'Subjected to the test of mental presentation (_Vorstellung_), your
views, most honoured prelate, would present to many minds a great, if
not an insuperable difficulty. You speak of "living powers,"
"percipient or perceiving powers," and "ourselves;" but can you form
a mental picture of any one of these apart from the organism through
which it is supposed to act? Test yourself honestly, and see whether
you possess any faculty that would enable you to form such a
conception. The true self has a local habitation in each of us; thus
localized, must it not possess a form? If so, what form? Have you
ever for a moment realized it? When a leg is amputated the body is
divided into two parts; is the true self in both of them or in one?
Thomas Aquinas might say in both; but not you, for you appeal to the
consciousness associated with one of the two parts to prove that the
other is foreign matter. Is consciousness, then, a necessary element
of the true self? If so, what do you say to the case of the whole
body being deprived of consciousness? If not, then on what grounds
do you deny any portion of the true self to the severed limb? It
seems very singular that, from the beginning to the end of your
admirable book (and no one admires its sober strength more than I
do), you never once mention the brain or nervous system. You begin
at one end of the body, and show that its parts may be removed
without prejudice to the perceiving power. What if you begin at the
other end, and remove, instead of the leg, the brain? The body, as
before, is divided into two parts; but both are now in the same
predicament, and neither can be appealed to to prove that the other
is foreign matter. Or, instead of going so far as to remove the
brain itself, let a certain portion of its bony covering be removed,
and let a rhythmic series of pressures and relaxations of pressure be
applied to the soft substance. At every pressure "the faculties of
perception and of action" vanish; at every relaxation of pressure
they are restored. Where, during the intervals of pressure, is the
perceiving power? I once had the discharge of a large Leyden battery
passed unexpectedly through me: I felt nothing, but was simply
blotted out of conscious existence for a sensible interval. Where
was my true self during that interval? Men who have recovered from
lightning-stroke have been much longer in the same state; and indeed
in cases of ordinary concussion of the brain, days may elapse during
which no experience is registered in consciousness. Where is the man
himself during the period of insensibility? You may say that I beg
the question when I assume the man to have been unconscious, that he
was really conscious all the time, and has simply forgotten what had
occurred to him. In reply to this, I can only say that no one need
shrink from the worst tortures that superstition ever invented if
only so felt and so remembered. I do not think your theory of
instruments goes at all to the bottom of the matter. A
telegraph-operator has his instruments, by means of which he
converses with the world; our bodies possess a nervous system, which
plays a similar part between the perceiving power and external
things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery,
demagnetize his needle: by this means you certainly sever his
connexion with the world; but inasmuch as these are real instruments,
their destruction does not touch the man who uses them. The operator
survives, _and he knows that he survives_. What is it, I would ask,
in the human system that answers to this conscious survival of the
operator when the battery of the brain is so disturbed as to produce
insensibility, or when it is destroyed altogether?
'Another consideration, which you may consider slight, presses upon
me with some force. The brain may change from health to disease, and
through such a change the most exemplary man may be converted into a
debauchee or a murderer. My very noble and approved good master had,
as you know, threatenings of lewdness introduced into his brain by
his jealous wife's philter; and sooner than permit himself to run
even the risk of yielding to these base promptings he slew himself.
How could the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself
if the real Lucretius remained as before? Can the brain or can it
not act in this distempered way without the intervention of the
immortal reason? If it can, then it is a prime mover which requires
only healthy regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, and
there is no apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it
cannot, then the immortal reason, by its mischievous activity in
operating upon a broken instrument, must have the credit of
committing every imaginable extravagance and crime. I think, if you
will allow me to say so, that the gravest consequences are likely to
flow from your estimate of the body. To regard the brain as you
would a staff or an eyeglass--to shut your eyes to all its mystery,
to the perfect correlation of its condition and our consciousness, to
the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces the
very swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to it our meat
and drink and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value
and significance--to forget all this does, I think, open a way to
innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in some
cases initiate and foster that very disease, and consequent mental
ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious organ would have
avoided.'
I can imagine the Bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument. He
was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the consideration of a
point of this kind. After due reflection, and having strengthened
himself by that honest contemplation of the facts which was habitual
with him, and which includes the desire to give even adverse facts
their due weight, I can suppose the Bishop to proceed thus:--'You
will remember that in the "Analogy of Religion," of which you have so
kindly spoken, I did not profess to prove anything absolutely, and
that I over and over again acknowledged and insisted on the smallness
of our knowledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as regards
the whole system of the universe. My object was to show my deistical
friends, who set forth so eloquently the beauty and beneficence of
Nature and the Ruler thereof, while they had nothing but scorn for
the so-called absurdities of the Christian scheme, that they were in
no better condition than we were, and that, for every difficulty
found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty was to be found upon
theirs. I will now, with your permission, adopt a similar line of
argument. You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and
separation of insensate atoms deduce all terrestrial things,
including organic forms and their phenomena. Let me tell you, in the
first instance, how far I am prepared to go with you. I admit that
you can build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force;
that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly wonderful
structures which are thus produced. I will go further and
acknowledge that even a tree or flower might in this way be
organized. Nay, if you can show me an animal without sensation, I
will concede to you that it also might be put together by the
suitable play of molecular force.
'Thus far our way is clear; but now comes my difficulty. Your atoms
are individually without sensation, much more are they without
intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this
problem? Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your
dead carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus
atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the
brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless, observe
them running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This,
as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you
see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act,
and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and
emotion are to arise? Are you likely to extract Homer out of the
rattling of dice, or the Differential Calculus out of the clash of
billiard-balls? I am not all bereft of this Vorstellungs-Kraft of
which you speak, nor am I, like so many of my brethren, a mere vacuum
as regards scientific knowledge. I can follow a particle of musk
until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can follow the waves of sound
until their tremors reach the water of the labyrinth and set the
otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can also visualize the waves
of ether as they cross the eye and hit the retina. Nay more, I am
able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the
periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of the brain thrown
into tremors. My insight is not baffled by these physical processes.
What baffles and bewilders me, is the notion that from those physical
tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation,
thought, and emotion can be derived. You may say, or think, that
this issue of consciousness from the clash of atoms is not more
incongruous than the flash of light from the union of oxygen and
hydrogen. But I beg to say that it is. For such incongruity as the
flash possesses is that which I now force upon your attention. The
flash is an affair of consciousness, the objective counterpart of
which is a vibration. It is a flash only by your interpretation.
