propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific investigation
of the evidence of these propositions. He tells us "that religious error
is, in itself, of an immoral nature." He declares that he has prejudged
certain conclusions, and looks upon those who show cause for arrest of
judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily follows that, for him,
the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest
aim of mental life. And, on careful analysis of the nature of this
faith, it will too often be found to be, not the mystic process of unity
with the Divine, understood by the religious enthusiast; but that which
the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be.
"Faith," said this unconscious plagiarist of Tertullian, "is the power
of saying you believe things which are incredible."
CXLVI
The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social
theories, of the modern world have grown out of those of Greece and
Rome--not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings
of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation
with the things of this world, were alike despicable.
CXLVII
All that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as it has
not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct
development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of
legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so
tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are
to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught nothing
but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and
ethical system of his people.
CXLVIII
The first-recorded judicial murder of a scientific thinker was compassed
and effected, not by a despot, nor by priests, but was brought about by
eloquent demagogues, to whom, of all men, thorough searchings of the
intellect are most dangerous and therefore most hateful.
CXLIX
Platonic philosophy is probably the grandest example of the unscientific
use of the imagination extant; and it would be hard to estimate the
amount of detriment to clear thinking effected, directly and indirectly,
by the theory of ideas, on the one hand, and by the unfortunate doctrine
of the baseness of matter, on the other.
CL
The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast range, from
physics to history and criticism, is the consequence of the working out,
in this province, of the resolution to "take nothing for truth without
clear knowledge that it is such"; to consider all beliefs open to
criticism; to regard the value of authority as neither greater nor less
than as much as it can prove itself to be worth. The modern spirit is
not the spirit "which always denies," delighting only in destruction;
still less is it that which builds castles in the air rather than not
construct; it is that spirit which works and will work "without haste
and without rest," gathering harvest after harvest of truth into its
barns and devouring error with unquenchable fire.
CLI
In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy;
and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there
has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.
CLII
The memorable service rendered to the cause of sound thinking by
Descartes consisted in this: that he laid the foundation of modern
philosophical criticism by his inquiry into the nature of certainty.
CLIII
There is no question in the mind of anyone acquainted with the facts
that, so far as observation and experiment can take us, the structure
and the functions of the nervous system are fundamentally the same in
an ape, or in a dog, and in a man. And the suggestion that we must stop
at the exact point at which direct proof fails us, and refuse to believe
that the similarity which extends so far stretches yet further, is no
better than a quibble. Robinson Crusoe did not feel bound to conclude,
from the single human footprint which he saw in the sand, that the maker
of the impression had only one leg.
CLIV
Descartes, as we have seen, illustrates what he means by an innate idea,
by the analogy of hereditary diseases or hereditary mental
peculiarities, such as generosity. On the other hand, hereditary mental
tendencies may justly be termed instincts; and still more appropriately
might those special proclivities, which constitute what we call genius,
come into the same category.
CLV
The child who is impelled to draw as soon as it can hold a pencil; the
Mozart who breaks out into music as early; the boy Bidder who worked out
the most complicated sums without learning arithmetic; the boy Pascal
who evolved Euclid out of his own consciousness: all these may be said
to have been impelled by instinct, as much as are the beaver and the
bee. And the man of genius is distinct in kind from the man of
cleverness, by reason of the working within him of strong innate
tendencies--which cultivation may improve, but which it can no more
create than horticulture can make thistles bear figs. The analogy
between a musical instrument and the mind holds good here also. Art and
industry may get much music, of a sort, out of a penny whistle; but,
when all is done, it has no chance against an organ. The innate musical
potentialities of the two are infinitely different.
CLVI
It is notorious that, to the unthinking mass of mankind, nine-tenths of
the facts of life do not suggest the relation of cause and effect; and
they practically deny the existence of any such relation by attributing
them to chance. Few gamblers but would stare if they were told that the
falling of a die on a particular face is as much the effect of a
definite cause as the fact of its falling; it is a proverb that "the
wind bloweth where it listeth"; and even thoughtful men usually receive
with surprise the suggestion, that the form of the crest of every wave
that breaks, wind-driven, on the sea-shore, and the direction of every
particle of foam that flies before the gale, are the exact effects of
definite causes; and, as such, must be capable of being determined,
deductively, from the laws of motion and the properties of air and
water. So again, there are large numbers of highly intelligent persons
who rather pride themselves on their fixed belief that our volitions
have no cause; or that the will causes itself, which is either the same
thing, or a contradiction in terms.
CLVII
To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot
conceive the contrary; and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary
of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its
truth.
