we agreed it should be stated. But I must go still further, and affirm
that in the eye of science _the animal body_ is just as much a product of
molecular force as the stalk and ear of corn, or as the crystal of salt or
sugar. Many of the parts of the body are obviously mechanical. Take the
human heart, for example, with its system of valves; or take the exquisite
mechanism of the eye or hand. Animal heat, moreover, is the same in kind
as the heat of a fire, being produced by the same chemical process. Animal
motion, too, is as directly derived from the food of the animal as the
motion of Trevethyck's walking engine from the fuel in its furnace. As
regards matter, the animal body creates nothing; as regards force, it
creates nothing. Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his
stature? All that has been said, then, regarding the plant may be restated
with regard to the animal. Every particle that enters into the composition
of a muscle, a nerve, or a bone has been placed in its position by
molecular force. And, unless the existence of law in these matters is
denied, and the element of caprice introduced, we must conclude that,
given the relation of any molecule of the body to its environment, its
position in the body might be determined mathematically. Our difficulty is
not with the _quality_ of the problem, but with its _complexity_; and this
difficulty might be met by the simple expansion of the faculties which we
now possess. Given this expansion, with the necessary data, and the chick
might be deduced as rigorously and as logically from the egg as the
existence of Neptune was deduced from the disturbances of Uranus, or as
conical refraction was deduced from the undulatory theory of light.
You see, I am not mincing matters, but avowing nakedly what many
scientific thinkers more or less distinctively believe. The formation of a
crystal, a plant, or an animal is, in their eyes, a purely mechanical
problem, which differs from the problems of ordinary mechanics in the
smallness of the masses and the complexity of the processes involved. Here
you have one half of our dual truth; let us now glance at the other half.
Associated with this wonderful mechanism of the animal body, we have
phenomena no less certain than those of physics, but between which and the
mechanism we discern no necessary connection. A man, for example, can say
_I feel_, _I think_, _I love_; but how does _consciousness_ infuse itself
into the problem? The human brain is said to be the organ of thought and
feeling; when we are hurt, the brain feels it; when we ponder, it is the
brain that thinks; when our passions or affections are excited, it is
through the instrumentality of the brain. Let us endeavor to be a little
more precise here. I hardly imagine that there exists a profound
scientific thinker, who has reflected upon the subject, unwilling to admit
the extreme probability of the hypothesis that, for every fact of
consciousness, whether in the domain of sense, of thought, or of emotion,
a certain definite molecular condition is set up in the brain; who does
not hold this relation of physics to consciousness to be invariable, so
that, given the state of the brain, the corresponding thought or feeling
might be inferred; or, given the thought or feeling, the corresponding
state of the brain might be inferred.
But how inferred? It is at bottom not a case of logical inference at all,
but of empirical association. You may reply that many of the inferences of
science are of this character; the inference, for example, that an
electric current of a given direction will deflect a magnetic needle in a
definite way; but the cases differ in this, that the passage from the
current to the needle, if not demonstrable, is thinkable, and that we
entertain no doubt as to the final mechanical solution of the problem. But
the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of
consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a
definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not
possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ,
which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to
the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds
and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated as to enable us to
see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following
all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if
such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding
states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the
solution of the problem, "How are these physical processes connected with
the facts of consciousness?" The chasm between the two classes of
phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable. Let the
consciousness of _love_, for example, be associated with a right-handed
spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of
_hate_ with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we
love, that the motion is in one direction, and when we hate, that the
motion is in the other; but the _Why?_ would remain as unanswerable as
before.
In affirming that the growth of the body is mechanical, and that thought,
as exercised by us, has its correlative in the physics of the brain, I
think the position of the "Materialist" is stated, as far as that position
is a tenable one. I think the materialist will be able finally to maintain
this position against all attacks; but I do not think, in the present
condition of the human mind, that he can pass beyond this position. I do
not think he is entitled to say that his molecular groupings and his
molecular motions _explain_ everything. In reality, they explain nothing.
The utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of phenomena,
of whose real bond of union he is in absolute ignorance.
The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble in its
modern form as it was in the pre-scientific ages. Phosphorus is known to
enter into the composition of the human brain, and a trenchant German
writer has exclaimed, "Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke."[4] That may or may
not be the case; but, even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge
would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to
the materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this
"Matter" of which we have been discoursing, who or what divided it into
molecules, who or what impressed upon them this necessity of running into
organic forms, he has no answer. Science is mute in reply to these
questions.
