Chapter XXII: Explanations (4)

The first supposition, the self-existence of the universe, the author denies, not because the universe is manifestly contingent and must have had a beginning, and therefore a cause or creator; but because self-existence is absolutely inconceivable, an impossible idea. He says, p. 35: “The hypothesis of the creation of the universe by an external agency is quite useless; it commits us to an infinite series of such agencies, and then leaves us where it found us.” “Those who cannot conceive of the self-existence of the universe, and therefore assume a creator as the source of the universe, take it for granted that they can conceive a self-existent creator. The mystery of the great fact surrounding them on every side they transfer to an alleged source of this great fact, and then suppose they have solved the mystery. But they delude themselves, as was proved in the outset of the argument. _Self-existence_ is _rigorously inconceivable_, and this holds true whatever be the nature of the object [subject] of which it is predicated. Whoever argues that the atheistical hypothesis is untenable because it involves the impossible idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that the theistical hypothesis is untenable if it contains the same impossible idea.” But who ever argued that the atheistical hypothesis is untenable because it involves the idea of self-existence? Atheism is denied because it asserts the self-existence of that which cannot be, and is known not to be, self-existent.

But it is evident that the author rejects alike self-existence and creation; that the cosmos is self-existent, or that it is created by an independent, self-existent, and supercosmic creator. How, then, can he assert the existence of the cosmos, real or phenomenal, at all? The cosmos either exists or it does not. If it does not, that ends the matter. If it does, it must be either created or self-existent; for the author rejects an infinite series as absurd, and self-creation as only an absurd form of expressing self-existence. But as the author denies self-existence, whatever the subject of which it is predicated, and also the fact of creation, it follows rigorously, if he is right, that the cosmos does not exist. The author cannot take refuge in his favorite _nescio_, or say we do not know the origin of the cosmos, for he has positively denied it every possible origin, and therefore has by implication denied it all existence. A moment ago, we showed that he denied by implication all science or knowledge, and now we see 637 that, if held rigorously to his system as he explains it, he denies all existence, and, by implication at least, asserts absolute nihilism. Surely there is no occasion to apply to his new system of philosophy the _reductio ad absurdum_.

The author is necessarily led to the assertion that at least nothing is knowable by his doctrine, that all knowledge is relative. The Comtists restrict, in theory, all knowledge to sensible things, their mutual relations, dependencies, and the conditions and laws of their development and progress; but they at least admit that these may be objects of science and positively known. But our cosmic philosopher denies this, and asserts the relativity of all knowledge. We know and can know only the relative that is, only what is relative to the absolute, and relative to our own consciousness. In this he follows Sir William Hamilton, J. Stuart Mill, and the late Dr. Mansel, Anglican Dean of St. Paul’s. But relative knowledge is simply no knowledge, because in it nothing is known. The relative is not cognizable nor cogitable in and by itself, because it in and by itself, or prescinded from that to which it is relative, does not exist, and is simply nothing. What neither is nor exists is not cognizable nor cogitable. The relativity of all knowledge, then, is simply the denial of all knowledge. It is idle, then, for Mr. Spencer to talk of science. His science is only a laborious ignorance.

Mr. Spencer labors hard to prove the relativity of all knowledge. He either proves it or he does not. If he does not, he has no right to assert it; if he does, he disproves it at the same time. If the proof is not absolute, it does not prove it; if it is absolute, then it is not true that all knowledge is relative; for the proof must be absolutely known, or it cannot be alleged. We either know that all knowledge is relative, or we do not. If we do not, no more need be said; if we do know it, then it is false, because the knowledge of the relativity of knowledge is itself not relative. The assertion of the relativity of all knowledge, therefore, contradicts and refutes itself. No man can doubt that he doubts, or that doubt is doubt, and therefore universal doubt or universal scepticism is impossible, and not even assertable. The same argument applies to the pretence that all knowledge is relative.

The relativists are misled by their dealing with the abstract and not the concrete. They regard all that is or exists either as relative or absolute. But both absolute and relative are abstract conceptions, and formed by abstraction from the concrete intuitively presented or apprehended. They exist, as St. Thomas tells us, only _in mente, cum fundamento in re_. There are no abstractions in nature or the cosmos, and there is and can be neither abstract science nor science of abstractions, for abstractions, prescinded from their concretes, are simply nullities. The absolute is, we grant, unknowable, and so also is the relative, for neither has any existence in nature, or _a parte rei_. They are both generalizations, and nature never generalizes. Whatever exists, exists _in concreto_, not _in genere_. Hence, the _ens in genere_ of Rosmini is no _ens reale_, but simply _ens possibile_, like the _reine Seyn_ of Hegel, which is the equivalent of _das Nichtseyn_; for the possible is only the ability of the real.

