Pythagoreans and Spensippus--that what is best and most fair is not
to be found in the principle of things, from the fact that though
the first principles both of plants and animals are causes, yet
what is fair and perfect resides in created things as results from
these,--persons, I say, who entertain these sentiments, do not form
their opinions correctly. For seed arises from other natures that are
antecedent and perfect, and seed is not the first thing, whereas that
which is perfect is."--Aristotle, 'Metaphysics,' xi. 7.
"It is manifest by the light of nature that there must at least be as
much reality in the efficient and entire cause as in its effect; for
whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause? And how
could the cause communicate to it this reality unless it possessed
it in itself? And hence it follows, not only that what is cannot be
produced by what is not, but likewise that the more perfect--in other
words, that which contains in itself more reality--cannot be the effect
of the less perfect."--Descartes, 'Meditations,' iii.
"In not a few of the progressionists the weak illusion is unmistakable,
that, with time enough, you may get everything out of next-to-nothing.
Grant us, they seem to say, any tiniest granule of power, so close upon
zero that it is not worth begrudging--allow it some trifling tendency
to infinitesimal increment--and we will show you how this little stock
became the kosmos, without ever taking a step worth thinking of, much
less constituting a case for design. The argument is a mere appeal
to an incompetency in the human imagination, in virtue of which,
magnitudes evading conception are treated as out of existence; and an
aggregate of inappreciable increments is simultaneously equated,--in
its cause to _nothing_, in its effect to _the whole of things_. You
manifestly want the same causality, whether concentrated on a moment
or distributed through incalculable ages; only, in drawing upon it,
a logical theft is more easily committed piecemeal than wholesale.
Surely it is a mean device for a philosopher thus to crib causation
by hair's-breadths, to put it out at compound interest through all
time, and then disown the debt."--Martineau, 'Essays Philosophical and
Theological,' pp. 141, 142.
"Think of it! An endless evolution, an eternal working, an infinite
causation, and yet an effect so finite. Nature has been working upward
from eternity, and has just passed the long-armed ape who begat
prognathus, as prognathus begat the troglodyte homo. What becomes of
our doctrine of progress? As sure as mathematics, it should have been
all evolved, all that we now have, over and over again--all _out_, or
far more _out_ than has come out, incalculable ages ago. An eternal
ante-past of progressive working. To what a height should it have
arisen! It should have transcended all our ideals. The most exalted
finite being should have been reached, the most exalted that our minds
can conceive, instead of this creature man, so poor, so low; for you
will bear in mind that I am speaking of him as measured by no higher
scale of value than that afforded by this physical hypothesis--man
evolved from nebular gas--man just coming out of darkness, and so soon
to return to darkness again--_e tenebris in tenebras_. This all comes
from that hideous [Greek: hysteron proteron], that inversion of all
necessary thinking. Nature first, it says--matter first, an impalpable
nebulous nihilism first, the lowest and most imperfect first; life,
thought, reason, idea, their junior products, and God, therefore, the
last product, if there be a God at all, or anything to which such a
name can possibly be given. And we are asked to adopt this, and call it
grand, whilst rejecting as narrow and soul-contracting the revelation
which makes God first, reason first, idea first, the perfect first,--as
has been said before--the imperfect and the finite ever a departure
from it, whether in the scale of order or of time, whether as exhibited
in processes of lapse and deterioration or the contrary seeming of
recovery and restoration in cyclical rounds. The two schemes have two
entirely different modes of speech. Says the mere physical hypothesis:
In the beginning was the nebula, and all things were in the nebula,
and all things were self-evolved from the nebula--even life, thought,
consciousness, idea, reason itself, having no other source. The other
speaks to us in language like this: [Greek: En archê ên ho Logos], "In
the beginning was the Word," the [Greek: Logos], the Reason, "and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being
by Him. In Him was life," [Greek: Zôê], and "from this life"--not
from motions, or molecules, or correlated forces, or the vibration of
fibres, or the arrangements of nebular atoms, but from this life of
the Logos, the eternal Reason--"came the light of men"--the mind,
reason, conscience of humanity--even "the light that lighteth" every
rational being "coming into the cosmos."--Prof. Lewis, 'The Kingdom of
God' (Dickinson's Theological Quarterly, No. 6).
NOTE XXIII., page 195.
THEOLOGICAL INFERENCES FROM THE DOCTRINE OF SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.
