Further, the evidence which we have for the three kinds of experience—scientific, moral, and spiritual—is the same: it is the evidence of consciousness—the only evidence that we can have of anything. That witness, if discredited at all, is discredited for all in all. If discredited, it must be by its own testimony, for we have no other witness which can give evidence against it. But we hope that it is true: the man of science is so certain of its truth, in the department in which he is most familiar with it and has the best right to speak of it, that he lays it down as a rule that there simply can be no evidence of an exception to the uniformity of Nature. The moralist is equally certain that no exception to the law of moral obligation is possible; the religious mind that there can be none to the universality of the Divine love. To the unity of consciousness corresponds the unity of our faith in its trustworthiness. Scientific and moral faith are not different from religious faith; they are but phases of the same. The common faith of mankind is not a synthesis formed artificially by adding the three together; on the contrary, the three are artificially distinguished by thought—they do not correspond to fact, but are abstractions from the facts, and are formed by the suppression of facts.
The religious consciousness is itself abstract; and as an abstraction, i.e. if taken to be the whole of what we know and feel and do, is capable of leading to false conclusions: no religious belief can stand permanently which runs counter to the facts of science or the moral faith of mankind. No amount of spiritual experience will add to our knowledge of chemistry or physics, or be valid evidence against any truth of science. It may serve to prevent the premature acceptance of something too hastily put forward as a scientific fact, in the same way that science may overthrow a belief erroneously supposed to be religious.
But though the religious consciousness is an abstraction, in the same sense that the scientific and moral consciousness are abstractions, each is valid in its own sphere; and the whole evidence of consciousness in all its three phases must be taken together, if we are to elicit any universal principles of thought and action, any unity in our experience, any purpose in evolution. From this point of view we shall expect to find a unity of experience corresponding to the unity of consciousness, and to discover that there is a fundamental identity underlying the apparent diversity in that reality of which in consciousness we are aware. What gives this unity to experience is the permanence which we attribute to the real, in whatever way the real is apprehended: the real, whether apprehended in sense-experience or in moral conviction or in spiritual experience, is characterised by permanence, as distinguished from the passing feelings with which we view it and from the transient experience we have of it. The reality of the things of which we are aware through our senses is conceived as something permanent, and is implied to be so conceived by all theories of evolution which wish to be taken seriously. The permanence of moral obligation is not conceived by those who are genuinely convinced of its reality to vary or to come and go with the flickering gleams of our moral resolutions. Nor when spiritual light is withdrawn from our hearts is it supposed, by those who believe it to be the light of God's countenance, to be quenched for the time.
The fundamental identity of the real throughout its diversity is what is postulated by science when it explains the process of evolution by means of the law of continuity. It is equally postulated by the moral philosopher who claims objective validity for the moral law on the ground that it is the same for all rational minds. It is the faith of the religious mind which not only feels the Divine love in its own heart, and finds it every time it obeys the conscience, but also divines it in the uniformity of Nature and throughout the process of evolution.
The identity of the real does not lie in the mere fact that we are conscious of it. The real things of which we are conscious have, indeed, as one feature common to them all, the fact that we are conscious of them. But the identity of the real is not created by nor a mere expression of the unity of our consciousness. It is not the understanding which makes Nature—save in the purely psychological way in which apperception does; on the contrary, the things of which we are conscious in sense-perception are given as independent of us, though sense-phenomena are obviously not. In the same way, the reality of the moral law is conceived, in the very act by which we recognise it as binding on us, to be something independent of us; nor is God's love towards us dependent on our merits, or existent only when we recognise it.
If, then, we are to gather up the permanence, the identity, and the independence of the real into the unity of a single principle, if we are to interpret the law of continuity in the light of the whole of our experience, we must look to the Divine will. In it we shall find the reality which is progressively revealed in the law of continuity; in it we shall find the permanence and the independence without which reality has no meaning; in it the changeless and eternal identity of Him whose property it is ever to have mercy and always to be the same. Then, perhaps, we may extend the principle of scientific method so as to include the whole of our experience and to make the whole of our knowledge truly scientific; for to the uniformity of Nature and of human nature we shall add the uniformity of the Divine nature, or, rather, we shall see in the former the expression of the latter. But it is not the agnostic who will thus enlarge the bounds of science, or open a page of knowledge rich with the spoils of faith.
XII.
PROGRESS
The artificial nature of the abstraction which distinguishes the scientific from the moral and the religious consciousness, as well as the impossibility of simultaneously exercising faith and repressing it, is plainly exhibited in the optimistic interpretation of evolution. The premises from which it starts are faith in the uniformity of Nature and belief in the reality of material things. The conclusions which it reaches constitute a non sequitur if they are supposed to follow from the avowed premises, and only command assent when we tacitly assume certain moral and religious presuppositions which, if not avowed in the optimist's argument, are instinctively supplied by the moral and religious consciousness of the optimist's disciples. That the process of evolution on the whole has been and will be a process of progress follows logically enough from the optimist's avowed premises, if by progress we mean the survival of those best fitted to survive—that is, if we empty the notion of progress of all moral meaning. But as the conclusion that evolution is progress is the conclusion which is necessary for the justification of the common faith of mankind, the illogical nature of the optimist's process of inference is apt to be overlooked in consideration of the satisfactory termination of his argument.