Shelburne Essays Part 12

Pa.s.sionless bride, divine Tranquillity.

To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in those who seemed to them endowed with a grace beyond their untutored comprehension.

Even if the imagination or the conscience could lift us to this blissful height, they would avail us little to-day; for we have put away the imagination as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-things of youth, and the conscience in this age of humanitarian pity has become less than ever a sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane powers and more than ever a feeling of brotherhood among men. Of faith, speaking generally, the past century had no recking, for it turned deliberately to observe and study the phenomena of change. We call that time, which is still our own time, the age of reason, but scarcely with justice. The Middle Ages, despite the obscurantism of the Church, had far better claim to that t.i.tle. One needs but to turn the pages of the doctors, even before the day of Abelard who is supposed first to have been the champion of reason against authority, to see how profound was their conviction that in reason might be discovered a justification of the faith they held. And indeed Abelard is styled the champion of reason because only with him do men begin to perceive the inability of reason to establish faith. Better we should call ours an age of observation, for never before have men given themselves with such complete abandon to observing and recording systematically. By long and intent observation of the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a seeming order in disorder, the shifting visions of time have a.s.sumed a specious regularity which we call law, and the mind has made for itself a home on this earth which to the wise of old seemed but a house of bondage.

For life is but a dream whose shapes return, Some frequently, some seldom, some by night And some by day, some night and day: we learn, The while all change and many vanish quite, In their recurrence with recurrent changes A certain seeming order; where this ranges We count things real; such is memory's might.

From this wealth of observation and record the modern age, and especially the century just past, has developed two fields of intellectual activity to such an extent as almost to claim the creation of them. Gradually through acc.u.mulated observation the nineteenth century came to look on human affairs in a new light; like everything else they were seen to be subject to the Herac.l.i.tean ebb and flow; and history was written from a new point of view. We learned to regard eras of the past as subject each to its peculiar pa.s.sions and ambitions, and this taught us to throw ourselves back into their life with a kind of sympathy never before known. We did not judge them by an immutable code, but by reference to time and place. Nor is this all. Within the small arc of our observation we observed a certain regularity of change similar to the changes due to growth in an individual, and this we called the law of progress. History was then no longer a mere chronicle of events or, if philosophical, the portrayal and judgment of characters from a fixed point of view; it became at its best the systematic examination of the causes of progress and development. And naturally this attention to change and motion, this historic sense, was extended to every other branch of human interest: in religion it taught Christians to accept the Bible as the history of revelation instead of something complete from the beginning; in literature it taught us to portray the development of character or the influence of environment on character rather than the interplay of fixed pa.s.sions; in art it created impressionism or the endeavour to reproduce what the individual sees at the moment instead of a rationalised picture; in criticism it introduced what Sainte-Beuve, the master of the movement, sought to write, a history of the human spirit.

But history, like Cronos of old, possessed a strange power of devouring its own offspring. Gradually, from the habit of regarding human affairs in a state of flux and more particularly from the growth of the idea of progress, the past lost its hold over men. It became a matter of curiosity but not of authority, and history as it was understood in Renan's day has in ours almost ceased to be written. Science on the other hand is the observation of phenomena regarded chiefly in the relation of s.p.a.ce--for it is correct, I believe, to a.s.sert that the laws of energy may be reduced to this point--and as such is not subject to this devouring act of time. It frankly discards the past and as frankly dwells in the present. It is not my purpose, indeed it would be quite superfluous, to reckon up the immense acquisitions of the scientific method in the past century: they are the theme of schoolboys and savants alike, the pride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need I dwell on the new philosophy which sprang up from the union of the historic and the scientific sense and still subsists. Not the system of Hegel or Schopenhauer or of any other professor of metaphysics is the true philosophy of the age; these are but echoes of a past civilisation, voices and _praeterea nil_. Evolution is the living guide of our thought, a.s.signing to the region of the unknowable the conceptions of unity and perfect rest, and building up its theories on the visible experience of motion and change and development. It has reduced the universal flux of Herac.l.i.tus to a scientific system and a.s.similated it to our inner growth; it has become as essentially a factor of our att.i.tude toward the natural world as Newton's laws of gravitation.

