COLLECTED ESSAYS

BY T. H. HUXLEY VOLUME V

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SCIENCE

AND

CHRISTIAN TRADITION

ESSAYS •'.'..•'.:.-

BY

THOMAS H. HUXLEY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1909

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, cBREAD STREET HILL, E.G., AND

BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

First Edition, 1894. Reprinted, 1895, 1897, 1900, 1902, 1904, 1909.

PKEFAOE

"FOR close upon forty years I have been writing with one purpose ; from time to time, I have fought for that which seemed to me the truth, perhaps still more, against that which I have thought error ; and, in this way, I have reached, indeed over- stepped, the threshold of old age. There, every earnest man has to listen to the voice within : « Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward. '

' ' That I have been an unjust steward my conscience does not bear witness. At times blundering, at times negligent, Heaven knows : but, on the whole, I have done that which I felt able and called upon to do ; and I have done it without looking to the right or to the left ; seeking no man's favour, fearing no man's disfavour.

"But what is it that I have been doing? In the end one's conceptions should form a whole, though only parts may have found utterance, as occasion arose ; now do these exhibit harmony and mutual connexion ? In one's zeal ifluch of the old gets broken to pieces ; but has one made ready something new, fit to be set in the place of the old ?

"That they merely destroy without reconstructing, is the especial charge, with which those who work in this direction are constantly reproached. In a certain sense I do not defend myself against the charge ; but I deny that any reproach is deserved.

*' I have never proposed to myself to begin outward construc- tion ; because I do not believe that the time has come for it. Our present business is with inward preparation, especially the

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preparation of those who have ceased to be content with the old, and find no satisfaction in half measures. I have wished, and I still wish, to disturb no man's peace of mind, no man's beliefs ; but only to point out to those in whom they are already shattered, the direction in which, in my conviction, firmer ground lies. " l

So wrote one of the protagonists of the New Reformation — and a well-abused man if ever there was one — a score of years since, in the re- markable book in which he discusses the negative and the positive results of the rigorous application of scientific method to the investigation/ of the higher problems of human life.

Recent experience leads me to imagine that there may be a good many countrymen of my own, even at this time, to whom it may be profit- able to read, mark and inwardly digest, the weighty words of the author of that " Leben Jesu," which, half a century ago, stirred the religious world so seriously that it has never settled down again quite on the old foundations; indeed, some think it never will. I have a personal interest-in the carrying out of the recommendation I venture to make. It may enable many worthy persons, in whose estimation I should really be glad to sta»tl higher than I do, to become aware of the possibility that my motives in writing the essays, contained in this and the preceding volume, were not exactly those that they ascribe to me.

1 D. F. Strauss, Der aUe. und der neue Glaube (1872), pp. 9-10.

PREFACE vii

I too have reached the term at which the still, small voice, more audible than any other to the dulled ear of age, makes its demand ; and I have found that it is of no sort of use to try to cook the accounts rendered. Nevertheless, I distinctly de- cline to admit some of the items charged ; more particularly that of having " gone out of my way " to attack the Bible ; and I as steadfastly deny that " hatred of Christianity " is a feeling with which I have any acquaintance. There are very few things which I find it permissible to hate ; and though, it may be, that some of the organisations, which arrogate to themselves the Christian name, have richly earned a place in the category of hateful things, that ought to have nothing to do with one's estimation of the religion, which they have perverted and disfigured out of all likeness to the original.

The simple fact is that, as I have already more than once hinted, my story is that of the wolf and the lamb over again. I have never " gone out of my way " to attack the Bible, or anything else : it was the dominant ecclesiasticism of my early days, which, as I believe, without any warrant from the Bible itself, thrust the book in my way.

I had set out on a journey, with no other purpose than that of exploring a certain province of natural knowledge ; I strayed no hair's breadth from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue ; and yet I found that, whatever

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ever been able to see, nothing can be more modest or inoffensive; to wit, that I am con- vinced of my own utter ignorance about a great number of things, respecting which the great majority of my neighbours (not only those of adult years, but children repeating their cate- chisms) affirm themselves to possess full infor- mation. I ask any candid and impartial judge, Is that attacking anybody or anything ?

Yet, if I had made the most wanton and arro- gant onslaught on the honest convictions of other people, I could not have been more hardly dealt with. The pentecostal charism, I believe, ex- hausted itself amongst the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as I have done, to copious objurgations, strewn with such appella- tions as " infidel " and " coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts the exist- ence of a " gift of tongues " in the Churches of our time; unless, indeed, it should occur to him that some of these outpourings may have taken place after "the third hoar of the day." I am far from thinking that it is worth while to give much attention to these inevitable inci- dents of all controversies, in which one party has acquired the mental peculiarities which are gene- rated by the habit of much talking, with immunity from criticism. But as a rule, they are the sauce of dishes of misrepresentations and inaccuracies which it may be a duty, nay, even an innocent pleasure,

PREFACE xiii

to expose. In the particular case of which I am thinking, I felt, as Strauss says, " able and called upon " to undertake the business : and it is no responsibility of mine, if I found the Gospels, with their miraculous stories, of which the Gada- rene is a typical example, blocking my way, as heretofore, the Pentateuch had done.

I was challenged to question the authority for the theory of " the spiritual world/' and the prac- tical consequences deducible from human relations to it, contained in these documents.

In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world — the value of the evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the course of things — are matters, which lie as much within the province of science, as any other question about the existence and powers of the varied forms of living and conscious activity.

It really is my strong conviction that a man has no more right to say he believes this world is haunted by swarms of evil spirits, without being able to produce satisfactory evidence of the fact, than he has a right to say, without adducing ade- quate proof, that the circumpolar antarctic ice swarms with sea-serpents. I should not like to assert positively that it does not. I imagine that no cautious biologist would say as much ; but while quite open to conviction, he might properly decline to waste time upon the consideration of talk, no better accredited than forecastle

xiv PREFACE

"yarns," about such monsters of the deep. And if the interests of ordinary veracity dictate this course, in relation to a matter of so little consequence as this, what must be our obligations in respect of the treatment of a question which is fundamental alike for science and for ethics ? For not only does our general theory of the universe and of the nature of the order which pervades it, hang upon the answer ; but the rules of practical life must be deeply affected by it.

The belief in a demonic world is inculcated throughout the Gospels and the rest of the books of the New Testament ; it pervades the whole patristic literature ; it colours the theory and the practice of every Christian church down to modern times. Indeed, I doubt, if even now, there is any church which, officially, departs from such a fundamental doctrine of primitive Christianity as the existence, in addition to the Cosmos with which natural knowledge is conversant, of a world of spirits ; that is to say, of intelligent agents, not subject to the physical or mental limitations of humanity, bat nevertheless competent to interfere, to an undefined extent, with the ordinary course of both physical and mental phenomena.

More especially is this conception fundamental for the authors of the Gospels. Without the belief that the present world, and particularly that part of it which is constituted by human society, has been given over, since the Fall, to the influence

PREFACE XV

of wicked and malignant spiritual beings, governed and directed by a supreme devil — the moral antithesis and enemy of the supreme God — their theory of salvation by the Messiah falls to pieces. " To this end was the Son of God mani- fested, that he might destroy the works of the devil." l

The half-hearted religiosity of latter-day Chris- tianity may choose to ignore the fact; but it remains none the less true, that he who refuses to accept the demonology of the Gospels rejects the revelation of a spiritual world, made in them, as much as if he denied the existence of such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ; and deserves, as much as any one can do, to be ear-marked " infidel " by our gentle shepherds.

Now that which I thought it desirable to make perfectly clear, on my own account, and for the sake of those who find their capacity of belief in the Gospel theory of the universe failing them, is the fact, that, in my judgment, the demonology of primitive Christianity is totally devoid of founda- tion ; and that no man, who is guided by the rules of investigation which are found to lead to the discovery of truth in other matters, not merely of science, but in the everyday affairs of life, will arrive at any other conclusion. To those who profess to be otherwise guided, I have nothing 1 1 John iii. 8.

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to say ; but to beg them to go their own way and leave me to mine.

I think it may be as well to repeat what I have said, over and over again, elsewhere, that a priori notions, about the possibility, or the impossibility, of the existence of a world of spirits, such as that presupposed by genuine Christianity, have no influence on my mind. The question for me is purely one of evidence : is the evidence adequate to bear out the theory, or is it not ? In my judgment it is not only inadequate, but quite absurdly insufficient. And on that ground, I should feel compelled to reject the theory ; even if there were no positive grounds for adopting a totally different conception of the Cosmos.

For most people, the question of the evidence of the existence of a demonic world, in the long run, resolves itself into that of the trustworthiness of the Gospels ; first, as to the objective truth of that which they narrate on this topic ; second, as to the accuracy of the interpretation which their authors put upon these objective facts. For example, with respect to the Gadarene miracle, it is one question whether, at a certain time and place, a raving madman became sane, and a herd of swine rushed into the lake of Tiberias ; and quite another, whether the cause of these occur- rences was the transmigration of certain devils from the man into the pigs. And again, it is one question whether Jesus made a long oration on a

PREFACE xvii

certain occasion, mentioned in the first Gospel , altogether another, whether more or fewer of the propositions contained in the " Sermon on the Mount " were uttered on that occasion. One may give an affirmative answer to one of each of these pairs of questions and a negative to the other : one may affirm all, or deny all.

In considering the historical value of any four documents, proof when they were written and who wrote them is, no doubt, highly important. For if proof exists, that ABC and D wrote them, and that they were intelligent persons, writing independently and without prejudice, about facts within their own knowledge — their statements must need be worthy of the most attentive con- sideration.1 But, even ecclesiastical tradition does not assert that either " Mark " or " Luke " wrote from his own knowledge— indeed " Luke " ex- pressly asserts he did not. I cannot discover that any competent authority now maintains that the apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel which passes under his name. And whether the apostle John had, or had not, anything to do with the fourth Gospel ; and if he had, what his share amounted to ; are, as everybody who has attended to these matters knows, questions still hotly disputed, and with regard to which the extant evidence can

1 Not necessarily of more than this. A few centuries ago the twelve most intelligent and impartial men to be found in England, would have independently testified that the sun moves, from east to west, across the heavens every day.

I

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hardly carry no impartial judge beyond the admission of a possibility this way or that.

Thus, nothing but a balancing of very dubious probabilities is to be attained by approaching the question from this side. It is otherwise if we make the documents tell their own story : if we study them, as we study fossils, to discover in- ternal evidence of when they arose, and how they have come to be. That really fruitful line of in- quiry has led to the statement and the discussion of what is known as the Synoptic Problem.

In the Essays (VII. — XI.) which deal with the consequences of the application of the agnostic principle to Christian Evidences, contained in this volume, there are several references to the results of the attempts which have been made, during the last hundred years, to solve this problem. And, though it has been clearly stated and discussed, in works accessible to, and intelligible by, every English reader,1 it may be well that I should here set forth a very brief exposition of the matters of fact out of which the problem has arisen ; and of some consequences, which, as I con- ceive, must be admitted if the facts are accepted.

These undisputed and, apparently, indisputable data may be thus stated :

I. The three books of which an ancient, but

1 Nowhere more concisely and clearly than in Dr. Sutherland Black's article " Gospels " in Chambers's Encyclopedia. Refer- ences are given to the more elaborate discussions of the problem.

PREFACE XIX

very questionable, ecclesiastical tradition asserts Matthew, Mark, and Luke to be the authors, agree, not only in presenting the same general view, or Synopsis, of the nature and the order of the events narrated; but, to a remarkable extent, the very words which they employ coincide.

II. Nevertheless, there are many equally marked, and some irreconcilable, differences between them. Narratives, verbally identical in some por- tions, diverge more or less in others. The order in which they occur in one, or in two, Gospels may be changed in another. In " Matthew " and in " Luke " events of great importance make their appearance, where the story of " Mark " seems to leave no place for them ; and, at the beginning and the end of the two former Gospels, there is a great amount of matter of which there is no trace in " Mark."

III. Obvious and highly important differences, in style and substance, separate the three *' Synoptics," taken together, from the fourth Gospel, connected, by ecclesiastical tradition, with the name of the apostle John. In its philosophical proemium ; in the conspicuous absence of exorcistic miracles ; in the self-assertive theosophy of the long and diffuse monologues, which are so utterly unlike the brief and pregnant utterances of Jesus recorded in the Synoptics ; in the assertion that the crucifixion took place before the Passover,

I 2

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which involves the denial, by implication, of the truth of the Synoptic story — to mention only a few particulars — the " Johannine " Gospel presents a wide divergence from the other three.

IV. If the mutual resemblances and differences of the Synoptic Gospels are closely considered, a curious result comes out ; namely, that each may be analyzed into four components. The first of these consists of passages, to a greater or less extent verbally identical, which occur in all three Gospels. If this triple tradition is separated from the rest it will be found to comprise :

a. A narrative, of a somewhat broken and anecdotic aspect, which covers the period from the appearance of John the Baptist to the discovery of the emptiness of the tomb, on the first day of the week, some six-and-thirty hours after the crucifixion.

1). An apocalyptic address.

c. Parables and brief discourses, or rather, centos of religious and ethical exhortations and injunctions.

The second and the third set of components of each Gospel present equally close resemblances to passages, which are found in only one of the other Gospels ; therefore it may be said that, for them, the tradition is double. The fourth component is peculiar to each Gospel ; it is a single tradition and has no representative in the others.

To put the facts in another way : each Gospel

PREFACE Xxi

is composed of a threefold tradition, two twofold traditions, and one peculiar tradition. If the Gospels were the work of totally independent writers, it would follow that there are three wit- nesses for the statements in the first tradition ; two for each of those in the second, and only one for those in the third.

V. If the reader will now take up that ex- tremely instructive little book, Abbott and Rush- brooke's " Common Tradition " he will easily satisfy himself that " Mark " has the remarkable structure just described. Almost the whole of this Gospel consists of the first component; namely, the threefold tradition. But in chap. i. 23-28 he will discover an exorcistic story, not to be found in "Matthew," but repeated, often word for word, in " Luke." This, therefore, belongs to one of the twofold traditions. In chap, viii. 1-10, on the other hand, there is a detailed account of the miracle of feeding the four thou- sand ; which is closely repeated in " Matthew " xv. 32-39, but is not to be found in " Luke." This is an example of the other twofold tradition, possible in " Mark." Finally, the story of the blind man of Bethsaida, " Mark " viii. 22-26, is peculiar to " Mark."

VI. Suppose that, A standing for the threefold tradition, or the matter common to all three Gos- pels ; we call the matter common to " Mark " and "Matthew" only — B; that common to "Mark"

Xxii PREFACE

and " Luke " only — C ; that common to " Matthew " and " Luke " only — D ; while the peculiar com- ponents of " Mark," " Matthew," and " Luke " are severally indicated by E, F, G ; then the structure of the Gospels may be represented thus :

Components of " Marl? " = A-fB + C + E.

"Matthew" = A-fB + D + F.

"Luke" = A + C-hD-fG.