But if the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who else
is prepared with a solution? To whom has this arm of the Lord been
revealed? Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and
philosopher, one and all. Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into
knowledge at some future day. The process of things upon this earth has
been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the iguanodon and his
contemporaries to the President and the Members of the British
Association. And whether we regard the improvement from the scientific or
from the theological point of view, as the result of progressive
development, or as the result of successive exhibitions of creative
energy, neither view entitles us to assume that man's present faculties
end the series--that the process of amelioration stops at him.
A time may therefore come when this ultra-scientific region by which we
are now enfolded may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to human,
investigation. Two thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse in
the eye the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ
requisite for their translation into light does not exist. And so, from
this region of darkness and mystery which surrounds us, rays may now be
darting which require but the development of the proper intellectual
organs to translate them into knowledge as far surpassing ours as ours
surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which once held possession of
this planet. Meanwhile the mystery is not without its uses. It certainly
may be made a power in the human soul; but it is a power which has
feeling, not knowledge, for its base. It may be, and will be, and we hope
is, turned to account, both in steadying and strengthening the intellect,
and in rescuing man from that littleness to which in the struggle for
existence or for precedence in the world he is continually prone.
JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN
CHRISTIANITY AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE[5]
So far, then, as these remarks have gone, Theology and Physics cannot
touch each other, have no intercommunion, have no ground of difference or
agreement, of jealousy or of sympathy. As well may musical truths be said
to interfere with the doctrines of architectural science; as well may
there be a collision between the mechanist and the geologist, the engineer
and the grammarian; as well might the British Parliament or the French
nation be jealous of some possible belligerent power upon the surface of
the moon, as Physics pick a quarrel with Theology. And it may be
well--before I proceed to fill up in detail this outline, and to explain
what has to be explained in this statement--to corroborate it, as it
stands, by the remarkable words upon the subject of a writer of the
day:[6]--
"We often hear it said," he observes, writing as a Protestant (and here
let me assure you, gentlemen, that though his words have a controversial
tone with them, I do not quote them in that aspect, or as wishing here to
urge anything against Protestants, but merely in pursuance of my own
point, that Revelation and Physical Science cannot really come into
collision), "we often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming
more and more enlightened, and that this enlightenment must be favorable
to Protestantism, and unfavorable to Catholicism. We wish that we could
think so. But we see great reason to doubt whether this is a well-founded
expectation. We see that during the last two hundred and fifty years the
human mind has been in the highest degree active; that it has made great
advances in every branch of natural philosophy; that it has produced
innumerable inventions tending to promote the convenience of life; that
medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering, have been very greatly
improved, that government, police, and law have been improved, though not
to so great an extent as the physical sciences. Yet we see that, during
these two hundred and fifty years, Protestantism has made no conquests
worth speaking of. Nay, we believe that, as far as there has been change,
that change has, on the whole, been in favor of the Church of Rome. We
cannot, therefore, feel confident that the progress of knowledge will
necessarily be fatal to a system which has, to say the least, stood its
ground in spite of the immense progress made by the human race in
knowledge since the days of Queen Elizabeth.
"Indeed, the argument which we are considering seems to us to be founded
on an entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge with respect to
which the law of the human mind is progress. In mathematics, when once a
proposition has been demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested. Every
fresh story is as solid a basis for a new superstructure as the original
foundation was. Here, therefore, there is a constant addition to the stock
of truth. In the inductive sciences, again, the law is progress....
"But with theology the case is very different. As respects natural
religion (Revelation being for the present altogether left out of the
question), it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day is
more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him just
the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe which the
early Greeks had.... As to the other great question, what becomes of man
after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his
unassisted reason, is more likely to be in the right than a Blackfoot
Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences, in which we surpass the
Blackfoot Indians, throws the smallest light on the state of the soul
after the animal life is extinct....