But if our thoughts are directed almost wholly to the sphere of motion, yet this does not mean that the longing after quietude and peace has pa.s.sed entirely from the mind of man; the thirst of the human heart is too deep for that. Only the world has learned to look for peace in another direction. In place of that faith which would deny valid reality to changing forms, we have taught ourselves to find a certain order in disorder, which we call law,--whether it be the law of progress or the law of energy,--and on the stability of this law we are willing to stake our desired tranquillity.

In this way, through what may be called the offspring begotten on the historic sense by science, the mind has turned its regard into the future and seemed to discern there a continuation of the same law of progress which it saw working in the past. Hence have arisen the manifold dreams and visions of socialism, altruism, humanitarianism, and all the other isms that would fix the hope of mankind upon some coming perfectibility of human life, and that like Prometheus in the play have implanted blind hopes in the hearts of men. It is indeed one of the most curious instances of the recrudescence of ideas to see the mediaeval visions of a city of golden streets and eternal bliss in another existence brought down to the future of this world itself. What to the mystic of that age was to come suddenly, with the twinkling of an eye, when we are changed and have put away mortal things, when the angel of the Apocalypse has sworn that time shall be no longer,--all this, the heavenly city of joy and endless content, is now to be the natural outcome here in this world of causes working in time. The theory is beautiful in itself and might satisfy the hunger of the heart, even though its main hope concerns only generations to come, were it not for a lingering and fatal suspicion that progress does not involve increased capability of happiness to the individual, and that somehow the race does not move toward content. Physical comfort has perhaps become more widely distributed, but of the placid joy of life the recent years have known singularly little; we need but turn over the pages of the more representative poets and prose writers of the past sixty years to discover how deep is the unrest of our souls. The higher literature has come to be chiefly the "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised"; and missing the note of deeper peace we sigh at times even for

A draught of dull complacency.

Alas, those who would find a resting-place for the spirit in the relations of man to man seem not to reckon that the very essence--if such a term may be used of so contingent a nature--that the very essence of this world's life is motion and change and contention, and that Peace spreads her wings in another and purer atmosphere. One might suppose that a single glance into the heart would show how vain are such aspirations, and how utterly dreary and illusory is every conceived ideal of progress and socialism because each and all are based on an inherent contradiction. He who waits for peace until the course of events has become stable is like the silly peasant by the river side, watching and waiting while the current flows forever and will ever flow.

Not less vain is the hope of those who would find in the laws of science a permanent abiding place--perhaps one should say was rather than is, for the avowed gospel of science which was to usurp the office of olden-time religious faith is already like the precedent historic sense, itself becoming a thing of the past. Yet the much discussed war between science and religion is none the less real because to-day the din of battle has ceased. It does not depend on criticism of the Mosaic story of creation by the one, nor on hostility to progress offered by the other. These things were only signs of a deeper and more radical difference: religion is the voice of faith uttering in symbols of the imagination its distrust of the world as a scene of deception and unreality, whereas science is the attempt to discover fixed laws in the midst of this very world of change. If to-day the strife between the two seems reconciled, this only means that faith has grown dimmer and that science has learned the futility of its more dogmatic a.s.sumptions.[10]

The very growth of science is in fact a gradual recognition of motion as the basis of phenomena and an increasing comprehension of what may be called the laws of motion. When motion was regarded as simple and regular, it seemed possible to explain phenomena by correspondingly simple and regular laws; but when each primary motion was seen to be the resultant of an infinite series of motions the question became in like manner infinitely complex, or in other words insoluble. But to be clear we must consider the matter more in detail.