VII. The analysis of the Synoptic documents need be carried no further than this point, in order to suggest one extremely important, and, apparently unavoidable conclusion ; and that is, that their authors were neither three independent witnesses of the things narrated ; nor, for the parts of the narrative about which all agree, that is to say, the threefold tradition, did they employ independent sources of information. It is sim- ply incredible that each of three independent witnesses of any series of occurrences should tell a story so similar, not only in arrangement and in small details, but in words, to that of each of the others.

Hence it follows, either that the Synoptic writers have, mediately or immediately, copied one from the other : or that the three have drawn from a common source ; that is to say, from one arrangement of similar traditions (whether oral or written) ; though that arrangement may have

PREFACE xxiii

been extant in three or more, somewhat different versions.

VIII. The suppositions (a) that " Mark " had " Matthew " and " Luke " before him ; and (b) that either of the two latter was acquainted with the work of the other, would seem to involve some singular consequences.

a. The second Gospel is saturated with the lowest supernaturalism. Jesus is exhibited as a wonder-worker and exorcist of the first rank. The earliest public recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus comes from an "unclean spirit"; he him- self is made to testify to the occurrence of the miraculous feeding twice over.

The purpose with which " Mark " sets out is to show forth Jesus as the Son of God, and it is suggested, if not distinctly stated, that he ac- quired this character at his baptism by John. The absence of any reference to the miraculous events of the infancy, detailed by "Matthew" and "Luke;" or to the appearances after the discovery of the emptiness of the tomb ; is unin- telligible, if " Mark " knew anything about them, or believed in the miraculous conception. The second Gospel is no summary : " Mark " can find room for the detailed story, irrelevant to his main purpose, of the beheading of John the Baptist, and his miraculous narrations are crowded with minute particulars. Is it to be imagined that, with the supposed apostolic authority of Matthew

XXIV PKEFACE

before him, he could leave out the miraculous conception of Jesus and the ascension ? Further, ecclesiastical tradition would have us believe that Mark wrote down his recollections of what Peter taught. Did Peter then omit to mention these matters? Did the fact testified by the oldest authority extant, that the first appearance of the risen Jesus was to himself seem not worth men- tioning ? Did he really fail to speak of the great position in the Church solemnly assigned to him by Jesus? The alternative would seem to be the impeachment either of Mark's memory, or of his judgment. But Mark's memory, is so good that he can recollect how, on the occasion of the stilling of the waves, Jesus was asleep " on the cushion," he remembers that the woman with the issue had " spent all she had " on her physicians ; that there was not room " even about the door " on a certain occasion at Capernaum. And it is surely hard to believe that " Mark " should have failed to recollect occurrences of infinitely greater moment, or that he should have deliberately left them out, as things not worthy of mention.

b. The supposition that " Matthew " was acquainted with " Luke," or " Luke" with "Matthew" has equally grave implications. If that be so, the one who used the other could have had but a poor opinion of his predecessor's his- torical veracity. If, as most experts agree, " Luke " is later than " Matthew/' it is clear that he does

PREFACE XXV

not credit " Matthew's " account of the infancy ; does not believe the " Sermon on the Mount " as given by Matthew was preached ; does not be- lieve in the two feeding miracles, to which Jesus himself is made to refer; wholly discredits " Matthew's " account of the events after the crucifixion; and thinks it not worth while to notice " Matthew's " grave admission that " some doubted."

IX. None of these troublesome consequences pursue the hypothesis that the threefold tradition, in one, or more, Greek versions, was extant before either of the canonical Synoptic Gospels ; and that it furnished the fundamental framework of their several narratives. Where and when the three- fold narrative arose, there is no positive evidence ; though it is obviously probable that the traditions it embodies, and perhaps many others, took their rise in Palestine and spread thence to Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt and Italy, in the track of the early missionaries. Nor is it less likely that they formed part of the " didaskalia " of the primitive Nazarene and Christian communities.1

X. The interest which attaches to "Mark" arises from the fact that it seems to present this

1 Those who regard the Apocalyptic discourse as a "vaticina- tion after the event " may draw conclusions therefrom as to the date of the Gospels in which its several forms occur. But the assumption is surely dangerous, from an apologetic point of view, since it begs the question as to the unhistorical character of this solemn prophecy.

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early, probably earliest, Greek Gospel narrative, with least addition, or modification. If, as appears likely from some internal evidences, it was com- piled for the use of the Christian sodalities in Rome ; and that it was accepted by them as an adequate account of the life and work of Jesus, it is evidence of the most valuable kind respecting their beliefs and the limits of dogma, as conceived by them.

In such case, a good Roman Christian of that epoch might know nothing of the doctrine of the incarnation, as taught by " Matthew " and " Luke " ; still less of the "logos" doctrine of "John "; neither need he have believed anything more than the simple fact of the resurrection. It was open to him to believe it either corporeal, or spiritual. He would never have heard of the power of the keys bestowed upon Peter ; nor have had brought to his mind so much as a suggestion of trinitarian doc- trine. He might be a rigidly monotheistic Judseo- Christian, and consider himself bound by the law : he might be a Gentile Pauline convert, neither knowing of nor caring for such restrictions. In neither case would he find in " Mark " any serious stumbling-block. In fact, persons of all the categories admitted to salvation by Justin, in the middle of the second century,1 could accept " Mark " from beginning to end. It may well be, that, in this wide adaptability, backed by the 1 See p. 287 of this volume

PREFACE xxvii

authority of the metropolitan church, there lies the reason for the fact of the preservation of " Mark," notwithstanding its limited and dogma- tically colourless character, as compared with the Gospels of " Luke " and " Matthew."

XI. " Mark," as we have seen, contains a re- latively small body of ethical and religious in- struction and only a few parables. Were these all that existed in the primitive threefold tradi- tion ? Were none others current in the Roman communities, at the time " Mark " wrote, supposing he wrote in Rome ? Or, on the other hand, was there extant, as early as the time at which " Mark " composed his Greek edition of the primitive Evangel, one or more collections of parables and teachings, such as those which form the bulk of the twofold tradition, common ex- clusively to " Matthew " and " Luke," and are also found in their single traditions ? Many have assumed this, or these, collections to be identical with, or at any rate based upon, the " logia," of which ecclesiastical tradition says, that they were written in Aramaic by Matthew, and that every- body translated them as he could.

Here is the old difficulty again. If such ma- terials were known to " Mark," what imaginable reason could he have for not using them ? Surely displacement of the long episode of John the Bap- tist— even perhaps of the story of the Gadarene swine — by portions of the Sermon on the Mount or

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by one or two of the beautiful parables in the twofold and single traditions would have been great improvements; and might have been effected, even though " Mark " was as much pressed for space as some have imagined. But there is no ground for that imagination ; Mark has actually found room for four or five parables; why should he not have given the best, if he had known of them ? Admitting he was the mere pedissequus et breviator of Matthew, that even Augustine supposed him to be, what could induce him to omit the Lord's Prayer ?

Whether more or less of the materials of the two- fold tradition D, and of the peculiar traditions F and G, were or were not current in some of the com- munities, as early as, or perhaps earlier than, the triple tradition, it is not necessary for me to discuss; nor to consider those solutions of the Synoptic problem which assume that it existed earlier, and was already combined with more or less narrative. Those who are working out the final solution of the Synoptic problem are taking into account, more than hitherto, the possibility that the widely separated Christian communities of Palestine, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Italy, especially after the Jewish war of A.D. 66-70, may have found them- selves in possession of very different traditional materials. Many circumstances tend to the con- clusion that, in Asia Minor, even the narrative part of the threefold tradition had a formidable

PREFACE

rival; and that, around this second narrative, teaching traditions of a totally different order from those in the Synoptics, grouped themselves ; and, under the influence of converts imbued more or less with the philosophical speculations of the time, eventually took shape in the fourth Gospel and its associated literature.

XII. But it is unnecessary, and it would be out of place, for me to attempt to do more than indicate the existence of these complex and diffi- cult questions. My purpose has been to make it clear that the Synoptic problem must force itself upon every one who studies the Gospels with attention ; that the broad facts of the case, and some of the consequences deducible from these facts, are just as plain to the simple English reader as they are to the profoundest scholar.

One of these consequences is that the three- fold tradition presents us with a narrative believed to be historically true, in all particulars, by the major part, if not the whole, of the Christian communities. That narrative is penetrated, from beginning to end, by the demonological beliefs of which the Gadarene story is a specimen ; and, if the fourth Gospel indicates the existence of another and, in some respects, irreconcilably divergent narrative, in which the demon ology retires into the background, it is none the less there.

Therefore, the demonology is an integral and inseparable component of primitive Christianity.

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The farther back the origin of the gospels is dated, the stronger does the certainty of this con- clusion grow ; and the more difficult it becomes to suppose that Jesus himself may not have shared the superstitious beliefs of his disciples.

It further follows that those who accept devils, possession, and exorcism as essential elements of their conception of the spiritual world may consistently consider the testimony of the Gospels to be unimpeachable in respect of the information they give us respecting other matters which appertain to that world.

Those who reject the gospel demonology, on the other hand, would seem to be as completely barred, as I feel myself to be, from professing to take the accuracy of that information for granted. If the threefold tradition is wrong about one fundamental topic, it may be wrong about another, while the authority of the single traditions, often mutually contradictory as they are, becomes a vanishing quantity.

It really is unreasonable to ask any rejector of the demonology to say more with respect to those other matters, than that the statements regarding them may be true, or may be false ; and that the ultimate decision, if it is to be favourable, must depend on the production of testimony of a very different character from that of the writers of the four gospels. Until such evidence is brought for- ward, that refusal of assent, with willingness to

PREFACE XXXl

re-open the question, on cause shown, which is /what I mean by Agnosticism, is, for me the only course open.

A verdict of "not proven" is undoubtedly unsatisfactory and essentially provisional, so far forth as the subject of the trial is capable of being dealt with by due process of reason.

Those who are of opinion that the historical realities at the root of Christianity, lie beyond the jurisdiction of science, need not be considered. Those who are convinced that the evidence is, and must always remain, insufficient to support any definite conclusion, are justified in ignoring the subject. They must be content to put up with that reproach of being mere destroyers, of which Strauss speaks. They may say that there are so many problems . which are and must remain insoluble, that the "burden of the mystery" "of all this unintelligible world " is not appreciably affected by one more or less.

For myself, I must confess that the problem of the origin of such very remarkable historical phenomena as the doctrines, and the social organization, which, in their broad features cer- tainly existed, and were in a state of rapid development, within a hundred years of the crucifixion of Jesus; and which have steadily prevailed against all rivals, among the most intelli- gent and civilized nations in the world ever since,

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is, and always has been, profoundly interesting ; and, considering how recent the really scientific study of that problem, and how great the progress made during the last half century in supplying the conditions for a positive solution of the problem, I cannot doubt that the attainment of such a solution is a mere question of time.

I am well aware that it has lain far beyond my powers to take any share in this great under- taking. All that I can hope is to have done somewhat towards " the preparation of those who have ceased to be contented with the old and find no satisfaction in half measures " : perhaps, also, something towards the lessening of that great proportion of my countrymen, whose eminent characteristic it is that they find full " full satis- faction in half measures:" T. H. H.

HODESLEA, EASTBOURNE, December 4th, 1893.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PROLOGUE 1

(Controverted Questions, 1892).

II

SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM [1887] . . 59

III

SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE [1887] .......... 90

IV

AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY [1887] 126

THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS [1889] . . 160

C

XXXIV CONTENTS

VI

PAOR

POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES [1891] 192

VII

AGNOSTICISM [13S9] 209

VIII

AGNOSTICISM : A REJOINDER [1889] 263

IX

AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY [1889] 309

X

THE KEEPERS OF THE HERD OF SWINE [1890] ... . 366

XI

ILLUSTRATIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL

.METHODS [1891] .395

COLLECTED ESSAYS

VOLUME V

PROLOGUE

[Controverted Questions, 1892]

Le plus grand service qu'on puisse rendre a la science est d'y faire place nette avant d'y rien construire. — CUVIER.

MOST of the Essays comprised in the present volume have been written during the last six or seven years, without premeditated purpose or intentional connection, in reply to attacks upon doctrines which I hold to be well founded ; or in refutation of allegations respecting matters lying within the province of natural knowledge, which I believe to be erroneous ; and they bear the mark of their origin in the controversial tone which pervades them.

Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of war- fare, I think it may be said, that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or less of an evil. It is useful, when it attracts attention to topics which might otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes happen, those who come to see a contest remain to think. It is necessary,

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when the interests of truth and of justice are at stake. It is an evil, in so far as controversy always tends to degenerate into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue of what is right and what is wrong to the very small question of who is right and who is wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary were more conspicuous than the evil attributes of literary militancy, when these papers were first published ; but I have had some hesitation about reprinting them. If I may judge by my own taste, few literary dishes are less appetising than cold controversy ; moreover, there is an air of unfair- ness about the presentation of only one side of a discussion, and a flavour of unkindness in the reproduction of " winged words," which, however appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find a still more appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly ask those who have honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer lustre on this collection, by permitting me to present their lucubrations along with my own ; and since it would be a manifest wrong to them to deprive their, by no means rare, vivacities of language of such justification as they may derive from similar freedoms on my part ; I came to the conclusion that my best course was to leave the essays just as they were written ; 1 assuring my

1 With a few exceptions, which are duly noted when they amount to more than verbal corrections.

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honourable adversaries than any heat of which signs may remain was generated, in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, by the force of their own blows, and has long since been dissipated into space.

But, however the polemical concomitants of these discussions may be regarded — or better, dis- regarded— there is no doubt either about the im- portance of the topics of which they treat, or as to the public interest in the "Controverted Questions" with which they deal. Or rather, the Controverted Question; for disconnected as these pieces may, perhaps, appear to be, they are, in fact, concerned only with different aspects of a single problem, with which thinking men have been occupied, ever since they began seriously to consider the wonderful frame of things in which their lives are set, and to seek for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies.

Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's stage have a perma- nent background ; that there is order amidst the seeming confusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules. To this region of familiar steadiness and customary regu- larity they gave the name of Nature. But at the same time, their infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature was sur-

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rounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They attributed to the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful region, an unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events of which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus came to regard them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature.

Hence arose the conception of a " Supernature " antithetic to " Nature " — the primitive dualism of a natural world " fixed in fate " and a super- natural, left to the free play of volition — which has pervaded all later speculation and, for thou- sands of years, has exercised a profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the successful conduct of life must demand careful attention to both worlds; and, if either is to be neglected, it may be safer that it should be Nature. In any given contin- gency, it must doubtless be desirable to know what may be expected to happen in the ordinary course of things ; but it must be quite as necessary to have some inkling of the line likely to be taken by supernatural agencies able, and possibly willing, to suspend or reverse that course. Indeed, logically developed, the dualistic theory

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must needs end in almost exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that its over-ruling strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well with its denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great schoolmaster, experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this conclusion. They have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not answer to neglect Nature ; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid to her dictates the better men fare.

Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism. From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernatural ism have consciously, or uncon- sciously, competed and struggled with one an- other; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civili- sation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people.

