Chapter I: Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. The paper's unusually extensive use of commas remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.

THE CREATOR, AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF
THE METHOD OF CREATION.

THE CREATOR,
AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF THE
METHOD OF CREATION.

THE FERNLEY LECTURE OF 1887.

BY
W. H. DALLINGER, LL.D., F.R.S.

‘For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth.... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
WORDSWORTH.

Seventh Thousand.

LONDON:
T. WOOLMER, 2, CASTLE STREET, CITY ROAD, E.C.,
AND 66, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1887.

TO
JAMES S. BUDGETT, ESQ.,
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
A FRIENDSHIP
WHICH HAS INFLUENCED BENEFICENTLY
MUCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK;
THIS LITTLE VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED BY
THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

The following discourse was prepared as a lecture. With the exception of the insertion of passages which it was found necessary to omit in delivery, on account of too great length, it is printed as it was spoken. It addressed, and in its present form addresses, thoughtful and earnest minds, not concerned specially with questions of philosophy, metaphysics, and science, but alive to the advanced knowledge and thought of our times, and anxious to know, so far as in such a form it could be expressed, how the great foundation of religious belief, the existence of Deity, is affected by the splendid advance of our knowledge of nature. To have written more than the following pages contain, in answering this desire, would have necessitated what I have earnestly endeavoured to avoid, a change from a discourse into a treatise. It is hoped that, as it is presented, it may to some extent be found useful to those who sought it—not so much students, as men interested in the deeper thought of our age, but whose time is occupied with the labours and engagements of a busy life.

W. H. DALLINGER.

WESLEY COLLEGE, SHEFFIELD,
_September 1, 1887_.

THE CREATOR, AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF THE METHOD OF CREATION.

In spite of the lucid and far-reaching reasoning of Hume, which aimed at effacing causality from our conceptions of phenomena, and making invariable sequence supplant it; in spite of Auguste Comte’s stern effort to ‘get rid of the vain pretension to investigate the causes of phenomena,’ and the affirmation that ‘forces are only movements, produced or tending to produce;’ nay, in spite of all the logical effort of all the following years, there remains unaltered, that inalienable property of the human mind, consciousness of power; the ability to realize ‘I can’ simultaneously with ‘I am.’ In this originates our universal explanation of external phenomena. Because we can act and produce phenomena, we infer that all phenomena were inevitably produced by some transcendent but equivalent act of conscious power. If we think of a plane surface or a sphere, we can only think of them as occupants of space: so, if we think of the light beams of Sirius, or the motion of Mars, we realize the normal necessity of thinking of them ultimately as caused. This is an inevitable sequence of our consciousness, reason, and experience. A phenomenon appearing in time evokes the mental demand for something which is not that phenomenon, but without which it would not have existed.

In this lies the insatiable desire of mind to peer into the origin of, and reason for, the existence of this universe. Deepening knowledge brings broader light and expanding mystery, but this only quickens the intellectual purpose of the race to seek to solve the problem, why we are circled with the splendid phenomena of heaven and earth, and possessed of the mystery of ourselves?

But to meet this mental demand is no part of the business of science. The study of phenomena, their succession and their classification, is the essential work of science. It has no function, and is possessed of no instrument with which to look behind or below the sequence, in quest of some higher relation. The eye and the mind of the experimentalist know only of antecedent and consequent. These fill the whole circle of his research; let him find these, and he has found all. But since a cause is no more a phenomenon, than a thought is a material manifestation, that which fills the whole circumference claimed by science does _not_ fill all the area legitimately held by reason. A prevision of the order, and the methods of the changes of the universe, is the ideal of science. But mind in its entirety refuses to be locked within such limits. It looks deeper than sequences, and farther back than phenomena; it demands, by the very laws of its existence, their cause. A continuity of transformed causes undoubtedly explains a wide, and ever-widening area of sequences. But that cannot annul the demand of reason for causation. It simply drives it farther back, and higher up, and indicates that the modes of action and relation originated by the primal cause are only the more sublimely rhythmic. Count this a lingering survival of ‘mere metaphysics’ who will, it is withal so stalwart, so perennial in our consciousness, amidst all vicissitudes of knowledge and reasoning, that whatever science may do, philosophy must give it audience.

The researches of science, then, are physical. The observable, finite contents of space and time are the subjects of its analysis. Existence, not the cause of existence, succession, not the reason of succession, method, not the origin of method, are the subjects of physical research. A primordial cause cannot be the subject of experiment nor the object of demonstration. It must for ever transcend the most delicate physical reaction, the profoundest analysis, and the last link in the keenest logic. Absolute knowledge concerning it can only be the prerogative of itself.

But human reason is not only, and wholly, concerned with the brilliant records of physical enquiry: it is conscious of powers within itself that transcend and elude all the processes of physics, and the analyses of mathematics. The activities of the mind are not exhausted, the demands of the mind are not met, the persistent questions of reason are not answered, by all the processes, all the products, and all the possibilities of physical research combined.

