Of these three sets of arguments, the two first bear upon all religion, whilst the third bears upon it only as embodied in some exclusive form.
Thus the physicist argues, for example, that consciousness being a function of the brain, unless the universe be a single brain itself, there can be no conscious God.[33] The moral philosopher argues that sin and misery being so prevalent, there can be no Almighty and all-merciful God. And the historian argues that all alleged revelations can be shown to have had analogous histories; and that therefore, even if God exists, there is no one religion through which He has specially revealed Himself. These are rough specimens solubly, _so far as observation can carry us_, mind with matter. The great gulf between the two has at last been spanned. The bridge across it, that was so long seen in dreams and despaired of, has been thrown triumphantly--a solid compact fabric, on which a hundred intellectual masons are still at work, adding stone on ponderous stone to it. Science, to put the matter in other words, has accomplished these three things. Firstly, to use the words of a well-known writer, '_it has established a functional relation to exist between every fact of thinking, willing, or feeling, on the one side, and some molecular change in the body on the other side_.' Secondly, it has connected, through countless elusive stages, this organic human body with the universal lifeless matter. And thirdly, it claims to have placed the universal matter itself in a new position for us, and to exhibit all forms of life as developed from it, through its own spontaneous motion. Thus for the first time, beyond the reach of question, the entire sensible universe is brought within the scope of the physicist. Everything that is, is matter moving. Life itself is nothing but motion of an infinitely complex kind. It is matter in its finest ferment. The first traceable beginnings of it are to be found in the phenomenon of crystallisation; we have there, we are told by the highest scientific authority, '_the first gropings of the so-called vital force_;' and we learn from the same quarter, that between these and the brain of Christ there is a difference in degree only, not in kind: they are each of them '_an assemblage of molecules, acting and re-acting according to law_.' '_We believe_,' says Dr. Tyndall, '_that every thought and every feeling has its definite mechanical correlative--that it is accompanied by a certain breaking up and re-marshalling of the atoms of the brain_.' And though he of course admits that to trace out the processes in detail is infinitely beyond our powers, yet '_the quality of the problem and of our powers_,' he says, '_are, we believe, so related, that a mere expansion of the latter would enable them to cope with the former_.' Nowhere is there any break in Nature; and '_supposing_,' in Dr. Tyndall's words, '_a planet carved from the sun, set spinning on an axis, and sent revolving round the sun at a distance equal to that of our earth_,' science points to the conclusion that as the mass cooled, it would flower out in places into just such another race as ours--creatures of as large discourse, and, like ourselves, looking before and after. The result is obvious. Every existing thing that we can ever know, or hope to know, in the whole inward as well as in the whole outward world--everything from a star to a thought, or from a flower to an affection, is connected with certain material figures, and with certain mechanical forces. All have a certain bulk and a certain place in space, and could conceivably be made the subjects of some physical experiment. Faith, sanctity, doubt, sorrow, and love, could conceivably be all gauged and detected by some scientific instrument--by a camera or by a spectroscope; and their conditions and their intensity be represented by some sort of diagram.
These marvellous achievements, as I have said, have been often before dreamed of. Now they are accomplished. As applied to natural religion, the effect of them is as follows.
Firstly, with regard to God, they have taken away every external proof of His existence, and, still more, every sign of His daily providence.
They destroy them completely at a sudden and single blow, and send them falling about us like so many dead flies. God, as connected with the external world, was conceived of in three ways--as a Mover, as a Designer, and as a Superintendent. In the first two capacities He was required by thought; in the last, He was supposed to be revealed by experience. But now in none of these is He required or revealed longer.
So far as thought goes, He has become a superfluity; so far as experience goes, He has become a fanciful suggestion.
Secondly, with regard to man, the life and soul are presented to us, not as an entity distinct from the body, and therefore capable of surviving it, but as a function of it, or the sum of its functions, which has demonstrably grown with its growth, which is demonstrably dependent upon even its minutest changes, and which, for any sign or hint to the contrary, will be dissolved with its dissolution.
A God, therefore, that is the master of matter, and a human soul that is independent of it--any second world, in fact, of alien and trans-material forces, is reduced, on physical grounds, to an utterly unsupported hypothesis. Were this all, however, it would logically have on religion no effect at all. It would supply us with nothing but the barren verbal proposition that the immaterial was not material, or that we could find no trace of it by merely studying matter. Its whole force rests on the following suppressed premiss, that nothing exists but what the study of matter conceivably could reveal to us; or that, in other words, the immaterial equals the nonexistent. The case stands thus. The forces of thought and spirit were supposed formerly to be quite distinct from matter, and to be capable of acting without the least connection with it. Now, it is shown that every smallest revelation of these to us, is accomplished by some local atomic movement, which, on a scientific instrument fine enough, would leave a distinct impression; and thus it is argued that no force is revealed through matter that is not inseparable from the forms revealing it. Here we see the meaning of that great modern axiom, that verification is the test of truth; or that we can build on nothing as certain but what we can prove true. The meaning of the word '_proof_' by itself may perhaps be somewhat hazy; but the meaning that positive science attaches to it is plain enough. A fact is only proved when the evidence it rests upon leaves us no room for doubt--when it forces on every mind the same invincible conviction; that is, in other words, when, directly or indirectly, its material equivalent can be impressed upon our bodily senses.
