1.03 Nature and Definition of Theological Science
Nature and Definition of Theological Science
Theological introduction not only divides and arranges the parts of theological science, but also defines its general nature and assigns it a place in the sum total or encyclopedia of knowledge. The important point of definition belongs here, and also the connection of theology with other sciences. This brings us to consider the nature and definition of theological science.
Definition of Theology
Theology is a science concerned with both the infinite and the finite, with both God and the universe. The material, therefore, which it includes is vaster than that of any other science. It is also the most necessary of all the sciences. “Divinity,” says Coleridge (Table Talk for 14 March 1833), “is essentially the first of the professions, because it is necessary for all men at all times; law and physics are only necessary for some men at some times.”
Theology must not be identified with ethics. This is greatly to narrow it. Ethics, strictly, is the science of morals or duties and is very limited compared with theology. It includes duties toward God and duties toward man. Ethics is concerned only with the moral law in both tables. It does not properly include the gospel or redemption. Ethics is wholly legal. It is true that ethics is affected by Christian theology, so that Christian ethics differs greatly from pagan ethics. It is more comprehensive because pagan ethics is confined to duties between man and man, while Christian ethics embraces duties toward God. Christian ethics differs also from pagan in respect to the motive presented. In pagan ethics the motive is legal and founded in fear; in Christian ethics the motive is evangelical and founded in love. St. Paul indicates the motive in Christian ethics: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1); “having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit” (2 Corinthians 7:1). The motive for the discharge of Christian duty is the love of God in Christ toward the forgiven sinner. There is no such motive as this in pagan ethics. (See supplement 1.3.1.)
Yet theology contains immensely more than belongs even to Christian ethics, because it includes the doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation, apostasy, and redemption, together with those of eschatology. None of these divisions belong properly to ethics. Some of the systems of Christian ethics, like that of Rothe, for example, are unscientific because they confuse and confound departments of science, erase the lines between law and gospel, morality and religion, and under the title of ethics discuss all the mysteries of revelation.
Theology (theou logos)1[Note: 1. θεοῦ λόγος = a word or discourse about God] is the science of God. The Supreme Being is the object and theme of theological investigation. The term as we have before remarked has a wide and a restricted signification. In the wide and common meaning in which we now employ it, theology includes not only the trinitarian nature and existence of God, but also the relations of man and the universe to him. It is thus inclusive of religion; and some define theology to be the science of religion. This definition has had considerable currency. It is defective, however, because it mentions God, the proper object of the science, only by implication and inference. But a technical definition ought to specify directly, not indirectly, the principal subject matter.
Religio, according to Cicero, is derived from relego and signifies a careful reflection or meditation of the mind:
Moreover, those who diligently observed and repeated, as it were, everything having to do with the worship of the gods were called “religious,” from the verb relegere [to reread or choose again]. Analogously, we speak of “elegant persons” (elegantes) from the verb eligere [to choose]; of “diligent persons” (deligantes) from the verb deligere [to call for]; and of “intelligent persons” (intelligentes) from the verb intellegere [to understand].” (Concerning the Nature of the Gods 2.28)2[Note: 2. Qui autem omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter retractarent, et tanquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi, ex relegendo; ut elegantes ex eligendo, a diligendo diligentes, ex intelligendo intelligentes. As H. C. P. McGregor notes, Cicero’s point is that “all these words contain the same sense of ‘choosing’ (legere) that is present in ‘religious’ ”; Cicero, Nature of the Gods (trans. H. C. P. McGregor; Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), 153.]
According to this etymology, religion means reverence and worship. These result from reflection upon God and divine things. But Lactantius disputes this etymology and derives religio from religo:3[Note: 3. to tie, fasten behind] “By this chain [of piety] we are bound and tied (religati) to God. From this we derive the very word religion, and not from the verb relego [to read or choose again and again] as Cicero interpreted it” (Institutes 4.28).4[Note: 4. Hoc vinculo obstricti deo et religati sumus: unde ipsa religio nomen recepit, non ut Cicero interpretatus est, a relegendo.] According to this etymology, religion denotes duty or the obligation of the creature toward the Creator. Man is bound or tied back to God. In this sense, Shakespeare speaks of “religion to the gods” (Timon 4.1). Lactantius asserts, further, that mere meditation would not distinguish religion from superstition, the true God from false gods. Hence the notion of obligation afforded by religo is necessary. Augustine takes the same view with Lactantius (City of God 10.3). But whichever etymology be adopted, only the relations of man to God, not God himself, are indicated by the word religion. To derive the definition of theology from this term is to define a science from one of its parts or phases rather than from its subject matter or principal object of investigation. Religion, strictly, would discuss only the relations of man to the deity; but theology treats first of the deity himself and then inferentially of the relations of the creature to him.
Augustine (City of God 8.1) defines theology to be “rational discussion respecting the deity (de divinitate rationem sive sermonem).” Turretin (1.5.1) defines the object of any science to be “that which is principally treated and to which all the conclusions refer” and affirms that the object of theology is God and divine things. He argues that this is so from the names of the science (theologia5[Note: 5. θεολογία = a discussion or discourse about God] and theosebeia)6[Note: 6. θεοσέβεια = reverence for or worship of God] and from the fact that the Scriptures, which are the fountainhead of the science, treat principally God. Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 3 also favors this definition of theology in its statement that the “Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.” Here, the nature and attributes of God are regarded as the primary matter, and man’s relations and duty to him the secondary. Aquinas also adopts this definition: “In sacred doctrine everything is treated with respect to God: either because the topics under consideration are God himself, or because they are related to God as their beginning and end. It follows from this that God truly is the subject of this science” (Summa 1.1.7).7[Note: 7. Omnia pertractantur in sacra doctrina sub ratione dei, vel quia sunt ipse deus, vel quia habent ordinem ad deum ut ad principium, et finem. Unde sequitur quod deus vere sit subjectum hujus scientiae.]
Whether Theology Is a Science
It has been objected by John of Damascus (Concerning the Orthodox Faith 3.24) that theology is not properly speaking the science of God because it is impossible to say what God is. Aquinas (Summa 1.1.7) replies to this objection that “if the qualities and relations of an object are the subject matter of any science, it is proper to call it the science of this object.” And it is certain that there could be no science of anything if it is asserted that there must first be a perfect comprehension. There is no science of matter any more than of God, if by science be meant a knowledge that excludes all mystery. The ultimate elements in chemistry are as much beyond complete apprehension as the divine attributes.
Science is profound and self-consistent knowledge. Depth and logical coherence are the two characteristics of scientific in distinction from popular apprehension. If statements result from a superficial view, they are not scientific; and if they clash with one another, they are not science. The distinction between popular and scientific knowledge is founded upon this. The common mind oftentimes adopts errors and contradictions which the educated mind detects and rejects. Sometimes science itself is superficial and unworthy of the name. Astronomy previous to Copernicus was founded upon a superficial view of the heavens; merely upon what every man’s eyes saw when he looked abroad upon the surface of the earth or above upon the surface of the sky. Space had no depth. It was only a plane surface. The result was a self-contradictory astronomy. New motions in the heavens were continually appearing that conflicted with the old, and when they were described upon the map of the heavens, it was, in Milton’s phrase, “with cycle and epicycle scribbled o’er.” Astronomical science was science falsely so called. But the mathematical studies-combined with the more careful observations of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton-penetrated the abysses of space, introduced depth into astronomy, threw out these contradictions, and now the scientific astronomy is truly such.
Sometimes theories in physics pass for science for a generation or two but are subsequently found to be superficial and self-contradictory. Examples of these are the theory of vortices invented by Descartes; the theory of spontaneous generation advocated by Lamarck; and the theory of pseudoevolution which just now has taken the place of the rejected doctrine of spontaneous generation and is popular with the materialistic school of physicists. These theories are denominated scientific by their authors; but true scientific progress finally demonstrates their falsity. The skeptical estimate of theology is unscientific because it is founded upon a superficial knowledge of the sources and objects of the science. A few examples will show this. One of the most acute of modern skeptics was David Hume. His argument against miracles is the most ingenious of any that has been constructed and is the arsenal from which modern infidelity obtains its keenest weapons. It was Hume’s subtlety that awoke Kant’s dogmatic slumbers, according to Kant’s own statement. But Hume had no knowledge of Christianity that deserves the epithet scientific. He was not versed in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. According to Johnson (Boswell’s Life), “Hume owned to a clergyman in the bishopric of Durham that he had never read the New Testament with attention.” No one would respect a critical estimate of Brahminism by one who had never carefully examined the Vedas and the body of Hindu literature growing out of them. Nor was Hume skilled in doctrinal theology. He was unacquainted with the careful analysis and close reasoning of Nicene trinitarianism, Chalcedon Christology, the Schoolmen, and the Protestant divines. The whole immense body of patristic, medieval, and modern divinity was comparatively a terra incognita to him. His knowledge of the Christian religion did not go beyond what was floating in the atmosphere. He lived in a Christian country, among a theological people, and knew something of Christianity by absorption. But he never studied the documents and mastered the doctrines of the Christian religion as Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin studied and mastered them; as Cudworth studied pagan theology, and Schleiermacher studied Plato; as Schlegel and Coleridge studied Shakespeare. The language of Bentley, the first classical scholar of his century, to Collins, is applicable to Hume in substance. Collins had remarked that the Bible “is the most miscellaneous book in the world and treats the greatest variety of things: creation, deluge, chronology and laws, ecclesiastical institutions, nature, miracles, building, husbandry, sailing, physics, pharmacy, mathematics, metaphysics, and morals” and draws the inference from this fact that “free thinking” is necessary; “for to understand the matter of this book, and to be master of the whole, a man must be able to think justly in every science and art.” “Very true!” says Bentley, in reply: And yet all he has here said of his sciences is requisite, were the English Bible supposed to be the very original. Add, therefore, to all the requisites here enumerated a sufficient skill in the Hebrew and Greek languages. Now pass your verdict on the man from his own evidence and confession. “To understand the Bible,” says he, “requires all sciences”; and two languages besides, say I. But it is plain from his book that he has condemned the whole Bible for a forgery and imposition. Did he do this without understanding the matter of it? This is too scandalous for him to own. We must take it then that he professes himself accomplished in all sciences and arts, according to his own rule. But where has he, or any of his sect, shown any tolerable skill in science? What dark passages of Scripture have they cleared? Or of any book whatever? Nay, to remit him to his “sciences” and “arts,” what have they done in the languages, the shell and surface of Scripture? A great master of the whole Bible, indeed, that can scarce step three lines in the easiest classic authors cited by himself without a notorious blunder.”8[Note: 8. WS: Bentley, On Free Thinking, 8. See Newton’s exposure of the mistakes of Bolingbroke in Prophecies, diss. 1.]
Hume was not more learned than Collins in Christian theology, and these remarks of Bentley hold true of him in all essential points.
Another illustration of the superficial knowledge of the skeptic in the province of Christian theology is seen in Gibbon. Few writers have been more conscientious in their scholarship than the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had read with great thoroughness all the Greek and Latin pagan writers who treat the period with which he was concerned. His quotations from the Byzantine historians are never secondhand. But when he derives historical material from the Christian fathers, he is not so conscientious. He obtains much of his information in this instance from Tillemont-a very trustworthy authority, it is true, but still a secondary source. Gibbon’s study of the Greek of Athanasius and the Latin of Augustine was not so thorough as his reading of Zosimus and Marcellinus. And the reason lay in his contempt for the former as ecclesiastical writers. A church father-though subtle like Athanasius or profound like Augustine, though among the finest intellects of the race and so reckoned in literary history-was, in his view, a superstitious man, and therefore his writings did not deserve continuous and complete perusal, but might be examined cursorily and through the eyes of others.9[Note: 9. WS: A writer in the Oct. 1838 Quarterly Review shows that Gibbon’s account of gnosticism is superficial and sometimes positively erroneous. The knowledge of gnosticism must be derived from the Christian fathers.]
These remarks apply with equal force to the skepticism of this generation; for there are no names in it superior to those of Hume and Gibbon, whether regard be had to learning or mental power. Such products as the survey of modern civilization by Buckle and of the intellectual development of Europe by Draper are specimens of superficial information and thinking concerning theological and metaphysical science. Almost exclusive attention is devoted to the material and physical aspects of civilization; the moral and religious elements in modern culture are overlooked, and the great problems of philosophy and theology are either unnoticed or else denied to be problems at all. The judgment passed upon either doctrinal or practical Christianity from this point of view is neither profound nor self-consistent.10[Note: 0 10. WS: See a searching criticism of Draper by Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 337-57.]
