The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made, now by theology and now by speculative philosophy. It is hardly descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined the rather fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of ignorance. The author of Ecce Coelum has declared: 'Things die out under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see, unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.
They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised scepticism as to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which Carlyle described as an everlasting No. This was but a preparatory stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.
In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. Exeunt omnia in mysterium. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has taught us toward all truth whatsoever.
The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has taken so kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something beyond the phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this relation of the phenomenal to the noumenal. His Synthetic Philosophy opens with an exposition of this non-relative or absolute, without which the relative itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute, indefinite as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the absolute cannot in any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing, yet we find that its positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness. The belief which this datum of consciousness constitutes has a higher warrant than any other belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or noumenal, according to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or relative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a phenomenon, and the source and secret of most complex and interesting phenomena. It has always been of the greatest importance in the history of mankind. It has been able to hold its own in face of the attacks of science. It must contain an element of truth. All religions, however, assert that their God is for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a great mystery. The higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this. It is by the flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular religiosity offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the next street. It does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into the truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally, the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results of modern physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in all phenomena, force. This manifests itself in various forms which are interchangeable, while amid all these changes the force remains the same. This latter must be regarded as the reality, and basis of all that is relative and phenomenal. The entire universe is to be explained from the movements of this absolute force. The phenomena of nature and of mental life come under the same general laws of matter, motion, and force.
Spencer's doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account for the world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a reconciliation of science and religion. It does not carry us beyond materialism. Spencer's real intention was directed to something higher than that. If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is as a necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. If we get the idea of force from the experience of our own power of volition, is it not natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical force, and not the reverse? Accordingly, the absolute force, basis of all specific forces, would be mind and will. The doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it would have to become idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of law and order to a first cause. He says that this first cause is incomprehensible. Yet he further says, when the question of attributing personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not between personality and something lower. It is between personality and something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion. It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again, in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will be to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The conception to which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.'
Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had at first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological. It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says Huxley, in one of his essays:—'What do we know of this terrible matter, except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter. He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical world being primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.
Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system whose parts, be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by universal laws. Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable condition of that control of nature upon which human welfare in so large degree depends. But this reign of law is an hypothesis. It is not an axiom which it would be absurd to deny. It is not an obvious fact, thrust upon us whether we will or no. Experiences are possible without the conception of law and order. The fruit of experience in knowledge is not possible without it. That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords the interesting spectacle of the rise of an hallucination, the growth of a habit of mythological speech, which is truly surprising. We begin to hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of myth-making and fetish worship—the homage to the fetish of law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,' says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural agencies, palpable and ready to hand for the explanation of everything, in the myth-making period of science which living men can still remember, have by this time paled. They have become simply various manifestations of one underlying spiritual energy, which is indeed beyond our perception.[6] When Comte said that the universe could not rest upon will, because then it would be arbitrary, incalculable, subject to caprice, one feels the humour and pathos of it. Comte's experience with will, his own and that of others, had evidently been too largely of that sad sort. Real freedom consists in conformity to what ought to be. In God, whom we conceive as perfect, this conformity is complete. With us it remains an ideal. Were we the creatures of a blind mechanical necessity there could be no talk of ideal standards and no meaning in reason at all.
Footnote 6:[(return)]
Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. p. 248.
[EVOLUTION]
In the progress of the thought of the generation, say, from 1870 to the present day, the conception of evolution has been much changed. The doctrine of evolution has itself been largely evolved within that period. The application of it has become familiar in fields of which there was at first no thought. The bearing of the acceptance of it upon religion has been seen to be quite different from that which was at first supposed. The advocacy of the doctrine was at first associated with the claims of naturalism or positivism. Wider applications of the doctrine and deeper insight into its meaning have done away with this misunderstanding. Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as possible from suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant primarily the gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic beginning to its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end and of cause looked at askance. They are regarded an outside the pale of the natural sciences. In a very definite sense that is true. The logical consequence of this admission should be merely the recognition that the idea of evolution as developed in the natural sciences cannot be the whole idea.