These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence ; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumu- lated a vast body of universally accepted know- ledge ; and the conceptions of man and of society,

6 PEOLOGUE I

of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.

History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature ; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually ex- clusive ; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the greater,

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the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable ; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition.

Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of Supernaturalism is an indica- tion of the progress, or of the regress, of humanity ; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life ; is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity, which is generally, and I venture to think not unreason- ably, regarded as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men's thoughts. The question — Ho\v tar is this ^process to go'T^is, in my apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time.

Controversy on this matter — prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the weapons of the flesh, as

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well as with those of the spirit — is no new thing to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these five hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to establish a modus vivendi between the antagonists, some of which have had a world-wide influence ; though, unfortunately, none have proved univers- ally and permanently satisfactory.

In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was, whether certain portions of the Supernaturalism. of mediaeval Christianity were well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of the problem which, in the course of the following two hundred years, acquired wide popularity and vast historical importance : Lollards, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Socin- ians, and Anabaptists, whatever their disagree- ments, concurred in the proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of Protestantism called in question either the supernatural origin and infallible authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible was the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to upset the Chair of St. Peter. The " freedom of private judgment " which they proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than

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permission to themselves to make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church, in respect of the canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words of the canonical books. Private judgment — that is to say, reason — was (theoreti- cally, at any rate) at liberty to decide what books were and what were not to take the rank of " Scripture " ; and to determine the sense of any passage in such books. But this sense, once ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to be taken for pure truth — for the very word of God. The controversial efficiency of the principle of biblical infallibility lay in the fact that the con- servative adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to contravene it without entangling themselves in serious difficulties ; while, since both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count.

The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by " faith," then the latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private judgment, why not the former? Even if the Bible could be proved anywhere to assert its own infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to those who dispute the point is not obvious. On

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the other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible was rested on that of a " primitive Church," the admission that the " Church " was formerly infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its present infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible text, when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially countenance contra- dictory deductions ; and furnish forth creeds and confessions as diverse as the quality and the information of the intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway, such judgments. Every sect, confident in the deriva- tive infallibility of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs ; and to enable history, once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness under persecution says much for the sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that which he believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more steadfastly than the Anabaptists.

Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself the germs of the destruc- tion of the finality, which the Lutheran, Calvin- istic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical Scriptures,

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it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon defined the creed. If the private judgment of Luther might legitimately conclude that the epistle of James was contemptible, while the epistles of Paul contained the very essence of Christianity, it must be permissible for some other private judgment, on as good or as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions ; the critical process which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any rate by people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesi- astes ; nor, having got so far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason ; and, in the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised ; and its decrees were valid only so far as they were countersigned by common sense, the responsible minister.

The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason ; but it may be doubted if their contention has any solid ground • while there is a good deal of evidence to

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show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff ; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work ; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Super- naturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Munzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible ; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judg- ment to the arrogant Caesaro-papistry of a state- enforced creed, had no more hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and judges, than had the old-fashioned Pontiff- papistry.

It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity ; which was, essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain practical deductions from a Supernatural- ism in which everybody, in principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of abolishing transubstantiation, image • worship, in- dulgences, ecclesiastical infallibility; if consub-

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stantiation, real-unreal presence mystifications, the bibliolatry, the " inner-light " pretensions, and the demonology, which are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and temporal support of a new infallibility ? One does not free a prisoner by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles.

It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reforma- tion one of the products of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the general head of the Renascence ? Melanch- thon, Ulrica, von Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists ? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus, fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely deserted it ?

From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they often forget that Reforma- tion and Protestantism are by no means con- vertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of the noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical learning ; the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold of mediaeval Supernaturalism. In the interests

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of liberal culture and of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the protestant ; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists, whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.

The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to lie in the clear appre- hension of this fact. That he was a man of many weaknesses may be true ; in fact, he was quite aware of them and professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory move- ment which he originally contemplated ; and it was impossible he should have deserted fche specifically Protestant reformation in which he never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs ; or, to borrow a still more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad church- man who refused to enlist with either the High

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Church or the Low Church zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr for that in which he does not believe ; and a fair consideration of the circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted.

Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of Europe ; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of Catholic doctrine ; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most influen- tial men in each country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly the enormous forces which were still at the command of the

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Papacy. Bad as the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse ; and a person of far more sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the future, except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others ; and to a cautious thinker, by whom, whatever his shortcomings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sin- cerely prized, it really was a fair question, whether it was worth while to bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no morta> could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman.

Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of Anabaptist communism, which opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England, with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher ; the bitter tyranny of evangel-

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istic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland ; the long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery ; finishing with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old ; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism ; more especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw upon them ? As the wiser of his con em- poraries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian " ; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century " enlightenment " ; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christian- ity " as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism.

In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds: while its true course became visible to all men,

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two centuries later. By this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate became aware what spirit they were of ; and they attacked Supernaturalism in its Biblical strong- hold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with equal zeal. In the eyes of the " Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and Calvinism were merely three persons of the one " Infame " which it was the object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another, it was probably the last ; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the free-thinking host, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and Pantheism.

The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits ; but cool judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to furnish permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However worthy of admiration may be the acute- ness, the common sense, the wit, the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the free-thinkers ; there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult in- vestigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that, from this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries. It must be admitted that they share to the full the fatal

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weakness of a priori philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to their age ; while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the record of the moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted them to resort to pre- posterous theories of imposture, in order to account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of that evolution.

For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own ; and with vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array, and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative " infidelity " of the eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the Analogy ; while the pro- gress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to light the important part played by the mythopceic faculty; and, by demonstrating the extreme readiness of men to impose upon them- selves, rendered the calling in of sacerdotal cooperation, in most cases, a superfluity.

Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and political influences came into play. The free-thinking philosophes, who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as they did to L'Infdme, were credited with the responsibility for all the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much

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justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the Bauern-krieg. In England, though our ancien regime was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad way as in France ; it was still capable of being repaired ; and our forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until that operation could be safely performed, rather than pull it all down about their ears, in order to build a philosophically planned house on brand-new speculative founda- tions. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques ; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free -thinking, or the indif- ference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which submerged the work of the free-thinkers ; and even seemed, for a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which that work was an imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free- thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.

My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when the

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evangelical flood had a little abated and the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Oxford ; but when never- theless, bibliolatry was rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.

In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher, ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to " sceptics " and " infidels," I became aware of the existence of people who trusted in carnal reason ; who audaciously doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that the deluge was universal ; perhaps even went so far as to question the literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of Balaam's ass ; and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I should have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash men belonged to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were more directly responsible for providing me

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with the knowledge essential to the right guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were discharging that most sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in the Protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of any part of the Old Testament and a fortiori of the Gospels, had to expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the other dis- agreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.

My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of a remarkable document, l signed by as many as thirty-eight out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not appear that the signataries are officially accredited spokesmen of the ecclesias-

1 Declaration on the Truth of Holy Scripture. The Times, 18th December, 1891.

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tical corporation to which they belong ; but I feel bound to take their word for it, that they are " stewards of the Lord, who have received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as evidence that, though theEvangelicismofmy early days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of " a dishonour to God," imperilling his salvation. It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they discern the real nature of / the Controverted Question of the age. They are // awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture II has been discovered " not to be worthy of un- i questioning belief," faith "in the supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may con- gratulate myself upon such weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have had the fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty- eight that they should go on to pro- claim that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to the coming generation to decide.

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The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves " stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I have briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are as many thorough-going defenders of " plenary inspiration " as there were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago. Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the " actual historical truth " of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as author or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be ; highly placed Divines tell us that the pre- Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be ignored ; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a

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patriotic romance of the second century B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distinguished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus. Conser- vative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are interpolations. An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to substitute the authority of the " Church " for that of the Bible. In my old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a "religion of a book " as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been reprehended for doubting that proposi- tion. It is a no less interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself " Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed, in- spired ; but they contain, a wholly undefined and indefinable " human element " ; and this unfortu- nate intruder is converted into a sort of biblical whipping boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame; while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out of reach of proof or disproof, is

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still asserted with all the vigour inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the pro- posal to treat the Bible " like any other book " which caused so much scandal, forty years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban, yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the scientific tempter ; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism which the memorialists renounce and denounce.

A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to assume even the uncon- sidered dignity of a " steward of science," may well find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesi- astical authorities perplexing — suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely the funda- mental position of the memorialists is examined.

"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical, critic- ism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." l 1 Declaration, Article 10.

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Grant that it is " the traditionary testimony of the Church " which guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet, according to the thirty-eight, this " traditionary testimony " has to be " ascer- tained and verified by appeal to antiquity." But "ascertainment and verification" are purely/ intellectual processes, which must be conducted^ according to the strict rules of scientific investigat- ion, or be self-convicted of worthlessness. More-] over, before we can set about the appeal to " antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully vague term must be defined by similar means. " Antiquity " may include any number of centu- ries, great or small ; and whether " antiquity " is to comprise the Council of Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of Nicaea, or to come to an end in the time of Irenseus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are knotty questions which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical methods which the signataries treat so cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is funda- mental, for as the limits of the canonical scrip- tures vary, so may the dogmas deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing, if the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles, and the Apo- calypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) in- fallibly true ; and another thing, if they are not.

28 PROLOGUE I

As I have already said, whoso defines the canon defines the creed.

Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and the Western Church differed in opinion for centuries ; and yet neither the one branch nor the other can have considered its judgment infallible, since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which each gave up its objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the " fathers " argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this or that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently used it to the best of their ability. Thus it would appear that though science, like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes back again. The appeal to " antiquity " is, in fact, an appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to determine what "anti- quity," so defined, says about canonicity ; thirdly, to prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the shape of the abhorred " criticism," has answered this appeal, and has shown that " antiquity " used her own methods, however clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants, and demands

I PROLOGUE 29

that they should show cause why, in these days, science should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, arid carry it out efficiently.

But no such cause can be shown. If " antiquity " permitted Eusebius, Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, to argue for the reception of this book into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds, " antiquity " admitted the whole prin- ciple of modern criticism. If Irena3us produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four, it was open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them) for cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the Eastern branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth century, any other branch would have an equal right, on cause shown, to reject both, or, as the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to accept both.

Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own petard. Their " appeal t( antiquity " turns out to be nothing but a round about way of appealing to the tribunal, the juris diction of which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian super-naturalism or the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnishec the elephant with standing ground on the tortois(

30 PROLOGUE I

of "antiquity/ they, like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been content to look no further ; and have thereby been spared the horror of dis- covering that the tortoise rests on a grievously fragile construction, to a great extent the work of that very intellectual operation which they anathe- matise and repudiate.

Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course true that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not, depends on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the Christian scriptures ; and that the in- fallibility of these depends upon the infalli- bility of the judgment of the persons who selected the books of which they are composed, out of the mass of literature current among the early Christians. The logical acumen.of Augustine showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on that of the Church to which he belonged.1 But it is no less true that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of the Old Testament books existed be- fore the birth of Jesus of Nazareth ; and that their divine authority is presupposed by, and therefore can hardly depend upon, the religious body con- stituted by his disciples. As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is purely

1 Ego vero evangelic non crederem, nisi ecclesiae Catholicse me commoveret auctoritas. — Contra Epistofam Manichcei, cap. v.

I PROLOGUE 31

Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic prophecies vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised as the highest court of appeal of the Christian.

The proposal to cite Christian " antiquity " as a witness to the infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if a claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory, argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it re- mains permissible to ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the " actual historical truth of all records " in the Old Testament ? Was Augus- tine heretical when he denied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that he was ; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their

32 PROLOGUE I

appeal to that early " antiquity," in which Augus- tine played so great a part, to say so.

Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the ridiculous — from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms Supernaturalism have deep roots in human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days, they have to cope with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning to be put out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are hemming them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of systematised natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries, has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which the Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.

When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables ; when the unity of authorship of the Iliad was successfully assailed by scientific literary

I PROLOGUE 33

criticism ; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had been ; it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in the same manner ; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested ; and that the evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found in the Scriptures would have to be strong indeed, if they were to be opposed to the conclusions of physical science. In point of fact, so far as I can discover, no one competent to judge of the evidential strength of these conclusions, ventures now to say that the biblical accounts of the creation and oi the deluge are true in the natural sense of th words of the narratives. The most modern Re- concilers venture upon is to affirm, that some quite different sense may be put upon the words ; and that this non-natural sense may, with a little trouble, be manipulated into some sort of non- contradiction of scientific truth.

My purpose, in the essay (XVI.) which treats of the narrative of the Deluge, was to prove, "by

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34 PROLOGUE I

physical criticism, that no such event as that described ever took place ; to exhibit the Tintrust- worthy character of the narrative demonstrated by literary criticism ; and, finally, to account for its origin, by producing a form of those ancient legends of pagan Chajdaea, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly derived. I have yet to learn that the main propositions of this essay can be seriously challenged.

In the essays (II., III.) on the narrative of the Creation, I have endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports, either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the narrative, quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the supernatural creation of the present forms of life; modern science teaches that they have come about by evolution. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the successive origin — firstly, of all the plants, secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals, thirdly, of all the terrestrial ani- mals, which now exist — during distinct intervals of time ; modern science teaches that, throughout all the duration of an immensely long past, so far as we have any adequate knowledge of it (that is as far back as the Silurian epoch), plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial animals have co-existed ; that the earliest known are unlike those which at present exist ; and that the modern species have

I PROLOGUE 35

come into existence as the last terms of a series, the members of which have appeared one after another. Thus, far from confirming the account in Genesis, the results of modern science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in detail, hopelessly discordant with it.

Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two most important of all events, the origin of things and the palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the commerce between the Bene Elohim and the daughters of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends ? And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what be- comes of the infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dog- matic conclusions upon their historical accuracy?

It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try to hide its Hexateuchal head — in the hope that the inseparable connec- tion of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The question will still be asked, if the first nine chapters of the Pentateuch are

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36 PROLOGUE I

unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the remainder to be guaranteed ? What more intrinsic claim has the story of the Exodus than that of the Deluge, to belief? If God did not walk in the Garden of Eden, how can we be assured that he spoke from Sinai ?

In some other of the following essays (IX., X., XI, XII., XIV., XV.) I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the canonical scriptures of the New Testament " declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records." We are told that the Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world — a proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I should not think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to signify that everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is infallibly true ; that we are bound to accept the demonology which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching ; and to profess belief in a Supernatural- ism as gross as that of any primitive people — it is at any rate permissible to ask why ? Science may be unable to define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful occurrence ; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the Gadarene miracle

I PROLOGUE 37

is altogether worthless. We have simply three, partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely nothing. But the evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any other.

