translates, and quotes against me. The act is due to misapprehension.
Evidence is at hand to prove that I employed similar language twenty
years ago. It is to be found in the 'Saturday Review' for 1860; but
a sufficient illustration of the agreement between my friend Du
Bois-Reymond and myself, is furnished by the discourse on 'Scientific
Materialism,' delivered in 1868, then widely circulated, and reprinted
here. The reader who compares the two discourses will see that the
same line of thought is pursued in both, and that perfect agreement
reigns between my friend and me. In the very Address he criticises,
Mr. Martineau might have seen that precisely the same position is
maintained. A quotation will prove this: 'Thus far,' I say, 'our way
is clear, but now comes my difficulty. Your atoms are individually
without sensation, much more are they without intelligence. May I ask
you, then, to try your hand upon this problem? Take your dead
hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, your
dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all the other
atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine
them separate and sensationless; observe them running together and
forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical
process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see, or dream, or in any
way imagine, how out of that mechanical act, and from these
individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to rise?
Are you likely to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the
Differential Calculus out of the clash of billiard balls? ... I can
follow a particle of musk until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can
follow the waves of sound until their tremors reach the water of the
labyrinth, and set the otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can
also visualise the waves of aether as they cross the eye and hit the
retina. Nay, more, I am able to pursue to the central organ the
motion thus imparted at the periphery, and to see in idea the very
molecules of the brain thrown into tremors. My insight is not baffled
by these physical processes. What baffles and bewilders me is the
notion that from these physical tremors things so utterly incongruous
with them as sensation, thought, and emotion can be derived.' It is
only a complete misapprehension of our true relationship that could
induce Mr. Martineau to represent Du Bois-Reymond and myself as
opposed to each other.
'The affluence of illustration,' writes an able and sympathetic
reviewer of this essay, in the 'New York Tribune,' 'in which Mr.
Martineau delights often impairs the distinctness of his statements by
diverting the attention of the reader from the essential points of his
discussion to the beauty of his imagery, and thus diminishes their
power of conviction. 'To the beauties here referred to I bear willing
testimony; but the reviewer is strictly just in his estimate of their
effect upon my critic's logic. The 'affluence of illustration,' and
the heat, and haze, and haste, generated by its reaction upon Mr.
Martineau's own mind, often produce vagueness where precision is the
one thing needful--poetic fervour where we require judicial calm; and
practical unfairness where the strictest justice ought to be, and I
willingly believe is meant to be, observed.
In one of his nobler passages Mr. Martineau tells us how the pupils of
his college have been educated hitherto: 'They have been trained
under the assumptions (1) that the Universe which includes us and
folds us round is the life-dwelling of an Eternal Mind; (2) that the
world of our abode is the scene of a moral government, incipient but
not complete; and (3) that the upper zones of human affection, above
the clouds of self and passion, take us into the sphere of a Divine
Communion. Into this over-arching scene it is that growing thought
and enthusiasm have expanded to catch their light and fire.'
Alpine summits seem to kindle above us as we read these glowing words;
we see their beauty and feel their life. At the close of one of the
essays here printed, [Footnote: 'Scientific Use of the Imagination.']
I thus refer to the 'Communion' which Mr. Martineau calls 'Divine':
"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. Though 'knowledge' is here disavowed, the 'feelings',
of Mr. Martineau and myself are, I think, very much alike. He,
nevertheless, censures me--almost denounces me--for referring Religion
to the region of Emotion. Surely he is inconsistent here. The
foregoing words refer to an inward hue or temperature, rather than to
an external object of thought. When I attempt to give the Power which
I see manifested in the Universe an objective form, personal or
otherwise, it slips away from me, declining all intellectual
manipulation. I dare not, save poetically, use the pronoun 'He'
regarding it; I dare not call it a 'Mind;' I refuse to call it even a
'Cause.' Its mystery overshadows me; but it remains a mystery, while
the objective frames which some of my neighbours try to make it fit,
seem to me to distort and desecrate it.
