LONGINGS.
FROM THE FRENCH OF ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.
I said: O heart! what is thy goal—thy end?
As the lambs follow where the mothers lead,
Shall I so tread their footprints who precede,
And life’s brief, death-doomed hour in folly spend?
One chases wealth across the restless wave—
Whelmed in the deep, his bark, his hopes go down;
Another loves the acclaim of vain renown,
And finds in glory’s bosom but a grave.
One makes men’s passions serve as steps to rise,
And mounts a throne—anon behold him fall;
Another dallies where soft accents call,
And reads his destiny in woman’s eyes.
In hunger’s arms I see the idler faint,
The laborer drive his ploughshare through the soil,
The wise man’s books, the warrior’s deadly toil,
The beggar by the wayside making plaint.
All pass; but whither? Whither flits the leaf
Chased by the rough blast, torn by winter rime?
So fade they from their various ways as time
Harvests and sows the generations brief.
They strove ’gainst time—time conquers all at last.
As the light sand-bank wastes down in the stream,
I see them vanish. Was their life a dream?
So quickly are they come, so quickly passed!
For me, I sing the Lord whom I adore,
In crowded cities or in deserts dun,
At rise of day or at the set of sun,
Tossed on the sea or couching on the shore.
Earth cries out: Who is God? That soul divine
Whose presence fills the illimitable place;
Who with one step doth span the realms of space;
Who lends his splendor in the sun to shine;
Who bade from nothing rise creation’s morn;
Who made on nothingness the world to stand;
Who held the sea in check ere yet was land;
Who gazed, and light ineffable was born;
For whom no morrow and no yesterday;
Who through eternity doth self sustain;
To whom revealed the future lieth plain;
Who can recall the past and bid it stay—
God! Let his hundred names of glory wake
For ever in my song! Oh! be my tongue
A golden harp before his altar hung,
Until his hand shall touch me and I break.
SIMILARITIES OF PHYSICAL AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.[184]
When Macaulay remarked that the Catholic Church owed its success in a great measure to the far-reaching policy of its organization, he uttered a truth of vast pregnancy; for the evidences of this far-sightedness abound on every side, and we find its latest attestation in the attitude the church holds to the questions which agitate the scientific world to-day. Had she, at any period of her existence, so far departed from a well-defined and consistent policy as to formulate theories touching the nature and course of physical phenomena, she might stand to-day condemned and branded in the light of recent scientific discoveries; but apart from the opinions of individual writers, lay and ecclesiastical, to whom she accorded full license to hold what they pleased in such matters, provided they did not contradict revealed truth, and who accordingly often touched on the border-land of the ridiculous and extravagant, not one authoritative expression of hers can be found at variance with a single scientific truth even of yesterday’s discovery. Of course she condemns materialism, because it runs counter to the belief in the immortality of the soul, which is a truth as readily demonstrable as the most undoubted fact in science; and she disbelieves in the eternity of matter, because such a monstrosity involves a violation of reason; but neither materialism nor the belief that
matter is eternal is science, nor do any but the blatant fuglemen of scientism hold to them. What we insist upon is that no expression recorded in any council or authoritatively uttered by the Holy See can be adduced which is in conflict with any truth of physical science now established. This may sound strange to those whose prejudices against the church have been fanned and fostered by the terrible things told concerning Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno; but it is as true as it stands printed, and it is a disgrace to the intelligence of the day that writers are tolerated who still retail trash in opposition to overwhelming historical evidence.
As in the past, the church to-day benignantly encourages all who devote themselves to the prosecution of the natural sciences, and welcomes their discoveries with delight. She wishes merely that scientific investigators confine themselves to their legitimate labors, and do not wildly rush to impious conclusions from insufficient data. She is ever willing to accept whatever conclusions premises really justify, and no more. Surely this attitude of the church towards science is eminently rational, and no right-thinking man can condemn it. Yet it is not alone such men as Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, St. Hilaire, and Figuier who charge the church with being steadily reactionary and actively antagonistic to science, but the whole sectarian world has taken up the cry. We are sorry to number
among these the author of the volume which affords subject-matter for this article, and which contains much that is novel, ingenious, and true, as we hope to be able to show when considering the chapter on the “Faiths of Science.”
But we will first learn from Mr. Bixby what manner of religion it is to which science is not opposed, so that we may ascertain the scope and purpose of his work. “In its most general significance,” he says, “it is the expression of man’s spiritual nature awakening to spiritual things” (italics by the author). After developing this definition at some length, he considers it more restrictedly as embracing the following elements:
“1. Belief in a soul within man.
“2. Belief in a sovereign soul without.
“3. Belief in actual or possible relations between them.”
