God has done more than manifest himself in Jesus Christ. He has
done more than place upon the earth and before men His own living
image, the type of sanctity and the model of life. The Creator
has accomplished, through Jesus Christ, toward man, His creature,
an act of His beneficence and at the same time of His sovereign
power. Jesus Christ is not only God made man to spread the divine
light upon men; He is God made man to conquer and efface in man
moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He brings not only light
and law, but pardon and salvation.
{77}
And it is at the price of His own suffering, of His own
sacrifice, that He brings these to them. He is the type of
self-devotion at the same time as of sanctity. He has submitted
to be a victim in order to be a saviour. The Incarnation leads to
the Cross, and the Cross to the Redemption.
Here are the supreme dogma and mystery. Here are revealed plainly
the sense and the import of Christianity. By what ways did Jesus
Christ penetrate the human soul to accomplish this great work?
How did He win the human soul to the Christian faith, in order to
snatch it from evil and to save it?
When man fails in the duty of which he recognises the law,--when
he commits the wrong which he is bound to shun,--when, after sin,
repentance arises within him, and a sense of the necessity of
expiation is soon joined with this sentiment of repentance, the
moral instinct of man teaches that repentance does not suffice to
efface the fault, and that it requires to be expiated: reparation
supposes suffering.
{78}
And when the religious sentiment is joined to the moral
sentiment,--when man believes in God, and sees in Him the author
and dispenser of the moral law, he regards himself as guilty of
transgression toward God whom he has disobeyed, he feels the need
of being pardoned and of being restored to the favour of the
Sovereign Master whom he has offended.
Among all nations, in all religions, under all social forms,
these two instincts--as to the necessity of expiation to ensue
upon the fault, and the necessity of pardon to follow the
transgression--appear natural and inherent in the human soul.
They have been at all times and in all places, the source of a
multitude of beliefs and practices; some pure and touching,
others foolish and odious: these may all be briefly comprised in
the single expression, _sacrifices_. The histories of all
nations, barbarous or civilized, ancient or modern, teem with
sacrificial rites of every description, whether they be of a
nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild or bloody; rites
invented and celebrated either to expiate the sins of man, or to
appease the anger of God and regain His favour.
{79}
Nor is this all; we have here to note another moral fact, not
less real although it seems stranger to the eyes of superficial
reason. Mankind has believed that a fault might be expiated by
another than its author, that innocent victims might be
efficaciously offered up to influence God, and to save the
guilty. This belief has led to sacrifices no less absurd than
atrocious: the pretended expiation has become an additional
crime: it has at the same time been also the source of heroic
acts and sublime examples of self-devotion. Both the domestic
records of families and the public histories of nations have
furnished us with admirable instances of innocence voluntarily
offering itself as a sacrifice, taking upon itself the penalty,
the suffering, the death, to expiate the sin of others, and to
win from Divine Justice--now satisfied--the pardon of the
offender.
{80}
And are we then to regard this merely as a pious, a generous
illusion, a devotedness as vain as admirable? Yes, such is the
view that all those must adopt who believe neither in Providence
nor prayer, nor in the existence of any efficacious relation
between the actions of man and the purposes of God; no solidarity
between men, no connection between the sacrifice of him who
practises the act of self-devotion, and the destiny of him who is
its object. But those who have faith in the living God, in His
continued presence, and His never-sleeping providence, those who
believe that nothing in man, whether it be good or whether it be
evil, is in vain, that every moral act bears its fruit visible or
invisible, immediate or remote, such as these cannot fail to
feel, to have, as it were, a presentiment, that in such
self-sacrifice of the innocent for the salvation of the guilty,
there exists a mysterious virtue. The secret of this it may not
be given them to fathom, but it nevertheless gives life in their
bosom to the hope that such sublime devotion will not fail of its
object.
