responsibility, which, as it has been much talked of lately, it is
desirable to meet. With the view of removing the fear of our falling
back into the condition of 'the ape and tiger,' so sedulously excited
by certain writers, I propose to grapple with this question in its
rudest form, and in the most uncompromising way. 'If,' says the
robber, the ravisher, or the murderer, 'I act because I must act, what
right have you to hold me responsible for my deeds?' The reply is,
'The right of society to protect itself against aggressive and
injurious forces, whether they be bond or free, forces of nature or
forces of man.' 'Then,' retorts the criminal, 'you punish me for
what I cannot help.' 'Let it be granted,' says society, 'but had you
known that the treadmill or the gallows was certainly in store for
you, you might have "helped." Let us reason the matter fully and
frankly out. We may entertain no malice or hatred against you; it is
enough that with a view to our own safety and purification we are
determined that you and such as you shall not enjoy liberty of evil
action in our midst. You, who have behaved as a wild beast, we claim
the right to cage or kill as we should a wild beast. The public safety
is a matter of more importance than the very limited chance of your
moral renovation, while the knowledge that you have been hanged by the
neck may furnish to others about to do as you have done the precise
motive which will hold them back. If your act be such as to invoke a
minor penalty, then not only others, but yourself, may profit by the
punishment which we inflict. On the homely principle that "a burnt
child dreads the fire," it will make you think twice before venturing
on a repetition of your crime. Observe, finally, the consistency of
our conduct. You offend, you say, because you cannot help offending,
to the public detriment. We punish, is our reply, because we cannot
help punishing, for the public good. Practically, then, as Bishop
Butler predicted, we act as the world acted when it supposed the evil
deeds of its criminals to be the products of free-will.' [Footnote:
An eminent Church dignitary describes all this, not unkindly, as
'truculent logic.' I think it worthy of his Grace's graver
consideration.]
'What,' I have heard it argued, 'is the use of preaching about duty,
if a man's predetermined position in the moral world renders him
incapable of profiting by advice?' Who knows that he is incapable?
The preacher's last word is a factor in the man's conduct, and it may
be a most important factor, unlocking moral energies which might
otherwise remain imprisoned and unused. If the preacher thoroughly
feel that words of enlightenment, courage, and admonition enter into
the list of forces employed by Nature herself for man's amelioration,
since she gifted man with speech, he will suffer no paralysis to fall
upon his tongue. Dung the fig-tree hopefully, and not until its
barrenness has been demonstrated beyond a doubt let the sentence go
forth, 'Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?'
I remember when a youth in the town of Halifax, some two-and-thirty
years ago, attending a lecture given by a young man to a small but
select audience. The aspect of the lecturer was earnest and
practical, and his voice soon rivetted attention. He spoke of duty,
defining it as a debt owed, and there was a kindling vigour in his
words which must have strengthened the sense of duty in the minds of
those who heard him. No speculations regarding the freedom of the
will could alter the fact that the words of that young man did me
good. His name was George Dawson. He also spoke, if you will allow
me to allude to it, of a social subject much discussed at the
time--the Chartist subject of 'levelling.' Suppose, he says, two men
to be equal at night, and that one rises at six, while the other
sleeps till nine next morning, what becomes of your levelling? And in
so speaking be made himself the mouthpiece of Nature, which, as we
have seen, secures advance, not by the reduction of all to a common
level, but by the encouragement and conservation of what is best.
It may be urged that, in dealing as above with my hypothetical
criminal, I am assuming a state of things brought about by the
influence of religions which include the dogmas of theology and the
belief in freewill--a state, namely, in which a moral majority control
and keep in awe an immoral minority. The heart of man is deceitful
above all things, and desperately wicked. Withdraw, then, our
theologic sanctions, including the belief in free-will, and the
condition of the race will be typified by the samples of individual
wickedness which have been above adduced. We shall all, that is,
become robbers, and ravishers, and murderers. From much that has been
written of late it would seem that this astounding inference finds
house-room in many minds. Possibly, the people who hold such views
might be able to illustrate them by individual instances.
The fear of hell's a hangman's whip,
To keep the wretch in order.
