against this interpretation I have maintained that the theory of
correlation not only fails to support it, but actually overthrows it.
The arguments may be found in the chapter on Matter and Spirit, in my
"Cosmic Philosophy," published in 1874, and in the essay entitled "A
Crumb for the Modern Symposium," written in 1877, and reprinted in
"Darwinism and Other Essays."[7] Their purport is, that in tracing the
correlation of motions into the organism through the nervous system and
out again, we are bound to get an account of each step in terms of
motion. Unless we can show that every unit of motion that disappears is
transformed into an exact quantitative equivalent, our theory of
correlation breaks down; but when we have shown this we shall have given
a complete account of the whole affair without taking any heed whatever
of thought, feeling, or consciousness. In other words, these psychical
activities do not enter into the circuit, but stand outside of it, as a
segment of a circle may stand outside a portion of an entire
circumference with which it is concentric. Motion is never transformed
into thought, but only into some other form of measurable (in fact, or
at any rate in theory, measurable) motion that takes place in
nerve-threads and ganglia. _It is not the thought, but the nerve-action
that accompanies the thought, that is really "transformed motion._" I
say that if we are going to verify the theory of correlation, it must be
done (actually or theoretically) by measurement; quantitative
equivalence must be proved at every step; and hence we must not change
our unit of measurement; from first to last it must be a unit of motion:
if we change it for a moment, our theory of correlation that moment
collapses. I say, therefore, that the theory of correlation and
equivalence of forces lends no support whatever to materialism. On the
contrary, its manifest implication is that psychical life cannot be a
mere product of temporary collocations of matter.
The argument here set forth is my own. When I first used it, I had never
met with it anywhere in books or conversation. Whether it has since been
employed by other writers I do not know, for during the past fifteen
years I have read very few books on such subjects. At all events, it is
an argument for which I am ready to bear the full responsibility. Some
doubt has recently been expressed whether Mr. Spencer would admit the
force of this argument. It has been urged by Mr. S. H. Wilder, in two
able papers published in the "New York Daily Tribune," June 13 and July
4, 1890, that the use of this argument marks a radical divergence on my
part from Mr. Spencer's own position.
It is true that in several passages of "First Principles" there are
statements which either imply or distinctly assert that motion can be
transformed into feeling and thought,--_e. g._: "Those modes of the
Unknowable which we call heat, light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike
transformable into each other, and into those modes of the Unknowable
which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought; these, in their
turns, being directly or indirectly retransformable into the original
shapes;"[8] and again, it is said "to be a necessary deduction from the
law of correlation that what exists in consciousness under the form of
feeling is transformable into an equivalent of mechanical motion,"
etc.[9] Now, if this, as literally interpreted, be Mr. Spencer's
deliberate opinion, I entirely dissent from it. To speak of quantitative
equivalence between a unit of feeling and a unit of motion seems to me
to be talking nonsense,--to be combining terms which severally possess a
meaning into a phrase which has no meaning. I am therefore inclined to
think that the above sentences, literally interpreted, do not really
convey Mr. Spencer's opinion. They appear manifestly inconsistent,
moreover, with other passages in which he has taken much more pains to
explain his position.[10] In the sentence from page 558 of "First
Principles," Mr. Spencer appears to me to mean that the nerve-action,
which is the objective concomitant of what is subjectively known as
feeling, is transformable into an equivalent of mechanical motion. When
he wrote that sentence perhaps he had not shaped the case quite so
distinctly in his own mind as he had a few years later, when he made the
more elaborate statements in the second edition of the Psychology.
Though in these more elaborate statements he does not assert the
doctrine I have here maintained, yet they seem consistent with it. When
I was finishing the chapter on Matter and Spirit, in my room in London,
one afternoon in February, 1874, Mr. Spencer came in, and I read to him
nearly the whole chapter, including my argument from correlation above
mentioned. He expressed warm approval of the chapter, without making any
specific qualifications. In the course of the chapter I had occasion to
quote a passage from the Psychology,[11] in which Mr. Spencer twice
inadvertently used the phrase "nervous shock" where he meant "psychical
shock." As his object was to keep the psychical phenomena and their
cerebral concomitants distinct in his argument, this colloquial use of
the word "nervous" was liable to puzzle the reader, and give querulous
critics a chance to charge Mr. Spencer with the materialistic
implications which it was his express purpose to avoid. Accordingly, in
my quotation I changed the word "nervous" to "psychical," using brackets
and explaining my reasons. On showing all this to Mr. Spencer, he
desired me to add in a footnote that he thoroughly approved the
emendation.
I mention this incident because our common, every-day speech abounds in
expressions that have a materialistic flavour; and sometimes in serious
writing an author's sheer intentness upon his main argument may lead him
to overlook some familiar form of expression which, when thrown into a
precise and formal context, will strike the reader in a very different
way from what the author intended. I am inclined to explain in this way
the passages in "First Principles" which are perhaps chiefly responsible
for the charge of materialism that has so often and so wrongly been
brought up against the doctrine of evolution.
