Читать книгу The Philosophy of Natural Theology - William Jackson T. - Страница 14

"Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise;"

is a good example of a poet's successfully expanding his own thought. Still more exquisitively true to nature is the final parallel drawn in Coleridge's description of the divided friends who stood apart,—

"Like cliffs which had been rent asunder,"

while the marks of a former union lingered indestructible. Perhaps few readers of "Christabel" ever looked at Lodore, and "its scars remaining," without feeling how aptly they represent traces of thought and affection engraved upon the soul of man, deeper and more imperishable than the primæval rocks between which the "dreary sea" now flows.

The wonderful force of many among Shakespeare's metaphors is derived from compressed analogy. But by expanding

"The slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,"

we should form no better conception of the goddess; and the next line,

"Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,"

might easily be turned into nonsense! Like Paley's "watch," the "sea" holds true only in one point. Shakespeare had before his eye the image of multitudinous vastness. But what arms could we take up to stem the billows of a swelling tide?

No one can read many commentators on the Scripture without feeling how groundless are numberless conclusions arrived at by extending Scriptural analogies beyond their just limits. Preachers and platform speakers are still more guilty. Not content with straining Holy Writ, they add to the mischief by pressing into their service comparisons of double meaning. The above quoted word "sea," has long been a much-enduring similitude in its relation to the countries and islands of the earth. What is it really to us, the earth's inhabitants? Our highway and bond of union? or a waste of waters given to divide rivals, as Horace phrases it, "Oceano dissociabili"? The last is the oldest metaphor.[19]

Enough has been said upon various analogies to show how frequently even in their widest use (that of illustration), the effect of extending them beyond their one salient point, is utter confusion. And with respect to illative analogy, this rule becomes obviously more stringent still. Paley meant it to be observed strictly as regards his own analogous reasoning.

But the caution itself must be cautiously applied, where the salient point on which the inference turns is too superficial, or too weak to stand alone. And this is the very thing we have to discuss next,—because a second accusation brought against the argument from Design is, that by reason of weakness in its pivot, it proves far too little.

This second charge is less usual amongst popular than scientific writers, and most of us may learn something by sifting it. Their position may be described in few words as standing thus:—

All examples which men can, of their own knowledge, connect with Design, fall under one sole class, and from this class alone they can argue. It contains the products of human workmanship and manufacture—and nothing else. By its characteristic processes (which together with their result make the sum of what we know about this class) it is so essentially dissociated from the products of Nature, that any appearance of design common between them must be pronounced superficial in the absence of stronger nexus. But since proof of such nexus remains wanting, Paley's analogy is worthless. It will be observed that the effect of this position is to sever between human works and natural things quite as completely as did the popular objection which we put first in our list of assaults upon Paley. Yet, though these conclusions may seem suspiciously coincident, the grounds of argument are really distinct. Scientific persons do not compare two objects natural and artificial, nor yet their two sets of constituents, and say, "These are unlike." They argue rather that the relative or proportionate likeness asserted is insufficiently made out, and that when it is said "Design implies a designer," people are speaking of design worked out in the known way of workmen. We (they observe) need not deny a designer of the world, but we desiderate evidence of his actual workmanship. By this we shall know that he first conceived and then realized the alleged design. We do not feel convinced by being shown certain organic somethings in their perfect state, and being told to observe how very like contrivances they are. They may be very like, certainly, but we want assurances that they can be nothing else. We want to have shown us some work being done, and to ascertain that it is carried on in a workmanlike manner. Then we shall say with confidence, Here is the active hand of a designer. To compress our requisition into a single sentence,—We want not only to catch Nature in the fact, but also to ascertain that Nature's way of performing the fact has something essentially humanlike about it.