Science refuses absolutely to recognise mind as the primal cause of the sequences of matter. This is just;—within the strict region of its research; for phenomena, their sequences and classification, are its sole domain. But observe, science, universally, puts _force_ where the reason asks for cause. The forces affecting matter are tacitly assumed to be competent to account for every activity, every sequence, every phenomenon, and all the harmonies of universal being. A nexus for the infinite diversities and harmonies, a basis for all the equilibrium of nature, is found by modern science in force. But force is as absolutely inscrutable as mind. Force can never be known in itself; it is known by its manifestations. It is not a phenomenon; it produces phenomena. We cannot know it; but we know nothing without it.

Then the ultimate analysis of physical science is the relations of force and matter. But force is a subject of knowledge to science only in its manifestations; that is, motion. In irreducible terms, therefore, the final analysis of science is _matter as affected by motion_. These—matter and motion—are held by many advanced physicists to be the primary elements of all phenomena; the most minute, subtile, and occult reaction, and the most majestic cosmic manifestation are held to be explained by these. Thus the whole cosmos, with its infinite complexities and harmonies, arose in space, and is in space, because of the affections of matter by motion. To search out the motions on which all changes are based, to reduce all the activities of the universe, from the awful movement of a constellation, to the rhythmic swing of an atom; from the origin of mind, and the writing of Faust, to the building of a snow crystal, or the production of a flower, to sheer mechanics—matter affected by motion—is held to be the chief mission of science.

But examine for a moment the nature of the problem. The matter with which analysis is thus finally concerned cannot be matter as we know it. It is the existing _properties_ or _qualities_ of matter that affect us. Matter is hard, it is yellow, it is sweet. Now the very qualities that _make_ matter as we know it are demonstrated by modern science to be but ‘modes of motion;’ matter is hot because the ultimate atoms of it vibrate in a special manner. The yellowness of an object is not in _it_, but in our percipient faculty. That which is yellow emits certain light vibrations only; these affect the retina in a special manner, and this affection we call the perception of yellowness. It is thus with all the qualities of matter.

Then what can that ‘matter’ be with which the physicist must ultimately and in the beginning deal? When matter is divested of all its qualities, divested in thought of all the ‘modes of motion’ by which it manifests itself to us, what is it? Is it mass, wholly incapable of affecting our senses? Matter _sine perceptione_? That cannot be a thing, it is an abstraction, and he must be something more than a bold man, who would logically infer an actual factor, corresponding to the abstract conception.

Manifestly, then, physical science and its methods cannot illuminate and explain all the dilating area of space, and flow of time, with which our consciousness and reason are concerned. Shapes and motion, form and number, are not data that can carry us to the origin of the universe. You must import an unacknowledged factor. Force stands ready: if you endow _it_, in imagination equipped in the uniform of science, with the very qualities of mind, no doubt you may cross the boundary of experimental science, and see in matter affected by motion the possibility of all that is. But, says Professor Huxley, ‘_Kraft und Stoff_—force and matter—are paraded as the Alpha and Omega of existence. This, I apprehend, is the fundamental article of the faith materialistic, and whosoever does not hold it is condemned by the more zealous of the persuasion (as I have some reason to know) to the Inferno appointed for fools and hypocrites. But all this,’ he continues, ‘I heartily disbelieve; and ... I will briefly give my reasons for persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, ... it seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my heart or head, I cannot see to be matter, or force, or any conceivable modification of either, however intimately the manifestations of the phenomena of consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as matter and force. In the second place, the arguments used by Descartes and Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend beyond our states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now as they did when I first became acquainted with them, some half-century ago. All the materialistic writers I know of, who have tried to bite that file, have simply broken their teeth. But if this is true, our one certainty is the existence of the mental world; and that of _Kraft und Stoff_ falls into the rank of, at best, a highly probable hypothesis.’[1]

[Footnote 1: _Fortnightly Review_, No. ccxl., new series, December 1886, p. 794.]

Look, then, at the striking incongruity. With no explanation of matter without qualities; with no indication of how motion could arise and become rhythmic and infinitely harmonious; with the distinct knowledge that, when the physicist wants to demonstrate matter, he is compelled to do it in terms of motion; and, when he would prove the presence of motion, he can only do it in terms of matter; with all these fetters to our mental movement, and clouds before our eyes, it is argued that, by carrying the discoverable and apparently self-acting affections of matter by motion far enough back, we can explain the origin and structure of the universe.

I would repeat, that in such a mental effort, it is vain to seek logical aid from the employment of the word ‘force.’ We have seen that the only scientific idea of force we can ever have, is motion. Motion is the result of ever-varying relations, borne to each other by matter, space, and time. At a given instant a body is here; in a measurable interval after, it is not here, but yonder. ‘Motion’ carries with it no occult constructive power. It is change of place, and no more.

Is it not inevitable, then, that the mind should refuse its sanction to the claim, that ‘the problem of the universe’ is solved by these feeble factors? ‘If I were forced,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘to choose between Materialism and Idealism, I should elect for the latter;’[2] and truly, if our choice must be between them, this is the normal alternative.

[Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, December 1886, p. 796.]