As regards the theological implications of the doctrine of evolution, I
have never undertaken to speak for Mr. Spencer; on such transcendental
subjects it is quite enough if one speaks for one's self. It is told of
Diogenes that, on listening one day to a sophistical argument against
the possibility of motion, he grimly got up out of his tub and walked
across the street. Whether his adversaries were convinced or not, we are
not told. Probably not; it is but seldom that adversaries are convinced.
So, when Professor Haeckel declares that belief in a "personal God" and
an "immortal soul" is incompatible with acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution, I can only say, for myself--however much or little the
personal experience may be worth--I find that the beliefs in the
psychical nature of God and in the immortality of the human soul seem to
harmonize infinitely better with my general system of cosmic philosophy
than the negation of these beliefs. If Professor Haeckel, or any other
writer, prefers a materialistic interpretation, very well. I neither
quarrel with him nor seek to convert him; but I do not agree with him. I
do not pretend that my opinion on these matters is susceptible of
scientific demonstration. Neither is his. I say, then, that his fifth
thesis has no business in a series of scientific generalizations about
the doctrine of evolution.
Far beyond the limits of what scientific methods, based upon our brief
terrestrial experience, can demonstrate, there lies on every side a
region with regard to which Science can only suggest questions. As
Goethe so profoundly says:--
"Willst du ins Unendliche streiten,
Geh' nur im Endlichen nach allen Seiten."[12]
It is of surpassing interest that the particular generalization which
has been extended into a universal formula of evolution should have been
the generalization of the development of an ovum. In enlarging the
sphere of life in such wise as to make the whole universe seem actuated
by a single principle of life, we are introduced to regions of sublime
speculation. The doctrine of evolution, which affects our thought about
all things, brings before us with vividness the conception of an ever
present God,--not an absentee God who once manufactured a cosmic
machine capable of running itself, except for a little jog or poke here
and there in the shape of a special providence. The doctrine of
evolution destroys the conception of the world as a machine. It makes
God our constant refuge and support, and Nature his true revelation; and
when all its religious implications shall have been set forth, it will
be seen to be the most potent ally that Christianity has ever had in
elevating mankind.
_March, 1890._
III
EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS[13]
In one of the most beautiful of all the shining pages of his "History of
the Spanish Conquest in America," Sir Arthur Helps describes the way in
which, through "some fitness of the season, whether in great scientific
discoveries or in the breaking into light of some great moral cause, the
same processes are going on in many minds, and it seems as if they
communicated with each other invisibly. We may imagine that all good
powers aid the 'new light,' and brave and wise thoughts about it float
aloft in the atmosphere of thought as downy seeds are borne over the
fruitful face of the earth."[14] The thinker who elaborates a new system
of philosophy, deeper and more comprehensive than any yet known to
mankind, though he may work in solitude, nevertheless does not work
alone. The very fact which makes his great scheme of thought a success,
and not a failure, is the fact that it puts into definite and coherent
shape the ideas which many people are more or less vaguely and loosely
entertaining, and that it carries to a grand and triumphant conclusion
processes of reasoning in which many persons have already begun taking
the earlier steps. This community in mental trend between the immortal
discoverer and many of the brightest contemporary minds, far from
diminishing the originality of his work, constitutes the feature of it
which makes it a permanent acquisition for mankind, and distinguishes it
from the eccentric philosophies which now and then come up to startle
the world for a while, and are presently discarded and forgotten. The
history of modern physics--as in the case of the correlation of forces
and the undulatory theory of light--furnishes us with many instances of
wise thoughts floating like downy seeds in the atmosphere until the
moment has come for them to take root. And so it has been with the
greatest achievement of modern thinking,--the doctrine of evolution.
Students and investigators in all departments, alike in the physical and
in the historical sciences, were fairly driven by the nature of the
phenomena before them into some hypothesis, more or less vague, of
gradual and orderly change or development. The world was ready and
waiting for Herbert Spencer's mighty work when it came, and it was for
that reason that it was so quickly triumphant over the old order of
thought. The victory has been so thorough, swift, and decisive that it
will take another generation to narrate the story of it so as to do it
full justice. Meanwhile, people's minds are apt to be somewhat dazed
with the rapidity and wholesale character of the change; and nothing is
more common than to see them adopting Mr. Spencer's ideas without
recognizing them as his or knowing whence they got them. As fast as Mr.
Spencer could set forth his generalizations they were taken hold of here
and there by special workers, each in his own department, and utilized
therein. His general system was at once seized, assimilated, and set
forth with new illustrations by serious thinkers who were already
groping in the regions of abstruse thought which the master's vision
pierced so clearly. And thus the doctrine of evolution has come to be
inseparably interfused with the whole mass of thinking in our day and
generation. I do not mean to imply that people commonly entertain very
clear ideas about it, for clear ideas are not altogether common. I
suspect that a good many people would hesitate if asked to state exactly
what Newton's law of gravitation is.