{81}
And now, to pass from this feeling, and from the acts of man,
whose reality no one can dispute, to the corresponding dogmas of
Christianity, let me, by the side of these acts of devotedness
and self-sacrifice of the human creature in his innocence seeking
to atone for the sins of the human creature who is guilty, place
the self-devotion and the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the
Man-God, tendered to ransom from sin the race of mankind and to
open to it the way of salvation; who is not struck by this
sublime analogy? What connection and harmony between the purest,
the most generous, instincts of the human soul, and the dogma of
God's Redemption? I touch upon none of the questions, I enter
into none of the controversies which have sprung up with respect
to this dogma of Redemption; I do not weigh with a view to
compare faith and works, nor do I essay to assign the part due to
divine grace or to human virtue; I do not define or seek to
number the elect, but I pause upon the fact itself of the
Redemption by Jesus Christ, the fact upon which the dogma itself
reposes.
{82}
All that the most renowned heroes, the most glorious saints of
humanity have striven to accomplish, in order to expiate the sins
of any creature or any nation, Jesus Christ the Elect of God, the
Son of God, the God-Man, came to effect for all mankind, by means
of incomparable sorrow, humiliation, and sufferings. And, as was
affirmed by St. Paul in the first century, and by Bossuet in the
seventeenth, this very suffering, this humiliation, this
martyrdom of Jesus Christ, have constituted his victory and his
empire. And I would ask, what other spectacle than that of God
made man to constitute himself victim--made victim to become the
saviour--could have excited in the soul of mankind those
outbursts of admiration, of respect, and of love, that ardent,
invincible, and contagious faith, of which the Apostles and the
primitive Christians have left us the evidences and the example?
It was requisite that the victim and the sacrifice should be
equal to the work.
{83}
That work was the Christian religion, that incomparable system of
facts, dogmas, precepts, promises, which, in the midst of all the
doubts and all the controversies of the mind of man, have for
nineteen centuries afforded satisfaction and solution to those
aspirings of the human race, which nature prompts, whether they
assume the form of religious instincts or religious problems.
{84}
Third Meditation.
The Supernatural.
To a system so grand, and in such profound harmony with man's own
nature, an objection is made which is thought decisive; that
system proclaims the Supernatural, has the Supernatural for its
principle and foundation. It is objected that the Supernatural
itself has no existence.
This objection is not novel, but it has at this moment in
appearance assumed a more serious and formidable shape than ever.
It is in the name of science itself, of all the human sciences,
of the physical sciences, historical science, philosophical
science, that the pretension is made that is to reduce the
Supernatural to a nonentity, and to banish it from the world and
from man.
{85}
The reverence that I feel for science is infinite. I would have
it as free and unshackled as I would desire to see it honoured.
But I would at the same time like to see it deal somewhat more
rigorously and logically with itself. I would like to see it less
exclusively absorbed by its own peculiar labours and occupations,
its momentary successes; more careful not to forget or omit any
of the ideas or any of the facts which bear upon the subject with
which it deals, and for which in its solution it has still to
account.
In whatever quarter, at this day, the wind may be, the abolition
of the Supernatural is a difficult enterprise, for the belief in
the Supernatural is a fact natural, primitive, universal,
constant in the life and history of the human race. We may
interrogate mankind in all times and places, in all states of
society and degrees of civilization, we find it always and
everywhere spontaneously believing in facts and causes beyond the
sphere of this palpable world, of this living piece of mechanism
termed nature. In vain do we extend, explain, amplify nature
itself; the instinct of man, the instinct of human masses, has
never suffered that nature to confine it: it has always sought
and seen something beyond.
{86}
It is this belief--instinctive, and hitherto
indestructible--which is qualified as a radical error; this
universal and enduring fact in man's history it is which men seek
to abolish. They go farther; they affirm that it is already
abolished--that the _people_ no longer believe in the
Supernatural, and that any attempt to bring them back to it would
be vain. Incredible conceit of man! What, because in a corner of
the world in one day among ages brilliant progress may have been
made in natural and historical science--because in the name of
the sciences, and in brilliant books, the Supernatural has been
combated, they proclaim the Supernatural vanquished, abolished;
and we hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in the name of
the learned, but of the people! Have you then completely
forgotten, or have you never thoroughly comprehended, humanity
and the history of humanity?
