Scientific Essays and Lectures
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if he will be even as wise as the social animals; as the ant and the bee, who have risen, if not to the virtue of all-embracing charity, at least to the virtues of self-sacrifice and patriotism,10 then he will rise towards a higher sphere; toward that kingdom of God of which it is written: “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
Whether that be matter of natural theology, I cannot tell as yet. But as for all the former questions—all that St. Paul means when he talks of the law, and how the works of the flesh bring men under the law, stern and terrible and destructive, though holy and just and good,—they are matter of natural theology; and I believe that on them, as elsewhere, Scripture and science will be ultimately found to coincide.
But here we have to face an objection which you will often hear now from scientific men, and still oftener from non-scientific men; who will say: It matters not to us whether Scripture contradicts or does not contradict a scientific natural theology; for we hold such a science to be impossible and naught. The old Jews put a God into Nature, and therefore of course they could see, as you see, what they had already put there. But we see no God in Nature. We do not deny the existence of a God; we merely say that scientific research does not reveal Him to us. We see no marks of design in physical phenomena. What used to be considered as marks of design can be better explained by considering them as the results of evolution according to necessary laws; and you and Scripture make a mere assumption when you ascribe them to the operation of a mind like the human mind.
Now, on this point I believe we may answer fearlessly: If you cannot see it we cannot help you. If the heavens do not declare to you the glory of God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our poor arguments about them will not show it. “The eye can only see that which it brings with it the power of seeing.” We can only reassert that we see design everywhere, and that the vast majority of the human race in every age and clime has seen it. Analogy from experience, sound induction (as we hold) from the works not only of men but of animals, has made it an all but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is arrangement, there must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to an end, there must be an adapter; wherever an organisation, there must be an organiser. The existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable from Nature than the existence of other human beings independent of ourselves, or, indeed, the existence of our own bodies. But, like the belief in them, the belief in Him has become an article of our common sense. And that this designing mind is, in some respects, similar to the human mind, is proved to us (as Sir John Herschel well puts it) by the mere fact that we can discover and comprehend the processes of Nature.
But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old words, “He that made the eye, shall He not see? He that planted the ear, shall He not hear?” do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind race, or of music by a deaf one.
So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion boldly; and more: we will say, in spite of ridicule, that if such a God exists, final causes must exist also. That the whole universe must be one chain of final causes. That if there be a Supreme Reason, He must have a reason, and that a good reason, for every physical phenomenon.
We will tell the modern scientific man—You are nervously afraid of the mention of final causes. You quote against them Bacon’s saying, that they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or explained by them. You are right as far as regards yourselves; you have no business with final causes, because final causes are moral causes, and you are physical students only. We, the natural theologians, have business with them. Your duty is to find out the How of things; ours, to find out the Why. If you rejoin that we shall never find out the Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny that. It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the clergy should have some scientific training. It may be most useful, I sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary, that every candidate for ordination should be required to have passed creditably in at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to teach him the method of sound scientific thought. But our having learnt the How, will not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to study the Why. It will merely make more clear to us the things of which we have to study the Why; and enable us to keep the How and the Why more religiously apart from each other.
But if it be said: After all, there is no Why; the doctrine of evolution, by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final causes—let us answer, boldly: Not in the least. We might accept all that Mr. Darwin, all that Professor Huxley, has so learnedly and so acutely written on physical science, and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that on which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I do.
Let me press this thought earnestly on you. I know that many wiser and better men than I have fears on this point. I cannot share in them.
All, it seems to me, that the new doctrines of Evolution demand is this. We all agree, for the fact is patent, that our own bodies, and indeed the body of every living creature, are evolved from a seemingly simple germ by natural laws, without visible action of any designing will or mind, into the full organisation of a human or other creature. Yet we do not say, on that account: God did not create me; I only grew. We hold in this case to our old idea, and say: If there be evolution, there must be an evolver. Now the new physical theories only ask us, it seems to me, to extend this conception to the whole universe: to believe that not individuals merely, but whole varieties and races, the total organised life on this planet, and it may be the total organisation of the universe, have been evolved just as our bodies are, by natural laws acting through circumstance. This may be true, or may be false. But all its truth can do to the natural theologian will be to make him believe that the Creator bears the same relation to the whole universe as that Creator undeniably bears to every individual human body.
