(February, 1880.)
Bishops should speak as men having authority, and not as the Scribes
and Pharisees. Even the smallest of them should be a great man.
An archbishop, with fifteen thousand a year, ought to possess a
transcendent intellect, almost beyond comprehension; while the worst
paid of all the reverend fathers of the Church, with less than a fifth
of that salary, ought to possess no common powers of mind. The Bishop
of Carlisle is not rich as bishops go, but he enjoys a yearly income
of £4,500, besides the patronage of forty-nine livings. Now this quite
equals the salary of the Prime Minister of the greatest empire in the
world, and the Bishop of Carlisle should therefore be a truly great man.
We regret however, to say that he is very much the reverse, if we may
judge from a newspaper report which has reached us of his lecture
on "Man's Place in Nature," recently delivered before the Keswick
Scientific and Literary Society. Newspaper reports, we know, are often
misleading in consequence of their summary character; nevertheless
two columns of small type must give some idea of a discourse, however
abstruse or profound; here and there, if such occured, a fine thought or
a shrewd observation would shine through the densest veil. Yet, unless
our vision be exceptionally obtuse, nothing of the kind is apparent in
this report of the Bishop's lecture. Being, as his lordship confessed,
the development of "a sermon delivered to the men at the Royal
Agricultural Society's Show last summer," the lecture was perhaps, like
the sermon, adapted to the bucolic mind, and thus does meagre justice to
the genius of its author. His lordship, however, chose to read it before
a society with some pretentions to culture, and therefore such a plea
cannot avail. As the case stands, we are constrained to accuse
the bishop of having delivered a lecture on a question of supreme
importance, which would do little credit to the president of a Young
Men's Christian Association; and when we reflect that a parson occupied
the chair at the meeting, and that the vote of thanks to the episcopal
lecturer was moved by a canon, who coupled with it some highly
complimentary remarks, we are obliged to think the Church more short of
brains than even we had previously believed, and that Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin has already been written on its temple walls by the finger of
doom.
Very early in his lecture the Bishop observed that "the Scriptures are
built on the hypothesis of the supreme and unique position of man."
Well, there is nothing novel in this statement. What we want is some
proof of the hypothesis. His lordship's way of supplying this need is,
to say the least, peculiar. After saying that "he would rather trust the
poet as an exponent of man than he would a student of natural history,"
he proceeds to quote from Shakespeare, Pope and Plato, and ends that
part of his argument with a rhetorical flourish, as though he had thus
really settled the whole case of Darwin _versus_ Moses. Our reverence
of great poets is probably as deep and sincere as the Bishop's, but
we never thought of treating them as scientific authorities, or as
witnesses to events that happened hundreds of thousands of years before
their birth. Poets deal with subjective facts of consciousness, or with
objective facts as related to these. The dry light of the intellect,
radiated from the cloudless sun of truth, is not their proper element,
but belongs exclusively to the man of science. They move in a softer
element suffused with emotion, whose varied clouds are by the sun of
imagination touched to all forms of beauty and splendor. The scientific
man's description of a lion, for instance, would be very different from
a poet's; because the one would describe the lion as it is in itself,
and the other as it affects us, a living whole, through our organs of
sight and sound. Both are true, because each is faithful to its purpose
and expresses a fact; yet neither can stand for the other, because
they express different facts and are faithful to different purposes.
Shakespeare poetically speaks of "the ruddy drops that visit this sad
heart," but the scientific truth of the circulation of the blood had
to await its Harvey. In like manner, it was not Milton but Newton
who expounded the Cosmos; the great poet, like Dante before him, wove
pre-existent cosmical ideas into the texture of his sublime epic, while
the great scientist wove all the truth of them into the texture of his
sublime theory. Let each receive his meed of reverent praise, but do not
let us appeal to Newton on poetry or to Milton on physics. And when a
Bishop of Carlisle, or other diocese, complains that "the views advanced
by scientific men tend painfully to degrade the views of poets and
philosophers," let us reply that in almost every case the great truths
of science have been found to transcend infinitely the marvels of
theology, and that the magnificence of song persists through all
fluctuations of knowledge, because its real cause lies less in the
subject than in the native grandeur of the poet's mind.
Man's place in nature is, indeed, a great question, and it can be
settled only by a wide appeal to past and present facts. And those
facts, besides being objective realities, must be treated in a purely
scientific, and not in a poetic or didactic spirit. Let the poet sing
the beauty of a consummate flower; and, if such things are required,
let the moralist preach its lessons. But neither should arrogate the
prerogative of the botanist, whose special function it is to inform us
of its genesis and development, and its true relations to other forms
of vegetable life. So with man. The poet may celebrate his passions and
aspirations, his joys and sorrows, his laughter and tears, and ever body
forth anew the shapes of things unseen; the moralist may employ every
fact of his life to illustrate its laws or to enforce its duties; but
they must leave it to the biologist to explain his position in the
animal economy, and the stages by which it has been reached. With regard
to that, Darwin is authoritative, while Moses is not even entitled to a
hearing.