It is otherwise with Mr. Martineau, and hence his discontent. He
professes to know where I only claim to feel. He could make his
contention good against me if, by a process of verification, he would
transform his assumptions into 'objective knowledge.' But he makes no
attempt to do so. They remain assumptions from the beginning of his
Address to its end. And yet he frequently uses the word 'unverified,'
as if it were fatal to the position oh which its incidence falls.
'The scrutiny of Nature' is one of his sources of 'religious faith:'
what logical foothold does that scrutiny furnish, on which any one of
the foregoing three assumptions could be planted? Nature, according to
his picturing, is base and cruel: what is the inference to be drawn
regarding its Author? If Nature be 'red in tooth and claw,' who is
responsible? On a Mindless nature Mr. Martineau pours the full
torrent of his gorgeous invective; but could the 'assumption' of 'an
Eternal Mind'--even of a Beneficent Eternal Mind--render the world
objectively a whit less mean and ugly than it is? Not an iota. It is
man's feelings, and not external phenomena, that are influenced by the
assumption. It adds not a ray of light nor a strain of music to the
objective sum of things. It does not touch the phenomena of physical
nature--storm, flood, or fire--nor diminish by a pang the bloody
combats of the animal world. But it does add the glow of religious
emotion to the human soul, as represented by Mr. Martineau. Beyond
this I defy him to go; and yet he rashly--it might be said
petulantly--kicks away the only philosophic foundation on which it is
possible for him to build his religion.
He twits incidentally the modern scientific interpretation of nature
because of its want of cheerfulness. Let the new future,' he says,
'preach its own gospel, and devise, if it can, the means of making the
tidings glad.' This is a common argument: 'If you only knew the
comfort of belief!' My reply is that I choose the nobler part of
Emerson, when, after various disenchantments, he exclaimed, 'I covet
truth!' The gladness of true heroism visits the heart of him who is
really competent to say this. Besides, 'gladness' is an emotion, and
Mr. Martineau theoretically scorns the emotional. I am not, however,
acquainted with a writer who draws more largely upon this source,
while mistaking it for something objective. 'To reach the Cause,' he
says, 'there is no need to go into the past, as though being missed
here, He could be found there. But when once He has been apprehended
by the proper organs of divine apprehension, the whole life of
Humanity is recognised as the scene of His agency.' That Mr. Martineau
should have lived so long, thought so much, and failed to recognise
the entirely subjective character of this creed, is highly
instructive. His 'proper organs of divine apprehension '--given, we
must assume, to Mr. Martineau and his pupils, but denied to many of
the greatest intellects and noblest men in this and other ages--lie at
the very core of his emotions.
In fact, it is when Mr. Martineau is most purely emotional that he
scorns the emotions; it is when he is most purely subjective that he
rejects subjectivity. He pays a just and liberal tribute to the
character of John Stuart Mill. But in the light of Mill's philosophy,
benevolence, honour, purity, having 'shrunk into mere unaccredited
subjective susceptibilities, have lost all support from Omniscient
approval, and all presumable accordance with the reality of things.'
If Mr. Martineau had given them any inkling of the process by which he
renders the 'subjective susceptibilities' objective, or how he arrives
at an objective ground of 'Omniscient approval,' gratitude from his
pupils would have been his just meed. But, as it is, he leaves them
lost in an iridescent cloud of words, after exciting a desire which he
is incompetent to appease.
'We are,' he says, in another place, 'for ever shaping our
representations of invisible things into forms of definite opinion,
and throwing them to the front, as if they were the photographic
equivalent of our real faith. It is a delusion which affects us all.
Yet somehow the essence of our religion never finds its way into these
frames of theory: as we put them together it slips away, and, if we
turn to pursue it, still retreats behind; ever ready to work with the
will, to unbind and sweeten the affections, and bathe the life with
reverence, but refusing to be seen, or to pass from a divine hue of
thinking into a human pattern of thought.' This is very beautiful, and
mainly so because the man who utters it obviously brings it all out of
the treasury of his own heart. But the 'hue' and 'pattern' here so
finely spoken of, the former refusing to pass into the latter, are
neither more nor less than that 'emotion,' on the one hand, and that
'objective knowledge,' on the other, which have drawn this suicidal
fire from Mr. Martineau's battery.