CLVIII
It is remarkable that Hume does not refer to the sentimental arguments
for the immortality of the soul which are so much in vogue at the
present day; and which are based upon our desire for a longer conscious
existence than that which nature appears to have allotted to us. Perhaps
he did not think them worth notice. For indeed it is not a little
strange, that our strong desire that a certain occurrence should happen
should be put forward as evidence that it will happen. If my intense
desire to see the friend, from whom I have parted, does not bring him
from the other side of the world, or take me thither; if the mother's
agonised prayer that her child should live has not prevented him from
dying; experience certainly affords no presumption that the strong
desire to be alive after death, which we call the aspiration after
immortality, is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly says,
"All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our passions";
and the doctrine, that we are immortal because we should extremely like
to be so, contains the quintessence of suspiciousness.
CLIX
If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to
interfere with such possession; or if no man desired that which could
damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the
universe.
CLX
To fail in justice, or in benevolence, is to be displeased with one's
self. But happiness is impossible without inward self-approval; and,
hence, every man who has any regard to his own happiness and welfare,
will find his best reward in the practice of every moral duty.
CLXI
Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent; but the man is to be envied to whom
her ways seem in anywise playful. And though she may not talk much about
suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted
for on the principle _ca va sans dire_.
CLXII
If mankind cannot be engaged in practices "full of austerity and
rigour," by the love of righteousness and the fear of evil, without
seeking for other compensation than that which flows from the
gratification of such love and the consciousness of escape from
debasement, they are in a bad case. For they will assuredly find that
virtue presents no very close likeness to the sportive leader of the
joyous hours in Hume's rosy picture; but that she is an awful Goddess,
whose ministers are the Furies, and whose highest reward is peace.
CLXIII
Under its theological aspect, morality is obedience to the will of God;
and the ground for such obedience is two-fold: either we ought to obey
God because He will punish us if we disobey Him, which is an argument
based on the utility of obedience; or our obedience ought to flow from
our love towards God, which is an argument based on pure feeling and for
which no reason can be given. For, if any man should say that he takes
no pleasure in the contemplation of the ideal of perfect holiness, or,
in other words, that he does not love God, the attempt to argue him into
acquiring that pleasure would be as hopeless as the endeavour to
persuade Peter Bell of the "witchery of the soft blue sky."
CLXIV
In whichever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling,
not on reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects
of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the
love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral
law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon
instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less "innate" and
"necessary" than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got to
understand the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathematics are
no less necessary and binding on the great mass of mankind. Some there
are who cannot feel the difference between the "Sonata Appassionata" and
"Cherry Ripe"; or between a grave-stone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo
Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged. While
some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy, are incapable of a sense of
duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations of
morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely the
halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the
anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body
would ignore abnormal specimens.
And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom
the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to
spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new
possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have
been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of
moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained:
though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, which
lay beyond the reach of their dull imaginations, and count life well
spent in shaping some faint image of it in the actual world.
CLXV
The horror of "Materialism" which weighs upon the minds of so many
excellent people appears to depend, in part, upon the purely accidental
connexion of some forms of materialistic philosophy with ethical and
religious tenets by which they are repelled; and, partly, on the
survival of a very ancient superstition concerning the nature of matter.
This superstition, for the tenacious vitality of which the idealistic
philosophers who are, more or less, disciples of Plato and the
theologians who have been influenced by them, are responsible, assumes
that matter is something, not merely inert and perishable, but
essentially base and evil-natured, if not actively antagonistic to, at
least a negative dead-weight upon, the good.
CLXVI
Judging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly
cultivated and indeed superior persons to whom the material world is
altogether contemptible; who can see nothing in a handful of garden
soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive and the corruptible.
To modern science, these assumptions are as much out of date as the
equally venerable errors, that the sun goes round the earth every
four-and-twenty hours, or that water is an elementary body. The handful
of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of busy workers; the rusty
nail is an aggregation of millions of particles, moving with
inconceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect
measure; harmonic with like performances throughout the solar system. If
there is good ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief
that the substance of these particles has existed and will exist, that
the energy which stirs them has persisted and will persist, without
assignable limit, either in the past or the future. Surely, as
Heracleitus said of his kitchen with its pots and pans, "Here also are
the gods." Little as we have, even yet, learned of the material
universe, that little makes for the belief that it is a system of
unbroken order and perfect symmetry, of which the form incessantly
changes, while the substance and the energy are imperishable.
CLXVII
Of all the dangerous mental habits, that which schoolboys call
"cocksureness" is probably the most perilous; and the inestimable value
of metaphysical discipline is that it furnishes an effectual
counterpoise to this evil proclivity. Whoso has mastered the elements of
philosophy knows that the attribute of unquestionable certainty
appertains only to the existence of a state of consciousness so long as
it exists; all other beliefs are mere probabilities of a higher or lower
order. Sound metaphysic is an amulet which renders its possessor proof
alike against the poison of superstition and the counter-poison of
shallow negation; by showing that the affirmations of the former and the
denials of the latter alike deal with matters about which, for lack of
evidence, nothing can be either affirmed or denied.
