BOOKS.

THE CREED OF SCIENCE.*

THERE are men of undoubted intellectual ability when dealing

with scholarship, history, and many other matters of human interest, who are yet incapable of understanding, not merely the Differential Calculus or the Prineipia. of Newton, but even a very simple proposition of Euclid. And there are others of no less ability in all these and other matters to whom the whole world of music known to Mozart, or Beethoven, or Handel, and to those who can appreciate these, is an utter blank. But if such men, conscious of their intellectual power in their own departments, feel something of contempt for the musician, or even the mathematician, as though they were mere dreamers, they —like George III. with his private opinion about Shakespeare- " do not tell it." And, in fact, they more probably are aware that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy, and are silent from genuine modesty. But, strangely enough, our men of science, and of the various forms of positive investigation which claim to deal with facts, while they maintain the properly scientific attitude of modest and patient learners in all their own special subjects of investiga- tion, claim the right of denying whole regions of fact of which

they—from an incapacity like that of the man to whom music or mathematics is an unexplored and unknown country—

know nothing, and of treating as visionaries all those who re- cognise those other facts of which the men of science are ignorant. The man of science,founcling himself on his astronomy, geology, physiology, and chemistry, sometimes denies that there is any religious, moral, or social belief which has a reality, unless it can be stated in terms of these sciences, and shown to be included in them ; and then the man who knows as a fact, and not as a theory, that there are realities—real objects of rational belief—which do not come within these scientific cate- gories, is often disposed to retaliate, by denying the facts which the men of science have ascertained, and contemning the hypo- theses by which they are endeavouring to bring their facts under their true laws. Now, the aim, to a great extent successful, of the volume before us is to avoid both these one-sided methods of dealing with the facts of the universe. Mr. Graham says :—

"I propose in the following pages to give the chief conclusions reached by modern science in the central questions of religion, morals, and society,—to state, in a word, the general creed of science ; and as the scientific faith may still be fallible, or of unequal degrees of credit, I propose, in the second place, to offer some comments and criticisms on some of its more doubtful articles, with a view to their reconsideration or revision."

The author begins by asking, "Whence came the physical worlds ?" By the condensation of nebulous vapour, according to La Place, Kant, Thompson, Helmholtz, and others ; then by spontaneous generation, according to Haeckel and Clifford ; and finally, by evolution and natural selection, according to Darwin. He agrees that these hypotheses are at least so far verified by ascertained facts, as to supersede the old notions of a mechanical creation at a not far back period of time by an anthropomorphic Creator ; but he maintains, with much force of argument, that whereas all these hypotheses practically make the actual evolution of the physical world a matter of chance— blind, unmeaning chance—there is in the wonderful structure of the several parts of the universe, and in their harmonious adaptation to each other, abundant evidence—evidence of facts, not imaginations—that there has been, and still is, throughout the process of evolution a Design, a Purpose, and a Power which may rightly be held to indicate a God. We have no space to give the author's able argument in detail ; but we will notice presently what we consider a fatal blot on it, in his statement that he is ready "to give up the human attributes of person- ality and consciousness in the Deity."

Then, proceeding from the physical worlds to Man, the author first describes man as modern science represents him to have been, and now to be, through the several stages of his development, till he has reached his present condition. After stating fully the Darwinian arguments for men having become not only physically but morally what they are by the struggle for existence, natural selection, and inheritance ; and how con- sciousness and conscience and the human virtues have been proved in many respects, and to a great extent, by the Evolution- ists to have come, by the slow processes in question, to be

* Tha Creed of Science, Religious, Moral, and Social. By William Graham, M. A. London : C. Kegan Paul and Co. 1581.

what they are ; he goes on to argue that these hypotheses do not explain all the facts. He maintains, with great force, and with many illustrations, that individual men, rising above, and then leading, their fellows, have made us what we are. Before primitive man could make a step in advance from the condition of a mere animal, some individual had to invent the first flint weapon ; to steal the secret of fire, Prometheus-like ; to discover the fruitful corn among the common grasses, and how to plant it; to adapt the skins of beasts for clothing ; and to invent spoken speech. Then have come the poets, the philo- sophers, and, above all, the mighty spirits who not only tried to discover, but did actually find out and teach men, the true way of life, and how they might conquer or bear the evils of life and destiny. Thus, he argues,—

" The development of the human species, the civilisations of humanity, have not been accomplished by natural selection, as the Darwinian doctrine implies. The development of the human spirit has come from an innerrevelation to certain privileged individuals, arevela- tion of truth, of insight, of inventive power, of duty, of beauty; visiting the soul unsolicited, coming none can say whence, not even the pos- sessors, farther than that it is from the Unknown, from the Purpose of the Universe, that thus means and wishes to declare itself,—from God, and not from Chance. Natural selection has clearly had nothing to do with the deposition of the first germs of morality, art, inven- tion, science, or religion ; and it has really had extremely little to do with the further development of any of these, or, by consequence, of

mankind It has not been by the superior man winning in the battle of life, and then transmitting his genius to his children, who thus b.ecame the origin of a chosen race, that the great man has

profited either his species or himself He served men not by the hereditary transmission, but by the direct communication of his soul. Often the man of genius did not win in the battle of life, rarely or never he transmitted his genius to his children, even if he had any."