Remove the fear, and the wretch, following his natural instinct, may
become disorderly; but I refuse to accept him as a sample of humanity.
'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die' is by no means the
ethical consequence of a rejection of dogma. To many of you the name
of George Jacob Holyoake is doubtless familiar, and you are probably
aware that at no man in England has the term 'atheist' been more
frequently pelted. There are, moreover, really few who have more
completely liberated themselves from theologic notions. Among
working-class politicians Mr. Holyoake is a leader. Does he exhort
his followers to 'Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'? Not so. In
the August number of the 'Nineteenth Century' you will find these
words from his pen: 'The gospel of dirt is bad enough, but the gospel
of mere material comfort is much worse.' He contemptuously calls the
Comtist championship of the working man, 'the championship of the
trencher.' He would place 'the leanest liberty which brought with it
the dignity and power of self-help' higher than 'any prospect of a
full plate without it.' Such is the moral doctrine taught by this
'atheistic' leader; and no Christian, I apprehend, need be ashamed of
it.
Most heartily do I recognise and admire the spiritual radiance, if I
may use the term, shed by religion on the minds and lives of many
personally known to me. At the same time I cannot but observe how
signally, as regards the production of anything beautiful, religion
fails in other cases. Its professor and defender is sometimes at
bottom a brawler and a clown. These differences depend upon primary
distinctions of character which religion does not remove. It may
comfort some to know that there are amongst us many whom the
gladiators of the pulpit would call 'atheists' and 'materialists,'
whose lives, nevertheless, as tested by any accessible standard of
morality, would contrast more than favourably with the lives of those
who seek to stamp them with this offensive brand. When I say
'offensive,' I refer simply to the intention of those who use such
terms, and not because atheism or materialism, when compared with many
of the notions ventilated in the columns of religious newspapers, has
any particular offensiveness for me. If I wished to find men who are
scrupulous in their adherence to engagements, whose words are their
bond, and to whom moral shiftiness of any kind is subjectively
unknown; if I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an
honourable neighbour, and a just citizen--I should seek him, and find
him among the band of 'atheists' to which I refer. I have known some
of the most pronounced among them not only in life but in death seen
them approaching with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no dread of
a 'hangman's whip,' with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still as
mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of them, as
if their eternal future depended upon their latest deeds.
In letters addressed to myself, and in utterances addressed to the
public, Faraday is often referred to as a sample of the association of
religious faith with moral elevation. I was locally intimate with him
for fourteen or fifteen years of my life, and had thus occasion to
observe how nearly his character approached what might, without
extravagance, be called perfection. He was strong but gentle,
impetuous but self-restrained; a sweet and lofty courtesy marked his
dealings with men and women; and though he sprang from the body of the
people, a nature so fine might well have been distilled from the
flower of antecedent chivalry. Not only in its broader sense was the
Christian religion necessary to Faraday's spiritual peace, but in what
many would call the narrow sense held by those described by Faraday
himself as 'a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if
known at all, as Sandemanians,' it constituted the light and comfort
of his days.
Were our experience confined to such cases, it would furnish an
irresistible argument in favour of the association of dogmatic
religion with moral purity and grace. But, as already intimated, our
experience is not thus confined. In further illustration of this
point, we may compare with Faraday a philosopher of equal magnitude,
whose character, including gentleness and strength, candour and
simplicity, intellectual power and moral elevation, singularly
resembles that of the great Sandemanian, but who has neither shared
the theologic views nor the religious emotions which formed so
dominant a factor in Faraday's life. I allude to Mr. Charles Darwin,
the Abraham of scientific men--a searcher as obedient to the command
of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God. I cannot
therefore, as so many desire, look upon Faraday's religious belief as
the exclusive source of qualities shared so conspicuously by one
uninfluenced by that belief. To a deeper virtue belonging to human
nature in its purer forms I am disposed to refer the excellence of
both.
Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown
incongruous with intelligence. We may admit, with Fichte, 'that
superstition has unquestionably constrained its subjects to abandon
many pernicious practices and to adopt many useful ones;' the real
loss accompanying its decay at the present day has been thus clearly
stated by the same philosopher: 'In so far as these lamentations do
not proceed from the priests themselves--whose grief at the loss of
their dominion over the human mind we can well understand--but from
the politicians, the whole matter resolves itself into this, that
government has thereby become more difficult and expensive. The judge
was spared the exercise of his own sagacity and penetration when, by
threats of relentless damnation, he could compel the accused to make
confession. The evil spirit formerly performed without reward
services for which in later times judges and policemen have to be
paid.'
No man ever felt the need of a high and ennobling religion more
thoroughly than this powerful and fervid teacher, who, by the way, did
not escape the brand of 'atheist.' But Fichte asserted emphatically
the power and sufficiency of morality in its own sphere. 'Let us
consider,' he says, 'the highest which man can possess in the absence
of religion--I mean pure morality. The moral man obeys the law of
duty in his breast absolutely, because it is a law unto him; and he
does whatever reveals itself to him as his duty simply because it is
duty. Let not the impudent assertion be repeated that such an
obedience, without regard for consequences, and without desire for
consequences, is in itself impossible and opposed to human nature.'
So much for Fichte. Faraday was equally distinct. 'I have no
intention,' he says, 'of substituting anything for religion, but I
wish to take that part of human nature which is independent of it.
Morality, philosophy, commerce, the various institutions and habits of
society, are independent of religion and may exist without it.' These
were the words of his youth, but they expressed his latest
convictions. I would add, that the muse of Tennyson never reached a
higher strain than when it embodied the sentiment of duty in AEnone:
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of
human nature been built up. The power which has moulded us thus far
has worked with stern tools upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done
cannot be so readily undone; and it has endowed us with moral
constitutions which take pleasure in the noble, the beautiful, and the
true, just as surely as it has endowed us with sentient organisms,
which find aloes bitter and sugar sweet. That power did not work with
delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are removed. Facts,
rather than dogmas, have been its ministers--hunger and thirst, heat
and cold, pleasure and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame,
pride, love, hate, terror, awe--such were the forces whose interaction
and adjustment throughout an immeasurable past wove the triplex web of
man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the
forces that will be effectual to the end.
You may retort that even on my own showing 'the power which makes for
righteousness' has dealt in delusions; for it cannot be denied that
the beliefs of religion, including the dogmas of theology and the
freedom of the will, have had some effect in moulding the moral world.
Granted; but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter.
Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are primary, and not
derived?--that they are not the products, instead of being the
creators, of man's moral nature? I think it is in one of the
Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the
nobility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts
the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in
heaven is derived from the nobility of man. The bird's instinct to
weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as typical of the force which
built cathedrals, temples, and pyramids:
Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nest
Of leaves and feathers from her breast,
Or how the fish outbuilt its shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Such and so grew these holy piles
While love and terror laid the tiles;
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone;
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky
As on its friends with kindred eye;
For out of Thought's interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air,
And nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.
Surely, many utterances which have been accepted as descriptions ought
to be interpreted as aspirations, or, as having their roots in
aspiration instead of in objective knowledge. Does the song of the
herald angels, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,
goodwill toward men,' express the exaltation and the yearning of a
human soul? or does it describe an optical and acoustical fact--a
visible host and an audible song? If the former, the exaltation and
the yearning are man's imperishable possession--a ferment long
confined to individuals, but which may by-and-by become the leaven of
the race. If the latter, then belief in the entire transaction is
wrecked by non-fulfilment. Look to the East at the present moment as
a comment on the promise of peace' on earth and goodwill toward men.
That promise is a dream ruined by the experience of eighteen
centuries, and in that ruin is involved the claim of the 'heavenly
host' to prophetic vision. But though the mechanical theory proves
untenable, the immortal song and the feelings it expresses are still
ours, to be incorporated, let us hope, in purer and less shadowy forms
in the poetry, philosophy, and practice of the future.