Among the men in America whose minds, between thirty and forty years
ago, were feeling their way toward some such unified conception of
nature as Mr. Spencer was about to set forth in all its dazzling
glory,--among the men who were thus prepared to grasp the doctrine of
evolution at once and expound it with fresh illustrations,--the first in
the field was the man to whose memory we have met here this evening to
pay a brief word of tribute. It is but a little while since that noble
face was here with us, and the tones of that kindly voice were fraught
with good cheer for us. To most of you, I presume, the man Edward
Livingston Youmans is still a familiar presence. There must be many here
this evening who listened to the tidings of his death three years ago
with a sense of personal bereavement. No one who knew him is likely ever
to forget him. But for those who remember distinctly the man it may not
be superfluous to recount the principal incidents of his life and work.
It is desirable that the story should be set forth concisely, so as to
be remembered; for the work was like the man, unselfish and unobtrusive,
and in the hurry and complication of modern life such work is liable to
be lost from sight, so that people profit by it without knowing that it
was ever done. So genuinely modest, so utterly destitute of
self-regarding impulses, was our friend, that I believe it would be
quite like him to chide us for thus drawing public attention to him, as
he would think, with too much emphasis. But such mild reproof it is
right that we should disregard; for the memory of a life so beautiful
and useful is a precious possession of which mankind ought not to be
deprived.
Edward Livingston Youmans was born in the town of Coeymans, Albany
County, N.Y., on the 3d of June, 1821. From his father and mother, both
of whom survived him, he inherited strong traits of character as well as
an immense fund of vital energy, such that the failure of health a few
years ago seemed (to me, at least) surprising. His father, Vincent
Youmans, was a man of independent character, strong convictions, and
perfect moral courage, with a quick and ready tongue, in the use of
which earnestness and frankness perhaps sometimes prevailed over
prudence. The mother, Catherine Scofield, was notable for balance of
judgment, prudence, and tact. The mother's grandfather was Irish; and
while I very much doubt the soundness of the generalizations we are so
prone to make about race characteristics, I cannot but feel that for the
impulsive--one had almost said explosive--warmth of sympathy, the
enchanting grace and vivacity of manner, in Edward Youmans, this strain
of Irish blood may have been to some extent accountable. Both father and
mother belonged to the old Puritan stock of New England, and the
father's ancestry was doubtless purely English. Nothing could be more
honourably or characteristically English than the name. In the old
feudal society, the _yeoman_, like the _franklin_, was the small
freeholder, owning a modest estate, yet holding it by no servile tenure;
a man of the common people, yet no churl; a member of the state who
"knew his rights, and knowing dared maintain." Few indeed were the nooks
and corners outside of merry England where such men flourished as the
yeomen and franklins who founded democratic New England. It has often
been remarked how the most illustrious of Franklins exemplified the
typical virtues of his class. There was much that was similar in the
temperament and disposition of Edward Youmans,--the sagacity and
penetration, the broad common sense, the earnest purpose veiled but not
hidden by the blithe humour, the devotion to ends of wide practical
value, the habit of making in the best sense the most out of life.
When Edward was but six months old, his parents moved to Greenfield,
near Saratoga Springs. With a comfortable house and three acres of
land, his father kept a wagon shop and smithy. In those days, while it
was hard work to wring a subsistence out of the soil or to prosper upon
any of the vocations which rural life permitted, there was doubtless
more independence of character and real thriftiness than in our time,
when cities and tariffs have so sapped the strength of the farming
country. In the family of Vincent Youmans, though rigid economy was
practised, books were reckoned to a certain extent among the necessaries
of life, and the house was one in which neighbours were fond of
gathering to discuss questions of politics or theology, social reform or
improvements in agriculture. On all such questions Vincent Youmans was
apt to have ideas of his own; he talked with enthusiasm, and was also
ready to listen; and he evidently supplied an intellectual stimulus to
the whole community. For a boy of bright and inquisitive mind, listening
to such talk is no mean source of education. It often goes much further
than the reading of books. From an early age Edward Youmans seems to
have appropriated all such means of instruction. He had that insatiable
thirst for knowledge which is one of God's best gifts to man; for he who
is born with this appetite must needs be grievously ill made in other
respects if it does not constrain him to lead a happy and useful life.
After ten years at Greenfield the family moved to a farm at Milton, some
two miles distant. Until his sixteenth year Edward helped his father at
farm work in the summer, and attended the district school in winter. It
was his good fortune at that time to fall into the hands of a teacher
who had a genius for teaching,--a man who in those days of rote-learning
did not care to have things learned by heart, but sought to stimulate
the thinking powers of his pupils, and who in that age of canes and
ferules never found it necessary to use such means of discipline,
because the fear of displeasing him was of itself all-sufficient.
Experience of the methods of such a man was enough to sharpen one's
disgust for the excessive mechanism, the rigid and stupid manner of
teaching, which characterize the ordinary school. In after years Youmans
used to say that "Uncle Good"--as this admirable pedagogue was
called--first taught him what his mind was for. Through intercourse and
training of this sort he learned to doubt, to test the soundness of
opinions, to make original inquiries, and to find and follow clues.