As an example of the ignorance of a literary man in scientific theology, consider the following from Froude (Short Studies, 3d series, 115): To represent man as an automaton sinning by the necessity of his nature, and yet as guilty of his sins; to represent God as having ordained all things, yet as angry with the actions of the puppets whom he has created as they are; is to insist on the acceptance of contradictory propositions from which reason recoils, and to make Christianity itself incredible by a travesty of Christian truth.
Froude believes this to be a true account of Protestant theology as formulated by Luther and Calvin. But it is pure misrepresentation-not intentional, but the misrepresentation of ignorance. A writer versed in the history of opinions would not have attributed such views to Calvin and the creeds of the Reformation. An erudite skeptic like Baur, for example, does not so describe systematic Augustinianism and Calvinism. And when we pass to the infidelity of the masses, the truth of our assertion is still more evident. In no quarter is there so little scientific knowledge of the most powerful and beneficent religion on earth as in the popular infidelity represented not by the treatise, but by the magazine and newspaper. The unbeliever of this grade may be moderately versed, perhaps, in some sections of natural science and in the lighter parts of literature, but he is unacquainted with the loftier products in secular letters and wholly ignorant of the systematic literature of the Christian church. The skeptical estimate of Christian theology, consequently, is an unscientific one. A profound and accurate judgment must come from experts. As the scientific comprehension of law is expected from jurists and not from laymen, so that of theology must be sought among philosophers and divines and not among physicists and littérateurs whose studies are devoted to very different branches of knowledge from ethics and theology and who make guerrilla incursions into this field merely for the purpose of attack. Every branch of knowledge has its recondite and abstract side, and hence, as in the case of law and medicine, the popular and superficial judgment must be corrected by the professional and scientific. “No one,” says Winckelmann (History of Art 1.1), “can form a correct judgment of Greek art, or of Greek literature, without having read repeatedly everything in the latter, and without having seen and examined if possible all the remains of the former.” Such thoroughness is eminently requisite in order to a just estimate of theological science because it extends over all spheres of being and includes the deepest problems and mysteries of existence.
Theology, then, as the science of God aims to obtain a knowledge of him free from contradictions and is as profound as is possible, considering the nature of the subject and the limitations of the human mind. If therefore it makes a statement of an abstruse doctrine like the Trinity, it continues true to science. It does not affirm and deny one and the same thing. It asserts that God is one in respect to essence and is three in respect to personal distinctions. These two propositions do not clash, because the idea of essence is different from that of person. Could it be proved that essence and person are identical conceptions, trinitarianism would be shown to be self-contradictory and therefore unscientific. Again, the theological statements respecting the decree of God and the liberty of man are scientific, so far as self-consistence constitutes science. The theologian does not affirm that one and the same future event is necessitated for God and free for man, or free for God and necessitated for man. But he affirms that one and the same future event may be certain for God and uncertain for man; and that for both God and man it may be a free event, like the decision of the human will, or for both God and man a necessitated event, like the fall of a stone to the ground. Such is the creed statement: “Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence he orders them to fall out according to the nature of second causes; either necessarily, or freely and contingently” (Westminster Confession 5.2). That is to say, when the second cause is a free cause, such as the human will, then the future act, which is free for both God and man, is uncertain for man and certain for God; and when the second cause is a necessary cause, such as the force of gravity, then the future event, which is necessitated for both God and man, is certain for God and uncertain for man. Whether I shall exert a particular volition tomorrow is uncertain to me but not to God. But if exerted, it is for both God and me alike a free act. Whether a particular stone shall fall tomorrow is uncertain to me, but not to God. But if it fall, it is for both God and me alike a necessitated event. There is no clashing or contradiction in these statements, and they contain the essential truth respecting divine sovereignty and human liberty. When theology is denominated the science of God, it is not meant that God is completely comprehended. There may be science without omniscience. Otherwise, science would be impossible for any but the infinite intelligence. Yet the tendency of science is to explain exhaustively and completely. The longer a science is pursued, the more is known of the subject. The aim and endeavor is to reach a final and perfect comprehension. In theology, which embraces the infinite as well as the finite, the goal can never be reached, either in this world or the next; but more and more will be known, and the progress of the science will be onward forever and forevermore. “The nature of a thing,” says Aristotle (Politics 1.2), “is judged by its tendency.” The tendency and aim of science toward a complete view evinces that it is profound in its nature. The superficial view is not rested in. Consider, for illustration, the anthropomorphic and materializing conception of God. This is unscientific. The descriptions of the deity borrowed from some resemblance to visible things are taken literally by the anthropomorphist. But the theologian goes behind them to the real truth:
Thus, when the Scriptures speak of God, and ascribe hands, eyes, and feet, to him, it is not designed that we should believe that he has any of these members according to the literal signification; but the meaning is that he has a power to execute all those acts, to the effecting of which these parts in us are instrumental; that is, he can converse with men as well as if he had a tongue or a mouth; he can discern all that we do or say as perfectly as if he had eyes and ears; he can reach us as well as if he had hands and feet; he has as true and substantial a being as if he had a body; and he is as truly present everywhere as if that body were infinitely extended. (King, On Foreknowledge, 468) Theology as an Absolute Science In defining the nature of theology, we remark in the first place that it is absolute science, in contradistinction to relative knowledge. Theological doctrine is not true merely or only for the human intellect, but for all rational intelligence. The cognition, it is true, does not extend to the uttermost limits of the object, but so far as it does extend and so far as the formulated statement is categorical and positive it is conformed to the real nature and truth of the object. Man’s conception of matter may be very different from that of the angel; but man’s conception of divine holiness is the same in kind with that of the angel and of God himself, though different in degree. The word holy conveyed the same idea to St. Paul that it would to the seraphim; and it conveys the same idea to us that it did to him. It is erroneous to assert that what man calls righteousness in God might be unrighteousness for the angels; and that what the angels call wickedness in Satan might be moral excellence for man. The ideas of right and wrong are the same in kind in all rational intelligence. Two diverse and contradictory conceptions of sin and holiness are impossible. There may be diverse and contradictory judgments as to whether a particular action is sinful or holy, but not as to whether sin is wrong and holiness is right. All rational beings have common principles of intelligence respecting moral truth, and this species of truth, if known at all, must be known absolutely. Relative knowledge is sufficient in the sphere of time and matter, but not of morals and eternity. There is too much at stake in the latter sphere. Whether man’s knowledge of matter is accurate or not is of little consequence, taking the whole of his endless existence into account; but if his knowledge of God and morals is erroneous, his immortality is ruined.11[Note: 1 11. WS: “Is a man,” says Plutarch (On Superstition), “of opinion that indivisibles were the first origin of things? It is indeed a mistaken view, but makes no ulcer, no shooting searching pain. But is a man of opinion that wealth is his chief good? This error contains in it a canker; it preys upon a man’s spirits, it suffers him not to sleep, it makes him horn-mad.” Similarly Frank (Christian Certainty, 105) remarks “that it is of slight importance for the person of the observer, whether this physical object which I see before me is in truth as I see it or other than I see it. But the whole constancy and strength and worth of the personality depends upon the question whether this moral good which I experience as real has an actual existence or not; the personality cannot free itself therefrom, without the innermost basis and supreme aim of its life being lost.”] The cognition, consequently, in such an important province as that of ethics and religion must be absolute, not relative. “A relative notion of a thing,” says Reid (Essay 2.18), “is, strictly speaking, no notion of the thing at all, but only of some relation which it bears to something else.” (See supplement 1.3.2.)
There is no science so rightly entitled to be denominated absolute and metaphysically certain as theology. It is the assertion of materialistic schools in every age that the science of matter and physical nature alone is certain and that the science of mind and of God is not science in the strict sense. But the fact is exactly the contrary; and this because of the nature of the objects in each province. “That knowledge,” says Milton (Reason of Church Government, 2), “that rests in the contemplation of natural causes and dimensions, must needs be a lower wisdom as the object is low.” It is clear that no science can be any more a priori and necessary than its subject matter. If an edifice rests upon the solid ground, it must be stationary; if it rests upon the waves, it must fluctuate. An a priori science like geometry retracts no positions and is immutable because its data are mental axioms and the logical conclusions from them. An a posteriori science like geology is continually altering its positions, because it derives its data from the notices of the senses, and new notices show that old deductions were errors. Whether, therefore, the science of physical nature and matter is as necessary and immutable as the science of God and the human mind will depend upon whether physical nature and matter are as necessary and immutable in their substance and properties as God and the rational soul of man. Let us compare the two.
If there be anything fixed and uniform in the material world, it is the laws and forces that prevail there. These are sometimes denominated the necessary laws of matter. But when examined, the necessity of material laws is found to be only relative. They are necessary under the present arrangement and in the existing system. Had the constitution of the material universe been different, they would have been different. There is no contradiction in the supposition that there might be a different system of nature from the present one, that matter might have some different properties from what it now has, and that material laws might be other than they are. There is no escaping this unless we adopt the position that matter is eternal. In this case, the properties and laws of matter have absolute, not relative necessity. But if we adopt the position of the theist and concede that matter with its properties and laws was created ex nihilo by omnipotent power, then we can conceive, without self-contradiction, that the Creator could have constituted the material world upon a law of attraction operating inversely as the cube of the distance as easily as he has made it upon the existing law operating inversely as the square. If he could not, then he is conditioned. There is something in the nature of matter, such as was supposed in the ancient hylē,12[Note: 2 12. ὕλη = matter] which compels him to establish and form the material universe in the manner he has. There is an insuperable limit set by nature and matter to divine power, so that God is powerless in any other direction than the one actually taken. He is merely a gnostic demiurge, not a biblical Creator. The same is true of vegetable and animal types and forms. Granting that they are creations ex nihilo, there is nothing to forbid the supposition that they might have been made upon a plan very different from the one actually employed by the Creator. It is absurd to suppose that the omnipotent has exhausted his power in the existing universe or that the omniscient can have only one scheme within his ken. (See supplement 1.3.3.)
These views of the sovereignty of God over the properties and laws of matter and of his free power to constitute the system of nature differently from what he has are adopted by the leading minds in physical science. Newton, at the close of his Optics, remarks that “the motions of the planets are marked by certain small irregularities which appear to come from the mutual action of the planets and comets, and which will probably become greater and greater, in the course of time, until at last the system will again require its author to put it in order.” Leibnitz (Theodicy 2.345) thus speaks concerning the laws of motion: The laws of motion which are operative in nature and are verified by experience and observation are not absolutely demonstrable like a geometrical proposition. They do not spring from a principle of necessity, but from a principle of perfection and order; they are an effect of the will (choix) and wisdom of God. Hence these laws are a wonderful proof of the existence of an intelligent and free being, in opposition to the system of absolute and unreasoning (brut) necessity taught by Strato and Spinoza.13[Note: 3 13. WS: Strato (289 b.c.) maintained that “there is inherent in nature an eternal and necessary principle of motion, or force, without intelligence, which is the only cause of the production or dissolution of bodies.”]
Similarly, Whewell (Astronomy and General Physics 1.3) remarks that the force of gravity, so far as we can judge, might have been different from what it now is. It depends upon the mass of the earth; and this mass is one of the elements of the solar system which is not determined by any cosmic necessity of which we are aware. We cannot see anything which would have prevented either the size or the density of the earth from being different, to a very great extent, from what they are. We can very easily conceive the solar system so adjusted that the year should be longer or shorter than it actually is. If the earth were removed toward the solar center by about one-eighth of its distance, the year would be shortened by about a month.
After saying that the vegetable world has been adjusted to the year as it now is, Whewell adds, that the length of either the solar or the vegetable year “might have been different from what it is, according to any grounds of necessity which we can perceive.” Only, if one were altered the other would be adjusted accordingly.14[Note: 4 14. WS: See especially Whewell’s recapitulation in 1.18.]