I now come to one of the most serious portions of Mr. Martineau's
pamphlet--serious far less on account of its 'personal errors,' than
of its intrinsic gravity, though its author has thought fit to give it
a witty and sarcastic tone. He analyses and criticises 'the
materialist doctrine, which, in our time, is proclaimed with so much
pomp, and resisted with so much passion. "Matter is all I want," says
the physicist; "give me its atoms alone, and I will explain the
universe."' It is thought, even by Mr. Martineau's intimate friends,
that in this pamphlet he is answering me. I must therefore ask the
reader to contrast the foregoing travesty with what I really do say
regarding atoms: 'I do not think that he [the materialist] is entitled
to say that his molecular groupings and motions _explain_ everything.
In reality, they explain nothing. The utmost he can affirm is the
association of two classes of phenomena, of whose real bond of union
he is in absolute ignorance.' [Footnote: Address on 'Scientific
Materialism.'] This is very different from saying, 'Give me its atoms
alone, and I will explain the universe.' Mr. Martineau continues his
dialogue with the physicist: '"Good," he says; "take as many atoms as
you please. See that they have all that is requisite to Body [a
metaphysical B], being homogeneous extended solids." "That is not
enough," his physicist replies; "it might do for Democritus and the
mathematicians, but I must have something more. The atoms must not
only be in motion, and of various shapes, but also of as many kinds as
there are chemical elements; for how could I ever get water if I had
only hydrogen elements to work with?" "So be it," Mr. Martineau
consents to answer, "only this is a considerable enlargement of your
specified datum [where, and by whom specified?]--in fact, a conversion
of it into several; yet, even at the cost of its monism [put into it
by Mr. Martineau], your scheme seems hardly to gain its end; for by
what manipulation of your resources will you, for example, educe
Consciousness?"'
This reads like pleasantry, but it deals with serious things. For the
last seven years the question here proposed by Mr. Martineau, and my
answer to it, have been accessible to all. The question, in my words,
is briefly this: 'A man can say, "I feel, I think, I love," but how
does consciousness infuse itself into the problem?' And here is my
answer: The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding
facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite
thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur
simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor
apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass,
by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear
together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so
expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and
feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all
their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if
such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the
corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as
ever from the solution of the problem, "How are these physical
processes connected with the facts of consciousness?" The chasm
between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually
impassable.' [Footnote: Bishop Butler's reply to the Lucretian in the
'Belfast Address' is all in the same strain.]
Compare this with the answer which Mr. Martineau puts into the mouth
of his physicist, and with which I am generally credited by Mr.
Martineau's readers, both in England and America--'"It [the problem of
consciousness] does not daunt me at all. Of course you understand
that all along my atoms have been affected by gravitation and
polarity; and now I have only to insist with Fechner on a difference
among molecules: there are the inorganic, which can change only their
place, like the particles in an undulation; and there are the organic,
which can change their order, as in a globule that turns itself inside
out. With an adequate number of these our problem will be
manageable." "Likely enough," we may say ["entirely unlikely," say
I], "seeing how careful you are to provide for all emergencies; and
if any hitch should occur in the next step, where you will have to
pass from mere sentiency to thought and will, you can again look in
upon your atoms, and fling among them a handful of Leibnitz's monads,
to serve as souls in little, and be ready, in a latent form, with that
Vorstellungs-faehigkeit which our picturesque interpreters of nature
so much prize."'
'But surely,' continues Mr. Martineau, 'you must observe that this
"matter" of yours alters its style with every change of service:
starting as a beggar with scarce a rag of "property" to cover its
bones, it turns up as a prince when large undertakings are wanted. "We
must radically change our notions of matter," says Professor Tyndall;
and then, he ventures to believe, it will answer all demands, carrying
"the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." If the measure of
the required "change in our notions" had been specified, the
proposition would have had a real meaning, and been susceptible of a
test. It is easy travelling through the stages of such an hypothesis;
you deposit at your bank a round sum ere you start, and, drawing on it
piecemeal at every pause, complete your grand tour without a debt.'