This, then, is religion according to Mr. Bixby, and it is to the rather easy task of reconciling a few modern scientific theories to this attenuated abstraction of religious sentiment, this evanescent aroma of an emotion, that he addresses himself. The statement of those three fully sufficient conditions of religion clearly involves pantheism; and not one of the wildest scientific conjectures of the day is there which may not be made to harmonize with pantheism. The task, therefore, of reducing science and religion to a harmonious plane is quite supererogatory, since on a bare statement of religion it is reconcilable with anything. Pantheism, as taught by its most eminent exponents in Germany—Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte—consists in a sovereign soul without the τὸ non ἐγώ, from which the soul of man, the τὸ ἐγώ, is an emanation—i.e., a fragmentary expression
of its consciousness. Beyond this these distinguished philosophers admit and recognize nothing. Do we not clearly find the same thing in the religion of Mr. Bixby?—viz., 1, soul within man; 2, sovereign soul without man; 3, actual or possible relations between the two. Now, taking the term soul as univocal in the first and second statements, is it not evident that the latter contains the former, and are we not landed high and dry on the absolute pantheism of Schelling? Or rather, going back to the parent source of pantheism, does not Mr. Bixby’s definition of religion strongly recall these words of the Vedas: “Thus the man who in his own soul recognizes the soul supreme present throughout all creation obtains the happiest lot of all—to be absorbed into Brahma”?
If this be Mr. Bixby’s meaning—or rather, whether meant or not, if this be the legitimate resultant of his views on religion—we see no way of escaping from the conclusion that matter is eternal, since his religion by no means includes the dogma of creation—indeed, it is his custom to scout dogmas—but is strictly limited to the recognition of an inner and an outer soul. It is true Mr. Bixby admits no such consequence, but he cannot help himself; he speaks most devoutly of God, condemns a “bald materialism that would make matter the sum and substance of all things, self-existent, and alone immortal, etc.,” all which is true enough, but by no means bound up in Mr. Bixby’s concept of religion. Our author consequently deprecates a conflict with a shadow, points out to scientific men the possibility of a complete reconciliation between their theories and a Bixbian fugitive tenuity, and devoutly implores them not to use
language which might delay “the awakening of our spiritual nature.” Mr. Bixby says that metaphysics must not obtrude themselves on the realm of physical science; that the missions of both constantly diverge. We would, however, remind him that without metaphysics—and we mean the metaphysics he so much abhors, viz., those of the scholastics—we could find no argument as supplied by reason against the eternity of matter. It is wonderful that a man of Mr. Bixby’s respectable attainments should not perceive into what a complete petitio principii he has fallen when he postulates the non-eternity of matter. He does not admit the correctness of the Mosaic cosmic genesis, and as he employs no reasoning to substantiate his postulate, we must regard it as a petitio principii and nothing more.
How differently do the theologians and philosophers of the Catholic Church comport themselves in presence of this old philosophical heresy, revived to-day in full force by Draper, Tyndall, and Huxley, and which may be regarded as the arch sin of modern scientific theories! They do not beg the question as Mr. Bixby does, but, grappling it with an iron logic, dispose of it as effectually as when St. Thomas overthrew the crude systems of Leucippus and Averroës by the aid of a few well-established metaphysical principles. Mr. Bixby says: “Mediæval scholasticism especially grievously sinned in these respects. It delighted in hair-splitting disputations over frivolous puzzles, and in endless speculations about things not only transcending the possibility of human knowledge, but destitute of any practical moment. Its only criterion was the deliverances of the church on the almost equally
venerated Aristotle.” Alas! we fear that the Summa of St. Thomas is a sealed book for Mr. Bixby, that he has not tempted the page of Suarez with well-trimmed lamp, and that his stock of mediæval lore is borrowed from Hallam or the latest edition of the encyclopædia. To prove how immeasurably superior the “hair-splitters” are to beggars of the question we will show in what way the former hold their own against the modern eternists. Prof. Draper says that as there will be an unending succession in the future, so there has been an unbeginning series in the past; species succeed species, and genera succeed genera, in a never-beginning and a never-to-end chain; Tyndall repeats the words of Draper, whom he so much admires; and Mr. Bixby says, “Gentlemen, it may not be so”; while the scholastic clearly proves that it cannot be so. At the outset a little “hair-splitting” is necessary. We distinguish what is called an actual series, each link of which has had an actual existence, from a potential series, in which the links have not as yet been projected into existence, but will be. Now, an actual series has an end—viz., the link marking the point of transition from the actual to the potential—and is susceptible of increase, since, indeed, it constantly receives fresh accessions from the potential. If, however, it can thus acquire increase, that increase is representable by numbers, so many fresh links added to the series. But a number cannot be added except to another number; consequently, the series to which fresh increase is added must be numerical—i.e., representable by figures. Now, whatever can be represented by figures must have had a beginning; for
there can be no number without a first unit, which is the first element of number. Moreover, the supposition that there stretches back into eternity a non-beginning succession of events contradicts the principle of causality; for it would give us one more effect than cause. Viewed in its descending aspect, every link in the chain is cause of the event which follows, till the last link is reached, the which is not cause, since it has as yet preceded no other event. But it is effect, since it depends on the previous event. Viewed now in its ascending aspect, the chain consists of a series of links which are all effects—effects more numerous than the causes by the addition of the latest link, which is effect but not cause. We must have, then, one effect without a cause, which is absurd. The same maybe said about consequent and antecedent terms in such a series; for the last term in the series being merely consequent, the chain or series which, by hypothesis, has no beginning contains more consequent than antecedent terms, which is equally absurd. We have here given but an outline of the argument. The scholastics have summed it up more fully, though far more tersely and concisely, in these words: There can be no infinite series a parte ante, but there can be a parte post. This reasoning not only conclusively disproves, but renders ridiculous, the arguments of Draper, Tyndall, and the rest. Yet from this philosophical armory Mr. Bixby would disdain to draw a single weapon in defence of his thesis, but prefers rather that the church be considered essentially inimical to the progress of true science, and constantly jealous of its encroachments.
