The British Association
AFALTERING attempt has been made by those who take a " sensational " rather than a scientific view of the British Association to re-stage the battle between Huxley and the theologians. The theologians are supposed to have thrown down challenges. For our part, having carefully read the wording of the alleged challenges, we cannot admit that they are challenges at all.
The public contests between Huxley and the theologians in the middle of last century were not struggles between good and evil, but between the demand of science to be allowed to solve the creation of the universe by means of ascertained facts and the pretension of the theologians to excommunicate any scientific hypothesis which did not coincide with their dogmatic description of the act of creation. The contest was short and decisive and ended—fortunately for them—in the defeat of the theologians. They all see now that they took. up the wrong ground and took it up quite unnecessarily. Genesis is not a scientific work, but a lyrical narrative of monotheism. Among the most enthusiastic expositors of Evolution to-day are theologians who see in the amazing progress of man the most perfect illustration they could want of the presence of purpose and design in the universe. How can such purpose and design be explained except by a divine direction ? As an Evolutionist the theologian is, in the popular idiom, on velvet. It is easier to believe that the ineffable mysteries of the universe had some divine starting point and are moving to some divine culmination than that the universe is a senseless chaos without rhyme or reason. It is indeed a bold man who calls himself an atheist. Probably also he is a man without humour or, let us say, a sense of perspective. It is reasonable for anyone to say, as Huxley did, that he does not know, but it is unreasonable in the absence of knowledge firmly to deny.
Huxley said no more than that he was an agnostic— a person who did not know and, so far as he could judge, could not know anything about a First Cause and an unseen world. R. H. Hutton, when he was Editor of the Spectator, used to say that Huxley suggested the word " agnostic " to describe his position at a meeting in the house of Mr. James Knowles when Hutton himself Was present. It is an unfortunate word in a way, as the privative "a," meaning "not," is never found in the Greek in combination with the termination " ikos." Huxley's temper was a model of humility. "Huxley goes about," as the Spectator said at the time, "exhorting all men to know how little they know."
In spite of his moderation and the profounder humility of Darwin, a huge group of men of science grew up who were very cocksure of their materialistic explanation of everything. God, having been banished from the skies, was banished altogether. There was no need for Him. Every extreme statement is sure to have its reaction, and the reaction that has come among men of science themselves is a patent, and sometimes an amusing, phenomenon. When the evolution of men from the lowest forms of life—even from a sponge—has been accepted, what then ? We still have to ask what Being,. what Impulse, provided the elements and started the process. To that tremendous question science gives no answer, and perhaps never can give any: The clash between the hypothesis of religion and the hyp- othesis of science is, so far as we can see at present, quite unreal. _ Sir Arthur Keith's presidential address to the British Association and its sequels have Prompted these reflec- tions In his brilliant popular survey of Darwinism _ _ Sir Arthur showed how Darwin had gone wrong in details, but how firmly based and indeed " unshakable " were his general conclusions. Darwin did not conceive quite how complicated and various were the stages by which man developed from his anthropoid ancestors. Research has already proved that there is no graded series of fossil forms, no straight line right back to our first ancestor. Remains show that the prehistoric world was peopled, though sparsely, by races with an even greater diversity than that of to-day. The retrospective journey is not along the links of a chain, but rather through the meshes of a complicated net. Still, these are details ; the progress of man, always forward on the average in spite of odd failures here and there, is majestic in all its implications. The mind has not yet even conceived how far it may go.
A sermon by the Bishop of Ripon and a letter by Professor Relton in the Times have started the wholly mistaken idea that the theologians want to challenge all this. The Bishop, whose sermon, by the way, did not contain a word about Darwinism, suggested that science had been going a little too fast for man's powers of absorption and that it would be a good thing for the physical and chemical laboratories to have a ten years' holiday. His argument was that human nature is not yet capable of using safely the enormous powers with which science year after year 'endows it. Certainly the suggestion was not very practical, though the Bishop excluded from his proposed holiday all physiological research. The idea behind it, however, was the highly respectable one that it is right to keep a careful balance and that there is an excess of activity in scientific research as compared with the lack of activity in the more important problem of the "remaking of man." "We cannot get on," as the Bishop said afterwards to the Evening Standard, "without a change of mind in man."
If the Bishop enjoyed thus girding at science, without repudiating Darwinism, Professor Relton must have enjoyed himself still more when ' he set himself to ask the men of science some awkward questions. He, too, does not deny the truth of Darwinism, but asks whether science has not been so intent upon physiological facts that it has lost sight of the psychological, mental or spiritual. Materialism presupposes the precedence of matter over mind in the time-spice sequence and the precedence of structure over function, but Professor Relton inquires whether it would not be equally legitimate to suppose a reversed process. For it is indeed difficult to explain the intense difference between the higher anthropoid ape and mankind in respect of mental power —" a difference of kind rather than of degree." Professor Relton, in fine, is less interested in the question how the body came to possess a mind than in the question how the mind ever succeeded in obtaining a body.
It is well that certain men of science should be posed with questions which remind them how little science can explain of the how and the why in spite of the magnificence of its discoveries. The little comedy we have described is significant of our times. Men of science would admit the pertinence of some of the questions which have been asked far more readily than they would have admitted them thirty years ago. For the first time in the history of the British Association the subject of psychical research was promoted to the platform. The discussion did not carry very far, it is true, but the grave admission of the subject was a curious little portent.
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