THE SUPERNATURAL IN NATURE.*
THE number of books and other writings which appear in the present day on either side of the long-standing controversy be- tween Atheism and Agnosticism on the one hand, and Theism on the other, as well as between mere theism and a belief in the -directly divine origin of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, is somewhat overwhelming. It looks as if the old feud were really at last coming to a crisis, and is at the least remarkable enough in any age which has been described as coldly Utilitarian, in the lowest sense of that word, and in which, we are sometimes told, metaphysical thought has passed away, and has given place to the more tangible and certain speculations of pure science. It has certainly not yet passed away, for in their very efforts to show its futility, its opponents are themselves compelled to think the thoughts and speak the language of that which they denounce. They can only demonstrate the worthlessness of metaphysical The Supernatural in Nature, a Verification by Free Use of Science. London : Regan Paul and Co. 1878.
inquiry by talking metaphysics. There will always be two opposing types of mind,—those who begin with the data of sensa- tion and end there, taking up in passing only such of the revela- tions of mental consciousness as are absolutely necessary for the coherence of their thoughts ; and those who, on the other hand, holding that human nature is not a lie, start with the assumption of the objective truth of those general concepts of the nature of force and cause, as prior, both logically and chronologically;to what are called material phenomena, which are inherent in the very structure of our minds, and which can be shaken off only temporarily, and, so to speak, artificially.
The anonymous volume before us is one of the many efforts now made to bring into harmony the results of modern science with belief in the necessary presence and constant operation of the supernatural,—that is to say, of the Unseen, not in the sense merely of the Forces of the scientific thinker, but of living, personal agency, and more especially of that agency in the form in which it is placed before our minds in the Old and New Itstaments. With many deficiencies, it is sufficiently remarkable, from its earnestness of tone, its ambitious aim, its wealth of scientific illustration, and the attractions of its style, to call for special notice.
The earlier chapters, or "Studies," as the author calls ,them, are occupied with the more general questions of the narrowness of the so-called Scientific School, its want of comprehension of the entire range of consciousness, the necessity of ethical and spiritual as well as sensory data, and the failure of even ethical thought unless backed by theological, the universality of belief in the unseen, and the impossibility of conceiving it apart from personality. The following is a fair specimen of the discussion :—
" We are assured 'a personal God is a limited Deity ; personality and infinity are terms expressive of ideas naturally incompatible.' This, again, is mere play upon words. Can these men, who talk so about God, explain what they mean by infinite extension, as applied to the Supreme? Is infinite extension more correct, or more easily com- prehended than infinite intelligence ? We must take phenomenal conceptions such as can be framed ; we know that they are inadequate to represent the Ineffable Reality ; but seeing that He is a reality, we consider that mental conceptions are of a higher order than physical. To call personality, goodness, intelligence, anthropomorphic in their nature is, indeed, to give them their right title ; but to forsake these and adopt energy and motion, mechanical in place of intellectual terms, is not less anthropomorphic, and forsakes the higher for the lower; personality as much transcending material conception as humanity transcends the crystal or the sea-weed."
The author's ideas of Atomism may be gathered from this passage :— " To develop° the visible from the invisible there must be a passage from the one to the other, or an etherial medium, a stage in which the energy had passed from the one and had not arrived at the other. Further, if we assume that all energies are reducible to One Energy, and that all forms of matter ate derived from one primeval substance, it is demonstrably impossible for variety ever to have unfolded itself from this primitive physical unity. The change must have come from without, and even allowing that the change can be mechanically. formulated, we must recognise in it the Unknown Energy. The variety called Nature did not evolve itself from unity, neither does Nature of itself guide or maintain the existing variety of physical change. Organic energy does not seem to be interchangeable into mechanical. No physical force that we know of, can be converted into that which is called vital energy, least of all can it be counted as the correlative of mental change. Again and again there have been intrusions of new things. If chemical action differs from mechanical, if life is not chemistry— and certainly it is unknown in our laboratories—and if mind is not matter, certainly many and great are the changes that have been wrought by new orders of energy."
The author's argument seems to amount to this,—that the wonderful variety of results in Nature, from the structure of a crystal up to the development of a man from a speck of Proto- plasm which cannot be distinguished from that which results in an oyster, and the apparent non-interchangeableness of the forces which produce that variety, implies that the one occulta vis which is at the root of all shall be a living and intelligent Will. The force which resides in organic being, and is usually called "life," must be prior to and the cause, not the result, of crganistion,— in other words, one of the various modifications of the Divine energy. He quotes Mr. Herbert Spencer's dictum concerning the
origin of life :—
" It is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter lap'ses from an indefinite, incoherent homo- geneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation."—" Will any one affirm," says our author, "that such an explanation is more lucid and explanatory than the words of Moses?—' God! said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed,' &c. Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that bath life,' &cr. 'Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,' &c. Ask a truly scientific assembly whether the earth bringing forth and the waters bringing forth' do not equally well explain the very doing of the thing as the integration and concomitant dissipation." And so on ; and he goes on to ridicule the words of Spencer, as being merely the statement of a truism, in awkward and pedantic language.
