LECTURE IV.
NATURE IS BUT THE NAME FOR AN EFFECT WHOSE CAUSE IS GOD.
I.
We have now to consider the principle of causality so far as it is implied in the theistic inference, and the theistic inference so far as it is conditioned by the principle of causality. It is not necessary to discuss the nature of the principle of causality in itself or for its own sake; it is even expedient, I believe, not to attempt to penetrate farther into its metaphysics and psychology than the work on hand imperatively requires. We must of course go as far as those have gone who have maintained on metaphysical or psychological grounds that the principle of causality warrants no theistic inference; we must show that their metaphysics and psychology are irrelevant when true, and false when relevant; but we may be content to stop when we have reached this result. The truth of theism has been very generally represented, both by those who admit and by those who deny the validity of the theistic inference, as much more dependent than it really is on the truth or falsity of some one or other of the many views which have been entertained as to the nature of causation, and the origin of the causal judgment. We are constantly being warned by theists that unless we accept this or that particular notion of causation, and account for it in this or that particular manner, we cannot reasonably believe in the existence of God; we are constantly being assured by anti-theists that belief in God is irrational, because it assumes some erroneous view of causation, or some erroneous explanation of the process by which causation is apprehended. But it will be found that representations of this kind seldom prove more than one-sidedness and immaturity of thought in those who make them. An accurate and comprehensive view of the nature of causation, and of our apprehension of it, will, it is true, have here as elsewhere great advantages over an erroneous and narrow one, but hardly any of the theories which have been held on these points can be consistently argued by those who hold them to invalidate theistic belief. Even utterly inadequate statements and explanations of the principle of causality—as, for example, those of Hume and J. S. Mill—are not more incompatible with the theistic inference than they are with any other inference which is a real extension of knowledge. Unless they are understood and applied more rigidly than by those who propound them, they allow us to draw the theistic inference; if understood and applied so as to forbid our drawing it, they logically disallow all scientific inference except such as is purely formal and deductive. In a word, if compatible with science they are compatible with theism, and if incompatible with theism they are incompatible with science.
When we assume the principle of causality in the argument for the existence of God, what precisely is it that we assume? Only this: that whatever has begun to be, must have had an antecedent, or ground, or cause which accounts for it. We do not assume that every existence must have had a cause. We have no right, indeed, to assume that any existence has had a cause until we have found reason to regard it as not an eternal existence, but one which has had an origin. Whatever we believe, however, to have had an origin, we at once believe also to have had a cause. The theistic argument assumes that this belief is true. It assumes that every existence, once new, every event or occurrence or change, must have a cause. This is certainly no very large assumption: on the contrary, if any assumption can claim to be self-evident, it surely may. Thought implies the truth of it every moment. Sensation only gives rise to thought in virtue of it. Unless it were true there could be no such thing as thought. To deny that the principle of causality, understood as has been indicated, is true, would be to deny that reason is reason; it would be equivalent to affirming that to seek for a reason is always and essentially an unreasonable process. And, in fact, so understood, the principle never has been denied. Hume even did not venture to deny it, although he ought in consistency to have denied it, and obviously desired to be able to deny it. He did not, however, deny that every object which begins to exist must have a cause,—he did not venture to do more than deny that this is either intuitively or demonstratively certain, and that any bond or tie can be perceived between what is called a cause and what is called an effect. The inquiry which he instituted was not whether we pronounce it necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause or not, but for what reason we pronounce it necessary. He assumed that we pronounce it necessary, and his elaborate investigation into the nature of causation was undertaken expressly and entirely to discover why we do so. The conclusion to which he came—viz., that the causal judgment is an "offspring of experience engendered upon custom"—was not only a very inadequate and erroneous one in itself, but inconsistent with the reality of what it professed to explain: still the admission which has been mentioned was what was professed to be explained.