This is the fulcrum of the modern intellectual lever. Ask anyone oppressed and embittered by the want of religion the reason why he does not again embrace it, and the answer will still be this--that there is no proof that it is true. Granting, says Professor Huxley, that a religious creed would be beneficial, '_my next step is to ask for a_ proof _of its dogmas_.' And with contemptuous passion another well-known writer, Mr. Leslie Stephen, has classified all beliefs, according as we can prove or not prove them, into realities and empty dreams. '_The ignorant and childish_,' he says, '_are hopelessly unable to draw the line between dreamland and reality; but the imagery which takes its rise in the imagination as distinguished from the perceptions, bears indelible traces of its origin in comparative unsubstantiality and vagueness of outline_.' And '_now_,' he exclaims, turning to the generation around him, '_at last your creed is decaying. People have discovered that you know nothing about it; that heaven and hell belong to dreamland; that the impertinent young curate who tells me that I shall be burnt everlastingly for not sharing his superstition, is just as ignorant as I myself, and that I know as much as my dog._'[34]
Such is that syllogism of the physical sciences which is now supposed to be so invincible against all religion, and which has already gone so far towards destroying the world's faith in it. Now as to the minor premiss, that there is no proof of religion, we may concede, _at least provisionally_, that it is completely true. What it is really important to examine is the major premiss, that we can be certain of nothing that we cannot support by proof. This it is plain does not stand on the same footing as the former, for it is of its very nature not capable of being proved itself. Its foundation is something far less definable--the general character for wisdom of the leading thinkers who have adopted it, and the general acceptance of its consequences by the common sense of mankind.
Now if we examine its value by these tests, the result will be somewhat startling. We find that not only are mankind at large as yet but very partially aware of its consequences, but that its true scope and meaning has not even dawned dimly on the leading thinkers themselves. Few spectacles, indeed, in the whole history of thought are more ludicrous than that of the modern positive school with their great doctrine of verification. They apply it rigorously to one set of facts, and then utterly fail to see that it is equally applicable to another. They apply it to religion, and declare that the dogmas of religion are dreams; but when they pass from the dogmas of religion to those of morality, they not only do not use their test, but unconsciously they denounce it with the utmost vehemence. Thus Mr. Leslie Stephen, in the very essay from which I have just now quoted, not only has recourse, for giving weight to his arguments, to such ethical epithets as _low_, _lofty_, and even _sacred_, but he puts forward as his own motive for speaking, a belief which on his own showing is a dream. That motive, he says, is devotion to truth for its own sake--the only principle that is really worthy of man. His argument is simply this. It is man's holiest and most important duty to discover the truth at all costs, and the one test of truth is physical verification. Here he tells us we find the only high morality, and the men who cling to religious dream-dogmas which they cannot physically verify, can only answer their opponents, says Mr. Stephen, '_by a shriek or a sneer_.' '_The sentiment_,' he proceeds, '_which the dreamer most thoroughly hates and misunderstands, is the love of truth for its own sake. He cannot conceive why a man should attack a lie simply because it is a lie._' Mr. Stephen is wrong. That is exactly what the dreamer can do, and no one else but he; and Mr. Stephen is himself a dreamer when he writes and feels like this. Why, let me ask him, should the truth be loved? Do the '_perceptions_,' which are for him the only valid guides, tell him so? The perceptions tell him, as he expressly says, that the truths of nature, so far as man is concerned with them, are '_harsh_' truths. Why should '_harsh_' things be loveable? Or supposing Mr. Stephen does love them, why is that love '_lofty_'? and why should he so brusquely command all other men to share it? _Low_ and _lofty_--what has Mr. Stephen to do with words like these? They are part of the language of dreamland, not of real life. Mr. Stephen has no right to them. If he has, he must be able to draw a hard and fast line between them; for if his conceptions of them be '_vague in outline_' and '_unsubstantial_,' they belong by his own express definition to the land of dreams. But this is what Mr. Stephen, with the solemn imbecility of his school, is quite incapable of seeing. Professor Huxley is in exactly the same case. He says, as we have seen already, that, come what may of it, our highest morality is to follow truth; that the '_lowest depth of immorality_' is to _pretend to believe what we see no reason for believing_;' and that our only proper reasons for belief are some physical, some _perceptible_ evidence. And yet at the same time he says that to '_attempt to upset morality_' by the help of the physical sciences is about as rational or as possible as to '_attempt to upset Euclid by the help of the Rig Veda_.' Now on Professor Huxley's principles, this last sentence, though it sounds very weighty, is, if so ungracious a word may be allowed me, nothing short of nonsense. It would be the lowest depth of immorality, he says, to believe in God, when we see that there is no physical evidence to justify the belief. And physical science in this way he admits--he indeed proclaims--has upset religion. How then has physical science in the same way failed to upset morality? The foundation of morality, he says, is the belief that truth for its own sake is sacred. But what proof can he discover of this sacredness? Does any positive method of experience or observation so much as tend to suggest it? We have already seen that it does not. What Professor Huxley's philosophy really proves to him is that it is true that nothing is sacred; not that it is a sacred thing to discover the truth.