“Mutato nomine de te
Fabula narratur.”
Mr. Bixby entertains a special dislike to theology as being apt to interfere with his pet scheme of reconciling science with—shall we call it Bixbyism? Certainly we cannot consistently call it religion. He says:
“Again, theological dogmas and science have been, and still are, opposed. Theologians have formulated their dim guesses about God’s character and ways into creeds, and imagined them finalities. They have speculated upon matters of purely physical knowledge—such as the antiquity of the earth and the age of man, the condition of the primitive globe and its inhabitants, the manner and method of their appearing—and have made these speculations into dogmas held as essential to religion.”
Here we must take sharp issue with Mr. Bixby. In the first place, have not the theologians as good right to speculate on such matters as Messrs. Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall? And if they have fallen into error, it is no more than the latter gentlemen have frequently done. Surely Mr. Bixby must allow the fact that St. George Mivart is no less a sound savant because he is read in theology; or would he maintain that Father Secchi is liable to additional chromatic aberration because he believes in the decrees of the Vatican Council? In the next place, no theologian deserving the name deems himself competent to erect into a religious dogma demanding the reverence and belief of his fellows his individual scientific opinions. The absurdity of such an idea is apparent to any one who has read a Catholic theological treatise, which breathes a spirit of submissiveness in every line where the author’s own views are expounded—a spirit strikingly in contrast with the arrogant dogmatism of our
scientific philosophers. Moreover, the church, the only competent authority to promulgate dogmas of faith, has never yet attempted to impose on the minds of her children a purely scientific truth as an article of belief. From this it is evident that Mr. Bixby occasionally palters, and merely wishes to pave the way for an easier adaptation of his religious views to the so-called advanced scientific tendencies of the day.
He says that all theologies stand in the way of science, but that two dogmas especially exhibit this perversity—viz., 1, the assumed infallibility of the Bible; 2, the assumed intervention of God. “In consequence of the first of these dogmas,” he says, “there has been a struggle by theologians to limit modern science to the contracted circle of the ancient Hebrew knowledge of the universe, and any variation of statement from the letter of Moses or Job, David or Paul, is regarded as a dangerous loosening of another screw in the bonds of righteousness and the evidences of immortality.” Mr. Bixby is not himself a believer in the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, and evidently thinks that whoever does not agree with him stands on the extreme opposite line and believes the very shaping of the letters to have been divinely commanded. This is wrong. The Scriptures were never intended as a manual of science. They merely state the great facts of human and cosmic genesis in a general way, so far as those two momentous facts affect the interests of the race. It has been proved time and again that the Mosaic books, fairly interpreted, contain nothing adverse to scientific truth. Why, then, will writers be ever harping on this well-worn
theme? It is not honest to advance a statement without proof, and try to clinch it with a sneer.
“In consequence of the second dogma,” he writes, “theologians have been jealous of any attempt at a natural explanation of the mysteries of the world, and have looked upon every extension of the realm of unbroken order and second causes as an invasion by science of the religious kingdom. They imagine that one must lose what the other gains; that, step by step, as the arcana of the Kosmos are penetrated, and the same laws and substances are found ruling and constituting these as rule and constitute the more familiar parts and operations of nature, the action and presence of the Deity must be denied, and the human mind landed more and more in the slough of materialism.”
