the uncertainty of their data, and they only yield to it a provisional
assent. They regard the nebular hypothesis as probable, and, in the
utter absence of any evidence to prove the act illegal, they extend
the method of nature from the present into the past. Here the observed
uniformity of nature is their only guide. Within the long range of
physical enquiry, they have never discerned in nature the insertion of
caprice. Throughout this range, the laws of physical and intellectual
continuity have run side by side. Having thus determined the elements
of their curve in a world of observation and experiment, they prolong
that curve into an antecedent world, and accept as probable the
unbroken sequence of development from the nebula to the present time.
You never hear the really philosophical defenders of the doctrine of
Uniformity speaking of impossibilities in nature. They never say,
what they are constantly charged with saying, that it is impossible
for the Builder of the universe to alter His work. Their business is
not with the possible, but the actual--not with a world which might
be, but with a world that is. This they explore with a courage not
unmixed with reverence, and according to methods which, like the
quality of a tree, are tested by their fruits. They have but one
desire--to know the truth. They have but one fear--to believe a lie.
And if they know the strength of science, and rely upon it with
unswerving trust, they also know the limits beyond which science
ceases to be strong. They best know that questions offer themselves
to thought, which science, as now prosecuted, has not even the
tendency to solve. They have as little fellowship with the atheist
who says there is no God, as with the theist who professes to know the
mind of God. 'Two things,' said Immanuel Kant, 'fill me with awe: the
starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man.' And in
his hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action
has ceased, and the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific
investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking
contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a
Power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can
neither analyse nor comprehend.
********************
There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals,
Whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature;
But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten,
With human sensations and voice and corporeal members;
So, if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man's fashion,
And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead,
Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen,
Each kind the divine with its own form and nature endowing.
XENOPHANES Of COLOPHON (six centuries B.C.),
Supernatural Religion, vol. 1.
*****
IX. THE BELFAST ADDRESS.
[Footnote: Delivered before the British Association on Wednesday
evening, August 19, 1874.]
1.
AN impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and
questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. The
same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific
action to-day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from
experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of
experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every
natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In forming their notions of
the origin of things, our earliest historic (and doubtless, we might
add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence
permitted, the same course. They also fell back upon experience; but
with this difference--that the particular experiences which furnished
the warp and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of
nature, but from what lay much closer to them--the observation of
men. Their theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form. To
super-sensual beings, which, 'however potent and invisible, were
nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among
mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites,' were handed
over the rule and governance of natural phenomena. [Footnote: Hume,
'Natural History of Religion.]
Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed in
the long run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our race.
Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional power
differentiating themselves from the crowd, rejecting these
anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural phenomena with
their physical principles. But, long prior to these purer efforts of
the understanding, the merchant had been abroad, and rendered the
philosopher possible; commerce had been developed, wealth amassed,
leisure for travel and speculation secured, while races educated under
different conditions, and therefore differently informed and endowed,
had been stimulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions
where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with their
eastern neighbours, the sciences were born, being nurtured and
developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The state of things to
be displaced may be gathered from a passage of Euripides quoted by
Hume. 'There is nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The
gods toss all into confusion; mix everything with its reverse, that
all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more
worship and reverence.' Now as science demands the radical extirpation
of caprice, and the absolute reliance upon law in nature, there grew,
with the growth of scientific notions, a desire and determination to
sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to
place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves.
The problem which had been previously approached from above, was now
attacked from below; theoretic effort passed from the super- to the
sub-sensible. It was felt that to construct the universe in idea, it
was necessary to have some notion of its constituent parts--of what
Lucretius subsequently called the 'First Beginnings.' Abstracting
again from experience, the leaders of scientific speculation reached
at length the pregnant doctrine of atoms and molecules, the latest
developments of which were set forth with such power and clearness at
the last meeting of the British Association. Thought, no doubt, had
long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the precision and
completeness which it assumed in the mind of Democritus, [Footnote:
Born 460 B.C.] a philosopher who may well for a moment arrest our
attention. 'Few great men,' says Lange, a non-materialist, in his
excellent 'History of Materialism,' to the spirit and to the letter
of which I am equally indebted, 'have been so despitefully used by
history as Democritus. In the distorted images sent down to us
through unscientific traditions, there remains of him almost nothing
but the name of "the laughing philosopher," while figures of
immeasurably smaller significance spread themselves out at full length
before us.' Lange speaks of Bacon's high appreciation of
Democritus--for ample illustrations of which I am indebted to my
excellent friend Mr. Spedding, the learned editor and biographer of
Bacon. It is evident, indeed, that Bacon considered Democritus to be
a man of weightier metal than either Plato or Aristotle, though their
philosophy 'was noised and celebrated in the schools, amid the din
and pomp of professors.' It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and
the barbarians, who destroyed the atomic philosophy. 'For, at a time
when all human learning had suffered shipwreck, these planks of
Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more
inflated substance, were preserved and came down to us, while things
more solid sank and almost passed into oblivion.'