Now, if it be true at all that every event, whether it be a new existence or a change in an old existence, presupposes an explanatory antecedent or cause, there can of course be no accepting in all its breadth one of the propositions which Hume urges most strenuously—viz., that the mere study of an event can tell us nothing about its cause. We may grant that it can tell us very little,—that Hume performed an immense service in showing how extremely little we can know of the particular causes of particular events apart from the study of both in connection, apart from observation, experiment, and induction,—but we cannot grant that the event itself teaches us absolutely nothing. If every event must have a cause, every event must have a sufficient cause. For these two statements, although verbally different, are really identical. The second seems to mean, but does not actually mean, more than the first. The whole cause of the elevation of a weight of ten pounds a foot high cannot be also the whole cause of the elevation of twenty pounds to the same height, for the simple reason that in the latter case the elevation of ten pounds—of half the weight—would be an event which had no cause at all. And this is universally true. If every event have not a sufficient cause, some events have no cause at all. This, then, I say, we necessarily know that the efficient cause of every event is a sufficient cause, however vague may be our knowledge of efficiency and sufficiency.
If every event—using this term as convenient to denote either a new existence or a change in some existence—must have a cause, to prove that the universe must have had a cause we require to prove it to have been an event—to have had a commencement. Can this be done? That is the question in the theistic argument from causality. Compared therewith, all other questions which have been introduced into or associated with the argument are of very subordinate importance. Now there is only one way of reasonably answering the question, and that is by examining the universe, in order to determine whether or not it bears the marks of being an event—whether or not it has the character of an effect. We have no right to assume it to be an event, or to have had a beginning. The entire argument for the Divine existence, which is at present under consideration, can be no stronger than the strength of the proof which we can adduce in favour of its having had a beginning, and the only valid proof of that which reason can hope to find must be derived from the examination of the universe itself.
What, then, is the result of such an examination? An absolute certainty that all the things which are seen are temporal,—that every object in the universe which presents itself to the senses has had a beginning,—that the most powerful, penetrating, and delicate instruments devised to assist our senses reach no cause which is not obviously also an effect. The progress of science has not more convincingly and completely disproved the once prevalent notion that the universe was created about six thousand years ago, than it has convincingly and completely established that everything of which our senses inform us has had a commencement in time, and is of a compound, derivative, and dependent nature. It is not long since men had no means of proving that the rocks, for example, were not as old as the earth itself—no direct means of proving even that they were not eternal; but science is now able to tell us with confidence under what conditions, in what order, and in what epochs of geological time they were formed. We have probably a more satisfactory knowledge of the formation of the coal-measures than of the establishment of the feudal system. We know that the Alps, although they look as if they might have stood for ever, are not even old, as geologists count age. The morning and night, the origin and disappearance of the countless species of living things which have peopled the earth from the enormously remote times when the rocks of the Laurentian period were deposited down to the births and deaths of contemporaneous animals, have been again brought into the light of day by the power of science. The limits of research are not even there reached, and with bold flight science passes beyond the confines of discovered life—beyond the epochs of formation even of the oldest rocks—to a time when there was no distinction of earth and sea and atmosphere, as all were mingled together in nebulous matter, in some sort of fluid or mist or steam; yea, onwards to a time when our earth had no separate existence, and suns, moons, and stars were not yet divided and arranged into systems. If we seek, then, after what is eternal, science tells us that it is not the earth nor anything which it contains, not the sea nor the living things within it, not the moving air, not the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars. These things when interrogated all tell us to look above and beyond them, for although they may have begun to be in times far remote, yet it was within times to which the thoughts of finite beings can reach back.
