Earth’s skepticism looking on at the protean antics of earth’s enthusiasms. Speculative unbelief, curiously and sneeringly watching the humdrum, commonplace, bread-and-butter toil of unspeculative belief. Lofty, unimpassioned agnosticism, that thinks—face to face with hobbling, blundering, unscientific faith, that works.
Dare we approach?
“Sir: I perceive you are not drawn into the whirl-pool of hurrying desires that sweep over earth’s restless sons. Your philosophy, I presume, lifts you above the toils and anxieties the ambitions and aspirations of the common herd. Pardon me, but do you not feel called to devote those superior powers of yours to the uplifting of your less favored brethren? May not you pour the oil of human kindness and love on these troubled waters? May not your wisdom shape and direct the channel of this tortuous stream, building up here, and clearing out there, till this torrent become once more a smiling river, reflecting Heaven’s pure love in its silvery bosom, and again this fruitful valley blossom with righteousness and peace? Does not your soul burn within you as you look on this seething mass of struggling, starving, sinning souls? Are you not inspired to lift up despairing, sinking, grovelling man,—to wipe the grime and tears from his marred countenance, and bid him Look aloft and be strong, Repent and be saved, Trust God and live!”
Ah! the coldness of the look he turned on me! Methought ’twould freeze my soul. “Poor fool!” it seemed to say; and yet I could not but think I discovered a trace of sadness as he replied:—
“What is man?—A curiously fashioned clock; a locomotive, capable of sensations;—a perfected brute. Man is a plant that grows and thinks; the form and place of his growth and the product of his thought are as little dependent on his will or effort as are the bark, leaves, and fruit of a tree on its choice. Food, soil, climate,—these make up the man,—the whole man, his life, his soul (if he have one). Man’s so-called moral sense is a mere dance of molecules; his spiritual nature, a pious invention. Remorse is a blunder, repentance is vain, self-improvement or reformation an impossibility. The laws of matter determine the laws of intellect, and these shape man’s nature and destiny and are as inevitable and uncontrollable as are the laws of gravitation and chemical affinity. You would-be reformers know not the stupendous nonsense you are talking. Man is as little responsible for vice or crime as for fever or an earthquake. Those in whom the cerebrum shows a particular formation, will make their holidays in gambling, betting, drinking, horse-racing—their more serious pursuits in stealing, ravening, murdering. They are not immoral any more than a tiger is immoral; they are simply unmoral. They need to be restrained, probably, as pests of society, or submitted to treatment as lunatics. Their fellows in whom the white and gray matter of the brain cells are a little differently correlated, will in their merry moods sing psalms and make it their habitual activity to reach out after the Unknown in various ways, trying to satisfy the vague and restless longings of what they call their souls by punishing themselves and pampering the poor. I have neither blame nor praise. Each class simply believe and do as they must. And as for God—science finds him not. If there be a God—He is unknown and unknowable. The finite mind of man cannot conceive the Infinite and Eternal. And if such a being exists, he cannot be concerned about the miserable wretches of earth. Searching after him is vain. Man has simply projected his own personality into space and worshipped it as a God—a person—himself. My utmost knowledge is limited to a series of sensations within, aware of itself; and a possibility of sensations without, both governed by unbending laws within the limits of experience and a reasonable distance beyond.”
“And beyond that Beyond” I ask breathlessly—“beyond that Beyond?”
I am sure I detected just then a tremor as of a chill running through that fragile frame; and the eye, at first thoughtful and coldly scornful only, is now unmistakably shaded with sadness. “Beyond that Beyond?” he repeated slowly,—beyond that Beyond, if there be such,—spaces of darkness and eternal silence!
Whether this prolonged throb of consciousness exist after its external possibilities have been dissolved—I cannot tell. That is to me—a horrible plunge—in the dark! I stand at the confluence of two eternities and three immensities. I see, with Pascal, only infinities in all directions which envelop me like an atom—like a shadow which endures for a moment and—will never return! All that I know is that I must die, but what I know the very least of is that very death—which I can not avoid! The eternal silence of these infinite paces maddens me!
Sick at heart, I turn away and ask myself what is this system which, in the words of Richter, makes the universe an automaton, and man’s future—a coffin! Is this the cold region to which thought, as it moves in its orbit, has brought us in the nineteenth century? Is this the germ of the “Philosophy of the future”—the exponent of our “advanced ideas,” the “new light” of which our age so uproariously boasts? Nay rather is not this monstruum horrendum of our day but a renewal of the empiricism and skepticism of the days of Voltaire? Here was undoubtedly the nucleus of the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which went on increasing in bulk and blackness till it seemed destined to enshroud earth and heaven in the gloom of hell.
David Hume, who, though seventeen years younger than Voltaire, died in 1776 just two years before the great French skeptic, taught skepticism in England on purely metaphysical grounds. Hume knew little or nothing about natural science; but held that what we call mind consists merely of successive perceptions, and that we can have no knowledge of anything but phenomena. His system afterwards passes through France, is borrowed and filtered through the brain of a half crazy French schoolmaster, Auguste Conte, who thus becomes the founder of the Contist school of Positivism or Nescience or Agnosticism as it is variously called. The adherents of his school admit neither revelation, nor a God, nor the immortality of the soul. Conte held, among other things, that two hours a day should be spent in the worship of Collective Humanity to be symbolized by some of the sexe aimant. On general principles it is not quite clear which is the sexe aimant. But as Conte proceeds to mention one’s wife, mother, and daughter as fitting objects of religious adoration because they represent the present, past and future of Humanity—one is left to infer that he considered the female the loving sex and the ones to be worshipped; though he does not set forth who were to be objects of woman’s own adoring worship. In this ecclesiastical system which Prof. Huxley wittily denominates Romanism minus Christianity, Conte made himself High Pontiff, and his inamorata, the widow of a galley slave, was chief saint. This man was founder of the system which the agnostic prefers to the teachings of Jesus! However, had this been all, the positivist would have been as harmless as any other lunatic. But he goes a step farther and sets up his system as the philosophy of natural science, originating in and proved by pure observation and investigation of physical phenomena; and scoffs at as presumptuous and unwarrantable all facts that cannot be discerned through the senses. In this last position he is followed by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, G. H. Lewes, and a noble army of physicists, naturalists, physiologists, and geologists. Says one: “We have no knowledge of anything but phenomena, and the essential nature of phenomena and their ultimate causes are unknown and inscrutable to us.” Says another: “All phenomena without exception are governed by invariable laws with which no volitions natural or supernatural interfere.” And another: “Final causes are unknown to us and the search after them is fruitless, a mere chase of a favorite will-o-the-wisp. We know nothing about any supposed purposes for which organs ‘were made.’ Birds fly because they have wings, a true naturalist will never say—he can never know they have wings in order that they may fly.”