completely under the law of causality. That law cannot inform us what
self-existence is. A self-existent cause, however, may be known as
well as any other cause by its effects. The mind may rise to it from
its effects. The principle of causality may lead up to it, although it
does not include within itself the proof of the self-existence of the
cause. It may at the last stage be attached to some other principle
which compels the affirmation of the self-existence of the cause
reached; in other words, the affirmation that the first cause is a
self-existent cause, may be a distinct mental act not necessitated by
the principle of causality itself. It may either be held that this
mental necessity is the reason why we cannot entertain the thought
of an infinite regress of causes, or that the incapacity of the mind
to regard the thought of an infinite regress of causes as other than
self-contradictory, is the explanation of its felt necessitation to
affirm a self-existent cause; in which latter case the principle
of causality really necessitates a belief in the ungenerated and
self-existent. Both of these views are plausible, and which of them is
true is an interesting subject of metaphysical investigation, but it is
one of no practical consequence in the inquiry on which we are engaged.
The principle of causality can lead us up from all things which have
on them the marks of having begun to be, and if we at length come to
something which bears no such marks, be it matter or be it mind, no
man can doubt, or does doubt, that something to be self-existent. This
difficulty about a self-existent cause not being able to be arrived
at by the principle of causality, will be worth attending to by the
theist when it is attended to by any one else,--when any atheist or
any anti-theist of any kind is prepared to deny that the last cause
in the order of knowledge, and the first in the order of existence,
must be a self-existent cause--but not until then; and it is mere
sophistry to represent it as of practical importance. Whenever we come
to an existence which we cannot regard as an effect or thing generated
in time, we, either in consequence of the very nature of the causal
judgment, or of some self-evident condition or conditions of knowledge
necessarily attached thereto, attribute to it self-existence and
eternity. We may dispute as to whether this is done in the one or the
other of these two ways, but that is a merely theoretical question;
that every one does, and must, as a reasonable being, do it, is what
no man disputes, or can dispute,--and this alone is of practical
consequence.
Another admission must be made by every man who reflects carefully
on the nature of causation. To say that the idea of cause can never
demand belief in an uncaused cause, sounds as self-evident; to say
that the idea of cause can find no satisfaction save in the belief of
an uncaused cause, sounds as a paradox; but let a man meditate for a
little with real thoughtfulness on the meaning of these two statements,
and he cannot fail to perceive that the former is an undeniable
falsehood, and the latter an undeniable truth. An uncaused cause, a
first cause, alone answers truly to the idea of a cause. A secondary
cause, in so far as secondary, in so far as caused, is not a cause. I
witness some event--some change. I am compelled as a rational being to
seek its cause. I reach it only to find that this cause was due to a
prior cause. What has happened? The cause from which I have had to go
back has ceased to be a cause; the cause to which I have had to go back
has become the cause of two effects, but it will remain so only if I am
not reasonably bound to seek a cause for _it_. If I am, its causality
must pass over to its explanatory antecedent. We may go back a hundred,
a thousand, a million times, but if the last cause reached be not truly
a first cause, an uncaused cause, the idea of cause in our mind will
be as unsatisfied at the end of our search as at the beginning, and
the whole process of investigation will be aimless and meaningless. A
true cause is one to which the reason not only moves but in which it
rests, and except in a first cause the mind cannot rest. A first cause,
however, is certainly not one which has been itself caused.
