THE BAPTIST QUARTERLY. CERTAINTY IN RELIGION. What can we know? YEARS ago, travelling in Germany, I fell in with a genial, intelli gent man, a merchant from Leipsic, who, in the most positive way, declared his disbelief in anything he could not touch or see. "I believe in this world," said he, "not in the other; I believe in man, not in God; I believe in business, not in religion." I quietly asked him how he came to believe so much,-how did he know that what he saw and handled was real. He laughed, and after a moment added, "I believe because I see. There it is," pointing to the trees and fields by the wayside, "there it is, and that's enough." It may be said that this man was no thinker, in the proper sense of the word, and little importance ought to be attached to his desultory talk. Very likely; but it will be allowed, we presume, that the "Association of Naturalists," founded in Germany nearly half a century ago by the famous Oken, is composed of practiced thinkers. Well, their annual meeting was held last autumn at Rostock. The opening address was delivered by Professor Rudolph Virchow, who stands in the first rank of physical investigators. His subject was, "The Mission of Physical Science," which he made to be not merely the advancement of the race in the knowledge of nature and of man, but the extermination of all divine conceptions and usages. He made (257) VOL. VI. NO. 3. R a violent attack upon religion as such, and especially upon those fundamental ideas which underlie the whole subject, and make any kind of worship possible. It contained, in fact, a special plea for materialism, denying all belief in the soul or God. The address was received, it is said, "with great and general applause,"-grosser allgemeiner Beifall der Versammlung. As a specimen of its spirit and style, the following is translated from Berliner Klinischer, Wochenscrift, Oct. 23, 1871: When a man says, I am of opinion that a personal soul exists, that it is separable from the body, that it uses the body for a time, but has no absolute need of it for its own existence; my friends, when a man says this, there is no use in reasoning with him; for there is no possibility of coming to an agreement. When I examine what is composed under the idea of a soul, I encounter a number of organic activities, which are confined to definite regions and organs clearly localized. Now it is impossible that the power goes elsewhere and the organ remains, for these activities are absolutely connected with the organs and cannot be found or shown to be where the organs are not. Of course he reasons in precisely the same way respecting the universe, which contains just so much force, or so many forces, from which all idea of a personal God, or of a supreme intelligent will, must be eliminated. It is well known that some of the most advanced positivists, particularly the materialists and cerebralists, take pretty much the same ground as Virchow. Some of them in England or in this country might decline to go so far; but all agree in rejecting all ideas beyond the relative and the phenomenal. Even those who admit the possibility of a religion consisting of wonder, reverence, and submission, deny everything like positive knowledge of God, of the soul, and immortality. Persons may have an opinion or a longing upon such subjects, but can reach no certainty. Knowledge is of the forms and forces of nature, that is all. Everything beyond is presumptuous guesswork. And what is singular, some idealists, from an entirely different, nay opposite, point of view, have spoken in the same way. Even Christian writers, like Mansell and some others, lost in metaphysical abstractions, have admitted that all beyond the relative and the conditioned is absolutely incognizable by the human intellect. It may be a matter of faith, but never of reason, or of knowledge. Nay, even among the poets, we find as a sort of reflection of scientific thought, or possibly of philosophic doubt, the same singular aberration. Tennyson, for example, at heart a true believer as well as a great poet, declares that the things of religion cannot be known or proved. Reverently and tenderly, in terms of exquisite beauty, he recognizes "the Son of God, immortal Love," but not as known. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see1 as if faith ("a beam in darkness") were a mere subjective state, with nothing corresponding to it in the way of knowledge or certainty. Tennyson on reflection, I doubt not, would modify this unguarded expression, which nas an air of plausibility, by admitting that the things of faith may be as certain as the things of sense. For, after all, what evidence have we that the things of sense or of the visible world are real, except that supplied by natural faith, or the intuitive conviction which we have respecting them? The senses are organs or vehicles of sight, hearing, touch, and so on, mere inlets of that which the perceptive power recognizes, first as internal sensation, and secondly as external fact, and cannot, therefore, of themselves, give us any assurance of reality. Even Dr. Huxley, with his dashing but dangerous audacity (Lay Sermons, Descartes) insists that we can know only the facts of consciousness, that the senses receive as much as they give, that they deceive us as to color, form, number, and so forth, and that all we can probably know even of the external world 1 In justice to Tennyson we ought to say, that in metaphysics and theology he is unquestionably an idealist. If by knowledge is meant simply the science of "the seen," and nothing more, his distinction may be admitted; but in view of his actual belief, it must be concluded that he is speaking ironically when he dignifies this with the exclusive name of knowledge, and his occult purpose must be to throw contempt upon the whole thing. Otherwise it is simply an abuse of language. The whole passage, however, is so tender and earnest that he must have sharp eyes who can discover in it the slightest tincture of irony. After all, this must have been the opinion of a thoughtful student of his poetry who says in the North British Review, 