{87}
Do you ignore absolutely what the people really is, and what all
those nations are that cover the surface of the earth? Have you
never then penetrated into those millions of souls in which the
belief in the Supernatural is and abides, present and active even
when the words which move their lips disown it? Are you then
unconscious of the immense distance which there is between the
depths and the surface of those souls, between the variable
breaths which only ruffle the minds of men, and the immutable
instincts which preside over their very being? True, there are,
in our days, amongst the people, many fathers, mothers, children,
who believe themselves incredulous, and mock scorn fully at
miracles; but follow them in the intimacy of their homes, amongst
the trials of their lives, how do these parents act, when their
child is ill, those farmers when their crops are threatened,
those sailors when they float upon the waters a prey to the
tempest? They elevate their eyes to heaven, they burst forth in
prayer, they invoke that Supernatural power said by you to be
abolished in their very thought. By their spontaneous and
irresistible acts they give to your words and to their own a
striking disavowal.
{88}
But to advance a step towards you, admitted that the faith in the
Supernatural is abolished; let us enter together that society and
those classes to whom this moral ruin is a triumph and a vaunt.
What then ensues? In the place of God's miracles, man's miracles
make their appearance. They are searched for, they are called
for; men are found to invent them, and to contrive them to be
recognised by thousands of beholders. It is not necessary to go
either far in time or wide in space to see the Supernatural of
Superstition raising itself in the place of the Supernatural of
Religion, and Credulity hurrying to meet Falsehood half-way.
{89}
But away with these unhealthy paroxysms of humanity; and to
return to its sober and enduring history. We will admit that the
instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been the source and
abides the foundation of all religions, of religion in the most
general sense of the word, and of essential religion. The most
serious, at the same time the most perplexed, of the thinkers who
in our days have approached the subject, M. Edmond Scherer, saw
plainly enough that that was the question at issue, and he has so
put it in the third of his "Conversations Théologiques," noble
yet sad imaging forth of the fermentation in his own ideas and
the struggles which they occasion in his soul. "The Supernatural
is not a something external to religion," says one of the two
speakers between whom M. Scherer supposes the discussion, "it is
religion itself." "No," says the other, "the Supernatural is not
the peculiar element of religion, but rather of superstition: the
Supernatural fact has no relation with the human soul, for it is
the essence of the Supernatural that it goes beyond all those
conditions which constitute credibility; its essence indeed is
the being _anti-human_."
{90}
The discussion continues and becomes animated: the contrary
nature of the perplexities experienced by the two speakers
becomes manifest. "Perhaps," says the Rationalist, "the
Supernatural was a necessary form of religion for ill cultivated
minds: but rightly or wrongly, our modern civilization rejects
miracles; without positive denial, it remains indifferent to
them. Even the preacher knows not how to deal with them; the more
he is in earnest, the more his Christian feeling has inwardness
and vitality, the more does the miracle also disappear from his
teaching. Miracles formerly constituted the great force of the
sermon, at the present day what are they but a secret source of
embarrassment? Everybody feels vaguely when confronted by the
marvellous accounts in our sacred volumes, what he feels when
confronted by the Legends of the Saints; it is impossible for
that to be religion, it is only its superfoetation." "It is
true," exclaims with sorrow the hesitating Christian, "we believe
no longer in miracles; you might have added that neither do we
any more believe in God himself; the two things go together.
{91}
We hear much now-a-days of Christian Spiritualism--of the
religion of the conscience, and you yourself seem to see that men
in giving up miracles are making progress in religion. Ah! why is
it that the intimate experience of my own heart cannot express
itself in a forcible protest against any such opinion? Whenever I
find my faith in miraculous agency vacillating within me, the
image of my God seems to be fading away from my eyes: He ceases
to be for me God the free, the living, the personal; the God with
whom the soul converses, as with a master and friend; and this
holy dialogue once interrupted, what is left us? How does life
become sad? how does it lose its illusions? Reduced to the
satisfaction of mere physical wants, to eat, to drink, to sleep,
to make money, deprived of all horizon, how puerile does our
maturity appear, how sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our
anxieties!