From the days of the old Greek Herac.l.i.tus, who built up his theory of the world on the axiom of eternal flux and change, the Doctrine of Motion as a distinct enunciation has lingered on in the world well-nigh unnoticed and buried from sight in the bulk of suppositions and guesses that have made up the pa.s.sing systems of philosophy. Now and then some lonely thinker took up the doctrine, but only to let it drop back into obscurity; until during the great burst of scientific enquiry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it a.s.sumed new significance and began to grow. From that time to this its progress in acceptance as the basis of phenomena may be regarded as a measure of scientific advance.

By a strange fatality Kant, who had been so efficient as an iconoclast in metaphysics, was perhaps with his nebular hypothesis, followed later by the work of Goethe on animal and plant variations, the one most largely responsible for the new hope that in science at last was to be found an answer to the riddle of existence which had baffled the search of pure reason. The achievement of Kant both destructive and constructive is well known, if vaguely understood, by the world at large; but it is not so well known that a contemporary of Kant did precisely for science what the sage of Konigsberg accomplished in metaphysics. In the very decade in which _The Critique of Pure Reason_ saw the light, Lagrange, a scholar of France, published a work which carried the a.n.a.lytic method, or the method of motion, to its farthest limit. In this work, the _Mecanique a.n.a.lytique_, Lagrange develops an equation from which it can be proved conclusively that to explain any group of phenomena measured by energy an infinite number of hypotheses may be employed. So, for instance, if we establish any one theory which will sufficiently account for the known phenomena of light, such as reflection, refraction, polarisation, etc., there will yet remain an infinite number of other hypotheses equally capable of explaining the same group of phenomena. Or to use the words of Poincare: "If then we can give one complete mechanical explanation of a phenomenon, there will also be possible an infinite number of others which will account equally well for all the particulars revealed by experiment." That is to say, no _experimentum crucis_ can be imagined which will reveal the truth or error of any given theory. This restriction on the finality of our knowledge is borne out in all physical reasoning,--and I venture also to say in the other sciences; thus in optics we can perform no experiment which will establish as finally true the theory that light is caused by the motion of corpuscles of matter emitted from a luminous body, or that it is due to vibrations propagated through a medium by a wave motion, or that it is generated by certain disturbances in the electrical state of bodies. Each of these hypotheses has its advantages and disadvantages; and in our choice we merely adopt that theory which explains the greater number of phenomena in the simplest way.

If any one should here ask: Granted that from phenomena expressed in terms of energy no ultimate law can be educed, yet may not some other view of phenomena lead to other results? We answer that no other view is possible. Not that the system of the universe, if we may use such an expression, is necessarily constructed on what we call energy, but that our minds can conceive it only in terms of energy. An a.n.a.lysis of the concepts which enter into the idea of energy must make it evident that in our understanding of nature we cannot go beyond this point.

There is an agreement among philosophers and scientists that the concept of s.p.a.ce is not derived from external experience, but is inherently intuitive. As stated by Kant:

The representation of s.p.a.ce cannot be borrowed through experience from relations of external phenomena, but, on the contrary, those external phenomena become possible only by means of the representation of s.p.a.ce. s.p.a.ce is a necessary representation, _a priori_, forming the very foundation of external intuitions. It is impossible to imagine that there should be no s.p.a.ce, though it is possible to imagine s.p.a.ce without objects to fill it.

The concept of s.p.a.ce therefore makes possible the intuition of external phenomena; but these phenomena to be realised must appeal to one of our senses, and this connecting link between the outer world and our consciousness is the concept which we call time. Quoting again from Kant:

Time is the formal condition, _a priori_, of all phenomena whatsoever. But, as all representations, whether they have for their objects external things or not, belong by themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state;... therefore, if I am able to say, _a priori_, that all external phenomena are in s.p.a.ce, I can, according to the principle of the internal sense, make the general a.s.sertion that all phenomena, that is, all objects of the senses, are _in time_, and stand necessarily in relations of time.

It follows, then, that our simplest possible expression for phenomena will be in terms of s.p.a.ce and time, and that beyond this the human mind cannot go.