These words bear their refutation with them. The accusation is serious, and yet not a word of proof to substantiate it. Too often is Mr. Bixby guilty of this illogical procedure of substituting statements for proven facts and captious deliverances for argument. When Dr. Draper denies the possibility of miracles, he does so at least logically; for he believes in the eternity, immutability, and necessity of law. With him there is no lawgiver, but with Mr. Bixby it is different. He speaks of God “pouring his will through the channels of unvaried law.” Now, it is an axiom in law that the framers thereof may derogate from it from time to time, if so it should seem good to them. Why not, therefore, God? Mr. Bixby cannot, then, deny the utter impossibility of a miracle, and yet he argues against it just as strenuously and in the same spirit as Mr. Draper or Mr. Tyndall. Should he charge that such exceptional deviations from apparently established laws would argue caprice or shortsightedness on the part of God, we beg to reply that they occur in consequence
of a higher law, representing the divine will, by which those secondary laws were established, and which, with far-reaching and clear-eyed gaze, made provision for those exceptional occurrences, so that they may be said virtually to come within the scope of the law itself. Should, then, the testimony in support of a miracle be of an unimpeachable nature, we see no reason why the possibility of a miraculous event is to be denied. When Voltaire said he would more readily believe that a whole citiful of people, separated by prejudices, social position, tastes, habits of life, and mutual distrust, might conspire to deceive him than he would that a dead man had arisen from the grave, he confounded physical with metaphysical impossibility; and this is precisely what every unbeliever since his time has done. To this charge Mr. Bixby is more grievously amenable, since he admits the reason for the validity of the distinction between the two impossibilities mentioned, by admitting God to be the author of law, and yet he virtually ignores it by the position he assumes.
But this chapter on the “Causes of Actual Antagonism” is so replete with reckless assertion and inconsequent reasoning that we have only to take up a passage at hazard to be confronted by an error. On page 41 he says:
“Neither is religion based on, nor bound up with, any one book. Had Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob no religion, because Moses had not yet written? Was there no Christianity in the lifetime of Jesus, or the first forty years of the apostolic generation before Matthew put his pen on to parchment? As well say that chemical affinity is based on Lavoisier’s or Dalton’s treatises, or that gravitation is ruined if Newton’s Principia is shown false in a single theorem.”
We assure our readers that we have selected this passage at random, lest we may be suspected of malice in having singled it out because of its surpassing fatuity. Who ever dreamt of saying that religion is bound up in a book? As well say that an author’s thoughts are nowhere to be found but between the covers of the book which bears his name. But mark the transparent fallacy of the underlying thought. Mr. Bixby evidently supposes that because religion had an existence prior to the books mentioned, we might therefore dispense with these, and still possess religion just as our predecessors had it before those books were yet written. But suppose those books happen to contain the previous body of religious doctrine, together with developments or disclosures inseparably connected with it; might we then carelessly reject them, as Mr. Bixby implies we might? Or does it follow that, because a “spiritual awakening” is defined to be of a special sort in one instance, it can never be so in another? Yet such is the irresistible inference to be drawn from the introductory portion of the passage just quoted. The same may be said of the reference to the priority of Christianity over the Gospel of St. Matthew. No one contends that Christianity did not exist in the lifetime of Jesus, or that it would not now exist had not St. Matthew written his Gospel; but it by no means follows that we are free to reject that evangelist’s history, since it is a compendium of Christian doctrine such as our Lord had preached it in his lifetime, and in rejecting it we would thereby reject the latter. The allusion to Lavoisier and Dalton is just as unhappy; for though it is true the science of chemistry might exist
without them, still we cannot reject their treatises, since these contain the essential principles of that science.
Mr. Bixby is sometimes quite happy in stating the objections which scientists urge against religion, but we regret that he also sometimes fails to make good his refutation of their views. Thus, on page 149, he presents the argument of science in these words: “Theologians may talk glibly of soul and over-soul, Creator and creation, absolute and Infinite; they may fancy that they understand them; but they are deceiving themselves, mistaking a familiarity with words for a genuine understanding of things. Their high-sounding terms are but covers to their real ignorance.” Indeed, this is a common objection made by those whose habits of mind have been formed in the laboratory, and who have never troubled themselves much about metaphysics. Still, the objection should be met in a patient and painstaking mood, and answer given according to our lights. Mr. Bixby makes his rejoinder a retorqueo argumentum by showing that science, too, bristles with difficulties and is beset with mysteries; that it borrows from conjecture more even than religion does; and that it can never hope to level all the hills and fill up all the valleys which lie along its course. This is very true and very apposite, but it may be asked: Does it contain an answer to the objection as stated? We rather think not. Cannot it be proved that we do really possess some knowledge of the Infinite and the Absolute, and that the apparent unintelligibility of these terms is to be sought for and found rather in the ignorance of those who object to them? The Infinite differs for us
subjectively from no other object of thought on the score of adequacy, since we can have an adequate idea of nothing. Not even of the simplest material objects that surround us can we have at the best more than an inchoate and imperfect knowledge. How, then, can we be expected to conceive the Infinite, except in a very shadowy way, “as in a glass darkly”? Still, the fact that we speak of the Infinite and assert its attributes, that we distinguish Infinite Being from finite, and that our hearts fly towards it in unappeasable longing, is open guarantee that we have some knowledge of it, which is all that the most exacting can demand. Therefore those who confound infinite knowledge of the Infinite, which appertains to the Infinite Being alone, with that subjectively finite knowledge of it which we all possess, display an unpardonable ignorance. This is our answer to those who object that Infinite, as one term, is unintelligible, and we see no necessity for classifying it with the impenetrable secrets with which science is confronted at every step. The same may be said of the term absolute; and though we do not agree with the views of the absolute taken by Mansel, Hamilton, Kant, and Spencer, we know at least that the term has a meaning, that it implies total independence, and is based on that divine attribute which the scholastics denominate Aseity. Mr. Bixby is too timorous in his utterances. He seems to write under a Damocles’ sword, fearing to offend those great men who tread in the stately van of science. But if he hesitates to be dogmatic in one direction, he does not hesitate to be aggressive in another; and when his mood inclines that way, he sets up as the target of his
shafts the doctrines and definitions of the Catholic Church.