You are the cause of the apparent incongruity, and you are the thing
that puzzles me. I need not remind you that the great Leibnitz felt
the difficulty which I feel, and that to get rid of this monstrous
deduction of life from death he displaced your atoms by his monads,
which were more or less perfect mirrors of the universe, and out of
the summation and integration of which he supposed all the phenomena
of life--sentient, intellectual, and emotional--to arise.
'Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is quite as
great as mine. You cannot satisfy the human understanding in its
demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the
phenomena of consciousness. This is a rock on which materialism must
inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of
life. What is the moral, my Lucretian? You and I are not likely to
indulge in ill-temper in the discussion of these great topics, where
we see so much room for honest differences of opinion. But there are
people of less wit or more bigotry (I say it with humility) on both
sides, who are ever ready to mingle anger and vituperation with such
discussions. There are, for example, writers of note and influence
at the present day who are not ashamed to assume the "deep personal
sin" of a great logician to be the cause of his unbelief in a
theologic dogma. And there are others who hold that we, who cherish
our noble Bible, wrought as it has been into the constitution of our
forefathers, and by inheritance into us, must necessarily be
hypocritical and insincere. Let us disavow and discountenance such
people, cherishing the unswerving faith that what is good and true in
both our arguments will be preserved for the benefit of humanity,
while all that is bad or false will disappear.'
I hold the Bishop's reasoning to be unanswerable, and his liberality
to be worthy of imitation.
It is worth remarking that in one respect the Bishop was a product of
his age. Long previous to his day the nature of the soul had been so
favourite and general a topic of discussion, that, when the students
of the University of Paris wished to know the leanings of a new
Professor, they at once requested him to lecture upon the soul.
About the time of Bishop Butler the question was not only agitated
but extended. It was seen by the clear-witted men who entered this
arena that many of their best arguments applied equally to brutes and
men. The Bishop's arguments were of this character. He saw it,
admitted it, accepted the consequences, and boldly embraced the whole
animal world in his scheme of immortality.
Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology of the
Old Testament, describing it as 'confirmed by the natural and civil
history of the world, collected from common historians, from the
state of the earth, and from the late inventions of arts and
sciences.' These words mark progress; and they must seem somewhat
hoary to the Bishop's successors of to-day.[15] It is hardly
necessary to inform you that since his time the domain of the
naturalist has been immensely extended--the whole science of geology,
with its astounding revelations regarding the life of the ancient
earth, having been created. The rigidity of old conceptions has been
relaxed, the public mind being rendered gradually tolerant of the
idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six
thousand thousand thousand, but for æons embracing untold millions of
years, this earth has been the theatre of life and death. The riddle
of the rocks has been read by the geologist and palæontologist, from
subcambrian depths to the deposits thickening over the sea-bottoms of
to-day. And upon the leaves of that stone book are, as you know,
stamped the characters, plainer and surer than those formed by the
ink of history, which carry the mind back into abysses of past time
compared with which the periods which satisfied Bishop Butler cease
to have a visual angle. The lode of discovery once struck, those
petrified forms in which life was at one time active increased to
multitudes and demanded classification. They were grouped in genera,
species, and varieties, according to the degree of similarity
subsisting between them. Thus confusion was avoided, each object
being found in the pigeon-hole appropriated to it and to its fellows
of similar morphological or physiological character. The general
fact soon became evident that none but the simplest forms of life lie
lowest down, that as we climb higher among the super-imposed strata
more perfect forms appear. The change, however, from form to form
was not continuous, but by steps--some small, some great. 'A
section,' says Mr. Huxley, 'a hundred feet thick will exhibit at
different heights a dozen species of Ammonite, none of which passes
beyond its particular zone of limestone, or clay, into the zone below
it, or into that above it.' In the presence of such facts it was not
possible to avoid the question:--Have these forms, showing, though in
broken stages and with many irregularities, this unmistakable general
advance, been subjected to no continuous law of growth or variation?
Had our education been purely scientific, or had it been sufficiently
detached from influences which, however ennobling in another domain,
have always proved hindrances and delusions when introduced as
factors into the domain of physics, the scientific mind never could
have swerved from the search for a law of growth, or allowed itself
to accept the anthropomorphism which regarded each successive stratum
as a kind of mechanic's bench for the manufacture of new species out
of all relation to the old.
Biassed, however, by their previous education, the great majority of
naturalists invoked a special creative act to account for the
appearance of each new group of organisms. Doubtless there were
numbers who were clear-headed enough to see that this was no
explanation at all, that in point of fact it was an attempt, by the
introduction of a greater difficulty, to account for a less. But
having nothing to offer in the way of explanation, they for the most
part held their peace. Still the thoughts of reflecting men
naturally and necessarily simmered round the question. De Maillet, a
contemporary of Newton, has been brought into notice by Professor
Huxley as one who 'had a notion of the modifiability of living
forms.' In my frequent conversations with him, the late Sir Benjamin
Brodie, a man of highly philosophic mind, often drew my attention to
the fact that, as early as 1794, Charles Darwin's grandfather was the
pioneer of Charles Darwin.[16] In 1801, and in subsequent years, the
celebrated Lamarck, who produced so profound an impression on the
public mind through the vigorous exposition of his views by the
author of the 'Vestiges of Creation,' endeavoured to show the
development of species out of changes of habit and external
condition. In 1813 Dr. Wells, the founder of our present theory of
Dew, read before the Royal Society a paper in which, to use the words
of Mr. Darwin, 'he distinctly recognises the principle of natural
selection; and this is the first recognition that has been
indicated.' The thoroughness and skill with which Wells pursued his
work, and the obvious independence of his character, rendered him
long ago a favourite with me; and it gave me the liveliest pleasure
to alight upon this additional testimony to his penetration.
Professor Grant, Mr. Patrick Matthew, Von Buch, the author of the
'Vestiges,' D'Halloy, and others,[17] by the enunciation of opinions
more or less clear and correct, showed that the question had been
fermenting long prior to the year 1858, when Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Wallace simultaneously but independently placed their closely
concurrent views upon the subject before the Linnean Society.