1871," The scepticism [of "In Memoriam"], if any, is only that which is found in the religious writings of all those men who, to enhance the greater certainty, treat the lesser as none at all, who because the next world is so true, resolve that this shall be only a dream, and so because they throw doubt upon that which is seen and known, are scarcely credited when they explain that they do so only to magnify the undoubtfulness of that which is invisible and unknown." So the conclusion of the whole poem is given to be the acquisition of the -"faith that comes of self-control The truths which never can be proved Until we close with all we love And all we flow from, soul in soul." We insist, however, and such is the purpose of our entire paper, that Christ and Christianity, the "invisible things of God" and the soul can be known, and if so, proved, though not mechanically and mathematically, as in the case of visible things. And the failure to make this distinction is the source of all sorts of contradictions and obscurities upon this subject. Knowledge is knowledge, whatever its form or its substance. is force. "The entire play of the scientific intellect," says Tyndall (Fragments of Science, p. 74), "is confined to the combination and resolution of the ideas of matter and force;" but what those ideas really represent, he does not attempt to say. Tyndall declares that he has no theory even of magnetism, that is, he knows not what it really is. It is correlated with light, heat, and motion; but does he know what at bottom these are? He has splendidly illustrated the laws of light. After all, what is light? "A mode of motion," "the undulations of an ethereal medium." But what causes the motion,— what propagates the undulations? action of the sun." Very good. But what causes the action of the sun? What in this case is action or reaction? "The polar play of the molecules." And what, I pray, is that? Is it force? force persistent." And what again is force? Is it power? And if so, what is power, as an ultimate idea? The chemical and magnetic "Yes, No one can tell, replies Herbert Spencer; for all beyond phenomena and their relations is inconceivable and unknowable. Hence Huxley declares that all religion, with anything like a scientific basis, must be "a worship of the unknown," and that "mainly" of the silent kind." Spencer, and his followers, are compelled to postulate the existence of this unknown and ineffable, not simply as a negative, but as a positive idea, both finite and infinite, and discuss it in a way strangely metaphysical for those who deny the very possibility of metaphysics, or the science of the metaphenomenal. It is instructive, however, to note that they have just as much difficulty with matter as with spirit. The moment the question of absolute reality comes up, they puzzle themselves over the simplest things; and all they claim to know positively is not the noumenon, but the phenomenon in space and time. Hence in one of his most ingenious passages in the First Principles, pp. 56, 57,1 Spencer demonstrates to his own satisfaction that motion, simple as we deem it, is the profoundest contradiction, and utterly incomprehensible! Well, then, what is the phenomenon? Is it appearance or reality? If appearance or the mere manifestation of an "unknown somewhat," upon what does it rest, so far as we are personally concerned? "Upon experience," we presume, will be the reply. What then is experience, and what the cognizance of the phenomenal about which we prate so knowingly? And how, above all, is a science of the phenomenal to be validated to the human soul? Is matter, is mind to be known simply as uniform similitudes and sequences in space and time, and what is all science good for if it has no permanent spiritual basis? 1 Editon of 1864. Owen, profound and accurate in his own department of investigation, declares positively respecting both mind and matter that all we can know of them is that they are "centres of force," the one being internai, the other external. Some one has spoken of matter as "frozen force;" and even Bain, the most material of the logicians, is inclined to resolve it into "mere points of resistance." Boscovich has said that it is "known to us only as localized points of attraction and repulsion." Stuart Mill dares not go further than to speak of it as "a permanent possibility of sensations;" while mind itself he makes "a series of feelings," and what is most marvellous, "a series of feelings aware of itself!"1 Against a stone you strike your toe; You feel 'tis sore, it makes a clatter; Successive feelings on us seize, As thick as falling hailstones patter; Is all we know of mind and matter." In this way matter itself, of which the positivist philosopher makes so much account, begins to vanish from the view of some of our advanced scientific thinkers. On the other hand, mind is reduced. by some recent writers in physiology to simple cerebration, and thence all but identified with matter. Consciousness, if not really denied, is represented as if it were "one set of brain-fibres dancing a mazy antistrophe to similar fibres in a corresponding brain-lobe.” Matter and spirit are confounded; and if both do not disappear altogether, it will be owing to the fact that a little common-sense, which springs from the common consciousness, is yet left among us. 113 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, in his interesting and sparkling little work entitled "Mechanism in Thought and Morals," indicates certain organic and mechanical conditions of thought, consequently of knowledge, and ascribes much of what passes for unconscious thinking, dreaming, and so forth, to the automatic action of the brain, after all pleads for the existence of the will as a separate personal power, capable of controlling both thought and action, and thus recognizes the great fact of human personality and responsibility. 1 Mill's Examination of Hamilton, p. 198; also pp. 205, 206. See especially chapter xi. 2 Lord Neaves (?) in Blackwood's Magazine. 3 Dr. Noah Porter's "Sciences of Nature versus the Science of Man," which we commend to our readers. |