Elsewhere, I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to declaim against these conclu- sions on the ground of their asserted tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith, and to destroy the foundations of morality ; still less to brand them with the question -begging vituperative appellation of " infidelity." The point is not whether they are wicked ; but, whether, from the point of view of scientific method, they are irrefragably true If they are, they will be accepted in time, whether they are wicked, or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have been able to attain to any insight into her ways, recks little about consolation and makes for righteousness by very round-about paths And, at any rate, whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less and less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientifi methods of ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by daily experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any matter. But the number of such men, driven into the use of scientific methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by their education, their daily pro-

38 PROLOGUE I

fessional and business needs, is increasing and will continually increase. The phraseology of Super- naturalism may remain on men's lips, but in practice they are Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the precept " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live " on Sunday, on Monday, dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain, so long as the wind is in the east ; and an outbreak of pestilence sends men, not to the churches, but to the drains. In\ spite of prayers for the success of our arms and Te Deums for victory, our real faith is in big battalions and keeping our powder dry ; in know- ledge of the science of warfare ; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "Labor are est orare " ; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable worship ; and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, our business is with Nature.

It is important to note that the principle of the ientific Naturalism of the latter half of the nine- enth century, in which the intellectual move- ent of the Renascence has culminated, and

I PROLOGUE 39

which was first clearly formulated by Descartes,/ leads not to the denial of the existence of any Supernature ; l but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, gxiant- form of Supernaturalism.

Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view, the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than man's as his is greater than a blackbeetle's ; no being endowed with powers of influencing the course of nature as much greater than his, as his is greater than a snail's, seems to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something prac- tically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omni- presence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole future ; if the universe

1 I employ the words "Supernature" and "Supernatural" in their popular senses. For myself, I am bound to say that the term ' ' Nature " covers the totality of that which is. The world of psychical phenomena appears to me to be as much part of "Nature" as the world of physical phenomena ; and I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the Universe into two halves, one natural and one supernatural.

40 PROLOGUE I

is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power. Finally, if evidence that a thing may be, were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic theology and demonology not less wonderful than the current supernatural ; just as it might justify the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms to which terrestrial biology offers no parallel. Until human life is longer and the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not think that wise men will oc- cupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural history ; and they will probably agree to a verdict of " not proven " in respect of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who object to say that they know what they are . aware they do not know. As to the in- terests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of life, a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet seen ; an approximation to the millennium, such as no supernatural! stic religion has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in effecting.

I PROLOGUE 41

I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Naturalism chiefly in its critical and destructive aspect. But the present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century, in that it builds up, as well as pulls down.

That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it is already raising the superstructure, is the doctrine of evolution. But so many strange mis- conceptions are current about this doctrine — it is attacked on such false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that is disputable by some of its friends, that I think it well to define as clearly as I can, what I do not and what I do understand by the doctrine.

I have nothing to say to any "Philosophy of Evolution." Attempts to construct such a phil- osophy may be as useful, nay, even as admirable, as was the attempt of Descartes to get at a theory of the universe by the same a priori road ; but, in my judgment, they are as premature. Nor, for this purpose, have I to do with any theory of the " Origin of Species," much as I value that which is known as the Darwinian theory. That the doctrine of natural selection presupposes evolution is quite true ; but it is not true that evolution necessarily implies natural selection. In fact, evolution might conceivably have taken place without the development of groups possessing the characters of species.

42 PROLOGUE !

For me, the doctrine of evolution is no specula- tion, but a generalisation of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who will take the necessary trouble. These facts are those which are classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology. Embryology proves that every higher form of individual life becomes what it is by a process of gradual differ- entiation from an extremely low form ; palaeonto- logy proves, in some cases, and renders probable in all, that the oldest types of a group are the lowest; and that they have been followed by a gradual succession of more and more differentiated forms. It is simply a fact, that evolution of the individual animal and plant is taking place, as a natural process, in millions and millions of cases every day ; it is a fact, that the species which have succeeded one another in the past, do, in many cases, present just those morphological relations, which they must possess, if they had proceeded, one from the other, b}^ an analogous process of evolution.

The alternative presented, therefore, is : either the forms of one and the same type — say, e.g., that of the Horse tribe l — arose successively, but inde- pendently of one another, at intervals, during myriads of years ; or, the later forms are modified

1 The general reader will find an admirably clear and concise statement of the evidence in this case, in Professor Flower's recently published work The Horse: a Study in Natural History.

I PROLOGUE 43

descendants of the earlier. And the latter sup- position is so vastly more probable than the former, that rational men will adopt it, unless satisfactory evidence to the contrary can be produced. The objection sometimes put forward, that no one yet professes to have seen one species pass into another, comes oddly from those who believe that mankind are all descended from Adam. Has any one then yet seen the production of negroes from a white stock, or vice versd ? Moreover, is it absolutely necessary to have watched every step of the progress of a planet, to be justified in concluding that it really does go round the sun ? If so, astronomy is in a bad way.

I do not, for a moment, presume to suggest that some one, far better acquainted than I am with astronomy and physics ; or that a master of the new chemistry, with its extraordinary revelations ; or that a student of the development of human society, of language, and of religions, may not find a sufficient foundation for the doctrine of evolution in these several regions. On the contrary, I rejoice to see that scientific investigation, in all directions, is tending to the same result. And it may well be, that it is only my long occupation with biological matters that leads me to feel safer among them than anywhere else. Be that as it may, I take my stand on the facts of embryology and of palaeontology ; and I hold that our present knowledge of these facts is sufficiently thorough

44 PKOLOGTJE I

and extensive to justify the assertion that all future philosophical and theological speculations will have to accommodate themselves to some such common body of established truths as the following : —

1. Plants and animals have existed on our planet for many hundred thousand, probably millions, of years. During this time, their forms, or species, have undergone a succession of changes, which eventually gave rise to the species which constitute the present living population of the earth. There is no evidence, nor any reason to suspect, that this secular process of evolution is other than a part of the ordinary course of nature ; there is no more ground for imagining the occur- rence of supernatural intervention, at any moment in the development of species in the past, than there is for supposing such intervention to take place, at any moment in the development of an individual animal or plant, at the present day.

2. At present, every individual animal or plant commences its existence as an organism of extremely simple anatomical structure; and it acquires all the complexity it ultimately possesses by gradual differentiation into parts of various structure and function. When a series of specific forms of the same type, extending over a long period of past time, is examined, the relation between the earlier and the later forms is analogous to that between earlier and later stages of indi-

I PROLOGUE 45

vidual development. Therefore, it is a probable conclusion that, if we could follow living beings back to their earlier states, we should find them to present forms similar to those of the individual germ, or, what comes to the same thing, of those lowest known organisms which stand upon the boundary line between plants and animals. At present, our knowledge of the ancient living world stops very far short of this point.

3. It is generally agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness ; that they neither feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution of the primordial living substance should have taken place only along the plant line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of vegetable life, as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though certainly widely different from the present flora, in the evolution of which animals have played so great a part. But the living world thus constituted would be simply an admirable piece of unconscious machinery, the working out of which lay potentially in its primitive composition ; pleasure and pain would have no place in it ; it would be a veritable Garden of Eden without any tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The question of the moral government of such a world could no more be asked, than we could reasonably seek for a moral purpose in a kaleidoscope.

4. How far down the scale of animal life the

46 PROLOGUE I

phenomena of consciousness are manifested, it is impossible to say. No one doubts their presence in his fellow-men ; and, unless any strict Cartesians are left, no one doubts that mammals and birds are to be reckoned creatures that have feelings analo- gous to our smell, taste, sight, hearing, touch, pleasure, and pain. For my own part, I should be disposed to extend this analogical judgment a good deal further. On the other hand, if the lowest forms of plants are to be denied conscious- ness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule, a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling ; and, in spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the "poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a fowl feels ; that the chick just hatched feels ; that the chick when it chirps within the egg may possibly feel ; what is to be said of it on the fifth day, when the bird is there, but with all its tissues nascent ? Still more, on the first day, when it is nothing but a flat cellular disk ? I certainly cannot bring myself to believe that this disk feels. Yet if it dose not, there must be some time in the three weeks, between the first day and the day of hatching, when, as a con- comitant, or a consequence, of the attainment by the brain of the chick of a certain stage of

I PROLOGUE 47

structural evolution, consciousness makes its ap- pearance. I have frequently expressed my in- capacity to understand the nature of the relation between consciousness and a certain anatomical tissue, which is thus established by observation. But the fact remains that, so far as observation and experiment go, they teach us that the psychical phenomena are dependent on the physical.

In like manner, if fishes, insects, scorpions, and such animals as the pearly nautilus, possess feeling, then undoubtedly consciousness was pres- ent in the world as far back as the Silurian epoch. But, if the earliest animals were similar to our rhizopods and monads, there must have been some time, between the much earlier epoch in which they constituted the whole animal population and the Silurian, in which feeling dawned, in consequence of the organism having reached the stage of evolution on which it depends.

5. Consciousness has various forms, which may be manifested independently of one another. The feelings of light and colour, of sound, of touch, though so often associated with those of pleasure and pain, are, by nature, as entirely independent of them as is thinking. An animal devoid of the feelings of pleasure and of pain, may nevertheless exhibit all the effects of sensa- tion and purposive action. Therefore, it would be a justifiable hypothesis that, long after organic

48 PROLOGUE I

evolution had attained to consciousness, pleasure and pain were still absent. Such a world would be without either happiness or misery; no act could be punished and none could be rewarded ; and it could have no moral purpose.

6. Suppose, for argument's sake, that all mammals and birds are subjects of pleasure and pain. Then we may be certain that these forms of consciousness were in existence at the beginning of the Mesozoic epoch. From that time forth, pleasure has been distributed without reference to merit, and pain inflicted without reference to demerit, throughout all but a mere fraction of the higher animals. Moreover, the amount and the severity of the pain, no less than the variety and acuteness of the pleasure, have increased with every advance in the scale of evolution. As suffering came into the world, not in consequence of a fall, but of a rise, in the scale of being, so every further rise has brought more suffering. As the evidence stands, it would appear that the sort of brain which characterises the highest mammals and which, so far as we know, is the indispensable condition of the highest sensibility, did not come into existence before the Tertiary epoch. The primordial anthropoid was probably, in this respect, on much the same footing as his pithe- coid kin. Like them he stood upon his " natural rights," gratified all his desires to the best of his ability, and was as incapable of either right or

I PROLOGUE 49

wrong doing as they. It would be as absurd as in their case, to regard his pleasures, any more than theirs, as moral rewards, and his pains, any more than theirs, as moral punishments.

7. From the remotest ages of which we have any cognizance, death has been the natural and, apparently, the necessary concomitant of life. In our hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing but plants, death must have very early resulted from the struggle for existence : many of the crowd must have jostled one another out of the conditions on which life depends. The occurrence of death, as far back as we have any fossil record of life, however, needs not to be proved by such arguments ; for, if there had been no death there would have been no fossil remains, such as the great majority of those we met with. Not only was there death in the world, as far as the record of life takes us; but, ever since mammals and birds have been preyed upon by carnivorous animals, there has been painful death, inflicted by mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it.

8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural relations between the human organisation and that of the mammals which come nearest to him, on the one hand ; and with the palseontological history of such animals as horses and dogs, on the other ; will not be disposed to question the origin of man from forms which stand in the same sort of relation to Homo

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50 PROLOGUE I

sapiens, as Hipparion does to Equiis. I think it a conclusion, fully justified by analogy, that, sooner or later, we shall discover the remains of our less specialised primatic ancestors in the strata which have yielded the less specialised equine and canine quadrupeds. At present, fossil remains of men do not take us back further than the later part of the Quaternary epoch ; and, as was to be expected, they do not differ more from existing men, than Quaternary horses differ from existing horses. Still earlier we find traces of man, in implements, such as are used by the ruder savages at the present day. Later, the remains of the palaeolithic and neolithic conditions take us gradually from the savage state to the civilisations of Egypt and of Mycenae ; though the true chronological order of the remains actually dis- covered may be uncertain.

9. Much has yet to be learned, but, at present, natural knowledge affords no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to a lower state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural evolution ; which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such localities as the valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the Nile, reached 'a relatively high pitch, five or six thousand years ago ; while, in many other regions, the savage condition has persisted down to our day. In all this vast lapse of time there is not a trace of the occurrence of any general

I PROLOGUE 51

destruction of the human race ; not the smallest indication that man has been treated on any other principles than the rest of the animal world.

10. The results of the process of evolution in the case of man, and in that of his more nearly allied contemporaries, have been marvellously different. Yet it is easy to see that small primi- tive differences of a certain order, must, in the long run, bring about a wide divergence of the human stock from the others. It is a reasonable supposition that, in the earliest human organisms, an improved brain, a voice more capable of modulation and articulation, limbs which lent themselves better to gesture, a more perfect hand, capable among other things of imitating form in plastic or other material, were combined with the curiosity, the mimetic tendency, the strong family affection of the next lower group; and that they were accompanied by exceptional length of life and a prolonged minority. The last two peculiarities are obviously calculated to strengthen the family organisation, and to give great weight to its educative influences. The potentiality of language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw ; and in the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing, as far back as the

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52 PROLOGUE I

days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in tradition, of the experience of more than one generation ; with writing as the record of that of any number of generations; the experience of the race, tested and corrected generation after generation, could be stored up and made the starting point for fresh progress. Having these perfectly natural factors of the evolutionary process in man before us, it seems unnecessary to go further a-field in search of others.

11. That the doctrine of evolution implies a former state of innocence of mankind is quite true ; but, as I have remarked, it is the innocence of the ape and of the tiger, whose acts, however they may run counter to the principles of morality, it would be absurd to blame. The lust of the one and the ferocity of the other are as much provided for in their organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other features that can be named.

Observation and experiment upon the pheno- mena of society soon taught men that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence, certain rules must be observed. Morality commenced with society. Society is possible only upon the condition that the members of it shall surrender more or less of their individual freedom of action. In primitive societies, individual selfishness is a centrifugal force of such intensity that it is

I PROLOGUE 53

constantly bringing the social organisation to the verge of destruction. Hence the prominence of the positive rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by the family or the tribe in all emergen- cies; of fulfilling the religious rites, non-observ- ance of which is conceived to damage it with the supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest products of human thought; and of the negative rules, which restrain each from meddling with the life or property of another.

12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the desire to do what is best for the whole, dominates and limits the action of every member of that society. The more complex the social organisation the greater the number of acts from which each man must abstain, if he desires to do that which is best for all. Thus the progressive evolution of society means increasing restriction of individual freedom in certain directions.

With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of nations by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which con- stitute the common foundation of morality and of law became more numerous and complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many of them stronger. In the absence of a clear apprehen- sion of the natural sanctions of these rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed ; and imagina-

54 PROLOGUE I

tion supplied the motives which reason was supposed to be incompetent to furnish. Religion, at first independent of morality, gradually took morality under its protection ; and the super- naturalists have ever since tried to persuade mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of supernaturalism.

I am not of that opinion, But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it is very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the aid of Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality. It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a liar from the beginning. If we set out in life with pre- tending to know that which we do not know ; with professing to accept for proof evidence which we are well aware is inadequate ; with wilfully shutting our eyes and our ears to facts which militate against this or that comfortable hypo- thesis ; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve the same character.