Now, because the abstract absolute is unknowable, unthinkable even, it by no means follows that the concrete, real and necessary being, cannot be both thought and known, or that things cannot be both thought 638 and known in their relations to it, without reducing it to the category of the relative. Sir William Hamilton says the absolute is the unconditioned, and is incogitable, because our thought necessarily conditions it. This would be true if the absolute is an abstraction or mental conception, but is false and absurd if applied to real, necessary, infinite, and self-existent being, which, as independent of us and all relation, is and must be the same whether we think it or not. The thought does not impose its own conditions and limitations on the object; certainly not when the object is real and necessary being, and in every respect independent of it. We cannot, of course, think infinite being infinitely or adequately, but it does not follow that we cannot think it, though finitely and inadequately. The human mind, being finite, cannot comprehend infinite being; but, nevertheless, it may and does apprehend it, or else Mr. Spencer could not assert the Infinite Something, which he says we are compelled to admit underlies the cosmic phenomena and is manifested in them. The human mind can apprehend more than it can comprehend, and nothing that is apprehensible, though incomprehensible, is unthinkable or unknowable, except in Mr. Spencer’s _New System of Philosophy_.

Sir William Hamilton says, in defending the relativity of all knowledge: “Only relations are cogitable. Relation is cogitable only in correlation, and the relation between correlatives is reciprocal, each is relative to the other. Thought is dual, and embraces at once subject and object in their mutual opposition and limitation.” This merely begs the question. Besides, it is not true. Relations are themselves cogitable only in the related; correlatives connote each other, so that the one cannot be thought without thinking the other; but not therefore are all relations reciprocal, as the relation between phenomenon and noumenon, cause and effect, creator and creation. Here are two terms and a relation between them, but no reciprocity. When we think cause and effect, we do not think them as mutually opposing and limiting each other. The effect cannot oppose or limit the cause, or the creature the creator, for the creature depends on the creator and is nothing without his creative act, and the effect is nothing without the cause which produces and sustains it. The creature depends on the creator, but not the creator on the creature; the effect depends on the cause, but not the cause on the effect. There may, then, be relation without reciprocity.

It is true, Mr. Spencer denies creation, and relegates all causative power to the dark region of the unknowable, and calls the origin of the universe in the creative act of being or God “an hypothesis,” and rejects it with ill-concealed scorn; yet creation is not “an hypothesis,” but a scientific fact, and a necessary principle of all science. Without it the cosmos would not be cognizable, for it would have no dialectic constitution. It could not even be thought, for every thought is a judgment, and no judgment is possible where there is no copula that joins the predicate to the subject. Rejecting creation, the author cannot assert the relation of cause and effect; rejecting cause and effect, he cannot assert even the cosmic phenomena. They are not able to stand on their own bottom, and therefore not at all, unless the Something of which they are, as he says, manifestations, is a cause producing and sustaining them. We submit, then, that Mr. Spencer’s doctrine of the unknowable, and the 639 relativity of all knowledge, estops him from asserting anything as knowable, for it really denies all the knowable and all the real--_omne scibile et omne reale_.

The second part of Mr. Spencer’s work on “The Knowable” we might well omit, but as it is that in which he claims to be original, and in which he supposes he has made most valuable contributions to the philosophy of the cosmos, an omission to examine it might seem ungracious. Besides, the inventors of new systems of philosophy must not be held too rigidly to the logical consequences of their own doctrines, _non omnia possumus_. It is impossible for the founder to foresee all that his doctrine involves, and it is but fair, if he really has said anything new that is true, that it should be recognized, and he receive due credit for it, even if it is an anomaly in his general system of philosophy. We proceed, therefore, to consider Part II.

In this second part, the author professes to treat the knowable, not indeed in its several details, but in its first principles, or ultimate generalizations. The generalization of a group of phenomena is science; the generalization of the several groups of phenomena observable in the cosmos constitutes the several special sciences; and the combination of these special sciences into one higher and more comprehensive generalization, which embraces them all, is philosophy. In constructing philosophy, the author, be it observed, like the coral insect, begins below and works upward, and bases the universal on the particular.

The great point, or novelty, in this second part, however, is unquestionably, as the author claims, the doctrine of Evolution. By evolution, the author does not understand evolving or unfolding, as do ordinary mortals; but the aggregation or contraction and diffusion, according to certain laws which he has determined, of matter, motion, and force. Evolution consists, therefore, of two processes, contraction and diffusion, and is either simple or compound. Simple evolution is where concentration and diffusion follow each other alternately; compound evolution is where the two processes go on simultaneously in the same subject, which may be said to be growing and decaying, or living and dying, at one and the same time.

Minerals, plants, and animals, including man, are all formed by the evolution of matter, motion, and force. The elimination or loss of motion, mechanical, chemical, or electrical, is followed by the concentration of matter and force, which may assume the form of a pebble, a diamond, a nettle, a rose, an oak, a jelly-fish, a tadpole, a monkey, a man. Life is simply the product of “the mechanical, chemical, and electrical arrangement of particles of matter.” The concentration of motion is followed by a diffusion or dispersion of matter and force, and the disappearance of the several groups of phenomena we have just named; but as matter is indestructible, and as there is always the same quantity of motion and force, they disappear only to reappear in new groups or transformations. The diffusion of the mineral may be the birth of the plant; of the plant, the birth of the animal; of the ape, may be a new concentration which gives birth to man. Nothing is lost. The cosmos is a ceaseless evolution; is, so to speak, in a state of perpetual flux and reflux, in which diffusion of one group of phenomena is followed by the birth of another, in endless rotation, or life from death, and death from life. Dissolution 640 follows concentration “in eternal alternation,” or both go on together. This is not a new doctrine, but substantially the doctrine of a school of Greek philosophers, warred against both by Plato and Aristotle, that all things are in a state of ceaseless motion, of growth and decay, in which corruption proceeds from generation, and generation from corruption, in which death is born of life, and life is born of death. Our cosmic philosophers only repeat the long since exploded errors of the old cosmists. But pass over this.