We saw all this already when we were examining his comparison of the perception of moral beauty to the perception of the heat of ginger. It is the same thing with which we are again dealing now, only we are approaching it from a slightly different point of view. What we saw before, was that without an assent to the religious dogmas, the moral dogmas can have no logical meaning. We have now seen that even were the two logically independent, they yet belong both of them to the same order of things; and that if our tests of truth prove the former to be illusions, they will, with precisely the same force, prove the same thing of the latter.
But the most crucial test of all we have still to come to, which will put this conclusion in a yet clearer and a more unmistakable light. Thus far what we have seen has amounted to only this--that if science can take from man his religious faith, it leaves him a being without any moral guidance. What we shall now see is that, by the same arguments, it will prove him to be not a moral being at all; that it will prove not only that he has no rule by which to direct his will, but also that he has no will to direct.
To understand this we must return to physical science, and to the exact results that have been accomplished by it. We have seen how completely, from one point of view, it has connected mind with matter, and how triumphantly it is supposed to have unified the apparent dualism of things. It has revealed the brain to us as matter in a combination of infinite complexity, which it has reached at last through its own automatic workings; and it has revealed consciousness to us as a function of this brain, and as altogether inseparable from it. But for this, the old dualism now supposed to be obsolete would remain undisturbed. Indeed, if this doctrine were denied, such a dualism would be the only alternative. For every thought, then, that we think, and every feeling or desire that we feel, there takes place in the brain some definite material movement, on the force or figure of which the thoughts and feelings are dependent. Now if physical observations are to be the only things that guide us, one important fact will become at once evident. Matter existed and fermented long before the evolution of mind; mind is not an exhibition of new forces, but the outcome of a special combination of old. Mental facts are therefore essentially dependent on molecular facts; molecular facts are not dependent on mental. They may seem to be so, but this is only seeming. They are as much the outcome of molecular groupings and movements as the figures in a kaleidoscope are of the groupings and movements of the colored bits of glass. They are things entirely by the way; and they can as little be considered links in any chain of causes as can the figure in a kaleidoscope be called the cause of the figure that succeeds it.
The conclusion, however, is so distasteful to most men, that but few of them can be brought even to face it, still less to accept it. There is not a single physicist of eminence--none at least who has spoken publicly on the moral aspects of life--who has honestly and fairly considered it, and said plainly whether he accepts it, rejects it, or is in doubt about it. On the contrary, instead of meeting this question, they all do their best to avoid it, and to hide it from themselves and others in a vague haze of mystery. And there is a peculiarity in the nature of the subject that has made this task an easy one. But the dust they have raised is not impenetrable, and can, with a little patience, be laid altogether.
The phenomenon of consciousness is in one way unique. It is the only phenomenon with which science comes in contact, of which the scientific imagination cannot form a coherent picture. It has a side, it is true, that we can picture well enough--'_the thrilling of the nerves_,' as Dr.
Tyndall says, '_the discharging of the muscles, and all the subsequent changes of the organism_.' But of how these changes come to have another side, we can form no picture. This, it is perfectly true, is a complete mystery. And this mystery it is that our modern physicists seize on, and try to hide and lose in the shadow of it a conclusion which they admit that, in any other case, a rigorous logic would force on them.
The following is a typical example of the way in which they do this. It is taken from Dr. Tyndall. '_The mechanical philosopher, as such_,' he says, '_will never place a state of consciousness and a group of molecules in the position of mover and moved. Observation proves them to interact; but in passing from one to the other, we meet a blank which the logic of deduction is unable to fill.... I lay bare unsparingly the initial difficulty of the materialist, and tell him that the facts of observation which he considers so simple are "almost as difficult to be seized as the idea of a soul." I go further, and say in effect: "If you abandon the interpretation of grosser minds, who image the soul as a Psyche which could be thrown out of the window--an entity which is usually occupied we know not how, among the molecules of the brain, but which on due occasion, such as the intrusion of a bullet, or the blow of a club, can fly away into other regions of space--if abandoning this heathen notion you approach the subject in the only way in which approach is possible--if you consent to make your soul a poetic rendering of a phenomenon which--as I have taken more pains than anyone else to show you--refuses the ordinary yoke of physical laws, then I, for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality." I say it strongly, but with good temper, that the theologian who hacks and scourges me for putting the matter in this light is guilty of black ingratitude._'
Now if we examine this very typical passage, we shall see that in it are confused two questions which, as regards our own relation to them, are on a totally different footing. One of these questions cannot be answered at all. The other can be answered in distinct and opposite ways. About the one we must rest in wonder; about the other we must make a choice. And the feat which our modern physicists are trying to perform is to hide the importunate nature of the second in the dark folds of the first. This first question is, Why should consciousness be connected with the brain at all? The second question is, What is it when connected? Is it simply the product of the brain's movement; or is the brain's movement in any degree produced by it? We only know it, so to speak, as the noise made by the working of the brain's machinery--as the crash, the roar, or the whisper of its restless colliding molecules. Is this machinery self-moving, or is it, at least, modulated, if not moved, by some force other than itself? The brain is the organ of consciousness, just as the instrument called an organ is an organ of music; and consciousness itself is as a tune emerging from the organ-pipes. Expressed in terms of this metaphor our two questions are as follows. The first is, Why, when the air goes through them, are the organ-pipes resonant? The second is, What controls the mechanism by which the air is regulated--a musician, or a revolving barrel? Now what our modern physicists fail to see is, not only that these two questions are distinct in detail, but that also they are distinct in kind; that a want of power to answer them means, in the two cases, not a distinct thing only, but also an opposite thing; and that our confessed impotence to form any conjecture at all as to the first, does not in the least exonerate us from choosing between conjectures as to the second.