The loftiest object of human thought is to discover how far the material universe is en expression of supreme unity, of rhythmic activity, and of rational order. But for this, the mind must take a range that transcends, without limit, all physical sequences, laws, phenomena. Taking the broad basis of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, we must _relate_ sequences, _interpret_ phenomena, and, however remotely and imperfectly, endeavour to account for ‘laws.’ But in doing this we must remember that we have pushed our way beyond the last outpost of _physical_ research. We have passed beyond the region where ‘quod erat demonstrandum’ is used. We have threaded our mental path into solitudes where no electrometer will be responsive, no spectroscope analytical, no lens revealing. We have come to the edge of all that we _know_ and can _demonstrate_; and then, impelled by the moral and rational light within us, we judge and balance all that we know, and all that we are, and we reach, not a demonstration, for that cannot be, but a conviction, a moral and intellectual certainty, of the being of a primordial cause, which is second, in its firmness and security, to nothing within the area of mind.

Since the time of Newton and Leibnitz the laws of ordinary dynamics have been settled; but between dynamics, and the so-called ‘imponderable forces,’ by which it was assumed that an explanation was furnished of heat, chemical action, electricity, magnetism and the rest, there was a great gulf. That has been bridged over by a common measure of value, giving rise to a general dynamic law of all the forces of the universe. This is known as the ‘Conservation of Energy.’ It demonstrates, with more or less completeness, that all physical phenomena are the different appearances resulting from different groupings of matter by force. Both matter and force are eternally changeless in quantity. They can be neither diminished nor increased, neither created nor destroyed. The ‘modes of motion’ that produce the varied phenomena are interchangeable. Light may become heat, heat may become electricity; but there is no loss. When motion seems to disappear, it is only transferred into another mode. The phenomena of light, heat, electricity, result from changes wrought in matter by motion. Every ray of sunshine, for instance, is an interwoven group of powerful energies. Whence do they come? From changes in the matter of the sun. For every measure of sunshine received by the earth an equivalent measure of solar matter has been changed. Through the sunbeam the varied forms of energy produced in the sun have been received, and stored up on this earth. For incalculable centuries the world has been clothed with abundant vegetation. This will only grow in sunlight. The energies in the sunbeam act on living matter, as on a spore or a seed, causing it to grow. That is to say, under the influence of vital action, the forces of the sunbeam are changed into wood. A section from a pine mast, or an oak trunk, stands for a measurable quantity of sunshine. But coal is wood; forests buried and carbonized. Coal then has, as it were, fixed the energies of the sunbeams that poured upon the earth millions of years ago. Put coal where it will be in contact with oxygen and heat, and what follows? You get heat, light, chemical action; that is to say, the locked-up energies of the sunbeams of a measureless past are set free.

Here then, all the activity of the universe, every phenomenon, and every vibration of every atom, from the centre to the margin of the immeasurable whole, is directly related to a unity of primal power. Nothing has happened to-day in the remotest or nearest part of creation, but was linked in an unbroken chain to the first throb that thrilled the incipient universe in the mystery of ‘the beginning.’ Nothing is isolated through all duration and all space. Because, everywhere and always, the resulting phenomena are self-acting and rhythmic to our mode of research, shall we say that they have no cause, or that they have determined their own condition? because we find that the self-adjustments and sublimity of Nature, transcend infinitely all the conceptions of earlier generations, will it be logical to argue, that therefore Nature may be the more readily explained as causeless and devoid of mind? that, being self-adjusting and self-acting, it needed no cause? or shall we not the rather realize that this unbroken line of physical continuity and interaction through all duration to ‘the beginning’ brings us _there_, face to face, with the inscrutable Power, by which that unchanging unity and continuity of purposeful action was caused?

Every phenomenon is motion; motion can only begin in force. Within the range of human experience and thought, as it has been long without answer contended, there is no force known but _will_: could any other cause than the volition of a mind, have primarily directed force to affect matter so as to produce, for ever, the infinite harmonies and self-adjusting interactions of this vast Universe?

The very intellect, which finds so noble a vocation in the researches of science, and which is so brilliantly employed in penetrating into, and opening up, the _intelligibility_ of the physical universe; and by that means demonstrating the _congruousness_ of the cosmos; is the same intellect that is conscious of _itself_, and of its _power_; which knows itself as possessed of causative capacity; and which has absolutely no other source of knowledge concerning power, save that which arises in itself. The very rationality of the Creation, in our deepest analysis and broadest survey of it, leads the mind, by the conditions inseverable from its reasoning faculties, to see in its perfect relations the inevitable congruity of an intelligent cause. And all this, be it observed, results _after_ science has disclosed the splendid treasures of its knowledge, the beauty and indisputable accuracy of its methods, and the new senses with which it has endowed itself by its instruments. Yes; the mind goes out to this conclusion, not defiant of science, but gratefully paying toll to it for an infinitely enlightening and ennobling passage through the marvels of phenomena, and the splendour of Nature’s methods, right to the very margin, beyond which science herself declares she cannot go; and although the physicist may declare he does not need it, and the mathematician that he can dispense with it, although all their immediate problems can be worked without it, yet the mind goes forth on the wings of its rational powers, its moral consciousness, its judgment; and leaving the margin of matter, it seeks audience, as it were, with the very mystery that enshrouds the universe; and it rises to the conviction that its quest has not been vain; it has realized, dimly, imperfectly, and, as it were, faint with awe, the necessity of the presence and action of Eternal Mind.