These papers were followed in 1859 by the publication of the first
edition of 'The Origin of Species.' All great things come slowly to
the birth. Copernicus, as I informed you, pondered his great work
for thirty-three years. Newton for nearly twenty years kept the idea
of Gravitation before his mind; for twenty years also he dwelt upon
his discovery of Fluxions, and doubtless would have continued to make
it the object of his private thought had he not found that Leibnitz
was upon his track. Darwin for two and twenty years pondered the
problem of the origin of species, and doubtless he would have
continued to do so had he not found Wallace upon his track.[18] A
concentrated but full and powerful epitome of his labours was the
consequence. The book was by no means an easy one; and probably not
one in every score of those who then attacked it had read its pages
through, or were competent to grasp their significance if they had.
I do not say this merely to discredit them; for there were in those
days some really eminent scientific men, entirely raised above the
heat of popular prejudice, willing to accept any conclusion that
science had to offer, provided it was duly backed by fact and
argument, and who entirely mistook Mr. Darwin's views. In fact, the
work needed an expounder; and it found one in Mr. Huxley. I know
nothing more admirable in the way of scientific exposition than those
early articles of his on the origin of species. He swept the curve
of discussion through the really significant points of the subject,
enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and
reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument
which a less compact mind would have spread over pages. But there is
one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it,
however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression of the vast
amount of labour, both of observation and of thought, implied in its
production. Let us glance at its principles.
It is conceded on all hands that what are called varieties are
continually produced. The rule is probably without exception. No
chick and no child is in all respects and particulars the counterpart
of its brother and sister; and in such differences we have 'variety'
incipient. No naturalist could tell how far this variation could be
carried; but the great mass of them held that never by any amount of
internal or external change, nor by the mixture of both, could the
offspring of the same progenitor so far deviate from each other as to
constitute different species. The function of the experimental
philosopher is to combine the conditions of nature and to produce her
results; and this was the method of Darwin.[19] He made himself
acquainted with what could, without any manner of doubt, be done in
the way of producing variation. He associated himself with
pigeon-fanciers--bought, begged, kept, and observed every breed that
he could obtain. Though derived from a common stock, the diversities
of these pigeons were such that 'a score of them might be chosen
which, if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were
wild birds, would certainly be ranked by him as well-defined
species.' The simple principle which guides the pigeon-fancier, as
it does the cattle-breeder, is the selection of some variety that
strikes his fancy, and the propagation of this variety by
inheritance. With his eye still directed to the particular
appearance which he wishes to exaggerate, he selects it as it
reappears in successive broods, and thus adds increment to increment
until an astonishing amount of divergence from the parent type is
effected. The breeder in this case does not produce the elements of
the variation. He simply observes them, and by selection adds them
together until the required result has been obtained. 'No man,' says
Mr. Darwin, 'would ever try to make a fantail till he saw a pigeon
with a tail developed in some slight degree in an unusual manner, or
a pouter until he saw a pigeon with a crop of unusual size.' Thus
nature gives the hint, man acts upon it, and by the law of
inheritance exaggerates the deviation.
Having thus satisfied himself by indubitable facts that the
organization of an animal or of a plant (for precisely the same
treatment applies to plants) is to some extent plastic, he passes
from variation under domestication to variation under nature.
Hitherto we have dealt with the adding together of small changes by
the conscious selection of man. Can Nature thus select? Mr.
Darwin's answer is, 'Assuredly she can.' The number of living things
produced is far in excess of the number that can be supported; hence
at some period or other of their lives there must be a struggle for
existence; and what is the infallible result? If one organism were a
perfect copy of the other in regard to strength, skill, and agility,
external conditions would decide. But this is not the case. Here we
have the fact of variety offering itself to nature, as in the former
instance it offered itself to man; and those varieties which are
least competent to cope with surrounding conditions will infallibly
give way to those that are most competent. To use a familiar
proverb, the weakest comes to the wall. But the triumphant fraction
again breeds to overproduction, transmitting the qualities which
secured its maintenance, but transmitting them in different degrees.
The struggle for food again supervenes, and those to whom the
favourable quality has been transmitted in excess will assuredly
triumph. It is easy to see that we have here the addition of
increments favourable to the individual still more rigorously carried
out than in the case of domestication; for not only are unfavourable
specimens not selected by nature, but they are destroyed. This is
what Mr. Darwin calls 'Natural Selection,' which 'acts by the
preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each
profitable to the preserved being.' With this idea he
interpenetrates and leavens the vast store of facts that he and
others have collected. We cannot, without shutting our eyes through
fear or prejudice, fail to see that Darwin is here dealing, not with
imaginary, but with true causes; nor can we fail to discern what vast
modifications may be produced by natural selection in periods
sufficiently long. Each individual increment may resemble what
mathematicians call a 'differential' (a quantity indefinitely small);
but definite and great changes may obviously be produced by the
integration of these infinitesimal quantities through practically
infinite time.
If Darwin, like Bruno, rejects the notion of creative power acting
after human fashion, it certainly is not because he is unacquainted
with the numberless exquisite adaptations on which this notion of a
supernatural artificer has been founded. His book is a repository of
the most startling facts of this description. Take the marvellous
observation which he cites from Dr. Crüger, where a bucket with an
aperture, serving as a spout, is formed in an orchid. Bees visit the
flower: in eager search of material for their combs they push each
other into the bucket, the drenched ones escaping from their
involuntary bath by the spout. Here they rub their backs against the
viscid stigma of the flower and obtain glue; then against the
pollen-masses, which are thus stuck to the back of the bee and
carried away. 'When the bee, so provided, flies to another flower,
or to the same flower a second time, and is pushed by its comrades
into the bucket, and then crawls out by the passage, the pollen-mass
upon its back necessarily comes first into contact with the viscid
stigma,' which takes up the pollen; and this is how that orchid is
fertilized. Or take this other case of the _Catasetum_. 'Bees visit
these flowers in order to gnaw the labellum; in doing this they
inevitably touch a long, tapering, sensitive projection. This, when
touched, transmits a sensation or vibration to a certain membrane,
which is instantly ruptured, setting free a spring, by which the
pollen-mass is shot forth like an arrow in the right direction, and
adheres by its viscid extremity to the back of the bee.' In this way
the fertilising pollen is spread abroad.
It is the mind thus stored with the choicest materials of the
teleologist that rejects teleology, seeking to refer these wonders to
natural cases. They illustrate, according to him, the method of
nature, not the 'technic' of a man-like Artificer. The beauty of
flowers is due to natural selection. Those that distinguish
themselves by vividly contrasting colours from the surrounding green
leaves are most readily seen, most frequently visited by insects,
most often fertilized, and hence most favoured by natural selection.