The son of a wealthy father, Democritus devoted the whole of his
inherited fortune to the culture of his mind. He travelled
everywhere; visited Athens when Socrates and Plato were there, but
quitted the city without making himself known. Indeed, the dialectic
strife in which Socrates so much delighted, had no charm for
Democritus, who held that 'the man who readily contradicts, and uses
many words, is unfit to learn anything truly right.' He is said to
have discovered and educated Protagoras the Sophist, being struck as
much by the manner in which he, being a hewer of wood, tied up his
faggots, as by the sagacity of his conversation. Democritus returned
poor from his travels, was supported by his brother, and at length
wrote his great work entitled 'Diakosmos,' which he read publicly
before the people of his native town. He was honoured by his
countrymen in various ways, and died serenely at a great age.
The principles enunciated by Democritus reveal his uncompromising
antagonism to those who deduced the phenomena of nature from the
caprices of the gods. They are briefly these:
1. From nothing comes nothing. Nothing that exists can be destroyed.
All changes are due to the combination and separation of molecules.
2. Nothing happens by chance; every occurrence has its cause, from
which it follows by necessity.
3. The only existing things are the atoms and empty space; all else is
mere opinion.
4. The atoms are infinite in number and infinitely various in form;
they strike together, and the lateral motions and whirlings which thus
arise are the beginnings of worlds.
5. The varieties of all things depend upon the varieties of their
atoms, in number, size, and aggregation.
6. The soul consists of fine, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire.
These are the most mobile of all: they interpenetrate the whole body,
and in their motions the phenomena of life arise.
The first five propositions are a fair general statement of the atomic
philosophy, as now held. As regards the sixth, Democritus made his
finer atoms do duty for the nervous system, whose functions were then
unknown. The atoms of Democritus are individually without sensation;
they combine in obedience to mechanical laws; and not only organic
forms, but the phenomena of sensation and thought, are the result of
their combination.
That great enigma, 'the exquisite adaptation of one part of an
organism to another part, and to the conditions of life,' more
especially the construction of the human body, Democritus made no
attempt to solve. Empedocles, a man of more fiery and poetic nature,
introduced the notion of love and hate among the atoms, to account for
their combination and separation; and bolder than Democritus, he
struck in with the penetrating thought, linked, however, with some
wild speculation, that it lay in the very nature of those combinations
which were suited to their ends (in other words, in harmony with their
environment) to maintain themselves, while unfit combinations, having
no proper habitat, must rapidly disappear. Thus, more than 2,000
years ago, the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest,' which in our
day, not on the basis of vague conjecture, but of positive knowledge,
has been raised to such extraordinary significance, had received at
all events partial enunciation. [Footnote: See 'Lange,' 2nd edit,
p. 23.]
Epicurus, [Footnote: Born 342 B.C.] said to be the son of a poor
schoolmaster at Samos, is the next dominant figure in the history of
the atomic philosophy. He mastered the writings of Democritus, heard
lectures in Athens, went back to Samos, and subsequently wandered
through various countries. He finally returned to Athens, where he
bought a garden, and surrounded himself by pupils, in the midst of
whom he lived a pure and serene life, and died a peaceful death.
Democritus looked to the soul as the ennobling part of man; even
beauty, without understanding, partook of animalism. Epicurus also
rated the spirit above the body; the pleasure of the body being that
of the moment, while the spirit could draw upon the future and the
past. His philosophy was almost identical with that of Democritus; but
he never quoted either friend or foe. One main object of Epicurus was
to free the world from superstition and the fear of death. Death be
treated with indifference. It merely robs us of sensation. As long
as we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not. Life has no
more evil for him who has made up his mind that it is no evil not to
live. He adored the gods, but not in the ordinary fashion. The idea
of Divine power, properly purified, he thought an elevating one. Still
he taught, 'Not he is godless who rejects the gods of the crowd, but
rather he who accepts them.' The gods were to him eternal and immortal
beings, whose blessedness excluded every thought of care or occupation
of any kind. Nature pursues her course in accordance with everlasting
laws, the gods never interfering. They haunt:
The lucid interspace Of world and world
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm.