We are warranted, then, in looking upon the universe as an event or
effect, and we may be certain that it is not the last link of an
infinite chain of causes and effects, or of any series of causes and
effects, long or short, suspended upon nothing. No chain or series can
be, properly speaking, infinite, or without a first link or term. The
universe has a First Cause. And its First Cause, I must proceed to
remark, reason and observation alike lead us to believe must be one--a
single cause. When one First Cause is sufficient to explain all the
facts, it is contrary to reason to suppose another or several. We must
prove that no one First Cause could account for the universe before
we can be entitled to ascribe it to more causes than one. The First
Cause, we shall further see afterwards, must have attributes which no
two or more beings can be supposed to possess, which one being alone
can possess. Then the character of the effect itself refers us back
to a single cause. A belief in more gods than one not only finds no
support in the universe, but, as the very word universe indicates,
is contradicted by it. For, numerous and diverse as are the objects
in nature, they are so constituted and connected--so dependent on
and related to one another--as to compose a whole which exhibits a
marvellous unity in variety. Everything counteracts or balances or
assists something else, and thus all things proclaim their common
dependence on One Original. Co-ordinate things must all be derivative
and secondary, and all things in nature are co-ordinate parts of a
stupendous system. Each one of us knows, for example, that a few years
ago he was not, and that in a few years hence the place which knows him
now will know him no more; and each one of us has been often taught
by the failure of his plans, and the disappointment of his hopes, and
the vanity of his efforts, that there are stronger forces and more
important interests in the world than his own, and that he is in the
grasp of a Power which he cannot resist--which besets him behind and
before, and hems him in on all sides. When we extend our view, we
perceive that this is as true of others as of ourselves, and that it is
true even, in a measure, of all finite things. No man lives or dies to
himself; no object moves and acts absolutely from and for itself alone.
This reveals a single all-originating, all-pervading, all-sustaining
principle. These manifold mutually dependent existences imply one
independent existence. The limitations assigned to all individual
persons and things point to a Being which limits them all. Particular
causes and secondary movements lead back to "a cause of causes," "a
first mover, itself immovable, yet making all things else to move."
The first cause must be far more truly and properly a cause than any
secondary cause. In fact, as we have already seen, a secondary cause
is not strictly a cause; so far as secondary, it merely transmits to
its consequent what it has received from its antecedent. There may be
a succession of a thousand such causes in a process, yet the first
cause is also the last, and there is, in fact, all through, but one
cause; the others merely convey and communicate its force. A machine,
however numerous its parts and movements, does not create the least
amount of force; on the contrary, the most perfect machine wastes and
absorbs some of the force which is imparted to it. The universe, so far
as subject to mechanical laws, is merely a machine which transmits a
given quantity of force, but which no more creates it than it creates
itself. The author of that force is the one true cause of all physical
phenomena. Life is probably, and mind is certainly, not entirely
explicable on mechanical principles; but neither life nor mind can be
maintained to do more than to determine the direction or application of
the power implanted in them, or rendered accessible to them, through
the working of the first cause. All things must, consequently, "live,
move, and have their being" therein. It is at their end as well as
at their origin; it encompasses them, all round; it penetrates them,
all through. The least things are not merely linked on to it through
intermediate agencies which go back an enormous distance, but are
immediately present to it, and filled to the limit of their faculties
with its power. It is in every ray of sunlight, every breath of wind,
and blade of grass; it is the source and life of all human minds and
hearts. The pantheist errs not so much in what he affirms of it, as in
what he denies to it.
This cause--the cause of causes--must, it is further obvious, be in
possession of a power far beyond the comprehension of our reasons or
imaginations. All other power is derived from its power. All the power
which is distributed and distinguished in secondary causes must be
combined and united in the first cause. Now, think what an enormous
power there is displayed even in this world. In every half-ounce of
coal there is stored up power enough, if properly used, to draw two
tons a mile. How vast, then, the power which God has deposited in the
coal-beds of the world alone! The inhabitants of this little island,
by availing themselves of the natural forces which Providence has
placed at their disposal, annually accomplish more work than could by
any possibility be effected by the inhabitants of the whole earth, if
they exerted merely the power which is in their own bodies, the power
of human bones and muscles. And yet there can be little doubt that,
even in this country, we make no use at all of many natural agents,
and only a wasteful use of any of them. "Weigh the earth on which we
dwell," says an astronomer; "count the millions of its inhabitants
that have come and gone for the last six thousand years; unite their
strength into one arm; and test its power in an effort to move the
earth. It could not stir it a single foot in a thousand years; and yet,
under the omnipotent hand of God, not a minute passes that it does
not fly far more than a thousand miles." The earth, however, is but a
mere atom in the universe. Through the vast abysses of space there are
scattered countless systems, at enormous distances, yet all related;
glorious galaxies of suns, planets, satellites, comets, all sweeping
onwards in their appointed courses. How mighty the arm which impels
and guides the whole! God can do all that, for He continually does it.
