Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions Part 12

Establishment has its duties as well as its rights. The clergy of a State Church enjoy many advantages over those of unprivileged and unendowed religious persuasions; but they lie under a correlative responsibility to the State, and to every member of the body politic. I am not aware that any sacredness attaches to sermons. If preachers stray beyond the doctrinal limits set by lay lawyers, the Privy Council will see to it; and, if they think fit to use their pulpits for the promulgation of literary, or historical, or scientific errors, it is not only the right, but the duty, of the humblest layman, who may happen to be better informed, to correct the evil effects of such perversion of the opportunities which the State affords them and such misuse of the authority which its support lends them.

Whatever else it may claim to be, in its relations with the State, the Established Church is a branch of the Civil Service; and, for those who {267} repudiate the ecclesiastical authority of the clergy, they are merely civil servants, as much responsible to the English people for the proper performance of their duties as any others.

The Duke of Argyll tells us that the "work and calling" of the clergy prevent them from "pursuing disputation as others can." I wonder if his Grace ever reads the so-called religious newspapers. It is not an occupation which I should commend to any one who wishes to employ his time profitably; but a very short devotion to this exercise will suffice to convince him that the "pursuit of disputation," carried to a degree of acrimony and vehemence unsurpa.s.sed in lay controversies, seems to be found quite compatible with the "work and calling" of a remarkably large number of the clergy.

Finally, it appears to me that nothing can be in worse taste than the a.s.sumption that a body of English gentlemen can, by any possibility, desire that immunity from criticism which the Duke of Argyll claims for them.

Nothing would be more personally offensive to me than the supposition that I shirked criticism, just or unjust, of any lecture I ever gave. I should be utterly ashamed of myself if, when I stood up as an instructor of others, I had not taken every pains to a.s.sure myself of the truth of that which I was about to say; and I should feel myself bound to be even more careful with a popular a.s.sembly, who would take me more or less on trust, than with an audience of competent and critical experts.

I decline to a.s.sume that the standard of morality, {268} in these matters, is lower among the clergy than it is among scientific men. I refuse to think that the priest who stands up before a congregation, as the minister and interpreter of the Divinity, is less careful in his utterances, less ready to meet adverse comment, than the layman who comes before his audience, as the minister and interpreter of nature. Yet what should we think of the man of science who, when his ignorance or his carelessness was exposed, whined about the want of delicacy of his critics, or pleaded his "work and calling" as a reason for being let alone?

No man, nor any body of men, is good enough, or wise enough, to dispense with the tonic of criticism. Nothing has done more harm to the clergy than the practice, too common among laymen, of regarding them, when in the pulpit, as a sort of chartered libertines, whose divagations are not to be taken seriously. And I am well a.s.sured that the distinguished divine, to whom the sermon is attributed, is the last person who would desire to avail himself of the dishonouring protection which has been superfluously thrown over him.

So much for the lecture on propriety. But the Duke of Argyll, to whom the hortatory style seems to come naturally, does me the honour to make my sayings the subjects of a series of other admonitions, some on philosophical, some on geological, some on biological topics. I can but rejoice that the Duke's authority in these matters is not always employed to show that I am ignorant of them; on the contrary, I meet with an amount of agreement, even of {269} approbation, for which I proffer such grat.i.tude as may be due, even if that grat.i.tude is sometimes almost overshadowed by surprise.

I am unfeignedly astonished to find that the Duke of Argyll, who professes to intervene on behalf of the preacher, does really, like another Balaam, bless me altogether in respect of the main issue.

I denied the justice of the preacher's ascription to men of science of the doctrine that miracles are incredible, because they are violations of natural law; and the Duke of Argyll says that he believes my "denial to be well founded. The preacher was answering an objection which has now been generally abandoned." Either the preacher knew this or he did not know it.

It seems to me, as a mere lay teacher, to be a pity that the "great dome of St. Paul's" should have been made to "echo" (if so be that such stentorian effects were really produced) a statement which, admitting the first alternative, was unfair, and, admitting the second, was ignorant.[69]

{270}

Having thus sacrificed one half of the preacher's arguments, the Duke of Argyll proceeds to make equally short work with the other half. It appears that he fully accepts my position that the occurrence of those events, which the preacher speaks of as catastrophes, is no evidence of disorder, inasmuch as such catastrophes may be necessary occasional consequences of uniform changes. Whence I conclude, his Grace agrees with me, that the talk about royal laws "wrecking" ordinary laws may be eloquent metaphor, but is also nonsense.

And now comes a further surprise. After having given these superfluous stabs to the slain body of the preacher's argument, my good ally remarks, with magnificent calmness: "So far, then, the preacher and the professor are at one." "Let them smoke the calumet." By all means: smoke would be the most appropriate symbol of this wonderful attempt to cover a retreat. After all, the Duke has come to bury the preacher, not to praise him; only he makes the funeral obsequies look as much like a triumphal procession as possible.

