an effect, an event, something which has begun to be, a process of
becoming. Science is, day by day, year by year, finding out more and
more that it is an effect. The growth of science is in great part
merely the extension of the proof that the universe is an effect. But
the scientific proof of the non-eternity of matter is as yet far
from a complete one. It leaves it possible for the mind to refer the
phases through which the universe has passed, and the forms which it
has assumed, to an underlying eternal source in nature itself, and,
therefore, not to God. And this is by far the most plausible and
forcible way of combating the argument we are employing. It meets it
with a direct counter-argument, which every person must acknowledge
to be relevant, and which, if sufficiently made out, is obviously
decisive. That counter-argument we are bound, therefore, to dispose
of. It has been thus stated by Mr J. S. Mill: "There is in nature a
permanent element, and also a changeable: the changes are always the
effects of previous changes; the permanent existences, so far as we
know, are not effects at all. It is true we are accustomed to say not
only of events, but of objects, that they are produced by causes, as
water by the union of hydrogen and oxygen. But by this we only mean
that when they begin to exist, their beginning is the effect of a
cause. But their beginning to exist is not an object, it is an event.
If it be objected that the cause of a thing's beginning to exist may
be said with propriety to be the cause of the thing itself, I shall
not quarrel with the expression. But that which in an object begins
to exist, is that in it which belongs to the changeable element in
nature; the outward form and the properties depending on mechanical
or chemical combinations of its component parts. There is in every
object another and a permanent element--viz., the specific elementary
substance or substances of which it consists and their inherent
properties. These are not known to us as beginning to exist: within the
range of human knowledge they had no beginning, and consequently no
cause; though they themselves are causes or non-causes of everything
that takes place. Experience, therefore, affords no evidences, not even
analogies, to justify our extending to the apparently immutable, a
generalisation grounded only on our observation of the changeable."[15]
[15] Three Essays on Religion, pp. 142, 143.
On this I would remark, first, that mere experience does not take us
to anything which we are entitled to call even apparently immutable.
It only takes us, even when extended to the utmost by scientific
instruments and processes, to elements which we call simple because
we have hitherto failed to analyse them into simpler elements. It is
a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis that all the substances
recognised by chemists as elementary and intransmutable, are in
reality the modifications or syntheses of a single material element,
which have been produced under conditions that render them incapable
of being affected by any tests or agencies which the analyst in his
laboratory can bring to bear upon them. Indeed, unless this hypothesis
be true, the theory of development, so generally accepted at present,
can hardly be supposed to be of any very wide application, seeing that
at its very outset it has to affirm the existence of no fewer than
sixty-four true untransformable species. But suppose the so-called
elementary substances of chemistry to be simple, no one can reasonably
suppose them as known to us to be ultimate. In oxygen there may be no
atoms which are not atoms of oxygen, but we know by experience only
oxygen, not atoms of oxygen. No man has ever been able to put himself
in sensible contact with what alone can be immutable in oxygen, if
there be anything immutable in it, its ultimate atoms. No man has seen,
heard, touched, or tasted an ultimate atom of any kind of matter. We
know nothing of atoms--nothing of what is permanent in nature--from
direct experience. We must pass beyond such experience--beyond all
testimony of the senses--when we believe in anything permanent in
nature, not less than when we believe in something beyond and above
nature. The atomic theory in chemistry demands a faith which transcends
experience, not less than the theistic theory in religion.
