the argument from order. That argument, it is said, does not prove
the Divine Intelligence to be infinite. The universe, as a system of
order, is finite, and we have no right to conclude that its cause
is in respect of intelligence, or in any other respect, infinite.
We must attribute to the cause the wisdom necessary to produce the
effect, but no more. The obvious reply is, that this is precisely
what we do. The argument is not employed to prove the infinity of the
Divine Intelligence, but to prove that the order and adaptations which
everywhere abound in the universe must have had an intelligence capable
of conceiving and producing them. It is an obvious and legitimate
argument to that extent, and it is pushed no farther. The inference
that the world had an intelligent author is as simple, direct, and
valid, as that any statue, painting, or book had an intelligent author.
When Mr Spencer, Mr Lewes, and Professor Tyndall argue that the cause
of the universe cannot be known to be intelligent, because the reason
of man, being finite, cannot comprehend the infinite, they overlook
that the reason of man has no need to comprehend the infinite in order
to apprehend such manifestations of the infinite as come before it.
Just as a person reading the works of the able men who urge this weak
objection feels certain that these books must have had their origin in
minds endowed with certain intellectual powers, and cannot have been
produced by chance, or blind forces, or bodies destitute of minds, and
this although much in their minds is and always must be inscrutable
to him; so, when he studies the books of nature and of history, he
feels equally certain, and in the same way certain, that they are the
compositions of a most amazing intellect; and his certainty as to this
need not be lessened, clouded, or in any degree affected, by the great
and indubitable, but here irrelevant, truth--that the mind of God is
in itself, in its essence, inscrutable; and in its greatness, its
infinity, incomprehensible.
The argument from order must further be admitted sufficient to show,
if valid at all, that the wisdom of the First Cause is of the most
wondrous character. The more nature and mind and history are studied by
any one who sees in them evidence of design at all, the more wondrous
must the wisdom displayed in them be felt to be. Whoever realises
that that wisdom is at once guiding the countless hosts of heavenly
bodies in all their evolutions through the boundless realms of space,
and fashioning and providing for the countless hosts of microscopic
creatures dwelling on the leaf of a flower or in a drop of water,
everywhere accomplishing a multitude of ends by few and simple means,
or effecting single and definite purposes by the most elaborate and
complex contrivances, must feel that rash beyond all expression is the
short-sighted mortal who can venture to affirm that it is not infinite.
If "the Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, and by understanding
hath established the heavens," His wisdom and His understanding are
at least so great that we cannot measure them, and have no right to
pronounce them limited. The adjustments and harmonies of the universe,
as we know it, indicate a depth and richness of wisdom in its Author
which far pass our comprehension; and the universe which we know is
probably less in comparison with the universe which God has made, than
the leaf on which a host of animalcules live and die is in comparison
with the vastest of primeval forests, or an ant-hill with the solar
system. The universe which we see and know is a noble commentary on
such words of Scripture as these: "I wisdom dwell with prudence,
and find out knowledge of witty inventions. The Lord possessed me
in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I was set up
from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He
prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass on the face of
the depth: when He established the clouds above: when He strengthened
the fountains of the deep: when He gave to the sea his decree, that
the waters should not pass His commandment: when He appointed the
foundations of the earth: then I was by Him, as one brought up with
Him; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him." But
beyond the universe which we see and know, extend illimitable fields of
space and stretches of time which we do not see and do not know, but
which may be even more crowded with the works of Divine Intelligence
than any which are within our range of bodily or mental vision. The
ingenious authors of the book entitled 'The Unseen Universe' suppose
the entire visible universe to be but a local product and temporary
phase of a far older and greater universe, which itself again may be
only an island in the ocean of a universe still more stupendous and
refined. Whatever error may be mingled with this thought in the work
mentioned, there is, I doubt not, at least this much of truth also,
that the entire course of nature which science reveals is but a ripple,
a current, in the ocean of God's universal action. The man whose mind
is duly open to the possibility of this will not venture to pronounce
the intelligence of God to be finite. The man who fails to recognise
its possibility is very blind, very thoughtless.