There is no denying, then, that the universe is to a great extent an effect, an event, something which has begun to be, a process of becoming. Science is, day by day, year by year, finding out more and more that it is an effect. The growth of science is in great part merely the extension of the proof that the universe is an effect. But the scientific proof of the non-eternity of matter is as yet far from a complete one. It leaves it possible for the mind to refer the phases through which the universe has passed, and the forms which it has assumed, to an underlying eternal source in nature itself, and, therefore, not to God. And this is by far the most plausible and forcible way of combating the argument we are employing. It meets it with a direct counter-argument, which every person must acknowledge to be relevant, and which, if sufficiently made out, is obviously decisive. That counter-argument we are bound, therefore, to dispose of. It has been thus stated by Mr J. S. Mill: "There is in nature a permanent element, and also a changeable: the changes are always the effects of previous changes; the permanent existences, so far as we know, are not effects at all. It is true we are accustomed to say not only of events, but of objects, that they are produced by causes, as water by the union of hydrogen and oxygen. But by this we only mean that when they begin to exist, their beginning is the effect of a cause. But their beginning to exist is not an object, it is an event. If it be objected that the cause of a thing's beginning to exist may be said with propriety to be the cause of the thing itself, I shall not quarrel with the expression. But that which in an object begins to exist, is that in it which belongs to the changeable element in nature; the outward form and the properties depending on mechanical or chemical combinations of its component parts. There is in every object another and a permanent element—viz., the specific elementary substance or substances of which it consists and their inherent properties. These are not known to us as beginning to exist: within the range of human knowledge they had no beginning, and consequently no cause; though they themselves are causes or non-causes of everything that takes place. Experience, therefore, affords no evidences, not even analogies, to justify our extending to the apparently immutable, a generalisation grounded only on our observation of the changeable."[15]
On this I would remark, first, that mere experience does not take us to anything which we are entitled to call even apparently immutable. It only takes us, even when extended to the utmost by scientific instruments and processes, to elements which we call simple because we have hitherto failed to analyse them into simpler elements. It is a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis that all the substances recognised by chemists as elementary and intransmutable, are in reality the modifications or syntheses of a single material element, which have been produced under conditions that render them incapable of being affected by any tests or agencies which the analyst in his laboratory can bring to bear upon them. Indeed, unless this hypothesis be true, the theory of development, so generally accepted at present, can hardly be supposed to be of any very wide application, seeing that at its very outset it has to affirm the existence of no fewer than sixty-four true untransformable species. But suppose the so-called elementary substances of chemistry to be simple, no one can reasonably suppose them as known to us to be ultimate. In oxygen there may be no atoms which are not atoms of oxygen, but we know by experience only oxygen, not atoms of oxygen. No man has ever been able to put himself in sensible contact with what alone can be immutable in oxygen, if there be anything immutable in it, its ultimate atoms. No man has seen, heard, touched, or tasted an ultimate atom of any kind of matter. We know nothing of atoms—nothing of what is permanent in nature—from direct experience. We must pass beyond such experience—beyond all testimony of the senses—when we believe in anything permanent in nature, not less than when we believe in something beyond and above nature. The atomic theory in chemistry demands a faith which transcends experience, not less than the theistic theory in religion.
Then, secondly, although we grant that there is a permanent element in the physical universe, something in matter itself which is self-existent and eternal, we still need, in order to account for the universe which we know, an Eternal Intelligence. The universe, regarded even only so far as it is admitted by all materialists no less than by theists and pantheists to be an effect, cannot be explained, as materialists think, merely physically. The atoms of matter are, it is said, eternal and immutable. Grant them to be so. There are, however, countless millions of them, and manifestly the universe is one, is a single, magnificent, and complicated system, is characterised by a marvellous unity in variety. We must be informed how the universe came to be a universe,—how it came to have the unity which underlies its diversity,—if it resulted from a countless multitude of ultimate causes. Did the atoms take counsel together and devise a common plan and work it out? That hypothesis is unspeakably absurd, yet it is rational in comparison with the notion that these atoms combined by mere chance, and by chance produced such a universe as that in which we live. Grant all the atoms of matter to be eternal, grant all the properties and forces which with the smallest degree of plausibility can be claimed for them to be eternal and immutable, and it is still beyond all expression improbable that these atoms with these forces, if unarranged, uncombined, ununified, unutilised by a presiding mind, would give rise to anything entitled to be called a universe. It is millions to one that they would never produce the simplest of the regular arrangements which we comprehend under the designation of course of nature, or the lowest of vegetable or animal organisms; millions of millions to one that they would never produce a solar system, the earth, the animal kingdom, or human history. No number of material atoms, although eternal and endowed with mechanical force, can explain the unity and order of the universe, and therefore the supposition of their existence does not free us from the necessity of believing in a single intelligent cause—a Supreme Mind—to move and mould, combine and adjust, the ultimate atoms of matter into a single orderly system. There at once rises the question, Is it really necessary to believe both matter and mind to be eternal? No, must be our answer. The law of parsimony of causes directly forbids the belief, unless we can show that one cause is insufficient to explain the universe. And that we cannot do. We can show that matter is insufficient,—that it cannot account of itself even for the physical universe,—but not that mind is insufficient, not that mind cannot account for anything that is in matter. On what grounds can it be shown that a mind possessed of sufficient power to originate the universe, the ultimate elements of matter being given, could not also have created these elements? that the Supreme Intelligence, which gave to each sun, and planet, and satellite its size, and shape, and position, and motion, could not have summoned into being their constituent particles? On none whatever. We may not understand how they could be created, but we have no reason for thinking that they could not be created; and it is surely far easier and far more reasonable to believe that they were created, than that a countless number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, lying far beyond the range of any of our senses, but extending through immeasurable fields of space, should all, inconceivably minute although they be, be self-existent and eternal. The man who asks us to accept the latter supposition, asks us, it seems to me, to believe what is not only as mysterious as the self-existence of Deity, but millions of millions of times more mysterious. I should require strong reasons for assigning infinitely great attributes to excessively little things, and to an inconceivable number of them; but I can in this instance find no reasons at all.