The author is treating of the knowable. We ask him, then, how he contrives to know that there is any such evolution as he asserts? He assumes that matter, motion, and force are the constituent elements of the cosmos; but he can neither know it nor prove it, since he maintains that what matter is, or what motion is, or what force is, is unknown and unknowable. He denies the relation of cause and effect, or at least that it is cognizable; how, then, can he assert the cosmic phenomena are only concentrations and diffusions of matter, motion, and force? A certain elimination of motion and a corresponding concentration of matter and force produces the rose, another produces an ape, another produces a man, says the author of this new system of philosophy. Does he know that he is only a certain concentration of matter and force, resulting from a certain diffusion or loss of motion? Can he not only think, but prove it? But all proof, all demonstration, as all reasoning, nay, sensible intuition itself, depends on the principle of cause and effect; for, unless we can assert that the sensation within is _caused_ by some object without that affects the sensible organism, we can assert nothing outside of us, not even a phenomenon or external appearance. How does the author know, or can he know, that he differs from the ape only in the different combination of matter, motion, and force?

Mr. Spencer, in his work on _Biology_, asserts that life results from the mechanical, chemical, and electrical arrangement of the particles of matter. If this were so, it would, on the author’s own principles, explain nothing. It would be only saying that a certain group of phenomena is accompanied by another group, which we call life, but not that there is any causal relation between them. That the supposed arrangement of the particles of matter originates the life Mr. Spencer cannot assert without the intuition of cause and causes he either denies or banishes to the unknowable. Analytical chemistry resolves, we are told, the diamond into certain gases; but is synthetic chemistry able to recombine the gases so as to produce a diamond? Professor Huxley finds, he thinks, the physical basis of life in protoplasm. Protoplasm is not itself life, according to him, but its basis. How does he know, since he denies causality, that life is or can be developed from protoplasm? Protoplasm, chemically analyzed, is resolved into certain well-known gases; but it is admitted that synthetic chemistry is unable to recombine them and reproduce protoplasm. Evidently, as in the case of the diamond, there is in the production of protoplasm some element which even analytic chemistry fails to detect. No synthetic chemistry can obtain the protoplasm from protein, and there is no instance in which life, feeling, thought and reason, are known, or can be proved, to result from dead matter, or from any possible combinations of matter, motion, and force. If it could so result, the fact could not be proved, and would remain for 641 ever in the unknowable.

The new philosophy resolves all the cosmic phenomena into the concentration and diffusion of the unknowable elements called matter, motion, and force. The quantities of these elements remain always the same, but they are in a state of constant evolution, and all the cosmic phenomena result from this evolution, and are simply changes or transformations of the same force. Now, the evolution either has had a beginning or it has not. If it has not, we must assume an infinite series of evolutions, or concentrations and diffusions; but an infinite series is absurd, and the author himself denies it. Then it must have had a beginning; but no phenomenon can begin to exist without a cause independent of the phenomenon, or the _causatum_. But the author denies the cause in denying the origin of the cosmos in creation, or its production by a supercosmic creator. We are sadly at loss, then, to conceive how he contrives, consistently with his new system, to assert either the law of evolution, or even evolution itself. Will he tell us how he does it?

We need not follow the author through the alleged facts and illustrations by which he seeks to explain and sustain his system of evolution; because evolution is not assertable on his own principles, nor is it provable _aliunde_ by any possible deductions or inductions of science. So far from being science, it is not even an admissible hypothesis; because it contradicts and refutes itself. Mr. Spencer has attempted to construct a system of philosophy or explication of the cosmic phenomena, and the law of their production or transformation, without recurrence to any metaphysical principles, and from physical principles alone, or by the generalization of the physical phenomena as they appear to the human consciousness in space and time, and has necessarily failed; because the physical principles themselves, and consequently the physical phenomena, are inexplicable and inconceivable even, without the principles discarded as metaphysical. The author’s whole theory of evolution depends on the assumed fact of the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of motion, and the persistence of force, not one of which can be asserted without the ideal intuition of being, substance, and cause, all three metaphysical principles, and as such relegated by the author to the region of the unknowable. The indestructibility of matter can be deduced or induced from no possible observation of sensible phenomena. The continuity of motion or the persistence of force is no fact of consciousness. Mr. Spencer himself says, to science or the explication of phenomena, the present must be linked with the past and with the future, and hence he argues the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of motion, and the persistence of force; but not one of them is a fact of consciousness. Consciousness is the recognition of one’s self as subject in the present act of thought, and looks neither before nor after, takes cognizance neither of the past nor of the future, and consequently of no link connecting them with the present. Indestructibility, continuity, persistence, all of which imply cognitions of the past and future, are not and cannot be facts of consciousness, which is cognition only of the present. Matter and motion, the author says, are derivative, derived from force, which alone is primitive. The indestructibility of matter and the continuity of motion depend, then, solely on the persistence of force, and are apprehensible, therefore, only in apprehending that persistence; but 642 that persistence is not a fact of consciousness. How, then, can it be asserted, unless force is, and is apprehended as, a persistent substance? But substance is unknowable.

