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