No search into the relations of matter and motion can ever affect our consciousness of causality. We cannot be conscious of our own being without being simultaneously conscious that whatever begins to be, must have a cause, a reason, for its being. The very validity of our mental acts is imperilled, if the congruity of the principle of causality be doubted. Permit an illustration: a minute and beautiful crystal of unknown nature is before us. By a mental necessity we know—we cannot free ourselves from the conviction—that this crystal occupied a measurable time to become a crystal, and that being such, it occupies a measurable portion of space. May we rely on this fundamental act of mind? Is it truth? If not, there is not a mental act that ever was, or ever can be, veritable. But if it be true, then, since for man to produce a physical effect involves (1) the consciousness of _power_ to do it, and (2) the volitional exercise of that power; and since the human mind is absolutely without a trace of knowledge of any other way in which power can be exercised, in earth or heaven; is not the insistence of reason that there must be a cause for cosmic phenomena, a mental act of the _same order_ as that which insists on time and space as inseverable factors in the origin and existence of a crystal?

Causality in its mere mechanical relations may be considered for convenience, and translated as, ‘mechanical law:’ contemplated in its relation to a living organism, we may render it by such an expression as a ‘law of life’. But carry causality to its spring, trace it back to consciousness and thought, and it admits of no disguise; it is power, it is volition; there is no halting in its phrase; it is, ‘I can,’ ‘I will.’

Herbert Spencer himself affirms, ‘The force by which we ourselves produce changes, and which serves to symbolize the causes of changes in general, is the final disclosure of analysis.’[3] ‘I can,’ ‘I am able,’ is a knowledge that emerges within us simultaneously with ‘I am.’ It involves a consciousness of power, which is the essence of causality. We possess it, in precisely the same way as we possess ourselves, or our thoughts. Our knowledge of power is not even derived from effort or resistance. We know as clearly what we mean by ‘I am able,’ as we do when we affirm ‘I am here.’ Being able, and _knowing_ we are able, are absolutely different. A telephone is mechanically able to transmit vocal sounds and language. But how different to man, who is not only able, but knows that he is able. This knowledge of our power to act is the immutable foundation of our belief in causation.

[Footnote 3: _First Principles_, §50, pp. 169, 170.]

We may make two separate affirmations: as, for example, that ‘the thermometer is 6° F. below zero,’ and that ‘water has become solid;’ or, again, we may state, ‘my fingers rest upon the key-board of an organ,’ and ‘now they move, and a symphony of Beethoven’s is floating in the air.’ These are ‘sequences;’ but is that enough? No. Instantly the mental act that _interprets_ them is supplied. In both cases, our consciousness and reason are compelled to demand the exercise of power, by means of which one event succeeds the other. We are absolutely and irresistibly certain, in the latter case, that it must be so. A direct act of volition changed the fingers from rest into rhythmic motion, causing the organ to pour out music; and, by an intellectual necessity, we see that a diminished temperature, and frozen water, are not sequences merely; they must be related: and this conviction is not changed, though, by means of research, we find their sequential relation to be the result of the continuity of prior effects; we still retain the unaltered judgment, that, if we go back far enough, we must be in the presence of a cause. The mind cannot dispense with the link of power uniting sequences.

Then, if by long trains of sequential effects and secondary causes we are led up, not by demonstration, but by irresistible moral conviction, to a Primordial Power, a source of all, what is such creative cause? Is it inevitably God? Is the universe, as we know it, infinite? Who dare say? Though we know that the vast looming firmament, in which the ‘milky way’ stretches its depths and winds its awful amplitudes, is beyond all finite power to follow; yet, it may be but a complex particle in a universe of universes, stretching on, and for ever on, over the bourneless immensity of the unknown.

If that be so, we can make no useful inference from our finite universe. We could infer only a finite creator from a finite cosmos. To be finite is to be infinitely less than infinite; and such a being could not be the ineffable majesty of mind and might, which we apprehend, but cannot comprehend, as the Creator.

If such a limited power could be conceived, because it is finite, it of necessity began to be; and therefore its very existence was of necessity caused. We seek _its_ cause, as we do that of all other secondary causes; until at last we reach the only position in which there is mental rest, an infinite cause of all causes, the primordial and ultimate reality of all being.

Concerning even it, the question has arisen, Must not it also have been caused? Is not this question a paradox? It is of finite being only that we can affirm the necessity for causation. What is finite begins to be; what begins to be, must have been caused to be. But if our moral and reasoning faculties bring us at last, face to face, with an inscrutable and infinite primal cause, is there a mental process exercised by us that demands that such a being must have had a cause? Experiment cannot suggest it, for this is neither finite, nor a phenomenon; and can neither be observed nor analyzed; research in it is infinitely impossible; and of experience there can be none. Science is without function in presence of a primal cause. It is powerless, by virtue of its knowledge or its methods, to affirm or to deny an infinite and eternal self-existence. And yet such is not only possible to thought, but has congruity with all the faculties of reason. The principle of causality involves merely that every _finite_ existence must have had a cause for its being; that what is born and dies, what arises and ceases to be, what began in time and flows on in continuous mutation, had an originator. But our consciousness of causality does not and cannot include or apply to an infinite and unsearchable cause of all. We may not with our finite plummet seek to measure the depths of the Infinite, nor with our limited grasp hope to enfold the All. To say nothing of its cause, what do we _know_ of even the universe itself? We write and talk freely of millions of miles, and in a moment reverse the process and write or speak of millionths of a grain or of an inch; we think of tens of thousandths of a second, of millions of years, and duration that is without beginning and without end. Imagination cannot picture these things, though thought can possess them. They involve the two great mysteries ever present to mind, space and time.