The author adopts the method of the physicists, the so-called inductive method, and proceeds from particular phenomena to induce by generalization their law; but no induction is valid that is not made by virtue of a general principle, which is not itself inferable from the phenomenal, and must be given and held by the mind before any induction is possible. This is the condemnation of the method of the physicists, for, from phenomena alone, only phenomena can be obtained. A method without principles is null, and leads only to nullity. The author does not understand that the reason why the cosmic phenomena are not cogitable without the assumption of the cosmic reality underlying them, is because the mind intuitively apprehends them as dependent on something which they are not, and at the same time, and in the same intellectual act, intuitively apprehends a reality beyond them, which by its causative act produces and sustains them. He is wrong in declaring that the something real is unknowable; it may be incomprehensible, but, as we have seen, it must be cognizable, or nothing is cognizable.

That the men who follow in the physical sciences the physical or, as they say, the inductive method, inducing general conclusions from particular facts or phenomena, have really advanced those sciences, and by their untiring labors and exhaustless patience achieved all but miracles in the application of science to the mechanical and productive arts from which trade and industry have so largely profited, we by no means deny; but they have done so because the mind, in their investigations and inductions, has all along had the intuition of the ideal principle which legitimates their generalizations, that of being or substance, and its creative or causative act, but of which they take no heed, or to which they do not advert; as St. Augustine says, the mind really has cognition of God in the idea of the perfect, but does not ordinarily advert to the fact. They suppose they obtain the law they assert by logical inference from the phenomena, because they do not observe that the mind has intuition of the causative or creative act, which is the ideal principle of the induction. The mind is superior to their philosophy, and they reason far better than they explain their reasoning. We may apply to them the advice Lord Mansfield gave to a man of good sense and sound judgment, but of little legal knowledge, who had been recently appointed a judge in one of the British colonies: “Give your decisions,” said his lordship, “without fear or hesitation; but don’t attempt to give your reasons.” So long as they confine themselves to the proper field of scientific investigation, they are safe enough; but let them come out of that field and attempt to explain the philosophy or the principles of their physical science, and they are pretty sure to make sad work of it. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam._

Mr. Spencer protests against being regarded as an atheist, for he denies the self-existence of the universe, and neither affirms nor denies the existence of God. But _atheist_ means simply _no-theist_, and, if he does not assert that God is, he certainly is an atheist. It is not necessary, in order to be an atheist, to make a positive denial of God. His disciple, Professor John Fiske, who has been lecturing on the cosmic philosophy before Harvard College, contends that the cosmic 643 philosophy is not atheistical, because it asserts in the unknowable an infinite power, being, or reality, that underlies the cosmic phenomena, of which they are the sensible manifestations; yet this does not relieve it, because what is asserted is not God, and is not pretended to be the God of theism, but the reality or substance of the cosmos and indistinguishable from it. It is the real, as the phenomena are the apparent, cosmos.

The author denies that he is a pantheist, for he denies the hypothesis of self-creation; but, if he is not a pantheist, it is only because he does not call the unknowable infinite power or being he asserts as the reality of the cosmos, that is, the real cosmos, by the name of God, Deus, or Theos. But asserting that power as the reality or substance of the cosmic phenomena is precisely what is meant by pantheism. Pantheism, in its modern form, is the assertion of one only substance, which is the reality of the cosmic phenomena, and the denial of the creation of finite substances, which are the real subject of the cosmic manifestations. Pantheism denies the creation of substances or second causes, and asserts that all phenomena are simply the appearances of the one infinite and only substance; and this is precisely what Mr. Spencer undeniably does. The only difference between atheism and pantheism is purely verbal. The atheist calls the reality asserted cosmos or nature, and the pantheist calls it God, but both assert one and the same thing. The power Mr. Spencer asserts is simply the _natura naturans_ of Spinoza, and that is nothing the atheist himself does not accept, and, indeed, assert. Neither asserts, nor does Mr. Spencer assert, any supercosmic being, or power on which the cosmos depends, and the power they do assert is as much cosmic as the phenomena themselves. Mr. Spencer’s protest betrays rare theological and philosophical ignorance, or is a mere verbal quibble, unworthy a man who even pretends to be a philosopher.

Mr. Spencer hardly once refers to Christian theology, and, without ever having studied it, evidently would have us think that he considers it beneath his attention. Yet he, as evidently, has constructed his system for the purpose of undermining and disposing of it once for all. This may be seen in the fact that, when he refers to religion at all, it is always to some heathen superstition, which he assumes to be the type or germ of all religion, carefully ignoring the patriarchal, Hebrew, or Christian religion. He tells us “the earliest traditions represent rulers as gods or demigods.” This is not true even of heathenism, which is in fact an apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive religion, or its corruption. The apotheosis of Romulus, according to tradition, took place only after his death, and it is only at a later period that the pagan emperors were held to be gods during their lifetime. Mr. Spencer’s real or affected ignorance of the whole order of religious thought is marvellous, and we cannot forbear saying:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

There is no philosophy or science, if God and his creative act are excluded or ignored, because there is no cosmos left, and neither a subject to know nor an object to be known.