Coloured berries also readily attract the attention of birds and
beasts, which feed upon them, spread their manured seeds abroad, thus
giving trees and shrubs possessing such berries a greater chance in
the struggle for existence.
With profound analytic and synthetic skill, Mr. Darwin investigates
the cell-making instinct of the hive-bee. His method of dealing with
it is representative. He falls back from the more perfectly to the
less perfectly developed instinct--from the hive-bee to the humble
bee, which uses its own cocoon as a comb, and to classes of bees of
intermediate skill, endeavouring to show how the passage might be
gradually made from the lowest to the highest. The saving of wax is
the most important point in the economy of bees. Twelve to fifteen
pounds of dry sugar are said to be needed for the secretion of a
single pound of wax. The quantities of nectar necessary for the wax
must therefore be vast; and every improvement of constructive
instinct which results in the saving of wax is a direct profit to the
insect's life. The time that would otherwise be devoted to the
making of wax is now devoted to the gathering and storing of honey
for winter food. He passes from the humble bee with its rude cells,
through the Melipona with its more artistic cells, to the hive-bee
with its astonishing architecture. The bees place themselves at
equal distances apart upon the wax, sweep and excavate equal spheres
round the selected points. The spheres intersect, and the planes of
intersection are built up with thin laminæ. Hexagonal cells are thus
formed. This mode of treating such questions is, as I have said,
representative. He habitually retires from the more perfect and
complex to the less perfect and simple, and carries you with him
through stages of perfecting, adds increment to increment of
infinitesimal change, and in this way gradually breaks down your
reluctance to admit that the exquisite climax of the whole could be a
result of natural selection.
Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty; and, saturated as the subject was
with his own thought, he must have known better than his critics the
weakness as well as the strength of his theory. This of course would
be of little avail were his object a temporary dialectic victory
instead of the establishment of a truth which he means to be
ever-lasting. But he takes no pains to disguise the weakness he has
discerned; nay, he takes every pains to bring it into the strongest
light. His vast resources enable him to cope with objections started
by himself and others, so as to leave the final impression upon the
reader's mind that, if they be not completely answered, they
certainly are not fatal. Their negative force being thus destroyed,
you are free to be influenced by the vast positive mass of evidence
he is able to bring before you. This largeness of knowledge and
readiness of resource render Mr. Darwin the most terrible of
antagonists. Accomplished naturalists have levelled heavy and
sustained criticisms against him--not always with the view of fairly
weighing his theory, but with the express intention of exposing its
weak points only. This does not irritate him. He treats every
objection with a soberness and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler
might be proud to imitate, surrounding each fact with its appropriate
detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a
significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to
appear. This is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over
the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the
grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the
logical pulverization of the objector.
But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been
stilled, there is an emotion of the intellect incident to the
discernment of new truth which often colours and warms the pages of
Mr. Darwin. His success has been great; and this implies not only
the solidity of his work, but the preparedness of the public mind for
such a revelation. On this head a remark of Agassiz impressed me
more than anything else. Sprung from a race of theologians, this
celebrated man combated to the last the theory of natural selection.
One of the many times I had the pleasure of meeting him in the United
States was at Mr. Winthrop's beautiful residence at Brookline, near
Boston. Rising from luncheon, we all halted as if by a common
impulse in front of a window, and continued there a discussion which
had been started at table. The maple was in its autumn glory; and
the exquisite beauty of the scene outside seemed, in my case, to
interpenetrate without disturbance the intellectual action.
Earnestly, almost sadly, Agassiz turned, and said to the gentlemen
standing round, 'I confess that I was not prepared to see this theory
received as it has been by the best intellects of our time. Its
success is greater than I could have thought possible.'
In our day grand generalizations have been reached. The theory of
the origin of species is but one of them. Another, of still wider
grasp and more radical significance, is the doctrine of the
Conservation of Energy, the ultimate philosophical issues of which
are as yet but dimly seen--that doctrine which 'binds nature fast in
fate' to an extent not hitherto recognized, exacting from every
antecedent its equivalent consequent, from every consequent its
equivalent antecedent, and bringing vital as well as physical
phenomena under the dominion of that law of causal connexion which,
so far as the human understanding has yet pierced, asserts itself
everywhere in nature. Long in advance of all definite experiment
upon the subject, the constancy and indestructibility of matter had
been affirmed; and all subsequent experience justified the
affirmation. Later researches extended the attribute of
indestructibility to force. This idea, applied in the first instance
to inorganic, rapidly embraced organic nature. The vegetable world,
though drawing almost all its nutriment from invisible sources, was
proved incompetent to generate anew either matter or force. Its
matter is for the most part transmuted gas; its force transformed
solar force. The animal world was proved to be equally uncreative,
all its motive energies being referred to the combustion of its food.
The activity of each animal as a whole was proved to be the
transferred activity of its molecules. The muscles were shown to be
stores of mechanical force, potential until unlocked by the nerves,
and then resulting in muscular contractions. The speed at which
messages fly to and fro along the nerves was determined, and found to
be, not as had been previously supposed, equal to that of light or
electricity, but less than the speed of a flying eagle.
This was the work of the physicist: then came the conquests of the
comparative anatomist and physiologist, revealing the structure of
every animal, and the function of every organ in the whole biological
series, from the lowest zoophyte up to man. The nervous system had
been made the object of profound and continued study, the wonderful
and, at bottom, entirely mysterious, controlling power which it
exercises over the whole organism, physical and mental, being
recognized more and more. Thought could not be kept back from a
subject so profoundly suggestive. Besides the physical life dealt
with by Mr. Darwin, there is a psychical life presenting similar
gradations, and asking equally for a solution. How are the different
grades and order of Mind to be accounted for? What is the principle
of growth of that mysterious power which on our planet culminates in
Reason? These are questions which, though not thrusting themselves
so forcibly upon the attention of the general public, had not only
occupied many reflecting minds, but had been formally broached by one
of them before the 'Origin of Species' appeared.
With the mass of materials furnished by the physicist and
physiologist in his hands, Mr. Herbert Spencer, twenty years ago,
sought to graft upon this basis a system of psychology; and two years
ago a second and greatly amplified edition of his work appeared.
Those who have occupied themselves with the beautiful experiments of
Plateau will remember that when two spherules of olive-oil, suspended
in a mixture of alcohol and water of the same density as the oil, are
brought together, they do not immediately unite. Something like a
pellicle appears to be formed around the drops, the rupture of which
is immediately followed by the coalescence of the globules into one.