Space includes within itself all that can be the subject of our knowledge, yet it is not a phenomenon, not an entity, not an object of sensation. It is a pure abstraction. No space is not thinkable. By no effort of mind can we think of space as non-existent at any period in infinite duration. So far as we can see, without objects with their dimensional relations, space could not be a concept. The contents of space, out of which the mind abstracts space, are the source from whence our concept, space, emerges. An infinite void is mentally nothing; an intellect like man’s, that had never realized extension in the dimensions of material bodies, could not present it in thought, any more than it can conceive correctly the qualities of a fourth dimension.

In like manner time is not a thing, an entity, to be accounted for as a creation, a thing caused; it is a consequence of existences; duration measured by sequences. If there were no succession of events, there would be no time. Space and time are mental abstractions, respectively, of the relations of dimensions and duration.

But with what mystery and majesty, with what proportions and powers, with what mass and movement is space full! and of what sequences and phenomena has time been the unconscious recorder! It is into these that the mind of man intently peers; it is across the bourneless area of uncharted space that he would carry his mental vision; it is into all the vicissitudes that have arisen, since the succession of cosmic phenomena marked off a section of duration, that the mind of man is ever struggling to thread its way; and if possible, to find the meaning and origin of it all.

That which is the most impressive outcome of all modern physical investigation, is the apparent mechanical automatism of all cosmic sequences and phenomena within our reach. As a result, the most powerful philosophies are directed to an endeavour to establish a mechanical—that is, a mindless or purposeless—_origin_ of the universe. But granted a universe, fully understood, exhaustively known, purely mechanical in all its _present_ activities; even this, surely, only makes more absolute the certainty that the very conditions of its present existence, involved at its beginning, a more majestic design than all the thinkers of the past had ever dreamed.

There is no alternative; either chance, or mental purpose, gave primal origin to all that is. Nothing within the reach of intellect could express the infinite improbability of the first suggestion. That _one_ vast harmony, one _perfect_ method, should fall out by chance, through the operation of uncounted millenniums of ages, is almost inexpressibly improbable; but that a system of harmonies, practically infinite in number and measureless in extent, should all be locked together in one vast uniting harmony, making all creation a chorus, to which all its parts from the centre to the margin contribute their flowing and concerted strains, without a discord to the unity of thought; to say that _that_ arose by chance, sprang from fortuity, fell out by accident, is surely to trifle with the fundamental principles of our moral faculties and reasoning powers.

Hence, nothing but philosophical ruin can be the end of materialism when enunciated in its grosser form. But our age is distinguished by the existence of a brilliant philosophical materialism, which has arrested, and is swaying, the deepest thought of our age, by the opulence of its learning and resource, by the scientific accuracy and insight of its abounding and perfect illustrations, and by the subtile, but stately method and breadth of its generalizations; but beyond all, by the fact that its world-famed author, Mr. Herbert Spencer, repels, with warmth, persistence, and manifest integrity, the very suspicion of ‘materialism’!

Yet we are compelled to ask, of what value, of what real service, are all the ideal and spiritual assumptions of his splendid and fascinating philosophy? It acknowledges a _something_ beyond the matter and the mechanism that fills the amplitudes of space; it even designates this something a ‘power,’ But that power is declared, for ever and infinitely, beyond the circumference of knowledge: it is the ‘absolute,’ the ‘unknowable;’ it can take no part, and become no agent in, no factor of, any philosophy of the origin of the universe which we construct. On the very terms of the philosophy itself, all in heaven and earth, through all the past and all the future, can be accounted for and explained without it. If the admission into its phraseology of the existence of a ‘power,’ which is a name only, be taken as sufficient reason, then this philosophy is not materialistic. But if it be remembered that this ‘power’ is absolutely without function in this philosophy of the construction of the universe,—if it be true to its formula,—and that only matter and motion are asked for, its ultimate materialism is a certainty, and, from its very subtilty, a peril.

To philosophical Theism the coarser Materialism can bring no lasting danger. It ignores too much, and assumes too much; and treats with a too manifest disdain the fundamental basis of our reasoning faculties.

It has many brilliant exponents; but foremost amongst them is Haeckel of Jena, a man of large scientific attainments, a biologist of the highest repute, and possessed of the keenest acumen. But these are not the only, nor the essential factors, of a philosophic mind.

He has no hesitancy, no scruple. A Creator for him is a conception for scorn, and he pours unceasing contempt upon the thought that he or any of us are more than material organisms, alive for our little day and then dead for ever. There is a future only for the race. The universe is declared to be without purpose; it is moving matter, which, by self-operation through immeasurable duration, has issued in laws that exist without reason, and devoid of an originator, act, with the deafness of the rock and the unconsciousness of the sea; producing in the realm of life the weaker and the stronger, but only for that unceasing war in which the stronger win.

That for man there is nothing nobler, nothing higher, than to study the grinding laws which compel him; which laws are the summaries of natural methods which began in nothing, and have been for ever vacant of thought or purpose.

We need have no anxiety concerning the influence of such a scheme; from its own incoherence it enfolds its intellectual death-warrant in its very form.

