THE APPROACH OF DOGMATIC ATHEISM.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY has said something lately about the drum ecclesiastic, but it seems to us that there is another kind of drum whose low reverberations are beginning to be heard, nay, whose vibrations send very perceptible tremors down the sensitive nerves of our modern society, and which is far from unlikely to take the place of the ancient drum eccle- siastic, both in relation to the power of which it may become the signal, and the terror which its notes may carry with them. About three years ago, when Professor Huxley intimated, in a very telling speech at the London School Board, that there were enemies of the human race whom it might become quite necessary for wise men to disqualify at least for the function of education,— we do not profess to quote his words, but only the impression they produced at the time on almost all who heard them,—we remarked on the tendency of the modern representatives of physical science, while denying all absolute certainty, to draw the most imperiously dogmatic conclusions from the most ostenta- tiously hypothetic premisses. That tendency has certainly per- severed, and rather more than persevered, among scientific Englishmen in the intervening period; and now, in Professor Clifford, one of the most able and eloquent of the school, scientific thought in relation to religion and morality appears to be undergoing a transformation from its chrysalis condition of Agnosticism, in which it fed so heartily and throve so fast on the vague hopes it killed, and to be taking to itself ephemeral wings with which it proposes to soar high above the humility of its previous condition, and, indeed, to flutter up into those empty spaces from which science, we are now told, has all but succeeded in expelling the empty dreams of a presiding Mind in the universe, and of a life after death. Automatism, which was a wild hypothesis yesterday, and is still so difficult to state without self, contradiction that Professor Clifford's own language is constantly at erotic- purposes with his theory, is, if we may trust his paper, published in the December Fortnightly, to be the creed of aU reasonable men to-morrow ; the faith in Providence is soon to be recognised as "immoral ;" and we are to expect before long evidence that "no intelligence or volition has been concerned in events happening within the range of the solar system, except that of animals living on the planets,"— nay, evidence "of the same kind and of the same cogency as that which forbids us to assume the existence between the Earth and Venus of a planet as large as either of them. These calm anticipations, moreover, are recorded in a lecture which is; we believe, as much distinguished by confident but utterly unreasoned assertions, and wild but dogmatic surmises, as it is by the eloquent audacity of its negative teaching, and by the scorn with which it compares the region . of faith to that "good man's croft" of the Scotch superstition, which is left unfilled for the Brownie to live in, in the hope that "if you grant him this grace, he will do a great deal of your household work for you in the night while you sleep." Let us just look at this body of "truth," as Professor Clifford regards it, and enumerate the theses which he either holds to be established now, or to form part of those sagacious divinations of scientific prescience, the verification of which we may expect in the immediate future.

1. "All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world gets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal rules. That is to say, the laws which hold good in the physical world hold good everywhere in it,—they hold good with practical universality, and there is no reason to suppose anything else but those laws in order to account for any physical fact." In other words, men and animals are physical automatons, with more or less of a consciousness annexed, the states of that conscious- ness, however, not forming necessary links, or any links at all, in the chain of physical events. "There is no reason why we should not regard the human body as merely an exceedingly complicated

machine, which is wound up by putting food into the mouth." This we understand Professor Clifford to regard as practically certain.

2. "If anybody says that the will influences matter, the state- ment is not untrue, but it is nonsense."

3. "The only thing which influences matter is the position of

• surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter." (These two latter propositions are quite certain, we gather, in Professor Clifford's view, the contradictory of them being simply unin- telligible. He reiterates his statement thus :—" The assertion that -another man's volition, a feeling in his consciousness which I cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical facts which I may perceive,—this is neither true nor untrue, but nonsense : it is a combination of words whose corresponding ideas will not go together.") 4. "The human race, as a whole, has made itself during the process of ages. The action of the whole race at any time deter- mines what the character of the race shall be in the future."

b. "The doctrine of a destiny or providence outside of us, over- ruling human efforts and guiding history to a foregone conclusion," is "immoral," "if it is right to call any doctrine immoral,"—the reason for the strong epithet thus applied to this doctrine being that the authority of this doctrine has so often been used to "paralyse the efforts of those who were climbing honestly up the hill-side towards the light and the right," and has so often also " nerved the sacrilegious arm of the fanatic or the adventurer who was conspiring against society." (How loose and rhetorical, by the way, is the moral language of the Professor! What is the sin of conspiring against society? If there were two or three scientific men united with Professor Clifford in his propaganda, would not that be as near to a "conspiracy against society" as ordinary men, who hold religion to be the chief bond of society, could conceive ?) We do not know with how much intellectual confidence the Professor regards this purely moral thesis, but it will be admitted that it is very dogmatically expressed.

6. The following, however, is a probable hypothesis only :— " The reality which underlies matter, the reality which we per- ceive as matter, is that same stuff which, being compounded together in a particular way, produces mind." "The actual reality which underlies what we call matter is not the same

thing as the mind, is not the same thing as our perception, but it is made up of the same stuff." It is not "of the same sub- -stance as mind (homo-ousion), but it is of like substance,—it is made of similar stuff differently compacted together (homoi- ousion)."