To see our meaning clearly (add these objectors) take the instance of some marvellous work of man's art previously unknown to us. We could, if we perceived the marks of human fabrication, reason from a watch, or some other well known machine, to the conclusion that some person had designed it. In other words, we should feel sure that we were looking at a new product of skill, which differed from what we had seen before in the degree of excellence attained. The difference we feel in our transition from Art to Nature appears, on the contrary, to be a difference not only between more or less perfect products or processes, but a thorough difference of kind in the whole manner of bringing about the results placed before our eyes. Or put the case (they continue) as a piece of circumstantial evidence. We say positively of this or that machine, They are contrivances, things designed, because we know the history of their manufacture. We feel positive, because we are arguing from a plain patent fact to a hidden but absolutely essential condition, without which the fact could not exist. As regards natural products we have not got the fact—we do not know the history of their production. We cannot say, Here is the process, because the processes of Nature are mostly unknown to us. Paley therefore would have us assume the fact and argue from it; first to design, next, to something more hidden still,—a Designer. Yet what we do know of natural processes is not encouraging; there is visible about them more unlikeness than likeness to the processes employed by man. The truth may be surmised, that Paley was always seeing in his own examples the footprints, as he thought, of a Designer. Hence he affirmed Design, and then argued back again in a never-ending circle. There is really no reason why he should have travelled round such a circuit. If his argument shows anything, it shows a Designer at once.[n]

With some risk of tediousness, this last attack on Paley has been detailed at great length, and placed (as the present writer believes) in several of its most formidable shapes[o]. But for additional security of fair dealing with the strongest of all objections—one which, if established, would be a death-blow to all argument on the subject (since its ultimatum is unconditional surrender)—for these reasons, then, and in order to satisfy the most rigorous understanding, let it be finally rehearsed in the words of a most eminent physicist whom no one will accuse of haste, oversight, or credulity. To this rehearsal the Professor adds what is to us more important still,—his judgment on the point at issue.

But before quoting Professor Baden Powell, it may be worth while to make two short notes on the few preceding paragraphs. Let us take the last paragraph first.

It really does appear that marks of Design and the footprints of a Designer are in common sense very nearly one and the same thing. If we concentrate our attention on the former, we are looking at an object on the side of certain properties,—that is, of certain subjectively perceived relations. For instance, we may think of the eye only as an optical instrument wonderfully constituted, and enumerate the parts of its visual apparatus. But the moment we speak of this apparatus as a provision intentionally made for sight, we have introduced the idea of a Designer in the strongest sense of the word. Now, it is difficult to think of anything as an example of intelligent arrangement, and at the same time give no hint even to our own thoughts of arranging Intelligence. We can hardly look through a pane of glass and admire the perfect transparency of one surface to the exclusion of the other! We are not now speaking of what might be done, if attempted by a man so profoundly skilled in analytics that

"He could distinguish, and divide

A hair 'twixt south and south-west side."

We are rather speaking of what it is natural to do. And it may be doubted whether anybody thinks of a design as design very long without thinking also of the Designer.

One other remark is suggested by the reference to process as contradistinguished from product. Here, again, the real question is, How far is such a distinction maintainable in fact? Does it rest upon any definite separation in Nature? The exact contradictory is the truth; taking the world as it is, the distinction, though clear in thought, becomes essentially fluent when objectively regarded. What we call a production one moment, we say is a process the next. You have, for example, a galvanic current, produced by certain chemical combinations, and often a product per se of some importance. Yet the current itself is a part of the electrotyping process. Suppose this done, you have your electrotype—your coin,—a hard fact,—a solid production, bright, beautiful, admirable! But we will suppose you, while devising all this, to have a further view;—the coin is to be employed in the process of imposture. Here again comes a result—a great fraud committed; but this is not all. The fraudulent procedure turns out a very useful police-trap, and your chemical combination sends the last actor on the scene to Portland, for at least ten years. Consider in this brief history the scientific arrangements, material conditions, and workmanlike execution, discernible in its earlier parts; then, see how mind becomes gradually predominant, and how Law, based on ideas of corrective justice, enters the series. Add the judge and jury, and you admit the force of intellect,—deliberating, deciding, putting further activities in motion; till, perhaps, if the reformatory process succeeds, Portland may have the honour of giving to society the welcome product of (as times go) a passably honest man. We might really frame a curious inquiry as respects this flowing tide of process and production, production and process, with its commingling currents and waves which seem to interrupt each other like circles of diffracted light. We might ask which of all these parts of the moving diorama is most distinctly human. I believe most people would say, those scenes in which mind, not mere workmanship, is most evidently discernible.

Professor Powell seems to have thought so too. The difficulty we have been discussing he states as an objection requiring solution.[20]

"In those cases most nearly approaching the nature of human works, such as the varied and endless changes in matter going on in the laboratory of nature, the results, even when most analogous to those obtained in human laboratories, yet present no marks of the process or of the means employed, by which to recognise the analogous workman; and in all the grander productions, the incessant evolutions of vegetable and animal life, which no human laboratory can produce,—in the structure of earth and ocean, or the infinite expanse of the heavens and their transcendent mechanism, still further must we be from finding any analogy to the works of man, or, by consequence, any analogy to a personal individual artificer."