Then, in the third place, any plausible conceptions we can form of the ultimate nature of matter lead to the belief that even that is an event or effect, a something derivative and caused. It must be admitted that the most plausible of these conceptions are vague and conjectural. We have a practical and relative knowledge of matter which is both exact and trustworthy,—a knowledge of its properties from which we can mathematically deduce a multitude of remote consequences of an extremely precise character—but we are hardly entitled to characterise as knowledge at all any of the views which have been propounded as to what it is in itself. It is only the unreflecting who fancy that matter in itself is something very clear and obvious, which they may apprehend by merely opening their eyes and stretching out their hands. Those who have never reasoned on the subject are apt to imagine that the nature of matter is of all things the easiest to understand, and they unhesitatingly invest it with their own sensations and perceptions. That is the so-called commonsense view of matter; but the slightest inquiry proves it to be delusive and nonsensical. Colour, for example, is just what is seen, and sound just what is heard; they are not qualities inherent in objects independent of the eye and ear: the matter which is supposed to cause by its motions on our senses these and other perceptions of the material world, we cannot see, hear, or apprehend by any sense. Change our senses and the universe will be thereby changed, everything in it becoming something other than it was before, green perhaps red, the bitter sweet, the loudest noise a gentle whisper, the hardest substance soft. As soon, then, as we thoughtfully ask ourselves, What is matter? we begin to discover that it is in itself something utterly mysterious. The collection of phenomena which we call its properties are quite unlike the phenomena of mind in this most important respect, that whatever they may be they are not what they appear to be. A state of mind is what we feel it to be; a state of matter is certainly not what we seem to ourselves to perceive it to be. No one, of course, knew all this better than Mr Mill. He, as a philosopher, had asked himself what matter is; he had formed a theory in answer to the question. And what is his theory? Just this,—that we cannot find a permanent element in matter; that we have no right to suppose that there is a permanent real existence or actual substance in matter; that all that we are warranted to affirm about the ultimate nature of matter is that it is a permanent possibility,—the permanent possibility of sensations. That was the conclusion which he arrived at when he theorised on matter without any theological aim. But he appears to have forgotten it when he came to criticise the argument for a first cause. He could not otherwise have written as if it were quite certain that there was in matter "a permanent element," not an underlying possibility but an inherent real substance. Had he remembered what his own theory as to the nature of matter was, he would have avoided as utterly untrue and misleading every expression which could suggest the notion of there being a permanent element in matter, and would have admitted that very probably the permanent possibilities of sensation, the causes of all material phenomena, lay in the Divine will, since he had been unable to find anything else permanent in which they could be supposed to subsist. That is a view which many profound thinkers have adopted. They have been led to hold that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that the whole material world is ultimately resolvable into forces; and that all its forces are but manifestations or outgoings of will-force. If so, the whole material world is not only dependent on, but is, the will of God, and has no being of any kind apart from the will of God. If so, God's will is not only the cause and controlling power of nature, but its substance, its self. And this view, that what alone substantially underlies all the phenomena we designate material is an acting mind, an energising will, has not only been reached by mental philosophers and idealistic speculators, but by those physicists who, like Boscovitch and Faraday, have found themselves forced to conclude that what is constitutive of matter is not indivisible particles, even infinitesimally small, but mere centres of force, since force necessarily implies some sort of substance, and, therefore, spirit where not matter.
