With regard to matter and motion, he would note that a piece might be removed and deposited by the side of the board, but was never destroyed, and he would infer that matter is indestructible and could never have been created. As for motion, the condition, the only invariable and necessary condition, of movement is previous movement, Black must move before White can: the only condition of change in the distribution of the pieces on the board would be some previous change. If the suggestion were made to him that possibly the real condition of all movement and every change was the purpose of an unseen agent, and that real knowledge was impossible without some idea of that purpose, he might as a man of science decline to accept the suggestion. The object of science is not to conjecture why things happen, or with what purpose, but to describe positively the way in which they actually do happen, or perhaps merely to describe the motions of material things in space. It does not matter with what purpose a shot or a mine is fired, or even whether with any or none: the results are just the same, if it is fired in just the same way. Science neither assumes nor denies the existence of purpose, because neither the assumption nor its rejection would in the least help her to discover the things that she wants to know. But are the things she wants to know the only things worth knowing? Every man is entitled to answer that question for himself. Are they the only things that can be known? They are the only things that can be known—on her assumptions. Just as the world can only be explained scientifically on the assumptions of science, so it can only be interpreted morally or religiously on the assumptions made by religion and morality. The only end that could be subserved by assuming a Divine purpose would be at most to enable us in some slight degree to argue what the purpose of some things might be—and that is of no interest or value to science. She declines to look for a final cause: her business is with efficient and mechanical causes.
The suggestion, then, that the chess-men may be moved with a purpose is not rejected, but is set aside as useless for a scientific comprehension of the game. Invisible agents—and we are all invisible, though our bodies are not—moving the chess-men with a purpose, or cross-purposes, are hypotheses valueless for science, which aims only at positive facts, the laws according to which the pieces actually do move. By the aid of these laws our philosopher might succeed in reconstructing the past history of the game which he was watching. From the positions occupied by the pieces now he might infer the positions from which they came (or think he could), and so back, step by step, until he reached the order in which the pieces are arranged at the beginning of a game. When he reviewed the knowledge thus obtained he would see in the process of the game a certain evolution from the relatively simple movements of the pawns which began the game to the highly complex movements of the queen. Then, whatever the order in which the pieces happened to be brought out and their qualities developed in the particular game he was watching, he might argue on the theory of necessity that that was the only order in which those properties could have been evolved. On the principle that efficient and mechanical causes were sufficient to provide a scientific explanation of the game it would follow that the higher powers manifested by castles and queens, the latest pieces to come out into the game, were caused by the previous action and movements of the less highly developed pawns—that life and consciousness are due to material causes. The idea that the movements of queens and pawns alike were due to the will of an unseen agent acting with purpose is, as we have said, a suggestion quite valueless to science, because any conclusions it might lead to would not be scientific knowledge. If we assumed the existence of purpose, and even could conjecture dimly its nature, we still should have made no addition to those positive facts which are the only things that science is concerned to establish: it would be neither more nor less true than before that bishops move diagonally, pawns one square at a time, gravitating bodies at the rate of sixteen feet in the first second, and so on. It would be neither more nor less true than before that pawns actually were the first pieces to move in the game, that lifeless matter preceded the evolution of organisms. Above all, it would be neither more nor less true than before that the conclusions of science are the only conclusions that a rational man will accept.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] To say that my consciousness offers no such evidence is, if true, irrelevant. We are concerned with the consciousness of mankind generally. In astronomy the personal equation is allowed for; and in science generally the observations of one savant are subject to confirmation or correction by others.
XI.
THE COMMON FAITH OF MANKIND
It is an article of the common faith of mankind that consciousness is good and trustworthy evidence of the reality of that of which we are conscious. It is also characteristic of that common faith to believe in the trustworthiness of the Power which manifests itself in that of which we are conscious. The man of science shares in the common faith of mankind up to a certain point: he accepts the testimony of consciousness to the reality of material things, and he believes that the Power which manifests itself in them can be trusted to behave when it is (in time or space) beyond the range of his observation in exactly the same way as it does within. But to walk in the common faith further than this point is unscientific. It is rational to trust the evidence of consciousness when it testifies to the reality of material things, but not when it testifies to the reality of our moral ideals, or the freedom of the will or the reality of God. It is scientific to trust the Power which manifests itself in consciousness to behave with the same uniformity in the future as it has done in the past, and rational to formulate our science and stake our material interests on that uniformity. But it is not rational or scientific to trust that Power to will freely the good of all things, or to trust our lives to that will.
The reason of this sharp division between science and faith is the mistaken idea that science involves no faith and is a body of knowledge built up without any assumption. But even if we got the man of science to admit that science would be impossible if things were not real and Nature not uniform, it would still be open to him to say that he considered any other assumptions unnecessary; and there is a way in which he could prove them to be unnecessary. He might show that they were no assumptions at all, but logical consequences from established scientific facts. That was in effect the object aimed at, as far as our moral ideals are concerned, by the optimistic philosophy of evolution.
For the optimistic philosopher, then, who refuses to begin by taking the difference between right and wrong on faith, the problem is, granted the reality of material things and the uniformity of Nature, to show that the moral law is simply one particular case of the uniformity of Nature.