{92}
"No more mystery, no more innocence, no more infinity, no longer
any heaven above our heads, no more poesy. Ah! be sure: the
incredulity which rejects the miracle has a tendency to unpeople
heaven, and to disenchant the earth. The Supernatural is the
natural sphere of the soul. It is the essence of its faith, of
its hope, of its love. I know how specious criticism is, how
victorious its arguments often appear; but I know one thing
besides, and perhaps I might here even appeal to your own
testimony; in ceasing to believe in what is miraculous, the soul
finds that it has lost the secret of divine life; henceforth it
is urged downwards towards the abyss, soon it lies on the earth,
and not seldom in the dirt."
In his turn the disbeliever in the Supernatural is troubled and
saddened: "Listen," he says: "the history of humanity seems to be
sometimes moving in obedience to the following scheme. The world
begins with religion, and, referring all phenomena to a first
cause, it sees God everywhere.
{93}
Then comes philosophy, which, having discovered the connection of
secondary causes, and the laws of their operation, makes a
corresponding deduction from the direct intervention of divinity,
and then founding itself upon the idea of necessity (for it is
only necessity which falls within the domain of science, and
science is in fact but the knowledge of what is necessary);
philosophy tends in its very fundamental principle to exclude God
from the world. It does more; it finishes by denying human
liberty as it has denied God. The reason is evident: liberty is a
cause beyond the sphere of the necessary connection of causes, a
first cause, a cause which serves as cause to itself: and from
that moment philosophy, unequal to any explanation, feels itself
disposed to deny that first cause. A philosophy true to itself
will ever be fatalistic. For from that moment philosophy corrupts
and destroys itself. When it has no other God than the universe,
no other man than the chief of the mammalia, what is it but a
mere system of Zoology?
{94}
Zoology constitutes the whole science of the epoch, of the
Materialists, and to speak plainly, that is our position at the
present day. But materialism can never be the be-all and the
end-all of the human race. Corrupt and enervated, society is
passing through immense catastrophes, is falling in ruins; the
iron harrow of Revolution is breaking up mankind like the clods
of the field; in the bloody furrows germinate new races; the soul
in the agony of its distress believes once more; it resumes its
faith in virtue, it finds again the language of prayer. To the
age of the Renaissance succeeded that of the Reformation; to the
Germany of Frederick the Great, the Germany of 1812. So faith
springs up for ever and ever out of its ashes. Ah, that I must
add it, humanity rises again but to resume the march which I have
just described. But can it be said of it besides, that like this
Globe of ours it is making any movement in advance whilst it is
so turning round itself, and if it does so advance, towards what
is it gravitating?
{95}
'Whither, whither, O Lord,
marches the earth in the heavens?'" [Footnote 18]
[Footnote 18: Mélange de Critique Religieuse, par Edmond
Scherer--Conversations Théologiques, pp. 169-187.]
But it is not towards heaven that the earth would march if it
followed the path in which the adversaries of the Supernatural
are impelling it. It is this peculiarity, they say, of the
Supernatural, that being incredible, it is in its very essence
anti-human. Now it is precisely to something not anti-human but
superhuman that the human soul aspires, and there seeks to
realize these aspirations in the Supernatural. We should be never
weary of repeating it; the whole finite world in its entirety,
with all its facts and all its laws, comprising indeed man
himself, suffices not for the soul of man; it requires something
grander and more perfect for the subject of its contemplation,
the object of its love; it desires to fix its trust in something
more stable; to lean upon something less fragile.
{96}
This supreme and sublime ambition it is to which religion, in its
widest sense, gives birth and supplies nourishment; and this
supreme and sublime ambition it is also that the religion of
Christ more particularly responds to and satisfies. Let those,
therefore, who flatter themselves that although abolishing the
belief in the Supernatural, they leave Christians still
Christians, undeceive themselves; what they are abolishing,
destroying, is very religion, for their arguments assail all
religion in general, and Christianity in particular. It may be
that they do not inflict upon themselves all this evil, and that
in retaining a sincere religious sentiment they really believe
themselves nearly Christians; the soul struggles against the
errors of the thought, and a moral suicide is a rare spectacle.
But the evil even in spreading unveils more plainly its nature
and increases in intensity; besides men, in masses, draw from
error far more logical conclusions than the man ever did in whom
the error had its origin. The people are not the learned, neither
are they philosophers, and only once succeed in destroying in
them all faith in the Supernatural, and you may consider it
certain that the faith in Christ must have previously
disappeared.
