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 organising 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 a cat ought to be as capable of education as 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 Shakspeares.'
8.
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 also appealed to the senses.
It thus became the substratum of the conception that atoms and
molecules are endowed with attractive and repellent poles, by the play
of which definite forms of crystalline architecture are produced. Thus
molecular force becomes structural. [Footnote: See Art. on Matter and
Force, or 'Lectures on Light,' No. III.] It required no great
boldness of thought to extend its play into organic nature, and to
recognise 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, so 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 I gradually learnt to see that it
was 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 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 conscious life coming out of it
cannot be formed by the mind. The argument placed in the mouth of
Bishop Butler suffices, in my opinion, to crush all such materialism
as this. Those, however, who framed these definitions of matter were
but partial students. They were not biologists, but mathematicians,
whose labours referred only to such accidents and properties of matter
as could be expressed in their formulae. Their science was mechanical
science, not the science of life. With matter in its wholeness they
never dealt; and, denuded by their imperfect definitions, 'the gentle
mother of all' became the object of her children's dread. Let us
reverently, but honestly, look the question in the face. Divorced
from matter, where is life? 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.
On tracing the line of life backwards, we 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 a necessity
engendered and justified by science I cross the boundary of the
experimental evidence, [Footnote: This mode of procedure was not
invented in Belfast.] 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 terrestrial 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 desire stronger than the wish to have his beliefs upheld;
namely, the desire 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
crystallisation. 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. [Footnote: Bruno was a
Pantheist,' not an 'Atheist' or a 'Materialist.']
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 J. S. Mill, 'is the great
battleground of metaphysics.' [Footnote: 'Examination of Hamilton,' p.
154.] 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
the mind. [Footnote: 'Bestimmung des Menschen.'] And it is by no
means easy to combat such notions. For when I say 'I see you,' and
that there is not the least doubt about it, the obvious reply is, that
what I am really conscious of is an affection of my own retina. And
if I urge that my sight can be checked 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.
[Footnote: 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 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.] 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.
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
cogency. 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; 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
connection 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 that of a man trying to lift himself by his own waistband. All
that has been said in this discourse is to be taken in connection 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 possessions and 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 the human intellect to carry it, without logical
rupture, from the one to the other.
9.
The doctrine of Evolution derives man, in his totality, from the
interaction 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
prescriptive 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 ever 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 press its claim as being at least as ancient, and
as valid, as that of the understanding itself. 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 Religious 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 freemen
as some of them undoubtedly have been, and would, if they could, be
again--it will be wise to recognise them as the forms of a force,
mischievous if permitted to intrude on the region of objective
knowledge, over which it holds no command, but capable of adding, in
the region of poetry and emotion, inward completeness and dignity to
man.
Feeling, I say again, dates from as old an origin and as high a source
as intelligence, and it equally demands its range of play. The wise
teacher of humanity will recognise the necessity of meeting this
demand, rather than of resisting it on account of errors and
absurdities of form. What we should resist, at all hazards, is the
attempt made in the past, and now repeated, to found upon this
elemental bias of man's nature a system which should exercise despotic
sway over his intellect. I have no fear of such a consummation.
Science has already to some extent leavened the world; it will leaven
it more and more. I should look upon the mild light of science
breaking in upon the minds of the youth of Ireland, and strengthening
gradually to the perfect day, as a surer check to any intellectual or
spiritual tyranny which may threaten this island, than the laws of
princes or the swords of emperors. We fought and won our battle even
in the Middle Ages: should we doubt the issue of another conflict with
our broken foe?
The impregnable position of science may be described in a few words.
We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of
cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon
the domain of science must, in so far as they do this, submit to its
control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it. Acting
otherwise proved always 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. Some of its greatest discoveries have been
made under the stimulus of a non-scientific ideal. This was the case
among the ancients, and it has been so amongst ourselves. Mayer,
Joule, and Colding, whose names are associated with the greatest of
modern generalisations, were thus influenced. With his usual insight,
Lange at one place remarks, that 'it is not always the objectively
correct and intelligible that helps man most, or leads most quickly to
the fullest and truest knowledge. As the sliding body upon the
brachystochrone reaches its end sooner than by the straighter road of
the inclined plane, so, through the swing of the ideal, we often
arrive at the naked truth more rapidly than by the processes of the
understanding.' 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 achievement
of the intellect would be poor indeed.
It has been said by its opponents 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 among 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, Ito 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.
*****