[1] Wilfrid Meynell, in his John Henry Newman, erroneously speaks of Charles Robert as the “youngest son.” [↑]
[2] This is a mistake. Owen in 1817 renounced the religions of the world, and proclaimed that man’s character was formed for him not by him. But he was not an Atheist. [↑]
CHARACTER OF CHARLES NEWMAN.
There is little to say and less need to add anything to what Mr. Wheeler writes, whose industry and discernment collect together all the accessible facts of his subject. My knowledge of Charles Robert Newman is confined to his correspondence, which, with my present engagements, I could not refer to and examine without delaying the printer longer than would be convenient to you, as Mr. Wheeler’s article is in type. The impression Mr. C. R. Newman conveyed to me by his letters is, I judge, sufficient for the purpose in hand. Charles Newman had an intermittent mind. He would write with great force and clearness, and in another letter, which was confused in parts, he would frankly say that his mind was leaving him, as was its wont as I understood him, and after a few months less or more, it would return to him, when he would write again. In this manly frankness and strong self-consciousness he resembled his two eminent brothers Francis and John. I trusted to his friend Mr. Purnell, who was the medium in communicating with me, to send me further letters when Mr. Charles was able or disposed to write them. I expected to hear from him again. Much occupied with debates and otherwise at the time, I neglected writing further to him myself. Afterwards thinking his disablement might have grown upon him with years, disinclined me from asking him to resume his letters. Mr. Wheeler seems ignorant of Charles Newman’s mental peculiarity, and does not recognise what may be generous delicacy on the part of his brothers in not referring to it. To do so would have subjected them to the imputation, very frequent formerly, of imputing difference of opinion to want of saneness. Even so liberal a preacher as W. J. Fox accounted, in 1841, for my disbelief in Theism by conjecturing the existence of some mental deficiency. No doubt many persons with whom Charles Newman had dealings in offices he held, would regard his Atheism—which it was contrary to his nature to conceal—as a personal disqualification. He avowed his opinions as naturally and as boldly as Professor Newman and the Cardinal avowed theirs. It is not conceivable that Cardinal Newman ever intermitted his aid—or Professor Newman either—on this account. They were both incapable of personal intolerance. They might deplore that their brother Charles’s opinions were so alien, so contrary to theirs; but this they would never make matter of reproach. It was doubtless a great trial to them that their brother, having fine powers like their own, making no persistent effort for his own maintenance, although he knew it must render independence impossible. Possibly the solitariness which he chose caused his tendency to unusualness of conduct, not to say eccentricity, to grow upon him—which they could not control or mitigate without an interference, which might subject them to resentment and reproach. Charles no doubt inherited his father’s sympathy for social improvement, which led to his sharing Robert Owen’s sociologic views. But he did not acquire his Atheism from Robert Owen—as Professor Newman has said—for Robert Owen was not an Atheist—always believing in some Great Power.
Professor Newman has told me that in any further edition of his little book upon his brother, the Cardinal, he will, on my authority, correct his description of Robert Owen as an Atheist. Charles owed his Atheism to himself, as his brothers owed their opinions to their own conclusions and reflections. Charles not taking a degree was less likely to be owing to means not being furnished to him than to his intermittent indecision of mind and his strong discernment, which produced satisfaction with the world, with others, and with himself.
TWO PRINCIPLES OF ORDER.
In my proof of the invalidity of that argument—it being indeed what is called “the Argument from Design”—I point out that our experience simultaneously informs us of two modes of producing order, otherwise called arrangement, relation of parts to each other and to the whole direction of means towards some recognisable end; or, to describe the phenomenon in the most summary, as well as the most practical, way—two modes of producing effects identical with those that proceed from design. I explain that, of these two principles of order, the one is Design itself, a modus operandi of intelligence (such as we find it here below, of which the human mind affords the best examples), while the other is something to which no name has been assigned, and which, consequently, we can only shortly describe by saying that it is not design. It becomes necessary, therefore, to give a farther periphrastic account of it as follows:—
This nameless principle of order, considered as a vague popular surmise, is as familiar to our experience as design. We all see, for instance, that water has a tendency to form a perfectly level and horizontal surface, that heavy bodies fall to the earth perpendicularly, that the plummet performs a straight line in just the same direction, that dew-drops and soap-bubbles assume a globular shape, that crystallisation observes similar artist-like rules, and so on. We are accustomed to say, “It is the nature of things,” and we ground our daily actions on a confidence in this regularity of proceeding, without generally attempting to explain it. Science comes to our help, and shows us that this orderly action of things around us may be traced to, and is the necessary result of, the operation of certain powers or properties inherent in these natural things. Grant that the property called gravitation belongs to moving bodies, and an innumerable quantity of orderly phenomena may be predicated as springing of their own accord by inevitable consequence from this datum; which same phenomena, moreover, intelligence is able coincidently to reproduce in its own special mental way.
Here, then, is a principle of order, less popularly appreciated, but not less certainly evidenced and known, than design. It is, no doubt, a principle infinitely inferior in dignity, for it is blind and unintelligent, while design sees and understands, but this is not the question. The question, superseded by an answer derived from human experience, is to this effect—that nature and natural things are, with no less propriety, assignable as the doers of a certain non-designing kind of order, than man is assignable as the doer of the designing kind; that we just as truly perceive that nature, in the exercise of certain powers that we find to be inherent in her, produces order in a dew-drop or in a crystal, as that man, in the exercise of certain powers that we find to be inherent in him, produces order in a poem or in a cathedral, and that, consequently, the argument from design, based as it is on the assertion that our experience assures us of only one principle of order, is invalid.