There are organisms whose vital actions are almost as purely physical
as that of these drops of oil. They come into contact and fuse
themselves thus together. From such organisms to others a shade
higher, and from these to others a shade higher still, and on through
an ever-ascending series, Mr. Spencer conducts his argument. There
are two obvious factors to be here taken into account--the creature
and the medium in which it lives, or, as it is often expressed, the
organism and its environment. Mr. Spencer's fundamental principle is
that between these two factors there is incessant interaction. The
organism is played upon by the environment, and is modified to meet
the requirements of the environment. Life he defines to be 'a
continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.'
In the lowest organisms we have a kind of tactual sense diffused over
the entire body; then, through impressions from without and their
corresponding adjustments, special portions of the surface become
more responsive to stimuli than others. The senses are nascent, the
basis of all of them being that simple tactual sense which the sage
Democritus recognised 2,300 years ago as their common progenitor.
The action of light, in the first instance, appears to be a mere
disturbance of the chemical processes in the animal organism, similar
to that which occurs in the leaves of plants. By degrees the action
becomes localized in a few pigment-cells, more sensitive to light
than the surrounding tissue. The eye is here incipient. At first it
is merely capable of revealing differences of light and shade
produced by bodies close at hand. Followed as the interception of
the light is in almost all cases by the contact of the closely
adjacent opaque body, sight in this condition becomes a kind of
'anticipatory touch.' The adjustment continues; a slight bulging out
of the epidermis over the pigment-granules supervenes. A lens is
incipient, and, through the operation of infinite adjustments, at
length reaches the perfection that it displays in the hawk and eagle.
So of the other senses; they are special differentiations of a tissue
which was originally vaguely sensitive all over.
With the development of the senses the adjustments between the
organism and its environment gradually extend in _space_, a
multiplication of experiences and a corresponding modification of
conduct being the result. The adjustments also extend in _time_,
covering continually greater intervals. Along with this extension in
space and time the adjustments also increase in specialty and
complexity, passing through the various grades of brute life, and
prolonging themselves into the domain of reason. Very striking are
Mr. Spencer's remarks regarding the influence of the sense of touch
upon the development of intelligence. This is, so to say, the
mother-tongue of all the senses, into which they must be translated
to be of service to the organism. Hence its importance. The parrot
is the most intelligent of birds, and its tactual power is also
greatest. From this sense it gets knowledge unattainable by birds
which cannot employ their feet as hands. The elephant is the most
sagacious of quadrupeds--its tactual range and skill, and the
consequent multiplication of experiences, which it owes to its
wonderfully adaptable trunk, being the basis of its sagacity. Feline
animals, for a similar cause, are more sagacious than hoofed
animals--atonement being to some extent made, in the case of the
horse, by the possession of sensitive prehensile lips. In the
Primates the evolution of intellect and the evolution of tactual
appendages go hand in hand. In the most intelligent anthropoid apes
we find the tactual range and delicacy greatly augmented, new avenues
of knowledge being thus open to the animal. Man crowns the edifice
here, not only in virtue of his own manipulatory power, but through
the enormous extension of his range of experience, by the invention
of instruments of precision, which serve as supplemental senses and
supplemental limbs. The reciprocal action of these is finely
described and illustrated. That chastened intellectual emotion to
which I have referred in connexion with Mr. Darwin is not absent in
Mr. Spencer. His illustrations possess at times exceeding vividness
and force; and from his style on such occasions it is to be inferred
that the ganglia of this Apostle of the Understanding are sometimes
the seat of a nascent poetic thrill.
It is a fact of supreme importance that actions the performance of
which at first requires even painful effort and deliberation may by
habit be rendered automatic. Witness the slow learning of its
letters by a child, and the subsequent facility of reading in a man,
when each group of letters which forms a word is instantly, and
without effort, fused to a single perception. Instance the
billiard-player, whose muscles of hand and eye, when he reaches the
perfection of his art, are unconsciously coördinated. Instance the
musician, who, by practice, is enabled to fuse a multitude of
arrangements, auditory, tactual, and muscular, into a process of
automatic manipulation. Combining such facts with the doctrine of
hereditary transmission, we reach a theory of Instinct. A chick,
after coming out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs about,
picks up food, thus showing that it possesses a power of directing
its movements to definite ends. How did the chick learn this very
complex coördination of eye, muscles, and beak? It has not been
individually taught; its personal experience is _nil_; but it has the
benefit of ancestral experience. In its inherited organization are
registered all the powers which it displays at birth. So also as
regards the instinct of the hive-bee, already referred to. The
distance at which the insects stand apart when they sweep their
hemispheres and build their cells is 'organically remembered.'
Man also carries with him the physical texture of his ancestry, as
well as the inherited intellect bound up with it. The defects of
intelligence during infancy and youth are probably less due to a lack
of individual experience than to the fact that in early life the
cerebral organization is still incomplete. The period necessary for
completion varies with the race and with the individual. As a round
shot outstrips a rifled one on quitting the muzzle of the gun, so the
lower race in childhood may outstrip the higher. But the higher
eventually overtakes the lower, and surpasses it in range. As
regards individuals, we do not always find the precocity of youth
prolonged to mental power in maturity; while the dulness of boyhood
is sometimes strikingly contrasted with the intellectual energy of
after years. Newton, when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no
particular aptitude at school; but in his eighteenth year he went to
Cambridge, and soon afterwards astonished his teachers by his power
of dealing with geometrical problems. During his quiet youth his
brain was slowly preparing itself to be the organ of those energies
which he subsequently displayed.
By myriad blows (to use a Lucretian phrase) the image and
superscription of the external world are stamped as states of
consciousness upon the organism, the depth of the impression
depending upon the number of the blows. When two or more phenomena
occur in the environment invariably together, they are stamped to the
same depth or to the same relief, and indissolubly connected. And
here we come to the threshold of a great question. Seeing that he
could in no way rid himself of the consciousness of Space and Time,
Kant assumed them to be necessary 'forms of intuition,' the moulds
and shapes into which our intuitions are thrown, belonging to
ourselves solely and without objective existence. With unexpected
power and success Mr. Spencer brings the hereditary experience
theory, as he holds it, to bear upon this question. 'If there exist
certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at
all instants of their waking lives--relations which are absolutely
constant and universal--there will be established answering internal
relations that are absolutely constant and universal. Such relations
we have in those of Space and Time. As the substratum of all other
relations of the Non-Ego, they must be responded to by conceptions
that are the substrata of all other relations in the Ego. Being the
constant and infinitely repeated elements of thought, they must
become the automatic elements of thought--the elements of thought
which it is impossible to get rid of--the "forms of intuition."