An eloquent preacher exclaims, "Great ought to be our compassion
for the weak brother whose faith in God would be shaken because
a chemist should succeed next year in producing vital cells out
of a hermetically-sealed vessel containing only the elements of
protoplasm."--Rev. E. A. Abbott, D.D., 'Cambridge Sermons,' p. 33. It
must be admitted, however, that many who certainly cannot be fairly
described as "weak brethren," entertain very strongly that fear of
the doctrine of spontaneous generation which Dr Abbott deprecates. I
quote, from the 'Presbyterian Quarterly' of January 1874, the words of
President Barnard of Columbia College, New York, expressing an entirely
opposite sentiment. I do so without criticism or comment, as I shall
have to consider the relation of materialistic theories of the origin
of life to theism in next volume.
"To the philosopher, the demonstration of the theory of spontaneous
generation, should it ever be demonstrated beyond all possibility of
doubt or cavil, cannot but be a matter of the deepest interest. But to
the man who finds himself compelled to receive it, this interest, it
seems to me, must be no less painful than it is deep. Nor is this the
only theory which the investigators of our time are urging upon our
attention, of which I feel compelled to make the same remark. There
are, at least, two besides which impress me with a similar feeling;
and the three together constitute a group which, though to a certain
extent independent of each other, are likely in the end to stand or
fall together. These are, the doctrine of spontaneous generation, the
doctrine of organic evolution, and the doctrine of the correlation of
mental and physical forces. If these doctrines are true, the existence
of an intelligence separate from organised matter is impossible, and
the death of the human body is the death of the human soul. If these
doctrines are true, the world becomes an enigma, no less to the theist
than it has always been to the atheist. We are told, indeed, that the
acceptance of these views need not shake our faith in the existence of
an almighty Creator. It is beautifully explained to us how they ought
to give us more elevated and more worthy conceptions of the modes by
which He works His will in the visible creation. We learn that our
complex organisms are none the less the work of His hands because they
have been evolved by an infinite series of changes from microscopic
gemmules, and that these gemmules themselves have taken on their forms
under the influence of the physical forces of light and heat and
attraction acting on brute mineral matter. Rather, it should seem, we
are a good deal more so. This kind of teaching is heard in our day even
from the theologians. Those sentinels on the watch-towers of the faith,
whose wont it has been for so many centuries to stand sturdily up in
opposition to the science which was not, in any proper sense, at war
with them, now, by a sudden and almost miraculous conversion, accept
with cheerful countenances, and become in their turn the expounders
and champions of the science which is. But while they find the mystery
of the original creation thus satisfactorily cleared up in their minds,
they seem to have taken very little thought as to what is going to
come of the rest of their theology. It is, indeed, a grand conception
which regards the Deity as conducting the work of His creation by
means of those all-pervading influences which we call the forces of
nature; but it leaves us profoundly at a loss to explain the wisdom
or the benevolence which brings every day into life such myriads of
sentient and intelligent beings only that they may perish on the morrow
of their birth. But this is not all. If these doctrines are true, all
talk of creation or methods of creation becomes absurdity; for just as
certainly as they are true, God Himself is impossible. If intelligence
presupposes a material organism, of which it is a mode of action, then
God must be a material organism or there is no God. But it is the law
of all living organisms that they grow, mature, and perish; and since
God cannot perish, He cannot be an organism."
NOTE XXIV., page 208.
DARWIN AND PALEY.
To the two treatises of Mr Darwin mentioned in the lecture, there
must now be added another equally rich in fact suggesting theological
inferences--'The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the same
Species.'
A multitude of books have been written on Darwinism and Teleology.
Most of those published between 1859 and 1875 will be found named in
the list of works on Darwinism appended to Seidlitz's 'Darwin'sche
Theorie.' There are two good popular accounts of the controversy: 'What
is Darwinism?' by Dr Charles Hodge of Princetown, and 'Die Darwin'schen
Theorien' of Rudolf Schmid.
As to Paley, it gives one pleasure to quote the following passage
from Sir William Thomson's address to the British Association in
1871; because the foolish writing which is so frequently met with in
books and journals about "the mechanical God of Paley," about Paley
representing Deity as "outside of the universe," or as "a God who makes
the world after the manner that a watchman manufactures a watch," &c.,
can only be explained by utter ignorance of Paley's views: "I feel
profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too
much lost sight of in recent zoological speculations. Reaction against
the frivolities of teleology, such as are to be found, not rarely, in
the notes of the learned commentators on Paley's 'Natural Theology,'
has, I believe, had a temporary effect of turning attention from the
solid irrefragable argument so well put forward in that excellent old
book. But overpowering proof of intelligence and benevolent design
lies all around us; and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or
scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us
with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of
a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend upon one
ever-acting Creator and Ruler."
NOTE XXV., page 214.
KANT'S MORAL ARGUMENT.