Although the Bishop is very ready to quote from the poets, he is not
always ready to use them fairly. For instance, he cites the splendid and
famous passage in "Hamlet:"--"What a piece of work is man! How noble in
reason! How infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and
admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like
a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" There his
lordship stops, and then exclaims, "Shakespeare knew nothing of the
evolution of man from inferior forms." But why did he not continue
the quotation? Hamlet goes on to say, "And yet, what to me is this
_quintessence of dust?_" How now, your lordship? We have you on the hip!
"Quintessence of dust" comes perilously near to evolution. Does not
your lordship remember, too, Hamlet's pursuing the dust of Cæsar to the
ignominious bunghole? And have you never reflected how the prescient
mind of Shakespeare created an entirely new and wonderful figure
in literature, the half-human, half-bestial Caliban, with his god
Setebos--a truly marvellous resuscitation of primitive man, that in our
day has inspired Mr. Browning's "Caliban on Setebos," which contains
the entire essence of all that Tylor and other investigators in the same
field have since written on the subject of Animism? It seems that the
Lord Bishop of Carlisle reads even the poets to small purpose.
Haughtily waving the biologists aside, his lordship proceeds to remark
that "man's superiority is not the same that a dog would claim over a
lobster, or an eagle over a worm;" the difference between man and
other animals being "not one of degree, but of kind." Such a statement,
without the least evidence being adduced to support it, places the
Bishop almost outside the pale of civil discussion. When will these
lordly ecclesiastics learn that the time for dogmatic assertion is past,
and that the intellectual temper of the present age can be satisfied
only by proof? We defy the Bishop of Carlisle to indicate a single
phase of man's nature which has no parallel in the lower animals. Man's
physical structure is notoriously akin to theirs, and even his brain
does not imply a distinction of kind, for every convolution of the brain
of man is reproduced in the brain of the higher apes. His lordship draws
a distinction between instinct and reason, which is purely fanciful and
evinces great ignorance of the subject. That, however, is a question we
have at present no room to discuss; nor, indeed, is there any necessity
to do so, since his lordship presently admits that the lower animals
share our "reason" to some extent, just as to a much larger extent we
share their "instinct," and thus evacuates the logical fortress he took
such pains to construct.
Quitting that ground, which proves too slippery for his feet, the Bishop
goes on to notice the moral and aesthetic difference between man and the
lower animals. No animal, says his lordship, shows "anything approaching
to a love of art." Now we are quite aware that no animal except man ever
painted a picture or chiselled a statue, for these things involve a very
high development of the artistic faculty. But the appreciation of
form and color, which is the foundation of all fine art, is certainly
manifested by the lower animals, and by some fathem to an extreme
degree. If his lordship doubts this, let him study the ways of animals
for himself; or, if he cannot do that, let him read the chapters in Mr.
Darwin's "Descent of Man" on sexual selection among birds. If he retains
any doubt after that, we must conclude that his head is too hard or too
soft to be influenced, in either of which cases he is much to be pitied.
His lordship thinks that the moral sense is entirely absent in the lower
animals. This, however, is absurdly untrue; so much so, indeed, that
we shall not trouble to refute it _Good_ and _noble_, he avers, are
epithets inapplicable to animals, even to the horse or dog. What vain
creatures men are to talk thus! Does his lordship remember Byron's
epitaph on his Newfoundland dog, and the very uncomplimentary
distinction drawn therein between dogs and men? Look at that big
pet with the lordly yet tender eye! How he submits to the boisterous
caresses of children, because he knows their weakness and shares their
spirit of play! Let their elders do the same, and he will at once show
resentment. See him peril his life ungrudgingly for those he loves, or
even for comparative strangers! And shall we deny him the epithet of
_noble or good?_ Whatever theologians may say, the sound heart of common
men and women will answer _No!_
Lastly, we are told that "the religious sentiment is characteristically
and supremely human." But here again we must complain of his lordship's
mental confusion. The religious sentiment is not a simple but a highly
complex emotion. Resolve it into its elemental feelings, and it will be
found that all these are possessed in some degree by lower animals. The
feeling of a dog who bays the moon is probably very similar to that of
the savage who cowers and moans beneath an eclipse; and if the savage
has superstitious ideas as well as awesome feelings, it is only because
he possesses a higher development of thought and imagination.
Canon Battersby, who moved the vote of thanks to the Bishop, ridiculed
the biologists, and likened them to Topsy who accounted for her
existence by saying "Specs I growed." Just so. That is precisely how we
all did come into existence. Growth and not making is the law for man as
well as for every other form of life. Moses stands for manufacture and
Darwin stands for growth. And if the great biologist finds himself in
the company of Topsy, he will not mind. Perhaps, indeed, as he is said
to enjoy a joke and to be able to crack one, might he jocularly observe
to "tremendous personages" like the Bishop of Carlisle, that this is not
the first instance of truths being hidden from the "wise" and revealed
unto babes.