Statements to the same effect are made by a writer in the July 1876 London Quarterly Review: The law of the inverse square is but the mathematical expression of a property which has been imposed on matter from the creation. It is no inherent quality, so far as we know. It is quite conceivable that the central law might have been different from what it is. There is no reason why the mathematical law should be what it is, except the will of the being who imposed the law. Any other proportion would equally well be expressed mathematically, and its results calculated. As an instance of what would occur if any other proportion than the inverse square were substituted as the attractive force of gravity, suppose at distances 1, 2, 3, the attractive force had varied as 1, 2, 3, instead of the squares of these numbers. Under such a law any number of planets might revolve in the most regular and orderly manner. But under this law, the weight of bodies at the earth’s surface would cease to exist; nothing would fall or weigh downward. The greater action of the distant sun and planets would exactly neutralize the attractive force of the earth. A ball thrown from the hand, however gently, would immediately become a satellite of the earth and would for the future accompany its course, revolving about it for the space of one year. All terrestrial things would obey the general law of the system, but would acknowledge no particular relation to the earth.
Again, to take an illustration from optics. If the undulatory theory of light be adopted, there does not appear to be any eternal and absolute necessity that exactly 458 billion vibrations per second of the supposed ether should produce the sensation of violet color for the human eye, and 727 billion should produce the sensation of crimson. The will that created the eye and established these numbers and proportions could have created a different eye and established different proportions.
If these positions of Newton, Leibnitz, and Whewell are correct, it follows that absoluteness cannot characterize physical science, because the subject matter of cognition within this province is not itself a priori and necessary. Knowledge, speaking generally, is the cognition of entity. Nonentity cannot be the subject matter of human investigation. A substance or real being of some kind is requisite for this. It is evident, therefore, that the absoluteness and certainty of a science will depend upon that of its subject matter. If the subject matter of a science has no necessity and absoluteness, the science will have none. Knowledge, then, that has physical and material substance and its properties for its basis must be marked by contingency and relativity. For since matter and its laws might have been different, or might not have been at all, the knowledge of them is the knowledge of the contingent, the conditioned, and the mutable. When the subject matter has a priori necessity, cognition acquires absolute certainty from it. This is the case with geometry. The data here are the intuitions of the mind and the necessary conclusions from them. Geometry does not deal with matter and its phenomena, but with ideal points, lines, and surfaces. It is absolutely necessary that the radii of a circle should be equal, but not that there should be a circular body like the sun. The laws of matter are not derived intuitively from the mind (like geometrical axioms) and then attributed to matter, but they are derived from matter and then impressed upon the mind. Physical laws, as formulated, are deduced from the outer world and have only relative necessity and certainty because the outer world has only such. Axioms, on the contrary, are derived from the mind itself and have a kind of certainty that cannot attach to a generalization drawn from the observation of material phenomena.
Ethics and pure mathematics have this in common: they deal with ideas, not with substances. Right and wrong, like a mathematical point and line, are not objective beings. Physics, on the contrary, deals with physical substances. The former, consequently, are more certain sciences than the latter; because there is no dispute about the nature of an intuitive idea, but there is about the nature of a physical substance. There cannot be two different views of a triangle or of right and wrong; but there can be of a piece of protoplasm or a bit of granite. When we pass from the world of matter to that of mind and of morals, we find more than a relative necessity in the object of cognition. Unextended, incorporeal, spiritual substance is the entity in this case. The divine mind and the human are the subject matter of theological and metaphysical science. But mind is reason, and reason is marked by necessary and immutable properties. It differs from matter in this respect. Matter, conceivably, may be of an indefinite variety; but we can conceive of only one species of reason. When God creates a rational being, he makes him after his own image; but when he creates a physical substance, he does not create it after his own image, but as he pleases. This makes reason to be one and invariable in its essential properties, while matter is variable. We cannot conceive of God’s creating two diverse kinds of rational mind, but we can conceive of his creating many kinds of matter. All finite reason must resemble the infinite reason in kind. When God creates a rational spirit, he must, from the nature of the case, make it after his own likeness and after no other pattern. But when he creates physical substance, he is not thus restricted. God is immaterial, a pure spirit, without body parts or passions; therefore when he creates physical substance, he creates something that has no resemblance whatever to himself. Matter, consequently, has nothing a priori or intrinsically necessary in its properties. Even gravity, says Whewell (General Physics 2.10), “is a property which we have no right to call necessary to matter, but have every reason to suppose is universal.” Not being made after any original and eternal pattern drawn from divine essence, it may be made as God pleases, in an indefinite number of modes. But when finite mind and reason are created, they are made after the divine image and therefore can be of only one species and quality.
Accordingly, the laws of mind have more necessity in them than the laws of material nature have. The laws of thought, as enunciated in logic, are more immutable than physical laws. Logic is a priori in its regulative principles. Mathematics is necessary and absolute in its axioms and conclusions. We cannot conceive of a different species of logic or mathematics; but we can conceive of a different astronomy, chemistry, and geology-a different physics generally. The movements of the planets might, conceivably, have been different; but the movement of the human intellect in logical and mathematical processes could not have been otherwise. This is true also of moral law as well as of mental. When we pass from the world of physics to the world of ethics and examine the laws that rule and regulate in this realm, we find more than a relative necessity. Take the Decalogue as summed up by our Lord: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.” This is for the rational universe what the law of gravitation is for the physical. And it is necessary and absolute for all intelligences. We cannot conceive that it might have been different from what it is; that the command might have run thus: “You shall hate the Lord your God and your neighbor.” Neither can we conceive of such a modification of it as to allow an equal degree of love toward the Creator and the creature. The golden rule, “Whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do even so to them,” is absolutely necessary. Neither the contrary nor any modification of it is conceivable. No other rule for the conduct of finite rational beings could have been laid down by the Supreme Reason.
Testing, then, the entity or substance which is the object of cognition in physics and metaphysics, respectively, by the properties and laws belonging to each, it is clear that absolute scientific certainty is to be claimed for the latter, not for the former.
There are three reasons, in particular, why physical science is relative knowledge. In the first place, it is to a great extent empirical or experimental. It is founded upon the observations of the five senses. But the senses never teach any a priori or absolute truth. They show what may be and what actually is, but not what must be. They disclose what occurs under certain actual circumstances, but not under all conceivable circumstances. By the senses, we know as a present fact that the sun rises in the east once in every twenty-four hours; but the senses do not teach that this could not possibly be otherwise and that the sun must of necessity rise in the east from eternity to eternity. Says Hume (Inquiry, 5): “The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with equal facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality.” That the sun will rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmative that it will rise. Similarly, Leibnitz (New Essays, foreword) remarks:
Though the senses are necessary in order to the knowledge of actual facts, yet they are not sufficient in order to knowledge of all kinds; since the senses give only present examples and instances and teach only particular and individual truths. No matter how great the number of examples may be that establish a particular truth, they are insufficient to demonstrate the universal necessity of this truth; because it does not follow that since a thing has uniformly occurred up to this moment, it will continue to occur forever. The Greeks and Romans noticed that in twenty-four hours, day uniformly turned into night, and night into day. But they would have erred had they concluded that this fact is necessary and universal; since it is not a fact in Nova Zembla.15[Note: 5 15. Nova Zembla is an island in the Russian Arctic.] And it would be a yet more mistaken judgment to conclude that this alternation of day and night is absolutely necessary at least within the temperate zone; because it is possible for both the earth and the sun to cease to exist.
Second, the judgments of the senses are relative and variable, from the nature of the sensuous organs themselves. Tested mathematically and absolutely, no two persons see the same-sized object. The tree is taller for one man than for another. The shade of red is deeper for one eye than for another; and not red at all for the color-blind. Pascal, perhaps the most metaphysical of mathematicians, speaking of the effect of magnifying glasses, asks: “After all, who is to take upon himself to affirm that these glasses have really altered the natural dimensions of the objects in question, but that, on the contrary, they may not have had the effect of restoring them to their original proportions, which our eyes had altered and contracted, in the same way that is done by the action of diminishing glasses” (Geometrical Spirit). The following experiment from a treatise on heat illustrates the relativity of sensuous perceptions. Plunge the right hand into a vessel of tepid water, and the left hand into one of iced water. Then put both into water of ordinary temperature. The latter will now seem to be cold, if we decide according to the sensation experienced by the right hand; but warm, if we judge by the left. Hence, says the author, it appears that there is no difference between heat and cold when we abstract our sensations and consider only the body that impresses us.
Thus it is evident that the sensuous data which enter so largely into natural and physical science are wholly subjective. They depend upon the structure and condition of the organ. Size and figure are all in the eye. Sound is in the ear. If human eyes and ears had been made upon one plan, Lilliput would have been the actual world. If they had been made upon another, Brobdingnag would have been.16[Note: 6 16. Lilliput and Brobdingnag are two fictitious lands described in Swift’s famous Gulliver’s Travels. In Lilliput, Gulliver is a giant in comparison to the six-inch-tall Lilliputians. Conversely, the inhabitants of Brobdingnag are giants who tower over Gulliver.] “Sensation,” says Cudworth, “is not science or intellection, because the soul by sense does not perceive the things themselves, or the absolute natures of them, but only her own passions from them. Were sensation knowledge and understanding, then he that sees light and colors, and feels heat and cold, would understand light and colors, heat and cold; and the like of all sensible things.”17[Note: 7 17. WS: Epicurus, on the contrary, carried the doctrine that the senses are the only measure of truth so far as to affirm that the sun is no larger than it appears; see Descartes, Preface to Principles of Philosophy.]
“All that the optic nerve reports to us,” says Helmholtz,
It reports under the form of a sensation of light, whether it be the beaming of the sun, or a blow on the eye, or an electric current in the eye. The acoustic nerve, again, transforms everything into phenomena of sound; the nerve of the skin transforms all things into sensations of temperature or touch. The same electric current, whose existence the optic nerve reports as a flash of light, which the nerve of taste reports as an acid, awakens in the nerve of the skin the feeling of burning. The same sunbeam, which we call light when it falls upon the eye, we call heat when it strikes the skin. This shows the relativity of sensuous perception. A material object appears to us only in accordance with the sensuous organ which transmits the impression, and not as an immutable object independent of the organ of sensation. But it is altogether different in the instance of a spiritual object like God or the soul. God makes only one and the same impression of holiness or wisdom or omnipotence, if any is made at all; and the very same qualities are attributed to him by all intelligence that is not abnormal and vitiated. The list of divine attributes is one and invariable. The same is true of the human soul as an object of knowledge and of its qualities. The human spirit has only one conceivable set of properties, and these are the same for all who are self-conscious and make an accurate report of self-consciousness. (See supplement 1.3.4.)
Third, the inferences from sensible phenomena in physical science are relative and uncertain because all the phenomena have not been seen. The material universe is too vast for all of it to come under the notice of men’s senses. Though perhaps improbable, yet it is possible that some established and accepted generalizations, n the existing physics may be overthrown by future observations and new phenomena. The following facts illustrate the uncertainty of which we are speaking. Water in cooling contracts down to forty degrees Fahrenheit; then if it continues to cool it begins to expand, and at thirty-two degrees freezes, which is very great expansion. Nature here reverses herself and contradicts herself. The first part of her process would yield the generalization that cold contracts substances; the second, that cold expands substances. He who should have observed only the phenomena above forty degrees would have deduced the general law that water invariably contracts in cooling; and were he of a certain school of physicists, he would add to this that it necessarily contracts. If upon this planet there were no natural or artificial temperature below forty degrees, the law that cold uniformly contracts substances would be regarded as well established and indisputable as the law of gravitation.