It is scarcely credible that the evidences of God's wisdom should
have been argued to be proofs of His weakness. And yet this has
happened. "It is not too much to say," wrote Mr J. S. Mill, "that
every indication of design in the Kosmos is so much evidence against
the omnipotence of the Designer. For what is meant by design?
Contrivance: the adaptation of means to an end. But the necessity for
contrivance--the need of employing means--is a consequence of the
limitation of power. Who would have recourse to means if to attain his
end his mere word was sufficient? The very idea of means implies that
the means have an efficacy which the direct action of the being who
employs them has not. Otherwise they are not means, but an encumbrance.
A man does not use machinery to move his arms. If he did, it could
only be when paralysis had deprived him of the power of moving them
by volition. But if the employment of contrivance is in itself a sign
of limited power, how much more so is the careful and skilful choice
of contrivances? Can any wisdom be shown in the selection of means
when the means have no efficacy but what is given them by the will
of him who employs them, and when his will could have bestowed the
same efficacy on any other means? Wisdom and contrivance are shown
in overcoming difficulties, and there is no room for them in a being
for whom no difficulties exist. The evidences, therefore, of natural
theology distinctly imply that the author of the Kosmos worked under
limitations."[30]
[30] Three Essays on Religion, pp. 176, 177.
This, it seems to me, is very strange and worthless reasoning.
According to it, the ability of God to form and execute a purpose is
evidence not of power but of weakness. I wonder if Mr Mill imagined
that the inability of God to form and carry out a purpose would have
been evidence not of His weakness but of His power. Or did he suppose,
perhaps, that both ability and inability were signs of weakness, and
that, consequently, for once opposites were identical? Or did he not
think on the subject at all, and so reasoned very much at random?
I confess I cannot see how ability to contrive things is weakness,
or inability to contrive them power. I hold to Bacon's maxim that
"knowledge is power," and refuse to admit that wisdom is weakness.
But God, if omnipotent, it is said, did not need to contrive: His
mere word must have been sufficient. Yes, is the obvious answer;
His mere word, His mere will, was sufficient to produce all His
contrivances, and has produced them all. There is no shadow of reason
for suspecting that anything was difficult to Him or for Him. No such
suspicion is entertained by those who employ the design argument;
and those who would rationally object to that argument must find
something else to insist on than the power of God's mere will. The
will of God is everywhere as efficacious as He in His omnipotence and
omniscience chooses that it should be. At the same time, if He desire
certain ends, His will cannot remain mere will and dispense with the
contrivance of appropriate means. If He wish to bestow happiness on
human beings, He must create human beings, and contrive their bodies
and minds. To speak of His will as able to "bestow the same efficacy
on any means" is no less contrary to reason than it would be to speak
of it as able to make the part greater than the whole. It is only
in the world imagined by Mr Mill--one in which two and two might be
five--that a sunbeam could serve the same purpose as a granite pillar
or a steam-engine; and such a world, most people will assuredly hold,
even omnipotence could not create. Infinite power and wisdom must
necessarily work "under limitations" when they originate and control
finite things; but the limitations are not in the infinite power and
wisdom themselves--they are in their operations and effects. According
to Mr Mill's argument, infinite power could not create a finite world
at all: only a finite power could do so. That surely means that a
finite power must be mightier than an infinite power; and that, again,
is surely a plain self-contradiction, a manifest absurdity.
