vivum_; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual
ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the evil example set us,
not only by Bacon but by {238} almost all the men of the Renaissance, in
pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate spiritual forefathers, the
schoolmen of the middle ages. It is accepted as a truth which is
indisputable, that, for seven or eight centuries, a long succession of able
men--some of them of transcendent acuteness and encyclopaedic
knowledge--devoted laborious lives to the grave discussion of mere
frivolities and the arduous pursuit of intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To
say nothing of a little modesty, a little impartial pondering over personal
experience might suggest a doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy
method of dealing with a large chapter of the history of the human mind.
Even an acquaintance with popular literature which had extended so far as
to include that part of the contributions of Sam Slick which contains his
weighty aphorism that "there is a great deal of human nature in all
mankind," might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that epoch,
who, take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly in much the
same proportion as ourselves, were likely to display nothing better than
the qualities of energetic idiots, when they devoted their faculties to the
elucidation of problems which were to them, and indeed are to us, the most
serious which life has to offer. Speaking for myself, the longer I live the
more I am disposed to think that there is much less either of pure folly,
or of pure wickedness, in the world than is commonly supposed. It may be
doubted if any sane man ever said to himself, "Evil be thou my good," and I
have never yet had the good fortune to meet with a perfect {239} fool. When
I have brought to the inquiry the patience and long-suffering which become
a scientific investigator, the most promising specimens have turned out to
have a good deal to say for themselves from their own point of view. And,
sometimes, calm reflection has taught the humiliating lesson, that their
point of view was not so different from my own as I had fondly imagined.
Comprehension is more than halfway to sympathy, here as elsewhere.
If we turn our attention to scholastic philosophy in the frame of mind
suggested by these prefatory remarks, it assumes a very different character
from that which it bears in general estimation. No doubt it is surrounded
by a dense thicket of thorny logomachies and obscured by the dust-clouds of
a barbarous and perplexing terminology. But suppose that, undeterred by
much grime and by many scratches, the explorer has toiled through this
jungle, he comes to an open country which is amazingly like his dear native
land. The hills which he has to climb, the ravines he has to avoid, look
very much the same; there is the same infinite space above, and the same
abyss of the unknown below; the means of travelling are the same, and the
goal is the same.
That goal for the schoolmen, as for us, is the settlement of the question
how far the universe is the manifestation of a rational order; in other
words, how far logical deduction from indisputable premisses will account
for that which has happened and does happen. That was the object of
scholasticism, and, so far as I am aware, the object of modern science may
be {240} expressed in the same terms. In pursuit of this end, modern
science takes into account all the phenomena of the universe which are
brought to our knowledge by observation or by experiment. It admits that
there are two worlds to be considered, the one physical and the other
psychical; and that though there is a most intimate relation and
interconnection between the two, the bridge from one to the other has yet
to be found; that their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two
parallel lines.
To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a different
aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless we clearly
apprehend the fact that they did really believe in dogmatic Christianity as
it was formulated by the Roman Church. They did not give a mere dull assent
to anything the Church told them on Sundays, and ignore her teachings for
the rest of the week; but they lived and moved and had their being in that
supersensible theological world which was created, or rather grew up,
during the first four centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their
thoughts far more than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was
cast.
For the most part, we learn history from the colourless compendiums or
partisan briefs of mere scholars, who have too little acquaintance with
practical life, and too little insight into speculative problems, to
understand that about which they write. In historical science, as in all
sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory practice is
indispensable; and the laboratory practice of historical science is {241}
afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political life, and, on the
other, by the study of those tendencies and operations of the mind which
embody themselves in philosophical and theological systems. Thucydides and
Tacitus, and, to come nearer our own time, Hume and Grote, were men of
affairs, and had acquired, by direct contact with social and political
history in the making, the secret of understanding how such history is
made. Our notions of the intellectual history of the middle ages are,
unfortunately, too often derived from writers who have never seriously
grappled with philosophical and theological problems: and hence that
strange myth of a millennium of moonshine to which I have adverted.