CLXVIII
If the question is asked, What then do we know about matter and motion?
there is but one reply possible. All that we know about motion is that
it is a name for certain changes in the relations of our visual,
tactile, and muscular sensations; and all that we know about matter is
that it is the hypothetical substance of physical phenomena, the
assumption of the existence of which is as pure a piece of metaphysical
speculation as is that of the existence of the substance of mind.
Our sensations, our pleasures, our pains, and the relations of these,
make up the sum total of the elements of positive, unquestionable
knowledge. We call a large section of these sensations and their
relations matter and motion; the rest we term mind and thinking; and
experience shows that there is a certain constant order of succession
between some of the former and some of the latter.
This is all that just metaphysical criticism leaves of the idols set up
by the spurious metaphysics of vulgar common sense. It is consistent
either with pure Materialism, or with pure Idealism, but it is neither.
For the Idealist, not content with declaring the truth that our
knowledge is limited to facts of consciousness, affirms the wholly
unprovable proposition that nothing exists beyond these and the
substance of mind. And, on the other hand, the Materialist, holding by
the truth that, for anything that appears to the contrary, material
phenomena are the causes of mental phenomena, asserts his unprovable
dogma, that material phenomena and the substance of matter are the sole
primary existences. Strike out the propositions about which neither
controversialist does or can know anything, and there is nothing left
for them to quarrel about. Make a desert of the Unknowable, and the
divine Astraea of philosophic peace will commence her blessed reign.
CLXIX
"Magna est veritas et praevalebit!" Truth is great, certainly, but,
considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to
take about prevailing.
CLXX
To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed through the
last thirty years. I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious
and as generally denied, as those contained in "Man's Place in Nature,"
now awaiting enunciation. If there is a young man of the present
generation, who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself
that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his
head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus, "Veritas
praevalebit"--some day; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he
himself will be all the better and the wiser for having tried to help
her. And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for
all his labour and pains.
CLXXI
Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern
investigations, commonly enough fade away into mere dreams: but it is
singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one,
presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist:
the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and
though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in
the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in
essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat's or
horse's half of the mythical compound, are now not only known, but
notorious.
CLXXII
It is a truth of very wide, if not of universal, application, that every
living creature commences its existence under a form different from,
and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.
The oak is a more complex thing than the little rudimentary plant
contained in the acorn; the caterpillar is more complex than the egg;
the butterfly than the caterpillar; and each of these beings, in passing
from its rudimentary to its perfect condition, runs through a series of
changes, the sum of which is called its development. In the higher
animals these changes are extremely complicated; but, within the last
half century, the labours of such men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert,
Bischoff, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled them, so that the
successive stages of development which are exhibited by a dog, for
example, are now as well known to the embryologist as are the steps of
the metamorphosis of the silkworm moth to the schoolboy. It will be
useful to consider with attention the nature and the order of the stages
of canine development, as an example of the process in the higher
animals generally.
CLXXIII
Exactly in those respects in which the developing Man differs from the
Dog, he resembles the ape, which, like man, has a spheroidal yelk-sac
and a discoidal, sometimes partially lobed, placenta. So that it is only
quite in the later stages of development that the young human being
presents marked differences from the young ape, while the latter departs
as much from the dog in its development, as the man does.
Startling as the last assertion may appear to be, it is demonstrably
true, and it alone appears to me sufficient to place beyond all doubt
the structural unity of man with the rest of the animal world, and more
particularly and closely with the apes.
Thus, identical in the physical processes by which he
originates--identical in the early stages of his formation--identical in
the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which
lie immediately below him in the scale--Man, if his adult and perfect
structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a
marvellous likeness of organisation. He resembles them as they resemble
one another--he differs from them as they differ from one another.
CLXXIV
If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion
about its altar-piece or painted window.
CLXXV
Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series
of gradations as this[1]--leading us insensibly from the crown and
summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but
a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of
the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the
arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his
intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves,
admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.
[1] This alludes to a foregoing enumeration of the seven families of
PRIMATES headed by the ANTHROPINI containing man alone.
CLXXVI
If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes
than they are from one another--then it seems to follow that if any
process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and
families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of
causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man.
CLXXVII
The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and
crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed
secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the
universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the
rest of the living world, and between the forces exerted by the latter
and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are
co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to
the formed--from the inorganic to the organic--from blind force to
conscious intellect and will.
CLXXVIII
Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and
enunciated truth.
CLXXIX
Thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional
prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has sprung the best
evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will discern in his
long progress through the Past a reasonable ground of faith in his
attainment of a nobler Future....
And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will
attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and
Andes of the living world--Man. Our reverence for the nobility of
manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance
and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the
marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in
the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and
organised the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation
of every individual life in other animals; so that, now, he stands
raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble
fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here
and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.
CLXXX
Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of Anthropology, the great
science which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out
the relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially
human in the mode in which man's complex functions are performed; and
searches after the conditions which have determined his presence in the
world. And Anthropology is a section of Zoology, which again is the
animal half of Biology--the science of life and living things.