It is for this reason that theories in physics are so uncertain and changing. Geology furnishes abundant example. Arnold (in Life of Stanley, 1.142), speaking of the discussions of the British Association in 1839, says that “Murchison convinced Greenough and De La Beche that they must recolor their geological maps; for what were called the Greywackes of North Devon, he maintains to be equivalent to the coal formation; and the limestones on which they rest are equivalent to the Old Red Sandstone which now is to be sandstone no more, but is to be called the Devonian system.” Agassiz, in his eulogy upon Humboldt, remarks that “Humboldt’s work upon the position of the rocks in the two hemispheres tells the history of that formation as it could be told in 1823 and is of course full of anachronisms.” But what absolute certainty is there that the statements of any geologist in 1880 respecting the rocks of the globe may not likewise be full of anachronisms? There would be more approach to scientific certainty in these empirical departments of knowledge which depend upon tentative experiments and repeated observations if all the facts could be observed or even a majority of them. But the conclusions of the physicist are drawn from only a small, oftentimes infinitesimal portion of the phenomena. Only the testimony of an eyewitness, an actual observer with instruments, is regarded as of the first rate. But how little of such testimony enters into geological theories generally. What observer was on the ground when the coal beds were forming? We may grant that inferences that are plausible and even probable may be drawn from what is seen in a coal mine today as to what was being done in that spot ten million years ago, but absolute certainty is impossible. A convulsion by earthquake, a fusion by fire, a deposit by flood, or some sudden catastrophe of nature might so dislocate strata and melt materials and overlay with sediment as entirely to alter a previous plan upon which nature had been working for a million years. But the observer of the present day sees only the shattered debris, scoriae, mud, or gravel of the earthquake, fire, or deluge and knows nothing at all of that preexistent plan which lay behind them and which was entirely obliterated by them. Yet he assumes that he is beholding the very first and original plan of all and upon the strength of what he sees at this moment lays down a theory respecting the very creation and beginning of the globe. For these reasons, a theory in physics cannot have the completeness and certainty of a theory in ethics. There is no eternal and immutable physics, as there is an eternal and immutable morality. The principles that should govern the action of all moral agents throughout the universe are necessary; but the principles that rule the material world are contingent. In this reference, the remark of Coleridge is correct: The use of a theory in physical sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question. It is a collected view, theomria,18[Note: 8 18. θεωρία = a looking at, viewing, or beholding (consequently, speculation)] of all he knows, in one survey. Of course, so long as any pertinent facts remain unknown, no physical theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. The only necessarily true theories are those of geometry; because in geometry all the premises are necessarily true and unalterable. But to suppose that in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology is necessarily correct, is absurd. (Table Talk for 29 June 1833; cf. Herschel, Discourse §183) The skeptical attitude, then, which Hume asserted to be the proper one toward religion is far more appropriate in reference to physical science, founded as it is upon the observations of the senses and deductions from them. “The whole subject of religion,” he remarks, “is a riddle and an inexplicable mystery; doubt, uncertainty, and suspension of judgment are the sole result of our closest examination.” The way and manner in which the material universe arose from nonentity and in which it is upheld from millennium to millennium “is a riddle and an inexplicable mystery” to physical science. The deep and learned minds in this province acknowledge this. To the question “how did man originate?” Quatrefages (Human Species 1.11) answers: “I do not know.” It is impossible to explain either the origin or the perpetuity of things by physical science. Neither self-motion nor perpetual motion belongs to matter. But the former is requisite in order to the origin, and the latter in order to the perpetuity of anything in nature. Respecting the mode in which the material universe came into existence, the question of God to Job (38:4, 16-21) is conclusive: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have you entered into the springs of the sea? or have you walked in the search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened to you? Have you perceived the breadth of the earth? Where is the way where light dwells? And as for darkness, where is the place thereof? Know you it because you were then born? or because the number of your days is great?
Compared with the sum total of phenomena in universal space and time, only a little is known of matter and its laws, and if the exclusive claim to an absolute cognition is set up for physical science, then it is proper to subject it to a skeptical criticism and compel it to bring forth its proofs. Especially is this proper when the theory is novel and contradicts the historical physics. “I am a skeptic in physics,” said one to an enthusiastic scientist who was endeavoring to convince him that life is an evolution from the lifeless. Extremes produce extremes; and if the fanciful biology of Haeckel shall succeed in driving out the sober biology of Agassiz, there will be more scientific than there is of religious skepticism. But skepticism in the bad sense of the term is an error both in science and religion. If anything in the great domain of material nature has been demonstrated by valid reasoning, the human mind will accept it as truth. There is much of this in the higher departments of physical science, for example, in astronomy. Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton have conclusively established truths and facts within this province. Astronomy contains much of certain knowledge, because it contains much that is mathematical. “The apparent motions of the sun, moon and stars,” says Whewell, “have been more completely reduced to their causes and laws, than any other class of phenomena.” And it should be observed, that in this instance more has been accomplished by mental and metaphysical processes than by sensuous and physical. Mathematical calculation has enabled the astronomer to solve astronomical problems which the senses, even aided by instruments, could not have solved. Le Verrier discovered Neptune by calculus, not by the naked or the armed eye. Fresnel, by mathematical calculation, established certain facts respecting refraction which contradicted the results of previous experiment; and certain other facts that had escaped experiment and observation. An eminent geometer demonstrated by mathematical optics that the center of the shadow made by a small circular plate of metal in a beam of light coming through an aperture is in fact no shadow, but an illumination precisely as bright as if the metal plate were away. This is utterly contrary to what appears to the eye of the observer (Herschel, Discourse §§23-24). But as we descend to lower departments in natural science, like geology, for example, we find nothing of this mathematical certainty and much doubtful theorizing built upon sensible experiments and observations. Astronomy, moreover, is a comparatively certain science, not only because it employs calculus, but because it confines itself to existing facts and phenomena. Its aim is to ascertain the present structure and motions of the solar system. Geology is uncertain because it proposes to describe a past state of things. It attempts to tell what existed millions of years ago and even how the worlds were originally made-which involves agencies and phenomena that occurred in “the dark backward and abysm of time” and which may have been totally different from what the present phenomena and agencies would imply as interpreted by the theorist.
Still another reason for the greater certainty of astronomical science is found in the fact of its greater simplicity. It is confined to its own problems and does not attempt those of other sciences. Says Herschel (Discourse §183):
It can hardly be pressed forcibly enough on the attention of the student of nature, that there is scarcely any natural phenomenon which can be fully and completely explained without a union of several, perhaps all, of the sciences. The great phenomena of astronomy, indeed, may be considered exceptions; but this is merely because their scale is so vast that one only of the most widely extended forces of nature takes the lead, and all those agents whose sphere of action is limited to narrower bounds, and which determine the production of phenomena nearer at hand, are thrown into the background, and become merged and lost in comparative insignificance. But in the more intimate phenomena which surround us, it is far otherwise. Into what a complication of different branches of science are we led by the consideration of such a phenomenon as rain, for instance, or flame, or a thousand others which are constantly going on before our eyes. By reason of this simplicity and comparative freedom from complication with other sciences, astronomy enables the investigator to be more certain in his conclusions than does chemistry or geology. It does not, like these latter, burden him with a multitude of particulars or tempt him to solve the difficulties arising from fanciful hypotheses and conjectures.
It is worthy of notice that astronomy generally speaking has been believing, while geology has often been skeptical. The Keplers and Newtons were reverent minds, and the main current of astronomical science has corroborated both natural and revealed religion. It is also noticeable that none of the great discoveries in physics, like the laws of planetary motion and the law of gravitation, have been made by materialists and atheists. Skeptical sections in the history of physics are barren sections, so far as original discovery is concerned. This is conceded by Lange in his History of Materialism (1.1.4). The inventive and powerful intellects who discover laws and make a positive addition to the knowledge of material nature express their faith and worship in the language of Kepler: “Father of the universe, what moved you to raise a little feeble creature of earth so high as to make him a king, and almost a God, in thinking your thoughts after you? I thank you, Lord and Creator of all, that you have filled me with rapture over the works of your hand and have enabled me to disclose to men the glory of your creation, so far as a finite mind can comprehend your infinity.” The skeptical naturalists, on the other hand, belong to the second and third class of investigators and have made few original contributions to science. The identification of matter and mind by the materialist blinds the human intelligence, so that its generalizations are false. The materialist may be an accurate observer of phenomena, but his conclusions from them are erroneous. The theories of spontaneous generation and the origin of species by natural selection are examples. Their authors were minute examiners of nature with both the naked and the armed eye, but little more. The report of what they saw is trustworthy; but what they inferred is not. This inferiority is explained by Whewell’s distinction between inductive and deductive habits of mind (Astronomy and General Physics 3.6). Investigators of the first rank by induction discover hitherto unknown laws and then those of the second rate by deduction draw conclusions and construct schemes from them. The Newton or the Kepler, when the law of gravitation or of planetary motion bursts upon his view with “the rapturous eurēka,”19[Note: 9 19. εὔρηκα = I have found it] is impressed with the idea of God as the author of it. But the investigator of a secondary grade, who merely uses the discovery and applies it, is sometimes a disbeliever in a personal Creator, a preconceived purpose, and a final end because he regards the law itself as the eternal first cause.20[Note: 0 20. WS:
Him the Maker, we behold not; calm He veils himself in everlasting laws, Which and not Him, the skeptic seeing, exclaims, “Wherefore a God? The world itself is God.”
-Schiller, Don Carlos] He converts the law which has been discovered by his predecessors in science into a god, as the African savages worshiped the plow which produced such wonderful effects in comparison with their rude mattock. The inventor of the plow never would have thought of deifying it. (See supplement 1.3.5.)
It appears then, after this examination of the materials and subject matter of physical and theological science respectively, that in point of absolute validity and certainty the superiority is with the latter. Tested rigorously, the sphere of natural science is a region of only relative knowledge and certainty. There is nothing absolutely and eternally necessary in the laws and phenomena of matter. There is no absolute knowledge within this domain because there is no absolute object to be known. Kant was correct in his celebrated but sometimes misapprehended position that all cognition within the province of the natural and sensuous-within the region which falls to the understanding, in his nomenclature-is unaxiomatic and conditional and that only within the domain of the moral and spiritual is there an absolutely certain intuition. What the practical reason perceives to be true is true for all intelligence. The metaphysical ideas of God and the soul, of free will and immortality, of right and wrong, are absolute; and all science founded upon them is of the same nature. But physical sensations and perceptions are individual, subjective, and relative. Even the conceptions of space and time are only forms of the finite understanding, under which these sensations are massed and unified. The finite mind when cognizing sensible phenomena must cognize them as successive in time and located in space, and its cognition of them is consequently gradual and incomplete. But the infinite mind is untrammeled by this gradual and sequacious mode of apprehension in time and space and beholds all phenomena in the simultaneous and complete intuition of omniscience. Successive sensuous cognition is relative knowledge. It is true for man’s senses, but not for the divine reason. Material and sensible things, which are the subject matter of physical science, are in continual flux and change. And even in regard to the invisible principles or forces beneath them, even in regard to the laws of nature themselves, we have seen that we cannot ascribe to them such a necessary and immutable quality as we must to spiritual and metaphysical realities. For they are creations from nonentity and are only one of the many various manners in which the divine mind can express itself in a material universe. But the mental and moral universe has no such conceivable variety. Reason is one and simple; matter is manifold and complex. The whole domain of physical nature is only a means to an end. It was created to be subservient to mind. It cannot, therefore, like the domain of the moral and spiritual, which is an end in and of itself, have absolute and immutable characteristics and therefore cannot be the object of an absolutely certain knowledge.21[Note: 1 21. WS: Shedd, Literary Essays, 301-5. On the inferiority of natural science to moral, see Plato, Phaedo 96-100.] Says Frank (Christian Certainty, 104):
Moral certainty, in distinction from natural certainty, is characterized by a firmness which in the latter case has its equal at most only as regards mathematical and logical certainty. A man may doubt the reality of the objects which he sees with bodily eyes and hears with physical ears, and still he does not on that account doubt the reality of the moral world, of which he is conscious. That is the abiding truth of the Kantian philosophy, which in the moral domain sets limits to the skepticism regarding objective realities; the truth also of Fichte’s doctrine of the moral order of the world, the validity of which is not affected by the idealism in other respects.
Theology as a Positive Science A second characteristic of theology is that it is positive science in contradistinction to negative knowledge. This ground is taken by theologians in the affirmation that faith is intelligent and not the blind and ignorant credulity of superstition. There is some real and true knowledge of the object of faith, although the object is still a mystery in many respects. Some of its properties and relations are known, but not all of them. For example, man knows that God is spirit and not matter. This is a positive and absolutely true knowledge. Man also knows that spiritual substance is intelligent and immortal, that is, incapable of dissolution by material causes. This also is a positive and absolutely true knowledge. But how the intelligence of God is eternal and omniscient, comprehending all things simultaneously and without succession, and how his omnipresence is the presence of the whole deity at every point of space and a multitude of other similar particulars-of these, he is ignorant. Man knows God “in part” with a true and valid knowledge; but being also ignorant “in part,” and by far the greater part, God is a mystery for him. But it would be absurd to say that because man knows only in part, therefore he does not know at all; that because he does not know everything, he knows nothing. Faith, therefore, though relating to the mysteries of God and the universe, is yet an intelligent act. It is denominated in Ephesians 3:18-19 a “comprehension” of the “breadth and length and depth and height” of revealed truth; a “knowledge” of “the love of Christ which passes knowledge.” Faith is defined in Hebrews 11:1 as the “evidence” of unseen things. The word elenchos22[Note: 2 22. ἔλεγχος = a proving or conviction about] in this passage denotes a mental conviction; and a conviction is both intelligent and positive. Christian faith is a rational and confident conviction of the mind.