However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers who,
without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy, were
learned and enlightened--such men, for example, as Eginhard or Dante--is
necessary to convince oneself that, for them, the world of the theologian
was an ever-present and awful reality. From the centre of that world, the
Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of angels and saints,
contemplated and governed the insignificant sensible world in which the
inferior spirits of men, burdened with the debasement of their material
embodiment and continually solicited to their perdition by a no less
numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy of devils, were constantly
struggling on the edge of the pit of everlasting damnation.[63]
{242}
The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, the
traditions of the Fathers, and the authority of the Church, they were in
possession of far more, and more trustworthy, information with respect to
the nature and order of things in the theological world than they had in
regard to the nature and order of things in the sensible world. And, if the
two sources of information came into conflict, so much the worse for the
sensible world, which, after all, was more or less under the dominion of
Satan. Let us suppose that a telescope powerful enough to show us what is
going on in the nebula of the sword of Orion, should reveal a world in
which stones fell upwards, parallel lines met, and the fourth dimension of
space was quite obvious. Men of science would have only two {243}
alternatives before them. Either the terrestrial and the nebular facts must
be brought into harmony by such feats of subtle sophistry as the human mind
is always capable of performing when driven into a corner; or science must
throw down its arms in despair, and commit suicide, either by the admission
that the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as that which is
truth in one corner of it is absurdity in another, or by a declaration of
incompetency.
In the middle ages, the labours of those great men who endeavoured to
reconcile the system of thought which started from the data of pure reason,
with that which started from the data of Roman theology, produced the
system of thought which is known as scholastic philosophy; the alternative
of surrender and suicide is exemplified by Avicenna and his followers when
they declared that that which is true in theology may be false in
philosophy, and _vice versa_; and by Sanchez in his famous defence of the
thesis "_Quod nil scitur_."
To those who deny the validity of one of the primary assumptions of the
disputants--who decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency of the
evidence, to put faith in the reality of that other world, the geography
and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in the
so-called[64] Christianity of Catholicism--the long and bitter contest,
which {244} engaged the best intellects for so many centuries, may seem a
terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle for
existence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in that of
matter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the history of
scholasticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of our race
as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought
their eternal no less than their temporal interests were at stake, could
have done. When a logical blunder may ensure combustion, not only in the
next world but in this, the construction of syllogisms acquires a peculiar
interest. Moreover, the schools kept the thinking faculty alive and active,
when the disturbed state of civil life, the mephitic atmosphere engendered
by the dominant ecclesiasticism, and the almost total neglect of natural
knowledge, might well have stifled it. And, finally, it should be
remembered that scholasticism really did thresh out pretty effectually
certain problems which have presented themselves to mankind ever since they
began to think, and which, I suppose, will present themselves so long as
they continue to think. Consider, for example, the controversy of the
Realists and the Nominalists, which was carried on with varying fortunes,
and under various names, from the time of Scotus Erigena to the end of the
scholastic period. Has it now a merely antiquarian interest? Has
Nominalism, in any of its modifications, so completely won the day that
Realism may be regarded as dead and buried without hope of resurrection?
{245} Many people seem to think so, but it appears to me that, without
taking Catholic philosophy into consideration, one has not to look about
far to find evidence that Realism is still to the fore, and indeed
extremely lively.[65]
The other day I happened to meet with a report of a sermon recently
preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. From internal evidence I am inclined to
think that the report is substantially correct. But as I have not the
slightest intention of finding fault with the eminent theologian and
eloquent preacher to whom the discourse is attributed, for employment of
scientific language in a manner for which he could find only too many
scientific precedents, the accuracy of the report in detail is not to the
purpose. I may safely take it as the embodiment of views which are thought
to be quite in accordance with science by many excellent, instructed, and
intelligent people.
The preacher further contended that it was yet more difficult to
realise that our earthly home would become the scene of a vast physical
catastrophe. Imagination recoils from the idea that the {246} course of
nature--the phrase helps to disguise the truth--so unvarying and
regular, the ordered sequence of movement and life, should suddenly
cease. Imagination looks more reasonable when it assumes the air of
scientific reason. Physical law, it says, will prevent the occurrence
of catastrophes only anticipated by an apostle in an unscientific age.
