Indeed, so patent is the ambiguity, that I cannot fancy that it has escaped the author and his school; and am driven, by mere respect for their logical powers, to suppose that they mean no ambiguity at all; that they do not conceive of irrational beings as differing from rational beings, or the physical from the moral, or the body of man from his spirit, in kind and property; and that the immutable laws which they represent as governing human life and history have nothing at all to do with those laws of right and wrong, which I intend to set forth to you, as the ‘everlasting judgments of God.’
In which case, I fear, they must go their way; while we go ours; confessing that there is an order, and there is a law, for man; and that if he disturb that order, or break that law in anywise, they will prove themselves too strong for him, and reassert themselves, and go forward, grinding him to powder if he stubbornly try to stop their way. But we must assert too, that his disobedience to them, even for a moment, has disturbed the natural course of events, and broken that inevitable sequence, which we may find indeed, in our own imaginations, as long as we sit with a book in our studies: but which vanishes the moment that we step outside into practical contact with life; and, instead of talking cheerfully of a necessary and orderly progress, find ourselves more inclined to cry with the cynical man of the world:
‘All the windy ways of men,
Are but dust that rises up;
And is lightly laid again.’
The usual rejoinder to this argument is to fall back upon man’s weakness and ignorance, and to take refuge in the infinite unknown. Man, it is said, may of course interfere a little with some of the less important laws of his being: but who is he, to grapple with the more vast and remote ones? Because he can prevent a pebble from falling, is he to suppose that he can alter the destiny of nations, and grapple forsooth with ‘the eternities and the immensities,’ and so forth? The argument is very powerful: but addrest rather to the imagination than the reason. It is, after all, another form of the old omne ignotum pro magnifico; and we may answer, I think fairly—About the eternities and immensities we know nothing, not having been there as yet; but it is a mere assumption to suppose, without proof, that the more remote and impalpable laws are more vast, in the sense of being more powerful (the only sense which really bears upon the argument), than the laws which are palpably at work around us all day long; and if we are capable of interfering with almost every law of human life which we know of already, it is more philosophical to believe (till disproved by actual failure) that we can interfere with those laws of our life which we may know hereafter. Whether it will pay us to interfere with them, is a different question. It is not prudent to interfere with the laws of health, and it may not be with other laws, hereafter to be discovered. I am only pleading that man can disobey the laws of his being; that such power has always been a disturbing force in the progress of the human race, which modern theories too hastily overlook; and that the science of history (unless the existence of the human will be denied) must belong rather to the moral sciences, than to that ‘positive science’ which seems to me inclined to reduce all human phænomena under physical laws, hastily assumed, by the old fallacy of εις αλλο yένος, to apply where there is no proof whatsoever that they do or even can apply.
As for the question of the existence of the human will—I am not here, I hope, to argue that. I shall only beg leave to assume its existence, for practical purposes. I may be told (though I trust not in this University), that it is, like the undulatory theory of light, an unphilosophical ‘hypothesis.’ Be that as it may, it is very convenient (and may be for a few centuries to come) to retain the said ‘hypothesis,’ as one retains the undulatory theory; and for the simple reason, that with it one can explain the phænomena tolerably; and without it cannot explain them at all.
A dread (half-unconscious, it may be) of this last practical result, seems to have crossed the mind of the author on whom I have been commenting; for he confesses, honestly enough (and he writes throughout like an honest man) that in human life ‘no rational thinker hopes to discover more than some few primary actions of law, and some approximative theory of growth.’ I have higher hopes of a possible science of history; because I fall back on those old moral laws, which I think he wishes to ignore: but I can conceive that he will not; because he cannot, on his own definitions of law and growth. They are (if I understand him aright) to be irresistible and inevitable. I say that they are not so, even in the case of trees and stones; much more in the world of man. Facts, when he goes on to verify his theories, will leave him with a very few primary actions of law, a very faint approximative theory; because his theories, in plain English, will not work. At the first step, at every step, they are stopped short by those disturbing forces, or at least disturbed phænomena, which have been as yet, and probably will be hereafter, attributed (as the only explanation of them) to the existence, for good and evil, of a human will.
