is no wonder, when a learned professor insults the common sense and attainments of educated men-men in the habit of encountering unbelief and misbelief—that they regard him as trifling with them; and say, with some little warmth—“ No one doubts the elementary facts in physical science: no wonder that the more courteous minority think and say— "We know all about what you have told us.” ... The same professor writes, “In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. . . . Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the base of primitive Judaism" ("The Origin of Species," Westminster Review, April, 1860). The professor reminds us— "Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined, "The fire of rage was in him, and 'twere good You leaned unto his sentence with what patience He states the saddest thing in the world-if it be true. We are a duped race led by knaves, or fools taught by maniacs. Is it possible any true man can be glad that there has been no revelation of God to men? that Christ's spotless life, wise words, mighty deeds, possess no truth, no reality? that all good men, past and present, who made the world better, who enlarged our views and use of Nature, made life happier, death more peaceable and hopeful, were deluded? Such conviction were enough to make the merriest-hearted weep and mourn. To extinguish the moral life in a man is a greater sin than murder. True Science and Doctrine not in Opposition. 409 Not the religious, but scientific men were the contemporary opposers of discoverers. Religious men have always found that advance of knowledge confirmed Scripture Truth. Sir Humphry Davy laughed at the idea of London being lighted with gas. Railways were styled by the Edinburgh Review projects of a lunatic. The undulatory theory of light was counted absurd. The Royal Society laughed at Franklin and his lightning-conductors. Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, were not scouted by devout and holy men; but resisted by men of science. Every one, even but a little acquainted with history, is well aware that science and true doctrine are never opposed. Religious, intellectual, industrial progress culminates in the most splendid series of researches when God's glory and man's welfare are the motives which unitedly urge devout and thoughtful men to fearless investigation of truth. The fanatical and ignorant, in all ages, have been rash, violent, unjust, cruel. They seem to think the face of Truth is full of dread. They are afraid to unveil her statue, they say "We will none of this dogma, none of that science." The great and good have no fears that, perchance they may encounter a ghastly death's head: they know the beaming countenance of the image of Truth, raised by God Almighty, is the face of Jesus Christ where Divine glory and human purity meet in rarest beauty. Feeling their way, as best they can, into that limited portion of facts lying within their reach, they interpret the Two Books of Revelation, the Works of God and the Word of God, as they are not as men might like them to be. The medieval conception of the material and spirit world, as presented by Dante, was somewhat in harmony with the best science and the urgent wants of the time; but the Copernican revolution displaced all that, and scientific light enables us more largely to understand Providence, and to see that God's plan is written in the physical laws of the universe and in the pure morality of Holy Scripture. It is time that all good and true men, whether students of Science or of Religion, put down antagonism. The roll of names, illustrating the annals of science, of itself ennobles that pursuit; the Newtons, the Wallises, the Wollastons, the Davys, the Rumfords, the Faradays, confer imperishable renown. Will not praise be added to their successors if, enfranchised from narrowness, they recognise those other lights of charities and moralities which shine in the path of human life that wayfarers may walk cheerily onward to their future home? For those who would falsify our high lineage, make us "cunning casts in clay," and require that we discard, as a romantic delusion, the ennobling conviction that we are little lower than the angels; we have an answer in the words of Goethe-"No strong-minded man suffers his belief in immortality to be torn from his breast." Indeed, we can show that their science is neither far-searching nor deeppiercing, and show it in their own way. Acting on their words" take nothing on trust, learn of Nature, listen to the voice of truth"- -we try their knowledge; we empty a lark's egg into a little vessel, a thrush's egg into another little vessel, a starling's egg into a third little vessel, and a blackbird's egg into a fourth little vessel; and, having destroyed the shells, ask these men to justify our confidence in their skill by severally naming the birds; they cannot --no, not even by aid of a microscope. ... These are a small matter, try something great. Take a camel, show the skeleton, and inquire our teachers never having seen a camel before-" Is it possible that skeleton can represent an animal with a huge hump on his back?" They will either say-"We know not; or prove from the bony structure that the hump is an absurdity almost approaching the impossible. Try a lion, a tiger, request an explanation of the