Then, secondly, although we grant that there is a permanent element
in the physical universe, something in matter itself which is
self-existent and eternal, we still need, in order to account for the
universe which we know, an Eternal Intelligence. The universe, regarded
even only so far as it is admitted by all materialists no less than
by theists and pantheists to be an effect, cannot be explained, as
materialists think, merely physically. The atoms of matter are, it is
said, eternal and immutable. Grant them to be so. There are, however,
countless millions of them, and manifestly the universe is one, is
a single, magnificent, and complicated system, is characterised by
a marvellous unity in variety. We must be informed how the universe
came to be a universe,--how it came to have the unity which underlies
its diversity,--if it resulted from a countless multitude of ultimate
causes. Did the atoms take counsel together and devise a common plan
and work it out? That hypothesis is unspeakably absurd, yet it is
rational in comparison with the notion that these atoms combined by
mere chance, and by chance produced such a universe as that in which
we live. Grant all the atoms of matter to be eternal, grant all the
properties and forces which with the smallest degree of plausibility
can be claimed for them to be eternal and immutable, and it is still
beyond all expression improbable that these atoms with these forces,
if unarranged, uncombined, ununified, unutilised by a presiding mind,
would give rise to anything entitled to be called a universe. It is
millions to one that they would never produce the simplest of the
regular arrangements which we comprehend under the designation of
course of nature, or the lowest of vegetable or animal organisms;
millions of millions to one that they would never produce a solar
system, the earth, the animal kingdom, or human history. No number of
material atoms, although eternal and endowed with mechanical force,
can explain the unity and order of the universe, and therefore the
supposition of their existence does not free us from the necessity
of believing in a single intelligent cause--a Supreme Mind--to move
and mould, combine and adjust, the ultimate atoms of matter into a
single orderly system. There at once rises the question, Is it really
necessary to believe both matter and mind to be eternal? No, must
be our answer. The law of parsimony of causes directly forbids the
belief, unless we can show that one cause is insufficient to explain
the universe. And that we cannot do. We can show that matter is
insufficient,--that it cannot account of itself even for the physical
universe,--but not that mind is insufficient, not that mind cannot
account for anything that is in matter. On what grounds can it be shown
that a mind possessed of sufficient power to originate the universe,
the ultimate elements of matter being given, could not also have
created these elements? that the Supreme Intelligence, which gave to
each sun, and planet, and satellite its size, and shape, and position,
and motion, could not have summoned into being their constituent
particles? On none whatever. We may not understand how they could be
created, but we have no reason for thinking that they could not be
created; and it is surely far easier and far more reasonable to believe
that they were created, than that a countless number of inconceivably
small indivisible particles of matter, lying far beyond the range of
any of our senses, but extending through immeasurable fields of space,
should all, inconceivably minute although they be, be self-existent
and eternal. The man who asks us to accept the latter supposition,
asks us, it seems to me, to believe what is not only as mysterious as
the self-existence of Deity, but millions of millions of times more
mysterious. I should require strong reasons for assigning infinitely
great attributes to excessively little things, and to an inconceivable
number of them; but I can in this instance find no reasons at all.
Then, in the third place, any plausible conceptions we can form of the
ultimate nature of matter lead to the belief that even that is an event
or effect, a something derivative and caused. It must be admitted that
the most plausible of these conceptions are vague and conjectural.
We have a practical and relative knowledge of matter which is both
exact and trustworthy,--a knowledge of its properties from which we
can mathematically deduce a multitude of remote consequences of an
extremely precise character--but we are hardly entitled to characterise
as knowledge at all any of the views which have been propounded as to
what it is in itself. It is only the unreflecting who fancy that matter
in itself is something very clear and obvious, which they may apprehend
by merely opening their eyes and stretching out their hands. Those
who have never reasoned on the subject are apt to imagine that the
nature of matter is of all things the easiest to understand, and they
unhesitatingly invest it with their own sensations and perceptions.
That is the so-called commonsense view of matter; but the slightest
inquiry proves it to be delusive and nonsensical. Colour, for example,
is just what is seen, and sound just what is heard; they are not
qualities inherent in objects independent of the eye and ear: the
matter which is supposed to cause by its motions on our senses these
and other perceptions of the material world, we cannot see, hear, or
apprehend by any sense. Change our senses and the universe will be
thereby changed, everything in it becoming something other than it was
before, green perhaps red, the bitter sweet, the loudest noise a gentle
whisper, the hardest substance soft. As soon, then, as we thoughtfully
ask ourselves, What is matter? we begin to discover that it is in
itself something utterly mysterious. The collection of phenomena which
we call its properties are quite unlike the phenomena of mind in this
most important respect, that whatever they may be they are not what
they appear to be. A state of mind is what we feel it to be; a state
of matter is certainly not what we seem to ourselves to perceive it
to be. No one, of course, knew all this better than Mr Mill. He, as a
philosopher, had asked himself what matter is; he had formed a theory
in answer to the question. And what is his theory? Just this,--that we
cannot find a permanent element in matter; that we have no right to
suppose that there is a permanent real existence or actual substance
in matter; that all that we are warranted to affirm about the ultimate
nature of matter is that it is a permanent possibility,--the permanent
possibility of sensations. That was the conclusion which he arrived at
when he theorised on matter without any theological aim. But he appears
to have forgotten it when he came to criticise the argument for a first
cause. He could not otherwise have written as if it were quite certain
that there was in matter "a permanent element," not an underlying
possibility but an inherent real substance. Had he remembered what his
own theory as to the nature of matter was, he would have avoided as
utterly untrue and misleading every expression which could suggest the
notion of there being a permanent element in matter, and would have
admitted that very probably the permanent possibilities of sensation,
the causes of all material phenomena, lay in the Divine will, since he
had been unable to find anything else permanent in which they could be
supposed to subsist. That is a view which many profound thinkers have
adopted. They have been led to hold that matter is essentially force,
and nothing but force; that the whole material world is ultimately
resolvable into forces; and that all its forces are but manifestations
or outgoings of will-force. If so, the whole material world is not
only dependent on, but _is_, the will of God, and has no being of any
kind apart from the will of God. If so, God's will is not only the
cause and controlling power of nature, but its substance, its self. And
this view, that what alone substantially underlies all the phenomena
we designate material is an acting mind, an energising will, has not
only been reached by mental philosophers and idealistic speculators,
but by those physicists who, like Boscovitch and Faraday, have found
themselves forced to conclude that what is constitutive of matter is
not indivisible particles, even infinitesimally small, but mere centres
of force, since force necessarily implies some sort of substance, and,
therefore, spirit where not matter.