There is another objection which, although in itself unworthy of
answer, has been urged so often and presented in so many forms, some
of which are rhetorically impressive, that it cannot be wholly
passed over. The design argument has been censured as "assuming
that the genesis of the heavens and the earth was effected somewhat
after the manner in which a workman shapes a piece of furniture"--as
"converting the Power whose garment is seen in the visible universe
into an Artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting as man
is seen to act"--as "transforming the First Cause into a magnified
mechanist who constructs a work of art, and then sits apart from it and
observes how it goes," &c. Now the heavens and the earth are to such a
wonderful extent exemplifications both of mechanical laws and æsthetic
principles, that no man of sense, I think, will deny that they may most
justly be compared to machines or works of art, or even pronounced to
be machines and works of art. They are that, although they are more
than that. An animal is a machine, although an organism too. Every
organism is a machine, although every machine is not an organism. Art
and nature are not antagonistic and exclusive. Man and all man's arts
are included in nature, and nature is the highest art. While, however,
it is legitimate and even necessary to illustrate the design argument
by references to human inventions, the numerous and immense differences
between the works of man's art and the processes of nature must not
be overlooked; and there is no excuse for saying that they have been
overlooked. It is precisely because the universe is so above anything
man has made or can make, and because vegetable and animal organisms
are so different from watches and statues, that the argument in
question leads us to a divine and not to a merely human intelligence.
It implies that both the works of God and the works of man are products
of intelligence; but it does not require that they should have anything
else in common. It recognises that the most elaborate and exquisite
contrivances of man fall immeasurably below "nature's most minute
designs." So far from requiring, it forbids our carrying any of the
limitations or peculiarities of human contrivance over to that which is
divine. Besides, the belief in design is held in conjunction with the
belief in creation out of nothing. The same persons who recognise that
there is a divine wisdom displayed in the constitution and course of
nature believe the universe to have been called into being by the mere
volition of the Almighty. But among all theories of the genesis of the
heavens and the earth, that is the only one which does not represent
the First Cause as working like a man. Man never creates--he cannot
create. To produce anything he must have something to work on--he must
have materials to mould and modify.[31]
[31] See Appendix XXII.
II.
Those who refuse to refer the order and adaptations in the universe to
a designing intelligence are bound to account for them in some other
way. Has this been done? Has any person succeeded in tracing them back
to any other principle which can be reasonably regarded as their cause,
or as adequate to their production? This is the question which we have
now to consider.
Matter, some would have us believe, is the origin of the order of the
universe. Grant it, and there is still the question--What is the origin
of matter?--to be disposed of. We have seen that this is a question
which we are bound to raise; we have seen that there are strong reasons
for holding that matter had an origin, had a beginning in time, and
none whatever for regarding it as self-existent and eternal. The very
existence of order and system, of mechanical adjustments and organic
adaptations in the universe, seems to prove that matter must have had
a beginning. If certain collocations of matter evince design, and
must have had a beginning, the adaptation of the parts to form the
collocation evinces design, and implies a beginning. And if matter
had a beginning, its cause can only have been mind. To say that it
originated with chance or necessity is plainly absurd. Chance and
necessity are meaningless terms unless mind or matter be presupposed.
There can be no accidents where neither mind nor matter exists. There
can be no chance where there is no law. Chance or accident is what
occurs when two or more independent series of phenomena meet, without
their meeting having been premeditated and provided for. When one
series of causes leads a man to pass a house at a given moment of a
given day, and another series of causes, coexistent with but wholly
independent of the former series, determines that a heavy body shall
fall from the roof of that house at that moment of that day and
kill that man, the consequence--his death--is what may be properly
called an accident, or matter of chance. One who believes, indeed,
in the omniscience and universal foreordination and government of
God, will hold that even in such a case the accident or chance is
merely apparent; but he will not deny the right of the atheist to
speak of chance or accident in this way, or to explain as matters of
chance whatever he can. The word chance, or accident, can have no
intelligible sense, however, unless there be such independent series of
phenomena--unless there be mental and material existences, mental and
material laws. Chance cannot be conceived of, even by the atheist, as
the origin of existence. The same may be said of necessity. Matter or
mind may act necessarily, but necessity cannot act without matter or
mind. If it be requisite, therefore, to seek a cause for matter, mind
alone can be assigned as its cause. If we are justified in seeking for
the origin of matter at all, our choice of an answer lies between mind
and absurdity, between a real and sufficient cause and an imaginary and
inconceivable cause. Besides, how could matter of itself produce order,
even if it were self-existent and eternal? It is far more unreasonable
to believe that the atoms or constituents of matter produced of
themselves, without the action of a Supreme Mind, this wonderful
universe, than that the letters of the English alphabet produced the
plays of Shakespeare, without the slightest assistance from the human
mind known by that famous name. These atoms might, perhaps, now and
then, here and there, at great distances and long intervals, produce,
by a chance contact, some curious collocation or compound; but never
could they produce order or organisation, on an extensive scale or of
a durable character, unless ordered, arranged, and adjusted in ways of
which intelligence alone can be the ultimate explanation. To believe
that their fortuitous and undirected movements could originate the
universe, and all the harmonies and utilities and beauties which abound
in it, evinces a credulity far more extravagant than has ever been
displayed by the most superstitious of religionists. Yet no consistent
materialist can refuse to accept this colossal chance-hypothesis.
