The reader will already have felt that the panzoistic conception of
God-the conception, that is to say, of God as comprising all living
units in His own single person-does not help us to understand the origin
of matter, nor yet that of the primordial cell which has grown and
unfolded itself into the present life of the world. How was the world
rendered fit for the habitation of the first germ of Life? How came it
to have air and water, without which nothing that we know of as living
can exist? Was the world fashioned and furnished with aqueous and
atmospheric adjuncts with a view to the requirements of the infant
monad, and to his due development? If so, we have evidence of design,
and if so of a designer, and if so there must be Some far vaster Person
who looms out behind our God, and who stands in the same relation to him
as he to us. And behind this vaster and more unknown God there may be
yet another, and another, and another.
It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to its own
future requirements. For the world was at one time red hot, and there
can have been no living being upon it. Nor is it conceivable that matter
in which there was no life-inasmuch as it was infinitely hotter than the
hottest infusion which any living germ can support-could gradually come
to be alive without impregnation from a living parent. All living things
that we know of have come from other living things with bodies and
souls, whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite of
their being often too small for our detection. Since, then, the world
was once without life, and since no analogy points in the direction of
thinking that life can spring up spontaneously, we are driven to suppose
that it was introduced into this world from some other source extraneous
to it altogether, and if so we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to
the inquiry whether the source of the life that is in the world-the
impregnator of this earth-may not also have prepared the earth for the
reception of his offspring, as a hen makes an egg-shell or a peach a
stone for the protection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn to
the inquiry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the earth was so
prepared designedly by a Person with body and soul who knew beforehand
the kind of thing he required, and who took the necessary steps to bring
it about.
If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, but we
are not his children; we are children of the Unknown and Vaster God who
called him into existence; and this in a far more literal sense than we
have been in the habit of realising [sic] to ourselves. For it may be
doubted whether the monads are not as truly seminal in character as the
procreative matter from which all animals spring.
It must be remembered that if there is any truth in the view put forward
in "Life and Habit," and in "Evolution Old and New" (and I have met
with no serious attempt to upset the line of argument taken in either
of these books), then no complex animal or plant can reach its full
development without having already gone through the stages of that
development on an infinite number of past occasions. An egg makes itself
into a hen because it knows the way to do so, having already made
itself into a hen millions and millions of times over; the ease and
unconsciousness with which it grows being in themselves sufficient
demonstration of this fact. At each stage in its growth the chicken is
reminded, by a return of the associated ideas, of the next step that it
should take, and it accordingly takes it.
But if this is so, and if also the congeries of all the living forms
in the world must be regarded as a single person, throughout their long
growth from the primordial cell onwards to the present day, then, by
parity of reasoning, the person thus compounded-that is to say, Life or
God-should have already passed through a growth analogous to that which
we find he has taken upon this earth on an infinite number of past
occasions; and the development of each class of life, with its
culmination in the vertebrate animals and in man, should be due to
recollection by God of his having passed through the same stages, or
nearly so, in worlds and universes, which we know of from personal
recollection, as evidenced in the growth and structure of our bodies,
but concerning which we have no other knowledge whatsoever.
So small a space remains to me that I cannot pursue further the
reflections which suggest themselves. A few concluding considerations
are here alone possible.
We know of three great concentric phases of life, and we are not without
reason to suspect a fourth. If there are so many there are very likely
more, but we do not know whether there are or not. The innermost sphere
of life we know of is that of our own cells. These people live in a
world of their own, knowing nothing of us, nor being known by ourselves
until very recently. Yet they can be seen under a microscope; they can
be taken out of us, and may then be watched going here and there in
perturbation of mind, endeavouring [sic] to find something in their
new environment that will suit them, and then dying on finding how
hopelessly different it is from any to which they have been accustomed.
They live in us, and make us up into the single person which we conceive
ourselves to form; we are to them a world comprising an organic and an
inorganic kingdom, of which they consider themselves to be the organic,
and whatever is not very like themselves to be the inorganic. Whether
they are composed of subordinate personalities or not we do not know,
but we have no reason to think that they are, and if we touch ground, so
to speak, with life in the units of which our own bodies are composed,
it is likely that there is a limit also in an upward direction,
though we have nothing whatever to guide us as to where it is, nor any
certainty that there is a limit at all.
We are ourselves the second concentric sphere of life, we being the
constituent cells which unite to form the body of God. Of the third
sphere we know a single member only-the God of this world; but we see
also the stars in heaven, and know their multitude. Analogy points
irresistibly in the direction of thinking that these other worlds are
like our own, begodded and full of life; it also bids us believe that
the God of their world is begotten of one more or less like himself,
and that his growth has followed the same course as that of all other
growths we know of.
If so, he is one of the constituent units of an unknown and vaster
personality who is composed of Gods, as our God is composed of all the
living forms on earth, and as all those living forms are composed of
cells. This is the Unknown God. Beyond this second God we cannot at
present go, nor should we wish to do so, if we are wise. It is no
reproach to a system that it does not profess to give an account of the
origin of things; the reproach rather should lie against a system
which professed to explain it, for we may be well assured that such a
profession would, for the present at any rate, be an empty boast. It is
enough if a system is true as far as it goes; if it throws new light
on old problems, and opens up vistas which reveal a hope of further
addition to our knowledge, and this I believe may be fairly claimed for
the theory of life put forward in "Life and Habit" and "Evolution,
Old and New," and for the corollary insisted upon in these pages; a
corollary which follows logically and irresistibly if the position I
have taken in the above-named books is admitted.
Let us imagine that one of the cells of which we are composed could
attain to a glimmering perception of the manner in which he unites
with other cells, of whom he knows very little, so as to form a greater
compound person of whom he has hitherto known nothing at all. Would he
not do well to content himself with the mastering of this conception,
at any rate for a considerable time? Would it be any just ground of
complaint against him on the part of his brother cells, that he had
failed to explain to them who made the man (or, as he would call it, the
omnipotent deity) whose existence and relations to himself he had just
caught sight of?
But if he were to argue further on the same lines as those on which he
had travelled hitherto, and were to arrive at the conclusion that there
might be other men in the world. besides the one whom he had just
learnt to apprehend, it would be still no refutation or just ground of
complaint against him that he had failed to show the manner in which his
supposed human race had come into existence.
Here our cell would probably stop. He could hardly be expected to arrive
at the existence of animals and plants differing from the human race,
and uniting with that race to form a single Person or God, in the
same way as he has himself united with other cells to form man. The
existence, and much more the roundness of the earth itself, would be
unknown to him, except by way of inference and deduction. The only
universe which he could at all understand would be the body of the man
of whom he was a component part.
How would not such a cell be astounded if all that we know ourselves
could be suddenly revealed to him, so that not only should the vastness
of this earth burst upon his dazzled view, but that of the sun and of
his planets also, and not only these, but the countless other suns which
we may see by night around us. Yet it is probable that an actual being
is hidden from us, which no less transcends the wildest dream of our
theologians than the existence of the heavenly bodies transcends the
perception of our own constituent cells.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's God the Known and God the Unknown, by Samuel Butler