And what, in more detail, of this sympathetic nature—of this ideal world, or perfect home, of thinking man? With much interest we certainly might trace all the aspects of its character corresponding to the different phases of the thinker's life, but discussion of them all would take too much of our space and might seriously tax an already tried patience. So we shall confine ourselves to one thing alone. The truly free thinker was said to be one who believes in what he knows or thinks, but only as a working view to something else. No thought of his could ever compass the fulness of truth within him. What, then, of nature?
Corresponding to the thinker's positive knowledge, to the specific law or order, which at one time or another he finds manifest in his world, there is the well-known, but often misunderstood, character of nature as a great mechanism, moving of course under the law. But corresponding to his only tentative acceptance, though always trustful use of what he knows, there is the much neglected character of nature as not an idle, unproductive mechanism, always doing exactly the same thing, but, if I may so speak, a moving, developing, ever-productive one, serving some end larger and deeper than the known law. Nature must indeed be a machine if the thinker's knowledge demands uniformity or law, but an instrument of something other than her mechanical self, in short, not a merely revolving, but an evolving, always productive machine, if the knowledge itself is never final.
The material, mechanical character of nature, as I have said, is often misunderstood. The real meaning of it is lost, and with serious results. In the first place, it is taken as if it involved a wholly external, physical nature, and in the second place it is taken as if it represented this nature only as moving through its changes according to a certain law and as having in consequence nothing to do but keep up the dead, strictly "mechanical" existence of its law-fixed character and incidentally involve man in the tireless turning of its fatal wheels. But nothing could be more superficial, or even more needlessly superstitious, than this. Obvious facts are overlooked or, if seen, forgotten. The simplest demands of a truly scientific mind are slighted so inexcusably. Could any law of an alien, external nature ever be an actual or possible object of knowledge? And could such law as is known —of a nature not alien—ever have any but a relative value, a provisional mediate character? Nature may be a machine, but the law of her moving is never identical with any law in positive knowledge, though what is known is always informed with the law of her moving; and this is to make her more than a mere machine. Again, no known law is ever the law, and under the law nature must be qualitatively different from what under the known law she appears to be. To neglect this difference, then, is seriously to misunderstand the mechanical character of nature.
Yet some one promptly objects that I am not at all fair to the common understanding of mechanicalism. I am told that no one ever thinks of nature as revolving strictly in accord with any known law. All men who give any thought to the matter concede that the really ultimate law must be not anything that is known, but only what is yet to be known, and is merely like in kind to such laws as men have cognizance of. This interesting concession, however, quite fails of its purpose, since it does not meet the real difficulty here in question. It shows mechanicalism, not indeed bound to any particular knowledge, but nevertheless still conceiving the final lawfulness of nature after the analogy of a particular law, the merely known or unknown or unknowable character of which matters not at all. The analogy is what misleads. The analogy only serves to deaden what really lives.
When will men cease to think of the whole after the analogy of the part? Of the, as if it were a? When will God cease to be only another person? And the universe only another thing? And the lawfulness or unity of all nature only another formula? This or that formula may show nature a mechanism as smooth running and as blindly given to dead routine as could be imagined, but nature is ever more and other than known formulæ of men, and as more and other, or say as answering to the free spirit of truth that moves in the thought of men, she is as free in her real lawfulness as she is infinite. By reason of her infinity there is no law that she may not break. A law may make her a mechanism, dead and idle; the law makes her an organism living and productive. How a positivistic science, making all knowledge wait on actual experience, and accepting all knowledge only tentatively, can ever be mechanicalistic or appeal to the ordinary understanding as an argument for the mechanicalistic view of things is hard to conceive. If one reasons from known forms to uniform activities, must one not also reason from the always provisional and developing knowledge to productive activities? Must not the mechanism evolve into something more, adding something to man's life, realizing something for all life, enlarging even the nature of God himself?
Once more, therefore, corresponding to the law that men may know and that they can know only as their working hypothesis, there is nature, a mechanism moving and herself at work, while corresponding to the great living fact of nature's final lawfulness, or to the thinker's sense of truth as a spirit or principle, not a form or creed or programme, there is the constantly, genuinely productive life of nature, the mechanism, as has now been said several times, ever evolving beyond its form and law. Her law is not a law, any more than the thinker's passion for truth can be finally satisfied by a formula or than God's continuously creative life can ever culminate in a single finishing act. The doubter's world, in short, or so much of it as is said to be material, is not law-bound, but law-free:[4] an organism, not a mechanism; and upon the value of this vision of nature, upon the theoretical or the practical value, whether to science or to philosophy, to morals or to religion, to politics or to industry, it seems hardly necessary to dwell. But, to add a word or two in very general appraisal of it, such a nature, served as it is by every law, by every mechanical action, yet bound to move, is active always from design; its life is essentially purposive. Not that it serves the purpose of anything, or any being, beyond itself, but in every part and movement it is itself always maintaining an end, the end of its its own untethered reality. In words used before, and applied alike to the spiritual and the material, it is at once dynamic and teleologic.
Such a nature, be it especially observed, is the basic condition, if not also the very inspiration of our modern industrialism. This industrial age, struggling against the old-time militarism, in its religion, in its art and in its literature, in its leisure and in its labour, in city and in country, is an age of machinery; of machinery in all the manifold forms demanded by all the various departments of human life, not of wheels and belts alone; an age of the conscious employment, for human purposes, of the resources of all sorts, the materials and the forces which the natural environment affords. Freedom, not slavery, is recognized as man's ideal portion, and in order to ensure the freedom, not human nature, but physical nature is mechanicalized; or, with the same intent, all the formal means, or instruments, of life are taken as incidents of environment, not as essential to man. So is industrialism supplanting the old-time militarism that sought, in all the relations of life, to identify the human with the instrumental. Witness the values now put upon theories and creeds, upon rites and institutions, upon personal habits and social laws. All of these, to begin with, are means, not ends; and, further, they are means whose devising—so man is insisting, as never before—must be, as near as possible, true to nature. The sovereign conviction of this age of industrialism appears to be that the only sure way to human freedom is the way of nature; employment of such instruments as she can supply; obedience to such law as she may disclose.
But many have found this age of industrialism insufficient. It seems to them so materialistic. It would view things so much from the standpoint of cold naturalism. The attitude of laissez faire as meaning "Let nature do the work," has so widely possessed the minds of men. If only we could get back some of our former idealism and regard nature as once more subject to some supernatural will! Despair like this, however, is blind and as needless as blind. Dependence on a lawful, mechanical nature can bring to human life no loss of what is truly ideal and personally worthy. Instead, it brings constant gain, for the knowledge of law and the making of machinery do not rob men of personal opportunity, but rather make the opportunity for personal achievement only the more manifest. A mechanical nature is always for man, not man for a mechanical nature; and its movement is always productive for man. If, then, industrial life has tended, as it has been supposed to tend, towards materialism and fatalism, the reason can lie only in the blindness of such as refuse to see clearly this visible fact. Not merely something always doing, but something always that man is doing is the definite message of a nature that ever manifests herself under the form of law. To the thinker, in no uncertain syllables, she says: Go forth and do. And our age of industrialism, if hearing this bidding, will lose its unnatural materialism, and find itself quick with a moral and religious instead of a narrowly practical and commercial motive.
So in the doubter's world are the spiritual and the material genuinely sympathetic.