I entreat you to weigh these words, which have not been written in haste; and I entreat you also, if you wish to see how little the new theory, that species may have been gradually created by variation, natural selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory of design, contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the fullest admission of benevolent final causes—I entreat you, I say, to study Darwin’s “Fertilisation of Orchids”—a book which (whether his main theory be true or not) will still remain a most valuable addition to natural theology.
For suppose, gentlemen, that all the species of Orchids, and not only they, but their congeners—the Gingers, the Arrowroots, the Bananas—are all the descendants of one original form, which was most probably nearly allied to the Snowdrop and the Iris. What then? Would that be one whit more wonderful, more unworthy of the wisdom and power of God, than if they were, as most believe, created each and all at once, with their minute and often imaginary shades of difference? What would the natural theologian have to say, were the first theory true, save that God’s works are even more wonderful than he always believed them to be? As for the theory being impossible: we must leave the discussion of that to physical students. It is not for us clergymen to limit the power of God. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” asked the prophet of old: and we have a right to ask it as long as time shall last. If it be said that natural selection is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety: that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by physical students. All we have to say on the matter is, that we always knew that God works by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the whole universe, as far as we could discern it, was one concatenation of the most simple means; that it was wonderful, yea, miraculous in our eyes, that a child should resemble its parents, that the raindrops should make the grass grow, that the grass should become flesh, and the flesh sustenance for the thinking brain of man. Ought God to seem less or more august in our eyes, when we are told that His means are even more simple than we supposed? We held Him to be Almighty and Allwise. Are we to reverence Him less or more, if we hear that His might is greater, His wisdom deeper, than we ever dreamed? We believed that His care was over all His works; that His Providence watched perpetually over the whole universe. We were taught—some of us at least—by Holy Scripture, to believe that the whole history of the universe was made up of special Providences. If, then, that should be true which Mr. Darwin writes: “It may be metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good, silently and incessantly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being”—if that, I say, were proven to be true, ought God’s care and God’s providence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing is made: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” Shall we quarrel with Science if she should show how those words are true? What, in one word, should we have to say but this?—We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things; but behold, He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves.
But it may be said: These notions are contrary to Scripture. I must beg very humbly, but very firmly, to demur to that opinion. Scripture says that God created. But it nowhere defines that term. The means, the How of Creation, is nowhere specified. Scripture, again, says that organised beings were produced each according to their kind. But it nowhere defines that term. What a kind includes, whether it includes or not the capacity of varying (which is just the question in point), is nowhere specified. And I think it a most important rule in scriptural exegesis, to be most cautious as to limiting the meaning of any term which Scripture itself has not limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the teaching of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. And consider, Is not man a kind? And has not mankind varied, physically, intellectually, spiritually? Is not the Bible, from beginning to end, a history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from their original type?
Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and good will, on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely mark a tendency toward a more, not a less, scriptural view of nature. Are they not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to escape from that shallow mechanical notion of the universe and its Creator which was too much in vogue in the eighteenth century among divines as well as philosophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him justice), and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it, save possibly—for even that was only half believed—by rare miraculous interferences with the laws which He Himself had made? Out of that chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God, the human mind, in Germany especially, tried during the early part of this century to escape by strange roads; roads by which there was no escape, because they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific facts. Then, in despair, men turned to the facts which they had neglected, and said: We are weary of philosophy; we will study you, and you alone. As for God, who can find Him? And they have worked at the facts like gallant and honest men; and their work, like all good work, has produced, in the last fifty years, results more enormous than they even dreamed. But what are they finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show? A something nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve: namely, the life which shapes and makes—that which the old school-men called “forma formativa,” which they call vital force and what not—metaphors all, or rather counters to mark an unknown quantity, as if they should call it x or y. One says: It is all vibrations; but his reason, unsatisfied, asks: And what makes the vibrations vibrate? Another: It is all physiological units; but his reason asks: What is the “physis,” the nature and “innate tendency” of the units? A third: It may be all caused by infinitely numerous “gemmules;” but his reason asks him: What puts infinite order into those gemmules, instead of infinite anarchy? I mention these theories not to laugh at them. No man has a deeper respect for those who have put them forth. Nor would it interfere with my theological creed, if any or all of them were proven to be true to-morrow. I mention them only to show that beneath all these theories—true or false—still lies the unknown x. Scientific men are becoming more and more aware of it; I had almost said ready to worship it. More and more the noblest-minded of them are engrossed by the mystery of that unknown and truly miraculous element in Nature, which is always escaping them, though they cannot escape it. How should they escape it? Was it not written of old: “Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee from Thy spirit?”
