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 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 have yielded and 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 breezy leap of the torrent before the foetid 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 claim the right 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 Shakspeare--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 still 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. Here, however, I touch a
theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled
by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud,
shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.
********************
X. APOLOGY FOR THE BELFAST ADDRESS.
1874.
THE world has been frequently informed of late that I have raised up
against myself a host of enemies; and considering, with few
exceptions, the deliverances of the Press, and more particularly of
the religious Press, I am forced to admit that the statement is only
too true. I derive some comfort, nevertheless, from the reflection of
Diogenes, transmitted to us by Plutarch, that 'he who would be saved
must have good friends or violent enemies; and that he is best off who
possesses both.' This 'best' condition, I have reason to believe, is
mine.
Reflecting on the fraction I have read of recent remonstrances,
appeals, menaces, and judgments--covering not only the world that now
is, but that which is to come--I have noticed with mournful interest
how trivially men seem to be influenced by what they call their
religion, and how potently by that 'nature' which it is the alleged
province of religion to eradicate or subdue. From fair and manly
argument, from the tenderest and holiest sympathy on the part of those
who desire my eternal good, I pass by many gradations, through
deliberate unfairness, to a spirit of bitterness, which desires with a
fervour inexpressible in words my eternal ill. Now, were religion the
potent factor, we might expect a homogeneous utterance from those
professing a common creed, while, if human nature be the really potent
factor, we may expect utterances as heterogeneous as the characters of
men. As a matter of fact we have the latter; suggesting to my mind
that the common religion, professed and defended by these different
people, is merely the accidental conduit through which they pour their
own tempers, lofty or low, courteous or vulgar, mild or ferocious, as
the case may be. Pure abuse, however, as serving no good end, I have,
wherever possible, deliberately avoided reading, wishing, indeed, to
keep, not only hatred, malice, and uncharitableness, but even every
trace of irritation, far away from my side of a discussion which
demands not only good-temper, but largeness, clearness, and
many-sidedness of mind, if it is to guide us to even provisional
solutions.
It has been stated, with many variations of note and comment, that in
the Address as subsequently published by Messrs. Longman I have
retracted opinions uttered at Belfast. A Roman Catholic writer is
specially strong upon this point. Startled by the deep chorus of
dissent which my 'dazzling fallacies' have evoked, I am now trying to
retreat. This he will by no means tolerate. 'It is too late now to
seek to hide from the eyes of mankind one foul blot, one ghastly
deformity. Professor Tyndall has himself told us how and where this
Address of his was composed. It was written among the glaciers and
the solitudes of the Swiss mountains. It was no hasty, hurried, crude
production; its every sentence bore marks of thought and care.
My critic intends to be severe: he is simply just. In the 'solitudes'
to which he refers I worked with deliberation, endeavouring even to
purify my intellect by disciplines similar to those enjoined by his
own Church for the sanctification of the soul. I tried, moreover, in
my ponderings to realise not only the lawful, but the expedient; and
to permit no fear to act upon my mind, save that of uttering a single
word on which I could not take my stand, either in this or in any
other world.
Still my time was so brief, the difficulties arising from my isolated
position were so numerous, and my thought and expression so slow,
that, in a literary point of view, I halted, not only behind the
ideal, but behind the possible. Hence, after the delivery of the
Address, I went over it with the desire, not to revoke its principles,
but to improve it verbally, and above all to remove any word which
might give colour to the notion of 'crudeness, hurry, or haste.'
In connection with the charge of Atheism my critic refers to the
Preface to the second issue of the Belfast Address: 'Christian men,' I
there say, 'are proved by their writings to have their hours of
weakness and of doubt, as well as their hours of strength and of
conviction; and men like myself share, in their own way, these
variations of mood and tense. Were the religious moods of many of my
assailants the only alternative ones, I do not know how strong the
claims of the doctrine of "Material Atheism" upon my allegiance might
be. Probably they would be very strong. But, as it is, I have
noticed during years of self-observation that it is not in hours of
clearness and vigour that this doctrine commends itself to my mind;
that in the presence of stronger and healthier thought it ever
dissolves and disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in
which we dwell, and of which we form a part.'