Might not there, however, be a suspension of a lower law by the
intervention of a higher? Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied
the laws of gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws
were held in check by others. The flood and the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah were brought about by the operations of existing laws, and
may it not be that in His illimitable universe there are more important
laws than those which surround our puny life--moral and not merely
physical forces? Is it inconceivable that the day will come when these
royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order of things which
seems so stable and so fair? Earthquakes were not things of remote
antiquity, as an island off Italy, the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and
Chicago bore witness.... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how
powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their weakness.
The end of human probation, the final dissolution of organised society,
and the destruction of man's home on the surface of the globe, were
none of them violently contrary to our present experience, but only the
extension of present facts. The presentiment of death was common; there
were felt to be many things which threatened the existence of society;
and as our globe was a ball of fire, at any moment the pent-up forces
which surge and boil beneath our feet might be poured out (_Pall Mall
Gazette_, December 6, 1886).
The preacher appears to entertain the notion that the occurrence of a
"catastrophe"[66] involves a breach of the present order of nature--that it
is an event incompatible with the physical laws which at present {247}
obtain. He seems to be of opinion that "scientific reason" lends its
authority to the imaginative supposition that physical law will prevent the
occurrence of the "catastrophes" anticipated by an unscientific apostle.
Scientific reason, like Homer, sometimes nods; but I am not aware that it
has ever dreamed dreams of this sort. The fundamental axiom of scientific
thought is that there is not, never has been, and never will be, any
disorder in nature. The admission of the occurrence of any event which was
not the logical consequence of the immediately antecedent events, according
to these definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules which we call the
"laws of nature," would be an act of self-destruction on the part of
science.
"Catastrophe" is a relative conception. For ourselves it means an event
which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or impresses his mind
by its magnitude relatively to him. But events which are quite in the
natural order of things to us, may be frightful catastrophes to other
sentient beings. Surely no interruption of the order of nature is involved
if, in the course of descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an
anthill and in a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a hundred thousand
of its inhabitants. To the ants the catastrophe is worse than the
earthquake of Lisbon. To me it is the natural and necessary consequence of
the laws of matter in motion. A redistribution of energy has taken place,
which is perfectly in accordance with natural order, however unpleasant its
effects may be to the ants. {248}
Imagination, inspired by scientific reason, and not merely assuming the
airs thereof, as it unfortunately too often does in the pulpit, so far from
having any right to repudiate catastrophes and deny the possibility of the
cessation of motion and life, easily finds justification for the exactly
contrary course. Kant in his famous _Theory of the Heavens_ declares the
end of the world and its reduction to a formless condition to be a
necessary consequence of the causes to which it owes its origin and
continuance. And, as to catastrophes of prodigious magnitude and frequent
occurrence, they were the favourite _asylum ignorantiae_ of geologists, not
a quarter of a century ago. If modern geology is becoming more and more
disinclined to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any _a
priori_ difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with the
universality of order, but because the _a posteriori_ evidence of the
occurrence of events of this character in past times has more or less
completely broken down.
It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of
extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the hot
interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness. It is no
less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and fractures,
everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and slow movements
through miles of elevation and depression, and its small and rapid
movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived and unperceived
earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to the {249} shrinkage
of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus.
Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, conditions are
easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more rapid than
it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as much in
accordance with ascertained laws of nature as the more rapid cooling of a
redhot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when it remains in the
air. But much more rapid cooling might entail a shifting and rearrangement
of the parts of the crust of the earth on a scale of unprecedented
magnitude, and bring about "catastrophes" to which the earthquake of Lisbon
is but a trifle. It is conceivable that man and his works and all the
higher forms of animal life should be utterly destroyed; that mountain
regions should be converted into ocean depths and the floor of oceans
raised into mountains; and the earth become a scene of horror which even
the lurid fancy of the writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And
yet, to the eye of science, there would be no more disorder here than in
the Sabbatical peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of natural
causes and effects would be broken, nowhere would there be the slightest
indication of the "suspension of a lower law by a higher." If a sober
scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild
vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than the
seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a revengeful
fanatic rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid men love {250}
their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict scientific
principles; but because the evidence of their scientific value does not
fulfil the conditions on which weight is attached to evidence. The
imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not "assume the air of
scientific reason."