As to the first question, our discovery of the fact it is concerned with, and our utter inability to account for this fact, has really no bearing at all upon the great dilemma--the dilemma as to the unity or the dualism of existence, and the independence or automatism of the life and will of man. All that science tells us on this first head the whole world may agree with, with the utmost readiness; and if any theologian '_hacks and scourges_' Dr. Tyndall for his views thus far, he must, beyond all doubt, be a very foolish theologian indeed. The whole bearing of this matter modern science seems to confuse and magnify, and it fancies itself assaulted by opponents who in reality have no existence.
Let a man be never so theological, and never so pledged to a faith in myths and mysteries, he would not have the least interest in denying that the brain, though we know not how, is the only seat for us of thought and mind and spirit. Let him have never so firm a faith in life immortal, yet this immortal has, he knows, put on mortality, through an inexplicable contact with matter; and his faith is not in the least shaken by learning that this point of contact is the brain. He can admit with the utmost readiness that the brain is the only instrument through which supernatural life is made at the same time natural life. He can admit that the moral state of a saint might be detected by some form of spectroscope. At first sight, doubtless, this may appear somewhat startling; but there is nothing really in it that is either strange or formidable. Dr. Tyndall says that the view indicated can, '_he thinks_,'
be maintained '_against all attack_.' But why he should apprehend any attack at all, and why he should only '_think_' it would be unsuccessful, it is somewhat hard to conceive. To say that a spectroscope as applied to the brain might conceivably detect such a thing as sanctity, is little more than to say that our eyes as applied to the face can actually detect such a thing as anger. There is nothing in that doctrine to alarm the most mystical of believers. In the completeness with which it is now brought before us it is doubtless new and wonderful, and will doubtless tend presently to clarify human thought. But no one need fear to accept it as a truth; and probably before long we shall all accept it as a truism. It is not denying the existence of a soul to say that it cannot move in matter without leaving some impress in matter, any more than it is denying the existence of an organist to say that he cannot play to us without striking the notes of his organ. Dr. Tyndall then need hardly have used so much emphasis and iteration in affirming that '_every thought and feeling has its definite mechanical correlative, that it is accompanied by a certain breaking-up and re-marshalling of the atoms of the brain_.' And he is no more likely to be '_hacked and scourged_' for doing so than he would be for affirming that every note we hear in a piece of music has its definite correlative in the mechanics of the organ, and that it is accompanied by a depression and a rising again of some particular key. In his views thus far the whole world may agree with him; whilst when he adds so emphatically that in these views there is still involved a mystery, we shall not so much say that the world agrees with him as that he, like a good sensible man, agrees with the world. The passage from mind to matter is, Dr. Tyndall says, unthinkable. The common sense of mankind has always said the same. We have here a something, not which we are doubtful how to explain, but which we cannot explain at all. We have not to choose or halt between alternative conjectures, for there are absolutely no conjectures to halt between. We are now, as to this point, in the same state of mind in which we have always been, only this state of mind has been revealed to us more clearly. We are in theoretical ignorance, but we are in no practical perplexity.
The perplexity comes in with the second question; and it is here that the issue lies between the affirmation and the denial of a second and a supernatural order. We will see, first, how this question is put and treated by Dr. Tyndall, and we will then see what his treatment comes to. Is it true, he asks, as many physicists hold it is, '_that the physical processes are complete in themselves, and would go on just as they do if consciousness were not at all implicated_,' as an engine might go on working though it made no noise, or as a barrel-organ might go on playing even though there were no ear to listen to it? Or do '_states of consciousness enter as links into the chain of antecedence and sequence which gives rise to bodily actions?_' Such is the question in Dr. Tyndall's own phrases; and here, in his own phrases also, comes his answer. '_I have no power_,' he says, '_of imagining such states interposed between the molecules of the brain, and influencing the transference of motion among the molecules. The thing_ eludes all mental presentation. _But_,' he adds, '_the production of consciousness by molecular motion is quite as unpresentable to the mental vision as the production of molecular motion by consciousness. If I reject one result, I reject both. I, however, reject neither, and thus stand in the presence of two Incomprehensibles, instead of one Incomprehensible._'
Now what does all this mean? There is one meaning of which the words are capable, which would make them perfectly clear and coherent; but that meaning, as we shall see presently, cannot possibly be Dr. Tyndall's.