In a chapter on "Free-will," Mr. Graham declares his sub- stantial agreement with Mill and Bain ; and is, like all who argue against Free-will, obliged at every step to use language which assumes, or even asserts, that there is a man, an ego who exercises this free-will of which the existence is denied. Mr.

Graham holds it to be a main argument against free-will in man that it involves the admission of the possibility of miracle, each being the arbitrary appearance and interference of a foreign power in the circle of natural phenomena. With something of the like fear of what the men of science may say, if he presses his own idealism to its proper conclusions, he winds up, and mars a fine argument for man's immortality by admitting—we do not pretend to understand why—that "science has made out the dependence of our mind and pre- sent consciousness on bodily conditions, so far as to justify the conclusion that the dissolution of the body carries with it the dissolution of our present consciousness and memory, which are reared on the bodily basis. At least, it raises appre- hensions in the highest degree that this will be the case."

How immortality can be, in any practical sense of the word, without memory—that is, withont conscious memory of previous relations—we cannot understand, or care to understand. It is true that those of us who have family pedigrees and family papers recording the events in the

lives of our ancestors, feel a sort of continuity of interest in times with which we are not linked by having ourselves taken

part in them ; and if we imagine that in another world there are complete records of all that we have been here on earth, and that we are told that these records do relate to our former existence, though we remember nothing about it, this might be called immortality, in a sense. But this would surely be a still less "scientific " hypothesis than that of the non-dissolution of memory by the death Of the body, which Mr. Graham fears to accept.

From man and his immortality the author returns to God, and in a succession of eloquent paragraphs states the argu- ments of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Spencer, for an "Ultimate- Reality in the Universe," which Ultimate Reality is in all essential particulars the God of Spinoza, and the conception which he thinks is "probably that with which all thinking men will finally close, as the worthiest that finite faculty can frame of Deity." But when he goes on to say that Wordsworth and Carlyle are among the men of imaginations of the grand order who have accepted it, we must demur. Carlyle never gave up- the faith of his fathers in a personal God, and Coleridge, who knew the philosophy of Spinoza as well as that of Wordsworth,. has told us that the latter was not a Pantheist. Mr. Graham goes on to say that theology must henceforth give up ascribing to God the attributes of personality and consoionsness, which, "imply the notion of limits and conditions neither of which_ can without contradiction be applied to an absolute and uncon- ditioned Being,"--as though it were the same anthropomorphic error to assert that man is made in the image of God, as to say that God is made in the image of man, or that there is no reality in the theological distinction between apprehending and com- prehending God. With the like train of argument, he proceeds to discuss the possibility of the revelation of God to man. He says :—

" It has been affirmed that men, or certain privileged men, have a special sense or faculty for the immediate and direct cognition of God as a separate being and personality, and that this sense presents them with a special class of intuitions, which are specially and par- ticularly related to the divine personality as no other intuitions are.

There is, say those who thus believe, a part, or side, or faculty of the soul—call it reason, imagination, illumination, religious sense, or by whatever name—that reveals God directly, as a mighty and mysterious power, it is true, but also in certain specially human or other important relations, as the compassionate God-Father, the Author of Good and of Grace, the Whisperer of Truth, the Inspirer of vision beatific of Himself. This religions sense the old saints and mystics had, Flotinus, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, as also the old prophets and holy men' and their modern representatives, though in less degree, still have it. It still gives them inspiration of the true, and aspiration to the good, intuitions issuing from the infinite fountain of goodness and truth, and yearnings again to it. And it is not to be denied as a fact that, throughout the history of theology and philosophy, we find a long line of saints and martyrs and mystics who were fully convinced that they had immediate cognition of God ; they felt knowledge of his presence or absence, and

the privilege of occasional communion with him Nor have there ever been wanting representatives of both types of soul, even up to our own days."

No one can say that Mr. Graham has not, so far, fairly stated the Christian argument in its true form ; but when he goes on to assert as fact that "those who lay claim to a special organ of communion with a personal Deity are becoming rarer," we must refuse altogether to admit the "fact ;" and when he proceeds to explain this Christian belief as a merely natural emotion, mistaken by those who feel it, we turn with greater respect to Mr. Mill's words :— " When we consider that a gift, extremely precious, came to us, which, though facilitated, was not apparently necessitated by what had gone before, but was due, as far as appearances go, to the peculiar mental and moral endowments of one man, and that man openly proclaimed that it did not come from himself, but from God through him, then we are entitled to say that there is nothing so inherently impossible or absolutely incredible in this supposition as to preclude any one from hoping that it may, perhaps, be true."

In conclusion, we may say that this volume shows in a very able as well as very interesting manner the poverty of the higher philosophy of the men of physical science, and the abso- lute need for something better than they can give us as the sup- plement of their own science, which is so excellent in itself. But it is a pity that the author, in his desire for maintaining close sympathy with the men of science, should have been so terribly afraid of being taken for a Christian. And though the book is, in one sense, made very pleasant reading by its ornate eloquence, we have found that a careful study of it, page by page, has been something like dining upon bonbons fondants, while a more serious objection to such rhetorical writing is that it weakens the force of arguments which should be stated in strictly logical form. Nothing, for instance, can be less effective for real argument than Mr. Graham's habitual personification of nature and science, — personifications by indulgence in which, we suspect, he has confused his own sense of what personality is.