SCIENCE AND FAITH.* THERE are not many unbiassed and capable

persons among us who would deny that the increased knowledge of the natural world, which is the most marked characteristic of our day, has- been accompanied, in almost direct proportion, by a decreased belief in the supernatural. The fact that courage is now often needed to avow opinions which courage was formerly always needed to disavow, has a real connection with the general interest in science. It is not very wonderful that men who have spent a lifetime in the study of a small part of the wonders of eye or ear should be incredulous, first, as to the importance, and then as to the reality of that which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. It is not at all wonderful that what they disbelieve should: assume, for average persons, the garb of superstition. We are apt to omit all nice investigation of the qualifications of those who have proved their power to benefit us, and the study by which men have almost annihilated distance, baffled pain, multiplied every convenience of life, and covered the civilised world with traces of triumphant skill, might have been foreseen to be the study which should set the key-note of Truth. Hence the numerous attempts at a reconciliation of Science and Religion which, if they prove nothing else, prove the need of a reconciliation, while the timid, propitiatory tone of Theology shows that the position of these ancient foes is almost inverted. A new kind of orthodoxy is springing up among us, expressed through the physician, rather than the clergyman, and the old orthodoxy betrays an uneasy recognition of its own attitude and of a large part of its former power in its dangerous rival. The change is as yet imperfectly accomplished, and we look for a great increase of all the negative inferences from the teaching of Science, before men return to other sources of truth. In the meantime, we are inclined to welcome any distinct and frank avowal of these negative inferences. We consider that they are more hostile to the welfare of mankind than all the discoveries of modern Science are beneficial to it, but we are glad that they should be definitely expressed, rather than vaguely hinted, or elaborately implied.

The belief that when we have catalogued the data of the senses, we have completed the inventory of existence, has- been hinted at or implied often and often; but the work named below presents 1113 with the first example, so far A Candid Examination of Theism. By " Pbyeicus." London : Tritbner.

The Atheistic Controversy. By F. W. Newman. Contemporary Review, October, 1578.

as we know, of a distinct acceptance of this belief ex- pressed in the English language, and addressed to the

average reader. It seems to us to proceed from an earnest, able, and candid mind, disciplined rather in the study of science -than of philosophy, and over-rating, as is natural, the advan-

tages of the scientific student on philosophic ground. It has been noticed, in an interesting article by Mr. F. W. Newman, -which we regret that our limits forbid our noticing further than by saying that it contains, in our opinion, a pregnant suggestion as to the true quarter from which the reaction towards faith will

originate, on the ground of Science. We ourselves notice it from a different point of view. The volume which first

accepts Atheism as the creed of Science, whatever its in- trinsic interest, is interesting mainly as a sign of the times. And the singular candour with which opposing arguments are weighed, as well as the great reluctance with which their result has been accepted, makes the appearance of this little volume a fitting occasion for aninquiry into the meaning of the change that has come over the world of thought. The author has, he informs us, not broken a chain, but surrendered a treasure, to gain his present position. We will let him speak for himself, in lan- guage which we will not allow ourselves to regard as dramatic. He declares it to be the result of an honest attempt to answer

-the question he has taken as his motto, "Gaud thou by searching find out God ?" that,— " Whether I regard the problem of Theism on the lower plane of strictly relative probability, or on the higher plane of purely formal considerations, it equally becomes my obvious duty to stifle all belief of the kind which I conceive to be the noblest, and to discipline my intellect with regard to this matter into an attitude of the purest scepticism. And forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the new faith' is a desirable substitute for the waning splendour of the old,' I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness ; and although from henceforth the precept to 'work while it is day' will doubtless but gain an intensified force, the terribly intensified meaning of the words that the night cometh when no man can work,' yet, when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it,—at such times, I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible. For whether it be due to my intelligence not being sufficiently advanced to meet the requirements of the age, or -whether it be due to the mammy of those sacred associations which to me, at least, were the sweetest that life has given, I cannot but feel that for me, and for others who think as I do, there is a dreadful -truth in those words of Hamilton,—' Philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the precept Know thyself has become transformed into the terrific oracle of stEdipus,—' Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art.'"

liournfal words! and yet the most mournful conviction they rouse is that their sadness must be transitory. The twilight of faith

is of varying length in different spiritual latitudes, but it must soon end in all. The objects that become unreal to the intellect cannot long remain dear to the heart. The void may be filled completely, for the nature may so contract, that that in man which desired the infinite may be satisfied with the in- definite, and an endless succession of ephemeral beings may open a vista that shall seem to replace the endless hope for -every individual among them. The yearning that binds shattered lives here to healing influences elsewhere, and feels a patient God the fellow-worker in all efforts that would raise -the fallen, may, in the marvellous change which follows the loss of a profound conviction, be regarded as selfishness. He who has ceased to believe in an invisible world will soon find the visible one a satisfactory abode, and even come to regard all -other feelings but satisfaction as unreasonable and wrong. Still, every one who occupies the past position of " Physicus," and perhaps a few who occupy his present one, will be thankful

that the avowal of disbelief was made in that fugitive moment when the thing lost seemed precious.