Throughout this application and extension of the 'Law of Inseparable
Association,' Mr. Spencer stands upon his own ground, invoking,
instead of the experiences of the individual, the registered
experiences of the race. His overthrow of the restriction of
experience to the individual is, I think, complete. That restriction
ignores the power of organizing experience furnished at the outset to
each individual; it ignores the different degrees of this power
possessed by different races and by different individuals of the same
race. Were there not in the human brain a potency antecedent to all
experience, a dog or cat ought to be as capable of education as a
man. These predetermined internal relations are independent of the
experiences of the individual. The human brain is the 'organised
register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the
evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of
organisms through which the human organism has been reached. The
effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have
been successively bequeathed, principal and interest, and have slowly
mounted to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of
the infant. Thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty
to thirty cubic inches more of brain than the Papuan. Thus it
happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some
inferior races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens
that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their
fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs,
arise at length our Newtons and Shakespeares.'
At the outset of this Address it was stated that physical theories
which lie beyond experience are derived by a process of abstraction
from experience. It is instructive to note from this point of view
the successive introduction of new conceptions. The idea of the
attraction of gravitation was preceded by the observation of the
attraction of iron by a magnet, and of light bodies by rubbed amber.
The polarity of magnetism and electricity appealed to the senses; and
thus became the substratum of the conception that atoms and molecules
are endowed with definite, attractive, and repellent poles, by the
play of which definite forms of crystalline architecture are
produced. Thus molecular force becomes _structural_. It required no
great boldness of thought to extend its play into organic nature, and
to recognize in molecular force the agency by which both plants and
animals are built up. In this way out of experience arise
conceptions which are wholly ultra-experiential. None of the
atomists of antiquity had any notion of this play of molecular polar
force, but they had experience of gravity as manifested by falling
bodies. Abstracting from this, they permitted their atoms to fall
eternally through empty space. Democritus assumed that the larger
atoms moved more rapidly than the smaller ones, which they therefore
could overtake, and with which they could combine. Epicurus, holding
that empty space could offer no resistance to motion, ascribed to all
the atoms the same velocity; but he seems to have overlooked the
consequence that under such circumstances the atoms could never
combine. Lucretius cut the knot by quitting the domain of physics
altogether, and causing the atoms to move together by a kind of
volition.
Was the instinct utterly at fault which caused Lucretius thus to
swerve from his own principles? Diminishing gradually the number of
progenitors, Mr. Darwin comes at length to one 'primordial form;' but
he does not say, as far as I remember, how he supposes this form to
have been introduced. He quotes with satisfaction the words of a
celebrated author and divine who had 'gradually learnt to see that it
is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe He created a
few original forms, capable of self-development into other and
needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation
to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.' What Mr.
Darwin thinks of this view of the introduction of life I do not know.
But the anthropomorphism, which it seemed his object to set aside, is
as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the
creation of a multitude. We need clearness and thoroughness here.
Two courses and two only, are possible. Either let us open our doors
freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let
us radically change our notions of Matter. If we look at matter as
pictured by Democritus, and as defined for generations in our
scientific text-books, the notion of any form of life whatever coming
out of it is utterly unimaginable. The argument placed in the mouth
of Bishop Butler suffices, in my opinion, to crush all such
materialism as this. But those who framed these definitions of
matter were not biologists but mathematicians, whose labours referred
only to such accidents and properties of matter as could be expressed
in their formulæ. The very intentness with which they pursued
mechanical science turned their thoughts aside from the science of
life. May not their imperfect definitions be the real cause of our
present dread? Let us reverently, but honestly, look the question in
the face. Divorced from matter, where is life to be found? Whatever
our _faith_ may say, our _knowledge_ shows them to be indissolubly
joined. Every meal we eat, and every cup we drink, illustrates the
mysterious control of Mind by Matter.
Trace the line of life backwards, and see it approaching more and
more to what we call the purely physical condition. We come at
length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil
suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the
_protogenes_ of Haeckel, in which we have 'a type distinguishable
from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.'
Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of
its fragments. We continue the process of breaking, but, however
small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity
of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the
intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do
_something_ similar in the case of life? Is there not a temptation
to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that 'nature
is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the
meddling of the gods?' or with Bruno, when he declares that Matter is
not 'that mere empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to
be, but the universal mother who brings forth all things as the fruit
of her own womb?' Believing as I do in the continuity of Nature, I
cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here
the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the
eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the
experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our
ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed
reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the
promise and potency of all terrestial Life.
If you ask me whether there exists the least evidence to prove that
any form of life can be developed out of matter, without demonstrable
antecedent life, my reply is that evidence considered perfectly
conclusive by many has been adduced; and that were some of us who
have pondered this question to follow a very common example, and
accept testimony because it falls in with our belief, we also should
eagerly close with the evidence referred to. But there is in the
true man of science a wish stronger than the wish to have his beliefs
upheld; namely, the wish to have them true. And this stronger wish
causes him to reject the most plausible support if he has reason to
suspect that it is vitiated by error. Those to whom I refer as
having studied this question, believing the evidence offered in
favour of 'spontaneous generation' to be thus vitiated, cannot accept
it. They know full well that the chemist now prepares from inorganic
matter a vast array of substances which were some time ago regarded
as the sole products of vitality. They are intimately acquainted
with the structural power of matter as evidenced in the phenomena of
crystallization. They can justify scientifically their _belief_ in
its potency, under the proper conditions, to produce organisms. But
in reply to your question they will frankly admit their inability to
point to any satisfactory experimental proof that life can be
developed save from demonstrable antecedent life. As already
indicated, they draw the line from the highest organisms through
lower ones down to the lowest, and it is the prolongation of this
line by the intellect beyond the range of the senses that leads them
to the conclusion which Bruno so boldly enunciated.[20]
The 'materialism' here professed may be vastly different from what
you suppose, and I therefore crave your gracious patience to the end.
'The question of an external world,' says Mr. J. S. Mill, 'is the
great battleground of metaphysics.'[21] Mr. Mill himself reduces
external phenomena to 'possibilities of sensation.' Kant, as we have
seen, made time and space 'forms' of our own intuitions. Fichte,
having first by the inexorable logic of his understanding proved
himself to be a mere link in that chain of eternal causation which
holds so rigidly in Nature, violently broke the chain by making
Nature, and all that it inherits, an apparition of his own mind.[22]
And it is by no means easy to combat such notions. For when I say I
see you, and that I have not the least doubt about it, the reply is,
that what I am really conscious of is an affection of my own retina.