{97}
Have you well weighed all this? Have you pictured to yourself
what a man, what mankind, what the soul of man, what human
society itself would become if religion were in effect abolished,
if religious faith entirely disappeared? I will not give way to
anguish of soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hesitate
to affirm that no imagination can represent with adequate
fidelity what would take place in us and around us if the place
at present occupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to
become vacant, and its empire annihilated. No one could pronounce
to what degree of disorder and degradation humanity would be
precipitated. But awful indeed would be the result if all faith
in the Supernatural were extinct in the soul, and if man had in a
supernatural state neither trust nor hope.
It is not my design, however, to confine myself here to the
question regarded merely in its moral, practical light; I
approach the Supernatural as viewed with the eyes of free and
speculative reason.
{98}
It is condemned for its very name's sake. Nothing is or can be,
it is said, beyond and above nature. Nature is one and complete;
everything is comprised in it; in it, of necessity, all things
cohere, enchain, and develop themselves.
We are here in thorough pantheism--that is to say, in absolute
atheism. I do not hesitate to give to pantheism its real name.
Amongst the men who at the present day declare themselves the
opponents of the Supernatural, most, certainly, do not believe
that they are nor do they desire to be atheists. But let me tell
them that they are leading others whither they neither think nor
wish themselves to go. The negation of the Supernatural, and that
in the name of the unity and universality of nature, is
pantheism, and pantheism is nothing more nor less than atheism.
{99}
In the sequel of these Meditations, when I come to speak
particularly of the actual state of the Christian religion, and
of the different systems which combat it, I will in this respect
justify my assertion; at present, I have to repel direct attacks
upon the Supernatural--attacks less fundamental than those of
pantheism, but not less serious, for in truth, whether men know
it or not, and whether they mean it or not, all attacks in this
warfare reach the same object, and as soon as the Supernatural is
the aim it is religion itself that receives the shaft.
The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed to; that, say they,
is the palpable and incontestable fact established by the
experience of mankind, and upon which rests the conduct of human
life. In presence of the permanent order of nature and the
immutability of its laws, we cannot admit any partial, any
momentary infractions; we cannot believe in the Supernatural, in
miracles.
True, general and constant laws do govern nature. Are we,
therefore, to affirm that those laws are necessary, and that no
deviation from them is possible in nature? Who is there that does
not discern an essential, an absolute difference between what is
general and what is necessary?
{100}
The permanence of the actual laws of nature is a fact established
by experience, but it is not the only fact possible, the only
fact conceivable by reason; those laws might have been other
laws, they may change. Several of them have not always been what
they now are, for science itself proves that the condition of the
universe has been different from what it is at present; the
universal and permanent order of which we form part, and in which
we confide, has not always been what we now see it; it has had a
beginning; the creation of the actual system of nature and of its
laws is a fact as certain as the system itself is certain. And
what is creation but a supernatural fact, the act of a Power
superior to the actual laws of nature, and which has power to
modify them just as much as it has had power to establish them?
The first of miracles is God himself.
{101}
There is a second miracle--man. I resume what I have already
said; by his title as a moral being and free agent, man lives
beyond and above the influence of the general and permanent laws
of nature; he creates by his will effects which are not at all
the necessary consequence of any pre-existent law; and those
effects take their place in a system absolutely distinct and
independent from the visible order which governs the universe.
The moral liberty of man is a fact as certain, and natural, as
the order of nature, and it is at the same time a supernatural
fact--that is to say, essentially foreign to the order of nature
and to its laws.
God is the being moral and free _par excellence_, that is to
say, the being excellently capable of acting as first cause
beyond the influence of causation. By his title as a moral being
and free agent, man is in intimate relation with God. Who shall
define the possible contingencies, or fathom the mysteries of
this relation? Who dare to say that God cannot modify, that He
never does modify, according to his plans with respect to the
moral system and to man, the laws which He has made and which He
maintains in the material order of nature?