They would be perfectly clear and coherent if he meant this by them--that the brain was a natural instrument, in the hands of a supernatural player; but that why the instrument should be able to be played upon, and how the player should be able to play upon it, were both matters on which he could throw no light. But elsewhere he has told us expressly that he does not mean this. This he expressly says is '_the interpretation of_ grosser _minds_,' and science will not for a moment permit us to retain it. The brain contains no '_entity usually occupied we know not how amongst its molecules_,' but at the same time separable from them. According to him, this is a '_heathen_' notion, and, until we abandon it, '_no approach_,' he says, '_to the subject is possible_.'
What does he mean, then, when he tells us he rejects neither result; when he tells us that he believes that molecular motion produces consciousness, and also that consciousness in its turn produces molecular motion?--when he tells us distinctly of these two that '_observation proves them to interact_'? If such language as this means anything, it must have reference to two distinct forces, one material and the other immaterial. Indeed, does he not himself say so? Does he not tell us that one of the beliefs he does not reject is the belief in '_states of consciousness_ interposed between _the molecules of the brain, and influencing the transference of motion among the molecules_'?
It is perfectly clear, then, that these states are not molecules; in other words, they are not material. But if not material, what are they, acting on matter, and yet distinct from matter? What can they belong to but that '_heathen_' thing the soul--that '_entity which could be thrown out of the window_,' and which, as Dr. Tyndall has said elsewhere, science forbids us to believe in? Surely for an exact thinker this is thought in strange confusion. '_Matter_,' he says, '_I define as that mysterious something by which all this is accomplished_;' and yet here we find him, in the face of this, invoking some second mystery as well.
And for what reason? This is the strangest thing of all. He believes in his second Incomprehensible _because_ he believes in his first Incomprehensible. '_If I reject one result_,' he says, '_I_ must _reject both. I, however, reject neither_.' But why? Because one undoubted fact is a mystery, is every mystery an undoubted fact? Such is Dr. Tyndall's logic in this remarkable utterance: and if this logic be valid, we can at once prove to him the existence of a personal God, and a variety of other '_heathen_' doctrines also. But, applied in this way, it is evident that the argument fails to move him; for a belief in a personal God is one of the first things that his science rejects. What shall we say of him, then, when he applies the argument in his own way? We can say simply this--that his mind for the time being is in a state of such confusion, that he is incapable really of clearly meaning anything. What his position logically must be--what, on other occasions, he clearly avows it to be--is plain enough. It is essentially that of a man confronted by one Incomprehensible, not confronted by two. But, looked at in certain ways, or rather looked _from_ in certain ways, this position seems to stagger him. The problem of existence reels and grows dim before him, and he fancies that he detects the presence of two Incomprehensibles, when he has really, in his state of mental insobriety, only seen one Incomprehensible double. If this be not the case, it must be one that, intellectually, is even weaker than this. It must be that, not of a man with a single coherent theory which his intellect in its less vigorous moments sometimes relaxes its hold upon, but it must be that of a man with two hostile theories which he vainly imagines to be one, and which he inculcates alternately, each with an equal emphasis.
If this bewilderment were peculiar to Dr. Tyndall, I should have no motive or meaning in thus dwelling on it. But it is no peculiarity of his. It is characteristic of the whole school he belongs to; it is inherent in our whole modern positivism--the whole of our exact and enlightened thought. I merely choose Dr. Tyndall as my example, not because there is more confusion in his mind than there is in that of his fellow-physicists, but because he is, as it were, the _enfant terrible_ of his family, who publicly lets out the secrets which the others are more careful to conceal.
But I have not done with this matter yet. We are here dealing with the central problem of things, and we must not leave it till we have made it as plain as possible. I will therefore re-state it in terms of another metaphor. Let us compare the universal matter, with its infinity of molecules, to a number of balls on a billiard-table, set in motion by the violent stroke of a cue. The balls at once begin to strike each other and rebound from the cushions at all angles and in all directions, and assume with regard to each other positions of every kind. At last six of them collide or cannon in a particular corner of the table, and thus group themselves so as to form a human brain; and their various changes thereafter, so long as the brain remains a brain, represent the various changes attendant on a man's conscious life. Now in this life let us take some moral crisis. Let us suppose the low desire to cling to some pleasing or comforting superstition is contending with the heroic desire to face the naked truth at all costs. The man in question is at first about to yield to the low desire. For a time there is a painful struggle in him. At last there is a sharp decisive pang; the heroic desire is the conqueror, the superstition is cast away, and '_though truth slay me_,' says the man, '_yet will I trust in it_.' Such is the aspect of the question when approached from one side. But what is it when approached from the other? The six billiard balls have simply changed their places. When they corresponded to low desire, they formed, let us say, an oval; when they corresponded to the heroic desire, they formed, let us say, a circle. Now what is the cause and what the conditions of this change? Clearly a certain impetus imparted to the balls, and certain fixed laws under which that impetus operates. The question is what laws and what impetus are these? Are they the same or not the same, now the balls correspond to consciousness, as they were before, when the balls did not correspond to it? One of two things must happen. Either the balls go on moving by exactly the same laws and forces they have always moved by, and are in the grasp of the same invincible necessity, or else there is some new and disturbing force in the midst of them, with which we have to reckon. But if consciousness is inseparable from matter, this cannot be. Do the billiard-balls when so grouped as to represent consciousness generate some second motive power distinct from, at variance with, and often stronger than, the original impetus? Clearly no scientific thinker can admit this. To do so would be to undermine the entire fabric of science, to contradict what is its first axiom and its last conclusion. If then the motion of our six billiard balls has anything, when it corresponds to consciousness, distinct in kind from what it always had, it can only derive this from one cause. That cause is a second cue, tampering with the balls and interfering with them, or even more than this--a second hand taking them up and arranging them arbitrarily in certain figures.