And if I urge that I can check my sight of you by touching you, the
retort would be that I am equally transgressing the limits of fact;
for what I am really conscious of is, not that you are there, but
that the nerves of my hand have undergone a change. All we hear, and
see, and touch, and taste, and smell, are, it would be urged, mere
variations of our own condition, beyond which, even to the extent of
a hair's breadth, we cannot go. That anything answering to our
impressions exists outside of ourselves is not a _fact_, but an
_inference_, to which all validity would be denied by an idealist
like Berkeley, or by a sceptic like Hume. Mr. Spencer takes another
line. With him, as with the uneducated man, there is no doubt or
question as to the existence of an external world. But he differs
from the uneducated, who think that the world really is what
consciousness represents it to be. Our states of consciousness are
mere _symbols_ of an outside entity which produces them and
determines the order of their succession, but the real nature of
which we can never know.[23] In fact, the whole process of evolution
is the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the
intellect of man. As little in our day as in the days of Job can man
by searching find this Power out. Considered fundamentally, then, it
is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life on earth is
evolved, species differentiated, and mind unfolded from their
prepotent elements in the immeasurable past. There is, you will
observe, no very rank materialism here.
The strength of the doctrine of evolution consists, not in an
experimental demonstration (for the subject is hardly accessible to
this mode of proof), but in its general harmony with scientific
thought. From contrast, moreover, it derives enormous relative
strength. On the one side we have a theory (if it could with any
propriety be so called) derived, as were the theories referred to at
the beginning of this Address, not from the study of Nature, but from
the observation of men--a theory which converts the Power whose
garment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, fashioned
after the human model, and acting by broken efforts, as man is seen
to act. On the other side, we have the conception that all we see
around us, and all we feel within us--the phenomena of physical
nature as well as those of the human mind--have their unsearchable
roots in a cosmical life, if I dare apply the term, an infinitesimal
span of which is offered to the investigation of man. And even this
span is only knowable in part. We can trace the development of a
nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of
sensation and thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go
hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to
comprehend the connexion between them. An Archimedean fulcrum is
here required which the human mind cannot command; and the effort to
solve the problem, to borrow a comparison from an illustrious friend
of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself by his
own waistband. All that has been here said is to be taken in
connexion with this fundamental truth. When 'nascent senses' are
spoken of, when 'the differentiation of a tissue at first vaguely
sensitive all over' is spoken of, and when these processes are
associated with 'the modification of an organism by its environment,'
the same parallelism, without contact, or even approach to contact,
is implied. Man the _object_ is separated by an impassable gulf from
man the _subject_. There is no motor energy in intellect to carry it
without logical rupture from the one to the other.
Further, the doctrine of evolution derives man in his totality from
the inter-action of organism and environment through countless ages
past. The Human Understanding, for example--that faculty which Mr.
Spencer has turned so skilfully round upon its own antecedents--is
itself a result of the play between organism and environment through
cosmic ranges of time. Never surely did prescription plead so
irresistible a claim. But then it comes to pass that, over and above
his understanding, there are many other things appertaining to man
whose perspective rights are quite as strong as those of the
understanding itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of
organism and environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are
bitter, that the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose.
Such facts of consciousness (for which, by the way, no adequate
reason has yet been rendered) are quite as old as the understanding;
and many other things can boast an equally ancient origin. Mr.
Spencer at one place refers to that most powerful of passions--the
amatory passion--as one which, when it first occurs, is antecedent to
all relative experience whatever; and we may pass its claim as being
at least as ancient and valid as that of the understanding. Then
there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of
Awe, Reverence, Wonder--and not alone the sexual love just referred
to, but the love of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in Nature,
Poetry, and Art. There is also that deep-set feeling which, since
the earliest dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all
history, incorporated itself in the Religions of the world. You who
have escaped from these religions into the high-and-dry light of the
intellect may deride them; but in so doing you deride accidents of
form merely, and fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious
sentiment in the nature of man. To yield this sentiment reasonable
satisfaction is the problem of problems at the present hour. And
grotesque in relation to scientific culture as many of the religions
of the world have been and are--dangerous, nay destructive, to the
dearest privileges of free-men as some of them undoubtedly have been,
and would, if they could, be again--it will be wise to recognize them
as the forms of a force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude on the
region of knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of
being guided to noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its
proper and elevated sphere.
All religious theories, schemes and systems, which embrace notions of
cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into the domain of science, must,
_in so far as they do this_, submit to the control of science, and
relinquish all thought of controlling it. Acting otherwise proved
disastrous in the past, and it is simply fatuous to-day. Every
system which would escape the fate of an organism too rigid to adjust
itself to its environment must be plastic to the extent that the
growth of knowledge demands. When this truth has been thoroughly
taken in, rigidity will be relaxed, exclusiveness diminished, things
now deemed essential will be dropped, and elements now rejected will
be assimilated. The lifting of the life is the essential point; and
as long as dogmatism, fanaticism, and intolerance are kept out,
various modes of leverage may be employed to raise life to a higher
level. Science itself not unfrequently derives motive power from an
ultra-scientific source. Whewell speaks of enthusiasm of temper as a
hindrance to science; but he means the enthusiasm of weak heads.
There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in which science finds an
ally; and it is to the lowering of this fire, rather than to the
diminution of intellectual insight, that the lessening productiveness
of men of science in their mature years is to be ascribed. Mr.
Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement from moral force.
He gravely erred; for without moral force to whip it into action, the
achievements of the intellect would be poor indeed.
It has been said that science divorces itself from literature; but
the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge. A
glance at the less technical writings of its leaders--of its
Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its Du Bois-Reymond--would show what
breadth of literary culture they command. Where among modern writers
can you find their superiors in clearness and vigour of literary
style? Science desires not isolation, but freely combines with every
effort towards the bettering of man's estate. Single-handed, and
supported not by outward sympathy, but by inward force, it has built
at least one great wing of the many-mansioned home which man in his
totality demands. And if rough walls and protruding rafter-ends
indicate that on one side the edifice is still incomplete, it is only
by wise combination of the parts required with those already
irrevocably built that we can hope for completeness. There is no
necessary incongruity between what has been accomplished and what
remains to be done. The moral glow of Socrates, which we all feel by
ignition, has in it nothing incompatible with the physics of
Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which he would hardly scorn
to-day.
