BOOKS.
MR. BALFOUR'S "FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF."* [FIRST NOTICE.] IN the best line of poetry which Mr. Lewis Morris ever wrote, he described Socrates as making it his great work in life to "doubt our doubts away." That may be said to be a terse description of Mr. Balfour's method of introducing his readers to the study of theology. He shows them first that the most far-reaching form of scepticism, that form of it which represents the origin of all things as laid in the original existence of physical forces not pervaded by any essential reason or purpose, is open to difficulties of the very same kind as, though of a very much more obstinate character than, those which beset the theologian who attributes the evils of Creation to the initiation of a good purpose, and the pangs of our mortal lot to the travail of a long gestation. To these "Notes," as Mr. Balfour modestly calls them, he brings more- over a power of felicitous illustration which gives them more than half their value. It is of no little use, for the pur- poses of mankind at large, to make thoughts as deep as Bishop Butler's, so striking that they are remembered as easily by the form into which they are thrown, as they are by the substance and the drift of them when you come to appreciate these adequately. When Mr. Balfour tells us, as we have formerly quoted him in these columns, that on the system of Naturalism, Le., of the assumed evolution of all that is spiritual out of mean and purely physical qualities, Nature "indifferent to our happiness, indifferent to our morals, but sedulous of our survival, commends disinterested virtue to our practice by decking it out in all the splendour which the specifically ethical sentiments alone are capable of sup- plying" (p. 17), and so lures us on into actions Which are not generally for our personal good, but only like "the blotches on the beetle's back" " protective " of the race, he shows us, as very few of the reasoners on this class of subjects have shown us, how impossible it is for those who have detected the illusion by which we are betrayed into what we imagined to be holiness, to pursue perseveringly the track on which the system of Nature had launched us. On that system, indeed, reason must be conceived as constantly employed in breaking down the very foundations on which Nature had previously built up the "evolution" of what is most beneficial to the prospects of our race ; and philosophy becomes the mere detective process by which we unveil the fraud of our education and expose the misleading promises by which we had been tempted to benefit the body politic at our own expense. As Mr. Balfour shows us, the system of deception
• The Foundatinns of Beli4: kin; Notes introductory to the Study of Theology. 13y the Bight Hon. Arthur James Balfour. Loudon; Longurins.
by which on the naturalistic hypothesis we are entrapped into.
doing what we have no really sound motive for doing, begins at the very beginning, when we are persuaded by a system of which fatalism is the master-key, to imagine ourselves free,..
In a most subtle and lucid note (pp. 22-23), he remarks that it would be far easier, if there were no obstinate protest against it in the human mind, to show reasons for believing in the absolute uniformity of Nature from the inside of consciousness.
rather than from observation, since we seldom find external Nature perfectly uniform,—indeed, generally find her aiming apparently at a uniformity which she does not reach,—while our own motives for acting as we do are simple compared with the complexity of those processes by which the external order of Nature is controlled. So that but for the deep-seated delusion of free-will,—as on the naturalistic system it must be regarded,—we should have found the clue to the great naturalistic dogma of the absolute uniformity of Nature in our own hearts, whereas it has been that deep-seated delusion that we ourselves are free, which has induced us to believer that the universe has its origin in some great volitions of like char- acter to our own,—volitions that have the power to play varia- tions even on natural laws. And, indeed, as Mr. Balfour shows us, Naturalism ought, if it had been effective for the purpose of entrapping us into irrational self-denials for the good of the race, to have eliminated the philosophers who expose these little tricks and illusions by which these useful errors have been.
fostered. The supposed discovery that we are not free, that there is no such thing as virtue and responsibility, that we are the slaves of an iron system of force, is one which we ought never to have been allowed to make, if Naturalism were not to undermine itself. For on the system of Naturalism, philosophy is the great bane of the elaborate network of illusion by which we have been tempted to put the welfare of others before our own. What does Naturalism, then, as. developed by reason, teach us P It teaches us, as Mr. Balfour shows in a magnificent passage, what should undo all the delusions by which it had at first persuaded us to enjoy the task of forming great societies and helping each other tc. dream of noble deeds :—
" Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after- infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable monuments' and • immortal deeds,' death itself, and love- stronger then death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour,_ genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect." (pp. 30-1.)