I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by
science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect
intellectual and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for
suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost powers
to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him to be a sort
of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of time, a new
arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry would present itself;
and each of them would show itself to be the logical consequence of the
preceding arrangement, under the conditions which we call the laws of
nature. Such a spectator might well be filled with that _Amor
intellectualis Dei_, the beatific vision of the _vita contemplativa_, which
some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza,
have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of
illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules
which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the
prospect to us poor mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord
of all, and disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us
pain.
The other fallacious employment of the names of {251} scientific
conceptions which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the
proper topic of the present paper. It is the use of the word "law" as if it
denoted a thing--as if a "law of nature," as science understands it, were a
being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the phenomena
expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher asks, "Might not
there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?" He
tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the law of gravitation.
He asks whether some day certain "royal and ultimate laws" may not come and
"wreck" those laws which are at present, it would appear, acting as
nature's police. It is evident, from these expressions, that "laws," in the
mind of the preacher, are entities having an objective existence in a
graduated hierarchy. And it would appear that the "royal laws" are by no
means to be regarded as constitutional royalties: at any moment, they may,
like Eastern despots, descend in wrath among the middle-class and plebeian
laws, which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and, to
use phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning--"make hay" of their
belongings. Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has suggested this
singular theory; and it is thought that high laws may "suspend" low laws,
as a bishop may suspend a curate.
Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to hold them.
All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the nature of "laws" has
nothing to do with modern science. It is scholastic {252} realism--realism
as intense and unmitigated as that of Scotus Erigena a thousand years ago.
The essence of such realism is that it maintains the objective existence of
universals, or, as we call them nowadays, general propositions. It affirms,
for example, that "man" is a real thing, apart from individual men, having
its existence, not in the sensible, but in the intelligible world, and
clothing itself with the accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and
Harry whom we know. Strange as such a notion may appear to modern
scientific thought, it really pervades ordinary language. There are few
people who would, at once, hesitate to admit that colour, for example,
exists apart from the mind which conceives the idea of colour. They hold it
to be something which resides in the coloured object; and so far they are
as much Realists as if they had sat at Plato's feet. Reflection on the
facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that "colour" is--not
a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist position--but a name for that
group of states of feeling which we call blue, red, yellow, and so on, and
which we believe to be caused by luminiferous vibrations which have not the
slightest resemblance to colour; while these again are set afoot by states
of the body to which we ascribe colour, but which are equally devoid of
likeness to colour.
In the same way, a law of nature, in the scientific sense, is the product
of a mental operation upon the facts of nature which come under our
observation, and has no more existence outside the mind than {253} colour
has. The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner in which
experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in fact, move
towards one another. But the other facts of observation, that bodies are
not always moving in this fashion, and sometimes move in a contrary
direction, are implied in the words "free to move." If it is a law of
nature that bodies tend to move towards one another in a certain way; it is
another and no less true law of nature that, if bodies are not free to move
as they tend to do, either in consequence of an obstacle, or of a contrary
impulse from some other source of energy than that to which we give the
name of gravitation, they either stop still, or go another way.
Scientifically speaking, it is the acme of absurdity to talk of a man
defying the law of gravitation when he lifts his arm. The general store of
energy in the universe working through terrestrial matter is doubtless
tending to bring the man's arm down; but the particular fraction of that
energy which is working through certain of his nervous and muscular organs
is tending to drive it up, and more energy being expended on the arm in the
upward than in the downward direction, the arm goes up accordingly. But the
law of gravitation is no more defied in this case than when a grocer throws
so much sugar into the empty pan of his scales that the one which contains
the weight kicks the beam.
The tenacity of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are agents,
instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, upon
which we {254} base our interpretations of that which does happen, and our
anticipation of that which will happen, is an interesting psychological
fact; and would be unintelligible if the tendency of the human mind towards
realism were less strong.