So far as the questions between the preacher and myself are concerned, then, I may feel happy. The authority of the Duke of Argyll is ranged on my side. But the Duke has raised a number of other questions, with respect to which I fear I shall have to dispense with his support--nay, even be compelled to differ from him as much, or more, than I have done about his Grace's new rendering of the "benefit of clergy." {271}

In discussing catastrophes, the Duke indulges in statements, partly scientific, partly anecdotic, which appear to me to be somewhat misleading.

We are told, to begin with, that Sir Charles Lyell's doctrine respecting the proper mode of interpreting the facts of geology (which is commonly called uniformitarianism) "does not hold its head quite so high as it once did." That is great news indeed. But is it true? All I can say is that I am aware of nothing that has happened of late that can in any way justify it; and my opinion is, that the body of Lyell's doctrine, as laid down in that great work, _The Principles of Geology_, whatever may have happened to its head, is a chief and permanent const.i.tuent of the foundations of geological science.

But this question cannot be advantageously discussed, unless we take some pains to discriminate between the essential part of the uniformitarian doctrine and its accessories; and it does not appear that the Duke of Argyll has carried his studies of geological philosophy so far as this point. For he defines uniformitarianism to be the a.s.sumption of the "extreme slowness and perfect continuity of all geological changes."

What "perfect continuity" may mean in this definition, I am by no means sure; but I can only imagine that it signifies the absence of any break in the course of natural order during the millions of years, the lapse of which is recorded by geological phenomena.

Is the Duke of Argyll prepared to say that any {272} geologist of authority, at the present day, believes that there is the slightest evidence of the occurrence of supernatural intervention, during the long ages of which the monuments are preserved to us in the crust of the earth?

And if he is not, in what sense has this part of the uniformitarian doctrine, as he defines it, lowered its pretensions to represent scientific truth?

As to the "extreme slowness of all geological changes," it is simply a popular error to regard that as, in any wise, a fundamental and necessary dogma of uniformitarianism. It is extremely astonishing to me that any one who has carefully studied Lyell's great work can have so completely failed to appreciate its purport, which yet is "writ large" on the very t.i.tle-page: "_The Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation_." The essence of Lyell's doctrine is here written so that those who run may read; and it has nothing to do with the quickness or slowness of the past changes of the earth's surface; except in so far as existing a.n.a.logous changes may go on slowly, and therefore create a presumption in favour of the slowness of past changes.

With that epigrammatic force which characterises his style, Buffon wrote, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in his famous _Theorie de la Terre_: "Pour juger de ce qui est arrive, et meme de ce qui arrivera, nous n'avons qu'a examiner ce qui arrive." The key of the past, as of the future, is to be sought in the present, and only when known causes of change have {273} been shown to be insufficient have we any right to have recourse to unknown causes. Geology is as much a historical science as archaeology; and I apprehend that all sound historical investigation rests upon this axiom. It underlay all Hutton's work and animated Lyell and Scrope in their successful efforts to revolutionise the geology of half a century ago.

There is no antagonism whatever, and there never was, between the belief in the views which had their chief and unwearied advocate in Lyell and the belief in the occurrence of catastrophes. The first edition of Lyell's _Principles_, published in 1830, lies before me; and a large part of the first volume is occupied by an account of volcanic, seismic, and diluvial catastrophes which have occurred within the historical period. Moreover, the author, over and over again, expressly draws the attention of his readers to the consistency of catastrophes with his doctrine.

Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed within the last three thousand years the devastation by deluge of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorised to regard them as part of the present order of nature, and they may be introduced into geological speculations respecting the past, provided that we do not imagine them to have been more frequent or general than we expect them to be in time to come (vol. i. p. 89).

Again:--

If we regard each of the causes separately, which we know to be at present the most instrumental in remodelling the state of the surface, we shall find that we must expect each to be in action for thousands of years, without producing any extensive {274} alterations in the habitable surface, and then to give rise, during a very brief period, to important revolutions (vol. ii. p. 161).[70]

Lyell quarrelled with the catastrophists then, by no means because they a.s.sumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because they had got into the habit of calling on their G.o.d Catastrophe to help them, when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel of observation of the present course of nature, in order to help themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become what it is, chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts.

So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more intensely or more rapidly, at any time between the older tertiary and the oldest palaeozoic epochs than they have done between the older tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformitarianism, even as limited by Lyell,[71] has no call to lower its crest. But if the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains {275} impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of nature were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now; what he did maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet been shown to be incorrect.