The next paragraph contains his own judgment.

"But the more just view of the case is that which arises from the consideration that the real evidence is that of mind and intelligence; for here we have a proper and strict analogy. Mind directing the operations of the laboratory or the workshop, is no part of the visible apparatus, nor are its operations seen in themselves—they are visible only in their effects;—and from effects, however dissimilar in magnitude or in kind, yet agreeing in the one grand condition of order, adjustment, profound and recondite connexion and dependence, there is the same evidence and outward manifestation of Invisible Intelligence, as vast and illimitable as the universe throughout which those manifestations are seen."

This second extract may be analysed into distinct propositions somewhat as follows:—

In a manufactory,—

Mind is no part of the visible apparatus—nor are its operations visible,—

But the effects make the operations manifest.—

In the universe,—

Effects may be seen differing from Human productions in many ways,—but agreeing in one common characteristic,—order—adjustment—hidden interdependence.

Such effects make manifest the operation of an Invisible Intelligence as vast as the Universe itself.

The majority of people might suppose this a conclusive inference from Nature to the Being of a Personal God. But Professor Powell does not so intend it; and therefore some readers may feel disposed to blame his use of words. It is, however, only fair that before so doing, they should carefully consider his whole mode of apprehending the subject in its completeness. And the easiest way of understanding Powell is, most probably, to compare him with Paley.

The latter is confident that when he has derived the design and arrangement of the world from a mind analogous to the mind of man, but immeasurably vast as the Universe which man inhabits,—little more need be said. He thinks the infinite intelligence thus demonstrated, is clearly no other than the Great First Cause, and Creator of all things. "Contrivance, if established, appears to me to prove everything which we wish to prove." This sentence begins Chap. xxiii., and the rest of Paley's Natural Theology is intended to demonstrate and verify its correctness.

Powell thinks that the step from a mind or intelligence, even if conceived illimitable as the Universe, to a First Cause, Supreme Mind, or Moral Cause, is a very much longer ascent[p] than Paley thought it. By these latter terms he meant—as Paley did—the Divine Personality believed in by Theists, and evidenced, first, as mind by a reign of law, order, and arrangement, so far as the world can evidence Him;—but manifest, secondly, in His higher nature as the fountain and originator of law—that is, a true Cause, a manifestation due to the causal structure of our own human minds. The point of difference is the length of the step to be taken from Law to Causation; but Powell agrees with his predecessor in asserting it, though arduous, to be absolutely safe. The point he insists on is that we cannot take it by a contemplation of the world without us only. "Ever-present mind" he says,[21] "is a direct inference from the universal order of nature, or rather only another mode of expressing it. But of the mode of existence of that mind we can infer nothing."

From this view he draws conclusions in opposite directions. Pantheism,[22] the co-existence or identification of mind with matter, "is at best a mere gratuitous hypothesis, and as such wholly unphilosophical in itself, and leading to many preposterous consequences." There are also grounds on which Theism appears certain and Pantheism extravagant, absurd, and contradictory.[23] To see these grounds we are to carry out the analogy given us by the common characteristics of order, adjustment, and interdependence visible through their effects as in the human workshop or laboratory, so, too, in the vast illimitable Universe, and described in our second extract as manifestations of Mind or invisible Intelligence. In the paragraph immediately following that extract,[24] he continues:—

"It is by analogy with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, that we speak of the Supreme Mind and Moral Cause of the Universe, of whose operation, order, arrangement and adaptation, are the external manifestations. Order implies what by analogy we call intelligence; subserviency to an observed end implies intelligence foreseeing which by analogy, we call Design."

The last sentence of the paragraph now quoted is very remarkable. The eminent writer directs attention to a distinction between two several inferences which can be drawn from the observed manifestations of Order, and of Foresight. From the first, he says, we infer Intelligence, from the latter we infer Design. It seems singular that Powell should have defined this distinction so clearly, and made no further use of it.