In order to prove that Bixbyism is the only religion which is at all reconcilable with science, and to brush aside any pretensions Catholicity might entertain in the same direction, he quotes the following:
“Let him be anathema—
“Who shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions even when opposed to revealed doctrines.”
This proposition does not meet the approbation of Mr. Bixby. If it does not, then its contradictory must be true, which implies that a scientific utterance may be true in the face of an opposing revealed truth. It is to be borne in mind that the revealed doctrines in question are supposed to be revealed, and revealed by God, and the whole statement is resolvable into this: Notwithstanding that God (in whom Mr. Bixby is a believer) has positively affirmed that a given statement is true, Mr. Tyndall or Prof. Huxley may affirm the contrary with impunity—nay, rather with a better title to our acceptance of their views—
“At nos virtutes ipsas invertimus.”
or, as Caramuel says, “We thus sweeten poison with sugar, and color guilt with the appearance of virtue.”
But in order to place himself still more en rapport with his adversaries, Mr. Bixby, seemingly forgetful that he either surrenders the gage or else resolves the conflict into a tilt with a windmill, expresses himself to the following effect: “Religion has no exclusive source of information, but such sources only as are common to all branches of human knowledge.” If this be true,
there is no necessity of even the shadow of an attempt to reconcile any differences which, by a stretch of fancy, might be conceived to exist between two sciences that travel along the same plane. All along, since this controversy was begun, it has been understood that the sole possible cause of conflict between science and religion arose out of the fact that they claimed each for itself more solid ground on which to stand. Reason and revelation were always supposed to be the party words of both, and every collision between them so far has resulted from the apparent irreconcilableness of these two. Mr. Bixby, in endeavoring to shift the ground of argument, should have confined himself to just that effort, and omitted those portions of his work tending to disprove all antagonism between science and religion, since, in the estimation of most men, a religion which asserts no claim to the supernatural is no religion at all. His attempted abatement of the claims of science, though well presented and sustained, works not an iota for Mr. Bixby’s point; for in all he says he is arguing for supernatural religion, which he virtually rejects, against the untenable assumptions of science.
As if in more strenuous advocacy of this idea, he elsewhere adds: “It [religion] is not all falsehood and masquerade; nevertheless, there is much popularly set down as religion which is no more religion than it is science. Now it has been bound up with one system, now with another. When Christianity first raised its head, it was told that polytheism alone was religion.” Continuing in this strain, he condemns every system of religion which stands opposed to another, and infers from the fact of
such opposition the necessary falsity of them all. He even goes to the extent of affirming that the doctrines of the Catholic Church changed age by age, according to the tone of the prevailing philosophy. He says:
“In Augustine’s day Christianity was made inseparable from the doctrines of predestination and fatalism. In Abelard’s time it was bound up with the metaphysics of realism; in Roger Bacon’s time, with the philosophy of Aristotle; in the days of Vesalius, with the medical treatises of Galen; in the lifetime of Galileo, with the astronomy of Ptolemy. To-day it is the orthodoxy of the Council of Trent or the Westminster Catechism that is cemented to religion, and any attack on the one is assumed to be undermining the very foundations of faith and morals.”
This passage is recklessly false. Any one acquainted with church history, with the rise and progress of Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, understands perfectly that in St. Augustine’s time no more stringent or rigorous views concerning original sin and predestination were held than tradition and the Scriptures sanctioned and ratified. And the patient reader of the history of philosophy will also condemn the assertion that the church proper had anything to do with the long-drawn disputes between the Nominalists and the Realists. The church left those wordy disputants severely alone, though the controversy was revived by the school of the Neo-Platonists for the very purpose of embroiling the church in the quarrel. We say the controversy was revived; for in reality the dispute is as old as Plato and Aristotle.