Mr. Spencer misapprehends the relations of religion and science, and consequently the conditions of their reconciliation. He says they are the two opposite poles of one and the same globe. This is a mistake. 644 Religion and science are indeed parts of one whole; but religion, while it includes science, supplements it by the analogical knowledge called faith. The truths of faith and of science are always in dialectic harmony, and between the Christian faith and real science there is no quarrel, and can be none; for religion only supplies the defect of science, and puts the mind in possession of the solution of the problem of man and the universe, not attainable by science.

There is a quarrel only when the scientists, in the name of science, deny or impugn the supplementary truths of revelation, and which are at least as certain as any scientific truths or facts are or can be; or when they reject the great principles of reason itself, which are the basis of all science. Let the scientists confine themselves, as we have said, to the study and classification of facts, or the development and application to them of the undoubted principles of the intuitive reason, and not attempt to go beyond their province or the proper field of scientific investigation, and there will be no quarrel between them and the theologians. The quarrel arises when men like Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and others, profoundly ignorant both of philosophy and of theology, or the teachings of revelation, ignoring them, despising them, or regarding them with sovereign contempt, put forth baseless theories and hypotheses incompatible with the truths alike of reason and faith; and it will continue till they learn that an unproved and unprovable theory or hypothesis is not science, nor a scientific explanation of the facts either of the soul or of the cosmos, and is quite insufficient to warrant a denial of the belief of the great bulk of mankind from the first man down to our own day. Then there may be peace between the theologians and the scientists, but not till then.

We said, or intended to say, that a philosopher is known by his principles. We add that he is also known by his method. The physical method is unscientific and illogical; for it seeks through phenomena to arrive at being, and from particulars to obtain general or universal conclusions. Induction that is not based on a universal principle can never attain to anything but the particular. Generalizations of particulars are only abstractions, and abstractions, prescinded from their concretes, are nullities, as the possible, without the real to actualize it, is nothing. There is no rising from particulars to the universal unless we start with a universal principle intuitively given. It is impossible to conclude, by logical inference, substance or being from phenomena. The reality which Mr. Spencer says we are compelled to assert, though itself unknowable, as underlying the cosmic phenomena, is no deduction nor induction from these, but is given intuitively as the ideal or intelligible in the very act in which the phenomena themselves are apprehended. Mr. Spencer is wrong in asserting it, as we have said, to be unknowable, and still more so in asserting it as the subject of the cosmic phenomena, which is simply pantheism. These phenomena are not the appearances or manifestations of the Infinite Power or Being which Mr. Spencer asserts as unknowable, but of the finite and dependent substances which God, the Infinite Being, creates and upholds as second causes.

The universal is not contained in the particular, the infinite in the finite, the identical in the diverse, the immutable in the mutable, the persistent in the transitory, unity in plurality, or the actual in the possible, and therefore cannot be concluded from it. The two 645 categories are not obtainable, either from the other, by any possible logical inference, and therefore must be given intuitively or neither is cognizable; for, though not reciprocal, they connote, as all correlatives, each the other, since neither is knowable without the other. This is the condemnation of the physical or inductive method, when followed as a method of obtaining the first principles either of the real or of the knowable. We say only what Bacon himself said. He said and proved that the inductive method is inapplicable in philosophy, or out of the sphere of the physical sciences. The great error has been in attempting to follow it in philosophy, or the science of the sciences, where it is inapplicable, for no science can start without first principles.

We feel that some apology is due our readers for soliciting their attention to anything so absurd as Herbert Spencer’s _New System of Philosophy_; but they must bear in mind that Mr. Spencer is a representative man, and has only attempted to bring together and combine into a systematic whole the anti-Christian, anti-theistical, and anti-rational theories, hypotheses, and unscientific speculations which, under the name and forms of science, govern the thought of the modern non-Catholic world. Mr. Spencer’s book, which is a laborious effort to give the philosophy or science of nothing, and ends only in a system of “symbolic conceptions,” in which nothing, according to the author, is conceived, has, after all, a certain value, as showing that there is no medium or middle ground between Catholicity and atheism, as there is none between atheism and nihilism. Mr. Spencer, we should think, is a man who has read comparatively little, and knows less of Christian theology or philosophy; he seems to us to be profoundly ignorant of his own ignorance, as well as of the knowledge other men have. He is only carrying out the system of Sir William Hamilton, Dr. Mansel, and providing a philosophy for the Darwins, the Huxleys, the Galtons, the Lubbocks, the Tyndalls, _et id omne genus_, and has succeeded in proving that no advance has been made by the non-Catholic world on the system of old Epicurus, which is rapidly becoming the philosophy of the whole world outside of the church, and against which the Bascoms, the Hodges, and the McCoshes, with honorable intentions and a few fragments of Catholic theology and philosophy, protest in vain. This is our apology for devoting so much space to Herbert Spencer’s inanities.

[129] _First Principles of a New System of Philosophy._ By
Herbert Spencer. Second Edition. New York: Appleton & Co. 1871.
12mo, pp. 559.