Accordingly, Calvin (3.2.14-15) defines faith to be “a solid constancy of persuasion and a certain and steady knowledge” and adds that the knowledge of faith consists more in certainty than in comprehension. When we call it knowledge, we intend not such a comprehension as men commonly have of those things which fall under the notice of their senses. The mind which attains to faith does not perfectly comprehend what it perceives, but, being persuaded of that which it cannot comprehend, it understands (intelligit) more by the certainty of this persuasion, than it would comprehend (perspiciret) of any human object by the exercise of its natural capacity. In this last statement, Calvin implies that a believer knows more certainly concerning some of the qualities of God than he does concerning any of the properties of matter, that religious cognition is closer to absolute truth than sensuous cognition is. It is more certain that God is holy and omnipotent than that light is the undulation of an ether and not a separate substance by itself. With this, the eminent Schoolman Hales agrees:
If we compare the way in which the relation of faith, or conviction, to knowledge, is determined in theology, with the way in which it is in the other sciences, we shall find that the order is a reverse one. In the other sciences, conviction is brought about by the activity of reason, or mediated by thought, and scientific knowledge precedes conviction; while the reverse holds true of religious matters. It is not till we have appropriated them by faith, that we can attain to a knowledge of them conformable to reason. These things can be understood only by those who are of a pure heart; and we get this purity by keeping God’s commandments.
Hales “distinguishes,” says Neander (4.427), “a certainty of speculation, and a certainty of experience; a certainty grounded in the intellectual agency, and another grounded in the feelings. Of the latter kind is the certainty of faith; and with reference to this kind of certainty, theology is superior to the other sciences.” The term positive signifies that something is laid down (positum) respecting an object or idea. An affirmation is made that it is thus and so; and not a mere denial that it is thus and so. To say that water is not fire conveys no information as to what water really is. But to say that water is a fluid resulting from the union of oxygen and hydrogen gas imparts some real knowledge of the nature of water, though it does not explain all the mystery connected with it. This is a positive statement springing out of a positive yet not exhaustive cognition. Water really is a fluid and really consists of two gases. Taking Aquinas’s definition of science as the knowledge of the qualities and relations of an object, it is evident that there may be positive without perfect comprehension. An object has, we will say, fifty qualities or properties. I know twenty of them and do not know the remaining thirty. My knowledge is valid and positive, so far. It is not merely negative and invalid in respect to the twenty known qualities. Again an object, we will assume, has twenty relations to other objects. I know ten of them. My knowledge to this extent is positive. I have so much true information upon the subject. To illustrate from the science of optics: The properties of transmission, reflection, and refraction of light were known before those of double refraction and polarization. Suppose that the latter were not known at all, at the present time. It would not follow that the knowledge of light, so far as the properties of transmission, reflection, and refraction are concerned, is merely negative and not real and true cognition. The knowledge conforms, so far, to the real nature of light. Again, the final cause or use of these latter properties of light is still unknown. They are not needed in order that the eye may see the outer world of forms and colors. “So far as has yet been discovered,” says Whewell (Astronomy and General Physics 1.16), “these latter properties and laws exert no agency whatever and have no purpose in the general economy of nature.” But the fact that the final cause and use of these properties and laws of diffraction and polarization is still unknown does not prove that the existing knowledge which the physicist has of light is a mere negation. A negation may be employed after an affirmation has been made in order to define an object or idea more carefully. Negative statements are of little value prior to affirmative. After affirming of God what is excellent in the creation, we may then remove from the affirmation any defect by the negative method: as when it is said that reason in God is the same in kind with reason in man, but not in degree. After saying that God is immanent in the universe, we may say negatively, in order to guard against a pantheistic interpretation of the term immanent, that God is not identical with the universe. And after saying that God is distinct from the world, we may add that he is not separate from it, in order to avoid a deistical interpretation of the term distinct. The denial that theology is positive science and that knowledge in morals and theology is positive cognition is a skeptical position. Hobbes took this ground and was combated by Cudworth (Intellectual System 5.1). The theologian Buddaeus (in Theses concerning Atheism and Superstitions) opposed Hobbes “because he denied a positive conception of the infinite and allowed only a negative one.” The theologian Huet, after having defended Christianity in the vigor of his life in his Evangelical Demonstration, at the age of ninety wrote his treatise On the Weakness of the Human Mind to prove that before we affirm anything of an object we must perfectly comprehend it and that therefore we have less right to affirm anything respecting the Supreme Being because we have a less perfect knowledge of him than of any other subject. This view has been run out to its logical result in the recent agnosticism, which contends that we know nothing concerning God and therefore can affirm nothing concerning him.
Theology has been denied to be a positive science by some of its friends as well as by its foes. The views of Hamilton and Mansel convert theology into a science of negations. In asserting that man has no positive cognition of the infinite being and especially in contending that the human mind cannot logically think of the infinite being either as a person or a cause because these conceptions are said to be contradictory to infinity, these philosophers, without intending it, lay the foundation for the same skepticism that Hobbes and Huet maintained. And their speculations have undoubtedly strengthened the hands of the present generation of agnostics. If all that can be said by the theologian respecting God is that he is not this or that, then the mind has in fact no object before it and no cognition whatever. It may not affirm anything whatever respecting such a being. It cannot assert either that he is holy or unholy, mighty or weak, wise or foolish. The deity becomes the unknown and the unknowable-a position that cuts up religion by the root and introduces atheism in theory and practice.
Mansel would save the mind from skepticism by the remark that the contradiction which he finds between the conception of the infinite and that of personality and causation is only relative. It is a contradiction for the human but not for the divine mind. Hence man can believe in the existence of an infinite being who is also personal and a cause, though it is self-contradictory to human intelligence. “It is true,” he says (Religious Thought, 106), “that we cannot reconcile these two representations with each other; as our conception of personality involves attributes apparently contradictory to the notion of infinity. But it does not follow that this contradiction exists anywhere but in our own minds; it does not follow that it implies any impossibility in the absolute nature of God.” But this reasoning implies that a man can believe what appears to him to be self-contradictory. This is impossible. It also implies that a contradiction for the human mind may be rational and logical for the divine mind. This makes reason in man to differ in kind from reason in God; so that what is logical and mathematical for one would be illogical and unmathematical for the other. If this be so, man was not created in the image of God.23[Note: 3 23. WS: On Hamilton’s and Mansel’s views, see Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 297-336; Porter, Human Intellect, 681-97; Hodge, Theology 1.346-65; Müller, Science of Language, 2d series, 596-600.]
Let us test this theory of negative knowledge by some particulars. Theology defines God to be a spirit. The idea which the human mind has of “spirit” is not exhausted when it is said that spirit is not matter or substance occupying space. This would not distinguish it from a mathematical point or from a thought or from a volition. We have over and above this negative definition a positive notion, which we proceed to enunciate by specifying certain definite properties of spirit such as intelligence and self-determination and certain qualities such as benevolence, justice, and veracity. These properties and qualities are as positively conceived as are the properties of matter: hardness, color, shape, and the like. That our knowledge of spirit is not all expressed in the statement that spirit is not matter is also proved by the fact that if it should be asserted that spirit is something semimaterial we should deny it. This evinces that we have a notion in our minds of the real nature of spirit which throws out an imperfect and inadequate definition like this.
Consider, again, the eternity of God. Of this, it is contended we have only a negative apprehension. All that the human intellect can know, it is said, is that eternity is not time. But that our idea of eternity is not exhausted by this negation is proved by the fact that we are not content to stop with it, but go beyond it and endeavor to convey some further notion of eternity by specifying positive characteristics. We define it as duration: as duration without beginning or end and as duration without succession. We thus differentiate eternity from time, which is conceived of as duration beginning and ending as a series of sequences and as measured by the successive motions of the heavenly bodies. Again we define eternity as stationary, time as flowing. These are figures, it is true, but they are employed to illustrate a positive idea in the mind. If we were content with a negative definition-with merely saying that eternity is not time-we should not make use of any metaphors at all because we should not attempt any further enunciation of our idea of eternity. On the theory of a negative knowledge, time might be as well defined by saying that it is not eternity, as eternity would be by saying that it is not time; and matter would be as well defined by saying that it is not mind, as mind would be by saying that it is not matter. But man’s knowledge of either of these contraries, though imperfect in the sense of not exhaustive, is yet more than these negations express. The doctrine of a merely negative knowledge of spiritual objects and ideas originates in a tendency to materialism. The theorist is prone to regard nothing as positive and real in human conceptions that cannot be imaged to the senses. Mansel defines a conception to be a “representative image,” and an image implies sensuous imagination. According to this view, positive knowledge is sensuous knowledge. But this is an error. Consider the common definition of God as “an essence absolutely perfect, infinitely good, wise, powerful, necessarily existent and the cause of all other beings.” There is not a word in this definition that is unintelligible or that does not convey a positive notion, and yet there is no sensible idea, no idea that can be imaged to the senses, answering to any one of these words. Says Cudworth (Intellectual System 1.5):
We have intelligible notions, or ideas, which have no phantasms [sensible images] belonging to them. Of which, whosoever doubts may easily be satisfied and convinced, by reading a sentence or two that he understands in any book almost that shall come to his hand; and reflexively examining himself whether he have a phantasm, or sensible idea, belonging to every word, or no. For whoever is ingenuous will quickly be forced to confess that he meets with many words which, though they have a meaning or intelligible notion, yet have no phantasm [image] belonging to them. And we have known some who were confidently engaged in the other opinion, being put to read the beginning of Tully’s Offices, presently nonplused and confounded in the first word although:24[Note: 4 24. quanquam] they being neither able to deny that there was a meaning belonging to it, nor yet to affirm that they had any phantasm thereof, save only of the sound or letters.
Cudworth then gives the definition of God which we have just cited in further proof of his position and then adds that it is nothing but want of meditation, together with a fond and sottish dotage upon corporeal sense, which has so far imposed upon some, as to make them believe that they have not the least cognition of anything not subject to corporeal sense; or that there is nothing in human understanding or conception which was not first in bodily sense: a doctrine highly favorable to atheism. But since it is certain, on the contrary, that we have many thoughts not subject to sense, it is manifest that what falls not under external sense is not therefore inconceivable and nothing. Which, whosoever asserts, must needs affirm life and cogitation itself, knowledge or understanding, reason and memory, volition and appetite, things of the greatest moment and reality, to be nothing but mere words without any signification.
It is indeed true that these positive definitions of eternity, spirit, and kindred ideas do not exhaust the subjects and leave them free from mystery. In the recent controversy respecting the knowledge of the infinite and the unconditioned, which was stimulated into life by the views of Hamilton, sufficient care was not taken upon either side to distinguish a positive from a perfect and complete conception. It seemed to be taken for granted by both parties that man’s knowledge of the finite is superior to his knowledge of the infinite in respect to exhaustiveness and absoluteness. But man’s cognition of matter and sensible phenomena has limits and imperfection as well as his cognition of God and the soul. “If anyone,” says Jacobi (Loose Leaves), “will tell me what sense is, I will tell him what spirit is. We talk more easily about sense than about spirit, because there are at least five senses and only one spirit.” The blade of grass which the naturalist picks up in his fingers and subjects to the microscope and chemical analysis contains an ultimate mystery which he can no more clear away than he can the mystery of divine eternity or Trinity. For the constitution of the smallest atom involves such baffling questions as “what is matter?” and “how does it originate?” Everything, be it finite or infinite, matter or mind, runs out into mystery. Speaking of law in material nature, Hooker (Polity 1.3), remarks that it “has in it more than men have as yet attained to know, or perhaps ever shall attain; seeing the travail of wading herein is given of God to the sons of men, that perceiving how much the least thing in the world has in it more than the wisest are able to reach unto, they may by this means learn humility.” Natural philosopher Boyle entitles one of his essays thus: “Of man’s great ignorance of the uses of natural things; or, that there is no one thing in nature whereof the uses to human life are yet thoroughly understood.” Much advance has been made in the knowledge of physical nature since Boyle’s day, but the title to his essay is still suited to all physical treatises. “What in fact,” says Frederick Schlegel (Philosophy of Life, lect. 4), “is all our knowledge of nature considered as a whole, and in its inmost essence, but a mere speculative conjecture and guess upon guess? What is it but an endless series of tentative experiments by which we are continually hoping to succeed in unveiling the secret of life, to seize the wonderful Proteus and to hold him fast in the chains of science?”