I have not the presumption to imagine that, in spite of all my efforts, errors may not have crept into these propositions. But I am tolerably confident that time will prove them to be substantially correct. And if they are so, I confess I do not see how any extant supernatural- istic system can also claim exactness. That they are irreconcilable with the biblical cosmogony,

I PROLOGUE 55

anthropology, and theodicy is obvious; but they are no less inconsistent with the sentimental Deism of the "Vicaire Savoyard" and his numerous modern progeny. It is as impossible, to my mind, to suppose that the evolutionary process was set going with full foreknowledge of the result and yet with what we should under- stand by a purely benevolent intention, as it is to imagine that the intention was purely malevo- lent. And the prevalence of dualistic theories from the earliest times to the present day — whether in the shape of the doctrine of the inherently evil nature of matter ; of an Ahriman ; of a hard and cruel Demiurge ; of a diabolical "prince of this world," show how widely this difficulty has been felt.

Many seem to think that, when it is admitted that the ancient literature, contained in our Bibles, has no more claim to infallibility than any other ancient literature; when it is proved that the Israelites and their Christian successors accepted a great many supernaturalistic theories and legends which have no better foundation than those of heathenism, nothing remains to be done but to throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper.

I have always opposed this opinion. It appears to me that if there is anybody more objectionable than the orthodox Bibliolater it is the heterodox Philistine, who can discover in a literature which, in some respects, has no superior, nothing but

56 PROLOGUE I

a subject for scoffing and an occasion for the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he owes to former generations.

Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of the Bible as an instrument of popular education, and I venture to repeat what I then said :

"Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history ; that it has become the national Epic of Britain and is as familiar to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians ; that it is written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form ; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the Eternities ; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work ? " l

1 " The School Boards : What they Can do and what they May do," 1870. Critiques and Addresses, p. 51.

I PROLOGUE 57

At the same time, I laid stress upon the neces- sity of placing such instruction in lay hands ; in the hope and belief, that it would thus gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion ; that the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the peren- nially interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would come more and more into view.

I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the attention of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed ; down to modern times, no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus ; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man j but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from struggling for " rights " ; on the fraternity of taking thought for one's neighbour as for one's self.

58 PROLOGUE I

So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity are included under the democratic principles which assume the same names, the Bible is the most democratic book in the world. As such it began, through the heretical sects, to undermine the clerico-political despotism of the middle ages, almost as soon as it was formed, in the eleventh century ; Pope and King had as much as they could do to put down the Albigenses and the Waldenses in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies ; the Lollards and the Hussites gave them still more trouble in the fourteenth and fifteenth ; from the sixteenth century onward, the Protestant sects have favoured political freedom in proportion to the degree in which they have refused to acknowledge any ultimate authority save that of the Bible.

But the enormous influence which has thus been exerted by the Jewish and Christian Scrip- tures has had no necessary connection with cosmogonies, demonologies, and miraculous inter- ferences. TJieirstrength lies intheir^appeals, not to the reason, but to the_ethical senge^ I do not say that even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive of others or needs no supplement. But I do believe that the human race is not yet, possibly may never be, in a position to dispense with it.

II

SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM

[1887]

NEXT to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of know- ledge is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at the present day, there is more excuse than at any former time for such neglect. No small labour is needed to raise one's self to the level of the acqui- sitions already made ; and able men, who have achieved thus much, know that, if they devote themselves body and soul to the increase of their store, and avoid looking back, with as much care as if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon them, such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the discoverer and

60 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less elevated character.

So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse inter mortuos qucerere mvum ; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the evil example set us, not only by Bacon but by almost all the men of the Renaissance, in pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. It is accepted as a truth which is indisput- able, that, for seven or eight centuries, a long succession of able men — some of them of trans- cendent acuteness and encyclopaedic knowledge- devoted laborious lives to the grave discussion of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a little modesty, a little impartial pondering over personal experience might suggest a doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy method of dealing with a large chapter of the history of the human mind. Even an acquaintance with popular literature which had extended so far as to include that part of the contributions of Sam Slick which contains his weighty aphorism that "there is a great deal of human nature in all mankind," might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that epoch, who, take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly in much the same proportion as ourselves, were likely to

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 61

display nothing better than the qualities of energetic idiots, when they devoted their faculties to the elucidation of problems which were to them, and indeed are to us, the most serious which life has to offer. Speaking for myself, the longer I live the more I am disposed to think that there is much less either of pure folly, or of pure wickedness, in the world than is commonly supposed. It may be doubted if any sane man ever said to himself, " Evil, be thou my good," and have never yet had the good fortune to meet with a perfect fool. When I have brought to the inquiry the patience and long-suffering which become a scientific investigator, the most promising specimens have turned out to have a good deal to say for themselves from their own point of view. And, sometimes, calm reflection has taught the humiliating lesson, that their point of view was not so different from my own as I had fondly imagined. Comprehension is more than half-way to sympathy, here as else- where.

If we turn our attention to scholastic philosophy in the frame of mind suggested by these prefatory remarks, it assumes a very different character from that which it bears in general estimation. No doubt it is surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny logomachies and obscured by the dust- clouds of a barbarous and perplexing terminology. But suppose that, undeterred by much grime and

62 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

by many scratches, the explorer has toiled through this jungle, he comes to an open country which is amazingly like his dear native land. The hills which he has to climb, the ravines he has to avoid, look very much the same ; there is the same infinite space above, and the same abyss of the unknown below ; the means of travelling are the same, and the goal is the same.

That goal for the schoolmen, as for us, is the settlement of the question how far the universe is the manifestation of a rational order ; in other words, how far logical deduction from indisput- able premisses will account for that which has happened and does happen. That was the object of scholasticism, and, so far as I am aware, the object of modern science may be expressed in the same terms. In pursuit of this end, modern science takes into account all the phenomena of the universe which are brought to our knowledge by observation or by experiment. It admits that there are two worlds to be considered, the one physical and the other psychical ; and that though there is a most intimate relation and interconnec- tion between the two, the bridge from one to the other has yet to be found ; that their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two parallel lines.

To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a different aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless we clearly apprehend the fact that they did really

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 63

believe in dogmatic Christianity as it was formu- lated by the Roman Church. They did not give a mere dull assent to anything the Church told them on Sundays, and ignore her teachings for the rest of the week ; but they lived and moved and had their being in that supersensible theo- logical world which was created, or rather grew up, during the first four centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their thoughts far more than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was cast.

For the most part, we learn history from the colourless compendiums or partisan briefs of mere scholars, who have too little acquaintance with practical life, and too little insight into specula- tive problems, to understand that about which they write. In historical science, as in all sciences which have to do with concrete pheno- mena, laboratory practice is indispensable ; and the laboratory practice of historical science is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political life, and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and operations of the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and theologi- cal systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our own time, Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by direct contact with social and political history in the making, the secret of understanding how such history is made. Our notions of the intellectual history of the

64 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

middle ages are, unfortunately, too often derived from writers who have never seriously grappled with philosophical and theological problems : and hence that strange myth of a millennium of moon- shine to which I have adverted.

However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy, were learned and enlightened — such men, for example, as Eginhard or Dante — is necessary to convince one's self, that, for them, the world of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. From the centre of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insignificant sen- sible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the debasement of their material embodiment and continually solicited to their perdition by a no less numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy of devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the pit of everlasting damnation.1

1 There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view of the Catholic cosmos. But it would be unfair to leave it to be supposed that the Reformation made any essential alteration, except perhaps for the worse, in that cosmology which called itself "Christian." The protagonist of the Reformation, from whom the whole of the Evangelical sects are lineally descended, states the case with that plainness of speech, not to say bru- tality, which characterised him. Luther says that man is a beast of burden who only moves as his rider orders; sometimes God rides him, and sometimes Satan. "Sic voluntas humana in medio posita est, ceu jumentum ; si insederit Deus, vult et

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 65

The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, the traditions of the Fathers, and the authority of the Church, they were in possession of far more, and more trust- worthy, information with respect to the nature and order of things in the theological world than they had in regard to the nature and order of things in the sensible world. And, if the two sources of information came into conflict, so much the worse for the sensible world, which, after all, was more or less under the dominion of Satan. Let us suppose that a telescope powerful enough to show us what is going on in the nebula of the sword of Orion, should reveal a world in which stones fell upwards, parallel lines met, and the fourth dimension of space was quite obvious. Men of science would have only two alternatives before them. Either the terrestrial and the nebular facts must be brought into harmony by such feats of subtle sophistry as the human mind is always

vadit, quo vult Deus. ... Si insederit Satan, vult et vadit, quo vult Satan ; nee est in ejus arbitrio ad utrum sessorem currere, aut eum quaerere, sed ipsi sessores certant ob ipsum obtinendum et possidendum " (De Servo Arbitrio, M. Lutheri Opera, ed. 1546, t. ii. p. 468). One may hear substantially the same doctrine preached in the parks and at street-corners by zealous volunteer missionaries of Evangelicism, any Sunday, in modern London. Why these doctrines, which are conspicuous by their absence in the four Gospels, should arrogate to them- selves the title of Evangelical, in contradistinction to Catholic, Christianity, may well perplex the impartial inquirer, • who, if he were obliged to choose between the two, might naturally prefer that which leaves the poor beast of burden a little freedom of choice.

VOL. V F

66 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

capable of performing when driven into a corner ; or science must throw down its arms in despair, and commit suicide, either by the admission that the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as that which is truth in one corner of it is absurdity in another, or by a declaration of incompetency.

In the middle ages, the labours of those great men who endeavoured to reconcile the system of thought which started from the data of pure reason, with that which started from the data of Roman theology, produced the system of thought which is known as scholastic philosophy ; the alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified by Avicenna and his followers when they declared that that which is true in theology may be false in philosophy, and vice versd ; and by Sanchez in his famous defence of the thesis " Quod nil scitur."

To those who deny the validity of one of the primary assumptions of the disputants — who decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency of the evidence, to put faith in the reality of that other world, the geography and the inhabitants of which are so confidently described in the so-called 1 Christianity of Catholicism — the long and bitter contest, which engaged the best intellects for so

i * I say "so-called" not by way of offence, but as a protest v- against the monstrous assumption that Catholic Christianity is ' explicitly or implicitly contained in any trustworthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 67

many centuries, may seem a terrible illustration of the wasteful way in which the struggle for ex- istence is carried on in the world of thought, no less than in that of matter. But there is a more cheerful mode of looking at the history of scholas- ticism. It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought their eternal, no less than their temporal, interests were at stake, could have done. When a logical blunder may ensure combustion, not only in the next world but in this, the construction of syllo- gisms acquires a peculiar interest. Moreover, the schools kept the thinking faculty alive and active, when the disturbed state of civil life, the mephitic atmosphere engendered by the dominant ecclesi- asticism, and the almost total neglect of natural knowledge, might well have stifled it. And, finally, it should be remembered that scholasticism really did thresh out pretty effectually certain problems which have presented themselves to mankind ever since they began to think, and which, I suppose, will present themselves so long as they continue to think. Consider, for example, the controversy of the Realists and the Nominal- ists, which was carried on with varying fortunes, and under various names, from the time of Scotus Erigena to the end of the scholastic period. Has it now a merely antiquarian interest ? Has Nominalism, in any of its modifications, so com-

F 2

68 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

pletely won the day that Realism may be regarded as dead and buried without hope of resurrection ? Many people seem to think so, but it appears to me that, without taking Catholic philosophy into consideration, one has not to look about far to find evidence that Realism is still to the fore, and indeed extremely lively.1

The other day I happened to meet with a report of a sermon recently preached in St. Paul's Cathedral. From internal evidence I am inclined to think that the report is substantially correct. But as I have not the slightest intention of finding fault with the eminent theologian and eloquent preacher to whom the discourse is attributed, for employment of scientific language in a manner for which he could find only too many scientific pre- cedents, the accuracy of the report in detail is not to the purpose. I may safely take it as the embodiment of views which are thought to be

1 It may be desirable to observe that, in modern times, the term "Realism "has acquired a signification wholly different from that which attached to it in the middle ages. We com- monly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I am not aware that any mediaeval philosopher was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in their oversight of the considera- tions which lead to Idealism. If many of them regarded the naterial world as a negation, it was an active negation ; not zero* but a minus quantity.

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 69

quite in accordance with science by many excel- lent, instructed, and intelligent people.

The preacher further contended that it was yet more difficult to realise that our earthly home would become the scene of a vast physical catastrophe. Imagination recoils from the idea that the course of nature — the phrase helps to disguise the truth —so unvarying and regular, the ordered sequence of movement and life, should suddenly cease. Imagination looks more reason- able when it assumes the air of scientific reason. Physical law, it says, will prevent the occurrence of catastrophes only antici- pated by an apostle in an unscientific age. Might not there, however, be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher ? Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied the laws of gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws were held in check by others. The flood and the destruc- tion of Sodom and Gomorrah were brought about by the opera- tions of existing laws, and may it not be that in His illimitable universe there are more important laws than those which sur- round our puny life — moral and not merely physical forces ? Is it inconceivable that the day will come when these royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order of things which seems so stable and so fair ? Earthquakes were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy, the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore witness. ... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their weakness. The end of human proba- tion, the final dissolution of organised society, and the destruc- tion of man's home on the surface of the globe, were none of them violently contrary to our present experience, but only the extension of present facts. The presentiment of death was com- mon ; there were felt to be many things which threatened the existence of society ; and as our globe was a ball of fire, at any moment the pent-up forces which surge and boil beneath our feet might be poured out ("Pall Mall Gazette," December 6, 1886).

The preacher appears to entertain the notion

70 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

that the occurrence of a " catastrophe " 1 involves a breach of the present order of nature — that it is an event incompatible with the physical laws which at present obtain. He seems to be of opinion that " scientific reason " lends its authority to the imaginative supposition that physical law will prevent the occurrence of the " catastrophes " anticipated by an unscientific apostle.

Scientific reason, like Homer, sometimes nods ; but I am not aware that it has ever dreamed dreams of this sort. The fundamental axiom of scientific thought is that there is not, never has been, and never will be, any disorder in nature. The admission of the occurrence of any event which was not the logical consequence of the immediately antecedent events, according to these definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules which we call the " laws of nature," would be an act of self-destruction on the part of science.

"Catastrophe" is a relative conception. For ourselves it means an event which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or impresses his mind by its magnitude relatively to him. But events which are quite in the natural order of things to us, may be frightful catastrophes to other sentient beings. Surely no interruption of the

1 At any rate a catastrophe greater than the flood, which, as I observe with interest, is as calmly assumed by the preacher to be an historical event as if science had never had a word to say on that subject !

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 71

order of nature is involved if, in the course of descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an anthill and in a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a hundred thousand of its inhabi- tants. To the ants the catastrophe is worse than the earthquake of Lisbon. To me it is the natural and necessary consequence of the laws of matter in motion. A redistribution of energy has taken place, which is perfectly in accordance with natural order, however unpleasant its effects may be to the ants.