Still more absurd is what Mr. Bixby says with reference to Vesalius and Galen. Not a single authoritative passage from father, council, or historian can be adduced
to prove that the church ever committed herself to the adoption of any views concerning the structure, functions, and disorders of the human body. Indeed, Vesalius, who led the way in the great revolution which medical science underwent from the errors of Galen, was a pious Catholic, and the popular painting of the first dissection of modern times represents him with eyes piously upturned to the crucifix before entering on one of the most important steps of modern scientific inquiry in the teeth of wide-spread and violent prejudice—viz., the first dissection of the human cadaver that has led to any valuable results.
But in order to be thoroughly careful that he should allow no element of what is entitled positive religion to enter into the conception of his emotional nonentity, he discards all the known and accepted grounds of religious evidence. He says there can be no infallible authority in religious matters, since the only one which fostered the pretence has been repeatedly detected in error. His words are:
“In its unflattering mirror the oracle of Rome is exhibited as convicted of error in scientific matters again and again; compelled to retreat from position to position; forced to correct and recorrect its interpretations. It is shown vacillating to and fro in regard to the most important ecclesiastical questions, possessed of no clear or well-defined principles concerning many essential theological issues, etc., etc.”
All this rodomontade is in the nature of a negative assertion, inasmuch as it would require a full review of the history of the church to refute it. It is the author’s favorite style of logic, however, and may go for what it is worth. He next rejects the authority of the Bible on the most frivolous grounds, and coming
to the value of our divine Saviour’s evidence in favor of revelation, he uses the following extraordinary language:
“I desire not to deny the existence of a divine element in Jesus. I gladly recognize him as the loftiest spiritual seer and teacher the world has seen; the best historic embodiment of spiritual perfection that we have. But we must own, if we are clear-sighted and frank, that in Christ himself we do not obtain an oracle exempt from the limitations of humanity and the conditions of earthly knowledge.”
This is a clear negation of the divinity of Christ, and an implied avowal that Mr. Bixby ranges himself with Renan and Strauss. As before stated, Mr. Bixby’s chief aim in the first chapters of his book is to simplify the conditions of the problem which he has set before him, and we see that he has striven to do this by stripping religion of all its positive attributes, and putting in its stead a bloodless and emasculated spectre. “It is a force,” he says, “anterior to all churches and hierarchies, the grand spiritual stream flowing from above through the souls of men, of which ecclesiastical organizations are but the earthly banks, the clayey reservoirs and wooden dams, by which men have thought they could better utilize the heavenly forces.” This is fine and figurative, we confess, but more marked by sound than sense. Mr. Bixby here brands all churches as purely human institutions, and yet allows that they possess religion, that they are its conduits and distributors to men, and that dogmas and codes and ethical enactments are mere accretions, the work of human minds. These must consequently be false, and, being such, should retard rather and operate against the influences of religion
pure and undefiled, the embodiment of truth. How, then, can they be said to be utilizers of heavenly force and reservoirs of religion, they being false, and it true?
“Pergis pugnantia secum
Frontibus adversis componere?”
The definition of religion which has passed current for centuries, making it to consist of a determinate and specified allegiance of man to his Maker, is contradicted by the views advanced in Mr. Bixby’s book, and therefore the few only, whose opinions are equally unsettled, can accept his conclusions. There is something so unreal and shadowy in his estimate of religion that one is at a loss to see thoroughly into what he means by it, and consequently incapable of appreciating all that his conclusions are intended to embody. “Religious truth,” he says, “(theologians and preachers defending the old beliefs have maintained) belongs to another realm from ordinary kinds of truth. It is not to be tried by the understanding. It is not to be brought to the bar of common sense, but it is to be discerned by the inner soul, and its evidence found in the soul’s satisfaction in it.” If this be Mr. Bixby’s estimate of the value of the evidence on which religious truth reposes, he must have had in view, as the ideal of all dogmatic religion, the utterances of some strong-lunged preacher at a camp-meeting. No theologian of the Catholic nor of the approximating sects ever thought for a moment that religion is not to be tried by the understanding nor brought to the bar of common sense. The evidences of revealed religion are based upon reason, which, closely scrutinizing these, is compelled to admit the claims of the Scriptures