There is as much reason for asserting that man’s conception of matter is merely negative because there is an unsolved mystery in it as there is for asserting the same respecting spirit and the supernatural. Perfect definitions are as difficult in one case as in the other. It is no easier to define time than to define eternity. “I know what time is,” said Augustine, “when you do not ask me.” That is to say, he had an intuitive notion of time that is trustworthy and valid, but not clear of all obscurity and which he found it difficult to enunciate. The same is true of the definition of space. Is it a real object? Or only a form of thought, a scheme under which the understanding masses and unifies phenomena? If by a positive conception be meant a cognition that is in accordance with the real nature of the object so far as the cognition extends, if the term positive be understood to refer to the quality not the quantity of the knowledge; then man’s knowledge of the infinite or of spirit is no more a negation than this knowledge of the finite or of matter. But it is the quality not the quantity of an idea or a cognition that determines its validity and trustworthiness, that is, its conformity to the real nature of the object. Man’s knowledge of God is like his knowledge of the ocean. He does not perfectly comprehend the ocean, but this does not render what knowledge he has of the ocean a merely negative knowledge. Says Cudworth (Intellectual System 1.5): When we affirm that God is incomprehensible, our meaning is only this, that our imperfect minds cannot have such a conception of his nature as does perfectly master, conquer, and subdue that vast object under it; or at least is so fully adequate and commensurate to the same, as that it does every way match and equalize it. Now, it does not at all follow from hence, because God is thus incomprehensible to our finite and narrow understandings, he is utterly inconceivable [unthinkable] by them, so that they cannot frame any idea at all of him, and he may therefore be concluded to be a nonentity. For it is certain that we cannot fully comprehend ourselves and that we cannot have such an adequate and comprehensive knowledge of the essence of any substantial thing, as that we can perfectly master and conquer it. Though we cannot fully comprehend the deity nor exhaust the infiniteness of his perfection, yet we may have an idea or conception of a being absolutely perfect; as we may approach near a mountain and touch it with our hands, though we cannot encompass it all round and enclasp it in our arms. Whatsoever is in its own nature absolutely inconceivable is nothing; but not whatsoever is not fully comprehensible by our imperfect understanding. But while the deity is in one sense the most mysterious of all objects of knowledge, in another sense he is the most luminous. No idea so impresses universal man as the idea of God. Neither space nor time, neither matter nor mind, neither life nor death, not sun, moon or stars, so influence the immediate consciousness of man in every clime, and in all his generations, as does that presence that in Wordsworth’s phrase “is not to be put by.” This idea of ideas overhangs human existence like the firmament, and though clouds and darkness obscure it in many zones, while in others it is crystalline and clear, all human beings must live beneath it and cannot possibly get from under its all-embracing arch. The very denial of divine existence evinces by its eagerness and effort the firmness with which the idea of God is entrenched in man’s constitution. A chimera or a nonentity would never evoke such a passionate antagonism as is expressed in the reasonings of atheism. Were there no God, absolute indifference toward the notion would be the mood of all mankind, and no arguments either for or against it would be constructed. In this reference, the striking remark of Cudworth (Intellectual System 1.5) applies:
It is indeed true, that the deity is more incomprehensible to us than anything else whatever; which proceeds from the fullness of his being and perfection, and from the transcendency of his brightness; but for this very same reason may it be said also, in some sense, that he is more knowable and conceivable than anything else. As the sun, though by reason of its excessive splendor it dazzle our weak sight, yet is notwithstanding far more visible, also, than any of the nebulosae stellae, the small misty stars. Where there is more light there is more visibility; so where there is more entity, reality, and perfection, there is more conceptibility and cognoscibility; such an object filling up the mind more, and acting more strongly upon it. Nevertheless, because our weak and imperfect minds are lost in the vast immensity and redundancy of the deity, and overcome with its transcendent light and dazzling brightness, therefore has it to us an appearance of darkness and incomprehensibility.
S U P P L E M E N T S
1.3.1 (see p. 51). One great difference between Christian and pagan ethics consists in the more searching and truthful estimate of human character made by the former. The sense of sin which is elicited by the Decalogue, as explained by the Sermon on the Mount, is far deeper than that produced by an ethics which omits the relations of man to God and is confined to those between man and man. A comparison of the two will demonstrate this. St. Paul says: “The law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwells no good thing; for to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not. I see a law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:14-24). Says Augustine (Confessions 9.1; 10.2, 36): “Who am I, and what man am I? Rather what evil have I not been, either in my deeds or if not in my deeds in my words or if not in my words in my will? But you, O Lord, are good and merciful, and your right hand had respect unto the depth of my death, and from the bottom of my heart emptied that abyss of corruption. From you, O Lord, unto whose eyes the abyss of man’s conscience is naked, what could be hidden in me even though I would not confess it? I might hide you from me, not me from you. By these temptations we are assailed daily, O Lord; without ceasing, we are assailed. And in this way, you command us self-denial. Give what you enjoin, and enjoin what you will. You know on this matter the groans of my heart and the floods of my eyes. For I cannot learn how far I am cleansed from this plague, and I much fear my secret sins, which your eyes know, mine do not.” Says Richard Baxter (Dying Thoughts): “O you that freely gave me your grace, maintain it to the last against its enemies, and make it finally victorious. O let it not fail and be conquered by blind and base carnality or by the temptations of a hellish enemy; without it I had lived as a beast, and without it I should die more miserably than a beast. My God, I have often sinned against you; but yet you know I would fain be yours. I have not served you with the resolution, fidelity, and delight as such a master should have been served, but yet I would not forsake your service nor change my master or my work. I have not loved you as infinite goodness, and love itself and fatherly bounty should have been loved, but yet I would not forsake your family. Forsake not, then, a sinner that would not forsake you, that looks every hour toward you, that feels it as a piece of hell to be so dark and strange unto you.” Says Leighton (on Psalms 130:1-8): “ ‘If you, Lord, should mark iniquity, O Lord, who could stand?’ An uninstructed and incautious reader might perhaps imagine that the psalmist was here seeking for refuge in a crowd and desirous of sheltering himself under the common lot of human nature; at least, that he would endeavor to find some low excuse for himself in the mention of its universal degeneracy. But the design of the sacred writer is far different from this. He confesses that whatever he or any other person, on a transient and inattentive glance, may imagine of his innocency, yet when the eye of the mind is directed inward in a serious and fixed manner, then he sees the sum and bulk of his sins to be so immensely great that he is even struck with astonishment by it; so that he finds himself beset as it were on every side with armed troops which cut off all possibility of escape otherwise than by flying to the divine mercy and to the freedom of pardoning grace. He perceives himself unable to bear the examination of an awakened conscience exercising itself in impartial self-reflection; and arguing from thence how much less he would be able to endure the penetrating eye and strict scrutiny of divine justice, he cries out as it were, in horror and trembling, under an apprehension of it, ‘If you, Lord, should mark iniquity, O Lord, who could stand?’ It cannot be doubted that they who daily and accurately survey themselves and their own hearts, though they may indeed escape many of those evils which the generality of mankind who live as it were by chance fall into, yet in consequence of that very care and study see so much the more clearly their own impurity and contract a greater abhorrence of themselves and a more reverent dread of divine judgments. It is certain that the holier and more spiritual anyone is the viler he is in his own eyes.” The pagan estimate of human character is found in the ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle, neither of whom expresses any sense of personal guilt and corruption like that contained in the above extracts from Christian writers, though they acknowledge their own failure to attain the philosopher’s ideal and condemn the crimes of the openly vicious and denounce the judgments of the gods upon them. They describe man as ideal, rather than actual. Aristotle defines the virtuous man as self-sufficient (autarkes),25[Note: 5 25. αὔταρκες] having resources within himself for right action and happiness: “We attribute self-sufficiency to him who lives for his parents and children and wife and for his friends and fellow citizens. The proper work of man is an energy of the soul according to reason. The goodness which we are in search of will exist in the happy man, for he will live in the practice of virtuous actions, will bear the accidents of fortune nobly, and in every case as a man truly good, a faultless cube. The virtues are produced in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but we are naturally adapted to attain them, and this natural capacity is perfected by habit. By performing good actions in our intercourse with men we become just” (Ethics 1.7; 2.1).