Imagination, inspired by scientific reason, and not merely assuming the airs thereof, as it unfortunately too often does in the pulpit, so far from having any right to repudiate catastrophes and deny the possibility of the cessation of motion and life, easily finds justification for the exactly contrary course. Kant in his famous " Theory of the Heavens" declares the end of the world and its reduction to a formless condition to be a necessary consequence of the causes to which it owes its origin and continuance. And, as to catastro- phes of prodigious magnitude and frequent occur- rence, they were the favourite asylum ignorantice of geologists, not a quarter of a century ago. If modern geology is becoming more and more disinclined to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any a priori difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with the universality of order, but because the a posteriori evidence of

72 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n

the occurrence of events of this character in past times has more or less completely broken down.

It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slow- ness. It is no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and fractures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and slow movements through miles of elevation and depres- sion, and its small and rapid movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived and unperceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to the shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus.

Without going beyond the range of fair scienti- fic analogy, conditions are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more rapid than it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as much in accordance with ascertained laws of nature, as the more rapid cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when it remains in the air. But much more rapid cooling might entail a shifting and re-arrangement of the parts of the crust of the earth on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about " catas- trophes" to which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle. It is conceivable that man and his works and all the higher forms of animal life should be utterly destroyed ; that mountain

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC KEALISM 73

regions should be converted into ocean depths and the floor of oceans raised into mountains ; and the earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy of the writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray. And yet, to the eye of science, there would be no more disorder here than in the sabbatical peace of a summer sea. Not a link in the chain of natural causes and effects would be broken, nowhere would there be the slightest indication of the " suspension of a lower law by a higher." If a sober scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a revengeful fanatic, rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid men love their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict scientific principles; but because the evidence of their scientific value does not fulfil the conditions on which weight is at- tached to evidence. The imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not " assume the air of scientific reason."

I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by science, disorder is unimagin- able. If a being endowed with perfect intellectual and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him to be a

74 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC KEALISM n

sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the logical consequence of the preceding arrange- ment, under the conditions which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be filled with that Amor intellectualis Dei, the beatific vision of the vita contemplative^, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.

The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions which pervades the preach- er's utterance, brings me back to the proper topic of the present essay. It is the use of the word " law " as if it denoted a thing — as if a " law of nature," as science understands it, were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the phenomena expressed by that law are brought about. The preacher asks, " Might not there be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher ? " He tells us that every time we lift our arms we defy the law of gravitation. He asks

II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 75

whether some day certain "royal and ultimate laws " may not come and " wreck " those laws which are at present, it would appear, acting as nature's police. It is evident, from these expres- sions, that " laws," in the mind of the preacher, are entities having an objective existence in a graduated hierarchy. And it would appear that the " royal laws " are by no means to be regarded as constitutional royalties : at any moment, they may, like Eastern despots, descend in wrath among the middle- class and plebeian laws, which have hitherto done the drudgery of the world's work, and, to use phraseology not unknown in our seats of learning — " make hay " of their belong- ings. Or perhaps a still more familiar analogy has suggested this singular theory; and it is thought that high laws may " suspend " low laws, as a bishop may suspend a curate.

Far be it from me to controvert these views, if any one likes to hold them. All I wish to remark is that such a conception of the nature of " laws " has nothing to do with modern science. It is scholastic realism — realism as intense and unmiti- gated as that of Scotus Erigena a thousand years ago. The essence of such realism is that it maintains the objective existence of universals, or, as we call them nowadays, general propositions. It affirms, for example, that "man" is a real thing, apart from individual men, having its exist- ence, not in the sensible, but in the intelligible

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world, and clothing itself with the accidents of sense to make the Jack and Tom and Harry whom we know. Strange as such a notion may appear to modern scientific thought, it really pervades ordinary language. There are few people who would, at once, hesitate to admit that colour, for example, exists apart from the mind which conceives the idea of colour. They hold it to be something which resides in the coloured object ; and so far they are as much Realists as if they had sat at Plato's feet. Reflection on the facts of the case must, I imagine, convince every one that " colour " is — not a mere name, which was the extreme Nominalist position — but a name for that group of states of feeling which we call blue, red, yellow, and so on, and which we believe to be caused by luminiferous vibrations which have not the slightest resemblance to colour ; while these again are set afoot by states of the body to which we ascribe colour, but which are equally devoid of likeness to colour.

In the same way, a law of nature, in the scienti- fic sense, is the product of a mental operation upon the facts of nature which come under our observation, and has no more existence outside the mind than colour has. The law of gravitation is a statement of the manner in which experience shows that bodies, which are free to move, do, in fact, move towards one another. But the other facts of observation, that bodies are not always

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moving in this fashion, and sometimes move in a contrary direction, are implied in the words " free to move." If it is a law of nature that bodies tend to move towards one another in a certain way ; it is another and no less true law of nature that, if bodies are not free to move as they tend to do, either in consequence of an obstacle, or of a contrary impulse from some other source of energy than that to which we give the name of gravitation, they either stop still, or go another way.

Scientifically speaking, it is the acme of absurd- ity to talk of a man defying the law of gravitation when he lifts his arm. The general store of energy in the universe working through terrestrial matter is doubtless tending to bring the man's arm down; but the particular fraction of that energy which is working through certain of his nervous and muscular organs is tending to drive it up, and more energy being expended on the arm in the upward than in the downward direc- tion, the arm goes up accordingly. But the law of gravitation is no more defied, in this case, than when a grocer throws so much sugar into the empty pan of his scales that the one which contains the weight kicks the beam

The tenacity of the wonderful fallacy that the laws of nature are agents, instead of being, as they really are, a mere record of experience, upon which we base our interpretations of that which

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does happen, and our anticipation of that which will happen, is an interesting psychological fact ; and would be unintelligible if the tendency of the human mind towards realism were less strong. Even at the present day, and in the writings of men who would at once repudiate scholastic realism in any form, "law " is often inadvertently em- ployed in the sense of cause, just as, in common life, a man will say that he is compelled by the law to do so and so, when, in point of fact, all he means is that the law orders him to do it, and tells him what will happen if he does not do it. We commonly hear of bodies falling to the ground by reason of the law of gravitation, whereas that law is simply the record of the fact that, according to all experience, they have so fallen (when free to move), and of the grounds of a reasonable expec- tation that they will so fall. If it should be worth anybody's while to seek for examples of such misuse of language on my own part, I am not at all sure he might not succeed, though I have usually been on my guard against such looseness of expression. If I am guilty, I do penance before- hand, and only hope that I may thereby deter others from committing the like fault. And I venture on this personal observation by way of showing that I have no wish to bear hardly on the preacher for falling into an error for which he might find good precedents. But it is one of those errors which, in the case of a person engaged

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in scientific pursuits, do little harm, because it is corrected as soon as its consequences become obvious ; while those who know physical science only by name are, as has been seen, easily led to build a mighty fabric of unrealities on this funda- mental fallacy. In fact, the habitual use of the word " law," in the sense of an active thing, is almost a mark of pseudo-science ; it characterises the writings of those who have appropriated the forms of science without knowing anything of its substance.

There are two classes of these people : those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long as it is guaranteed by ecclesiastical authority; and those who are ready to believe in any miracle so long as it has some different guarantee. The believers in what are ordinarily called miracles — those who accept the miraculous narratives which they are taught to think are essential elements of religious doctrine — are in the one category; the spirit-rappers, table-turners, and all the other devotees of the occult sciences of our day are in the other: and, if they disagree in most things they agree in this, namely, that they ascribe to science a dictum that is not scientific ; and that they endeavour to upset the dictum thus foisted on science by a realistic argument which is equally unscientific.

It is asserted, for example, that, on a particular occasion, water was turned into wine ; and, on the

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other hand, it is asserted that a man or a woman "levitated" to the ceiling, floated about there, and finally sailed out by the window. And it is assumed that the pardonable scepticism, with which most scientific men receive these state- ments, is due to the fact that they feel themselves justified in denying the possibility of any such metamorphosis of water, or of any such levi- tation, because such events are contrary to the laws of nature. So the question of the preacher is triumphantly put : How do you know that there are not " higher " laws of nature than your chemical and physical laws, and that these higher laws may not intervene and " wreck " the latter ? The plain answer to this question is, Why should anybody be called upon to say how he knows that which he does not know ? You are assuming that laws are agents — efficient causes of that which happens — and that one law can interfere with another. To us, that assumption is as nonsensical as if you were to talk of a propo- sition of Euclid being the cause of the diagram which illustrates it, or of the integral calculus interfering with the rule of three. Your question really implies that we pretend to complete know- ledge not only of all past and present phenomena, but of all that are possible in the future, and we leave all that sort of thing to the adepts of esoteric Buddhism. Our pretensions are infinitely more modest. We have succeeded in finding out

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the rules of action of a little bit of the universe ; we call these rules " laws of nature," not because anybody knows whether they bind nature or not, but because we find it is obligatory on us to take them into account, both as actors under nature, and as interpreters of nature. We have any quantity of genuine miracles of our own, and if you will furnish us with as good evidence of your miracles as we have of ours, we shall be quite happy to accept them and to amend our expression of the laws of nature in accordance with the new facts.

As to the particular cases adduced, we are so perfectly fair-minded as to be willing to help your case as far as we can. You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are already inclined to think that the bodies, which we have hitherto called elementary, are really com- posite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical diffi- culty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this pres- ent moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles ; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid ; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than

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musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple. If the so-called " elements," oxygen and hydrogen, which compose water, are aggregates of the same ultimate particles, or physical units, as those which enter into the structure of the so-called element " car- bon," it is obvious that alcohol and other substances, composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, may be produced by a rearrangement of some of the units of oxygen and hydrogen into the " element " carbon, and their synthesis with the rest of the oxygen and hydrogen.

Theoretically, therefore, we can have no sort of objection to your miracle. And our reply to the lovitators is just the same. Why should not your friend " levitate " ? Fish are said to rise and sink in the water by altering the volume of an internal air-receptacle ; and there may be many ways science, as yet, knows nothing of, by which we, who live at the bottom of an ocean of air, may do the same thing. Dialectic gas and wind appear to be by no means wanting among you, and why should not long practice in pneumatic philosophy have resulted in the internal generation of something a thousand times rarer than hydrogen, by which, in accordance with the most ordinary natural laws, you would not only rise to the ceiling and float there in quasi-angelic posture, but perhaps, as one of your feminine adepts is said to have done, flit swifter than train or telegram to " still-vexed Bermoothes," and twit Ariel, if he happens to be

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there, for a sluggard ? We have not the presump- tion to deny the possibility of anything you affirm ; only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, do give us as much to go upon as may save us from being roared down by their inextinguishable laughter.

Enough of the realism which clings about " laws." There are plenty of other exemplifications of its vitality in modern science, but I will cite only one of them.

This is the conception of " vital force " which comes straight from the philosophy of Aristotle. It is a fundamental proposition of that philosophy that a natural object is composed of two constitu- ents— the one its matter, conceived as inert or even, to a certain extent, opposed to orderly and purposive motion ; the other its form, conceived as a quasi-spiritual something, containing or con- ditioning the actual activities of the body and the potentiality of its possible activities.

I am disposed to think that the prominence of this conception in Aristotle's theory of things arose from the circumstance that he was, to begin with and throughout his life, devoted to biological studies. In fact it is a notion which must force itself upon the mind of any one who studies biological phenomena, without reference to general physics, as they now stand. Everybody who observes the obvious phenomena of the develop- ment of a seed into a tree, or of an egg into an

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animal, will note that a relatively formless mass of matter gradually grows, takes a definite shape and structure, and, finally, begins to perform actions which contribute towards a certain end, namely, the maintenance of the individual in the first place, and of the species in the second. Starting from the axiom that every event has a cause, we have here the causa finalis manifested in the last set of phenomena, the causa materialis axidformalis in the first, while the existence of a causa efficiens within the seed or egg and its product, is a corollary from the phenomena of growth and metamorphosis, which proceed in unbroken succession and make up the life of the animal or plant.

Thus, at starting, the egg or seed is matter having a " form " like all other material bodies. But this form has the peculiarity, in contradistinc- tion to lower substantial " forms," that it is a power which constantly works towards an end by means of living organisation.

So far as I know, Leibnitz is the only philosopher (at the same time a man of science, in the modern sense, of the first rank) who has noted that the modern conception of Force, as a sort of atmosphere enveloping the particles of bodies, and having potential or actual activity, is simply a new name for the Aristotelian Form.1 In modern biology, up till within quite recent times, the Aristotelian con-

1 ' ' Les formes des anciens ou Entelechies ne sont autre chose que les forces" (Leibnitz, Lettre au Ptre Eouvet, 1697).

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ception held undisputed sway ; living matter was endowed with "vital force," and that accounted for everything. Whosoever was not satisfied with that explanation was treated to that very " plain argument " — "confound you eternally ' —where- with Lord Peter overcomes the doubts of his brothers in the " Tale of a Tub " " Materialist " was the mildest term applied to him — fortunate if he escaped pelting with " infidel " and " atheist." There may be scientific Rip Yan Winkles about, who still hold by vital force ; but among those biologists who have not been asleep for the last quarter of a century " vital force " no longer figures in the vocabulary of science. It is a patent survival of realism; the generalisation from ex- perience that all living bodies exhibit certain activities of a definite character is made the basis of the notion that every living body contains an entity, " vital force," which is assumed to be the cause of those activities.

It is remarkable, in looking back, to notice to what an extent this and other survivals of scholastic realism arrested or, at any rate, impeded the application of sound scientific principles to the investigation of biological phenomena. W'hen I was beginning to think about these matters, the scientific world was occasionally agitated by discussions respecting the nature of the " species " and " genera " of Naturalists, of a different order from the disputes of a later time. I think most

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were agreed that a "species" was something which existed objectively, somehow or other, and had been created by a Divine fiat. As to the objective reality of genera, there was a good deal of difference of opinion. On the other hand, there were a few who could see no objective reality in anything but individuals, and looked upon both species and genera as hypostatised universal s. As for myself, I seem to have unconsciously emulated William of Occam, inasmuch as almost the first public discourse I ever ventured upon, dealt with " Animal Individuality," and its tendency was to fight the Nominalist battle even in that quarter.

Realism 'appeared in still stranger forms at the time to which I refer. The community of plan which is observable in each great group of animals was hypostatised into a Platonic idea with the appropriate name of " archetype," and we were told, as a disciple of Philo-Juda3us might have told us, that this realistic figment was " the archetypal light" by which Nature has been guided amidst the " wreck of worlds." So, again, another naturalist, who had no less earned a well- deserved reputation by his contributions to positive knowledge, put forward a theory of the production of living things which, as nearly as the increase of knowledge allowed, was a reproduction of the doctrine inculcated by the Jewish Cabbala.

Annexing the archetype notion, and carrying it to its full logical consequence, the author of this

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theory conceived that the species of animals and plants were so many incarnations of the thoughts of God — material representations of Divine ideas — during the particular period of the world's history at which they existed. But, under the influence of the embryological and palseontological discoveries of modern times, which had already lent some scientific support to the revived ancient theories of cosmical evolution or emanation, the ingenious author of this speculation, while denying and repudiating the ordinary theory of evolution by successive modification of individuals, main- tained and endeavoured to prove the occurrence of a progressive modification in the divine ideas of successive epochs.