Science places the positive school on the horns of a dilemma. The mind or spirit is either arranged entirely by the molecules it is connected with, and these molecules move with the same automatic necessity that the earth moves with; or else these molecules are, partially at least, arranged by the mind or spirit. If we do not accept the former theory we must accept the latter: there is no third course open to us. If man is not an automaton, his consciousness is no mere function of any physical organ. It is an alien and disturbing element. Its impress on physical facts, its disturbance of physical laws, may be doubtless the only things through which we can perceive its existence; but it is as distinct from the things by which we can alone at present perceive it, as a hand unseen in the dark, that should arrest or change the course of a phosphorescent billiard-ball. Once let us deny even in the most qualified way that the mind in the most absolute way is a material machine, an automaton, and in that denial we are affirming a second and immaterial universe, independent of the material, and obeying different laws. But of this universe, if it exists, no natural proof can be given, because _ex hypothesi_ it lies quite beyond the region of nature.
One theory then of man's life is that it is a union of two orders of things; another, that it is single, and belongs to only one. And of these theories--opposite, and mutually exclusive, Dr. Tyndall, and modern positivism with him, says '_I reject neither_.'[35]
Now this statement of their position, if taken as they state it, is of course nonsense. It is impossible to consider matter as '_that mysterious something by which all that is is accomplished;_' and then to solve the one chief riddle of things by a second mysterious something that is not material. Nor can we '_reject_,' as the positivists say they do, an '_outside builder_' of the world, and then claim the assistance of an _outside_ orderer of the brain. The positivists would probably tell us that they do not do so, or that they do not mean to do so. And we may well believe them. Their fault is that they do not know what they mean. I will try to show them.
First, they mean something, with which, as I have said already, we may all agree. They mean that matter moving under certain laws (which may possibly be part and parcel of its own essence) combines after many changes into the human brain, every motion of which has its definite connection with consciousness, and its definite correspondence to some state of it. And this fact is a mystery, though it may be questioned if it be more mysterious why matter should think of itself, than why it should move of itself. At any rate, thus far we are all agreed; and whatever mystery we may be dealing with, it is one that leaves us in ignorance but not in doubt. The doubt comes in at the next step. We have then not to wonder at one fact, but, the mystery being in either case the same, to choose between two hypotheses. The first is that there is in consciousness one order of forces only, the second is that there are two. And when the positive school say that they reject neither of these, what they really mean to say is that as to the second they neither dare openly do one thing or the other--to deny it or accept it, but that they remain like an awkward child when offered some more pudding, blushing and looking down, and utterly unable to say either yes or no.
Now the question to ask the positive school is this. Why are they in this state of suspense? '_There is an iron strength in the logic_,' as Dr. Tyndall himself says, that rejects the second order altogether. The hypothesis of its existence explains no fact of observation. The scheme of nature, if it cannot be wholly explained without it, can, at any rate, be explained better without it than with it. Indeed from the standpoint of the thinker who holds that all that is is matter, it seems a thing too superfluous, too unmeaning, to be even worth denial. And yet the positive school announce solemnly that they will not deny it. Now why is this? It is true that they cannot prove its non-existence; but this is no reason for professing a solemn uncertainty as to its existence. We cannot prove that each time a cab drives down Regent Street a stick of barley-sugar is not created in Sirius. But we do not proclaim, to the world our eternal ignorance as to whether or no this is so. Why then should our positivists treat in this way the alleged immaterial part of consciousness? Why this emphatic protestation on their part that there may exist a something which, as far as the needs of their science go, is superfluous, and as far as the logic of their science goes is impossible? The answer is plain. Though their science does not need it, the moral value of life does. As to that value they have certain foregone conclusions, which they cannot resolve to abandon, but which their science can make no room for. Two alternatives are offered them--to admit that life has not the meaning they thought it had, or that their system has not the completeness they thought it had; and of these two alternatives they will accept neither. They could tell us '_with an iron strength of logic_' that all human sorrow was as involuntary and as unmeaning as sea-sickness; that love and faith were but distillations of what exists diluted in mutton-chops and beer; and that the voice of one crying in the wilderness was nothing but an automatic metamorphosis of the locusts and wild honey. They could tell us '_with an iron strength of logic_' that all the thoughts and moral struggles of humanity were but as the clanging whirr of a machine, which if a little better adjusted might for the future go on spinning in silence. But they see that the discovery on man's part that his life was nothing more than this would mean a complete change in its mechanism, and that thenceforward its entire action would be different. They therefore seek a refuge in saying it _may_ be more than this. But what do they mean by _may be_? Do they mean that in spite of all that science can teach them, in spite of that uniformity absolute and omnipresent which alone it reveals to them, which day by day it is forcing with more vividness on their imaginations, and which seems to have no room for anything besides itself--do they mean that in spite of this there may still be a second something, a power of a different order, acting on man's brain and grappling with its automatic movements? Do they mean that that '_heathen_' and '_gross_' conception of an immaterial soul is probably after all the true one? Either they must mean this or else they must mean the exact opposite. There is no third course open to them.[36]
Their opinion, as soon as they form one, must rest either on this extreme or that. They will see, as exact and scientific thinkers, that if it be not practically certain that there is some supernatural entity in us, it is practically certain that there is not one. To say merely that it _may_ exist is but to put an ounce in one scale whilst there is a ton in the other. It is an admission that is utterly dead and meaningless. They can only entertain the question of its existence because its existence is essential to man as a moral being. The only reason that can tempt us to say it _may_ be forces us in the same moment to say that it _must_ be, and that it _is_.