But suppose the substratum of the universe to consist of a countless number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, and do we not even on this hypothesis reach by a single step the truth on which theism rests, and on which only theism can be based? "None of the processes of nature," says one of the most eminent of our physical philosophers, "since the time when nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. On the other hand, the exact quality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent. Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which science must stop. Not that science is debarred from studying the external mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural."[16] I believe that no reply to these words of Professor Clark Maxwell is possible from any one who holds the ordinary view of scientific men as to the ultimate constitution of matter. They must suppose every atom, every molecule, to be of such a nature, to be so related to others, and to the universe generally, that things may be such as we see them to be; but this their fitness to be built up into the structure of the universe is a proof that they have been made fit, and since natural forces could not have acted on them while not yet existent, a supernatural power must have created them, and created them with a view to their manifold uses. Every atom, every molecule, must even in what is ultimate in it bear the impress of a Supernatural Power and Wisdom; must, from the very nature of the case, reflect the glory of God and proclaim its dependence upon Him.
In like manner the latest speculation regarding the nature of matter—the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson—seems, so far from having any tendency to exclude creative action, necessarily to imply it. He supposes that the atoms may be small vortex-rings in the ether, the rotating portions of a perfect fluid which fills all space. But a perfect fluid can neither explain its own existence nor the commencement of rotation in any part of it. Rotation once commenced in a perfect or frictionless and incompressible fluid would continue for ever, but it never could naturally commence. There is nothing in a perfect fluid to account either for the origin or cessation of rotation, and consequently nothing, on the vortex-atom hypothesis, to account either for the production or destruction of an atom of matter. The origin and cessation of rotation in fluids are due to their imperfection, their internal friction, their viscosity. The origin or cessation of rotation in a perfect fluid must be the effect of supernatural action; in other words, every vortex-atom must owe the rotation which gives it its individuality to a Divine impulse.
A theist has certainly no need, then, to be afraid of researches into the ultimate nature of matter. Our knowledge thereof is exceedingly small and imperfect, but all that we do know of it, all that we can even rationally conceive of it, leads to the inference that it is not self-existent, but the work of God. The farther research is pushed, the more clearly, we may be assured, will this become apparent, for the more wonderfully adapted will the ultimate constituents of matter be found for assuming countless forms and composing countless objects—the air, the land, the sea, and starry heavens, with all that in or on them is. Research has already shown us reason to believe "that even chemical atoms are very complicated structures; that an atom of pure iron is probably a vastly more complicated system than that of the planets and their satellites; that each constituent of a chemical atom must go through an orbit in the millionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in which it successively or simultaneously is under the influence of many other constituents, or possibly comes into collision with them; that each of these particles is, as Sir John Herschel has beautifully said, for ever solving differential equations which, if written out in full, might perhaps belt the earth."[17] Now, what does this mean, if not that every ultimate atom of matter is full to the very heart of it with evidences of the power and wisdom of God, and that every particle of dust or drop of water is crowded with traces of the action of the Divine Reason, not less marvellous, it may be, than those which astronomy exhibits in the structure of the heavens and the evolutions of the heavenly bodies? Those who hoped that molecular science would help them to get rid of God have obviously made a profound mistake. It has already shown far more clearly than ever was or could have been anticipated, that every atom of matter points back beyond itself to the all-originating will of God, and refuses to receive the idolatrous homage of those who would put it in the place of God.
To these considerations it has to be added that some of our ablest physicists believe that in the present age a strictly scientific proof has been found of the position that the universe had a beginning in time. "According to Sir W. Thomson's deductions from Fourier's Theory of Heat, we can trace down the dissipation of heat by conduction and radiation to an infinitely distant time when all things will be uniformly cold. But we cannot similarly trace the heat-history of the universe to an infinite distance in the past. For a certain negative value of the time the formulæ give impossible values, indicating that there was some initial distribution of heat which could not have resulted, according to known laws of nature, from any previous distribution. There are other cases in which a consideration of the dissipation of energy leads to the conception of a limit to the antiquity of the present order of things."[18] If this theory be true, physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly teaches that creation took place, that the present system of nature and its laws originated at an approximately assignable date in the past. The theory is supported by the most eminent physical philosophers of this country, and if there be any oversight or error in the principles or calculations on which it is founded, it would appear not to have been as yet detected. It is a theory on which, however, only specialists are entitled to pronounce judgment; and therefore, although those who assume that matter was not created are bound to refute it, I do not wish myself to lay any stress upon it—the more especially as I believe that apart from it there is amply sufficient evidence for holding that "Nature is but the name for an effect whose cause is God."[19]
II.
