showing that the articles of the common faith which he accepts require
in their logical consequences the rejection of the rest. In saying that
man ought to choose the right, but has no choice between right and
wrong, he is not formulating a consequence of the facts of science, he
is simply assuming without evidence the existence of a universal
necessity of which the changes in Nature and the actions of man are but
the varying though inevitable expression--an assumption which
invalidates morality without adding to the truth of science.
There are those whose belief in demonology furnishes them with a reason
and an excuse for the misdeeds of man. The belief in necessity exhibits
demonology as a doctrine of science: man would fain do right, but the
uniformity, which is the necessity, of Nature allows him no choice. It
is Nature, the environment, which is the abode and headquarters of
necessity, the enemy of the ethical process, the arch-demon of
scientific demonology. And the proof that he exists is that he must.
What must be, must be, because it must.
The attempt to render morality scientific ends in a result fatal to
morality; and the reason seems clear. It is that science is not
morality, nor are the principles of science those of morality. Science
is knowledge, morality is action. Knowledge, to be knowledge, has to
presuppose that Nature is uniform and that the things it deals with are
real. So, too, action, to be moral, requires the belief that our moral
ideals are real and that we are free to choose between good and evil.
The optimist who would have us believe that science includes all the
remaining articles of the common faith, and the pessimist who argues
that it excludes them, alike fall into the error of imagining that
science, the knowledge of what is, is the whole of knowledge, and that
the assumptions which are required in order to describe what is will
enable us to do and to know what ought to be. Science, which is a true
description of part of our experience, becomes a misleading half-truth
when it is offered as an exhaustive account of the whole. If, knowing
the rules of chess and having a record of the moves in a solitary (and
unfinished) game, we refused to inquire why the pieces moved, on the
ground that if we succeeded in the inquiry we should have made no
addition to our knowledge of the way in which the pieces do move, we
should never understand the game. But we should be nearer the truth than
if we assumed that a piece caused its own movements or those of the
other pieces; and that will or purpose was quite incompatible with the
uniformity of their movements.
The fact is that we have to play the game--we are not merely
spectators--and as a matter of fact, also, men do assume that they can
freely choose what moves they will make and that there are certain moves
which they ought to make. The assumptions which they make, not exactly
for the sake of playing the game, but in the act of playing it, are
neither included in the assumptions of science nor excluded by them. To
play the game at all, it is necessary to have some knowledge (or to act
as though we had some knowledge) of how the pieces move, to know that
bishops move diagonally, that bodies tend to gravitate at a certain
rate. Man cannot indeed act or make the slightest movement without
deflecting or starting some of the processes of Nature and of his own
psychological mechanism: it is through them that he operates, and by
means of them that he plays the game. In the beginning he has but little
knowledge of what the consequences will be if he touches this or that
spring of the mechanism. Yet the knowledge is necessary for him, if he
is to play the game as he ought, _i.e._ to attain the moral ideals of
which he is more or less (less at first) conscious. In acquiring this
knowledge he uses his faculty of abstraction, that is his power of
concentrating his attention on one aspect of a thing or problem, to the
exclusion of the rest, in order to gain a clearer knowledge of it by
giving it his undivided and undistracted attention. Thus, in order to
understand how the mechanism of Nature or human nature actually does
act, he concentrates his attention on the working of that mechanism in
the abstract, _i.e._ wholly apart from the fact that it is at times
started, at times interrupted, or redirected for the sake of realising
(or thwarting) his ideals. The knowledge thus gained is science, and is,
according to the agnostic, the optimist, and the pessimist, the only
knowledge that man can have.
But it is clear that man can and does reflect, not only on the way in
which the mechanism acts, but also on the use to which he puts it and
the relation of that use to his ideals. These reflections may add
nothing to his science, to his knowledge that rooks when moved must be
moved parallel to the sides of the board, but they do add to his
knowledge of the game. In fine, man gains a more important part of that
knowledge by or in playing the game than he does by studying the rules.
The rules acquaint him with the resources which are at his disposal, the
capacities of the various pieces and the powers of the various forces of
Nature or human nature. But it would be absurd to pass this off as a
complete knowledge of the game. We may, by playing the game, add only to
our knowledge of how the game ought to be played, of how the mechanism
of Nature and human nature ought to be used, and not add to our
knowledge of the fact that if and when the mechanism is set agoing it
acts in the way described by science. But the one kind of knowledge,
though not science, is just as true as the other, on the same terms,
viz. if you accept the assumptions presupposed by it.