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ST. CECILIA’s DAY IN ROME. 646

St. Cecilia is one of the few figures among the representative throng of virgin-martyrs that strike us at once as the most familiar, the most lovable, and the most to be exalted. Every one knows the legend of her life, and the conversion of her husband and his brother, brought about by her prayers, as also by the miracles she obtained for their further confirmation in the faith. Her death, in itself a miracle, needs no retelling, neither does the history of her wondrously preserved remains, that are now laid in the shrine beneath the altar of _Santa Cecilia in Trastevere_, a church erected, by her own wish and behest, on the spot where her palace stood. This church is a basilica, and has its altar raised many steps above the level of the mosaic floor of the nave, and the front of the altar turned away from the people so that the celebrant at Mass stands facing the congregation, as in many other ancient Roman churches. Under the altar, on the lower level of the nave, is the shrine of the saint, and there lies her marble image, small and frail, though it is said to be life-sized, and reverently and truly copied from the sleeping body, whose form remained entire and uncorrupted, at least until the last time it was solemnly uncovered. To the right of the church is a dark side-chapel, floored with rare mosaic, once the bath-room of the young and wealthy patrician, and the consecrated spot where heathen cruelty twice endeavored to put an end to the sweet singer’s life. The actual bath is said to be within the railings that divide a narrow portion of the chapel from the rest. There was the first miracle performed, of her preservation from the boiling water; there also the second, of the prolongation of her life after the three deadly yet ineffectual strokes of the unskilful executioner’s sword. One can fancy the young matron, so childlike in years, so experienced in holiness, lying in meek and chaste expectation of the embraces of her heavenly Bridegroom, and of the purified reunion with her earthly and virgin spouse--while, all the time the wondrous, angel-sustained life lasted, the Christians, her brethren in the faith, her children through charity, would be coming and going, silently as to an altar, rejoicingly as to a saint, and learning, from lips on whom the kiss of peace of the glorified Jesus was already laid, lessons of fortitude and love most precious to their faithful souls. We are told, also, that Urban, the pope, visited her on her glorious death-bed, and, no doubt, he learnt from her entranced soul more than he could teach it in its passing hour; learnt, perhaps, things whose sweetness became strength to him in the hour of his own not far distant martyrdom.

Cecilia, in her short and heavenly life, seems a fitting model for all women, and especially for young maidens and wives. She was of those who know well how to put religion before men in its most beautiful garb and most enthralling form; purity with her was no ice-cold stream and repellent rocky fastness: it was beauty, it was reward, it was glory. Crowns of lilies and roses, heavenly perfume, and angelic companionship were to be its lovely guerdon; and not otherwise should 647 it ever be preached, nor otherwise surrounded, when its precepts are presented to man. Had we more Cecilias among our Christian women of to-day, there would be more Valeriani and Tiburtii among our men, and virtue would be more readily deemed an honor than a yoke; home would be more of a temple, rather than a mere resting-place; home-life more of a prayer, rather than a simple idyl. For blamelessness is not Christian purity; righteousness is not Christian faith. We want the visible blessings of the church on our daily lives, even as Cecilia brought into the circle of home the visible, angelic gifts of flowers; and we know that to those who seek them where Valerian and his brother sought the heavenly apparition--that is, through faith and prayer--these blessings, these gifts, these blossoms, these safeguards, are never denied.

And to pass from these aspirations after a more Christian ideal of home to the impressions made on an eye-witness by the feast of St. Cecilia in Rome, we will merely say that this feast had been eagerly looked forward to, and had always held a special charm over the mind of the writer of these pages.

On this day, the 22d of November, Mass is said from dawn till noon in the catacomb chapel, where the martyr was first buried. This chapel is one of the largest and most interesting in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus. The distance from the Eternal City to this shrine is not long, but the old Appian Way that leads from the one to the other is crowded with memories and monuments, each a history in itself.

The most noticeable of these is very near the catacomb, and is none other than the mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, the mysterious and oft-sung pile that Byron has made strangely familiar to us. One cannot help being struck by the familiarity of the two names, and the proximity of the two shrines, of the Cecilias of Rome. The proud mausoleum, stately as a palace, strong as a fortress, built by some ostentatious patrician, or by some sorrowing husband, for the merely worldly end of perpetuating the memory of an illustrious house, or of the domestic virtues of a spouse a little above the common run of licentious Roman matrons, stands now deserted and unvisited, its real history lost and forgotten, and a fictitious one attached to it through the imaginative efforts of a foreign poet. The lonely sepulchre in an earthen wall, the hidden recess in an underground chapel--dug out by silent, persecuted men for the proscribed body of a so-called criminal--remains to this day the pilgrimage of thousands, the well-remembered and well-loved spot where devout followers of the faith Cecilia followed come to beg her intercession as they kneel before the same sacrament, and assist at the same sacrifice, whose blessings were Cecilia’s only strength. Cecilia Metella, the rich Roman lady, is unknown save to antiquaries; Cecilia, the virgin-martyr, is honored all over the world, by all races and all nations. The wealth of the first has rusted away and is heard of no more, because its last emblem was a palatial tomb; the riches of the second have increased a hundred-fold, and have been sown broadcast over the earth, because their abiding symbol lies in a church built over her former dwelling; and the harvest her prayers have reaped is gathered year after year in the riches untold, of virgins crowned with miraculous flowers, of wives laden with the conversions of those dear to them, of women of all ages, all ranks, all nations, bearing in 648 their hands the charity born of Cecilia’s death-bed generosity, and in their hearts the faith of her death-bed professions.