But the philosophy of Spencer is of another order. It is a philosophy that scorns the idealism of Berkeley, and that with the fervour of conviction, indignantly repudiates ‘Materialism.’ He contends for the equal and independent reality of self and not-self, of subject and object, of mind and matter. He affirms that the ‘co-existence of subject and object is a deliverance of consciousness.... and is a truth transcending all others in certainty.’[4] Yet, in the progress of the philosophy, we discover that from matter in motion, and nothing else, the whole universe is supposed to arise; life emerges; and mind, in its most transcendent forms comes forth. And it is this fallacy pervading the philosophy that is the essence of its power. Repudiating ‘Materialism’ as philosophically untenable, it yet exists as a philosophy to endeavour to show that mind is an outcome of matter.

[Footnote 4: _Principles of Psychology_, vol. i. p. 209.]

Look at the problem it sets for solution. ‘Philosophy,’ says Spencer, ‘is _completely unified_ knowledge;’ and adds, ‘... a philosophy stands self-convicted of inadequacy, if it does not formulate the whole series of changes passed through by every existence.... If it begins its explanations with existences that already have concrete forms ... then manifestly they had preceding histories ... of which no account is given. And as such preceding ... histories are subjects of possible knowledge, a philosophy which says nothing about them falls short of the required unification.’[5]

Then, on the very terms of the philosophy, we are to contemplate ‘the beginning’ with absolutely nothing anterior or unaccounted for. There must be no ‘concrete forms,’ no ‘preceding histories,’ to be encountered.

Now observe, it is clearly recognised in this philosophy that the ultimate nature of all that constitutes the universe is infinitely beyond the reach of the human mind; that in their final nature time, space, matter, motion, rest, the transfer of motion, the exercise of force, the nature and operation of consciousness and thought, are all equally, that is, infinitely, inscrutable. Knowledge is inexorably limited to, and co-extensive with, phenomena; yet from these phenomena alone we are to obtain exhaustive accounts of their own origin and existence, in spite of the admitted inscrutable mysteries of which they are the manifestations.

[Footnote 5: _First Principles_, pp. 541-42.]

If we can obtain so complete a knowledge of matter and motion, by a scientific study of them, as will enable us, with that knowledge alone, to explain their origin and account for the sequences they involve, then there is no more mystery. There are no ‘ultimates’ to explain. Our knowledge covers all that is, in space and time. The ‘Absolute’ itself is a meaningless superfluity, and the mysterious ‘power’ that is philosophically invoked can have no true place, for all is explicable without it.

A beginning is inevitable to a philosophy of material evolution. Then ‘in the beginning’ what? How in the zero, in which there were no ‘concrete forms’ and no ‘preceding histories,’ did the first movement towards the plenished arch of heaven and the fruitful earth arise? Concentration and diffusion, it is affirmed, are universally observed physical processes. The latest science in tracing back the genealogies of various objects finds that ‘their components were once in diffused states, and, pursuing their histories forwards, finds diffused states will be again assumed by them.’[6] Clearly, then, ‘matter’ is assumed to exist at the ‘beginning.’ It certainly _may_ have had a ‘preceding history;’ and to ignore this is to come, at the outset, perilously near to a philosophy ‘that stands self-convicted of inadequacy.’

[Footnote 6: _First Principles_, p. 280.]

A diffused state of matter is, it thus appears, the earliest point of the beginning that physical evolution can descry. This is the nebular hypothesis of Laplace; without doubt a majestic theory, but a theory still. Science has welcomed it to work with; and it explains, or aids in the interpretation of, much; but, that it should be taken so for granted as to be considered a demonstrated or even undisputed and established fact of modern science, we may be permitted to doubt; and it must have had a ‘preceding history.’ It takes us to a point in measureless past duration, where all that is now concrete matter is assumed to have been in a gaseous state. It is not even contended that it is an original condition. Such an almost infinite mass of nebulous matter must have been due, if existent, to heat, and to heat of an intensity that defies our range of conception.

But whence did such heat come? ‘Heat’ is demonstrated to us now as a rhythmic ‘mode of motion;’ one of the phenomena of nature to be accounted for. Verily, heat is a phenomenon with a ‘preceding history,’ and yet at the outset its presence is assumed in the cosmic cloud.

But, further complexity still, how does heat act in this primordial nebula? If heat is a ‘mode of motion,’ by what were the heat vibrations wrought? You must have _then_, for the phenomenon of heat, what is indispensable to the physical theory of it now:—the inconceivable but indispensable ether of modern physics. But how came the ether in, and beyond, the cosmic cloud? It is an ‘existence,’ manifestly; more, it is ‘matter;’ but matter that transcends the range of the action of gravity; it is without weight, and differentiated from all matter that we know in a manner that thought cannot follow.

How did this ‘existence’ pass from the imperceptible to the perceptible? and by its own requirement should not a complete philosophy furnish its past history?

Let us come more closely into contact with the actual formula of this philosophy. ‘Evolution,’ says Spencer, ‘is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.’[7]

Here, then, are the factors of the potential universe. By definition they are the sole structural essentials. Beyond them nothing should be asked, required, or assumed. What are these irreducible factors of the formula? ‘Matter’ and ‘motion.’ But we have clearly seen that we are cognizant of matter as such only by its ‘modes of motion’. It is _these_ for which evolution has to account. ‘Matter’ denuded of the qualities by which we now are cognizant of it, can be no other than dimensions without qualities, spatial presence undiscoverable by sense.