And here I am reminded of one amongst us, hoary, but still strong,
whose prophet-voice some thirty years ago, far more than any other of
this age, unlocked whatever of life and nobleness lay latent in its
most gifted minds--one fit to stand beside Socrates or the Maccabean
Eleazar, and to dare and suffer all that they suffered and
dared--fit, as he once said of Fichte, 'to have been the teacher of
the Stoa, and to have discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves
of Academe.' With a capacity to grasp physical principles which his
friend Goethe did not possess, and which even total lack of exercise
has not been able to reduce to atrophy, it is the world's loss that
he, in the vigour of his years, did not open his mind and sympathies
to science, and make its conclusions a portion of his message to
mankind. Marvellously endowed as he was--equally equipped on the
side of the Heart and of the Understanding--he might have done much
towards teaching us how to reconcile the claims of both, and to
enable them in coming times to dwell together in unity of spirit and
in the bond of peace.
And now the end is come. With more time, or greater strength and
knowledge, what has been here said might have been better said, while
worthy matters here omitted might have received fit expression. But
there would have been no material deviation from the views set forth.
As regards myself, they are not the growth of a day; and as regards
you, I thought you ought to know the environment which, with or
without your consent, is rapidly surrounding you, and in relation to
which some adjustment on your part may be necessary. A hint of
Hamlet's, however, teaches us all how the troubles of common life may
be ended; and it is perfectly possible for you and me to purchase
intellectual peace at the price of intellectual death. The world is
not without refuges of this description; nor is it wanting in persons
who seek their shelter and try to persuade others to do the same.
The unstable and the weak will yield to this persuasion, and they to
whom repose is sweeter than the truth. But I would exhort you to
refuse the offered shelter and to scorn the base repose--to accept,
if the choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, the
leap of the torrent before the stillness of the swamp.
In the course of this Address I have touched on debatable questions
and led you over what will be deemed dangerous ground--and this
partly with the view of telling you that as regards these questions
science claims unrestricted right of search. It is not to the point
to say that the views of Lucretius and Bruno, of Darwin and Spencer,
may be wrong. Here I should agree with you, deeming it indeed
certain that these views will undergo modification. But the point
is, that, whether right or wrong, we ask the freedom to discuss them.
For science, however, no exclusive claim is here made; you are not
urged to erect it into an idol. The inexorable advance of man's
understanding in the path of knowledge, and those unquenchable claims
of his moral and emotional nature which the understanding can never
satisfy, are here equally set forth. The world embraces not only a
Newton, but a Shakespeare--not only a Boyle, but a Raphael--not only
a Kant, but a Beethoven--not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in
each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are not
opposed, but supplementary--not mutually exclusive, but reconcilable.
And if, unsatisfied with them all, the human mind, with the yearning
of a pilgrim for his distant home, will turn to the Mystery from
which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to
thought and faith; so long as this is done, not only without
intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened
recognition that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattainable,
and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion the Mystery
in accordance with its own needs--then, casting aside all the
restrictions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for
the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the _knowing_
faculties, may be called the _creative_ faculties of man.
'Fill thy heart with it,' said Goethe, 'and then name it as thou
wilt.' Goethe himself did this in untranslateable language.[24]
Wordsworth did it in words known to all Englishmen, and which may be
regarded as a forecast and religious vitalization of the latest and
deepest scientific truth,--
'For I have learned
To look on nature; not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. _And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things_.'[25]
[1] Hume, _Natural History of Religion_.
[2] Born 460 B.C.
[3] Lange, 2nd edit., p. 23.
[4] Born 342 B.C.
[5] Tennyson's Lucretius.
[6] Born 99 B.C.
[7] Monro's translation. In his criticism of this work,
_Contemporary Review_, 1867, Dr. Hayman does not appear to be aware
of the really sound and subtile observations on which the reasoning
of Lucretius, though erroneous, sometimes rests.
[8] _History of the Intellectual Development of Europe_, p. 295.
[9] _History of the Inductive Sciences_, vol. i.
[10] Depicted with terrible vividness in _Renan's Antichrist_.
[11] _Intellectual Development of Europe_, p. 359.
[12] Lange, 2nd edit. pp. 181, 182.
[13] See Huxley's admirable Essay on Descartes. _Lay Sermons_, pp.
864, 365.
[14] Boyle's model of the universe was the Strasburg clock with an
outside Artificer. Goethe, on the other hand, sang
'Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen.'
See also Carlyle, _Past and Present_, Chap. V.
[15] Only to some; for there are dignitaries who even now speak of
the earth's rocky crust as so much building material prepared for man
at the Creation. Surely it is time that this loose language should
cease.
[16] _Zoonomia_, vol. i. pp. 500-510.
[17] In 1855 Mr. Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 2nd edit.
vol. i. p. 465) expressed 'the belief that life under all its forms
has arisen by an unbroken evolution, and through the instrumentality
of what are called natural causes.'
[18] The behaviour of Mr. Wallace in relation to this subject has
been dignified in the highest desgree.
[19] The first step only towards experimental demonstration has been
taken. Experiments now begun might, a couple of centuries hence,
furnish data of incalculable value, which ought to be supplied to the
science of the future.
[20] Bruno was a 'Pantheist,' not an 'Atheist' or a 'Materialist.'
[21] _Examination of Hamilton_, p. 154.
[22] _Bestimmung des Menschen_.
[23] In a paper, at once popular and profound, entitled _Recent
Progress in the Theory of Vision_, contained in the volume of
Lectures by Helmholtz, published by Longmans, this symbolism of our
states of consciousness is also dwelt upon. The impressions of sense
are the mere signs of external things. In this paper Helmholtz
contends strongly against the view that the consciousness of space is
inborn; and he evidently doubts the power of the chick to pick up
grains of corn without preliminary lessons. On this point, he says,
further experiments are needed. Such experiments have been since
made by Mr. Spalding, aided, I believe, in some of his observations
by the accomplished and deeply lamented Lady Amberly; and they seem
to prove conclusively that the chick does not need a single moment's
tuition to enable it to stand, run, govern the muscles of its eyes,
and to peck. Helmholtz, however, is contending against the notion of
pre-established harmony; and I am not aware of his views as to the
organisation of experiences of race or breed.
[24] Proœmium to 'Gott und Welt.'
[25] Tintern Abbey.
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