He might naturally have insisted upon the separate and diverse evidences thus afforded by the physical world. Amid the variety of human minds, some may feel impressed by the contemplation of Nature in one of these ways, some in the other. To many persons the magnificent spectacle of a law-governed Universe, infinitely manifold yet everywhere harmonious, appears to justify the belief in one supreme Reason and sovereign Will. Separate parts of this same Universe—or the whole in its entirety of vastness—when considered as manifesting purpose—that is, intentional adaptation to separate ends or to one end—are to other minds a more convincing line of thought.

With many writers on Natural Theology the different shades of meaning implied in the word Design[25] may prevent clearness of conception in this respect. But our author (like Paley) appears to use this word in its strongest signification.

And this usage of Powell's brings into view another point in his reasoning even more singular than the one to which we have just adverted. Surely, if in the natural world we observe the manifestations of an Intelligence foreseeing an End, and employing means in subserviency to that end, it seems strange to conclude that respecting the mode of existence of such Intelligence we can infer nothing, yet the words occur on the very next page. It would seem almost an impossibility to suppose such a mind existing as anything less than a Personality under the twofold aspect of a Reason and a Will. Paley's common sense drew this conclusion at once, and very profound thinkers have agreed with Paley on the topic. "That," says F. H. Jacobi, "which, in opposition to Fate, makes God into a true God, is called Foresight. Where it is, there alone is Reason; and where Reason is, there also is Foresight. Foresight in itself is Spirit, and to that only which is of Spirit do those feelings of admiration, awe, and love, which announce its existence, correspond. We can indeed declare of any object that it is beautiful or perfect, without previously knowing how it became so, whether with or without the operation of Foresight;—but the power which caused it so to be, that we cannot admire, if it produced the object, without aim or purpose, according to laws of mere Necessity of Nature."[26]

In point of fact Professor Powell was himself of the same opinion, for in another place he writes thus:—

"Now, the bare fact of order and arrangement is on all hands undisputed, though commonly most inadequately understood and appreciated.

"The inference of design, intention, forethought, is something beyond the last mentioned truth, and not to be confounded with it. This implies intelligent agency, or moral causation. Hence again, we advance to the notion of distinct existence, or what is sometimes called personality; and thence proceed to ascribe the other Divine attributes and perfections as centring in that independent Being."[27]

It appears only just to the Archdeacon that we should notice this variation of language on the part of his censor.[28] Of this variation itself the true account seems undoubtedly to be as follows. The writer was engaged in tracing the progress of conviction in his own mind. He first observes order, adjustment, interdependence, throughout the Universe. Hence he is penetrated by the impression of pervading Intelligence. Next, he perceives that these results could never have taken place unless foreseen and provided for by a designed subserviency of means to ends, and this convinces him of the Personality of that universal Mind. Finally, he draws, from the analysis of Causation, a full definition of the great Originator of all things.

The fact, however, remains that each of these gradations of reasoning may be stated just as easily and more logically as separate and convergent lines of thought, because each can be rested on a separate combination of proofs. But the elucidation of this subject cannot be compressed into few words, and must be deferred to our fifth and sixth chapters.

Still there is a very peculiar and special satisfaction in following the path of argument which persuaded an acute and practised reasoner, accomplished in several departments of knowledge, and himself of a turn of mind which would appear naturally adapted to the utmost refinements of sceptical investigation. We shall, therefore, now return to our comparison of Powell with his predecessor.

These two distinguished writers do, in fact, come at last to the same conclusion. But they reach it through a difference in the paths travelled over by such logic of evidence as may after all seem natural enough to a theological pleader on one side, and on the other to a scientific physicist.

Professor Powell, of course, leads us more deeply than his predecessor into the thorny thickets surrounding Natural Theology. No one can read his essays without remarking the subtlety of his thought, which to many readers appears over refined, and to some as employed on points in themselves unimportant. Mr. Baden Powell's own deliberate judgment was the other way, as we find from the last[29] of his considerable performances on our subject. "Points," he writes, "which may be seen to involve the greatest difficulty to more profound inquirers, are often such as do not occasion the least perplexity to ordinary minds, but are allowed to pass without hesitation.... On the other hand, exceptions held forth as fatal by the shallow caviller are seen by the more deeply reflecting in all their actual littleness and fallacy."

We may add that a subtle argument is often like a sharp thin blade, cutting clean into the very heart of a question. If it indeed prove a home thrust, few things ought to be more fearlessly and cheerfully welcomed by those who desire to dissect out the naked, intrinsic truth. We will, therefore, dissect a little deeper, following the Professor's track of demonstration.