Which answer eventually the positive school will choose, and which answer men in general will accept, I make as I have said before, no attempt to answer. My only purpose to show is, that if man has any moral being at all, he has it in virtue of his _immaterial_ will--a force, a something of which physical science can give no account whatever, and which it has no shadow of authority either for affirming or for denying; and further, that if we are not prevented by it from affirming his immaterial will, we are not prevented from affirming his immortality, and the existence of God likewise.
And now I come to that third point which I said I should deal with here, but which I have not yet touched upon. Every logical reasoner who admits the power of will must admit not only the possibility of miracles, but also the actual fact of their daily and hourly occurrence. Every exertion of the human will is a miracle in the strictest sense of the word; only it takes place privately, within the closed walls of the brain. The molecules of the brain are arranged and ordered by a supernatural agency. Their natural automatic movements are suspended, or directed and interfered with. It is true that in common usage the word _miracle_ has a more restricted sense. It is applied generally not to the action of man's will, but of God's. But the sense in both cases is essentially the same. God's will is conceived of as disturbing the automatic movements of matter without the skull, in just the same way as man's will is conceived of as disturbing those of the brain within it.
Nor, though the alleged manifestations of the former do more violence to the scientific imagination than do those of the latter, are they in the eye of reason one whit more impossible. The erection of a pyramid at the will of an Egyptian king would as much disturb the course of nature as the removal of a mountain by the faith of a Galilean fisherman; whilst the flooding of the Sahara at the will of a speculating company would interfere with the weather of Europe far more than the most believing of men ever thought that any answer to prayer would.
It will thus be seen that morality and religion are, so far as science goes, on one and the same footing--of one and the same substance, and that as assailed by science they either fall together or stand together. It will be seen too that the power of science against them resides not in itself, but in a certain intellectual fulcrum that we ourselves supply it with. That its methods can discover no trace of either of them, of itself proves nothing, unless we first lay down as a dogma that its methods of discovery are the only methods. If we are prepared to abide by this, there is little more to be said. The rest, it is becoming daily plainer, is a very simple process; and what we have to urge against religion will thenceforth amount to this. There is no supernatural, because everything is natural; there is no spirit, because everything is matter; or there is no air, because everything is earth; there is no fire, because everything is water; a rose has no smell because our eyes cannot detect any.
This, in its simplest form, is the so-called argument of modern materialism. Argument, however, it is quite plain it is not. It is a mere dogmatic statement, that can give no logical account of itself, and must trust, for its acceptance, to the world's vague sense of its fitness. The modern world, it is true, has mistaken it for an argument, and has been cowed by it accordingly; but the mistake is a simple one, and can be readily accounted for. The dogmatism of denial was formerly a sort of crude rebellion, inconsistent with itself, and vulnerable in a thousand places. Nature, as then known, was, to all who could weigh the wonder of it, a thing inexplicable without some supernatural agency.
Indeed, marks of such an agency seemed to meet men everywhere. But now all this has changed. Step by step science has been unravelling the tangle, and has loosened with its human fingers the knots that once seemed _deo digni vindice_. It has enabled us to see in nature a complete machine, needing no aid from without. It has made a conception of things rational and coherent that was formerly absurd and arbitrary.
Science has done all this; but this is all that it has done. The dogmatism of denial it has left as it found it, an unverified and unverifiable assertion. It has simply made this dogmatism consistent with itself. But in doing this, as men will soon come to see, it has done a great deal more than its chief masters bargained for. Nature, as explained by science, is nothing more than a vast automaton; and man with all his ways and works is simply a part of Nature, and can, by no device of thought, be detached from or set above it. He is as absolutely automatic as a tree is, or as a flower is; and is an incapable as a tree or flower of any spiritual responsibility or significance. Here we see the real limits of science. It will explain the facts of life to us, it is true, but it will not explain the value that hitherto we have attached to them. Is that solemn value a fact or fancy? As far as proof and reason go, we can answer either way. We have two simple and opposite statements set against each other, between which argument will give us no help in choosing, and between which the only arbiter is a judgment formed upon utterly alien grounds. As for proof, the nature of the case does not admit of it. The world of moral facts, if it existed a thousand times, could give no more proof of its existence than it does now. If on other grounds we believe that it does exist, then signs, if not proofs of it, at once surround us everywhere. But let the belief in its reality fail us, and instantly the whole cloud of witnesses vanishes. For science to demand a proof that shall convince it on its own premisses is to demand an impossibility, and to involve a contradiction in terms.