Science, then, is from the very terms of its constitution abstract,
_i.e._ essentially incomplete. The very terms on which alone science is
possible are that it shall study one aspect only of Nature, the
mechanical, and shall ascertain what conclusions follow if we confine
our attention to the mechanical factors and neglect certain other
factors--the freedom of the will, final causes, and the moral and
æsthetic ideals--which, though voluntarily neglected for the moment, are
yet known to be important factors in the game of life as it is played by
us. As often as we act, however, we set those factors, temporarily
neglected by science, in action; and there is no reason why, when we
have acted, we should not reflect upon our action, disengage the
assumptions which are presupposed by our actions, and then reconsider
the world and life in the light of the assumptions on which our actions
and the actions of all men are based, viz. the freedom of the will and
the reality of our ideals. Thus viewed, the world becomes the scene and
life the opportunity of using the forces of Nature and our own
psychological mechanism for the purpose of achieving the ideal.
But free-will and the moral ideal are not the only factors in the world
as it is presented to the common consciousness, or in life as it is
carried on by humanity, which are neglected by science, and which have
to be restored by subsequent reflection, if we wish to see life true and
see it whole. Science declines to entertain the question why things
happen, or whether there is any purpose in events; and moral faith only
guarantees that there is that which man ought to do, and that he is free
to do it. But science, in neglecting the action of final causes, omits
a factor which not only must be replaced before we can have any adequate
understanding of the part which man plays in the world, but which, by
the testimony of the common consciousness of mankind, manifests itself
in the phenomena of Nature.
The description which science gives of the sequences and co-existences
of material and physical phenomena is consistent with itself, and is all
that is required by the assumptions of science. It is only when we
reflect upon the further assumptions which we make, or rather act upon
as moral agents, that we find science inadequate or--if it professes to
be the whole account of the world and man--misleading. And it is only by
restoring those factors for which our moral consciousness is the
evidence that we can remedy the defect or correct the error. The attempt
made by the optimist to dispense with the testimony of consciousness to
the reality of the moral law, and the attempt of the pessimist to
dispense with the freedom of the will, were both failures.
In the same way, both the scientific and the moral interpretation of the
world are judged by the religious consciousness to be abstract, and are
seen, when viewed in the light of its presuppositions, to be inadequate,
if not misleading. The inadequacy of the moral assumptions which are
made by the common consciousness of mankind is manifest, when we
reflect that while those assumptions serve to decide the question--left
open by science--as to the "Why?" of human actions, they do not decide
the same question as to the events of Nature, but leave it open as it
was left by science, whether final or mechanical causation is the
ultimate explanation of Nature.
The problem what we are to do and to think in life and of life is
one which for its solution requires that the whole of our experience
should be taken into account: if it is to account for the sum total
of the facts of which we are conscious, it must take for its basis
the totality of those facts and nothing less extensive. It is true
that the very vastness of the field to be surveyed--the whole of the
common consciousness of mankind--makes a division of labour
necessary, and compels us to concentrate ourselves at different
times on different aspects of it, and to treat each of the phases of
our experience--religious, moral, and scientific experience--for the
moment as though it alone existed. But it is equally true that this
isolation of first one phase and then the other is merely a
temporary device, designed and adopted for a purpose; and that that
purpose is to enable us ultimately to bring the whole of our
experience to bear on the problem of what to do and to think.
Legitimate as it is, when we are working at the details of the problem,
to distinguish the moral consciousness from the scientific, and the
religious consciousness from the moral, it is necessary to bear in mind
that these distinctions are merely abstractions. In thought we may and
do so distinguish, but in fact and experience consciousness is a unity.
The same man who is conscious of sense-phenomena is also conscious of
moral obligation: the "I" which is conscious of moral experience is the
same "I" that is conscious of spiritual experience.
Further, the evidence which we have for the three kinds of
experience--scientific, moral, and spiritual--is the same: it is the
evidence of consciousness--the only evidence that we can have of
anything. That witness, if discredited at all, is discredited for all in
all. If discredited, it must be by its own testimony, for we have no
other witness which can give evidence against it. But we hope that it is
true: the man of science is so certain of its truth, in the department
in which he is most familiar with it and has the best right to speak of
it, that he lays it down as a rule that there simply can be no evidence
of an exception to the uniformity of Nature. The moralist is equally
certain that no exception to the law of moral obligation is possible;
the religious mind that there can be none to the universality of the
Divine love. To the unity of consciousness corresponds the unity of our
faith in its trustworthiness. Scientific and moral faith are not
different from religious faith; they are but phases of the same. The
common faith of mankind is not a synthesis formed artificially by adding
the three together; on the contrary, the three are artificially
distinguished by thought--they do not correspond to fact, but are
abstractions from the facts, and are formed by the suppression of facts.
The religious consciousness is itself abstract; and as an abstraction,
_i.e._ if taken to be the whole of what we know and feel and do, is
capable of leading to false conclusions: no religious belief can stand
permanently which runs counter to the facts of science or the moral
faith of mankind. No amount of spiritual experience will add to our
knowledge of chemistry or physics, or be valid evidence against any
truth of science. It may serve to prevent the premature acceptance of
something too hastily put forward as a scientific fact, in the same way
that science may overthrow a belief erroneously supposed to be
religious.