Plato (Republic 1.330-31) distinguishes between the vicious who fear the punishments of the future world and the virtuous who do not: “When a man thinks himself to be near death, he has fears which never entered his mind before; the tales of a life below, and the punishment which is exacted there for deeds done here were a laughing matter to him once, but now he is haunted with the thought that they may be true. Either because of the feebleness of age or from the nearness of the prospect, he seems to have a clearer view of the other world; suspicions and alarms crowd upon him, and he begins to reckon up in his own mind what wrongs he had done to others, and when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great, he is filled with dark forebodings. But he who is conscious of no sin has in old age a sweet hope which, as Pindar says, is a kind of nurse to him: ‘Hope cherishes the soul of him who lives in holiness and righteousness and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his journey.’ ” Plutarch (Pyrrhus and Marius) borrows and endorses the sentiments of Plato: “The avenging Fury began to punish Marius in this life and call him to a severe account for all the blood he had spilt. So true is what Plato says that the impious and wicked at the approach of death begin to fear everything of which they had made a mock before. Then does dread and distrust seize them, remorse torments them, and their only companion is despair. Whereas that person who can reproach himself for nothing and who has spent his life in innocency is always full of hope, which Pindar calls the tender nurse of old men. ‘They,’ says he, ‘who have walked in the ways of purity and justice are always possessed of that comfortable hope which is the tender nurse of age.’ For it is an incontestable truth that a happy old age is a crown of glory and is nowhere to be found but in the paths of justice.” The moral treatises of Cicero are remarkably devoid of the sense of personal sin and demerit and are equally remarkable for their comparatively good ethics. Though subject to the doubts incident to natural religion, yet, in the main, Cicero defends with an eloquence and positiveness not exceeded by any pagan writer the doctrines of divine existence, immortality and spirituality of the soul, freedom of the will, providence as against fate, and of future reward and punishment; and his denunciation of vice and wickedness is earnest and vehement. But the virtuous man, he teaches, has nothing to fear in this life or the next from the divine tribunal. At the close of his treatise On Old Age he gives glowing expression to his feelings at the prospect of death. “I am not disposed to lament the loss of life, as many men, and those learned men, too, have done; neither do I regret that I have lived, since I have lived in such a way that I conceive I was not born in vain; and from this life I depart as from a temporary home. For nature has assigned it to us as an inn to sojourn in, not a place of habitation. Oh, glorious day! when I shall depart to that divine company and assemblage of spirits and quit this troubled and polluted scene. For I shall go not only to those great men of whom I have spoken before, but also to my son Cato, than whom never was better man born nor more distinguished for pious affection. If I am wrong in this, that I believe the souls of men to be immortal, I willingly delude myself; nor do I desire this mistake in which I take pleasure should be wrested from me as long as I live; but if I when dead shall have no consciousness, as some narrow-minded philosophers imagine, I do not fear lest dead philosophers should ridicule this my delusion. Even if we are not destined to be immortal, yet it is a desirable thing for a man to expire at his fit time. For as nature prescribes a boundary to all other things, so does she also to life. Now old age is the consummation of life, just as of a play, from the fatigue of which we ought to escape, especially when satiety is superadded.” Two thousand years later, from the plane of deism and natural religion, Hume (Essay 1.16) presents the same general view of human virtue and the future state: “Glory is the portion of virtue, the sweet reward of honorable toils, the triumphant crown which covers the thoughtful head of the disinterested patriot or the dusty brow of the victorious warrior. Elevated by so sublime a prize the man of virtue looks down with contempt on all the allurements of pleasure and all the menaces of danger. Death itself loses its terrors when he considers that its dominion extends only over a part of him and that in spite of death and time he is assured of an immortal fame among all the sons of men. There surely is a being who presides over the universe and who with infinite wisdom and power has reduced the jarring elements into just order and proportion. Let speculative reasoners dispute how far this beneficent being extends his care and whether he prolongs our existence beyond the grave in order to bestow on virtue its just reward and render it fully triumphant. The man of morals, without deciding anything on so dubious a subject, is satisfied with the portion marked out to him by the supreme Disposer of all things. Gratefully he accepts that further reward prepared for him; but, if disappointed, he thinks not virtue an empty name, but justly esteeming it its own reward he gratefully acknowledges the bounty of his Creator, who by calling him into existence has thereby afforded him an opportunity of once acquiring so invaluable a possession.” The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius contain this view of human self-sufficiency and virtue in an extreme form. Though often represented as teaching an excellent morality, they are defective in the highest degree: (1) because the Stoic doctrine of fate is the foundation of the ethics and (2) because of the egotism and pride which pervade them. These two characteristics place the ethics of Antoninus upon a lower level than that of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, who combat the doctrine of fate and assert free will, and do not claim for human nature such an exorbitant grade of moral excellence. The following extracts from Casaubon’s translation evince this. The doctrine of fate is taught in these terms: “The nature of the universe has prescribed unto this man sickness or blindness or some loss or damage or some such thing. Whatsoever does happen to any is ordained unto him as a thing subordinate unto the fates. Nothing shall happen unto you which is not according to the nature of the universe. All that I consist of is either form or matter. No corruption can reduce either of these to nothing; for neither did I of nothing become a subsistent creature. Every part of me, then, will by mutation be disposed into a certain part of the whole world; and that in time into another part; and so in infinitum; by which kind of mutation I also became what I am, and so did they that fathered me, and they before them, and so upward in infinitum. Consider how swiftly all things that subsist and all things that are done in the world are carried away and conveyed out of sight. For both the substances themselves as a flood are in continual flux, and all actions in a perpetual change; and the causes themselves subject to a thousand alterations; neither is there anything that may be said to be settled and constant. Next unto this and which follows upon it, consider both the infiniteness of the time already passed and the immense vastness of that which is to come wherein all things are to be resolved and annihilated. Are you not then a very fool who for these things are either puffed up with pride or distracted with cares or can find in your heart to make such moans as for a thing that would trouble you for a very long time? Consider the whole universe whereof you are but a very little part and the whole age of the world together whereof but a short and momentary portion is allotted unto you and all the fates and destinies together. All substances come soon to their change, and either they shall be resolved by way of exhalation, if so be that all things shall be reunited into one substance, or shall be scattered and dispersed. As for that rational essence by which all things are governed, it best understand itself both its own disposition and what it does and what matter it has to do with. Let this be your only comfort from one action to pass into another, God [i.e., nature] being ever in your mind. All things come to pass according to the nature and general condition of the universe, and within a very little while all things will be at an end; no man will be remembered” (5.8, 10, 13, 19; 6.4-6; 8.4). That man’s duty and virtue consist in submitting his will to the nature of the universe and to fate is taught in these terms: “The matter itself of which the universe does consist is very tractable and pliable. That rational essence that does govern it has in itself no cause to do anything that is evil; neither can anything be hurt by it; and all things are done and determined according to its will and command. Be it all one to you, therefore, whether half frozen or well warm, whether only slumbering or after a full sleep, whether discommended or commended for doing your duty, or whether dying or doing something else: for dying must be reckoned as one of the duties and actions of our lives. Even then also must it suffice you that you do well acquit yourself of that duty of dying. Let not things future trouble you. For if necessity so require that they come to pass, you shall be prepared for them by the same reason by which whatsoever is now present is made both tolerable and acceptable unto you. All things are linked and knit together, and the knot is sacred, neither is there anything in the world that is not kind and natural in regard to any other thing. For all things are ranked together, and by that decency of its due place and order that each particular does observe, they all concur together to the making of one and the same cosmos or orderly composition. Through all things there is one and the same God, the same substance, the same law. There is one common reason, the one common truth that belong unto all reasonable creatures; for neither is there more than one perfection of all creatures that are homogeneous and partakers of the same reason. To a reasonable creature the same action is both according to nature and according to reason. As several members in our body are united, so are reasonable creatures in one body divided and dispersed, all made and prepared for one common operation. And this you shall apprehend the better if you use yourself often to say to yourself: I am a member (melos)26[Note: 6 26. μέλος] of the mass and body of reasonable substance. Through this substance of the universe, as through a torrent, pass all particular bodies, being all of the same nature and all joint workers with the universe itself; as in one of our bodies so many members cowork among themselves. How many such as Chrysippus, how many such as Socrates, how many such as Epictetus has the age of the world long since swallowed up and devoured. Let this come into your mind upon every occasion, be it either of men or business, that you have to do work. Of all my thoughts and cares one only shall be the object: that I myself do nothing which is contrary to the constitution of man. The time when I shall have forgotten all things is at hand; and the time also is at hand when I myself shall be forgotten. Upon every action that you are about put this question to yourself: How will this, when it is done, agree with me? Shall I have no occasion to repent of it? Yet a very little while, and I am dead and gone, and all things are at an end. What then do I care for more than this, that my present action may be the proper action of one that is reasonable; whose end is the common good; who in all things is ruled and governed by the same law by which God himself is?” (6.1.2; 7.6, 8, 10, 16; 8.2). The self-sufficiency of man is taught in these terms: “The time of a man’s life is as a point; the substance of it is ever flowing, and the whole composition of the body tending to corruption. His soul is restless, fortune uncertain, and fame doubtful; in brief, as a stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream or a smoke so are all things that belong unto the soul. Fame after life is no better than oblivion. What is it, then, that will remain and support? Only one thing, philosophy. And philosophy consists in this: For a man to preserve that spirit which is within him from all manner of contumelies and injuries and, above all, pains and pleasures; never to do anything either rashly or feignedly or hypocritically; wholly to depend upon himself and his own proper actions; to embrace contentedly all things that happen unto him, as coming from him from whom he himself also came; and above all things, with meekness and a calm cheerfulness to expect death, as being nothing but the resolution of those elements of which every creature is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by this their perpetual conversion of one into another, why should that dissolution, which is common to all, be feared by any? Is it not thus according to nature? But nothing that is according to nature can be evil. He lives with the gods who at all times affords unto them the spectacle of a soul both contented and well pleased with whatsoever is allotted unto her and performing whatsoever is pleasing to that spirit whom, being part of himself, love has appointed to every man as his overseer and governor: which is, every man’s intellect and reason. Let not this chief commanding part of your soul be ever subject to any variation through any corporal pain or pleasure, but let it both circumscribe itself and confine those affections to their own proper parts and members. But if at any time they do reflect and rebound upon the mind and understanding, as in a united and compacted body it must needs be, then must you not go about to resist sense and feeling, it being natural and necessary. How ridiculous and strange is he that wonders at anything that happens in this life in the ordinary course of nature! Either there is fate and an absolute necessity and an unavoidable decree; or a placable and flexible providence; or a universe of mere casual confusion, void of all order and government. If an absolute and unavoidable necessity, why do you resist? If a placable and exorable providence, make yourself worthy of divine help and assistance. If all be a mere confusion without any governor, then have you reason to congratulate yourself that in such a flood of confusion you yourself have obtained a reasonable faculty whereby you may govern your own life and actions” (2.15; 5.20-21; 12.10-11). The difference between these two estimates of human character, as has been remarked, is owing to the difference between the two standards. Christian ethics places the relation of man to God in the forefront and tests him by his feelings and actions toward the Supreme Being. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” is the first and great commandment. It then passes to the relations of man to his fellowmen: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Tried by these two commandments human nature finds itself to be deeply defective and corrupt. Pagan ethics omits the first test. Its virtue does not consist in the love and service of God, but in outward fidelity to the family, society, and the state. If a man is free from vice and reputably discharges his domestic, social, and civil duties, he is free from fault and entitled to the rewards of loyal obedience. The Stoic philosophy was the source and support of this view of human nature and human virtue, and Milton (Paradise Regained 4.300-321) puts the following description of it into the mouth of Christ, in his reply to the suggestions of Satan: The Stoic last in philosophic pride, By him called virtue; and his virtuous man, Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer, As fearing God nor man, contemning all Wealth, pleasure, pain, or torment, death and life, Which when he lists, he leaves; or boasts he can, For all his tedious talk is but vain boast, Or subtle shifts conviction to evade.
Alas, what can they teach, and not mislead!
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, And how the world began, and how man fell Degraded by himself, on grace depending?
Much of the soul they talk, but all awry, And in themselves seek virtue, and to themselves All glory arrogate, to God give none;
Rather accuse him under usual names, Fortune and fate, as one regardless quite Of mortal things. Who therefore seeks in these True wisdom, finds her not; or by delusion Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, An empty cloud.
1.3.2 (see p. 58). Respecting the inferiority and unimportance of knowledge in physics compared with knowledge in morals and religion, Johnson (Life of Milton) remarks as follows: “The knowledge of external nature and of the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes is not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Physical learning is of such rare emergence that one may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostatics or astronomy; but his moral and prudential character immediately appears.”
Augustine (Enchiridion 9) notices the same fact: “When the question is asked what we are to believe in regard to religion, it is not necessary to probe into the nature of material things, as was done by those whom the Greeks call physici; nor need we be in alarm lest the Christian should be ignorant of the force and number of the elements; the motion and order and eclipses of the heavenly bodies; the form of the heavens; the species and natures of animals, plants, stones, fountains, rivers, mountains; about chronology and distances; the signs of coming storms; and a thousand other things which those philosophers either have found out or think they have found out. For even these men themselves, endowed though they are with so much genius, burning with zeal, abounding in leisure, tracking some things by the aid of human conjecture, searching into others with the aids of history and experience, have not found out all things; and even their boasted discoveries are oftener mere guesses than certain knowledge. It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator, the one true God; and that nothing exists that does not derive its existence from him; and that he is the Trinity; to wit, the Father, and the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the same Father, but one and the same Spirit of Father and Son.” In the same vein Guizot (History of Civilization, lect. 4) remarks: “Moral sciences nowadays are accused of a want of exactitude, of perspicuity, of certainty; they are reproached as not being sciences. They should, they may be sciences, just the same as physical sciences; for they also are occupied with facts. Moral facts are not less real than others; man has not invented them; he discovered and named them; he takes note of them every moment of his life; he studies them as he studies all that surrounds him, all that comes to his intelligence by the senses. Moral sciences have, if the expression be allowed, the same matter of fact as other sciences; they are, then, not by any means condemned by their nature to be less precise or less certain. It is more difficult, I grant, for them to arrive at exactitude, perspicuity, precision. Moral facts are, on the one hand, more extended and more exact and, on the other, more profoundly concealed than physical facts; they are at once more complex in their development and more simple in their origin. Hence arises a much greater difficulty of observing them, classifying them, and reducing them to a science. This is the true source of the reproaches of which the moral sciences have often been the subject. Mark their singular fate: they are evidently the first upon which the human race occupied itself; when we go back to the cradle of societies we everywhere encounter moral facts, which, under the cloak of religion or of poetry, attracted the attention and excited the thought of men. And yet in order to succeed in thoroughly knowing them, scientifically knowing them, all the skill, all the penetration, and all the prudence of the most practiced reason is necessary. Such, therefore, is the nature of the moral sciences that they are at once the first and the last in the chronological order; the first, the necessity of which works upon the human mind; the last, that it succeeds in elevating to the precision, clearness, and certainty, which is the scientific characteristic.”