Ah that we clergy would summon up courage to tell them that! Courage to tell them—what need not hamper for a moment the freedom of their investigations, what will add to them a sanction, I may say a sanctity—that the unknown x which lies below all phenomena, which is for ever at work on all phenomena, on the whole and on every part of the whole, down to the colouring of every leaf and the curdling of every cell of protoplasm, is none other than that which the old Hebrews called—(by a metaphor, no doubt—for how can man speak of the unseen, save in metaphors drawn from the seen?—but by the only metaphor adequate to express the perpetual and omnipresent miracle)—The Breath of God; The Spirit who is The Lord and Giver of Life.
In the rest, gentlemen, let us think, and let us observe. For if we are ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but of the methods thereof, then we and the men of science shall have no common ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.
But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too high-minded to care for popularity themselves.
True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that “Sensationalism” which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who own the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother’s love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the “Emotions and the Will” (Second Edition, pp. 78, 79), then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.
Only wait; and fret not yourselves, else shall you be moved to do evil. Remember the saying of the wise man: “Go not after the world. She turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough she will turn round to thee.”
1
An Address given to the Scientific Society of Winchester, 1871.
2
A Lecture delivered to the Officers of the Royal Artillery, Woolwich, 1872.
3
A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.
4
For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros, see Burton’s “Lake Regions of Central Africa,” vol. ii. pp. 341-60.
5
A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.
6
A Lecture delivered at the Mechanics’ Institute, Odiham, 1857.
7
Lecture delivered at Reading, 1846.
8
Novalis, I think, says that one’s own thought gains quite infinitely in value as soon as one finds it shared by even one other human being. The saying has proved true, at least, to me. The morning after this paper was read, I received a book, “The Genesis of Species, by St. George Mivart, F.R.S.” The name of the author demanded all attention and respect; and as I read on, I found him, to my exceeding pleasure, advocating views which I had long held, with a learning and ability to which I have no pretensions. The book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in the scientific world. I hope that it may do the same in the clerical world; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me with so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well Mr. Mivart’s last chapter, on “Theology and Evolution.”
9
Quoted from Schleiden’s “The Plant, a Biography.”—Lecture XI. in fine.
10
I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these words. The fact that the great majority of workers among the social insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care of other individuals’ offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and that by means of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large and prosperous, ought to be well weighed just now; both by those who hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality is one, immutable and eternal. Those who take the former view (confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of Species, “material” and “formal” morality) have no difficulty in tracing the germs of the highest human morality in animals; for self-interest is, in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality, and the average animal is utterly selfish. But certain animals perform acts, as in the case of working bees and ants, and (as I hold) in the case of mothers working for and protecting their offspring, which at least seem formally moral; because they seem founded on self-sacrifice. I am well aware, I say again, of the very serious admissions which we clergymen should have to make if we confessed that these acts really are that which they seem to be. But I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being; I am ready, with Socrates, to follow the Logos whithersoever it leads; and I hope that Mr. Mivart will reconsider the two latter paragraphs of p. 196, and let his “thoughts play freely” round this curious subject. Perhaps, in so doing, he may lay his hand on an even sharper weapon than those which he has already used against the sensationalist theory of morals.