The last paragraph of this argument is forcibly and ably stated. On
it I am willing to try conclusions with Mr. Martineau. I may say, in
passing, that I share his contempt for the picturesque interpretation
of nature, if accuracy of vision be thereby impaired. But the term
Vorstellungs-faehigkeit, as used by me, means the power of definite
mental presentation, of attaching to words the corresponding objects
of thought, and of seeing these in their proper relations, without the
interior haze and soft penumbral borders which the theologian loves.
To this mode of interpreting nature' I shall to the best of my ability
now adhere.
Neither of us, I trust, will be afraid or ashamed to begin at the
alphabet of this question. Our first effort must be to understand
each other, and this mutual understanding can only be ensured by
beginning low down. Physically speaking, however, we need not go
below the sea-level. Let us then travel in company to the Caribbean
Sea, and halt upon the heated water. What is that sea, and what is
the sun that heats it? Answering for myself, I say that they are both
matter. I fill a glass with the sea-water and expose it on the deck
of the vessel; after some time the liquid has all disappeared, and
left a solid residue of salt in the glass behind. We have mobility,
invisibility--apparent annihilation. In virtue of
The glad and secret aid
The sun unto the ocean paid,
the water has taken to itself wings and flown off as vapour. From the
whole surface of the Caribbean Sea such vapour is rising: and now we
must follow it--not upon our legs, however, nor in a ship, nor even in
a balloon, but by the mind's eye--in other words, by that power of
Vorstellung which Mr. Martineau knows so well, and which he so justly
scorns when it indulges in loose practices.
Compounding, then, the northward motion of the vapour with the earth's
axial rotation, we track our fugitive through the higher atmospheric
regions, obliquely across the Atlantic Ocean to Western Europe, and on
to our familiar Alps. Here another wonderful metamorphosis occurs.
Floating on the cold calm air, and in presence of the cold firmament,
the vapour condenses, not only to particles of water, but to particles
of crystalline water. These coalesce to stars of snow, which fall
upon the mountains in forms so exquisite that, when first seen, they
never fail to excite rapture. As to beauty, indeed, they put the work
of the lapidary to shame, while as to accuracy they render concrete
the abstractions of the geometer. Are these crystals 'matter'?
Without presuming to dogmatise, I answer for myself in the
affirmative.
Still, a formative power has obviously here come into play which did
not manifest itself in either the liquid or the vapour. The question
now is, Was not the power 'potential' in both of them, requiring only
the proper conditions of temperature to bring it into action? Again I
answer for myself in the affirmative. I am, however, quite willing to
discuss with Mr. Martineau the alternative hypothesis, that an
imponderable formative soul unites itself with the substance after its
escape from the liquid state. If he should espouse this hypothesis,
then I should demand of him an immediate exercise of that
Vorstellungs-faehigkeit, with which, in my efforts to think clearly, I
can never dispense. I should ask, At what moment did the soul come
in? Did it enter at once or by degrees; perfect from the first, or
growing and perfecting itself contemporaneously with its own
handiwork? I should also ask whether it is localised or diffused?
Does it move about as a lonely builder, putting the bits of solid
water in their places as soon as the proper temperature has set in? or
is it distributed through the entire mass of the crystal? If the
latter, then the soul has the shape of the crystal; but if the former,
then I should enquire after its shape. Has it legs or arms? If not,
I would ask it to be made clear to me how a thing without these
appliances can act so perfectly the part of a builder? (I insist on
definition, and ask unusual questions, if haply I might thereby banish
unmeaning words.) What were the condition and residence of the soul
before it joined the crystal? What becomes of it when the crystal is
dissolved? Why should a particular temperature be needed before it
can exercise its vocation? Finally, is the problem before us in any
way simplified by the assumption of its existence? I think it
probable that, after a full discussion of the question, Mr. Martineau
would agree with me in ascribing the building power displayed in the
crystal to the bits of water themselves. At all events, I should
count upon his sympathy so far as to believe that he would consider
any one unmannerly who would denounce me for rejecting this notion of
a separate soul, and for holding the snow-crystal to be matter.'
But then what an astonishing addition is here made to the powers of
Matter! Who would have dreamt, without actually seeing its work, that
such a power was locked up in a drop of water? All that we needed to
make the action of the liquid intelligible was the assumption of Mr.