Let us look in detail at a few of these disturbances of anything like inevitable or irresistible movement. Shall we not, at the very first glance, confess—I am afraid only too soon—that there always have been fools therein; fools of whom no man could guess, or can yet, what they were going to do next or why they were going to do it? And how, pray, can we talk of the inevitable, in the face of that one miserable fact of human folly, whether of ignorance or of passion, folly still? There may be laws of folly, as there are laws of disease; and whether there are or not, we may learn much wisdom from folly; we may see what the true laws of humanity are, by seeing the penalties which come from breaking them: but as for laws which work of themselves, by an irresistible movement,—how can we discover such in a past in which every law which we know has been outraged again and again? Take one of the highest instances—the progress of the human intellect—I do not mean just now the spread of conscious science, but of that unconscious science which we call common sense. What hope have we of laying down exact laws for its growth, in a world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a thousand times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by the stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so, yet by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the mob? How, again, are we to arrive at any exact laws of the increase of population, in a race which has had, from the beginning, the abnormal and truly monstrous habit of slaughtering each other, not for food—for in a race of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or decrease might easily be calculated—but uselessly, from rage, hate, fanaticism, or even mere wantonness? No man is less inclined than I to undervalue vital statistics, and their already admirable results: but how can they help us, and how can we help them, in looking at such a past as that of three-fourths of the nations of the world? Look—as a single instance among too many—at that most noble nation of Germany, swept and stunned, by peasant wars, thirty years’ wars, French wars, and after each hurricane, blossoming up again into brave industry and brave thought, to be in its turn cut off by a fresh storm ere it could bear full fruit: doing nevertheless such work, against such fearful disadvantages, as nation never did before; and proving thereby what she might have done for humanity, had not she, the mother of all European life, been devoured, generation after generation, by her own unnatural children. Nevertheless, she is their mother still; and her history, as I believe, the root-history of Europe: but it is hard to read—the sibylline leaves are so fantastically torn, the characters so blotted out by tears and blood.
And if such be the history of not one nation only, but of the average, how, I ask, are we to make calculations about such a species as man? Many modern men of science wish to draw the normal laws of human life from the average of humanity: I question whether they can do so; because I do not believe the average man to be the normal man, exhibiting the normal laws: but a very abnormal man, diseased and crippled, but even if their method were correct, it could work in practice, only if the destinies of men were always decided by majorities: and granting that the majority of men have common sense, are the minority of fools to count for nothing? Are they powerless? Have they had no influence on History? Have they even been always a minority, and not at times a terrible majority, doing each that which was right in the sight of his own eyes? You can surely answer that question for yourselves. As far as my small knowledge of History goes, I think it may be proved from facts, that any given people, down to the lowest savages, has, at any period of its life, known far more than it has done; known quite enough to have enabled it to have got on comfortably, thriven, and developed; if it had only done, what no man does, all that it knew it ought to do, and could do. St. Paul’s experience of himself is true of all mankind—‘The good which I would, I do not; and the evil which I would not, that I do.’ The discrepancy between the amount of knowledge and the amount of work, is one of the most patent and most painful facts which strikes us in the history of man; and one not certainly to be explained on any theory of man’s progress being the effect of inevitable laws, or one which gives us much hope of ascertaining fixed laws for that progress.
And bear in mind, that fools are not always merely imbecile and obstructive; they are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad. There is in human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying all law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause, as easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can calculate that of the vines upon the slopes of Ætna, with the lava ready to boil up and overwhelm them at any and every moment. Let us learn, in God’s name, all we can, from the short intervals of average peace and common sense: let us, or rather our grandchildren, get precious lessons from them for the next period of sanity. But let us not be surprised, much less disheartened, if after learning a very little, some unexpected and truly demoniac factor, Anabaptist war, French revolution, or other, should toss all our calculations to the winds, and set us to begin afresh, sadder and wiser men. We may learn, doubtless, even more of the real facts of human nature, the real laws of human history, from these critical periods, when the root-fibres of the human heart are laid bare, for good and evil, than from any smooth and respectable periods of peace and plenty: nevertheless their lessons are not statistical, but moral.
But if human folly has been a disturbing force for evil, surely human reason has been a disturbing force for good. Man can not only disobey the laws of his being, he can also choose between them, to an extent which science widens every day, and so become, what he was meant to be, an artificial being; artificial in his manufactures, habits, society, polity—what not? All day long he has a free choice between even physical laws, which mere things have not, and which make the laws of mere things inapplicable to him. Take the simplest case. If he falls into the water, he has his choice whether he will obey the laws of gravity and sink, or by other laws perform the (to him) artificial process of swimming, and get ashore. True, both would happen by law: but he has his choice which law shall conquer, sink or swim. We have yet to learn why whole nations, why all mankind may not use the same prudential power as to which law they shall obey,—which, without breaking it, they shall conquer and repress, as long as seems good to them.