With reference to this honest and reasonable utterance my censor
exclaims, 'This is a most remarkable passage. Much as we dislike
seasoning polemics with strong words, we assert that this Apology only
tends to affix with links of steel to the name of Professor Tyndall,
the dread imputation against which be struggles.'
Here we have a very fair example of subjective religious vigour. But
my quarrel with such exhibitions is that they do not always represent
objective fact. No atheistic reasoning can, I hold, dislodge religion
from the human heart. Logic cannot deprive us of life, and religion
is life to the religious. As an experience of consciousness it is
beyond the assaults of logic. But the religious life is often
projected in external forms--I use the word in its widest sense--and
this embodiment of the religious sentiment will have to bear more and
more, as the world become more enlightened, the stress of scientific
tests. We must be careful of projecting into external nature that
which belongs to ourselves. My critic commits this mistake: he feels,
and takes delight in feeling, that I am struggling, and he obviously
experiences the most exquisite pleasures of 'the muscular sense' in
holding me down. His feelings are as real, as if his imagination of
what mine are were equally real. His picture of my 'struggles' is,
however, a mere delusion. I do not struggle. I do not fear the
charge of Atheism; nor should I even disavow it, in reference to any
definition of the Supreme which he, or his order, would be likely to
frame. His 'links' and his 'steel' and his 'dread imputations' are,
therefore, even more unsubstantial than my 'streaks of morning
cloud,' and they may be permitted to vanish together.
*****
These minor and more purely personal matters at an end, the weightier
allegation remains, that at Belfast I misused my position by quitting
the domain of science, and making an unjustifiable raid into the
domain of theology. This I fail to see. Laying aside abuse, I hope
my accusers will consent to reason with me. Is it not lawful for a
scientific man to speculate on the antecedents of the solar system?
Did Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel quit their legitimate spheres,
when they prolonged the intellectual vision beyond the boundary of
experience, and propounded the nebular theory? Accepting that theory
as probable, is it not permitted to a scientific man to follow up, in
idea, the series of changes associated with the condensation of the
nebulae; to picture the successive detachment of planets and moons,
and the relation of all of them to the sun? If I look upon our earth,
with its orbital revolution and axial rotation, as one small issue of
the process which made the solar system what it is, will any
theologian deny my right to entertain and express this theoretic view?
Time was when a multitude of theologians would have been found to do
so--when that archenemy of science which now vaunts its tolerance
would have made a speedy end of the man who might venture to publish
any opinion of the kind. But, that time, unless the world is caught
strangely slumbering, is for ever past.
As regards inorganic nature, then, we may traverse, without let or
hindrance, the whole distance which separates the nebulae from the
worlds of to-day. But only a few years ago this now conceded ground
of science was theological ground. I could by no means regard this as
the final and sufficient concession of theology; and, at Belfast, I
thought it not only my right but my duty to state that, as regards the
organic world, we must enjoy the freedom which we have already won in
regard to the inorganic. I could not discern the shred of a
title-deed which gave any man, or any class of men, the right to open
the door of one of these worlds to the scientific searcher, and to
close the other against him. And I considered it frankest, wisest,
and in the long run most conducive to permanent peace, to indicate,
without evasion or reserve, the ground that belongs to Science, and to
which she will assuredly make good her claim.
I have been reminded that an eminent predecessor of mine in the
Presidential chair, expressed a totally different view of the Cause of
things from that enunciated by me. In doing so he transgressed the
bounds of science at least as much as I did; but nobody raised an
outcry against him. The freedom he took I claim. And looking at what
I must regard as the extravagances of the religious world; at the very
inadequate and foolish notions concerning this universe which are
entertained by the majority of our authorised religious teachers; at
the waste of energy on the part of good men over things unworthy, if I
may say it without discourtesy, of the attention of enlightened
heathens; the fight about the fripperies of Ritualism, and the verbal
quibbles of the Athanasian Creed; the forcing on the public view of
Pontigny Pilgrimages; the dating of historic epochs from the
definition of the Immaculate Conception; the proclamation of the
Divine Glories of the Sacred Heart--standing in the midst of these
chimeras, which astound all thinking men, it did not appear to me
extravagant to claim the public tolerance for an hour and a half, for
the statement of more reasonable views--views more in accordance with
the verities which science has brought to light, and which many weary
souls would, I thought, welcome with gratification and relief.