"Natural Theology, then, is not a progressive science. That knowledge of
our origin and of our destiny which we derive from Revelation is indeed of
very different clearness, and of very different importance. But neither is
Revealed Religion of the nature of a progressive science.... In divinity
there cannot be a progress analogous to that which is constantly taking
place in pharmacy, geology, and navigation. A Christian of the fifth
century with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated than a Christian
of the nineteenth century with a Bible, candor and natural acuteness
being, of course, supposed equal. It matters not at all that the compass,
printing, gunpowder, steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand other
discoveries and inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are
familiar to the nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has
the smallest bearing on the question whether man is justified by faith
alone, or whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice.... We
are confident that the world will never go back to the solar system of
Ptolemy; nor is our confidence in the least shaken by the circumstance
that so great a man as Bacon rejected the theory of Galileo with scorn;
for Bacon had not all the means of arriving at a sound conclusion. But
when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was ready to die for the doctrine of
Transubstantiation, we cannot but feel some doubt whether the doctrine of
Transubstantiation may not triumph over all opposition. More was a man of
eminent talents. He had all the information on the subject that we have,
or _that, while the world lasts, any human being will have.... No
progress that science has made, or will make_, can add to what seems to us
the overwhelming force of the argument against the Real Presence. We are
therefore unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More believed
respecting Transubstantiation may not be believed, to the end of time, by
men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More. But Sir Thomas More
is one of the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue; and the
doctrine of Transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. The faith which
stands that test will stand any test....
"The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observations.
During the last seven centuries the public mind of Europe has made
constant progress in every department of secular knowledge; but in
religion we can trace no constant progress.... Four times since the
authority of the Church of Rome was established in Western Christendom,
has the human intellect risen up against her yoke. Twice that Church
remained completely victorious. Twice she came forth from the conflict
bearing the marks of cruel wounds, but with the principle of life still
strong within her. When we reflect on the tremendous assaults she has
survived, we find it difficult to conceive in what way she is to perish."
* * * * *
You see, gentlemen, if you trust the judgment of a sagacious mind, deeply
read in history, Catholic Theology has nothing to fear from the progress
of Physical Science, even independently of the divinity of its doctrines.
It speaks of things supernatural; and these, by the very force of the
words, research into nature cannot touch.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
PULVIS ET UMBRA[7]
We look for some reward of our endeavors, and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our
ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues
barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The
canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on
the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and
no country where some action is not honored for a virtue and none where it
is not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, and find no
vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness.
It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much.
Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they
are all emasculate and sentimentalized, and only please and weaken. Truth
is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a
bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten
commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints
we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still.
Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things,
and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on
which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry
us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity, which swings the
incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying
inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds
themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH{3} and H{2}O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;
science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable
city for the mind of man.
But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We
behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards
and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,
like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these
we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis
can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can
reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of
fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its
atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumors that become
independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one
splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady
proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used
as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust; and the profusion
of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with
insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner
places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure
spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms;
even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.
In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the
animal and the vegetable; one in some degree the inversion of the other;
the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal
mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects, or towering
into the heavens on the wings of birds; a thing so inconceivable that, if
it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored
vermin, we have little clue; doubtless they have their joys and sorrows,
their delights and killing agonies; it appears not how. But of the
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share
with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the
projection of sound; things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and
reason, by which the present is conceived, and, when it is gone, its image
kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction,
with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the
last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable,
all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces,
cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat:
the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the
desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.
Meanwhile our rotatory island, loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to
the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.
What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated
dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with
hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a
thing to set children screaming; and yet, looked at nearlier, known as his
fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for
so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so
incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely
descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who
should have blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny, and a
being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with
imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often
touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of
right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle
for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with
cordial affection; bringing forth in pain; rearing, with long-suffering
solicitude, his young.
To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to
the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing
to himself, to his neighbor, to his God; an ideal of decency, to which he
would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be
possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity;
here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the
other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their
degrees, it is a bosom thought. Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs
and cats whom we know fairly well; and doubtless some similar point of
honor sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so
little. But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that
merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish; that appetites
are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest
shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all
but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble,
having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and
embrace death. Strange enough, if, with their singular origin and
perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future
life; stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think
this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity.
I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at
large presents: of organized injustice, cowardly violence, and treacherous
crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too
darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right.
But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that
all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching
and inspiriting that, in a field from which success is banished, our race
should not cease to labor.
If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a
thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight he
startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under
what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of
ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality: by camp-fires in
Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his
blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave
opinions like a Roman senator: in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship
and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a
bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that,
simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave
to drown for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future,
with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest
up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the
bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins
him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming
tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the
discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a
fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of
honor and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with
service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches--everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere
some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's
ineffectual goodness. Ah! if I could show you this! if I could show you
these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under
every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope,
without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of
virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of
honor, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet
they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom;
they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of
good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.