And so, past the stately tomb worthy of Egypt’s solemn magnificence, the road leads to a small door in a wall, which opens on to a field. A path fringed with red and purple flowers, the last-born children of a southern autumn, winds through the field, to the head of a steep but wide flight of stairs, at the foot of which is the entrance to St. Callixtus’ Catacomb. The pure air, just mist-veiled in the morning coolness, shows the landscape around to its utmost advantage; the omnipresent dome of St. Peter’s basilica clears the line of the blue horizon; the wide purple plain is crossed here and there by dust-whitened roads and arched aqueducts, as by the gigantic bones of a decayed and now powerless monster; the distant hills, darkened at their base by chestnut woods, and dotted with white villas, as with the loosened beads of a string of pearls, throw bluer shadows on the dusky, olive-spotted expanse: and we pause, and wonder whether, after all, things looked so very unlike this on the dawning day when the Christians bore the happy Cecilia to her first resting-place. Their hearts surely must have felt as ours do now, full of joy and thanksgiving, and, above all, full of peace. There would have been a silent throng, a quiet gradual gathering of the future martyrs around the narrow grave of their blessed-forerunner; for in those days no one knew how soon he or she might be called from the altar to the stake, and summoned to carry the unconsumed sacrament within his bosom to the tribunal of an unjust and ignorant judge.

The avenues of the perplexing labyrinth of the catacomb are all guarded by the government on this day of St. Cecilia’s, so that no one may stray from the one chapel where service is going on. Close to the entrance is the small recess where the saint was laid in her first sleep. It is low and reaches far back into the damp earth-wall; myrtle and bay-leaves are strewn over its floor, and flowers and little oil-lamps are spread about like stars. As each person leaves the chapel, he takes away a leaf or flower as a holy remembrance. Two altars are erected, one close to the martyr’s grave, just beneath a Byzantine fresco head of our divine Lord, the other on the opposite side of the chapel. The space, small enough for a modern congregation, though large for a catacomb chapel, is so crowded that it is difficult for the priests to pass in and out from the altars to the temporary sacristy, and the worshippers almost lean upon them when they stand to say the “Judica me, Deus.” No noise is heard, save the murmured words of the Mass and the tinkling of the elevation-bell. Foreigners are there with fair-haired boys serving the Mass of some favorite friend and accompanying chaplain; Romans are there with their intense, if not deep, southern devotion; rich and poor, prince and beggar, student and peasant, are alike crowding the virgin-martyr’s shrine. A few hundred years ago, this was the church’s cradle, and patrician and slave came to be baptized together and wear for one day the white robes that to-morrow twilight would see red with blood on the deserted sand of the gladiator’s amphitheatre. The priest who said Mass in those days hardly knew, when he came to the consecration, whether the hand of the pagan soldiery might not be upon him before the communion; the mother 649 who knelt in tears, half of natural sorrow, half of heavenly joy, and thought of the fair young boy she had but yesterday given back to God on the scaffold, did not know whether tomorrow’s dawn might not find her herself prostrate and headless on the same place of execution. Partings then were seldom for long, and, even when the Christians parted with our Lord on the hidden altars, they knew they would meet him soon again at the right hand of his Father. Not unfrequently, the Blessed Sacrament was kept in a silver vessel made in the shape of a dove, and one cannot help thinking how sweet a union must have existed between this custom and the idea of the protection and the teaching the Holy Spirit was to afford to his spouse, the church. “When the Spirit of truth cometh,” Jesus had said, “he shall teach you all things.” And so the Dove of heaven taught the church the hidden beauties of the ineffable sacrament, and protected this greatest treasure of the Bride in its integrity of doctrine and its continuity of love. May we not so interpret, lovingly and reverentially, the olden custom of the dove-shaped tabernacle?

Beautiful as the day was, it was a sore trial to leave the darksome, silent chapel, where generations of older and braver Christians than ourselves had spent their triumphant vigils and been brought back to sleep their peaceful hero-slumbers--it was a trial, I say, to return to the carelessly beautiful earth, the unheeding theatre of such wondrous mysteries. To leave the catacombs in Cecilia’s times was to go forth to almost certain death; to leave prayer and solitude, the catacombs of the heart in our day, is to encounter certain sorrow and possible sin. It is hard to leave God’s temple and mingle with the chattering throng; it is hard to lift the curtain of silence and mix with the wrangling world. Yet it is our duty. Few are privileged to be hermits, and those few not until the privilege is turned into a trial, and the apparent retreat is no other than a hard-won stronghold. In the battle, we must fight, and fight manfully, in the foremost rank; it is only the generals and the chiefs among us that watch from afar, and feel, like wearied Moses, the weight of victory or defeat hanging on the issue of their prayers. Our part seems the harder, but it is only because our nature is so little that dissatisfaction with our present lot is the very air we breathe. After all, if we could look around us, we should see many beautiful things; if we are bound in fetters of duty, they are golden fetters, with the word of God carved all over their sunlike sheen; if we are led in one way and forced to wear the harness of unalterable circumstances, the reins are broidered with fair work that tells the story of how the angel led the ass of Balaam, and how palms were strewn on the path of Jesus; the way is emblazoned with rarest flowers and sweetest fruits, the heraldry of grace; if we bear a yoke and a burden, they are but spices and ointments, wine and oil, and milk and honey, all fair and gracious merchandise from the great mart of heaven, to be borne over the world, as the clouds bear the rain, in fertilizing charity and fruit-bearing meekness. So let us leave the dear catacomb, where even Music hushed her sighs, and come forth across the Roman Campagna, with the mist-veils rolled off it, and the noonday sun, with its reminiscences of summer, gilding its fringe of distant mountains, and its strange rifts of sudden, unsuspected valleys. Here and there, an aqueduct or a proud stone pyre, a mound of stones, each of which bears an imperial 650 inscription, a rude shepherd’s fence, or irregular stone wall, that is all you see. Not far from here, in a cornfield whose waves of brown and gold a few months ago kissed the foot of an ilex-crowned hillock, is the fountain of Egeria, a grotto, fern-clothed, with a broken goddess of mouldering stone. The water and the “maiden-hair” fern are there still, as beautiful as when the king of Rome is said to have wandered here in search of wisdom; the sage himself and the problematic nymph of tradition are dead and gone, forgotten by the owner of the corn-field, ignored by the peasant who drinks at the fountain, unknown to the brown, barefooted child who gathers the feathery fern.