Tennyson's 'Lucretius.'
Lange considers the relation of Epicurus to the gods subjective; the
indication, probably, of an ethical requirement of his own nature. We
cannot read history with open eyes, or study human nature to its
depths, and fail to discern such a requirement. Man never has been,
and he never will be, satisfied with the operations and products of
the Understanding alone; hence physical science cannot cover all the
demands of his nature. But the history of the efforts made to satisfy
these demands might be broadly described as a history of errors--the
error, in great part, consisting in ascribing fixity to that which is
fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we are gross, and
becoming, as our capacities widen, more abstract and sublime. On one
great point the mind of Epicurus was at peace. He neither sought nor
expected, here or hereafter, any personal profit from his relation to
the gods. And it is assuredly a fact, that loftiness and serenity of
thought may be promoted by conceptions which involve no idea of profit
of this kind. 'Did I not believe,' said a great man. [Footnote:
Carlyle.] to me once, 'that an Intelligence is at the heart of
things, my life on earth would be intolerable.' The utterer of these
words is not, in my opinion, rendered less but more noble by the fact,
that it was the need of ethical harmony here, and not the thought of
personal happiness hereafter, that prompted his observation.
There are persons, not belonging to the highest intellectual zone, nor
yet to the lowest, to whom perfect clearness of exposition suggests
want of depth. They find comfort and edification in an abstract and
learned phraseology. To such people Epicurus, who spared no pains to
rid his style of every trace of haze and turbidity, appeared, on this
very account, superficial. He had, however, a disciple who thought it
no unworthy occupation to spend his days and nights in the effort to
reach the clearness of his master, and to whom the Greek philosopher
is mainly indebted for the extension and perpetuation of his fame.
Some two centuries after the death of Epicurus, Lucretius [Footnote:
Born 99 B.C.] wrote his great poem, 'On the Nature of Things,' in
which he, a Roman, developed with extraordinary ardour the philosophy
of his Greek predecessor. He wishes to win over his friend Memnius to
the school of Epicurus; and although he has no rewards in a future
life to offer, although his object appears to be a purely negative
one, he addresses his friend with the heat of an apostle. His object,
like that of his great forerunner, is the destruction of superstition;
and considering that men in his day trembled before every natural
event as a direct monition from the gods, and that everlasting torture
was also in prospect, the freedom aimed at by Lucretius might be
deemed a positive good. 'This terror,' he says, 'and darkness of
mind, must be dispelled, not by the rays of the sun and glittering
shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature.' He refutes
the notion that anything can come out of nothing, or that what is once
begotten can be recalled to nothing. The first beginnings, the atoms,
are indestructible, and into them all things can be resolved at last.
Bodies are partly atoms; and partly combinations of atoms; but the
atoms nothing can quench. They are strong in solid singleness, and, by
their denser combination, all things can be closely packed and exhibit
enduring strength. He denies that matter is infinitely divisible. We
come at length to the atoms, without which, as an imperishable
substratum, all order in the generation and development of things
would be destroyed.
The mechanical shock of the atoms being, in his view, the
all-sufficient cause of things, he combats the notion that the
constitution of nature has been in any way determined by intelligent
design. The interaction of the atoms throughout infinite time
rendered all manner of combinations possible. Of these, the fit ones
persisted, while the unfit ones disappeared. Not after sage
deliberation did the atoms station themselves in their right places,
nor did they bargain what motions they should assume. From all
eternity they have been driven together, and, after trying motions and
unions of every kind, they fell at length into the arrangements out
of which this system of things has been evolved.
'If you will apprehend and keep in mind these things, Nature, free at
once, and rid of her haughty lords, is seen to do all things
spontaneously of herself, without the meddling of the gods.'
[Footnote: 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.]
To meet the objection that his atoms cannot be seen, Lucretius
describes a violent storm, and shows that the invisible particles of
air act in the same way as the visible particles of water. We
perceive, moreover, the different smells of things, yet never see them
coming to our nostrils. Again, clothes hung up on a shore which waves
break upon, become moist, and then get dry if spread out in the sun,
though no eye can see either the approach or the escape of the
water-particles. A ring, worn long on the finger, becomes thinner; a
water-drop hollows out a stone; the ploughshare is rubbed away in the
field; the street-pavement is worn by the feet; but the particles that
disappear at any moment we cannot see. Nature acts through invisible
particles. That Lucretius had a strong scientific imagination the
foregoing references prove. A fine illustration of his power in this
respect, is his explanation of the apparent rest of bodies whose atoms
are in motion. He employs the image of a flock of sheep with skipping
lambs, which, seen from a distance, presents simply a white patch upon
the green hill, the jumping of the individual lambs being quite
invisible.