Thus, following the lead of physical science, we are brought without
solution of continuity into the presence of problems which, as usually
classified, lie entirely outside the domain of physics. To these
problems thoughtful and penetrative minds are now applying those
methods of research which in physical science have proved their truth
by their fruits. There is on all hands a growing repugnance to invoke
the supernatural in accounting for the phenomena of human life; and
the thoughtful minds just referred to, finding no trace of evidence in
favour of any other origin, are driven to seek in the interaction of
social forces the genesis and development of man's moral nature. If
they succeed in their search--and I think they are sure to
succeed--social duty will be raised to a higher level of significance
and the deepening sense of social duty will, it is to be hoped,
lessen, if not obliterate, the strifes and heartburnings which now
beset and disfigure our social life. Towards this great end it
behoves us one and all to work; and devoutly wishing its consummation,
I have the honour, ladies and gentlemen, to bid you a friendly
farewell.
********************
XV. PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION.
THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the
growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the
hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The
torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. Through
the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate;
through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion
and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own
frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have
withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the
world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded
on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such
thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general
want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor
their abiding power so strong. This general need--this hunger for the
ideal and wonderful--led eventually to the differentiation of a caste,
whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its
surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions
which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread
alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his
capacities and needs. As time advanced--in other words, as the savage
opened out into civilised man--these forms were purified and ennobled
until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:
Where still the magic robe of Poesy
Wound itself lovingly around the Truth.
[Footnote:
Da der Dichtung zauberische Huelle
Sich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'--Schiller.]
As poets, the priesthood would have been justified, their deities,
celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being
more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of
nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or
those among them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objective
validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external
evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man.
It is against this objective rendering of the emotions--this thrusting
into the region of fact and positive knowledge of conceptions
essentially ideal and poetic--that science, consciously or
unconsciously, wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as
any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on its
subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But when,
manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or
inaccurate historic data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this
feeling makes claims which traverse our knowledge of nature, science,
as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is
against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than
against the life and substance of religion, that Science enters her
protest. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be
taken for what it is worth--as an effort on the part of man to bring
the mystery of life and nature within the range of his capacities; as
a temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms of knowledge
of that which transcends all knowledge, and admits only of ideal
approach.
The signs of the times, I think, point in this direction. It is, for
example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold to protect, amid the
wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of religion. And it is to be
remembered that under the circumstances poetry may be the purest
accessible truth. In other influential quarters a similar spirit is
at work. In a remarkable article published by Professor Knight of St.
Andrews in the September number of the 'Nineteenth Century,' amid
other free utterances, we have this one: 'If matter is not eternal,
its first emergence into being is a miracle beside which all others
dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been pointed
out, the process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a material
world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined; [Footnote: Professor
Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of
whose Collects begins thus: 'O God, who by thy mighty power halt made
all things of nothing.] its emergence into order out of chaos when
"without form and void" of life, is merely a poetic rendering of the
doctrine of its slow evolution.' These are all bold words to be spoken
before the moral philosophy class of a Scotch university, while those
I have underlined show a remarkable freedom of dealing with the sacred
text. They repeat in terser language what I ventured to utter four
years ago regarding the Book of Genesis. '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. _It is a poem, not a scientific treatise._ In
the former aspect it is for ever beautiful; in the latter it has been,
and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful.' My
agreement with Professor Knight extends still further. 'Does the
vital,' he asks, 'proceed by a still remoter development from the
non-vital? Or was it created by a fiat of volition? Or'--and here he
emphasises his question--'has it always existed in some form or other
as an eternal constituent of the universe? I do not see,' he replies,
'how we can escape from the last alternative.' With the whole force of
my conviction I say, Nor do I, though our modes of regarding the
'eternal constituent' may not be the same.
When matter was defined by Descartes, he deliberately excluded the
idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition.
Extension only was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impotence
of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions were
referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, gave
the impulse. In this connection the argument in Young's 'Night
Thoughts' will occur to most readers:
Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain
Shot through vast masses of enormous weight?
Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assume
Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?
Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose
ashes lie unmarked in Putney Churchyard, strenuously contended. He
affirmed motion to be an inherent attribute of matter--that no portion
of matter was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were
animated by a motion of their ultimate particles. The success of his
contention, according to the learned and laborious Dr. Berthold,
[Footnote: 'John Toland und der Monismus der Gegenwart,' Heidelberg,
Carl Winter.] entitles Toland to be regarded as the founder of that
monistic doctrine which is now so rapidly spreading.