We find him, then, reaching down to a septum, or, as botanists prefer to speak, a strong dissepiment between a law of Nature or physical causation, and a true Cause in the highest and most emphatic sense[q].

Such a separation is not to be sought from a writer of Paley's date, when the modern notion of law was unformed, or rather was in process of formation. Thus Newton's discoveries were thought by many persons irreligious, because the stability of the heavens appeared like something necessarily determined. Respecting this opinion, Powell observes (and from his point of view with truth), that "such necessity of reason is the highest proof of design." Paley, on the contrary, felt inclined to despair of discovering much evidence of Design in Astronomy, but he looked upon the starry heavens as affording the most ample and glorious confirmation of the agency of an intelligent Creator, when proved from some other source. In his next chapter (the 23rd) he proceeds to reprehend the mistaken sense of law, growing up amongst physicists in his own day. "It will," he says, "be made to take the place of power, and still more, of intelligent power," and will "be assigned for the cause of anything or of any property of anything that exists." In this remark he shows his accustomed penetration. Law, antecedent and consequent, with their series of physical evolutions, have been talked of by men who confuse physics and metaphysics, as if they could thereby account for a whole universe.[30] Now, from this cloudy confusion[r], Professor Powell is exempt. He accepts (as obviously he must accept) the natural-science idea of law, which looks at it as an orderly expression of force, and tells us that "law and order, physical causation and uniformity of action are the elevated manifestations of Divinity, creation and providence."[31] But from the conception of Mind or Intelligence thus given us, which, though invisible to the eye, is yet, in its effects, plainly visible, he distinguishes, over and over again, the idea of a true originating first Cause.[32] We see the necessity of a moral Cause as distinguished from a physical antecedent, when we survey Nature. But Nature does not contain the idea in an explicit shape. She only necessitates its acceptance. This idea, we find, he tells us, manifest in our own moral nature,—by analogy we discern it in the Divine. He likewise severely blames those who commingle in words the two contrasted thoughts and lines of inference, and mentions Coleridge and Sterling[33] by way of example. As concerns his own mode of establishing the idea of causation in its proper and peculiar force, Professor Powell agrees with a large number of metaphysicians, ancient and modern. It might seem superfluous to name as an instance the late Dean Mansel, were not a passage in his "Prolegomena" so full of good matter on the topic.[34]

In this view of causation, then, Powell advanced nothing new. But what he did advance was really valuable. The man who can rise no higher than law or succession as he sees it impressed on outward nature, stands in a totally different position from the man whose insight into Reason and Will has shown him the idea of true Causation. For, he has seen that whoever is the author of his own act, does something which puts in movement a new series of antecedence and consequence,—a new train of events, the issue of which no man can foresee;—though of what has come, and is coming, he, the individual man, is the truly responsible cause[s]. But if he can introduce into the order of the outward world a new antecedent carrying after it a chain of new consequents, what shall he think respecting the absolute Cause of all worlds, things and beings, the thinker himself included? Who shall persuade him to deny the reasonableness of a Providence following creation? Who can reprove the man when he feels and asserts his own moral power, for a belief in Miracles? Above all, who will demonstrate that prayer is inefficacious, if we can rise (as Baden Powell says we can rise) "by analogy with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, to the Supreme Mind and Moral Cause of the universe?"

It is no slight praise to say that Professor Powell clearly saw, and no less clearly expressed, a truth not always apprehended among physicists. By giving it expression, he rendered a substantial service to Natural Theology. It is, indeed, a serious drawback and impediment to Natural Theologians that their argument requires some acquaintance with more than one wide field of knowledge. They have to reason from the material world,—they have also to reason from the world of mind; and in countries like England, France, and Germany, where division of labour penetrates every calling, literary as well as manufacturing, a combination of this sort is a matter of infrequent occurrence. To this retarding circumstance may be ascribed the want of progress in several mixed sciences,[35] which, like the subject we are treating, occupy two distinct tracts of border-land territory.

The separating wall between Law and Cause built up by Professor Powell, was founded on fact, and will probably remain unshaken. But he added to it a theoretical limitation of the term, Natural Theology, which, like many changes in verbal usage, does not appear defensible,—particularly as its bad effects are plainly shown in Professor Powell's own book.