Martineau's 'homogeneous extended atomic solids,' smoothly gliding
over one another. But had we supposed the water to be nothing more
than this, we should have ignorantly defrauded it of an intrinsic
architectural power, which the art of man, even when pushed to its
utmost degree of refinement, is incompetent to imitate. I would
invite Mr. Martineau to consider how inappropriate his figure of a
fictitious bank deposit becomes under these circumstances. The
'account current' of matter receives nothing at my hands which could
be honestly kept back from it. If, then, 'Democritus and the
mathematicians' so defined matter as to exclude the powers here proved
to belong to it, they were clearly wrong, and Mr. Martineau, instead
of twitting me with my departure from them, ought rather to applaud me
for correcting them. [Footnote: Definition implies previous
examination of the object defined, and is open to correction or
modification as knowledge of the object increases. Such increased
knowledge has radically changed our conceptions of the luminiferous
aether, converting its vibrations from longitudinal into transverse.
Such changes also Mr. Martineau's conceptions of matter are doomed to
undergo.]
The reader of my small contributions to the literature which deals
with the overlapping margins of Science and Theology, will have
noticed how frequently I quote Mr. Emerson. I do so mainly because in
him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and
entirely undaunted by the discoveries of Science, past, present, or
prospective. In his case Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes
her graver brother Science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal
laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually
transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world. Our
present theme is touched upon in the lines--
The journeying atoms, primordial wholes
Firmly draw, firmly drive by their animate poles.
As regards veracity and insight these few words outweigh, in my
estimation, all the formal learning expended by Mr. Martineau in those
disquisitions on Force, where he treats the physicist as a conjuror,
and speaks so wittily of atomic polarity. In fact, without this
notion of polarity--this 'drawing' and 'driving'--this attraction and
repulsion, we stand as stupidly dumb before the phenomena of
Crystallisation as a Bushman before the phenomena of the Solar System.
The genesis and growth of the notion I have endeavoured to make clear
in my third Lecture on Light, and in the article on 'Matter and Force'
published in this volume.
Our further course is here foreshadowed. A Sunday or two ago I stood
under an oak planted by Sir John Moore, the hero of Corunna. On the
ground near the tree little oaklets were successfully fighting for
life with the surrounding vegetation. The acorns had dropped into the
friendly soil, and this was the result of their interaction. What is
the acorn? what the earth? and what the sun, without whose heat and
light the tree could not become a tree, however rich the soil, and
however healthy the seed? I answer for myself as before--all
'matter.' And the heat and light which here play so potent a part are
acknowledged to be motions of matter. By taking something much lower
down in the vegetable kingdom than the oak, we might approach much
more nearly to the case of crystallisation already discussed; but this
is not now necessary.
If, instead of conceding the sufficiency of matter here, Mr. Martineau
should fly to the hypothesis of a vegetative soul, all the questions
before asked in relation to the snow-star become pertinent. I would
invite him to go over them one by one, and consider what replies he
will make to them. He may retort by asking me, 'Who infused the
principle of life into the tree?' I say, in answer, that our present
question is not this, but another--not who made the tree, but what is
it? Is there anything besides matter in the tree? If so, what,
and where? Mr. Martineau may have begun by this time to discern
that it is not 'picturesqueness,' but cold precision, that my
Vorstellungs-faehigkeit demands. How, I would ask, is this vegetative
soul to be presented to the mind? where did it flourish before the
tree grew? and what will become of it when the tree is sawn into
planks, or consumed in fire?
Possibly Mr. Martineau may consider the assumption of this soul to be
as untenable and as useless as I do. But then if the power to build a
tree be conceded to pure matter, what an amazing expansion of our
notions of the 'potency of matter' is implied in the concession' Think
of the acorn, of the earth, and of the solar light and heat--was ever
such necromancy dreamt of as the production of that massive trunk,
those swaying boughs and whispering leaves, from the interaction of
these three factors? In this interaction, moreover, consists what we
call life. It will be seen that I am not in the least insensible to
the wonder of the tree; nay, I should not be surprised if, in the
presence of this wonder, I feel more perplexed and overwhelmed than
Mr. Martineau himself.