Plato (Phaedo 96-99) represents Socrates as asserting the inferiority of physical to moral science: “When I was young, Cebes, I had a prodigious desire to know that department of philosophy which is called natural science (physeōs historian);27[Note: 7 27. φύσεως ἱστορίαν] this appeared to me to have lofty aims, as being the science which has to do with the causes of things and which teaches why a thing is and is created and destroyed; and I was always agitating myself with the consideration of such questions as these: Is the growth of animals the result of some decay which the hot and cold principle contract, as some have said? Is the blood the element with which we think, or the air or the fire? or perhaps nothing of this sort, but the brain may be the originating power of the perceptions of hearing and sight and smell, and memory and opinion may come from them [thought is cerebration], and science may be based on memory and opinion when no longer in motion but at rest. And then I went on to examine the decay of them and then to the things of heaven and earth, and at last I concluded that I was wholly incapable of these inquiries. For I was fascinated by them to such a degree that my eyes grew blind to things that I had seemed to myself, and also to others, to know quite well; and I forgot what I had before thought to be self-evident. Then I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was quite delighted at the notion of this which appeared admirable. I seized the book and read it as fast as I could. But, as I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order and having recourse to air and ether and water and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which unite them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture; and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound and air and hearing, and he would assign a multitude of causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia-by the dog of Egypt they would, if they had been guided only by their own idea of what is best and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body, I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition.”
Varro, in Cicero’s Academic Questions 1.4, declares that “Socrates called philosophy away from the obscure subjects with which previous philosophers had been occupied and brought it down to practical common life, namely, to the consideration of virtue and vice, good and evil; being of the opinion that questions in physics (caelestia)28[Note: 8 28. heavenly bodies (as in astronomy)] are difficult to be known, and if known contribute nothing to right living.” In periods noted for excessive attention to physical science the higher and finer products of literature decline. Originality and creative power in these provinces disappear, owing to the materializing influence of physical studies and observations, and only ephemeral composition is produced. The last decades of the nineteenth century, when standard treatises are displaced by periodicals and fiction, are an example.
1.3.3 (see p. 59). The necessity of postulating the agency of a personal will in the origination and control of the impersonal forces of matter is shown by a writer in the Foreign Quarterly Review 3 on Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics. After remarking that the mathematical investigations of Newton, Clairaut, d’Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace demonstrate the stability of the solar system, he says: “The conditions which assure its stability and exclude all access to confusion are the three following: First, that the eccentricities of the orbits are inconsiderable and their variations confined to very narrow limits. Second, that all the planets, primary and secondary, move in the same direction. Third, that the inclinations of their orbits to the plane of the ecliptic are very small. These conditions are not necessary consequences of gravitation or of mechanical motion; of their prime causes, however, we are entirely ignorant and probably will ever remain so: some barrier will always be interposed between the curiosity of man and omniscience. They cannot for a moment be admitted to result from chance; for on comparing, by means of calculus of probabilities, the unique combination on which they depend with all the other combinations possible, it is found that there is almost infinity to wager against one, that the arrangement of the system is the effect of a special cause.” The origination of curvilinear motion requires the agency of a power higher than that of matter because it cannot be produced by the forces inherent in matter. The curvilinear motion of a planet around its central sun requires two motions in order to account for it, namely, a centripetal motion and a tangential. If the earth obtains a tangential motion which causes it to move away into space, while at the same time it has a pull toward its solar center, the result will be a circular movement. The force of gravitation will give the latter, but not the former. None of the forces of attraction inherent in matter are tangential. They are all centripetal. There must, therefore, be a tangential impulse given ab extra29[Note: 9 29. from the outside] if there is to be the movement of a body in an orbit. And this tangential impulse can come only from the Creator of matter, by an exertion of will similar to that by which a man gives a tangential or lateral impulse to a stone that is falling in a perpendicular line by the force of gravity. Were there only the centripetal force of attraction, every planetary mass would merely be pulled into its sun and remain there. The orbital motion cannot therefore be explained by the force of attraction between particles of matter. The writer of the article “Mechanics” in the Penny Cyclopaedia describes Newton as postulating a tangential impulse along with the centripetal attraction in his Principia: “The Principia commences with the three well-known laws of motion. Assuming, then, as a hypothesis that all the bodies of the universe and all the particles of every body exert on each other mutual attractions; assuming also that the planetary bodies were originally put in motion [tangentially] by impulsive forces; the rotations of these bodies on their axes, their revolutions in their orbits, and all the perturbations by which these movements are varied are explained by means of the elementary theorem for the composition and resolution of motions.” According to this, the rotary motion of the earth on its axis is the resultant of two motions, only one of which can be explained by the attraction of gravitation; and so also is its orbital motion. There are two assumptions, namely, that of the inherent attraction of matter and that of an impulsive force. But inherent attraction has no impulse and cannot impart one. And this is not all. For the tangential force requisite to curvilinear motion that proceeds from a personal will requires to be perpetuated by the same will that originated it, because of the resistance and impeding by the ether in which the planet moves. If not continually reinforced by the Prime Mover, it will cease. Not only, therefore, must the first tangential impulse be imparted, but it must be perpetuated by the author of it.
“The doctrine of a resisting medium,” says Whewell (Astronomy and General Physics 2.8), “leads us toward a point which the nebular hypothesis assumes: a beginning of the present order of things. There must have been a commencement of the motions now going on in the solar system. Since these motions, when once begun, would be deranged and destroyed in a period which, however large, is yet finite, it is obvious we cannot carry their origin indefinitely backward in the range of past duration. There is a period in which these revolutions, whenever they had begun, would have brought the revolving bodies into contact with the central mass; and this period has in our system not yet elapsed. The watch is still going, and therefore, it must have been wound up within a limited time. The solar system, at this its beginning, must have been arranged and put in motion by some cause. If we suppose this cause to operate by means of the configurations and the properties of previously existing matter, these configurations must have resulted from some still previous cause, these properties must have produced some previous effects. We are thus led to a condition still earlier than the assumed beginning-to an origin of the original state of the universe-and in this manner we are carried perpetually further and further back, through a labyrinth of mechanical causation, without any possibility of finding anything in which the mind can acquiesce or rest, till we admit a first cause which is not mechanical [but voluntary].”
Whewell (Astronomy and General Physics 1.18) continues his argument as follows: “It has been shown in the preceding chapters that a great number of quantities and laws appear to have been selected in the construction of the universe and that by the adjustment to each other of the magnitudes and laws thus selected the constitution of the world is what we find it and is fitted for the support of vegetables and animals in a manner in which it could not have been if the properties and quantities of the elements had been different from what they now are. We shall here recapitulate the principal of the laws and magnitudes to which this conclusion has been shown to apply:
1. the length of the year, which depends on the force of the attraction of the sun and its distance from the earth 2. the length of the day 3. the mass of the earth, which depends on its magnitude and density 4. the magnitude of the ocean 5. the magnitude of the atmosphere 6. the law and rate of the conducting power of the earth 7. the law and rate of the radiating power of the earth 8. the law and rate of the expansion of water by heat 9. the law and rate of the expansion of water by cold below forty degrees 10. the law and quantity of the expansion of water in freezing 11. the quantity of latent heat absorbed in thawing 12. the quantity of latent heat absorbed in evaporation 13. the law and rate of evaporation with regard to heat 14. the law and rate of the expansion of air by heat 15. the quantity of heat absorbed in the expansion of air 16. the law and rate of the passage of aqueous vapor through air 17. the laws of electricity; its relations to air and moisture 18. the fluidity, density, and elasticity of the air, by means of which its vibrations produce sound 19. the fluidity, density, and elasticity of the ether, by means of which its vibrations produce light
“These are the data, the elements, as astronomers call the quantities which determine a planet’s orbit, on which the mere inorganic part of the universe is constructed. To these the constitution of the organic world is adapted in innumerable points by laws of which we can trace the results though we cannot analyze their machinery. Thus the vital functions of vegetables have periods which correspond to the length of the year and of the day; their vital powers have forces which correspond to the force of gravity; the sentient faculties of man are such that the vibrations of air, within certain limits, are perceived as sound, those of ether as light. And while we are enumerating these correspondences we perceive that there are thousands of others, and that we can only select but a very small number of those where the relation happens to be most clearly made out or most easily explained.
“Now, in the list of the mathematical elements of the universe which has just been given, why have we such laws and such quantities as occur and no other? For the most part the data there enumerated are independent of each other and might be altered separately, so far as the mechanical conditions of the case are concerned. Some of these data probably depend on each other. Thus the latent heat of aqueous vapor is perhaps connected with the difference of the rate of expansion of water and of steam. But all natural philosophers will probably agree that there must be in this list a great number of things entirely without mutual dependence-such as the year and the day, the expansion of air and the expansion of steam. There are, therefore, it appears, a number of things which in the structure of the world might have been otherwise and which are what they are in consequence of choice or else of chance. We have already seen, in many of the cases separately, how unlike chance everything looks-that substances which might have existed anyhow, so far as they themselves alone are concerned, exist exactly in such a manner and measure as they should to secure the welfare of other things; that the laws are tempered and fitted together in the only way in which the world could have gone on, according to all that we can conceive of it. This must, therefore, be the work of choice; and if so, it cannot be doubted, of a most wise and benevolent chooser.
“The appearance of choice is still further illustrated by the variety as well as the number of the laws selected. The laws are unlike one another. Steam certainly expands at a very different rate from air by the application of heat and probably according to a different law; water expands in freezing, but mercury contracts; heat travels in a manner quite different through solids and through fluids. Every separate substance has its own density, gravity, cohesion, elasticity, its relations to heat, to electricity, to magnetism, besides all its chemical affinities, which form an endless throng of laws connecting every one substance in creation with every other, and different for each pair, however taken. Nothing can look less like a world formed of atoms operating upon each other, according to some universal and inevitable laws, than this does; if such a system of things be conceivable, it cannot be our system. We have, it may be, fifty simple substances in the world; each of which is invested with properties and both chemical and mechanical action, altogether different from those of any other substance. Each portion, however minute, of any of these possesses all the properties of the substance. Of each of these substances there is a certain definite and fixed quantity in the universe; when combined their compounds exhibit new chemical affinities, new mechanical laws. Who gave these different properties to the different simple substances? Who proportioned the quantity of each? But suppose this done. Suppose these simple primary substances in existence, in contact, in due proportion to each other. Is this a world, or at least our world? No more than the mine and the forest are the ship of war or the factory. These elements with their constitution perfect are still a mere chaos. They must be put in their places. They must not be where their own properties would place them. They must be made to assume a particular arrangement, or we can have no regular and permanent course of nature. This arrangement must again have additional peculiarities, or we can have no organic portion of the world. The millions of millions of particles which the world contains must be finished up in as complete a manner and fitted into their places with as much nicety as the most delicate wheel or spring in a piece of human machinery. What are the habits of thought to which it can appear possible that this could take place without design, intention, intelligence, purpose, knowledge?
“In what has thus far been said we have spoken only of the constitution of the inorganic part of the universe. The mechanism, if we may so call it, of vegetable and animal life is so far beyond our comprehension that, although some of the same observations might be applied to it, we do not dwell upon the subject. We know that in these processes, also, the mechanical and chemical properties of matter are necessary; but we know, too, that these alone will not account for the phenomena of life. There is something more than these. The lowest stage of vitality and irritability appears to carry us beyond mechanism, beyond chemical affinity. All that has been said with regard to the exactness of the adjustments, the combination of the various means, the tendency to continuance, to preservation, is applicable with additional force to the organic creation, so far as we can perceive the means employed.”
1.3.4 (see p. 64). Sensible objects may be differently conceived of at the same moment; but moral and spiritual objects cannot be. A man may have simultaneously two diverse ideas of the sun: one from the senses and one from the mind. The first makes the sun a small body-as large as a cartwheel. The last makes it an immense body-eight hundred thousand miles in diameter. The first is the idea of the savage; the last is that of the astronomer. But a man cannot have two such diverse ideas of God simultaneously. If he conceives that God is a wooden idol, he must renounce this idea in order to conceive of God as a spirit. He cannot conceive of God as related to both the senses and the mind; as being both an idol and a spirit. But if he conceives of the sun as being as large as a cartwheel for the senses, it is not necessary that he should renounce the idea that it is eight hundred thousand miles in diameter for the mind.
1.3.5 (see p. 68). The following are some of the great discoveries in physics which have been made by believers in Christianity: the heliocentric theory by Copernicus, the laws of planetary motion by Kepler, the law of gravitation by Newton, the sexual system in botany and the classification of the vegetable and animal systems by Linnaeus, the circulation of the blood by Harvey, the identity of fixed alkalies and metallic oxides by Davy, magneto-electric induction and electrochemical decomposition by Faraday, and the distinction between the nerves of motion and sensation by Bell.