But though the religious consciousness is an abstraction, in the same
sense that the scientific and moral consciousness are abstractions, each
is valid in its own sphere; and the whole evidence of consciousness in
all its three phases must be taken together, if we are to elicit any
universal principles of thought and action, any unity in our experience,
any purpose in evolution. From this point of view we shall expect to
find a unity of experience corresponding to the unity of consciousness,
and to discover that there is a fundamental identity underlying the
apparent diversity in that reality of which in consciousness we are
aware. What gives this unity to experience is the permanence which we
attribute to the real, in whatever way the real is apprehended: the
real, whether apprehended in sense-experience or in moral conviction or
in spiritual experience, is characterised by permanence, as
distinguished from the passing feelings with which we view it and from
the transient experience we have of it. The reality of the things of
which we are aware through our senses is conceived as something
permanent, and is implied to be so conceived by all theories of
evolution which wish to be taken seriously. The permanence of moral
obligation is not conceived by those who are genuinely convinced of its
reality to vary or to come and go with the flickering gleams of our
moral resolutions. Nor when spiritual light is withdrawn from our hearts
is it supposed, by those who believe it to be the light of God's
countenance, to be quenched for the time.
The fundamental identity of the real throughout its diversity is what is
postulated by science when it explains the process of evolution by means
of the law of continuity. It is equally postulated by the moral
philosopher who claims objective validity for the moral law on the
ground that it is the same for all rational minds. It is the faith of
the religious mind which not only feels the Divine love in its own
heart, and finds it every time it obeys the conscience, but also divines
it in the uniformity of Nature and throughout the process of evolution.
The identity of the real does not lie in the mere fact that we are
conscious of it. The real things of which we are conscious have, indeed,
as one feature common to them all, the fact that we are conscious of
them. But the identity of the real is not created by nor a mere
expression of the unity of our consciousness. It is not the
understanding which makes Nature--save in the purely psychological way
in which apperception does; on the contrary, the things of which we are
conscious in sense-perception are given as independent of us, though
sense-phenomena are obviously not. In the same way, the reality of the
moral law is conceived, in the very act by which we recognise it as
binding on us, to be something independent of us; nor is God's love
towards us dependent on our merits, or existent only when we recognise
it.
If, then, we are to gather up the permanence, the identity, and the
independence of the real into the unity of a single principle, if we are
to interpret the law of continuity in the light of the whole of our
experience, we must look to the Divine will. In it we shall find the
reality which is progressively revealed in the law of continuity; in it
we shall find the permanence and the independence without which reality
has no meaning; in it the changeless and eternal identity of Him whose
property it is ever to have mercy and always to be the same. Then,
perhaps, we may extend the principle of scientific method so as to
include the whole of our experience and to make the whole of our
knowledge truly scientific; for to the uniformity of Nature and of human
nature we shall add the uniformity of the Divine nature, or, rather, we
shall see in the former the expression of the latter. But it is not the
agnostic who will thus enlarge the bounds of science, or open a page of
knowledge rich with the spoils of faith.
XII.
PROGRESS
The artificial nature of the abstraction which distinguishes the
scientific from the moral and the religious consciousness, as well as
the impossibility of simultaneously exercising faith and repressing it,
is plainly exhibited in the optimistic interpretation of evolution. The
premises from which it starts are faith in the uniformity of Nature and
belief in the reality of material things. The conclusions which it
reaches constitute a _non sequitur_ if they are supposed to follow from
the avowed premises, and only command assent when we tacitly assume
certain moral and religious presuppositions which, if not avowed in the
optimist's argument, are instinctively supplied by the moral and
religious consciousness of the optimist's disciples. That the process of
evolution on the whole has been and will be a process of progress
follows logically enough from the optimist's avowed premises, if by
progress we mean the survival of those best fitted to survive--that is,
if we empty the notion of progress of all moral meaning. But as the
conclusion that evolution is progress is the conclusion which is
necessary for the justification of the common faith of mankind, the
illogical nature of the optimist's process of inference is apt to be
overlooked in consideration of the satisfactory termination of his
argument.