On the other hand, pure motion, motion by itself, is impossible to thought. Motion is only known as an affection of matter. ‘It becomes manifest,’ says Spencer, ‘that our experience of _force_ is that out of which our idea of matter is built’.[8] But, in the terms of the formula, force can be nothing but matter affected by motion. What, then, was this primary matter on which motion first acted, and before motion had by various ‘modes’ produced in it a single quality? No answer is possible; but, nevertheless, as the philosophy unfolds itself we find that ‘we need not refrain ... from dealing with matter as made up of extended and resistant atoms,’[9] and henceforth we are led to consider the cosmic nebula as not only homogeneous, but as being, in its homogeneity, atomic.

[Footnote 7: _First Principles_, p. 396.]

[Footnote 8: _First Principles_, p. 167.]

[Footnote 9: _First Principles_, p. 176.]

No lover of physical and chemical science can do other than profoundly admire the atomic theory of modern physics. But there is no sound physicist or chemist but is sufficiently alive to its difficulties to know that in every form in which it has been presented, it is, to say no more, tentative and hypothetic. In Mr. Spencer’s philosophy it becomes a fundamental fact of the beginning. But the existence of atoms being granted, how did they arise? ‘If you ask the materialist,’ says Professor Tyndall, ‘whence is this matter ... who or what divided it into molecules ... he has no answer.’[10] So that here, in spite of the claim made, no philosophy can be ‘complete;’ and even the doctrine of an eternally automatic evolution is philosophically inadequate.

But these atoms of the primordial haze are ‘resistant;’ such a quality can only result from a special affection of matter by motion; whence came or how arose such an affection of matter? Its existence in the atoms of the nebula inevitably implies ‘preceding history,’ but it is not given; and this pregnant atomic haze is, so far as we can see, without colour, without chemical affinity or reaction, without light, electricity, or magnetism, and devoid of all cohesion.

Clearly, these are not the atoms of the chemical elements known to us. They are not the atoms of Dalton nor of Clark Maxwell. The atoms of the cosmic mist are, by the very terms of the formula, naked of quality; and, by the limiting conditions of the definition of the cloud as homogeneous, are, throughout all the abysms of space, alike in size, in shape, and in motions. Equal extensions of space moving at equal rates.

[Footnote 10: _Fragments of Science_, vol. ii. p. 396.]

By these conditions, then, it is manifest that primordial matter is in itself infinitely powerless and inert. Motion can affect it; but can there be motion of any _new_ kind originated without a power to cause it? If that can be, the fundamental acts of human reason are untrustworthy; and man is incapable of knowledge or deduction, which is absurd. Then what was the power that determined new motions in the primordial homogeneous matter?

It could not by any demand in the formula be even gravity, if that were competent. Modern thought and knowledge cannot allow gravitation to be a property of matter. Ether is matter, but it does not gravitate. Gravity is therefore an occult affection of matter by motion, that has a history ‘to be accounted for.’

In this almost infinite primal nebula, a certain class of motion is assumed. How it originated is unexplained. But what is the atomic motion of this primal homogeneous matter? From the terms given it must be as I have said. Motion of absolute likeness throughout all the profounds of space it filled; equalized motion in every atom; no difference of rate; no difference of mode. The motion of one atom is identic with the motion of all. It could never be lost; it could never increase; it could never alter. It is homogeneous, and _therefore_ changeless—balanced for ever—in itself. Says Mr. Spencer: ‘Any finite mass of diffused matter, even though vast enough to form our whole sidereal system,’ if it were of ‘absolute sphericity, absolute uniformity of composition, and absolute symmetry of relation to all forces external to it,’[11] would be homogeneous and eternally incapable of change.

[Footnote 11: _First Principles_, p. 407.]

And that ‘homogeneity’ is the very condition laid down for the beginning, from which mechanical evolution is to educe the universe. In the Spencerian formula there is no qualification of the term homogeneous. It postulates ‘an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity,’ that is, an indefinite cloud, with balanced motion in all its atoms which neither attracts nor repels, and is in itself infinitely incapable of change.

Now, shall we not ask _how_ the first pulse, that caused the stupendously vast homogeneity to throb into the heterogeneous, arose? whence did it come? Infinite incapacity could not, unless reason be mendacious, render _itself_ capable. Then how came that _first_ movement that, it is argued, ended in revolving systems, a bountiful earth, the throat of the nightingale, and the tragedy of Macbeth!

There is no answer. This philosophy, to get the first progressive movement in its balanced nebula, bids its formula stand aside, that it may advance. At a critical moment it changes the very meaning of the homogeneous. ‘The condition of homogeneity is a condition of unstable equilibrium!’[12] ‘The phrase ... is one used in mechanics to express a balance of forces of such kind that the interference of any further force, however minute, will destroy the arrangement previously subsisting, and bring about a totally different arrangement.’[13]

[Footnote 12: _First Principles_, p. 401.]

[Footnote 13: _Ibid._ p. 401-402.]