But suppose the substratum of the universe to consist of a countless
number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, and
do we not even on this hypothesis reach by a single step the truth
on which theism rests, and on which only theism can be based? "None
of the processes of nature," says one of the most eminent of our
physical philosophers, "since the time when nature began, have produced
the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are
therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or
the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes
which we call natural. On the other hand, the exact quality of each
molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel
has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and
precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent. Thus we have
been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at
which science must stop. Not that science is debarred from studying the
external mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any
more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together.
But, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when
she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made,
and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we
call natural."[16] I believe that no reply to these words of Professor
Clark Maxwell is possible from any one who holds the ordinary view of
scientific men as to the ultimate constitution of matter. They must
suppose every atom, every molecule, to be of such a nature, to be so
related to others, and to the universe generally, that things may be
such as we see them to be; but this their fitness to be built up into
the structure of the universe is a proof that they have been made fit,
and since natural forces could not have acted on them while not yet
existent, a supernatural power must have created them, and created them
with a view to their manifold uses. Every atom, every molecule, must
even in what is ultimate in it bear the impress of a Supernatural Power
and Wisdom; must, from the very nature of the case, reflect the glory
of God and proclaim its dependence upon Him.
[16] President's Address in Transactions of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, 1870.
In like manner the latest speculation regarding the nature of
matter--the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson--seems, so far
from having any tendency to exclude creative action, necessarily to
imply it. He supposes that the atoms may be small vortex-rings in the
ether, the rotating portions of a perfect fluid which fills all space.
But a perfect fluid can neither explain its own existence nor the
commencement of rotation in any part of it. Rotation once commenced
in a perfect or frictionless and incompressible fluid would continue
for ever, but it never could naturally commence. There is nothing
in a perfect fluid to account either for the origin or cessation of
rotation, and consequently nothing, on the vortex-atom hypothesis,
to account either for the production or destruction of an atom of
matter. The origin and cessation of rotation in fluids are due to their
imperfection, their internal friction, their viscosity. The origin
or cessation of rotation in a perfect fluid must be the effect of
supernatural action; in other words, every vortex-atom must owe the
rotation which gives it its individuality to a Divine impulse.
A theist has certainly no need, then, to be afraid of researches into
the ultimate nature of matter. Our knowledge thereof is exceedingly
small and imperfect, but all that we do know of it, all that we can
even rationally conceive of it, leads to the inference that it is not
self-existent, but the work of God. The farther research is pushed, the
more clearly, we may be assured, will this become apparent, for the
more wonderfully adapted will the ultimate constituents of matter be
found for assuming countless forms and composing countless objects--the
air, the land, the sea, and starry heavens, with all that in or on
them is. Research has already shown us reason to believe "that even
chemical atoms are very complicated structures; that an atom of pure
iron is probably a vastly more complicated system than that of the
planets and their satellites; that each constituent of a chemical atom
must go through an orbit in the millionth part of the twinkling of an
eye, in which it successively or simultaneously is under the influence
of many other constituents, or possibly comes into collision with them;
that each of these particles is, as Sir John Herschel has beautifully
said, for ever solving differential equations which, if written out
in full, might perhaps belt the earth."[17] Now, what does this mean,
if not that every ultimate atom of matter is full to the very heart
of it with evidences of the power and wisdom of God, and that every
particle of dust or drop of water is crowded with traces of the action
of the Divine Reason, not less marvellous, it may be, than those which
astronomy exhibits in the structure of the heavens and the evolutions
of the heavenly bodies? Those who hoped that molecular science would
help them to get rid of God have obviously made a profound mistake. It
has already shown far more clearly than ever was or could have been
anticipated, that every atom of matter points back beyond itself to the
all-originating will of God, and refuses to receive the idolatrous
homage of those who would put it in the place of God.