and the church, just as it is obliged to admit the truths of geometry. It is true that individual dogmas are not the subject-matter of purely rational investigation, but they appeal to our reason just as strongly through the evident infallibility of the authority which submits them to our belief. Mr. Bixby, we fear, either misapprehends plain things or is given to misrepresenting. Objectively, all truths resemble each other in that they are true—i.e., eternal, immutable, and necessary; subjectively, for us, those truths which we can discern with the eye of reason pertain to the natural order, and to the supernatural order those whose guarantee depends on the revealed word of God. It is evident that in the logical order, the natural precedes and underlies the supernatural, and that, with respect to the evidence on which both repose, it must be tried by the understanding, and that searchingly, and cannot escape the bar of common sense. “Truth,” says the author of An Essay on a Philosophy of Literature, “is independent of man. The power is his to discover, develop, and apply it; but he cannot create it. That belongs to the Infinite Intelligence alone. He it is who creates it and who creates the light of our reason by which to perceive it.” Truth, therefore, must be consistent with itself; and it is the province of every individual truth to borrow lustre from, and shed radiance on, each sister truth, and not to detract from and obstruct it. This is the logic of the schools—nay, it is the logic of Hamilton, Mansel, Baden Powell, and Faraday, whom Bixby charges with dividing the field of truth into two separate portions: one the province of knowledge, where science holds sway; the other the province of
belief, where religion has her throne. Then truth may be divided against itself, and to this effect must we interpret the writings of the distinguished philosophers mentioned. We doubt not that, for logic’s sake, these scholars would all indignantly repudiate this charge which places them in an absurd and uncourted position. Pity ’tis Mr. Bixby did not attempt by a citation to substantiate his charge. He does not fail, however, to draw his accustomed inference. “Now,” he says, “by taking this mode of defending itself against the incursions of modern science, the church has aided much in spreading suspicion of the certainty of its cherished doctrines.” Then modern science does make incursions against the church, which is perfectly right, but the church is debarred the right of repelling them. A burglar may break into our house, and we are not at liberty to resist his ingress by means of the nearest weapon at hand, but we should preach him a homily on the impropriety of his conduct.
But he is brave enough in this: that not an inkling or a wrinkle of his too transparent sophistry disturbs him. Immediately after he says (p. 72): “Bishops like he [sic] of London may exhort the modern inquirer as eloquently as they please to throw away doubt as they would a bombshell; but it serves only to make the investigator more suspicious of the validity of religion.” Then is it not proper, Mr. Bixby, to throw away doubt? If not so, it must by all means be better to entertain doubt, so that a state of doubt ought to be our normal intellectual condition. Just in proportion as we entertain doubt may we be less suspicious of the validity of religion; but the moment we think of discarding
it suspicions grow up in our minds! Verily, this kind of logic is perplexing. We admire the devout spirit which Mr. Bixby everywhere exhibits, but when it is paraded at the expense of true religion, and in a spirit calculated to lead astray the unwary, we must enter our protest against it. On page 222 he says:
“And religion needs not only to accept the corrections and recognize the coadjutorship of science in disclosing the ways of God, but it should engraft into itself, I believe, more of the scientific spirit. Instead of aiming to defend systems already established [!], and to bolster up foregone conclusions, it should go simply with inquiring mind to the eternal facts.”
And this passes current for reasoning! We write without bitterness of heart, but in the spirit which prompted Juvenal to say:
“Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.”
Religion must borrow all from science, accept her criterion from science, see that she admit nothing but what the scientific plummet is capable of sounding, and reject all that does not conform to the square and compass of this arbitrary mistress. “Established systems” and “foregone conclusions” must be sacrificed at the beck of a scientific clique, and meek religion must sit awaiting crumbs from their table. Surely, had the great author of the apology for the Christian religion anticipated that an apology with such intent would be subsequently offered, he would have bestowed a different title on his famous work. But Mr. Bixby goes farther when he actually breaks down the barriers which have ever been supposed to divide science from religion. On page 223 he says:
“Thus religion is capable of being made a genuine science, and it will never, I believe, maintain the purity, attain the stability and accuracy, reach unto the depth and breadth of truth which is within the demands of its grand mission unto mankind, until it thus weds science to itself.”
This might not give offence if viewed as from the pen of a sophomore; but from a teacher—a philosopher! The passage jumbles science and religion inextricably together; it virtually identifies them, and yet pretends to hold them apart. The idea that religion is capable of being made a genuine science must sound oddly in the ears of those who have been taught to regard religion as the science of sciences, their queen, mistress, and guide. But, according to Mr. Bixby, religion is in the lowly position still of being a handmaiden to her proud sisters, with the possible prospect at some time of being elevated to their queenly plane.