{102}
Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the possibility of
supernatural facts; and so their attack is indirect. If those
facts, say they, are not impossible, they are incredible, for no
particular testimony of man in favour of a miracle can give a
certitude equal to that which, on the opposite side, results from
the experience which men have of the fixity of the laws of
nature.
"It is experience only," says Hume, "which gives authority to
human testimony; and it is the same experience which assures us
of the laws of nature. When therefore these two kinds of
experience are contrary, we have nothing to do, but subtract the
one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or
the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder.
But according to the principles here explained, this subtraction,
with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire
annihilation: and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that
no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and
make it a just foundation for any such system of religion."
[Footnote 19]
[Footnote 19: Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by
David Hume; Essay on Miracles, vol. iii. p. 119-145, Bâle,
1793. [Same work, p. 91, London, 16mo, 1860.--TRANSLATOR.]]
{103}
It is in this reasoning of Hume that the opponents of miracles
shut themselves up as in an impregnable fortress to refuse them
all credence.
What confusion of facts and ideas! What a superficial solution of
one of the grandest problems of our nature! What! a simple
operation of arithmetic, with respect to two experimental
observations, estimated in ciphers, is to decide the question
whether the universal belief of the race of man in the
Supernatural is well-founded or simply absurd; whether God only
acts upon the world and upon man by laws established once for
all, or whether He still continues to make, in the exercise of
his power, use of his liberty!
{104}
Not only does the sceptic Hume here show himself unconscious of
the grandeur of the problem; he mistakes even in the motives upon
which he founds his shallow conclusion; for it is not from human
experience alone that human testimony draws her authority: this
authority has sources more profound, and a worth anterior to
experience: it is one of the natural bonds, one of the
spontaneous sympathies which unite with one another men and the
generations of men. Is it by virtue of experience that the child
trusts to the words of its mother, that it has faith in all she
tells it? The mutual trust that men repose in what they say or
transmit to each other is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous,
which experience confirms or shakes, sets up again or sets bounds
to, but which experience does not originate.
I find in the same essay of Hume, [Footnote 20] this other
passage: "The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from
miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency
towards the belief of those events from which it is derived."
[Footnote 20: Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 128,
_ubi supra_.]
{105}
Thus, if we are to credit Hume, it is merely for his pleasure,
for the diversion of the imaginative faculty, that man believes
in the Supernatural; and beneath this impression--though real,
still only of a secondary nature--which does no more than skim
the surface of the human soul, the philosopher has no glimpse at
all of the profound instincts and superior requisitions which
have sway over him.
But why an attack of this character, so indirect and little
complete? Why should Hume limit himself to the proposition that
miracles can never be historically proved, instead of at once
affirming the impossibility of miracles themselves? This is what
the opponents of the Supernatural virtually think; and it is
because they commence by regarding miracles as impossible that
they apply themselves to destroy the value of the evidences by
which they are supported.
{106}
If the evidence which surrounds the cradle of Christianity, if
the fourth, if even the tenth part of it were adduced in support
of facts of a nature extra-ordinary, unexpected, or unheard of,
but still not having a character positively supernatural, the
proof would be accepted as unexceptionable: the facts for
certain. In appearance, it is merely the proof by witnesses of
the Supernatural that is contested; whereas, in reality, the very
possibility of the thing is denied that is sought to be proved.
The question ought to be put as it really is, instead of such a
solution being offered as is a mere evasion.
Lately, however, men of logical minds and daring spirits have not
hesitated to speak more frankly and plainly. "The new dogma, they
say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is the negation of
the Supernatural. ... Those still disposed to reject this
principle have nothing to do with our books, and we, on our side,
have no cause to feel disquietude at their opposition and their
censure, for we do not write for them. And if this discussion is
altogether avoided, it is because it is impossible to enter into
it with out admitting an unacceptable proposition, viz., one
which presumes that the Supernatural can in any given case be
possible. [Footnote 21]
[Footnote 21: Conservation, Involution, et Positivisme, par
M. Littré, Preface, p. xxvi, and following pages--M. Havet,
Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Août, 1863.]