On the foundation of a supposed elevation of organisation in the whole living population of any epoch, as compared with that of its predecessor, and a supposed complete difference in species between the populations of any two epochs (neither of which suppositions has stood the test of further inquiry), the author of this speculation based his conclusion that the Creator had, so to speak, improved upon his thoughts as time went on ; and that, as each such amended scheme of creation came up, the embodiment of the earlier divine thoughts was swept away by a universal catastrophe, and an incarnation of the improved ideas took its place. Only after the last such " wreck " thus brought about, did the embodiment

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of a divine thought, in the shape of the first man, make its appearance as the ne plus ultra of the cosmogonical process.

I imagine that Louis Agassiz, the genial back- woodsman of the science of my young days, who did more to open out new tracks in the scientific forest than most men, would have been much surprised to learn that he was preaching the doctrine of the Cabbala, pure and simple. Ac- cording to this modification of Neoplatonism by contact with Hebrew speculation, the divine essence is unknowable — without form or attribute ; but the interval between it and the world of sense is filled by intelligible entities, which are nothing but the familiar hypostatised abstractions of the realists. These have emanated, like immense waves of light, from the divine centre, and, as ten consecutive zones of Sephiroth, form the universe. The farther away from the centre, the more the primitive light wanes, until the periphery ends in those mere negations, darkness and evil, which are the essence of matter. On this, the divine agency transmitted through the Sephiroth operates after the fashion of the Aris- totelian forms, and, at first, produces the lowest of a series of worlds. After a certain duration the primitive world is demolished and its fragments used up in making a better ; and this process is repeated, until at length a final world, with man for its crown and finish, makes its appearance.

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It is needless to trace the process of retrogressive metamorphosis by which, through the agency of the Messiah, the steps of the process of evolution here sketched are retraced. Sufficient has been said to prove that the extremist realism current in the philosophy of the thirteenth century can be fully matched by the speculations of our own time.

Ill

SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

[1887]

IN the opening sentences of a contribution to the last number of this Review, l the Duke of Argyll has favoured me with a lecture on the proprieties of controversy, to which I should be disposed to listen with more docility if his Grace's precepts appeared to me to be based upon rational principles, or if his example were more exemplary.

With respect to the latter point, the Duke has thought fit to entitle his article " Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon," and thus forces into prominence an element of personality, which those who read the paper which is the object of the Duke's animadversions will observe I have endeavoured, most carefully, to avoid. My criticisms dealt with a report of a sermon, published in a newspaper, and thereby addressed to all the world. Whether that sermon was preached by A or B was not a

1 Nineteenth Century, March 1887.

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matter of the smallest consequence ; and I went out of my way to absolve the learned divine to whom the discourse was attributed, from the responsibility for statements which, for anything I knew to the contrary, might contain imperfect, or inaccurate, representations of his views. The assertion that I had the wish, or was beset, by any " temptation to attack " Canon Liddon is simply contrary to fact.

But suppose that if, instead of sedulously avoiding even the appearance of such attack, I had thought fit to take a different course ; suppose that, after satisfying myself that the eminent clergyman whose name is paraded by the Duke of Argyll had really uttered the words attributed to him from the pulpit of St. Paul's, what right would any one have to find fault with my action on grounds either of justice, expediency, or good taste ?

Establishment has its duties as well as its rights. The clergy of a State Church enjoy many advantages over those of unprivileged and unen- dowed religious persuasions ; but they lie under a correlative responsibility to the State, and to every member of the body politic. I am not aware that any sacredness attaches to sermons. If preachers stray beyond the doctrinal limits set by lay lawyers, the Privy Council will see to it ; and, if they think fit to use their pulpits for the promulgation of literary, or historical, or scientific

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errors, it is not only the right, but the duty, of the humblest layman, who may happen to be better informed, to correct the evil effects of such perver- sion of the opportunities which the State affords them ; and such misuse of the authority which its support lends them. Whatever else it may claim to be, in its relations with the State, the Established Church is a branch of the Civil Service ; and, for those who repudiate the eccle- siastical authority of the clergy, they are merely civil servants, as much responsible to the English people for the proper performance of their duties as any others.

The Duke of Argyll tells us that the " work and calling" of the clergy prevent them from " pursuing disputation as others can." I wonder if his Grace ever reads the so-called " religious " news- papers. It is not an occupation which I should commend to any one who wishes to employ his time profitably ; but a very short devotion to this exercise will suffice to convince him that the "pursuit of disputation," carried to a degree of acrimony and vehemence unsurpassed in lay con- troversies, seems to be found quite compatible with the " work and calling " of a remarkably large number of the clergy.

Finally, it appears to me that nothing can be in worse taste than the assumption that a body of English gentlemen can, by any possibility, desire that immunity from criticism which the Duke of

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Argyll claims for them. Nothing would be more personally offensive to me than the supposition that I shirked criticism, just or unjust, of any lecture I ever gave. I should be utterly ashamed of myself if, when I stood up as an instructor of others, I had not taken every pains to assure / myself of the truth of that which I was about to say ; and I should feel myself bound to be even more careful with a popular assembly, who would take me more or less on trust, than with an audience of competent and critical experts.

I decline to assume that the standard of morality, in these matters, is lower among the clergy than it is among scientific men. I refuse to think that the priest who stands up before a con- gregatipn, as the minister and interpreter of the Divinity, is less careful in his utterances, less ready to meet adverse comment, than the layman who comes before his audience, as the minister and interpreter of nature. Yet what should we think of the man of science who, when his ignorance or his carelessness was exposed, whined about the want of delicacy of his critics, or pleaded his " work and calling " as a reason for being let alone ?

No man, nor any body of men, is good enough, or wise enough, to dispense with the tonic of criticism. Nothing has done more harm to the clergy than the practice, too common among laymen, of regarding them, when in the pulpit, as

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a sort of chartered libertines, whose divagations are not to be taken seriously. And I am well assured that the distinguished divine, to whom the sermon is attributed, is the last person who would desire to avail himself of the dishonouring pro- tection which has been superfluously thrown over him.

So much for the lecture on propriety. But the Duke of Argyll, to whom the hortatory style seems to come naturally, does me the honour to make my sayings the subjects of a series of other admonitions, some on philosophical, some on geological, some on biological topics. I can but rejoice that the Duke's authority in these matters is not always employed to show that I am ignorant of them ; on the contrary, I meet with an amount of agreement, even of approbation, for which I proffer such gratitude as may be due, even if that gratitude is sometimes almost overshadowed by surprise.

I am unfeignedly astonished to find that the Duke of Argyll, who professes to intervene on behalf of the preacher, does really, like another Balaam, bless me altogether in respect of the main issue.

I denied the justice of the preacher's ascription to men of science of the doctrine that miracles are incredible, because they are violations of natural law ; and the Duke of Argyll says that he believes my "denial to be well-founded. The

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preacher was answering an objection which has now been generally abandoned." Either the preacher knew this or he did not know it. It seems to me, as a mere lay teacher, to be a pity that the "great dome of St. Paul's" should have been made to " echo " (if so be that such stentorian effects were really produced) a statement which, admitting the first alternative, was unfair, and, admitting the second, was ignorant.1

Having thus sacrificed one half of the preacher's arguments, the Duke of Argyll proceeds to make equally short work with the other half. It ap- pears that he fully accepts my position that the occurrence of those events, which the preacher speaks of as catastrophes, is no evidence of dis- order, inasmuch as such catastrophes may be necessary occasional consequences of uniform changes. Whence I conclude, his Grace agrees with me, that the talk about royal laws "wrecking "

1 The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demon- stration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. "Recent" is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully discussed in my book on Hume ; which, if I may believe my publishers, has been read by a good many people since it ap- peared in 3879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of The Reign of Law, a work to which I shall have occasion to advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I hold on this subject were well known. The Duke, in fact, writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine : 1 * The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence." In science, we think that a teacher who ignores views which have been discussed coram populo for twenty years, is hardly up to the mark.

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ordinary laws may be eloquent metaphor, but is also nonsense.

And now comes a further surprise. After having given these superfluous stabs to the slain body of the preacher's argument, my good ally remarks, with magnificent calmness : "So far, then, the preacher and the professor are at one." " Let them smoke the calumet." By all means : smoke would be the most appropriate symbol of this wonderful attempt to cover a retreat. After all, the Duke has come to bury the preacher, not to praise him ; only he makes the funeral obsequies look as much like a triumphal pro- cession as possible.

So far as the questions between the preacher and myself are concerned, then, I may feel happy. The authority of the Duke of Argyll is ranged on my side. But the Duke has raised a number of other questions, wTith respect to which I fear I shall have to dispense with his support — nay, even be compelled to differ from him as much, or more, than I have done about his Grace's new rendering of the " benefit of clergy."

In discussing catastrophes, the Duke indulges in statements, partly scientific, partly anecdotic, which appear to me to be somewhat misleading. We are told, to begin with, that Sir Charles Lyell's doctrine respecting the proper mode of interpreting the facts of geology (which is com- monly called uniformitarianism) "does not hold

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its head quite so high as it once did." That is great news indeed. But is it true ? All I can say is that I am aware of nothing that has happened of late that can in any way justify it; and my opinion is, that the body of Lyell's doctrine, as laid down in that great work, " The Principles of Geology," whatever may have hap- pened to its head, is a chief and permanent con- stituent of the foundations of geological science.

But this question cannot be advantageously dis- cussed, unless we take some pains to discriminate between the essential part of the uniformitarian doctrine and its accessories ; and it does not appear that the Duke of Argyll has carried his studies of geological philosophy so far as this point. For he defines uniforaiitarianism to be the assumption of the " extreme slowness and perfect continuity of all geological changes."

What " perfect continuity " may mean in this definition, I am by no means sure ; but I can only imagine that it signifies the absence of any break in the course of natural order during the millions of years, the lapse of which is recorded by geological phenomena.

Is the Duke of Argyll prepared to say that any geologist of authority, at the present day, believes that there is the slightest evidence of the occur- rence of supernatural intervention, during the long ages of which the monuments are preserved to us in the crust of the earth ? And if he is not,

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in what sense has this part of the uniformitarian doctrine, as he defines it, lowered its pretensions to represent scientific truth ?

As to the "extreme slowness of all geological changes," it is simply a popular error to regard that as, in any wise, a fundamental and necessary dogma of uniformitarianism. It is extremely astonishing to me that any one who has carefully studied Lyell's great work can have so completely failed to appreciate its purport, which yet is " writ large " on the very title-page : " The Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation." The essence of Lyell's doctrine is here written so that those who run may read ; and it has nothing to do with the quickness or slowness of the past changes of the earth's surface ; except in so far as existing analogous changes may go on slowly, and there- fore create a presumption in favour of the slowness of past changes.

With that epigrammatic force which character- ises his style, Buffon wrote, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in his famous " Theorie de la Terre " : " Pour juger de ce qui est arrive, et meme de ce qui arrivera, nous n'avons qu'a examiner ce qui arrive." The key of the past, as of the future, is to be sought in the present; and, only when known causes of change have been shown to be insufficient, have we any right to have recourse to

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unknown causes. Geology is as much a historical science as archaeology ; and I apprehend that all sound historical investigation rests upon this axiom. It underlay all Hutton's work and ani- mated Lyell and Scope in their successful efforts to revolutionise the geology of half a century ago. There is no antagonism whatever, and there never was, between the belief in the views which had their chief and unwearied advocate in Lyell and the belief in the occurrence of catastrophes. The first edition of Lyell's " Principles," published in 1830, lies before me ; and a large part of the first volume is occupied by an account of volcanic, seismic, and diluvial catastrophes which have occurred within the historical period. Moreover, the author, over and over again, expressly draws the attention of his readers to the consistency of catastrophes with his doctrine.

Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed with- in the last three thousand years the devastation by deluge of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorised to regard them as part of the present order of nature, and they may be introduced into geological speculations respecting the past, provided that we do not imagine them to have been more frequent or general than we expect them to be in time to come (vol. i. p. 89).

Again : —

If we regard each of the causes separately, which we know to be at present the most instrumental in remodelling the state of the surface, we shall find that we must expect each to be in action for thousands of years, without producing any extensive

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alterations in the habitable surface, and then to give rise, during a very brief period, to important revolutions (vol. ii. p. 161). l

Lyell quarrelled with the catastrophists then, by no means because they assumed that catas- trophes occur and have occurred, but because they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to help them, when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel of observation of the present course of nature, in order to help themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become what it is, chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts.

So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more in- tensely or more rapidly, at any time between the older tertiary and the oldest paleozoic epochs than they have done between the older tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformitarianism, even as limited by Lyell,2 has no

1 See also vol. i. p. 460. In the ninth edition (1853), pub- lished twenty-three years after the first, Lyell deprives even the most careless reader of any excuse for misunderstanding him : " So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth- crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited geographical areas " (p. 187).

2 A great many years ago (Presidential Address to the Geo- logical Society, 1869) I ventured to indicate that which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a

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call to lower its crest. But if the facts were other- wise,thepositionLyell took up remains impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of nature were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now ; what he did maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet been shown to be incorrect.

I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the " Principles of Geology " in my young days ; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was familiar with the truth that " the doctrine of uniformity is not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is taught totidem verbis in that work. Even had it been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the " Principles," Whewell's " Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound, author, in arguing against Ly ell's uniformitarianism, ex- less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said : ' ' This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and de- ductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which were — this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geo- logical speculation which it might otherwise have held " (Lay Sermons, p. 260). The context shows that " uniformitarianism" here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Hutton and Lyell, and that what I mean by "evolutionism" is con- sistent and thoroughgoing uniformitarianism.

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pressly points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of catastrophes.

"With regard to such, occurrences [earthquakes, deluges, etc.], terrible as they appear at the time, they may not much affect the average rate of change : there may be a cycle, though an irregular one, of rapid and slow change : and if such cycles go on succeeding each other, we may still call the order of nature uniform, notwithstanding the periods of violence which it in- volves.1

The reader who has followed me through this brief chapter of the history of geological philoso- phy will probably find the following passage in the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little remarkable : —

Many years ago, when I had the honour of being President of the British Association,2 1 ventured to point out, in the presence and in the hearing of that most distinguished man [Sir C. Lyell] that the doctrine of uniformity was not incompatible with great and sudden changes, since cycles of these and other cycles of comparative rest might well be constituent parts of that uni- formity which he asserted. Lyell did not object to this extended interpretation of his own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me his entire concurrence.

I should think he did ; for, as I have shown, there was nothing in it that Lyell himself had not said, six-and-twenty years before, and enforced, three years before ; and it is almost verbally identical with the view of uniformitarianism taken by Whewell, sixteen years before, in a work with which, one would think, that any one who

1 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i. p. 670. New edition, 1847. 2 At Glasgow in 1856.

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undertakes to discuss the philosophy of science should be familiar.