Turning here from metaphysical to scientific language, we speak of s.p.a.ce and time as the fundamental units from which we deduce the laws of the external world. The fact that s.p.a.ce appeals to us only through time furnishes us with our concept or unit of motion, which is the ratio of s.p.a.ce to time. The external phenomena so revealed to us we call the manifestations of ma.s.s or energy, thus providing ourselves with a second unit. It must be observed, however, that ma.s.s or energy is not a new concept, but bears precisely the same relation to motion as Kant's _Ding-an-sich_ bears to s.p.a.ce and time: it is the unknowable cause of motion--or more properly speaking it is the ability residing in an object to change the motion of another object and is measured by the degree of change it can produce. And I say ma.s.s or energy, advisedly, for the two are merely different names or different views of the same thing; we cannot conceive of matter without energy or of energy without matter. Our choice between the two depends solely on the simplicity and convenience with which deductions may be made from one or the other.

From a physical standpoint the concept energy is rather the simpler, but mathematically our deductions flow more readily from the concept ma.s.s.

If then our explanations of phenomena must ultimately involve the two units of motion and of energy or ma.s.s, and if it can be demonstrated that on this basis we may account for any group of phenomena in an infinite number of ways, what shall we say but that the attempt to attain any resting-place for the mind in the laws of nature is, and must always be, futile? Further than this, any given law is itself only an approximate explanation of phenomena, and must be continually modified as we add to our experimental knowledge. In all cases a law must be considered valid only within the limits of the sensitiveness of the instruments by which we get our measurements. With more delicate instruments variations will be observed that must be expressed by additional terms in the formula. Thus we maintain that the law of gravitation is true only within the range of our observation; it does not apply to ma.s.ses of molecular dimensions. Another formula, the well-known law of the pressure of gases, can be shown by experiment to be merely an approximation, because the variations in it are not of a dimension negligible in comparison with the sensibility of our instruments. As the pressure increases the error in the formular equation becomes constantly greater. To remedy this a second approximation, which is still inadequate, has been added to the equation by Van der Waals; yet greater accuracy will require the addition of other terms; and a complete demonstration would demand an infinite series of approximations.

The meaning of all this is quite plain: there is no reach of the human intellect which can bridge the gap between motion and rest. Our senses are adapted to a world of universal flux which is, so far as we can determine, subject to no absolute law but the law of probabilities. He who attempts to circ.u.mscribe the ebb and flow of circ.u.mstance within the bounds of our spiritual needs, he who attempts to find peace in any formula of science or in any promise of historic progress, is like one who labours on the old and vain problem of squaring the circle:

Qual e'l geometra, che tutto s'affige Per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, Pensando, quel principio ond' egli indige.

The desire of peace, as the world has known it in past times, signified always a turning away from the flotsam and jetsam of time and an attempt to fix the mind on absolute rest and unity,--the desire of peace has been the aspiration of faith. And because the object of faith cannot be seen by the eyes of the body or expressed in terms of the understanding, a firm grasp of the will has been necessary to keep the desire of the heart from falling back into the visible, tangible things of change and motion. For this reason, when the will is relaxed, doubts spring up and men give themselves wholly to the transient intoxication of the senses.

Yet blessed are they that believe and have not seen. It was the peculiar quest of the nineteenth century to discover fixed laws and an unshaken abiding place for the mind in the very kingdom of unrest; we have sought to chain the waves of the sea with the winds.

And how does all this affect one who stands apart, striving in his own small way to live in the serene contemplation of the universe? I cannot doubt that there are some in the world to-day who look back over the long past and watch the toiling of the human race toward peace as a traveller in the Alps may with a telescope follow the mountain-climbers in their slow ascent through the snows of Mont Blanc; or again they watch our labours and painstaking in the valley of the senses and wonder at our grotesque industry; or look upon the striving of men to build a city for the soul amid the uncertainties of this life, as men look at the play of children who build castles and domes in the sands of the seash.o.r.e and cry out when the advancing waves wash all their hopes away.