{107}
I do not reproach the disciples of the school of Hume for having
evinced greater timidity: if they attacked the Supernatural by a
side way, not as being impossible in itself, but as being merely
incapable of proof by human testimony, they did not do so
designedly and with deceitful purpose. Let us render them more
justice, and do them more honour. A prudent and an honest
instinct held them back on the declivity upon which they had
placed themselves; they felt that to deny even the possibility of
the Supernatural, was to enter at full sail into pantheism and
fatalism, that is to say, was the same thing as at once
dispensing with God and doing away with the free agency of man.
Their moral sense, their good sense, withheld them from any such
course.
{108}
The fundamental error of the adversaries of the Supernatural is
that they contest it in the name of human science, and that they
class the Supernatural amongst facts within the domain of
science, whereas the Supernatural does not fall within that
domain, and the very attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to
its being entirely rejected.
{109}
Fourth Meditation.
The Limits Of Science.
An eminent moralist, who was at the same time not only a
theologian, but a philosopher well versed in the physical
sciences, I mean Dr. Chalmers, professor at the University of
Edinburgh, and corresponding member of the Institute of France,
wrote in his work on _Natural Theology_, a chapter entitled:
_On man's partial and limited knowledge of divine things._
The first pages are as follows:--
"The true modern philosophy never makes more characteristic
exhibition of itself, than at the limit which separates the
known from the unknown. It is there that we behold it in a
twofold aspect--that of the utmost deference and respect for
all the findings of experience within this limit; that, on the
other hand, of the utmost disinclination and distrust for all
those fancies of ingenious or plausible speculation which have
their place in the ideal region beyond it.
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To call in the aid of a language which far surpasses our own in
expressive brevity, its office is '_indagare_' rather than
'_divinare_.' The products of this philosophy are copies
and not creations. It may discover a system of nature, but not
devise one. It proceeds first on the observation of individual
facts and if these facts are ever harmonised into a system,
this is only in the exercise of a more extended observation. In
the work of systematising, it makes no excursion beyond the
territory of actual nature--for they are the actual phenomena
of nature which form the first materials of this
philosophy--and they are the actual resemblances of these
phenomena that form, as it were, the cementing principle, to
which the goodly fabrics of modern science owe all the solidity
and all the endurance that belong to them.
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It is this chiefly which distinguishes the philosophy of the
present day from that of by-gone ages. The one was mainly an
excogitative, the other mainly a descriptive process--a
description however extending to the likenesses as well as to
the peculiarities of things; and, by means of these likenesses,
these observed likenesses alone, often realising a more
glorious and magnificent harmony than was ever pictured forth
by all the imaginations of all the theorists.
"In the mental characteristics of this philosophy, the strength
of a full-grown understanding is blended with the modesty of
childhood. The ideal is sacrificed to the actual--and, however
splendid or fondly cherished a hypothesis may be, yet if but
one phenomenon in the real history of nature stand in the way,
it is forthwith and conclusively abandoned. To some the
renunciation may be as painful as the cutting off a right hand,
or the plucking out a right eye--yet, if true to the great
principle of the Baconian school, it must be submitted to.
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With its hardy disciples one valid proof outweighs a thousand
plausibilities--and the resolute firmness wherewith they bid
away the speculations of fancy is only equalled by the
childlike compliance wherewith they submit themselves to the
lessons of experience.
"It is thus that the same principle which guides to a just and
a sound philosophy in all that lies within the circle of human
discovery, leads also to a most unpresuming and unpronouncing
modesty in reference to all that lies beyond it. And should
some new light spring up on this exterior region, should the
information of its before hidden mysteries break in upon us
from some quarter that was before inaccessible, it will be at
once perceived (on the supposition of its being a genuine and
not an illusory light) that, of all other men, they are the
followers of Bacon and Newton who should pay the most
unqualified respect to all its revelations.
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In their case it comes upon minds which are without prejudice,
because on that very principle, which is most characteristic of
our modern science, upon minds without preoccupation. ... The
strength of his confidence in all the ascertained facts of the
_terra cognita_ is at one or in perfect harmony with the
humility of his diffidence in regard to all the conceived
plausibilities of the _terra incognita_.