Is it easy then to believe, as the Naturalistic hypothesis should oblige us to believe, in original physical forces not controlled by any mind, which yet, under special conditions, give birth to mind, and mind of such a kind that while at first it is easily inveigled into imposing on us delusions favourable to the progress and protection of the race, yet
before long learns to emancipate itself from those delusions and to undo all that it once did for its progress and safety P.
Surely this is a perfectly unimaginable hypothesis. If the "natural selection" of favourable conditions had actually generated mind, it could hardly have generated a mind that would turn against itself and as it were commit suicide. For Nature to " select " a mental " boomerang " capable of assas- sinating its most ingenious contrivance in a back-stroke, is indeed a most difficult creed for Scepticism to swallow.
The chapter on Naturalism and 4Esthetic is, we think, the least successful in Mr. Balfour's striking book. It adds but little to the force of his picture of the insufficiency of Naturalism to explain the higher instincts of man's nature ;
and perhaps it does not do full justice to the (rather feeble but not wholly false) Naturalistic explanation of esthetic feeling as founded partly in the imitative instincts of man, and as in that humble capacity not entirely devoid of utility, because it tends to bind together men in masses, who would otherwise be all spinning off in different directions. Imitativeness is cer- tainly one root of artistic feeling, though not by any means the most important root.
Perhaps the most original of the negative portions of Mr. Balfour's book is his demonstration of the entirely subordi- nate part which human reason (used in the narrow sense of reasoning) plays in the development of human life, and that not only on the Naturalistic hypothesis on which human reason is a mere late "sport" as it were of the great forces of Nature, but in truth and fact. The following seems to us one of the most striking passages in the writings of modern philosophers :— "People sometimes talk, indeed, as if it was the difficult and com- plex work connected with the maintenance of life that was performed by intellect. But there can be no greater delusion. The management of the humblest organ would be infinitely beyond our mental capacity, were it possible for us to be entrusted with it ; and as a matter of fact, it is only in the simplest jobs that discursive reason is permitted to have a hand at all ; our tendency to take a different view being merely the self-importance of a child who, because it is allowed to stamp the letters, imagines that it conducts the correspondence. The best way of looking at mind on the naturalistic hypothesis is, perhaps, to regard it as an instrument for securing a flexibility of adaptation which instinct alone is not able to attain. Instinct is incomparably the better machine in every respect save one. It works more smoothly, with less friction, with far greater precision and accuracy. But it is not adaptable. Many generations and much slaughter are required to breed it into a race. Once acquired, it can be modified or expelled only by the same harsh and tedious methods. Mind, on the other hand, from the point of view of organic evolution, may be considered as an inherited faculty for self-adjustment ; and though, as I have already had occasion to note, the limits within which such adjustment is permitted are exceedingly narrow, within those limits it is doubtless exceedingly valuable. But even hero one of the principal functions of mind is to create habits by which, when they are fully formed, it is itself supplanted. If the conscious adaptation of means to ends was always necessary in order to perform even those few functions for the first performance of which conscious adaptation was originally required, life would be frittered away in doing badly, but with deliberation, some small fraction of that which we now do well without any deliberation at all." (pp. 72-3.)
This demonstration of Mr. Balfour's, that reason (in the nar- rower sense) is a very subordinate element in the structure of human life and human society, is of the very essence of his book, for it enables him to add to his proof that Naturalism, were it the true rationale of the universe, would soon cut the ground from under the very principle of the organisation which it had evolved, the proof that the reasoning power of man, when at length it arises in the world, though it may relax the rigidity of instincts and habits too imperious for the adaptability of man to his surroundings, would also, unless it were controlled by glimpses of a higher reason and a more commanding authority than our own, dangerously increase the tendency to relax those human ties and habits without which human society could not exist at all. But we must postpone our notice of the more constructive part of Mr. Balfour's book for the present.
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