The recent address delivered by Professor Tyndall before the British
Association at Belfast, in which he "confessed" that he "prolonged
the vision backward across the boundary of experimental evidence,
and discerned in matter the promise and potency of every quality and
form of life," produced one by no means very surprising result. Dr.
Watts, a professor of theology in the Presbyterian College in that
city, was led by it to offer to read before the Biological Section
of the Association a paper containing a plan of his own for the
establishment of "peace and co-operation between science and
religion." The paper was, as might have been expected, declined. The
author then read it before a large body of religious people, who
apparently liked it, and they passed him a vote of thanks. The whole
religious world, indeed, is greatly excited against both Tyndall and
Huxley for their performances on this occasion, and papers by no
means in sympathy with the religious world--the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
for instance--are very severe on them for having "recourse to a
style of oratory and disquisition more appropriate to the chapel
than the lecture-room," or, in other words, for using the meetings
of the Association for a sort of propagandism not much superior in
method to that of theological missionaries, and thus challenging the
theologians to a conflict which may make it necessary, in the
interest of fair play, to add a theological section to the
Association. Of course, when Professor Tyndall passed "beyond the
boundary of experimental evidence," and began to see with his
"mind's eye" instead of with the microscope and telescope, he got
into a region in which the theologian is not only more at home than
he, but which theology claims as its exclusive domain, and in which
ministers look on physicists as intruders.
But then, Dr. Watts's "plea for peace and co-operation between
science and religion" is one of many signs that theologians are, in
spite of all that has as yet been said, hardly alive to the exact
nature of the attitude they occupy toward science. They evidently
look upon scientific men as they look on a hostile school of
theologians--as the Princeton men look on the Yale men, for
instance, or the New looked on the Old School Presbyterians, or the
Calvinists on the Arminians--that is, as persons having a common
standard of orthodoxy, but differing somewhat in their method of
applying it, and who may, therefore, be induced from considerations
of expediency to suppress all outward marks of divergence and work
together harmoniously for the common end. All schools of theology
seek the glory of God and salvation of souls, and, this being the
case, differences on points of doctrine do seem trifling and capable
of being put aside.
It is this way of regarding the matter which has led Dr. Watts to
propose an alliance between religion and science, and which produces
the arguments one sometimes sees in defence of Christianity against
Positivism, drawn from a consideration of the services which
Christianity has rendered to the race, and of the gloomy and
desolate condition in which its disappearance would leave the world.
Tyndall and Huxley do not, however, occupy the position of religious
prophets or fathers. They preside over no church or other
organization. They have no power or authority to draft any creed or
articles which will bind anybody else, or which would have any
claims on anybody's reverence or adhesion. No person, in short, is
authorized to bring science into an alliance with religion or with
anything else. Such "peace and co-operation" as Dr. Watts proposed
would be peace and co-operation between him and Professor Tyndall,
or between the theologians and the British Association, but "peace
and co-operation between science and religion" is a term which
carries absurdity on its face. Science is simply a body of facts
which lead people familiar with them to infer the existence of
certain laws. How can it, therefore, be either at peace or war with
anybody, or co-operate with anybody? What Professor Tyndall might
promise would be either not to discover any more facts, or to
discover only certain classes of facts, or to draw no inferences
from facts which would be unfavorable to Dr. Watts's theory of the
universe; but the only result of this would be that Tyndall would
lose his place as a scientific man, and others would go on
discovering the facts and drawing the inferences.
In like manner, the supposition that Christianity can be defended
against Positivism on grounds of expediency implies a singular
conception of the mental operations of those persons who are
affected by Positivist theories, and indeed, we might add, of the
thinking world generally. No man believes in a religion simply
because he thinks it useful, and therefore no man's real adhesion to
the Christian creed can be secured by showing him how human
happiness would suffer by its extinction. This argument, if it had
any weight at all, would only induce persons either to pretend to be
Christians when they were not, or to refrain from assailing
Christianity, or to avoid all inquiries which might possibly lead to
sceptical conclusions. It is therefore, perhaps, a good argument to
address to believers, because it may induce them to suppress doubts
and avoid lines of thought or social relations likely to beget
doubt; but it is an utterly futile argument to address to those who
have already lost their faith. Men believe because they are
convinced; it is not in their power to believe from motives of
prudence or from public spirit.