Within two pages of the passage on Causation last quoted, he startles the unwary reader by saying (p. 173) that "Natural Theology confessedly 'proves too little,' because it cannot rise to the metaphysical idea or scriptural representation of God." It is generally vain to inquire what may be meant by "Metaphysical." Few people are aware that everybody, learned or unlearned, talks metaphysics either well or ill; and usually (as M. Jourdain talked prose) without knowing it. The epithet "metaphysical" figures often enough as another name for what is unintelligible;—and most Englishmen apply it to all "ideas" not strictly commercial or practical. Here it seems to stand along with Scripture, in opposition to Natural Theology; while the latter term is in turn opposed to the science of the human mind. Yet does not Powell distinctly trace a Mind and Intelligence analogous to the mind and intelligence of Man, throughout the world of outward Nature; and does he not further determine that this same analogy, fairly carried out, leads to what he now calls "the metaphysical idea, or scriptural representation of God?" In other words, when discussing the question of Evidence, he finds Mind pervading outward Nature,—he treats Mind as the ordering and sovereign part of the Natural world, which visibly shows the effect of its invisible direction, and bids us follow up this higher nature in its analogies to God, of Whose operation the order and arrangement of the Universe are external manifestations. But, when he speaks of Natural Theology, that higher nature seems to disappear; intellect, volition, and the power of moral causation, slip out of sight, and are blotted from his catalogue of natural facts. Human nature must thus be treated as no part of universal Nature, in order that a needlessly narrow and purely theoretical fence may be drawn round the science of Natural Theology! Natural Theology and Natural Religion are, in truth, terms originally adopted as mere antitheses to Revelation. The first signifies what mankind might have known, or may know, of the Divine Being, prior to, or apart from, any direct message sent by Himself. The second is intended to comprehend those relations between that Divine Being and ourselves, which must ensue immediately upon the acceptance of Theism.[36] The ideas expressed by these two terms are as old as Revelation itself,—a strong reason why their meaning should not be lightly altered.[37] But this antithetic usage was never intended to prejudge the question whether the results of Natural Theology and Religion do not coincide to a very great extent with the teaching of revelation. Much less was there any idea of answering this question in the negative, as a hasty reader of certain isolated passages in Professor Powell's book might easily be led to answer it.[38]

Our strictures may be aptly concluded by a quotation taken from another recent writer. Professor Newman understands the evidence of Design in the same breadth of meaning which we have attached to it. Under it he comprehends the evidence of Mind naturally known to us, as may be seen by the following extracts:—

"A lung," says Mr. Newman,[39] "bears a certain relation to the air, a gill to the water, the eye to light, the mind to truth, human hearts to one another: is it gratuitous and puerile to say that these relations imply design? There is no undue specification here, no antagonist argument, no intrusion of human artifice: we take the things fresh from nature. In saying that lungs were intended to breathe, and eyes to see, we imply an argument from Fitness to Design, which carries conviction to the overwhelming majority of cultivated as well as uncultivated minds.... If such a fact stood alone in the universe, and no other existences spoke of Design, it would probably remain a mere enigma to us; but when the whole human world is pervaded by similar instances, not to see a Universal Mind in nature appears almost a brutal insensibility.... Of the physical structure of mind, no one pretends to know anything; but this does not weaken our conviction that the mind was meant to discern truth. Why should any philosopher resist this judgment? One thing might justify him; namely, if there were strong à priori reasons for disbelieving that Mind exists anywhere except in man. But the case is just the reverse. That puny beings who are but of yesterday, and presently disappear, should alone possess that which of all things is highest and most wonderful, is à priori exceedingly unplausible. As Socrates and Cicero have pointedly asked: 'Whence have we picked it up?' Its source is not in ourselves: there must surely be a source beyond us. Thus the tables are turned: we must primâ facie expect to find Mind in the Universe, acting on some stupendous scale, and of course imperfectly understood by us. Consequently, such Fitnesses as meet our view on all sides bring a reasonable conviction that Design lies beneath them. To confess this, is to confess the doctrine of an intelligent Creator, although we pretend not to understand anything concerning the mode, stages, or time of Creation. Adding now the conclusions drawn from the Order of the universe, we have testimony, adapted to the cultivated judgment, that there is a Boundless, Eternal, Unchangeable, Designing Mind, not without whom this system of things coheres: and this Mind we call God."