But to come to closer quarters. The expression to which the most
violent exception has been taken is this: 'Abandoning all disguise,
the confession I feel bound to make before you is, that I prolong the
vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and
discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance, and notwithstanding
our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with
opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of
life.' To call it a 'chorus of dissent,' as my Catholic critic does,
is a mild way of describing the storm of opprobrium with which this
statement has been assailed. But the first blast of passion being
past, I hope I may again ask my opponents to consent to reason. First
of all, I am blamed for crossing the boundary of the experimental
evidence. This, I reply, is the habitual action of the scientific
mind--at least of that portion of it which applies itself to physical
investigation. Our theories of light, heat, magnetism, and
electricity, all imply the crossing of this boundary. My paper on the
'Scientific Use of the Imagination,' and my 'Lectures on Light,'
illustrate this point in the amplest manner; and in the Article
entitled 'Matter and Force' in the present volume I have sought,
incidentally, to make clear, that in physics the experiential
incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; that out of experience
there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in
their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part,
the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The
kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment
alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and
experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which
we are forced to fall back upon the picturing power of the mind.
Passing the boundary of experience, therefore, does not, in the
abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for censure. There must have
been something in my particular mode of crossing it which provoked
this tremendous 'chorus of dissent.'
Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular theory as it
was held by Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel, and as it is held by
the best scientific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun
and planets were once diffused through space as an impalpable haze,
out of which, by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the
haze to condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets?
That which rounds a tear--molecular force. For aeons, the immensity
of which overwhelms man's conceptions, the earth was unfit to maintain
what we call life. It is now covered with visible living things. They
are not formed of matter different from that of the earth around them.
They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone, and flesh of its flesh.
How were they introduced? Was life implicated in the nebula--as part,
it may be, of a vaster and wholly Unfathomable Life; or is it the work
of a Being standing outside the nebula, who fashioned it, and
vitalised it; but whose own origin and ways are equally past finding
out? As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature,
no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of phenomena has
ever been observed. The assumption of such a power to account for
special phenomena, though often made, has always proved a failure. It
is opposed to the very spirit of science; and I therefore assumed the
responsibility of holding up, in contrast with it, that method of
nature which it has been the vocation and triumph of science to
disclose, and in the application of which we can alone hope for
further light. Holding, then, 'that the nebulae and the solar system,
life included, stand to each other in the relation of the germ to the
finished organism, I reaffirm here, not arrogantly, or defiantly, but
without a shade of indistinctness, the position laid down at Belfast.
Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but with the
definiteness belonging to the understanding, the scientific man has to
put to himself these questions regarding the introduction of life upon
the earth. He will be the last to dogmatise upon the subject, for he
knows best that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His
refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of knowledge
than a protest against the assumption of knowledge which must long, if
not for ever, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is the source of
perpetual confusion upon earth. With a mind open to conviction he
asks his opponents to show him an authority for the belief they so
strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to
the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. Profoundly
interesting, and indeed pathetic, to me are those attempts of the
opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book
of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of
geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded like
potter's clay; its authority as a system of cosmogony being
discredited on all hands, by the abandonment of the obvious meaning of
its writer. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former
aspect it is for ever beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, and
it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful. To knowledge
its value has been negative, leading, in rougher ages than ours, to
physical, and even in our own' free' age to moral, violence.
*****
No incident connected with the proceedings at Belfast is more
instructive than the deportment of the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland;
a body usually too wise to confer notoriety upon an adversary by
imprudently denouncing him. The 'Times,' to which I owe a great deal
on the score of fair play, where so much has been unfair, thinks that
the Irish Cardinal, Archbishops, and Bishops, in a recent manifesto,
adroitly employed a weapon which I, at an unlucky moment, placed in
their hands. The antecedents of their action cause me to regard it in
a different light; and a brief reference to these antecedents will, I
think, illuminate not only their proceedings regarding Belfast, but
other doings which have been recently noised abroad.
Before me lies a document bearing the date of November 1873, which,
after appearing for a moment, unaccountably vanished from public view.
It is a Memorial addressed, by Seventy of the Students and Ex-students
of the Catholic University in Ireland, to the Episcopal Board of the
University; and it constitutes the plainest and bravest remonstrance
ever addressed by Irish laymen to their spiritual pastors and masters.
