My dear ——,
Desiring to approach the subject of miracles, you ask me whether I do not accept the following sentence as a statement of my views concerning nature: “The Universe is perennially renewed and created afresh by an active energy of the Spirit of God, and what we call ‘laws of nature’ are the mode in which our limited minds are enabled to apprehend the working of Creative Power.” If I accept it, you declare you cannot understand why I should stumble at miracles. “It is a matter of every-day experience,” you say, “and natural, that the human will should suspend the laws of nature, as for example by arresting the motion of gravitation; and consequently it seems unreasonable for you, or for other believers in a personal God, to be scandalized if He also now and then permits Himself the same liberty.”
I accept your statement, so far as concerns the perennial energy of the Spirit of God upon the material and immaterial Universe; but I do not quite agree with the thought, or perhaps I should say with the expression, of the last part of your sentence—“the mode in which our limited minds are enabled to apprehend the working of Creative Power.” I should prefer to call the Laws of Nature “a revelation of Himself by God to men, on the recognition of which our very existence depends.” The Laws of Nature are indeed nothing but ideas of our own Imagination; but they appear to me, more or less, true ideas, through which God has revealed Himself to us as a God of Law and Order. I believe in the fixity of natural Law as much (I think) as the man of science does; I reverence a Law of Nature, not as a result of necessity, but as an expression of God’s will. But your own remarks about the ordinary “suspension of the law of nature by the human will” appear to me to imply a little confusion of thought arising from a confused use of the word “nature” in two or more senses. On this point therefore I should like to say a few words.
Nature
i. Nature sometimes means the ordinary course of things apart from us and from our intervention; as when we say that “Nature looks gay”—an expression which we might use of fields and even of a not too artificial garden, but not of a city or a street.
In this sense it may be occasionally applied to the ordinary course of things in our own bodily frame, so far as it goes on without our deliberate intervention; as when a physician tells a fussy patient to cease from medicining himself and to “let Nature take its course.”
ii. Nature sometimes means the ordinary course of things in ourselves, not in our bodies but in some other part of us, but still apart from our deliberate intervention; as when we say that “Nature impels us to avoid pain, to preserve our lives, to cherish our children, to love and revere our parents, and to seek the esteem and friendship of our neighbours.”
But sometimes in human beings one “natural” impulse is opposed by another: as when the desire to preserve one’s life is opposed by the desire to gain the esteem of one’s neighbours. When these two conflict, which is to be called the more “natural”?
The answer will be different, according as we use the word “natural” in the sense of “ordinary” or “orderly.” One class of natural impulses, which may be called selfish or self-regarding, is perhaps more ordinarily predominant; another class, those which regard the good of others, contributes more to the progress and order of society. In the individual, as well as in society, the former or “ordinary” impulses, if unchecked, often tend to excess of passion, and what we call mental “disorder”; the latter (which are seldom in excess) tend to self-control and a well-ordered mind. In the former sense, it is more “natural,” because more “ordinary,” to laugh when we are tickled, or to seize food when we are hungry, than to die for our country or to provide food for our children; but, in the latter sense, the nobler actions are more “natural” because more in accordance with order.
What do we mean by a well-ordered mind? We mean one in which the Will does not at once yield to the impulses from the things which seem nearest to ourselves; in which the Imagination vividly presents to us the wants of our neighbours as well as our own; in which the Reason states what can be said for and against each proposal, and the Conscience finally decides the course to be taken. Here then we see an entirely new notion of Nature, at least so far as man is concerned; a course or order of things no longer apart from human intervention, but entirely dependent upon the supremacy of the Will and Conscience aided by Reason and Imagination: and hence we are led to a double definition of human Nature as follows:—