7. If this last proposition be true, as seems probable to Pro- fessor Clifford, then, as "mind is the reality or substance of that which appears to us as brain-action, the supposition of mind without brain" is "a contradiction in terms."

8. On the same supposition, there can be no mind in the universe except where there are animals with animal brains. And of this opinion we may expect to be one day as certain as we are now that there is no planet between the Earth and Venus as large as either of them.

Such are the main theses of this remarkable essay, of which the first five, if we understand Professor Clifford rightly, are moral certainties of the highest conceivable validity, while the last three are as yet but divinations of science, but divinations of high scientific probability. As Professor Clifford says that not one man in a million has a right to • any opinion on the subjects on which his own opinion is so very confidently expressed,— and the present writer certainly does not suppose that he is one of thirty-two men in the United Kingdom alone qualified to have a view on the subject,—it may be desirable to say why we cannot regard Professor Clifford's authority on the subject, in spite of his obviously great ability, as worth very much, and why therefore we need not accept his warning of the temerity of entering the lists against one of the thirty-two.

In his very clever, though, as usual, arrogant introductory observations, Professor Clifford admirably calls science "organised common-sense." Now there is not one of the eight propositions we have treated as the leading dogmatic principles of his lecture which seems to us to deserve that character ; and those seven of the eight which alone we clearly understand, might, we think, be more nearly described as disorganising but fortunately very uncommon nonsense. With regard, first, to the first thesis :---If the physical world gets along by itself, without any interference from the mental world,—if the human body is an automaton wound up by putting food into the mouth,—why, we should like to know, is Professor Clifford so impressed with the mischief worked by the doctrine of Providence, and why does he describe it as "nerving

the sacrilegious arm of the fanatic "? In his view, no belief ever nerves any arm at all. "The food which is put into the mouth," and which winds up the automaton, at once nerves the arm and results in the belief ; but on his theory, belief nerves no arm, and it is not so much untrue as "nonsense,"—words without a meaning,—to say that it does nerve any arm. We are perfectly aware that popular language, like our language about sunrise for instance, often involves a fundamental blunder, and that not the less men go on using the blunder, on the tacit understand- ing that it shall be interpreted to stand for its own correction. And of course, Professor Clifford would say that what he means by condemning a belief for nerving the sacrilegious arm of the fanatic, is that the condition of nerve and brain which at one and the same time produces the belief and also "nerves the sacrilegious arm of the fanatic," is a degenerate or diseased condition. But substitute the one phrase for the other, and you destroy its whole meaning. If the belief is not even a link- in the chain, if no belief is capable of being a link in the chain of causes leading to bad actions, if the mischief altogether arises in the nervous structure, in the unhealthy organism, or the inade- quate, or else the too violent winding-up of the automaton,—then why blame the belief, instead of the antecedent of the belief? Talk no more of sacrilegious beliefs, but only of the evil cellular tissues, the disgraceful foods, and the infamous air, leading to such beliefs. On the theory of Professor Clifford, the physical structure of the automaton is a whole in itself, with the movement of which con- sciousness never interferes, though it varies with it. You might reform the belief by reforming the brain, but you could not reform the brain by reforming the belief. Again, to go to the next thesis, what assumption can be more bewilderingly arbitrary than the assumption that "volition cannot influence matter " ? We had always thought that the tendency of the new physical science was not to say what can or cannot be, but what is or is not ; and that in its language, "influence" is only a word for invariable ante- cedence. Now it is quite certain that, be volition what it may, it invariably precedes all the actions we call voluntary, and that these actions do influence matter,—my present volition to write on this paper, for instance, causing a rearrangement of certain particles of ink. If the only thing which can influence matter is "the posi- tion of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter," the question is of course at an end. But this assumption appears to be a return into that region of a priori necessity which Professor Clifford's school usually regards as so sterile, and so much con- demns. As a matter of fact, I know that thoughts are as invariable antecedents of certain classes of actions as any physical conditions could be, and it is the mere omniscience of an a priori materialism to declare the former mere conjoint consequents of the same ante- cedents, instead of causes of the actions. As for the doctrines that the human race has "made itself," that the faith in providence has paralysed honest upward effort,—a doctrine which wehave shown to be unintelligible on Professor Clifford's theory,—and the assertion that we may soon have proof that what we call " mind" cannot exist without a "brain," and that it will then be as easy to disprove God as to disprove the existence of a planet between the Earth and Venus of the same size as either of them,—it seems to us that these doctrines are the very extravagances of a riotous imagination. The first of these three statements is, we suppose, only an intel- lectual inference from the last, since unless the existence of God, —in men's usual understanding of the word,—can be disproved, it certainly is not true that the human race made itself. And as for the second of them, the contradictory is just as true, even for the very reason Professor Clifford gives as the thesis itself. If the appeal to the doctrine of Providence has been used to keep down some honest effort, it has animated and nerved a great deal that Professor Clifford himself would acknowledge,—as, for example, Luther's whole life. If the disbelief in Providential guidance has ever,—which we doubts—relieved anyhonest effort of an incubus, it is matter of biographical record that it has quenched a good deal more honest effort in utter despair. A more luxuriant use of unreasoned assumptions than is to be found in Professor Clifford's lecture we do not think it would be possible to discover, even in the most desolate wastes of theological literature.