In his chapters on the “Faiths of Science” and “The Claim of Science” Mr. Bixby very adroitly brings into contrast the arrogant aggressiveness of scientism with its own haltings, weaknesses, and vacillations, and we deem these two chapters to be really valuable contributions to the fast-swelling literature concerning the dispute between religion and scientism. They are inoperative of effect, so far as Mr. Bixby’s notion of religion is concerned, but they clearly prove that science is fully amenable to the charge of taking much for granted, of postulating much, of believing in the mysterious and inexplicable—the very charges it flippantly prefers against Christianity. Experience and observation have been the watchwords of science since the days of Locke, and the whole system of Scotch philosophy
as taught by Reid, Stewart, Brown, and Hamilton in the past, and Bain to-day, rests on the results of those two procedures. The supersensible finds no room in this system, and is relegated to the domain of the unknowable, the unthinkable. Says Büchner: “Those who talk of a creative power which is said to have produced the world out of nothing are ignorant of the first and most simple principle founded upon experience and the contemplation of nature. How could a power have existed not manifested in material substance, but governing it arbitrarily according to individual views?” Herbert Spencer calls supersensible conceptions “pseudo-ideas,” “symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order.” Virchow says he “knows only bodies and their qualities; what is beyond he terms transcendental, and he considers transcendentalism an aberration of the human mind.” And so with the majority of the modern school of scientism. They deem nothing demonstrable but what responds to their tests of truth, to chemical or physico-chemical modes of investigation. For this reason physiologists reject the notion of soul as a distinct substance in man, for it cannot be investigated according to the methods known to physiology; and yet, with glaring inconsistency, these men admit as the very basis of experience and observation what outlies the range and limit of the senses.
The advocates of the germ theory of disease have neither felt, seen, nor heard one of those minute spores. “We have,” says Prof. Tyndall, “particles that defy both the microscope and the balance, which do not darken the air, and which, nevertheless, exist in multitudes sufficient to reduce to insignificance
the Israelitish hyperbole, the sands upon the sea-shore.” So, also, Mr. Lewes, in his Philosophy of Aristotle, writes: “The fundamental ideas of modern science are as transcendental as any of the axioms in ancient philosophy.” With such admissions from the leading men of the modern school, how can scientists contend that they limit their acceptance of truth to those facts which experience proves, and that, using a strict induction, they build their laws and systems on these alone? It is evident that they make freer use of hypotheses than did the scholastics. Nor does it avail them to attempt the distinction suggested by Mr. Lewes between metaphysical and metempirical knowledge. The aim of this distinction is to relieve scientism from the charges brought against metaphysical doctrines on the ground that, as they transcend the senses, they necessarily elude the grasp of the human mind. Now, the metempirical knowledge of Mr. Lewes is just as elusive of our grasp, since it does not come within the scope of the senses; and all the objections, however unfounded, which these scholars have alleged against metaphysics and the science of the immaterial, hold good against any knowledge which is not the direct outcome of the senses. Surely the new doctrine of the correlation and conservation of force pertains to the supersensible order fully as much as the doctrine of a spiritual soul. Nay, it deals in the obscure and transcendental more, a great deal, than the scholastic doctrine of first matter and substantial form. The advocates of this theory have adopted a nomenclature which repeats the very errors on account of which modern scholastics have rejected the peripatetic doctrine of
matter and form. They identify all things under the title of force, and deem motion, light, heat, and electricity as so many modes of force constantly interchanging. They thus confound identity with distinction, and ignore the nature of change. Every change supposes a term from which, a term into which, and the subject of both; now, those who identify all force deny the subject of change, for that from which becomes into which in all its essentials, so that heat becomes light, and yet does not, according to the neo-terminologists, lose its identity. We have therefore the anomaly of a thing remaining the same and becoming something else at the same time. All this confusion arises from the ignorance of metaphysics in which modern men of science glory. They declare light to be a force, and no two of them are agreed as to the meaning of the word. They declare that all forces are correlated, and nowhere do we find given by them the meaning of the term relation. Now, the scholastics give no fewer than six different modes of relation, and the modern school has not given us even a definition of one. And yet these are the contemners of metaphysics and scholasticism, the men who aspire to be leaders of thought. They raise their structure on a basis of supposition, and declaim against the credulity of those who admit aught but facts of the sensible order. Their science is confused because of the vagueness of their speech and its great lack of fixity. Herbert Spencer
discourses with more learning than lucidity concerning those great problems which the church solved centuries ago, and which she has so formulated by the aid of a fixed and coherent vocabulary that mere children can see her meaning. Mr. Spencer defines evolution to be “a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations.” This certainly pertains to the supersensible order, and in more senses than one. No wonder that such utterances are made the butt of witticisms. Thus, the Rev. Mr. Kirkman, in his Philosophy without Assumption, amusingly parodies the above definition of Herbert Spencer: “Evolution is a change from a nohowish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in-general-talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous somethingelseifications and sticktogetherations.”
And as for mistakes, commend us to science. Every new edition of Darwin contains corrections of previous errors, and Huxley has quite recently modified his views on evolution. But this is freedom of thought, just as a consistent and abiding belief which precludes the possibility of change or error is denominated by these same neoterists superstition and reaction. Mr. Bixby has well exhibited the fluctuations and errors of modern science—which is about all he has satisfactorily accomplished—in his Similarities of Physical and Religious Knowledge.
[184] Similarities of Physical and Religious Knowledge. By James Thompson Bixby. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.