While fully at one with " Physicus " as to the bearing of the Science on the Faith of our day, in its broad general aspect, we would take exception to some of the details. He writes as if the modern man of science, like the conquering Pompey, had penetrated to the Holy of Holies, and found it empty. We should not so map out the march of the new invaders of our Holy Land. We cannot give the discoveries of our own day -the proportion, in the general result, which he assigns to them.

It is only in the present day, no doubt, that a strong interest in the visible world has been linked with a decided disbelief in the invisible. But the tendency, now fully manifest, was always latent. The first elaborate attempt at a system of Nature was the first elaborate assertion of Atheism. We have

often been surprised at the small attention which the Physicists of our day have paid to the most original of their predecessors, who is also the one original thinker on the illustrious roll of Roman literature. The poet from whom a Gray has borrowed some of his most pathetic lines might (though we are well assured he has not) have proved a mine of suggestion for the discoveries of a Darwin. The anticipation of the theory of natural selection on the page of Lucretius has been doubtless often noticed, and grotesque as is this first edition of the great scientific discovery of our day, we do not see that the variation between it and that familiar to us is other than one of detail. The idea of a set of anomalous births,—creatures who came into existence as rough sketches from Nature's hand, to be thrown aside and perish, till she arrived at the conception of a being fitted to live and reproduce its kind,—this contains in germ all that we have been taught to receive as the latest deliverance of Science on the Origin of Species. And this is no more than the most important in- stance of an anticipation of the principles of modern science to be found in the pages of Lucretius. Indeed, we should say that the poem Da Nature needs only a different set of illustrations to furnish the modern naturalist with a set of weapons against the supernaturalist, quite as effective as any he could find in the pages of a Spencer or a Huxley. Of course, therefore, we must consider that, from a philosophic point of view, " Physicus" enormously overrates the influence of the discovery of the correlation of Force. It would be impossible to overrate this last, probably, as a contribution to Science. The work of Mr. Justice Grove, in which it first received literary expression, high as is the place it occupies in public estimate, seems to us to deserve one yet higher. Still we cannot see in it anything more, as a contribution to philosophy, than an expan- sion, richly illustrated, of the laws of movement, as they are formulated in the Prineipia. It pursues the principles Newton there grasps and defines into regions where the mere sense fails to follow them. It takes up the idea there latent of indestruct- ible force, and carries on its history when, to the unassisted eye, it has ceased to exist. Movement, men learnt from Newton, is perpetual in the heavens, from the mere absence of any im- pediment to bring it to a pause, not from any distinction of things earthly and things heavenly. Movement, men learn from the physicists of our day, inferred by the mind when it can no longer be discerned by the eye, is no less perpetual on earth. Surely the last principle might, the moment molecular physics existed, have been evolved from the first. We cannot see that the power to follow with quantitative appreciation the change of one force into another, adds anything to the con- viction that within the circle of Nature the forces that seem destroyed must be really transformed; any more than the power to estimate a man's income in French or English money adds anything to the conviction that the two figures must re- present the same sum. It seems to us, therefore, that if the ideas of "the persistence of Force and the primary qualities of matter" render "the theory of Theism in any shape superfluous," that theory is rendered superfluous by the mere conception of a " natnra diedala rerum." To connect many effects with one cause is a necessity of our intellectual being, but there is a point of view from which one self-existent reality is as good as another. When the intellect is in contact with the idea of a body of laws bound up in mutual interdepend- ence, so that each depends on all, and all on each (and this, after all, was always the scientific view of the world), it is in contact with that ultimate, inexplicable simplicity, which is all the mere intellect can discern in the Will of God.

But the notion that this is all the spirit of man can discern in the Will of God, is a characteristic of our own day. Never before has it been thought unreasonable that the intellect should take cognisance of the data of our whole being, moral as well as sen- sible, or have ordinary human beings considered that while the senses proved their object by their action, the emotions were shut out from any right of a similar testimony till their veracity was guaranteed from elsewhere. And while, on the one hand, the faculties which come in contact with the Divine have been called upon, for the first time, to prove their own existence in the face of hostile criticism, on the other, all the inferences which the intellect has hitherto supplied towards justifying them have been sensibly retrenched, For it is only in our own day that the idea of Natural Law has invaded the idea of Creation. Most scientific thinkers, before a time that an old person can remember, thought that at some particular epoch an event took place that they would.