It seems to me, then, that the universe when examined must be concluded to be throughout—from centre to circumference—alike in what is most permanent and what is most changeable in it,—an event or effect, and that its only adequate cause is a Supreme Intelligence. It is only such a cause which is sufficient to explain the universe as we know it, and that universe is what has to be explained. The assertion of Kant that the principle of causality cannot take us beyond the limits of the sensible world is only true if causality be confined to strictly material events which display no signs of law and order, and the progress of science is one long uninterrupted proof that no such events are to be discovered; that it is hopeless to look for them; that matter and its changes are ordained, arranged, adjusted phenomena. The assertion of Kant is clearly false, if we are not to exclude from the event anything which demands explanation; if we are to reason from the universe itself and not from its name; if we are to infer a particular cause from a knowledge of the nature of a given particular event. This, the so-called concrete use of the principle of causality, is the only use of it which is legitimate, the only use of it which is not extremely childish.
The opposite—the absurd—notion that the principle of causality is abstractly applied, has led some to argue that it leads legitimately to nothing else than an infinite regress—an eternal succession of causes and effects. But whatever it may lead to, it certainly does not lead to that conclusion, and has never led any human being, either legitimately or illegitimately, to that conclusion. Those even who have maintained that the principle of causality cannot lead to a first cause, to an eternal self-existent cause, but only to an eternal succession of causes and effects, have all, without a single exception, allowed themselves to be led by it to a first cause and not to an eternal succession of causes. They have all believed what they say they ought to have disbelieved; they have all disbelieved what they say they ought to have believed. They have all accepted as true that there is a first and self-existent cause, although some have supposed it to be matter, some mind, some within the world, some without the world. They have differed as to what it is, but not as to that it is. None of them have adopted the conclusion to which they have said the argument founded on causation logically leads. No man has ever adopted that conclusion. The human mind universally and instantaneously rejects it as inconceivable, unthinkable, self-contradictory, absurd. We may believe either in a self-existent God or in a self-existent world, and must believe in one or the other; we cannot believe in an infinite regress of causes. The alternatives of a self-existent cause and an infinite regress of causes are not, as some would represent, equally credible alternatives. The one is an indubitable truth, the other is a manifest absurdity. The one all men believe, the other no man believes.
This takes away, it seems to me, all force from the objection that the argument founded on the principle of causality when it infers God as the self-existent cause of the universe infers more than is strictly warranted, a self-existent cause being something which does not in itself fall under the principle of causality. That every event must have a cause will be valid, it is said, for an endless series of causes and effects; but if you stop, if you affirm the existence of what is uncaused, of what is at once, as it were, cause and effect, you may affirm what is true, but you affirm also what is independent of the principle of causation. You claim more than your argument entitles you to; you are not developing a logical conclusion, but concealing under a term which seems to express the same idea what is really the vaulting of the mind to a higher idea which cannot be expressed under the form efficient cause at all.
Now, of course, a self-existent cause does not in itself come completely under the law of causality. That law cannot inform us what self-existence is. A self-existent cause, however, may be known as well as any other cause by its effects. The mind may rise to it from its effects. The principle of causality may lead up to it, although it does not include within itself the proof of the self-existence of the cause. It may at the last stage be attached to some other principle which compels the affirmation of the self-existence of the cause reached; in other words, the affirmation that the first cause is a self-existent cause, may be a distinct mental act not necessitated by the principle of causality itself. It may either be held that this mental necessity is the reason why we cannot entertain the thought of an infinite regress of causes, or that the incapacity of the mind to regard the thought of an infinite regress of causes as other than self-contradictory, is the explanation of its felt necessitation to affirm a self-existent cause; in which latter case the principle of causality really necessitates a belief in the ungenerated and self-existent. Both of these views are plausible, and which of them is true is an interesting subject of metaphysical investigation, but it is one of no practical consequence in the inquiry on which we are engaged. The principle of causality can lead us up from all things which have on them the marks of having begun to be, and if we at length come to something which bears no such marks, be it matter or be it mind, no man can doubt, or does doubt, that something to be self-existent. This difficulty about a self-existent cause not being able to be arrived at by the principle of causality, will be worth attending to by the theist when it is attended to by any one else,—when any atheist or any anti-theist of any kind is prepared to deny that the last cause in the order of knowledge, and the first in the order of existence, must be a self-existent cause—but not until then; and it is mere sophistry to represent it as of practical importance. Whenever we come to an existence which we cannot regard as an effect or thing generated in time, we, either in consequence of the very nature of the causal judgment, or of some self-evident condition or conditions of knowledge necessarily attached thereto, attribute to it self-existence and eternity. We may dispute as to whether this is done in the one or the other of these two ways, but that is a merely theoretical question; that every one does, and must, as a reasonable being, do it, is what no man disputes, or can dispute,—and this alone is of practical consequence.