I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the _Principles of Geology_ in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is taught _totidem verbis_ in that work. Even had it been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the _Principles_, Whewell's _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound, author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of catastrophes.

With regard to such occurrences [earthquakes, deluges, etc.], terrible as they appear at the time, they may not much affect the {276} average rate of change: there may be a _cycle_, though an irregular one, of rapid and slow change: and if such cycles go on succeeding each other, we may still call the order of nature uniform, notwithstanding the periods of violence which it involves.[72]

The reader who has followed me through this brief chapter of the history of geological philosophy will probably find the following pa.s.sage in the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little remarkable:--

Many years ago, when I had the honour of being President of the British a.s.sociation,[73] I ventured to point out, in the presence and in the hearing of that most distinguished man [Sir C. Lyell] that the doctrine of uniformity was not incompatible with great and sudden changes, since cycles of these and other cycles of comparative rest might well be const.i.tuent parts of that uniformity which he a.s.serted. Lyell did not object to this extended interpretation of his own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me his entire concurrence.

I should think he did; for, as I have shown, there was nothing in it that Lyell himself had not said, six-and-twenty years before, and enforced, three years before; and it is almost verbally identical with the view of uniformitarianism taken by Whewell, sixteen years before, in a work with which, one would think, that any one who undertakes to discuss the philosophy of science should be familiar.

Thirty years have elapsed since the beginner of 1856 persuaded himself that he enlightened the foremost geologist of his time, and one of the most acute and far-seeing men of science of any time, as to the scope of the doctrines which the veteran philosopher {277} had grown gray in promulgating; and the Duke of Argyll's acquaintance with the literature of geology has not, even now, become sufficiently profound to dissipate that pleasant delusion.

If the Duke of Argyll's guidance in that branch of physical science, with which alone he has given evidence of any practical acquaintance, is thus unsafe, I may breathe more freely in setting my opinion against the authoritative deliverances of his Grace about matters which lie outside the province of geology.

And here the Duke's paper offers me such a wealth of opportunities that choice becomes embarra.s.sing. I must bear in mind the good old adage, "Non multa sed multum." Tempting as it would be to follow the Duke through his labyrinthine misunderstandings of the ordinary terminology of philosophy, and to comment on the curious unintelligibility which hangs about his frequent outpourings of fervid language, limits of s.p.a.ce oblige me to restrict myself to those points, the discussion of which may help to enlighten the public in respect of matters of more importance than the competence of my Mentor for the task which he has undertaken.

I am not sure when the employment of the word Law, in the sense in which we speak of laws of nature, commenced, but examples of it may be found in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza. Bacon employs "Law" as the equivalent of "Form," and I am inclined to think that he may be responsible for a good deal of the confusion that has subsequently {278} arisen; but I am not aware that the term is used by other authorities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in any other sense than that of "rule" or "definite order" of the coexistence of things or succession of events in nature. Descartes speaks of "regles, que je nomme les lois de la nature."

Leibnitz says "loi ou regle generale," as if he considered the terms interchangeable.

The Duke of Argyll, however, affirms that the "law of gravitation" as put forth by Newton was something more than the statement of an observed order.

He admits that Kepler's three laws "were an observed order of facts and nothing more." As to the law of gravitation, "it contains an element which Kepler's laws did not contain, even an element of causation, the recognition of which belongs to a higher category of intellectual conceptions than that which is concerned in the mere observation and record of separate and apparently unconnected facts." There is hardly a line in these paragraphs which appears to me to be indisputable. But, to confine myself to the matter in hand, I cannot conceive that any one who had taken ordinary pains to acquaint himself with the real nature of either Kepler's or Newton's work could have written them. That the labours of Kepler, of all men in the world, should be called "mere observation and record," is truly wonderful. And any one who will look into the _Principia_, or the _Optics_, or the _Letters to Bentley_, will see, even if he has no more special knowledge of the topics discussed than I have, that Newton over and over again insisted that he had {279} nothing to do with gravitation as a physical cause, and that when he used the terms attraction, force, and the like, he employed them, as he says, "_mathematice_" and not "_physice_".