How much more He could do than He does, we cannot know. The power of
no true cause, of no free cause, is to be measured by what it does.
It must be adequate to produce its actual effects, but it may be able
to produce countless merely possible effects. It has power over its
powers, and is not necessitated to do all that it is capable of doing.
It is difficult, perhaps, to show that the universe is not infinite. It
is obviously unreasonable and presumptuous to deny that the power of
its Author may be infinite. And yet we find men who do so. For example,
the late Mr John Stuart Mill, for no better reasons than that nature
sometimes drowns men, and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful
process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall
not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed in
such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the
littleness of a human intellect. The mind of man never shows itself
so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the
greatness of its Creator.
A first cause, we have already seen, must be a free cause. It cannot
have been itself caused. It is absurd to look for it among effects.
But we never get out of the sphere of effects until we enter that of
free agency; until we emerge from the natural into the spiritual;
until we leave matter and reach mind. The first cause must, indeed,
be in--all through--the universe; but it must also be out of the
universe, anterior to, and above the universe. The idea of cause is
a delusion--the search for causes an inexplicable folly--if there be
no first cause, and if that first cause be not a free cause, a Will, a
Spirit, a Person. Those who object to the causation argument, that it
does not take us beyond the world--does not lead us up to a personal
cause of the world--have failed to apprehend what causation signifies.
Secondary causes may not be true causes, and yet reason be trustworthy,
for there is that behind them on which it can fall back; but if
there be no first cause, or if the first cause be not free, reason
is throughout a lie. Reason, if honest and consistent, cannot in its
pursuit of causes stop short of a rational will. That alone answers to
and satisfies its idea of a cause.
The most rapid glance at the universe powerfully confirms the
conclusion that its first cause can only be a Mind, a Reason. The
universe is a universe; that is to say, it is a whole, a unity, a
system. The first cause of it, therefore, in creating and sustaining
it, must comprehend, act on, and guide it as a systematic whole;
must have created all things with reference to each other; and must
continually direct them towards a preconceived goal. The complex and
harmonious constitution of the universe is the expression of a Divine
Idea, of a Creative Reason. This thought brings me to my next argument
and next lecture.[20]
[20] See Appendix XII.
LECTURE V.
THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER.
I.
The prevalence of order in nature has already been referred to as
contributing to prove that the universe is an event, a generated
existence, a something which once began to be. It will now be brought
forward as in itself a manifestation of, and consequently a ground
for believing in, a Supreme Mind. Where order meets us, the natural
and immediate inference is that there is the work of intelligence.
And order meets us everywhere in the universe. It covers and pervades
the universe. It is obvious to the ordinary naked eye, and spreads
far beyond the range of disciplined vision when assisted by all the
instruments and appliances which science and art have been able to
invent. It is conspicuous alike in the architecture of the heavens
and the structure of a feather or a leaf. It goes back through all
the epochs of human history, and all the ages of geological and
astronomical time. It is the common work of all the sciences to
discover and explain the order in the universe. There is no true
science which is not constantly making new and fuller discoveries of
the order in nature,--the order within us and without us; not one
which is not ever increasingly establishing that in order all things
move and have their being. What is maintained by the theist is, that
this order, the proof of which is the grand achievement of science,
universally implies mind; that all relations of order--all laws and
uniformities--are evidences of an intelligent cause.
The order which science finds in nature may be described as either
general or special, although in strictness the difference between them
is only a difference of degree, the former being the more and the
latter the less general, or the former being the less and the latter
the more special. In what may be called general order, that which
strikes us chiefly is regularity; in what may be called special order,
that which chiefly strikes us is adaptation or adjustment. In inorganic
nature general order is the more conspicuous; in organic nature special
order. Astronomy discloses to us relations of number and proportion
so far-reaching that it almost seems as if nature were "a living
arithmetic in its development, a realised geometry in its repose."