The unsatisfactoriness of the position that conscience can supply the
place of reason, and can do without its help, in the search after God,
is clearly seen in the case of the thinker who undertook with most
deliberation to maintain that position. When Kant said,--Although all
other arguments for the existence of God are delusive, still conscience
gives us a feeling of responsibility and a sense of freedom which
compel us to believe in One through whom virtue and fortune, duty and
inclination, will be reconciled, and in whom the will will be free to
do all that it ought,--he saw that he would be met with the retort and
reproach that the same process by which he pretended to have demolished
the other arguments was just as applicable to this new one; that the
ideas of freedom and responsibility might be as delusive when supposed
to assure us of reality, as those of causation and design; that if the
latter were mere forms of human thought, the former might be held to be
so likewise with equal reason, and to be equally incapable of affording
a warrant to belief in God Himself; and consequently, that the final
religious result of his philosophy was, not that there is a God, but
that there is an idea of God, which, although we cannot get rid of it,
is full of contradictions, and wholly incapable of justification or
verification. He saw all this as clearly as man could do, and it is
marvellous that so many authors should have written as if he had not
seen it; but certainly he might as well not have seen it, for all that
he was able to do in the way of repelling the objection. His reply
amounted merely to reaffirming that we are under the necessity of
associating the idea of a Supreme Being with the moral law, and then
qualifying the statement by the admission that we can know, however,
nothing about that Being; that as soon as we try to know anything about
Him we make a speculative, not a practical, use of reason, and fall
back into the realm of sophistry and illusion from which the Critical
Philosophy was designed to deliver us. In other words, what he tells
us is, that the argument is good, but only on the conditions that
it is not to be subjected to rational scrutiny, and that no attempt
is to be made to determine what its conclusion signifies. It seems
to me that, on these conditions, he might have found any argument
good. Such conditions are inconsistent with the whole spirit and very
existence of a critical philosophy. And it is not really God that Kant
reaches by his argument: it is a mere moral ideal--a dead, empty,
abstract assumption, which is regarded as practically useful, although
rationally baseless--a necessary presupposition of moral action, but
one which tells us nothing about the nature of its object. Fichte was
only consistent when he refused to speak of that object as a Will or
Person, and affirmed that God exists only as the Moral Order of the
universe, and that we can neither know nor conceive of any other God.
He was also, only following out the principles of his master when he
represented that order as the creation of the individual mind, the form
of the individual conscience, a mode of mental action.
Kant has expounded his argument, and discussed its bearings fully and
minutely, in his 'Kritik der Urtheilskraft,' sec. 86-90, and 'Kritik
der Praktischen Vernunft, Zweites Buch, Zweites Hauptstück,' v.-viii.
M. Renouvier, in an article entitled "De la Contradiction reprochée à
la doctrine de Kant" (La Critique Philosophique, 3^{ieme.} Année, No.
29), has exposed some errors on the subject which are common in France,
and equally common in England.
NOTE XXVI., page 217.
DR SCHENKEL'S VIEW OF CONSCIENCE AS THE ORGAN OF RELIGION.
Dr Schenkel has fully set forth his reasons for holding that
conscience is the religious organ of the soul, in the ninth chapter
of the first volume of his 'Christliche Dogmatik.' He endeavours to
meet the objection urged in the text by representing what is truly
the primary and distinctive function of conscience as a secondary
and derivative function. Its primary activity is, according to him,
religious; it unites with God--it is conscious communion with Him. Its
ethical activity is only elicited when this communion is disturbed and
broken; its source is the religious want occasioned by the rupture of
communion. That is felt to be a something abnormal and unsatisfactory,
and awakens a desire after the restoration of the lost communion
with God. The conscience is cognisant of a moral law only when, its
communion with God being disturbed, it seeks its re-establishment Dr
Schenkel thus, as he thinks, accounts for conscience having an ethical
function as well as a religious function. But clearly the result at
which he arrives is in direct contradiction to the position from which
he starts. The affirmation of conscience as religious is represented
as being that man is in direct communion with God; and the affirmation
of conscience as ethical is represented as being that man is not in
direct communion with God, but desires to be so. These are, however,
contrary declarations; and to describe conscience in the way Schenkel
does, as "a synthesis of the ethical and religious factor," is to
represent it as a synthesis of self-contradictory elements--a compound
of yes and no. We cannot be conscious both of communion with God and of
non-communion with Him. And, on Dr Schenkel's own showing, the evidence
for immediate communion with Him is but small. The consciousness
of moral law he affirms to be consciousness of the want or need of
communion with God, not the consciousness of enjoying it. But is
conscience ever independent of the consciousness of moral law? If not,
it can never, according to the hypothesis, be a consciousness of God.