osteological differences which constitute the one a lion-frame, the other a tiger-frame. They have no explanation. The most skilful can only point out some few small differences in the skulls and elsewhere. We all wonder how great a matter a little fire kindleth. During the controversy about man-like apes, we were not told that these apes have a huge air-sac packed away in front of the wind-pipe, and amongst the muscles of the neck,1 rendering the man-like apes very unman-like, and utterly unable to speak: so that we are not of them, nor they of us? It was ignorance that exalted the monkey and abased the man. The power of uttering articulate words "Cassell's Natural History,” p. 67: Dr, P. M. Duncan, F.R.S. An End Supremely Good. 4II is not found in races possessing structures nearest in likeness to man's; but in creatures, such as parrots, with vocal organs so different to ours that it is not easy to trace the analogous parts. We ought to remember what Pascal said "It is dangerous to show man how much he resembles the beast, without, at the same time, indicating his own greatness." We accept progress, far as verification warrants, but to misexplain everything and lower man until there is "no essential difference between the drowning of a superfluous baby, and a superfluous kitten" is false and dangerous. No faith means no morals ultimately. We disregard teachers of little science and of less faith, with "their maxims of the mud." There is "an end worth living for an end supremely good for us to gain, and supremely ill for us to lose-an end that we can only gain by virtue, and must lose by vice." A vital celestial influence comes to us from those who lived long ago. This not only proves that the spiritual is connected; it evidences a Mind who is the All in all. Physical Science, properly so called, concerns the relations. between natural phenomena and their physical antecedents. The investigation is conducted by processes of mathematical reasoning as to whatever regards quantity and conditions of space. A lower department of natural science, phenomenology, examines and classifies phenomena; and infers, by induction, their laws. These laws cannot, however, be determined as the necessary results of physical energies; until so interpreted by higher science, they can only be regarded as serial occurrences. The subordinate science has of late invaded the province of the higher; and, no longer servant, masterfully asserts, with high-sounding phrases, that though the world was not made, in any proper sense of making, all powers are mechanical, all mysteries can be explained by the laws of tangible matter and its energy. 1 On examination, we find no clear evidence in favour of this masterful assertion. Matter, simple as it may seem, "is the complex of so many relations, a conjuncture of so many events, a synthesis of so many sensations, that to know one Real thoroughly would only be possible through Church Quarterly, April, 1876. an intuition embracing the universe."1 Common sense refuses to believe that matter is everything: for we find that scientific conviction of the objective reality of matter is obtained only by experiment under the guidance of mind; and that Heat, Light, Sound, Electric currents, are real objective existences though not matter, but forms of energy. A shadow or reflection is real, though not a solid; a motion is real, though not a substance; a feeling is real, intelligence is real, though not solids, but certainly energy with other things added. As to scientific conception of matter, it is convenient in mathematical reasoning to dispense with the ordinary meaning of the word; and, in place of the hard atom, to suppose a mere geometrical point" with repulsive and attractive energies tending towards or from a certain point-but nothing at the point." The points are fictions without relations, solidity, extension, or colour. Nor is that all; physicist and metaphysicist admit that we never feel matter, never see it, never hear it; our perceptions are symbols of the externals, but are not more like them and have no more community of kind than a numerical figure has to the form. of the numbered objects. Our sensations are mental affections which are called up by impulses on the nerves. Our notion of Matter and of Mind, "is the notion of a perpetual something, contrasted with the perpetual flux of the sensations and other feelings or mental states which we refer to it; a something which we figure as remaining the same, while the particular feelings, through which it reveals its existence, change." 2 On one side is the world of forms, of colours, of movements; on the other is a mirror which reflects their images; not in any respect a plain transcript, but an ideal picture of external order. Sensations, terror, hope, calculations, are psychical phenomena associated with molecular motions set up in a previously prepared brain; but we do not know the causal connection, if any, between the objective and subjective-between molecular motion and the state of consciousness. In astronomical speculations we take into account dark stars, scattered through space, hidden from observation not being luminous. In everything 1 "Problems of Life and Mind," vol. i. p. 343: Geo. Henry Lewes. 2 "An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," p. 205: John Stuart Mill. |