It expresses the profoundest dissatisfaction with the curriculum
marked out for the students of the University; setting forth the
extraordinary fact that the lecture-list for the faculty of Science,
published a month before they wrote, did not contain the name of a
single Professor of the Physical or Natural Sciences.
The memorialists forcibly deprecate this, and dwell upon the necessity
of education in science: 'The distinguishing mark of this age is its
ardour for science. The natural sciences have, within the last fifty
years, become the chiefest study in the world; they are in our time
pursued with an activity unparalleled in the history of mankind.
Scarce a year now passes without some discovery being made in these
sciences which, as with the touch of the magician's wand, shivers to
atoms theories formerly deemed unassailable. It is through the
physical and natural sciences that the fiercest assaults are now made
on our religion. No more deadly weapon is used against our faith than
the facts incontestably proved by modern researches in science.'
Such statements must be the reverse of comfortable to a number of
gentlemen who, trained in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, have been
accustomed to the unquestioning submission of all other sciences to
their divine science of Theology. But this is not all:
One thing seems certain,' say the memorialists, viz, that if chairs
for the physical and natural sciences be not soon founded in the
Catholic University, very many young men will have their faith exposed
to dangers which the creation of a school of science in the University
would defend them from. For our generation of Irish Catholics are
writhing under the sense of their inferiority in science, and are
determined that such inferiority shall not long continue; and so, if
scientific training be unattainable at our University, they will seek
it at Trinity or at the Queen's Colleges, in not one of which is there
a Catholic Professor of Science.'
Those who imagined the Catholic University at Kensington to be due to
the spontaneous recognition, on the part of the Roman hierarchy, of
the intellectual needs of the age, will derive enlightenment from
this, and still more from what follows: for the most formidable threat
remains. To the picture of Catholic students seceding to Trinity and
the Queen's Colleges, the memorialists add this darkest stroke of all:
'They will, in the solitude of their own homes, unaided by any guiding
advice, devour the works of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and
Lyell; works innocuous if studied under a professor who would point
out the difference between established facts and erroneous inferences,
but which are calculated to sap the faith of a solitary student,
deprived of a discriminating judgment to which he could refer for a
solution of his difficulties.'
In the light of the knowledge given by this courageous memorial, and
of similar knowledge otherwise derived, the recent Catholic manifesto
did not at all strike me as a chuckle over the mistake of a maladroit
adversary, but rather as an evidence of profound uneasiness on the
part of the Cardinal, the Archbishops, and the Bishops who signed it.
They acted towards the Students' Memorial, however, with their
accustomed practical wisdom. As one concession to the spirit which it
embodied, the Catholic University at Kensington was brought forth,
apparently as the effect of spontaneous inward force, and not of
outward pressure becoming too formidable to be successfully opposed.
The memorialists point with bitterness to the fact, that 'the name of
no Irish Catholic is known in connection with the physical and natural
sciences.' But this, they ought to know, is the complaint of free and
cultivated minds wherever a Priesthood exercises dominant power.
Precisely the same complaint has been made with respect to the
Catholics of Germany. The great national literature and the
scientific achievements of that country, in modern times, are almost
wholly the work of Protestants. A vanishingly small fraction of it
only is derived from members of the Roman Church, although the number
of these in Germany is at least as great as that of the Protestants.
'The question arises,' says a writer in an able German periodical,
'what is the cause of a phenomenon so humiliating to the Catholics? It
cannot be referred to want of natural endowment due to climate (for
the Protestants of Southern Germany have contributed powerfully to the
creations of the German intellect), but purely to outward
circumstances. And these are readily discovered in the pressure
exercised for centuries by the Jesuitical system, which has crushed
out of Catholics every tendency to free mental productiveness.' It is,
indeed, in Catholic countries that the weight of Ultramontanism has
been most severely felt. It is in such countries that the very finest
spirits, who have dared, without quitting their faith, to plead for
freedom or reform, have suffered extinction. The extinction, however,
was more apparent than real, and Hermes, Hirscher, and Gunther, though
individually broken and subdued, prepared the way, in Bavaria, for the
persecuted but unflinching Frohschammer, for Doellinger, and for the
remarkable liberal movement of which Doellinger is the head and guide.