All the explanations of the order of the universe which materialists,
from Democritus and Epicurus to Diderot and Lange, have devised, rest
on the assumption that the elements of matter, being eternal, must
pass through infinite combinations, and that one of these must be our
present world--a special collocation among the countless millions of
collocations, past and future. Throw the letters of the Greek alphabet,
it has been said, an infinite number of times, and you must produce the
Iliad and all Greek books. The theory of probabilities, I need hardly
say, requires us to believe nothing so absurd. Throw letters together
without thought through all eternity, and you will never make them
express thought. All the letters in the Iliad might have been tossed
and jumbled together from morning to night by the hands of the whole
human race, from the beginning of the world until now, and the first
line of the Iliad would have been still to compose, had not the genius
of Homer been inspired to sing the wrath of Achilles and the war around
Troy. But what is the Iliad to the hymn of creation, and the drama of
providence? Were these glorious works composed by the mere jumbling
together of atoms, which were not even prepared beforehand to form
things, as letters are to form words, and which had to shake themselves
into order without the help of any hand? They may believe that who
can. It seems to me that it ought to be much easier to believe all the
Arabian Nights.
To ascribe the origination of order to _law_ is a manifest evasion of
the real problem. Law is order. Law is the very thing to be explained.
The question is--Has law a reason, or is it without a reason? The
unperverted human mind cannot believe it to be without a reason. "The
existence of a law connecting and governing any class of phenomena
implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established
the law. The regulation of events by precise rules of time and space,
of number and measure, is evidence of thought and mind." So says Dr
Whewell; and the statement is amply justified by the fact, that all
laws and rules in the universe imply that existences are related to one
another in a way of which intelligent adjustment alone is the adequate
and ultimate explanation. The existence of a law uniformly involves
the coexistence of several conditions, and that is a phenomenon
which, whenever the conditions and law are physically ultimate, and
consequently physically inexplicable, clearly presupposes mind. Laws,
in a word, are not the causes but the expressions of order. They are
themselves the results of delicately accurate adjustments, which
indicate the operation of a divine wisdom. There are chemical laws,
for example, simply because there are chemical elements endowed with
affinities, attractions, or forces the most diverse, yet so balanced
and harmonised as to secure the welfare of the world. Besides, laws
do not act of themselves. No law produces of itself any result. It is
the agents which act according to the law that produce results, and
the nature of the result produced depends on the number and character
of the agents, and how each is situated and circumstanced. If the
agents oppose each other, or are inappropriately distributed, they
bring about disorder and disaster in conformity to law. There is no
calamity, no evil, no scene of confusion, in the known world, which
is not the result of the action of agents which operate in strictest
accordance to law. The law of gravitation might rule every particle
of matter, and yet conflict and confusion and death would prevail
throughout the entire solar system were harmony and stability and
life not secured by very special arrangements. Matter might have all
its present inherent and essential laws, and yet remain for ever a
chaos. Apart from a designing and superintending intelligence, the
chances in favour of chaos and against cosmos, even allowing matter
to have uncreated properties and laws, were incalculable. The obvious
inference is that which Professor Jevons expresses in these words--"As
an unlimited number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an
unlimited number of modes of distribution, there must, even granting
matter to have had all its laws from eternity, have been at some moment
in time, out of the unlimited choices and distributions possible, that
one choice and distribution which yielded the fair and orderly universe
that now exists." Only out of rational choice can order have come.