But what is the most striking point in this lectureis that a thinker who throws the word nonsense ' so recklessly at the head of his oppo- nents, should treat the whole domain of religious belief as one spring- ing out of pure intellectual hypothesis, and as one for which there is no conceivable excuse apart from theories of body and mind. That religious belief has its source in a totally different region of life, which is no less real than the external world itself to those who have never even heard of any theory of the relation of body to mind, he either disbelieves or wholly ignores. And yet to

millions of men who have heard no more about the relation of brain to consciousness, than they have about Berkeley's theory of vision, the love of God has been as true a constituent of their life as the light of the sun. For the consciousness of sin and the dread and remorse caused by it, Professor Clifford has no room in his theory except that he may of course, if he will, admit that our automatons are all of very defective structure, and that by dint of greater care in selecting the reproductive machines, and more scientific caution in winding them up, their works may be improved. Responsibility, he expressly states, cannot exist unless a man's brain is as much the source of his actions as the springs of a machine are of its opera- tions. "The notion that we are not automata destroys responsi- bility, because, if my actions are not determined by my character [brain], in accordance with the particular circumstances which occur, then I am not responsible for them, and it is not 1 that do them ;" so that a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing, which means that he is responsible for the twitch of his eyebrows, and the consumptive tendency in his lungs, and the heat or coldness of his inherited passions, and the alertness or dullness of his constitutional intelligence,—but that if it be con- ceivable that at any point he had a true choice as to what he would or would not do, then he would not be responsible, because it would be only the free, momentary "self," and not the mere sum and issue of all the streams of previous tendency, which made the choice. Professor Clifford's fallacy is a very old one, which has been repeated thousands of times before, but it is one the plausibility of which the human mind steadily resists,—the laws of all civilised peoples declining every day to punish a man for what there is evidence that he could not help, and taking pity even on the lunatic, who may possibly be re- sponsible for being a lunatic at all, but who, if he be not responsible for that, cannot usually be responsible for the individual crimes which, as a lunatic, he commits. All we can say is, that the doctrine which this clever theorist professes to substi- tute for the old faith in God and duty, is one which has repeatedly proved too unreal to overcome the organised common-sense" of the human race, and that it is likely enough to prove equally feeble again ; but that if ever it does conquer the belief of an intelligent people, we are likely to have such a re- sult as no necessitarianism of the Calvinist or Augustinian type could ever produce. Suppose for a moment that the Scotch,—a people, as we believe, far more really competent to master and apply abstract ideas than the Germans,—were, in the intimate confidence of their belief in the "conservation of energy," as Mr. Clifford

• interprets that hypothesis, to take to the automaton doctrine

in all its nakedness,—in other words, to a materialistic Calvinism, without the sublimity of the belief in an Almighty Will that forces purity on at least some of us, or the terror of the belief in an awful torment for those of uewho cannot hate the evil at their heart. Is it conceivable that a people really believing that the body is a machine which goes on, when it is wound up, independently of consciousness, would struggle against temptations which they would regard as modes of a mechanical force, the antagonism to which, if it were possible to resist it, would manifest itself in their natures as powerfully as the temptation itself? Why should they refuse to wind up the automaton, say with whiskey, or any other watch- key that might seem most attractive, if they confidently held that whatever it was which they might do, they would do as inevitably as a clock goes right or goes wrong? Effort against the grain is altogether a superfluity of worry for one who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no. Of course if he makes it, he could not but make it. But if he does not make ,it, he could not help not making it, and why not, therefore, drift, if drifting be the easier? We venture to affirm that the automato-atheistic theory once earnestly adopted by a nation of graphic and logical mind, like the Scotch, would make such a hell upon earth, such a world of languors where languors were most agreeable, and of vehement and lawless moral pressures where the application of such pressures was most in keeping with the temperament of the indi- vidual, as civilised men would never have seen before. The happy device of combining Atheism with a distinct and vivid confidence in the absolutely mechanical character of man's bodily life, may be consistent, in a few isolated instances, as doubtless it is in Professor Clifford's case, with a lofty mind, a strenuous character, and a firm will, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it would lead to the natural or artificial selection and elaboration of those wheels in the corporeal machine which would produce the kind of motion their owners found most plea- surable ;—and then the crash and battle of the various revolving cogs of self-interest would be such as even savage life could hardly rival. Professor Clifford is great in his own field. In the field he has now chosen he is hurling about wildly loose thoughts over which he has no intellectual control. These are indeed what Mr. Kingsley once called some suggestions of his own, "loose thoughts for loose thinkers."