Biology, on the other hand, impresses us by showing the delicacy and
subtlety of the adjustment of part to part, of part to whole, and
of whole to surroundings, in the organic world. There is, perhaps,
sufficient difference between these two kinds of order to warrant
their being viewed separately, and as each furnishing the basis of an
argument for the existence of God. The argument from regularity has
sometimes been kept apart from the argument from adjustment. The former
infers the universe to be an effect of mind because it is characterised
by proportion or harmony, which is held to be only explicable by the
operation of mind. The latter draws the same inference because the
universe contains countless complex wholes, of which the parts are
so collocated and combined as to co-operate with one another in the
attainment of certain results; and this, it is contended, implies an
intelligent purpose in the primary cause of these things.
While we may readily admit the distinction to be so far valid, it is
certainly not absolute. Regularity and adjustment are rather different
aspects of order than different kinds of order, and, so far from
excluding each other, they will be found implying each other. It is
obvious that even the most specialised adjustments of organic structure
and activity presuppose the most general and simple uniformities of
purely physical nature. Such cases of adjustment comprehend in fact
many cases of regularity. It is less obvious, but not less true, that
wherever regularity can be traced adjustment will also be found, if the
search be carried far enough. The regularity disclosed by astronomy
depends on adjustment as regards magnitude, weight, distance, &c.,
in the celestial bodies, just as the adjustments brought to light by
biology depend on the general regularity of the course of nature. There
is no law of nature so simple as not to presuppose in every instance
of its action at least two things related to one another in the manner
which is meant when we speak of adjustment. It being thus impossible
to separate regularity from adjustment as regards the phenomena of the
universe, it seems unnecessary to attempt by abstraction to separate
them in the theological argumentation, while giving a rapid general
glance at the phenomena which display them.
The physical universe has, perhaps, no more general characteristic than
this,--its laws are mathematical relations. The law of gravitation,
which rules all masses of matter, great or small, heavy or light,
at all distances, is a definite numerical law. The curves which
the heavenly bodies describe under the influence of that law are
the ellipse, circle, parabola, and hyperbola--or, in other words,
they all belong to the class of curves called conic sections, the
properties of which mathematicians had begun to investigate nearly
twenty centuries before Newton established that whatever was true
of them might be directly transferred to the heavens, since the
planets revolve in ellipses, the satellites of Jupiter in circles,
and the comets in elliptical, parabolic, and hyperbolic orbits. The
law of chemical combination, through which the whole world of matter
has been built up out of a few elements, always admits of precise
numerical expression. So does the law of the correlation of heat and
gravitation. Each colour in the rainbow is due to a certain number of
vibrations in a given time; so is each note in the scale of harmony.
Each crystal is a geometrical construction. The pistils of flowers,
and the feathers in the wings and tails of birds, are all numbered.