[17] See W. S. Jevons, Principles of Science, ii. 452, 453.
To these considerations it has to be added that some of our ablest
physicists believe that in the present age a strictly scientific proof
has been found of the position that the universe had a beginning in
time. "According to Sir W. Thomson's deductions from Fourier's Theory
of Heat, we can trace down the dissipation of heat by conduction
and radiation to an infinitely distant time when all things will
be uniformly cold. But we cannot similarly trace the heat-history
of the universe to an infinite distance in the past. For a certain
negative value of the time the formulæ give impossible values,
indicating that there was some initial distribution of heat which
could not have resulted, according to known laws of nature, from any
previous distribution. There are other cases in which a consideration
of the dissipation of energy leads to the conception of a limit to
the antiquity of the present order of things."[18] If this theory
be true, physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the
notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly teaches
that creation took place, that the present system of nature and its
laws originated at an approximately assignable date in the past. The
theory is supported by the most eminent physical philosophers of this
country, and if there be any oversight or error in the principles or
calculations on which it is founded, it would appear not to have been
as yet detected. It is a theory on which, however, only specialists
are entitled to pronounce judgment; and therefore, although those who
assume that matter was not created are bound to refute it, I do not
wish myself to lay any stress upon it--the more especially as I believe
that apart from it there is amply sufficient evidence for holding that
"Nature is but the name for an effect whose cause is God."[19]
[18] Jevons, Principles of Science, ii. 438.
[19] See Appendix XI.
II.
It seems to me, then, that the universe when examined must be concluded
to be throughout--from centre to circumference--alike in what is most
permanent and what is most changeable in it,--an event or effect,
and that its only adequate cause is a Supreme Intelligence. It is
only such a cause which is sufficient to explain the universe as we
know it, and that universe is what has to be explained. The assertion
of Kant that the principle of causality cannot take us beyond the
limits of the sensible world is only true if causality be confined to
strictly material events which display no signs of law and order, and
the progress of science is one long uninterrupted proof that no such
events are to be discovered; that it is hopeless to look for them; that
matter and its changes are ordained, arranged, adjusted phenomena. The
assertion of Kant is clearly false, if we are not to exclude from the
event anything which demands explanation; if we are to reason from the
universe itself and not from its name; if we are to infer a particular
cause from a knowledge of the nature of a given particular event.
This, the so-called concrete use of the principle of causality, is the
only use of it which is legitimate, the only use of it which is not
extremely childish.
The opposite--the absurd--notion that the principle of causality is
abstractly applied, has led some to argue that it leads legitimately
to nothing else than an infinite regress--an eternal succession of
causes and effects. But whatever it may lead to, it certainly does not
lead to that conclusion, and has never led any human being, either
legitimately or illegitimately, to that conclusion. Those even who
have maintained that the principle of causality cannot lead to a first
cause, to an eternal self-existent cause, but only to an eternal
succession of causes and effects, have all, without a single exception,
allowed themselves to be led by it to a first cause and not to an
eternal succession of causes. They have all believed what they say
they ought to have disbelieved; they have all disbelieved what they
say they ought to have believed. They have all accepted as true that
there is a first and self-existent cause, although some have supposed
it to be matter, some mind, some within the world, some without the
world. They have differed as to what it is, but not as to that it is.
None of them have adopted the conclusion to which they have said the
argument founded on causation logically leads. No man has ever adopted
that conclusion. The human mind universally and instantaneously rejects
it as inconceivable, unthinkable, self-contradictory, absurd. We may
believe either in a self-existent God or in a self-existent world, and
must believe in one or the other; we cannot believe in an infinite
regress of causes. The alternatives of a self-existent cause and an
infinite regress of causes are not, as some would represent, equally
credible alternatives. The one is an indubitable truth, the other is a
manifest absurdity. The one all men believe, the other no man believes.
This takes away, it seems to me, all force from the objection that the
argument founded on the principle of causality when it infers God as
the self-existent cause of the universe infers more than is strictly
warranted, a self-existent cause being something which does not in
itself fall under the principle of causality. That every event must
have a cause will be valid, it is said, for an endless series of
causes and effects; but if you stop, if you affirm the existence of
what is uncaused, of what is at once, as it were, cause and effect, you
may affirm what is true, but you affirm also what is independent of the
principle of causation. You claim more than your argument entitles you
to; you are not developing a logical conclusion, but concealing under a
term which seems to express the same idea what is really the vaulting
of the mind to a higher idea which cannot be expressed under the form
efficient cause at all.