Another admission must be made by every man who reflects carefully on the nature of causation. To say that the idea of cause can never demand belief in an uncaused cause, sounds as self-evident; to say that the idea of cause can find no satisfaction save in the belief of an uncaused cause, sounds as a paradox; but let a man meditate for a little with real thoughtfulness on the meaning of these two statements, and he cannot fail to perceive that the former is an undeniable falsehood, and the latter an undeniable truth. An uncaused cause, a first cause, alone answers truly to the idea of a cause. A secondary cause, in so far as secondary, in so far as caused, is not a cause. I witness some event—some change. I am compelled as a rational being to seek its cause. I reach it only to find that this cause was due to a prior cause. What has happened? The cause from which I have had to go back has ceased to be a cause; the cause to which I have had to go back has become the cause of two effects, but it will remain so only if I am not reasonably bound to seek a cause for it. If I am, its causality must pass over to its explanatory antecedent. We may go back a hundred, a thousand, a million times, but if the last cause reached be not truly a first cause, an uncaused cause, the idea of cause in our mind will be as unsatisfied at the end of our search as at the beginning, and the whole process of investigation will be aimless and meaningless. A true cause is one to which the reason not only moves but in which it rests, and except in a first cause the mind cannot rest. A first cause, however, is certainly not one which has been itself caused.
We are warranted, then, in looking upon the universe as an event or effect, and we may be certain that it is not the last link of an infinite chain of causes and effects, or of any series of causes and effects, long or short, suspended upon nothing. No chain or series can be, properly speaking, infinite, or without a first link or term. The universe has a First Cause. And its First Cause, I must proceed to remark, reason and observation alike lead us to believe must be one—a single cause. When one First Cause is sufficient to explain all the facts, it is contrary to reason to suppose another or several. We must prove that no one First Cause could account for the universe before we can be entitled to ascribe it to more causes than one. The First Cause, we shall further see afterwards, must have attributes which no two or more beings can be supposed to possess, which one being alone can possess. Then the character of the effect itself refers us back to a single cause. A belief in more gods than one not only finds no support in the universe, but, as the very word universe indicates, is contradicted by it. For, numerous and diverse as are the objects in nature, they are so constituted and connected—so dependent on and related to one another—as to compose a whole which exhibits a marvellous unity in variety. Everything counteracts or balances or assists something else, and thus all things proclaim their common dependence on One Original. Co-ordinate things must all be derivative and secondary, and all things in nature are co-ordinate parts of a stupendous system. Each one of us knows, for example, that a few years ago he was not, and that in a few years hence the place which knows him now will know him no more; and each one of us has been often taught by the failure of his plans, and the disappointment of his hopes, and the vanity of his efforts, that there are stronger forces and more important interests in the world than his own, and that he is in the grasp of a Power which he cannot resist—which besets him behind and before, and hems him in on all sides. When we extend our view, we perceive that this is as true of others as of ourselves, and that it is true even, in a measure, of all finite things. No man lives or dies to himself; no object moves and acts absolutely from and for itself alone. This reveals a single all-originating, all-pervading, all-sustaining principle. These manifold mutually dependent existences imply one independent existence. The limitations assigned to all individual persons and things point to a Being which limits them all. Particular causes and secondary movements lead back to "a cause of causes," "a first mover, itself immovable, yet making all things else to move."