If nature had not thus been ruled by numerical laws, the mathematical
sciences might have existed, but they would have had no other use than
to exercise the intellect, whereas they have been the great instruments
of physical investigation. They are the creations of a mental power
which, while occupied in their origination and elaboration, requires
to borrow little, if anything, from matter; and yet, it is only with
their help that the constitution of the material universe has been
displayed, and its laws have been discovered, with that high measure
of success of which physicists are so proud. But they could not have
been applied to the universe at all unless its order had been of the
exact numerical and geometrical kind which has been indicated; unless
masses had attracted each other, and elements combined with each
other, in invariable proportions; unless "the waters had been measured
as if in the hollow of a hand, the heaven meted out as with a span,
the dust of the earth comprehended in a measure, and the mountains
weighed in scales and the hills in a balance." Now it is possible to
deny that things have been thus weighed, measured, and numbered by a
Creative Intelligence, but not that they have been weighed, measured,
and numbered. If we are to give any credit to science, there can be
no doubt about the weights and measures and numbers. This question,
then, is alone left,--Could anything else than intelligence thus weigh,
measure, and number? Could mere matter know the abstrusest properties
of space and time and number, so as to obey them in the wondrous way
it does? Could what has taken so much mathematical knowledge and
research to apprehend, have originated with what was wholly ignorant
of all quantitative relations? Or must not the order of the universe
be due to a mind whose thoughts as to these relations are high above
even those of the profoundest mathematicians, as are the heavens above
the earth? If the universe were created by an intelligence conversant
with quantitative truth, it is easy to understand why it should be
ruled by definitely quantitative laws; but that there should be such
laws in a universe which did not originate in intelligence, is not
only inexplicable but inconceivably improbable. There is not merely in
that case no discoverable reason why there should be any numerically
definite law in nature, but the probability of there being no law
or numerical regularity of any kind is exceedingly great, and of
there being no law-governed universe incalculably great. Apart from
the supposition of a Supreme Intelligence, the chances in favour of
disorder against order, of chaos against cosmos, of the numerically
indefinite and inconstant against the definite and constant, must be
pronounced all but infinite. The belief in a Divine Reason is alone
capable of rendering rational the fact that mathematical truths are
realised in the material world.[21]
[21] See Appendix XIII.
The celestial bodies were among the earliest objects of science, and
before there was any science they stimulated religious thought and
awakened religious feeling. The sun and moon have given rise to so
extraordinary a number of myths that some authors have referred to them
the whole of heathen mythology. There can be little doubt that the
growth of astronomical knowledge contributed greatly to bring about
the transition from polytheism to monotheism, and that so soon as the
heavens were clearly understood to be subject to law, and the countless
bodies which circle in them not to be independent agents but parts or
members of a single mechanical or organic system, the triumph of the
latter was for ever secured. No science, indeed, has hitherto had so
much influence on man's religious beliefs as astronomy, although there
may now appear to be indications that chemistry and biology will rival
it in this respect in the future. And it has been thus influential
chiefly because through its whole history it has been a continuous,
conspicuous, and ever-advancing, ever-expanding demonstration of a
reign of law on the most magnificent scale,--a demonstration begun when
with unassisted vision men first attempted roughly to distribute the
stars into groups or constellations, and far from yet ended when the
same laws of gravitation, light, heat, and chemical combination which
rule on earth have been proved to rule on orbs so distant that their
rays do not reach us in a thousand years. The system of which our earth
is a member is vast, varied, and orderly, the planets and satellites
of which it is composed being so adjusted as regards magnitude and
mass, distance, rate, and plane of direction, &c., that the whole is
stable and secure, while part ministers to part as organ to organ in
an animal body. Our own planet, for example, is so related to the sun
and moon that seed-time and harvest never fail, and the ebb and flow
of the tides never deceive us. And the solar system is but one of
hundreds of millions of systems, some of which are incalculably larger
than it, yet the countless millions of suns and stars thus "profusely
scattered o'er the void immense" are so arranged and distributed in
relation to one another and in accordance with the requirements of the
profoundest mathematics as to secure the safety of one and all, and to
produce everywhere harmony and beauty. Each orb is affecting the orbit
of every other--each is doing what, if unchecked, would destroy itself
and the entire system--but so wondrously is the whole constructed
that these seemingly dangerous disturbances are the very means of
preventing destruction and securing the universal welfare, being due to
reciprocally compensating forces which in given times exactly balance
one another. Is it, I ask, to be held as evidence of the power of
the human mind that it should have been able after many centuries of
combined and continuous exertion to compute with approximate accuracy
the paths and perturbations of the planets which circle round our
sun and the returns of a few comets, but as no evidence even of the
existence of mind in the First Cause of things that the paths and
perturbations of millions on millions of suns and planets and comets
should have been determined with perfect precision for all the ages
past and future of their existence, so that, multitudinous as they
are, each proceeds safely on its destined way, and all united form a
glorious harmony of structure and motion?[22]
[22] See Appendix XIV.