Note, then, the homogeneous cosmic cloud is, by the terms given, in equilibrium. But some ‘further force,’ some small influence _outside_ itself, acts upon it, and it breaks up.

But what is the _outside_ influence? What is this ‘further force,’ and from whence? We have a cloud composed of atoms in balanced motion—nothing more. Outside influence, ‘further force,’ is an intrusion. It has no right there. It has not on the wedding garment of the formula.

Surely an outside influence must be caused? If it involved no more energy than is wielded by a may-fly’s wing, how came it there? It is as easy to admit the _self-origination_ of a divinity of power, as the _self-creation_ of power to lift a grain. It is not in the philosophy; ‘outside influence’ has no credentials, and the admission of inability to evolve the universe without it, is an admission that the mechanical philosophy fails at the outset. Nor can it serve the emergency to invoke ‘force.’

A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force _does_, but it can no more find what force _is_, than what an infinite mind is. Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science.

It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. Let us remember this, while for the purposes of argument we allow it. There may have been secured, added, and perhaps altered, motion by the surreptitious ‘outside influence;’ but it can be nothing more. The atoms are still without property, and are only affected by motion. Have we any _experience_ to induce us to believe that atoms without property, even affected by thermal vibrations and pushed by gravity, will build themselves up into the seventy ‘elements’ of chemistry with their specific and inalienable qualities? That, through vibrations of heat and pushings of gravity, they could become hydrogen and mercury, carbon and gold, chlorine and phosphorus! And these properties being thus acquired, by their sheer interactions that all the chemistry, the physics, and the _order_ of all the area of space within the galaxy arose? This is what the formula of the most brilliant philosophy of any age would lead us to infer.

In this relation I do not forget the recent and splendid service done by Mr. Crooks to the philosophical side of chemistry in the record of his researches on ‘The Genesis of the Elements.’ It is a most subtile and exquisite means of endeavouring to deduce the _method_, the ‘_law_’ according to which what we know as the ‘chemical elements’ were built up. He obtains indications of a primitive element—a something out of which the elements were evolved. He calls it _protyle_ or first stuff, and from its presence he concludes that the elements, as we know them, ‘are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance, or been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been evolved from simpler matter—or perhaps indeed from one sole kind of matter.’[14]

[Footnote 14: Reprint of a Lecture at the Royal Institution by Mr. Crooks, p. 2.]

But this reduction of matter, as we know it, to a simpler but still highly differentiated condition, only causes reason the more earnestly to demand how the rhythmic and complex method, which we express by the word ‘law,’ came into operation, and was established for ever.

The ‘protyle’ is infinitely more complex than the atoms of the homogeneous nebula. It makes no philosophical difference whether the ultimate atoms of the bodies known as elementary are all alike, or in each instance special. In either case there is infinitely more in the matter they severally make, than can be deduced from motion affecting the primitive atoms.

But not only have we by the formula and constructive method of this philosophy to obtain protyle from the mere effects of motion on primitive atoms; but, by the same means alone, we have to change protyle into the seventy ‘elements;’ above all, without an added factor or a change in the method, we have to rise to life!

Let us reflect. By life in this relation is meant that which lives, an organism endowed with life’s properties. Are these properties unique? Or is there some point of fluxion where the properties of life at their minima arise in the activities of not-life at some undiscovered maxima? A point at which some occult molecular complexities arise, changing matter dead into matter living?

The answer must come, not through our abstract logic, but from our laboratories.

Life, it is well known, has its phenomena inherent in, and strictly confined to, a highly complex compound, with fixed chemical constituents. This compound, in its living state, is known as protoplasm. It is clear, colourless, and, to our finest optical resources, devoid of discoverable structure. There is not a living thing on earth but possesses its life in protoplasm, from a microscopic fungus to man.

To depict the properties of life in irreducible simplicity, take one of the lowliest instances within the present range of science. Let it be one of the exquisitely minute, almost infinitely prolific, and universally diffused living forms that set up and carry on putrefaction. The lesser of them may, when considered as solid specks, vary from the fifty thousand millionth of a cubic inch to the twenty billionth of a cubic inch. I select one that is oval in shape. It moves with the agility of the grayling and the grace of a swallow, the motion resulting from the rhythmic action of two motile fibres.

This free and self-originating action is its first vital quality.

Its mission as an organism, is to break up and set free the chemical elements that had been locked up in dead organic compounds. Its own substance wears out by this and other means; and it has the power to renovate the waste from the dead decomposition in which it lives; constructing, in the laboratory of its protoplasm, new living matter.

This is the second characteristic of that alone which lives. By it, living matter is _sui generis_. Every instant, and at the same temperature, this inconceivably minute speck, without discoverable structure, effects analyses and complicated syntheses which either baffle all the synthetic chemistry of man, or else, where he is able to accomplish the simplest of the organic syntheses, it is by processes and at temperatures that make all life impossible.

But more, this vital and inconceivably minute speck multiplies with astounding rapidity in two ways; by the first and common process, in the course of a minute and a half the entire body is divided into two precisely similar bodies, each one being perfect; almost immediately these again divide, and so on in geometric ratio through all the populated fluid; the rapidity of this intense and wonderful vital action transcending all thought. By this process alone a single form may in three hours give rise to a population of organisms as great as the human population of the globe.