If it be independent thereof, the fact would require to be better
proved than by the misinterpretation of a few texts of Scripture.
Solidly proved it never, I believe, can be. A conscience not conscious
of a moral law is simply no conscience at all.
NOTE XXVII., page 221.
CHALMERS AND ERSKINE ON THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIENCE.
The moral argument was, as was to be expected, a very favourite one
with Dr Chalmers, and his way of stating it was as remarkable for
its simplicity and directness as for its eloquence. "Had God," he
asks, "been an unrighteous Being Himself, would He have given to
the obviously superior faculty in man so distinct and authoritative
a voice on the side of righteousness? Would He have so constructed
the creatures of our species as to have planted in every breast a
reclaiming witness against Himself? Would He have thus inscribed on
the tablet of every heart the sentence of His own condemnation; and
is this not just as likely, as that He should have inscribed it in
written characters on the forehead of each individual? Would He so have
fashioned the workmanship of His own hands; or, if a God of cruelty,
injustice, and falsehood, would He have placed in the station of master
and judge that faculty which, felt to be the highest in our nature,
would prompt a generous and high-minded revolt of all our sentiments
against the Being who formed us? From a God possessed of such
characteristics, we should surely have expected a differently-moulded
humanity; or, in other words, from the actual constitution of man,
from the testimonies on the side of all righteousness, given by the
vicegerent within the heart, do we infer the righteousness of the
Sovereign who placed it there."--Natural Theology, vol. i. pp. 323,
324. This argument of Dr Chalmers, like all other arguments from
conscience, implies the soundness of the reasoning by which God has
been attempted to be shown to be the intelligent cause or author of the
universe; and, on that perfectly legitimate presupposition, it seems
to me as irresistible as it is simple. An intelligent but unrighteous
God would never have made a creature better than himself and endowed
with admiration of what is most opposite to himself, the reverse and
counterpart of his own character.
The argument as stated by the late Mr Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, is
no less simple and direct: "When I attentively consider what is going
on in my conscience, the chief thing forced on my notice is, that I
find myself face to face with a purpose--not my own, for I am often
conscious of resisting it--but which dominates me and makes itself
felt as ever present, as the very root and reason of my being....
This consciousness of a purpose concerning me that I should be a good
man--right, true, and unselfish--is the first firm footing I have in
the region of religious thought: for I cannot dissociate the idea of
a purpose from that of a Purposer, and I cannot but identify this
Purposer with the Author of my being and the Being of all beings; and
further, I cannot but regard His purpose towards me as the unmistakable
indication of His own character."--'The Spiritual Order, and other
Papers,' pp. 47, 48.
NOTE XXVIII., page 225.
ASSOCIATIONIST THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE.
I have indicated to some extent my reasons for regarding this theory as
unsatisfactory in an article entitled "Associationism and the Origin
of Moral Ideas," in 'Mind,' No. III. (July 1876). In the treatise of
M. Carrau, 'La Morale Utilitaire,' the various forms of the theory are
examined with fairness and penetration.
NOTE XXIX., page 229.
CHALMERS AND BAIN ON THE PLEASURE OF MALEVOLENCE.
Dr Chalmers devotes a chapter of his 'Natural Theology' to the
illustration of "the inherent pleasure of the virtuous, and misery of
the vicious affections." I do not think the psychological doctrine
of that chapter unexceptionable; but, at the same time, I cannot
understand on what ground Prof. Bain imagines that it "implies
doubts as to the genuineness of the pleasures of malevolence," and
virtually denies that "the feeling of gratified vengeance is a real
and indisputable pleasure."--See Emotions and the Will, pp. 187-189.
The very passage which Prof. Bain quotes is quite inconsistent with
this view. It is as follows: "The most ordinary observer of his own
feelings, however incapable of analysis, must be sensible, even at the
moment of wreaking the full indulgence of his resentment on the man who
has provoked or injured him, that all is not perfect within; but that
in this, and indeed in every other malignant feeling, there is a sore
burden of disquietude, an unhappiness tumultuating in the heart, and
visibly pictured in the countenance. The ferocious tyrant who has only
to issue forth his mandate, and strike dead at pleasure the victim of
his wrath, with any circumstance too of barbaric caprice and cruelty
which his fancy, in the very waywardness of passion unrestrained and
power unbounded, might suggest to him--he may be said through life
to have experienced a thousand gratifications, in the solaced rage
and revenge which, though ever breaking forth on some new subject, he
can appease again every day of his life by some new execution. But we
mistake it if we think otherwise than that, in spite of these distinct
and very numerous, nay, daily gratifications, if he so choose, it is
not a life of fierce internal agony notwithstanding."