Science is only possible on the assumption that nature is uniform.
Morality is only possible on the assumption that this uniformity is interfered with by the will. The world of morals is as distinct from the world of science as a wine is from the cup that holds it; and to say that it does not exist because science can find no trace of it, is to say that a bird has not flown over a desert because it has left no footprints in the sand. And as with morals, so it is with religion.
Science will allow us to deny or to affirm both. Reason will not allow us to deny or affirm only one.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] The argument has been used in this exact form by Professor Clifford.
[34] _Dreams and Realities_, by Leslie Stephen.
[35] The feebleness and vacillation of Dr. Tyndall's whole views of things, as soon as they bear on matters that are of any universal moment, is so typical of the entire positive thought of the day, that I may with advantage give one or two further illustrations of it. Although in one place he proclaims loudly that the emergence of consciousness from matter must ever remain a mystery, he yet shows indication of a hope that it may yet be solved. He quotes with approval, and with an implication that he himself leans to the view expressed in them, the following words of Ueberweg, whom he calls '_one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced_.' '_What happens in the brain_, says Ueberweg, '_would in my opinion not be possible if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration, did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice, and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these preserved by the first pair is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last would feel more fully than the first. The sensations and the feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale, it is true, and not concentrated, as in the brain._' '_We may not_,' Dr. Tyndall adds, by way of a gloss to this, '_be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling pre-existing, but diluted, in the food._'
Let us now compare this with the following. '_It is no explanation_,'
says Dr. Tyndall, '_to say that objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should phenomena have two sides?
There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window pane? If not, why should the molecular motions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion consciousness?_'
Here we have two views, diametrically opposed to each other, the one suggested with approval, and the other implied as his own, by the same writer, and in the same short essay. The first view is that consciousness is the general property of all matter, just as motion is.
The second view is that consciousness is not the general property of matter, but the inexplicable property of the brain only.
Here again we have a similar inconsistency. Upon one page Dr. Tyndall says that when we have '_exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty Mystery stills looms beyond us. We have made no step towards its solution. And thus it will ever loom._' And on the opposite page he says thus: '_If asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, the problem of the universe, I must shake my head in doubt._'
Further, I will remind the reader of Dr. Tyndall's arguments, on one occasion, against any outside builder or creator of the material universe. He argued that such did not exist, because his supposed action was not definitely presentable. '_I should enquire after its shape_,' he says:--'_Has it legs or arms? If not, I would wish it to be made clear to me how a thing without these appliances can act so perfectly the part of a builder?_ He challenged the theist (the theist addressed at the time was Dr. Martineau) to give him some account of his God's workings; and '_When he does this_,' said Dr. Tyndall, '_I shall "demand of him an immediate exercise" of the power "of definite mental presentation."_' If he fails here, Dr. Tyndall argues, his case is at once disproved; for nothing exists that is not thus presentable. Let us compare this with his dealing with the fact of consciousness. Consciousness, he admits, is not thus presentable; and yet consciousness, he admits, exists.
Instances might be multiplied of the same vacillation and confusion of thought--the same feminine inability to be constant to one train of reasoning. But those just given suffice. What weight can we attach to a man's philosophy, who after telling us that consciousness may possibly be an inherent property of matter, of which '_the receit of reason is a limbec only_,' adds in the same breath almost, that matter generally is certainly not conscious, and that consciousness comes to the brain we know not whence nor wherefore? What shall we say of a man who in one sentence tells us that it is impossible that science can ever solve the riddle of things, and tells us in the next sentence that it is doubtful if this impossibility will be accomplished within the next fifty years?--who argues that God is a mystery, and therefore God is a fiction; who admits that consciousness is a fact, and yet proclaims that it is a mystery; and who says that the fact of matter producing consciousness being a mystery, proves the mystery of consciousness acting on matter to be a fact?
[36] It is true that one of the favourite teachings of the positive school is, that as to this question the proper attitude is that of Agnosticism; in other words, that a state of perpetual suspense on this subject is the only rational one. They are asked, have we a soul, a will, and consequently any moral responsibility? And the answer is that they must shake their heads in doubt. It is true they tell us that it is but _as men of science_ that they shake their heads. But Dr. Tyndall tells us what this admission means. '_If the materialist is confounded_,' he says, '_and science rendered dumb_, who else is prepared with an answer? _Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher--one and all._' In like manner, referring to the feeling which others have supposed to be a sense of God's presence and majesty: this, for the '_man of science_,' he says is the sense of a '_power which gives fulness and force, to his existence, but which he can neither analyse nor comprehend_.' Which means, that because a physical specialist cannot analyse this sense, it is therefore incapable of analysis. A bishop might with equal propriety use just the same language about a glass of port wine, and argue with, equal cogency that it was a primary and simple element. What is meant is, that the facts of the materialist are the only facts we can be certain of; and because these can give man no moral guidance, that therefore man can have no moral guidance at all.
Let us illustrate the case by some example that is mentally presentable.