The most common mode, perhaps, of evading the problem which order
presents to reason, is the indication of the process by which the
order has been realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there
have been men who supposed that they had completely explained away the
evidences for design in nature when they had described the physical
antecedents of the arrangements appealed to as evidences. Aristotle
showed the absurdity of the supposition more than 2200 years ago. But
those who deny final causes have gone on arguing in the same irrational
manner down to the present time. They cannot, in fact, do otherwise.
They are committed to a false position, and they dare not abandon the
sophism on which it rests. Nothing else can explain how any sane mind
should infer that because a thing is conditioned it cannot have been
designed. The man who argues that the eye was not constructed in order
to see because it has been so constructed as to be capable of seeing,
is clearly either unable to reason correctly, or allows his reasoning
faculty to be terribly perverted by prejudice. That a result is secured
by appropriate conditions can seem to no sound and unprejudiced
intellect a reason for regarding it to have been undesigned. And yet
what other reason is involved in all the attempts to explain away
final causes by means of the nebular, Darwinian, and other development
hypotheses?
M. Comte imagines that he has shown the inference of design, from
the order and stability of the solar system, to be unwarranted, when
he has pointed out the physical conditions through which that order
and stability are secured, and the process by which they have been
obtained. He refers to the comparative smallness of the planetary
masses in relation to the central mass, the feeble eccentricity of
their orbits, the moderate mutual inclination of their planes, and the
superior mean density of their solid over their fluid constituents,
as the circumstances which render it stable and habitable, and these
characteristic circumstances, as he calls them, he tells us flow
naturally and necessarily from the simple mutual gravity of the several
parts of nebulous matter. When he has done this, he supposes himself
to have proved that the heavens declare no other glory than that of
Hipparchus, of Kepler, and of Newton.
Now, the assertion that the peculiarities which make the solar system
stable and the earth habitable have flowed naturally and necessarily
from the simple mutual gravity of the several parts of nebulous matter,
is one which greatly requires proof, but which has never received it.
In saying this, we do not challenge the proof of the nebular theory
itself. That theory may or may not be true. We are quite willing to
suppose it true; to grant that it has been scientifically established.
What we maintain is, that even if we admit unreservedly that the earth,
and the whole system to which it belongs, once existed in a nebulous
state, from which they have been gradually evolved into their present
condition conformably to physical laws, we are in no degree entitled
to infer from the admission the conclusion which Comte and others have
drawn. The man who fancies that the nebular theory implies that the law
of gravitation, or any other physical law, has of itself determined the
course of cosmical evolution, so that there is no need for believing
in the existence and operation of a Divine Mind, proves merely that he
is not exempt from reasoning very illogically. The solar system could
only have been evolved out of its nebulous state into that which it
now presents if the nebula possessed a certain size, mass, form, and
constitution--if it was neither too rare nor too dense, neither too
fluid nor too tenacious; if its atoms were all numbered, its elements
all weighed, its constituents all disposed in due relation to each
other--that is to say, only if the nebula was in reality as much a
system of order, which intelligence alone could account for, as the
worlds which have been developed from it. The origin of the nebula thus
presents itself to the reason as a problem which demands solution no
less than the origin of the planets. All the properties and laws of the
nebula require to be accounted for. What origin are we to give them? It
must be either reason or unreason. We may go back as far as we please,
but at every step and stage of the regress we must find ourselves
confronted with the same question--the same alternative.