To take stumbling-blocks out of the reader's way has been the main object of this Chapter. It has discussed the meaning and force of several words. The discussion may have seemed somewhat intricate,—but if honest, and, so far as it goes, thorough, no one will deny its utility. For facts are known to us as words, and words are facts to our intellect, since they express our apprehension of objects. They are, in brief, the interpreters of a world-wide human consciousness. And in the strength of consciousness our knowledge stands, if it does stand;—unfaithful to consciousness, it must fall, and ought to die the death of a traitor.[40]

The word most discussed has been that one upon which turns the best known argument by Natural Theology—"Design." We trust also, that it may hereafter gain additional clearness under sidelights from other trains of thought.[41] And what next follows will be essentially a discussion of thoughts and things—in which words are to be treated less as their representatives, and more as our servants and implements. For this Chapter will have been written to very little purpose if the reader has failed to perceive that Natural Theology[42] includes at the very least two distinct elements—two separate sets of premises drawn from different sources. One of these factors rests upon our human knowledge of the natural world we live in—the other requires a deeper kind of knowledge, and one far less cultivated upon inductive principles—the knowledge, that is to say, of our own nature—our essential humanity and self-ness.

The investigation of this last element is of paramount importance for the purpose we have in hand, since, without some ascertained principles and conditions of truth, men may fold their hands and view all behind and above the moving diorama of present impressions as ideas sublime but hopeless[43]—too high for us, who surely can never attain to them. The plan, therefore, of this essay is to take from the point now reached a fresh start—to set out, not from a consideration of what we may desire to know, but of how much or how little can be known, and the conditions of our knowing it.

An honest wish to be sure of one single thing soon shows us the impediments we meet in making quite sure of anything. Soon, also, we painfully learn that these impediments arise from two persistent sets of causes. Difficulties on the one hand occasioned by the obscurity, complication, or many-sidedness of objects actually existing in rerum naturâ. Difficulties on the other hand, which, like barnacles and remoræ attached to a good ship's wooden bottom, act as drags and retardations on our own apprehending faculties. Barnacle-like, they can only be kept at a distance or detached by carefully-devised contrivances. And these again give rise to troubles of other kinds,—just as copper-sheathed keels or iron vessels are not without their drawbacks.

The inquiry we propose will have a great collateral advantage, both to him who doubts and to him who accepts Theism. For we shall at least get rid of what may fairly be termed a stupid prejudice. Persons who read and think little, are apt to base upon their own ignorance a vague presumption that the path of knowledge is plain and easy, until men try to know God. Then all is hard; the pleasant path becomes a rough and toilsome road. Others who read, but think less than they read, are aware that very real obstacles beset all deep inquiry, yet form hazy and imperfect notions as to the true extent of those obstacles. They little think how often we are all obliged to accept and maintain first truths;—difficulties objective, and difficulties subjective, notwithstanding.

Of one practical conclusion resulting from these difficulties, we may feel assured beforehand. Many objects of the greatest interest and importance to truth can never be truly known as they are in themselves;—our utmost hope is to know, not them, but as much as we can discover respecting them. And sometimes this limited knowledge is invaluable. If it does not gratify our natural desire for speculation, it may often guide and govern our lives. Unspeakably important, for example, in itself and in its consequences, must be an affirmative answer to our anxious question concerning the existence of a God.

Corollary.—It plainly appears from what has been said, that the knowledge of an "efficient cause" (in physics) does not, and cannot, at all preclude the inquiry after a purpose or "final cause"; but, on the contrary, leads to its investigation. In a watch's action, the former is represented by the moving power—that is, the spring; the latter, by the watch's function—that of indicating hours, minutes, and seconds. Would any uninformed person, examining a watch for the first time, and knowing no more than what he sees,—be able to give to himself any real account of the watch, if spring, train of wheel-work, and pointers, were shown him; but no hint given of the purpose and object of the whole construction? Now, to tell him this, would be to convey the idea,—a principle which resides in Mind, and in Mind alone;—and, so residing, leads to intelligent adaptation;—that is, a law or laws apprehended by the active exercise of certain mental faculties.

Let the intelligent reader ask himself whether any functional structure can be comprehended on any lower terms?—As however this latter question will be fully discussed further on, it is unnecessary to say more respecting it at present.