Of what use is it to say any more? Facts are more cruel commentaries on the past than any words.

Yet we have just seen children and peasants, women from northern lands, men from eastern climes, bearing away as a relic a leaf of bay or a starry flower from the once filled recess where Cecilia lay in peace-sealed slumber.

Where is the difference, and why?

A little child can tell, but the philosopher will not listen.

The feast of St. Cecilia, though to the writer of these pages it ended on the threshold of the catacomb, is not completed here.

At her church in the _Trastevere_, the church already mentioned, takes place the ceremony of solemn vespers, in which the artists of Rome assist and take part gratuitously, out of homage to the queen of music. The antiphon “Cantantibus Organis” is magnificent in art, but unresponsive in devotion. The phantom of the unhappy _Renaissance_ breathes in these strains, religious only in so far as they are a fabric built on sacred words. The simple solemnity of the church’s service dwells not in them, and the touching silence of the catacomb recalls the saint to our mind far more sweetly than these outbursts of paganized minstrelsy within the halls she once called her own. Still, if honor to God be meant by this concourse of the artist fraternity, let us be simple of intention, and see in it, as God does, the first-fruits of what they have offered to the God of all.

Reader, if you ever pray before the early shrine of the virgin-martyr in St. Callixtus’ chapel, remember the writer of these few words, and let our prayers go up to God together, “as a morning sacrifice” and “as incense in his sight.”

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FLEURANGE. 651

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF MRS. CRAVEN,
AUTHOR OF “A SISTER’s STORY.”

PART FIRST.

THE OLD MANSION.

I.

“Young, beautiful, poor, and alone in Paris, what will become of her?”

It was the third time Dr. Leblanc had repeated these words in the presence of his sister, Mademoiselle Josephine, who remained so mute that she might have been thought deaf, had not the irregular click of her knitting-needles, and two or three indistinct exclamations as she paused in her work, testified to a preoccupation quite equal to that of her brother. The latter at first manifested his by swiftly striding up and down the apartment in which they were, but now he resumed his usual place in the chimney-corner opposite his sister, opened and shut his snuff-box noisily, taking a useless profusion of pinches, which he forgot to convey to their destination, and tapping the floor with his foot in a manner that expressed great agitation or extreme perplexity.

Mademoiselle Josephine continued to knit without replying, and seemed no less absorbed than her brother. At length she said:

“At least, if she were not, as you say, so young and so beautiful!”

“And so poor and alone in the world, you should add. A sensible remark, indeed! It is evident if she were old, ugly, rich, and surrounded by friends, her situation would be very different. I am indebted to you, Josephine, for the discovery.”

“Do not be impatient, brother. I am only repeating what you have just said. To continue the subject: if she only had a different air--”

“Well, go on!”

“And another name--”

“Another name! Why so? What has her name to do with the matter?”

“A name which was not ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous! The name of her father? Poor Gerard d’Yves’ name was very respectable, and even noble, I believe. He committed a thousand extravagances and ruined himself. He then became an artist, and displayed talent enough to have repaired his fortunes had he been wise. Besides, he was of a good family, and his name--”

“I am not alluding to his name, but to his daughter’s.”

“Well?”

“Well, brother, do you think this young girl’s name bears any resemblance to a Christian name?”

“Fleurange? I acknowledge it is perhaps an odd name. Her father had a taste for odd things, and hearing the name of Fior Angela in Italy, he translated it.”

“Her mother should have had more sense.”

“Her poor mother died when she was born, so she had nothing to do with 652 it.”

“Did you not say her mother had a brother who was a professor in some city in Germany?”

“Yes, at Leipsic; but who knows where to find him now? Her whole family disapproved of her marriage, which was finally effected without her father’s consent. Poor Margaret lived only a year, and Gerard, who remained a widower, declined all intercourse with his wife’s relatives. He remained many years in Italy, and placed his daughter, as soon as she was five years old, in some convent near Perugia. He took her away only two months before he came here, already ill, to linger and die three days ago in this poor child’s arms, leaving her entirely alone in the world.”