However, the complaints of the theologians excited by Professor
Tyndall's last utterances are not wholly unreasonable. Science has
done nothing hitherto to give it any authority in the region of the
unseen. "Beyond the boundary of experimental evidence" one man's
vision is about as good as another's. It is interesting to know that
Professor Tyndall there "discerns in matter the potency and promise
of every quality and form of life," but only because he is a
distinguished man, who gives much thought to this class of subjects
and occupies a very prominent place in the public eye. As a basis
for belief of any kind, his vision is of no more value than that of
the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would probably in that region
discern the promise and potency of every form of life in a supreme
and creative intelligence. Scientific men are continually pushing
back the limits of our knowledge of the material universe. They have
during the last eighty years made an enormous addition to the sum of
that knowledge, but they have not, since Democritus, taken away one
hair's-breadth from the Mystery which lies behind. In fact, their
labors have in many ways deepened this Mystery. We can appeal
confidently to any candid man to say, for instance, whether Darwin's
theory of the origin of life and the evolution of species does not
make this globe and its inhabitants a problem vastly darker and more
inscrutable than the Mosaic account of the creation. Take, again,
the light thrown on the constitution of the sun by the spectroscope;
it is a marvellous addition to our knowledge of our environment, but
then, does it not make our ignorance as to the origin of the sun
seem deeper? No scientific man pretends that any success in
discovery will ever lead the human mind beyond the resolution of the
number of laws which now seem to govern phenomena into a smaller
number; but if we reached the limit of the possible in that
direction to-morrow, we should be as far from the secret of the
universe as ever. When we have all got to the blank wall which
everybody admits lies at the boundary of experimental evidence, the
philosopher will know no more about what lies beyond than the
peasant, though the peasant will probably do then what he does
now--people it with the creatures of his imagination. If a
philosopher in our day likes to anticipate that period, and hazards
the conjecture that matter lies beyond, he is welcome to his guess,
but it ought to be understood that it is only a guess.
The danger to society from the men of science does not, we imagine,
lie in the direction in which the theologians look for it. We do not
think they need feel particularly troubled by Professor Tyndall's
speculations as to the origin of things, for these speculations are
very old, and have, after all, only a remote connection with human
affairs. But there are signs both in his and Professor Huxley's
methods of popularizing science, and in those of a good many of
their followers, that we may fear the growth of something in the
nature of a scientific priesthood, who, tempted by the great
facilities for addressing the public which our age affords, and to
which nearly every other profession has fallen a victim, will no
longer confine themselves to their laboratories and museums and
scientific journals, but serve as "ministers of nature" before great
crowds of persons, for the most part of small knowledge and limited
capacity, on whom their hints, suggestions, and denunciations will
have a dangerously stimulating effect, particularly as the contempt
of scientific men for what is called "literature"--that is, the
recorded experience of the human race and the recorded expression of
human feelings--grows every year stronger, and exerts more and more
influence on the masses. The number of dabblers in science--of
persons with a slight smattering of chemistry, geology, botany, and
so on--too, promises to be largely increased for some time to come
by the arrangements of one sort or another made by colleges and
schools for scientific education; and though there is reason to
expect from this education a considerable improvement in knowledge
of the art of reasoning, there is also reason to fear a considerable
increase of dogmatic temper, of eagerness for experimentation in all
fields, and of scorn for the experience of persons who have never
worked in the laboratory or done any deep-sea dredging. Now,
whatever views we may hold as to the value of science in general and
in the long run to the human race, and in particular its value for
purposes of legislation and social economy, which we are far from
denying, there is some risk that lectures like Professor Huxley's at
Belfast, dressed up for promiscuous crowds, and produced with the
polite scorn of infallibility, in which the destruction of moral
responsibility is broadly hinted at as one of the probable results
of researches in biology, will do great mischief. For what does it
matter, or rather ought it to matter, for social purposes, in what
part of a man's system his conscience lies, or whether pressure on a
particular portion of the brain may convert him into a thief, when
we know, as of experience, that the establishment of good courts and
police turns a robbers' den into a hive of peaceful industry, and
when we see the wonders which discipline works in an ignorant crowd?