"And let it further be remarked of the self-denial which is
laid upon us by Bacon's Philosophy, that, like all other
self-denial in the cause of truth or virtue, it hath its
reward. In giving ourselves up to its guidance, we have often
to quit the fascinations of beautiful theory; but in exchange
for them, we are at length regaled by the higher and
substantial beauties of actual nature. There is a stubbornness
in facts before which the specious imagination is compelled to
give way; and perhaps the mind never suffers more painful
laceration than when, after having vainly attempted to force
nature into a compliance with her own splendid generalizations,
she, on the appearance of some rebellious and impracticable
phenomenon, has to practise a force upon herself--when she thus
finds the goodly speculation superseded by the homely and
unwelcome experience.
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It seemed at the outset a cruel sacrifice, when the world of
speculation, with all its manageable and engaging simplicities,
had to be abandoned; and on becoming the pupils of observation,
we, amid the varieties of the actual world around us, felt as
if bewildered, if not lost, among the perplexities of a chaos.
This was a period of greatest sufferance; but it has had a
glorious termination. In return for the assiduity wherewith the
study of nature hath been prosecuted, she hath made a more
abundant revelation of her charms. Order hath arisen out of
confusion, and in the ascertained structure of the universe
there are now found to be a state and a sublimity beyond all
that was ever pictured by the mind in the days of her
adventurous and unfettered imagination.
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Even viewed in the light of a noble and engaging spectacle for
the fancy to dwell upon, who would ever think of comparing with
the system of Newton, either that celestial machinery of Des
Cartes, which was impelled by whirlpools of ether, or that
still more cumbrous planetarium of cycles and epicycles which
was the progeny of a remoter age? It is thus that at the
commencement of the observational process there is the
abjuration of beauty. But it soon reappears in another form,
and brightens as we advance, and at length there arises on
solid foundation, a fairer and goodlier system than ever
floated in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor is it
difficult to perceive the reason of this. What we discover by
observation is the product of divine imagination bodied forth
by creative power into a stable and enduring reality. What we
devise by our own ingenuity is but the product of human
imagination. The one is the solid archetype of those
conceptions which are in the mind of God: the other is the
shadowy representation of those conceptions which are in the
mind of man. It is just as with the labourer, who, by
excavating the rubbish which hides and besets some noble
architecture, does more for the gratification of our taste,
than if by his unpractised hand he should attempt to regale us
with plans and sketches of his own.
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And so the drudgery of experimental science, in exchange for
that beauty whose fascinations it withstood at the outset of
its career, has evolved a surpassing beauty from among the
realities of truth and nature. ...
"The views contemplated through the medium of observation, are
found not only to have a justness in them, but to have a grace
and a grandeur in them far beyond all the visions which are
contemplated through the medium of fancy, or which ever regaled
the fondest enthusiast in the enchanted walks of speculation
and poetry. But neither the grace nor the grandeur alone would,
without evidence, have secured acceptance for any opinion. It
must first be made to undergo, and without ceremony, the freest
treatment from human eyes and human hands. It is at one time
stretched on the rack of an experiment, at another it has to
pass through fiery trial in the bottom of a crucible.
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In another it undergoes a long questioning process among the
fumes and the filtrations and the intense heat of a laboratory;
and not till it has been subjected to all this inquisitorial
torture and survived it, is it preferred to a place in the
temple of Truth, or admitted among the laws and lessons of a
sound philosophy."
No one certainly will contest that this is the language of a
fervent disciple of science. It is impossible to have a keener
apprehension of its beauty, and to accept more completely its
laws. What mathematician, natural philosopher, physiologist, or
chemist, could speak in terms of greater respect and submission
of the necessity of observation, and of the authority of
experience? Dr. Chalmers is not the less for that a true and
fervent Christian; his religious faith equals his scientific
exactitude: he receives Christ, and professes Christ's doctrine
with as firm a voice as he does Bacon and Bacon's method.
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Not that for him religious belief is the mere result of
education, of tradition, of habit; but it, on the contrary,
springs as much from reflection and learning, as his acquirements
in natural science themselves; in each sphere he has probed the
very sources and weighed the motives of his convictions. How did
he, in each instance, reach such a haven of repose? Whence in him
this harmony between the philosopher and the Christian?