Thesepassages show the weakness as well as the strength of this author's mode of reasoning. He is deeply possessed by the spirit of theism, and all the high and reverential emotions which ought to flow from it and react on it, and this belief in the con- stant agency of the unseen and spiritual on the seen and tangible is based on .a sound foundation ; but his very zeal and the depth of his conviction mislead him ; he fails to see that Mr. Spencer's statement is not a statement, in general and popular terms, that grganic things arose from inorganic, or that they did so by the creative word or thought of Deity, but an analysis and definition of what he conceives to be the essence of all molecular change. The things which our author compares may not be contradictory, and may even contain a common element, but their aim is different, and they do not really admit of comparison. He also errs here, as well as throughout the entire work, in failing to separate those arguments and considerations, which are, or ought to be, in the mouth of every thinker who is not atheistic or agnostic, from those which refer peculiarly to the account of Creation given in the Book of Genesis. His strong prepossessions lead him frequently into expressions on which an opponent might easily found the charge of petitio prineipii, and he mixes his logical statements with a great amount of rhetoric, so that it is no light labour to extricate the former, and to discover what they really are.
A large portion of the book is occupied with the details of Creation which we find in the first and second chapters of Genesis. In common with most interpreters, the author looks upon the words, "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," as a general statement, leaving possibly myriads of ages between the 'beginning" and the creative "days." He finds that the "days," or rather their work, overlap each I other,—the work of the first is completed on the fourth, that of the second on the fifth, and that of the third on the sixth. This arrangement is rhythmical, not scientific, and the days are arranged in triplets. These are themselves triple,—in vegetation, grass, bush, tree ; in light, sun, moon, stars ; in life from water, fish, bird, creature of length ; in life from the ground, wild beast, cattle, creeping thing ; which terms admit of being interpreted as corresponding to the ascending scale of plant and animal life. The days are, of course, indefinitely long periods ; the seventh still goes on. All is mystical, symbolical, and full of the spirit and peculiarities of ancient Semitic poetry ; definite in its moral and theological teaching, indefinite otherwise, the language such as could be understood by an old Hebrew, and yet open to the interpretations of modern scientific discovery. Evolu- tion the author evidently admits, in some limited sense, for he seems to hold that the amphibia, through the Pterodactyles, were the progenitors of birds, but he gives full weight to the very obvious difficulty attending the fact that, with the exception of the trifling variations of form resulting from domesticity, and the known very strange metamorphoses of some Entozoa, depending on change of habitat, no such thing as evolution seems to be going on at the present epoch.
What has always appeared to us the strongest argument (we mean, of course, so far as such arguments can be drawn from science), in favour of the supernatural origin of the Mosaic cosmogony may be stated in a few words :—(1) It acknowledges the common origin and, substantially, the com- mon chemical composition of all organic things ; (2) it indicates a progression upwards from simpler to more complex forms of life, culminating in man. In a document emanating from an unscientific race, in an unscientific age, this is remarkable, for the tendency of semi-barbarous myths is to imagine the more perfect state of things as preceding the less perfect, as in the case of the Golden Age. It seems very improbable that the unaided imagina- tion of the ancient Hebrews or other Semitic race should have originated a story of progress which undoubtedly agrees in its general principle with the results, speaking roughly and approxi- mately, of modern geological science. Our author seems to feel the force of these considerations, but attempts to prove much more.
There is nothing very new in all this, but from the great amount of scientific description, covering a very large field, and on the whole, in sufficient accordance with the latest views, though occasionally betraying that it is at second-band, by assuming as ascertained fact what is merely probable hypothesis, this part of the book is exceedingly pleasant and readable. The defects of the work are, as we have indicated, a certain want of metaphysical precision, the overclonding of reasoning by rhetorical and often picturesque and eloquent talk, and a general discursiveness and neglect of method which are extremely perplexing. It is a work which will delight and even instruct and elevate a large class of readers ; but they will be readers who, already in sympathy with the author's general views, are more or less puzzled and disturbed by the half-philosophical, half-scientific speculations with which the air is at present so full, and with which, from want of accurate scientific knowledge, they are unable to grapple. If it is in- tended to convince the sceptical thinker, we fear that its success will not be great. The author has not sufficient common ground with such opponents from which to start. The syllogistic element is deficient. We say this perfectly aware that much which the author advocates, and which we firmly believe, has often been said not to be matter of rigid demonstration. Most of it, how- ever, admits of being stated, and its strength and weakness being estimated, with some approach to precision, in syllogistic form. The hitch will be found in the admission or rejection of a few major premisses, the reception of which will turn on the amount of authority with which some of the primary intuitions of the human mind and spirit are to be credited. We can conscientiously recommend this work to the general reader, but scarcely to the trained philosophical doubter.
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