The first cause must be far more truly and properly a cause than any secondary cause. In fact, as we have already seen, a secondary cause is not strictly a cause; so far as secondary, it merely transmits to its consequent what it has received from its antecedent. There may be a succession of a thousand such causes in a process, yet the first cause is also the last, and there is, in fact, all through, but one cause; the others merely convey and communicate its force. A machine, however numerous its parts and movements, does not create the least amount of force; on the contrary, the most perfect machine wastes and absorbs some of the force which is imparted to it. The universe, so far as subject to mechanical laws, is merely a machine which transmits a given quantity of force, but which no more creates it than it creates itself. The author of that force is the one true cause of all physical phenomena. Life is probably, and mind is certainly, not entirely explicable on mechanical principles; but neither life nor mind can be maintained to do more than to determine the direction or application of the power implanted in them, or rendered accessible to them, through the working of the first cause. All things must, consequently, "live, move, and have their being" therein. It is at their end as well as at their origin; it encompasses them, all round; it penetrates them, all through. The least things are not merely linked on to it through intermediate agencies which go back an enormous distance, but are immediately present to it, and filled to the limit of their faculties with its power. It is in every ray of sunlight, every breath of wind, and blade of grass; it is the source and life of all human minds and hearts. The pantheist errs not so much in what he affirms of it, as in what he denies to it.
This cause—the cause of causes—must, it is further obvious, be in possession of a power far beyond the comprehension of our reasons or imaginations. All other power is derived from its power. All the power which is distributed and distinguished in secondary causes must be combined and united in the first cause. Now, think what an enormous power there is displayed even in this world. In every half-ounce of coal there is stored up power enough, if properly used, to draw two tons a mile. How vast, then, the power which God has deposited in the coal-beds of the world alone! The inhabitants of this little island, by availing themselves of the natural forces which Providence has placed at their disposal, annually accomplish more work than could by any possibility be effected by the inhabitants of the whole earth, if they exerted merely the power which is in their own bodies, the power of human bones and muscles. And yet there can be little doubt that, even in this country, we make no use at all of many natural agents, and only a wasteful use of any of them. "Weigh the earth on which we dwell," says an astronomer; "count the millions of its inhabitants that have come and gone for the last six thousand years; unite their strength into one arm; and test its power in an effort to move the earth. It could not stir it a single foot in a thousand years; and yet, under the omnipotent hand of God, not a minute passes that it does not fly far more than a thousand miles." The earth, however, is but a mere atom in the universe. Through the vast abysses of space there are scattered countless systems, at enormous distances, yet all related; glorious galaxies of suns, planets, satellites, comets, all sweeping onwards in their appointed courses. How mighty the arm which impels and guides the whole! God can do all that, for He continually does it. How much more He could do than He does, we cannot know. The power of no true cause, of no free cause, is to be measured by what it does. It must be adequate to produce its actual effects, but it may be able to produce countless merely possible effects. It has power over its powers, and is not necessitated to do all that it is capable of doing. It is difficult, perhaps, to show that the universe is not infinite. It is obviously unreasonable and presumptuous to deny that the power of its Author may be infinite. And yet we find men who do so. For example, the late Mr John Stuart Mill, for no better reasons than that nature sometimes drowns men, and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed in such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of a human intellect. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator.
A first cause, we have already seen, must be a free cause. It cannot have been itself caused. It is absurd to look for it among effects. But we never get out of the sphere of effects until we enter that of free agency; until we emerge from the natural into the spiritual; until we leave matter and reach mind. The first cause must, indeed, be in—all through—the universe; but it must also be out of the universe, anterior to, and above the universe. The idea of cause is a delusion—the search for causes an inexplicable folly—if there be no first cause, and if that first cause be not a free cause, a Will, a Spirit, a Person. Those who object to the causation argument, that it does not take us beyond the world—does not lead us up to a personal cause of the world—have failed to apprehend what causation signifies. Secondary causes may not be true causes, and yet reason be trustworthy, for there is that behind them on which it can fall back; but if there be no first cause, or if the first cause be not free, reason is throughout a lie. Reason, if honest and consistent, cannot in its pursuit of causes stop short of a rational will. That alone answers to and satisfies its idea of a cause.
The most rapid glance at the universe powerfully confirms the conclusion that its first cause can only be a Mind, a Reason. The universe is a universe; that is to say, it is a whole, a unity, a system. The first cause of it, therefore, in creating and sustaining it, must comprehend, act on, and guide it as a systematic whole; must have created all things with reference to each other; and must continually direct them towards a preconceived goal. The complex and harmonious constitution of the universe is the expression of a Divine Idea, of a Creative Reason. This thought brings me to my next argument and next lecture.[20]