all have described as a stupendous miracle. No doubt this was disbelieved by individuals, but it was the ordinary assump- tion. Nor was there anything in the older discoveries to shake it. The idea of gravitation—the largest, we still believe, that Science has ever originated—does not in any way tend to exclude the idea of a beginning of things. It belongs to a different region. But we cannot say this of the scientific ideas of our day. They make Natural Law in time, what Newton made it in space. He raised it to share the infinity of the world,—they, to share the eternity of God. It is not wonderful, surely, that such a change as this should modify profoundly the intellectual ground-work on which men seek to justify Faith, and that the cosmic speculations of our day should put a strain on our belief in God which was not imposed on it by those of our fathers. And perhaps it is not wonderful that the absorbing interest of the outward world, and the incessant illustration of physical truth, and the imperiousness of all that part of our nature which it concerns, and which it aids so powerfully, should deafen our ears to the voices which do not insist upon being heard. From this double cause, at any rate, it happens that the arguments to support a belief in God, reviewed in the pages of " Physicus," will seem eminently unsatisfactory to those who entirely concur in the conclusion at which they aim. The men whom they satisfied meant, by proof, something different from what the Materialists of our age do. They were looking out for a line of thought which should justify the spirit to the intellect. They thought it was possible to trace in the constitu- tion of our intellectual being certain peculiarities which corre- sponded to the demands of our spiritual being, and to their conscious satisfaction. They did not believe that any words of theirs could open the eyes of the blind. It is not wonderful that arguments which suited the earlier need break down under the strain of that which is felt in our day.

The attempt to crowd into a space somewhat narrow for our original object (an appreciation of the influence of Science on Faith), any answer to a question so gigantic as that which concerns the appropriate evidence for a spiritual world, can only be made here in the briefest form. Mr. Newman's essay would lead to a region in which the voice of Science itself sup- plies this evidence. To one who has an independent conviction of the reality of the thing witnessed to, we are certain that it does. Natural science only needs a recognition of its partial character to be flooded with testimony to something beyond itself. But to demand this testimony while it is regarded as the whole of knowledge, is to demand that fertile soil shall it- self produce seed. It is not science which opposes faith, it is the philosophy which is based on science. The mind formed by the study of things outward, is accustomed to a kind of proof which, in the domain of the spirit, will always be sought for in vain. That array of convergent certainties which makes up the evidence of the world of sense, and which, in a world domineered over by the truths of sense, has come to form the measure of certainty, has no place whatever in the world of Faith. This outward order in which we live appeals to various faculties, and obtrudes itself on our belief at once by the cumulative force and the nice agree- ment of their various testimony. Sight and touch, different as they are, send us in reports of things external to us, which, wherever we can compare them, turn out to be perfectly har- monious. The blind man can judge of form. The deaf man can feel the vibration of sound. No privation of sense in- capacitates a man for some estimate of the evidence of sense. But no vibration can correct the deaf ear, no touch can correct the blind eye, when we deal with the things of the spirit. Such a correction is, indeed, not only impossible ; but, under the present limitations of our nature, inconceivable. If the analogy were complete here, if we could set the object of spiritual vision in that focus of convergent faculties occupied by every object of our sensible vision, and guarantee or supplement the faltering testimony of one witness with the distinctness of a quite separate report from another, it

is hard to see how faith could exist. The word would so change

its meaning, that some other would more fitly express the reality. Perhaps we are apt to forget how much we exclude, when we speak of having faith in a fellow-man. If we have known the integrity of his motives, as we know that snow is white, we may approve and esteem the character, but for trust there is no room. Such a knowledge, we may be told, would be impossible. Tree, the knowledge of man, no less than the knowledge of God, is founded on faith. Only the knowledge of the external world excludes it. Only an age. in. which knowledge means knowledge concerning the external world, could suppose that knowledge of God would be vouchsafed through any other channel. He who feels in the presence of a fellow-man that expansion and elevation of the whole being which is the result of reverence for what is above us, possesses, we believe, the germ of an effective refutation of a theory which must graduate thin ennobling influence in inverse proportion to all else that is excellent, and at last leave the summits of humanity wholly devoid of the glow that fills its valleys. The loftiest of men, assuredly, are not cut off from that which raises the lowest. Genius and, heroism do not shut men out from any share in that blessing which they enable their gifted ones to bestow on, all around them ; nor does the attainment of a high stan- dard in goodness diminish the scope of veneration. These are certainties to some minds, as the perceptions of sense are cer- tainties; they are the statements into which we condense experi- ence far less questionable than that on which any physical theory is founded. But they can not, like lesser certainties, be transferred from one mind to another. They are, we believe, as the lesser certainties are not, inseparable from the experi- ence which gives rise to them. And there are reasons peculiar to our own day which tend to shrivel up the faculty of venera- tion, and leave sympathy, affection, and pity, the only links by which man is bound. to man- So rich may be the moral world thus left, that men forget how greatly it is impoverished.