How these attractions [of gravity, magnetism, and electricity] may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by impulse or by some other means unknown to me. I use that word here to signify only in a general way any force by which bodies tend towards one another, whatever be the cause.[74]

According to my reading of the best authorities upon the history of science, Newton discovered neither gravitation, nor the law of gravitation; nor did he pretend to offer more than a conjecture as to the causation of gravitation. Moreover, his a.s.sertion that the notion of a body acting where it is not, is one that no competent thinker could entertain, is antagonistic to the whole current conception of attractive and repulsive forces, and therefore of "the attractive force of gravitation." What, then, was that labour of unsurpa.s.sed magnitude and excellence and immortal influence which Newton did perform? In the first place, Newton defined the laws, rules, or observed order of the phenomena of motion, which come under our daily observation, with greater precision than had been before attained; and, by following out with marvellous power and subtlety the mathematical consequences of these rules, he almost created the modern science of pure mechanics. In the second place, applying exactly the same method {280} to the explication of the facts of astronomy as that which was applied a century and a half later to the facts of geology by Lyell, he set himself to solve the following problem. a.s.suming that all bodies, free to move, tend to approach one another as the earth and the bodies on it do; a.s.suming that the strength of that tendency is directly as the ma.s.s and inversely as the squares of the distances; a.s.suming that the laws of motion, determined for terrestrial bodies, hold good throughout the universe; a.s.suming that the planets and their satellites were created and placed at their observed mean distances, and that each received a certain impulse from the Creator; will the form of the orbits, the varying rates of motion of the planets, and the ratio between those rates and their distances from the sun which must follow by mathematical reasoning from these premisses, agree with the order of facts determined by Kepler and others, or not?

Newton, employing mathematical methods which are the admiration of adepts, but which no one but himself appears to have been able to use with ease, not only answered this question in the affirmative, but stayed not his constructive genius before it had founded modern physical astronomy.

The historians of mechanical and of astronomical science appear to be agreed that he was the first person who clearly and distinctly put forth the hypothesis that the phenomena comprehended under the general name of "gravity" follow the same order throughout the universe, and that all material bodies exhibit these phenomena; so that, in this sense, the {281} idea of universal gravitation may, doubtless, be properly ascribed to him.

Newton proved that the laws of Kepler were particular consequences of the laws of motion and the law of gravitation--in other words, the reason of the first lay in the two latter. But to talk of the law of gravitation alone as the reason of Kepler's laws, and still more as standing in any causal relation to Kepler's laws, is simply a misuse of language. It would really be interesting if the Duke of Argyll would explain how he proposes to set about showing that the elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, the constant area described by the radius vector, and the proportionality of the squares of the periodic times to the cubes of the distances from the sun, are either caused by the "force of gravitation" or deducible from the "law of gravitation." I conceive that it would be about as apposite to say that the various compounds of nitrogen with oxygen are caused by chemical attraction and deducible from the atomic theory.

Newton a.s.suredly lent no shadow of support to the modern pseudo-scientific philosophy which confounds laws with causes. I have not taken the trouble to trace out this commonest of fallacies to its first beginning; but I was familiar with it in full bloom, more than thirty years ago, in a work which had a great vogue in its day--the _Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation_--of which the first edition was published in 1844.

It is full of apt and forcible ill.u.s.trations of {282} pseudoscientific realism. Consider, for example, this gem serene. When a boy who has climbed a tree loses his hold of the branch, "the law of gravitation unrelentingly pulls him to the ground, and then he is hurt," whereby the Almighty is quite relieved from any responsibility for the accident. Here is the "law of gravitation" acting as a cause in a way quite in accordance with the Duke of Argyll's conception of it. In fact, in the mind of the author of the _Vestiges_, "laws" are existences intermediate between the Creator and his works, like the "ideas" of the Platonisers or the Logos of the Alexandrians.[75] I may cite a pa.s.sage which is quite in the vein of Philo:--

We have seen powerful evidences that the construction of this globe and its a.s.sociates; and, inferentially, that of all the other globes in s.p.a.ce, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are the expression of his will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws which are in like manner an expression of his will? (p. 154, 1st edition).

And creation "operating by law" is constantly cited as relieving the Creator from trouble about insignificant details.

I am perplexed to picture to myself the state of mind which accepts these verbal juggleries. It is intelligible that the Creator should operate according to such rules as he might think fit to lay down for himself (and therefore according to law); but that would leave the operation of his will just as much a direct personal act as it would be under any other {283} circ.u.mstances. I can also understand that (as in Leibnitz's caricature of Newton's views) the Creator might have made the cosmical machine, and, after setting it going, have left it to itself till it needed repair. But then, by the supposition, his personal responsibility would have been involved in all that it did, just as much as a dynamiter is responsible for what happens when he has set his machine going and left it to explode.

The only hypothesis which gives a sort of mad consistency to the Vestigiarian's views is the supposition that laws are a kind of angels or demiurgoi, who, being supplied with the Great Architect's plan, were permitted to settle the details among themselves. Accepting this doctrine, the conception of royal laws and plebeian laws, and of those more than Homeric contests in which the big laws "wreck" the little ones, becomes quite intelligible. And, in fact, the honour of the paternity of those remarkable ideas which come into full flower in the preacher's discourse, must, so far as my imperfect knowledge goes, be attributed to the author of the _Vestiges_.