It is, however, necessary, in the interests of clearness of thought as
well as of the moral and religious consciousness, that the conception of
progress thus thoughtlessly emptied of meaning by the optimist should
have its context restored. This service--a service essential as a
preliminary to every theory of evolution--was rendered by one in whom
the moral consciousness spoke with force--Professor Huxley. To him is
due the demonstration that adaptation to environment, so far from being
the cause of progress, counteracts it; so far from being man's ideal, it
is that which resists the realisation of his ideals. Progress is
effected, according to Professor Huxley, not by adaptation to but
adaptation of the environment, and consists in approximating to the
ideals of art and morality--which ideals are not accounted for, as
ideals, by the fact that they are the outcome of evolution, because evil
has been evolved as well as good. Why approximation to the ideal of
religion--love of God as well as of one's neighbour--should not
contribute to progress does not appear. If, however, we add it, and also
add the ideal of science, viz. truth, then progress will be the
continuous approximation to the ideals of truth, beauty, goodness, and
holiness; and human evolution, so far as evolution is progress, will be
the progressive revelation of the ideal in and to man.
Two things are implied in this conception of evolution: the first is
that evolution may or may not in any given case be progress; the next
that we have a means of judging, a canon whereby to determine, whether
evolution is progress. Both points are illustrated by the argument of
Professor Huxley, who uses the moral ideals as a test whereby to judge
the process of evolution, and decides that evolution has been
progressive in the past and will be regressive in the future. Strange to
say, the reason why Professor Huxley maintains that evolution will be
regressive is exactly the same reason that leads Mr. Herbert Spencer to
maintain that it will be progressive. It is that the law of evolution is
Necessity, that evolution is the outcome of mechanical causes. But in
effect both arguments lead logically to the same conclusion, for the
progress which is the outcome of Mr. Spencer's argument is not progress
in the moral or any other sense of the word. In fine, progress is
eventually impossible if evolution is due to mechanical causes; progress
is conceivable only if we interpret the process of evolution
teleologically and as expressing the operation of a final cause.
Science, as such, declines to inquire whether there is any purpose in
evolution, and leaves it an open question. The moral consciousness
affirms only that the process of evolution ought to make for good. The
religious consciousness alone is in a position to say that its spiritual
experience requires us to affirm that evolution, in accordance with the
uniformity of the Divine nature, will be, in years to come as in ages
past, a continuous movement towards the realisation of all that in its
best moments the human heart holds most dear.
The argument that evolution _must_ be progress commits logical suicide,
for in the very act of proving its conclusion it proves that progress is
not progress. We are therefore left to face the fact that progress is
only a possibility; and that amounts to saying that regress also is
possible. What is implied therein will become clear if we return to the
question of the nature of progress.
Progress is not the survival of the fittest to survive, but of the
æsthetically or ethically fittest; not adaptation to the environment,
but approximation to the ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness. Those
ideals are manifested in man, but not equally in all men; and the words
and works of those men on whom they are most clearly impressed and by
whom they are most faithfully expressed become the canon whereby we
judge whether any tendency in art or morality is progressive or
retrogressive. We cannot all make beautiful things or do heroic deeds,
but we can all appreciate them when made or done. To appreciate them,
however, is to judge that they do come nearer to the ideal than anything
else of the kind which we have yet known. Thus the ultimate court of
appeal for each one of us is not the ideal as manifested by man, but the
ideal as revealed to each of us. True it is that, until we saw that
particular work of art or that particular instance of love, we had no
idea what beauty or love could be. But that makes no difference to the
fact that we feel for ourselves how much nearer it comes to the ideal
than anything we had any idea of before. It may henceforth be the
standard by which we shall measure other things, but in adopting it we
measure it ourselves, and measure it not by itself, but in relation to
the ideal. And what shall we say of the artist himself? By what does he
measure the work of his predecessors and judge that it is not the best
that can yet be done, if he does not measure it by the ideal which is
revealed more perfectly to him than to them?
But the perfect work of art or love, when done, becomes not merely the
canon by which to test progress; it becomes itself the cause of
progress, both because of its more perfect revelation of the ideal and
because of the emulation which it arouses in others to go and do
likewise. They likewise strive after the ideal and labour for its sake:
it is the final cause of their endeavours, the purpose of their
attempts; and were there no such final cause there would be no progress.
The ideal is a principle both of thought and action, the test of
knowledge and the source of progress. Truth is the ideal of science:
approximation to truth is that for which the man of science labours and
that in which he conceives that scientific progress lies. The
gravitation formula not only expresses a wide-reaching truth, but has
acted as an incentive to many attempts to extend it to the domain of
chemistry, and serves as an ideal yet to be rivalled in other branches
of science. But science and progress in science are alike impossible, if
consciousness and experience be discredited, or if the ideal of science
be not real, _i.e._ if the laws of science have not the permanence, the
independence, and the self-identity which are the attributes of the
real, but are as transient as the minds that discovered them, exist only
when thought of by man, and are not really the same at different times.
But if these ideals, whether of truth, beauty, or goodness, are thus
real, then they are "our" ideals only in the sense that we are aware of
them and adopt them, not in the sense that we make them; they are ours
because they are present in the common consciousness of mankind, but not
in the sense that they are created by that consciousness. They are
revealed to man before they are manifested by man.