His vaguely grand conception of the atoms falling eternally through
space, suggested the nebular hypothesis to Kant, its first propounder.
Far beyond the limits of our visible world are to be found atoms
innumerable, which have never been united to form bodies, or which, if
once united, have been again dispersed--falling silently through
immeasurable intervals of time and space. As everywhere throughout
the All the same conditions are repeated, so must the phenomena be
repeated also. Above us, below us, beside us, therefore, are worlds
without end; and this, when considered, must dissipate every thought
of a deflection of the universe by the gods. The worlds come and go,
attracting new atoms out of limitless space, or dispersing their own
particles. The reputed death of Lucretius, which forms the basis of
Mr. Tennyson's noble poem, is in strict accordance with his
philosophy, which was severe and pure.
2.
Still earlier than these three philosophers, and during the centuries
between the first of them and the last, the human intellect was active
in other fields than theirs. Pythagoras had founded a school of
mathematics, and made his experiments on the harmonic intervals. The
Sophists had run through their career. At Athens had appeared
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who ruined the Sophists, and whose
yoke remains to some extent unbroken to the present hour. Within this
period also the School of Alexandria was founded, Euclid wrote his
'Elements' and made some advance in optics. Archimedes had propounded
the theory of the lever, and the principles of hydrostatics. Astronomy
was immensely enriched by the discoveries of Hipparchus, who was
followed by the historically more celebrated Ptolemy. Anatomy had
been made the basis of scientific medicine; and it is said by Draper
that vivisection had begun. [Footnote: 'History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe,' p. 295.] In fact, the science of ancient Greece
had already cleared the world of the fantastic images of divinities
operating capriciously through natural phenomena. It had shaken itself
free from that fruitless scrutiny 'by the internal light of the mind
alone,' which had vainly sought to transcend experience, and to reach
a knowledge of ultimate causes. Instead of accidental observation, it
had introduced observation with a purpose; instruments were employed
to aid the senses; and scientific method was rendered in a great measure
complete by the union of Induction and Experiment.
What, then, stopped its victorious advance? Why was the scientific
intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow for nearly
two millenniums, before it could regather the elements necessary to
its fertility and strength? Bacon has already let us know one cause;
Whewell ascribes this stationary period to four causes--obscurity of
thought, servility, intolerance of disposition, enthusiasm of temper;
and he gives striking examples of each. [Footnote: 'History of the
Inductive Sciences,' vol. i.] But these characteristics must have
had their antecedents in the circumstances of the time. Rome, and the
other cities of the Empire, had fallen into moral putrefaction.
Christianity had appeared, offering the Gospel to the poor, and by
moderation, if not asceticism of life, practically protesting against
the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of the early Christians,
and the extraordinary exaltation of mind which enabled them to triumph
over the diabolical tortures to which they were subjected, must have
left traces not easily effaced. [Footnote: Described with terrible
vividness in Renan's 'Antichrist.'] They scorned the earth, in view of
that 'building of God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens.' The Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs
were also the measure of their Science. When, for example, the
celebrated question of Antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible was
with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine, who flourished
A.D. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth; but he would
deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the other side, 'because
no such race is recorded in Scripture among the descendants of Adam.'
Archbishop Boniface was shocked at the assumption of a 'world of human
beings out of the reach of the means of salvation.' Thus reined in,
Science was not likely to make much progress. Later on, the political
and theological strife between the Church and civil governments, so
powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle
investigation.
Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the spirit of the
Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers after natural
knowledge had forsaken the fountain of living waters, the direct
appeal to nature by observation and experiment, and given themselves
up to the remanipulation of the notions of their predecessors. It was
a time when thought had become abject, and when the acceptance of mere
authority led, as it always does in science, to intellectual death.
Natural events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to
moral, causes; while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading
as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific
speculation. Then came the mysticism of the Middle Ages, Magic,
Alchemy, the Neoplatonic philosophy, with its visionary though sublime
abstractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their own
bodies, as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the
blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, a
fusion, according to Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle
with the Christianity of the West. Intellectual immobility was the
result. As a traveller without a compass in a fog may wander long,
imagining he is making way, and find himself after hours of toil at
his starting-point, so the schoolmen, having 'tied and untied the same
knots, and formed and dissipated the same clouds,' found themselves
at the end of centuries in their old position. [Footnote: Whewell.]
With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the Middle Ages,
and which, to a less extent, he still wields, I would ask permission
to make one remark.