I think there are some such men in the world to-day who are absorbed in the fellowship of the wise men of the East, and of the no less wise Plato, with whom they would retort upon the accusing advocates of the present: "Do you think that a spirit full of lofty thoughts, and privileged to contemplate all time and all existence, can possibly attach any great importance to this life?" They live in the world of action, but are not of it. They pa.s.s each other at rare intervals on the thoroughfares of life and know each other by a secret sign, and smile to each other and go on their way comforted and in better hope.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Correspondence of William Cowper._ Arranged in chronological order, with annotations, by Thomas Wright, Princ.i.p.al of Cowper School, Olney. Four volumes. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1904.

[2] In a newly published volume of the letters of William Bodham Donne (the friend of Edward FitzGerald and Bernard Barton), the editor, Catharine B. Johnson, throws doubt on this supposed descent of Cowper's mother from the Poet Dean.

[3] How refreshing is that whiff of good honest smoke in the abstemious lives of Cowper and John Newton! I have just seen, in W. Tuckwell's _Reminiscences of a Radical Parson_, a happy allusion to William Bull's pipes: "To Olney, under the auspices of a benevolent Quaker.... I saw all the relics: the parlour where bewitching Lady Austen's shuttlec.o.c.k flew to and fro; the hole made in the wall for the entrance and exit of the hares; the poet's bedroom; Mrs. Unwin's room, where, as she knelt by the bed in prayer, her clothes caught fire. The garden was in other hands, but I obtained leave to enter it. Of course, I went straight to the summer-house, small, and with not much gla.s.s, the wall and ceiling covered with names, Cowper's wig-block on the table, _a hole in the floor where that mellow divine, the Reverend Mr. Bull, kept his pipes_; outside, the bed of pinks celebrated affectionately in one of his letters to Joseph Hill, pipings from which are still growing in my garden."--The date of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell's visit to Olney is not indicated, but his _Reminiscences_ were published in the present year, 1905.

[4] Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December 23, 1804, and died at Paris, October 13, 1869.

[5] _The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne._ In six volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1904.

[6] _The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti._ With Memoir and Notes, etc. By William Michael Rossetti. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904.

[7] _Robert Browning._ By C. H. Herford. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1905.

[8] _The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne._ Edited by Wilbur L. Cross.

Supplemented with the Life by Percy Fitzgerald. 12 volumes. New York: J.

F. Taylor & Co. 1904.

[9] _Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of J. H. Shorthouse._ Edited by his wife. In two volumes. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1905.

[10] Yet even while I read the proof of this page there lies before me an article in the _Contemporary Review_ (July, 1905), in which Sir Oliver Lodge utters the old a.s.sumptions of science with childlike simplicity. "I want to urge," he says, "that my advocacy of science and scientific training is not really due to any wish to be able to travel faster or shout further round the earth, or to construct more extensive towns, or to consume more atmosphere and absorb more rivers, nor even to overcome disease, prolong human life, grow more corn, and cultivate to better advantage the kindly surface of the earth; though all these latter things will be 'added unto us' if we persevere in high aims. But it is none of these things which should be held out as the ultimate object and aim of humanity--the gain derivable from a genuine pursuit of truth of every kind; no, the ultimate aim can be expressed in many ways, but I claim that it is no less than to be able to comprehend what is the length and breadth and depth and height of this mighty universe, including man as part of it, and to know not man and nature alone, but to attain also some incipient comprehension of what the saints speak of as the love of G.o.d which pa.s.seth knowledge, and so to begin an entrance into the fulness of an existence beside which the joy even of a perfect earthly life is but as the happiness of a summer's day." The sentiment is beautiful, but what shall we say of the logic? To speak of attaining through _science_ a comprehension, even an incipient comprehension, of that which pa.s.seth _knowledge_, is to fall into that curious confusion of ideas to which the scientifically trained mind is subject when it goes beyond its own field. "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding." Has Sir Oliver read the Book of Job?

THE END.