Thirty years have elapsed since the beginner of 1856 persuaded himself that he enlightened the foremost geologist of his time, and one of the most acute and far-seeing men of science of any time, as to the scope of the doctrines which the veteran philosopher had grown gray in promulgating ; and the Duke of Argyll's acquaintance with the literature of geology has not, even now, become sufficiently profound to dissipate that pleasant delusion.

If the Duke of Argyll's guidance in that branch of physical science, with which alone he has given evidence of any practical acquaintance, is thus unsafe, I may breathe more freely in setting my opinion against the authoritative deliverances of his Grace about matters which lie outside the province of geology.

And here the Duke's paper offers me such a wealth of opportunities that choice becomes em- barrassing. I must bear in mind the good old adage, " Non multa sed multum." Tempting as it would be to follow the Duke through his labyrinthine misunderstandings of the ordinary terminology of philosophy, and to comment on the curious unintelligibility which hangs about his frequent outpourings of fervid language, limits of space oblige me to restrict myself to those points, the discussion of which may help to en-

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lighten the public in respect of matters of more importance than the competence of my Mentor for the task which he has undertaken.

I am not sure when the employment of the word Law, in the sense in which we speak of laws of nature, commenced, but examples of it may be found in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza. Bacon employs "Law" as the equiva- lent of " Form," and I am inclined to think that he may be responsible for a good deal of the confusion that has subsequently arisen ; but I am not aware that the term is used by other authori- ties, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any other sense than that of " rule " or "definite order " of the coexistence of things or succession of events m nature. Descartes speaks of " regies, que je nomme les lois de la nature." Leibnitz says " loi ou regie generale," as if he considered the terms interchangeable.

The Duke of Argyll, however, affirms that the " law of gravitation " as put forth by Newton was something more than the statement of an observed order. He admits that Kepler's three laws " were an observed order of facts and nothing more." As to the law of gravitation, " it contains an element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even an element of causation, the recognition of which belongs to a higher category of intellectual con- ceptions than that which is concerned in the mere observation and record of separate and apparently

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unconnected facts." There is hardly a line in these paragraphs which appears to me to be in- disputable. But, to confine myself to the matter in hand, I cannot conceive that any one who had taken ordinary pains to acquaint himself with the real nature of either Kepler's or Newton's work could have written them. That the labours of Kepler, of all men in the world, should be called " mere observation and record," is truly wonderful. And any one who will look into the " Principia," or the " Optics," or the " Letters to Bentley," will see, even if he has no more special knowledge of the topics discussed than I have, that Newton over and over again insisted that he had nothing to do with gravitation as a physical cause, and that when he used the terms attraction, force, and the like, he employed them, as he says, " mathe- malict " and not "physict."

How these attractions [of gravity, magnetism, and electricity] may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attrac- tion may be performed by impulse or by some other means un- known to me. I use that word here to signify only in a general way any force by which bodies tend towards one another, what- ever be the cause. l

According to my reading of the best authorities upon the history of science, Newton discovered neither gravitation, nor the law of gravitation; nor did he pretend to offer more than a conjecture as to the causation of gravitation. Moreover, his

1 Optics, query 31.

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assertion that the notion of a body acting where it is not, is one that no competent thinker could entertain, is antagonistic to the whole current conception of attractive and repulsive forces, and therefore of " the attractive force of gravitation." What, then, was that labour of unsurpassed mag- nitude and excellence and of immortal influence which Newton did perform ? In the first place, Newton defined the laws, rules, or observed order of the phenomena of motion, which come under our daily observation, with greater precision than had been before attained ; and, by following out, with marvellous power and subtlety, the mathe- matical consequences of these rules, he almost created the modern science of pure mechanics. In the second place, applying exactly the same method to the explication of the facts of astro- nomy as that which was applied a century and a half later to the facts of geology by Lyell, he set himself to solve the following problem. Assuming that all bodies, free to move, tend to approach one another as the earth and the bodies on it do ; assuming that the strength of that tendency is directly as the mass and inversely as the squares of the distances ; assuming that the laws of motion, determined for terrestrial bodies, hold good throughout the universe ; assuming that the planets and their satellites were created and placed at their observed mean distances, and that each received a certain impulse from the Creator ;

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will the form of the orbits, the varying rates of motion of the planets, and the ratio between those rates and their distances from the sun, which must follow by mathematical reasoning from these premisses, agree with the order of facts determined by Kepler and others, or not ?

Newton, employing mathematical methods which are the admiration of adepts, but which no one but himself appears to have been able to use with ease, not only answered this question in the affirmative, but stayed not his constructive genius before it had founded modern physical astronomy.

The historians of mechanical and of astronomi- cal science appear to be agreed that he was the first person who clearly and distinctly put forth the hypothesis that the phenomena comprehended under the general name of " gravity " follow the same order throughout the universe, and that all material bodies exhibit these phenomena ; so that, in this sense, the idea of universal gravitation may, doubtless, be properly ascribed to him.

Newton proved that the laws of Kepler were particular consequences of the laws of motion and the law of gravitation — in other words, the reason of the first lay in the two latter. But to talk of the law of gravitation alone as the reason of Kepler's laws, and still more as standing in any causal relation to Kepler's laws, is simply a misuse of language. It would really be interest-

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ing if the Duke of Argyll would explain how he proposes to set about showing that the elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, the constant area described by the radius vector, and the proportionality of the squares of the periodic times to the cubes of the distances from the sun, are either caused by the " force of gravitation " or deducible from the " law of gravitation." I conceive that it would be about as apposite to say that the various compounds of nitrogen with oxygen are caused by chemical attraction and deducible from the atomic theory.

Newton assuredly lent no shadow of support to the modern pseudo-scientific philosophy which confounds laws with causes. I have not taken the trouble to trace out this commonest of fallacies to its first beginning ; but I was familiar with it in full bloom, more than thirty years ago, in a work which had a great vogue in its day — the " Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation " — of which the first edition was published in 1844.

It is full of apt and forcible illustrations of pseudo-scientific realism. Consider, for example, this gem serene. When a boy who has climbed a tree loses his hold of the branch, "the law of gravitation unrelentingly pulls him to the ground, and then he is hurt," whereby the Almighty is quite relieved from any responsibility for the accident. Here is the " law of gravitation "

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acting as a cause in a way quite in accordance with the Duke of Argyll's conception of it. In fact, in the mind of the author of the " Vestiges," " laws " are existences intermediate between the Creator and His works, like the " ideas " of the Platonisers or the Logos of the Alexandrians.1 I may cite a passage which is quite in the vein of Philo :—

We have seen powerful evidences that the construction of this globe and its associates ; and, inferentially, that of all the other globes in space, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are the expression of His will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws which are in like manner an expression of His will ? (p. 154, 1st edition).

And creation " operating by law " is constantly cited as relieving the Creator from trouble about insignificant details.

I am perplexed to picture to myself the state of mind which accepts these verbal juggleries. It is intelligible that the Creator should operate according to such rules as he might think fit to lay down for himself (and therefore according to law) ; but that would leave the operation of his will just as much a direct personal act as it would be under any other circumstances. I can also understand that (as in Leibnitz's caricature of Newton's views) the Creator might have made

1 The author recognises this in his Explanations.

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the cosmical machine, and, after setting it going, have left it to itself till it needed repair. But then, by the supposition, his personal responsi- bility would have been involved in all that it did ; just as much as a dynamiter is responsible for what happens, when he has set his machine going and left it to explode.

The only hypothesis which gives a sort of mad consistency to the Vestigiarian's views is the supposition that laws are a kind of angels or demiurgoi, who, being supplied with the Great Architect's plan, were permitted to settle the details among themselves. Accepting this doc- trine, the conception of royal laws and plebeian laws, and of those more than Homeric contests in which the big laws " wreck " the little ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the preacher's dis- course, must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, be attributed to the author of the Vestiges."

But the author of the " Vestiges " is not the only writer who is responsible for the current pseudo-scientific mystifications which hang about the term " law." When I wrote my paper about " Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Realism," I had not read a work by the Duke of Argyll, "The Reign of Law," which, I believe, has enjoyed, possibly still enjoys, a widespread popularity. But the vivacity of the Duke's attack led me to

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think it possible that criticisms directed else- where might have come home to him. And, in fact, I find that the second chapter of the work in question, which is entitled " Law ; its definitions," is, from my point of view, a sort of " summa " of pseudo-scientific philosophy. It will be worth while to examine it in some detail.

In the first place, it is to be noted that the author of the " Reign of Law " admits that " law," in many cases, means nothing more than the statement of the order in which facts occur, or, as he says, " an observed order of facts " (p. 66). But his appreciation of the value of accuracy of expression does not hinder him from adding, almost in the same breath, "In this sense the laws of nature are simply those facts of nature which recur according to rule " (p. 66). Thus " laws," which were rightly said to be the state- ment of an order of facts in one paragraph, are declared to be the facts themselves in the next.

We are next told that, though it may be customary and permissible to use " law " in the sense of a statement of the order of facts, this is a low use of the word ; and, indeed, two pages farther on, the writer, flatly contradicting himself, altogether denies its admissibility.

An observed order of facts, to be entitled to the rank of a law, must be an order so constant and uniform as to indicate necessity, and necessity can only arise out of the action of some compelling force (p. 68).

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This is undoubtedly one of the most singular propositions that I have ever met with in a professedly scientific work, and its rarity is embellished by another direct self-contradiction which it implies. For on the preceding page (67), when the Duke of Argyll is speaking of the laws of Kepler, which he admits to be laws, and which are types of that which men of science understand by "laws," he says that they are " simply and purely an order of facts." Moreover, he adds : " A very large proportion of the laws of every science are laws of this kind and in this sense."

If, according to the Duke of Argyll's admission, law is understood, in this sense, thus widely and constantly by scientific authorities, where is the justification for his unqualified assertion that such statements of the observed order of facts are not " entitled to the rank " of laws ?

But let us examine the consequences of the really interesting proposition I have just quoted. I presume that it is a law of nature that "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points." This law affirms the constant association of a certain fact of form with a certain fact of dimension. Whether the notion of necessity which attaches to it has an a priori or an a posteriori origin is a question not relevant to the present discussion. But I would beg to be informed, if it is necessary, where is the " com-

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pelling force " out of which the necessity arises ; and further, if it is not necessary, whether it loses the character of a law of nature ?

I take it to be a law of nature, based on unex- ceptionable evidence, that the mass of matter remains unchanged, whatever chemical or other modifications it may undergo. This law is one of the foundations of chemistry. But it is by no means necessary. It is quite possible to imagine that the mass of matter should vary according to circumstances, as we know its weight does. More- over, the determination of the " force " which makes mass constant (if there is any intelligi- bility in that form of words) would not, so far as I can see, confer any more validity on the law than it has now.

There is a law of nature, so well vouched by experience, that all mankind, from pure logicians in search of examples to parish sextons in search of fees, confide in it. This is the law that " all men are mortal." It is simply a statement of the observed order of facts that all men sooner or later die. I am not acquainted with any law of nature which is more " constant and uniform " than this. But will any one tell me that death is " necessary " ? Certainly there is no a priori necessity in the case, for various men have been imagined to be immortal. And I should be glad to be informed of any " necessity " that can be deduced from biological considerations. It is

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quite conceivable, as has recently been pointed out, that some of the lowest forms of life may be immortal, after a fashion. However this may be, I would further ask, supposing " all men are mortal " to be a real law of nature, where and what is that to which, with any propriety, the title of " compelling force " of the law can be given ?

On page 69, the Duke of Argyll asserts that the law of gravitation " is a law in the sense, not merely of a rule, but of a cause." But this revival of the teaching of the "Vestiges" has already been examined and disposed of; and when tlio Duke of Argyll states that the " observed order " which Kepler had discovered was simply a necessary consequence of the force of "gravita- tion," I need not recapitulate the evidence which proves such a statement to be wholly fallacious. But it may be useful to say, once more, that, at this present moment, nobody knows anything about the existence of a " force " of gravitation apart from the fact ; that Newton declared the ordinary notion of such force to be inconceivable ; that various attempts have been made to account for the order of facts we call gravitation, without recourse to the notion of attractive force ; that, if such a force exists, it is utterly incompetent to account for Kepler's laws, without taking into the reckoning a great number of other considerations ; and, finally, that all we know about the " force "

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of gravitation, or any other so-called " force," is that it is a name for the hypothetical cause of an observed order of facts.

Thus, when the Duke of Argyll says : " Force, as- certained according to some measure of its operation —this is indeed one of the definitions, but only one, of a scientific law " (p. 71) I reply that it is a definition which must be repudiated by every one who possesses an adequate acquaintance with either the facts, or the philosophy, of science, and be relegated to the limbo of pseudo-scientific fallacies. If the human mind had never entertained this notion of " force," nay, if it substituted bare in- variable succession for the ordinary notion of causation, the idea of law, as the expression of a constantly-observed order, which generates a cor- responding intensity of expectation in our minds, would have exactly the same value, and play its part in real science, exactly as it does now.

It is needless to extend further the present excursus on the origin and history of modern pseudo-science. Under such high patronage as it has enjoyed, it has grown and flourished until, nowadays, it is becoming somewhat rampant. It has its weekly " Ephemerides," in which every new pseudo-scientific mare's-nest is hailed and belauded with the unconscious unfairness of ignorance ; and an army of " reconcilers," enlisted in its service, whose business seems to be to mix the black of dogma and the, white of science into

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the neutral tint of what they call liberal theology.

I remember that, not long after the publication of the " Vestiges," a shrewd and sarcastic countryman of the author defined it as " cauld kail made het again." A cynic might find amusement in the reflection that, at the present time, the principles and the methods of the much -vilified Vestigiarian are being "made het again"; and are not only " echoed by the dome of St. Paul's/' but thundered from the castle of Inverary. But my turn of mind is not cynical, and I can but regret the waste of time and energy bestowed on the en- deavour to deal with the most difficult problems of science, by those who have neither undergone the discipline, nor possess the information, which are indispensable to the successful issue of such an enterprise.

I have already had occasion to remark that the Duke of Argyll's views of the conduct of con- troversy are different from mine ; and this much- to-be lamented discrepancy becomes yet more accentuated when the Duke reaches biological topics. Anything that was good enough for Sir Charles Lyell, in his department of study, is cer- tainly good enough for me in mine ; and I by no means demur to being pedagogically instructed about a variety of matters with which it has been the business of my life to try to acquaint myself. But the Duke of Argyll is not content with

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favouring me with his opinions about my own business ; he also answers for mine ; and, at that point, really the worm must turn. I am told that " no one knows better than Professor Huxley " a variety of things which I really do not know ; and I am said to be a disciple of that " Positive Philosophy " which I have, over and over again, publicly repudiated in language which is certainly not lacking in intelligibility, whatever may be its other defects.

I am told that I have been amusing myself with a " metaphysical exercitation or logomachy " (may I remark incidentally that these are not quite convertible terms ?), when, to the best of my belief, I have been trying to expose a process of mystification, based upon the use of scientific language by writers who exhibit no sign of scientific training, of accurate scientific knowledge, or of clear ideas respecting the philosophy of science,