It is strange, but it sometimes happens, that after having obtained the full knowledge of that cause, we find that it carries with it so necessarily the effect which we had admired at first, that we refuse to recognise in it longer the character of a final cause; and we say: “I was very simple to believe that God had provided such an arrangement with such a design; I see now that the cause which I have discovered being given (and it is inevitable), this arrangement must follow necessarily, apart from any pretended providential intention.”
It is thus that defective and superficial science, with its scalpel and its analyses, comes sometimes to destroy in our souls the religious sentiment to which the simple aspect of nature had given rise.
This is the case frequently with the anatomist and the astronomer. What a strange thing it is, exclaims the ignorant man, that when an extraneous substance penetrates into a tissue, where its presence does great injury, an inflammation and a suppuration take place, which tend to expel it! No, says the anatomist, there is nothing intentional in that expulsion. It is a necessary effect of the suppuration; and the suppuration itself is a necessary effect of the presence of an extraneous substance in our tissues. If you wish it, I shall explain to you the mechanism, and you will acknowledge yourself that the effect follows the cause, but that the cause has not been arranged intentionally to produce that effect, since it is itself the necessary effect of an anterior cause.
How I admire, says the ignorant man, the foresight of God, who has willed that the rain should not descend on the soil in a sheet, but should fall in drops, as if it came from the gardener’s watering-pot! Were it not so, vegetation would be impossible. You throw away your admiration, answers the learned naturalist; the cloud is not a sheet of water; if it were, it could not be supported by the atmosphere. It is a collection of microscopic vesicles, or minute bladders like soap-bubbles. When their density increases, or when they burst by compression, these thousands of millions of infinitesimal drops fall, growing larger in their descent by the vapour of the water which they precipitate, etc. If vegetation is benefited in consequence, it is by accident; but we must not think that the Creator amuses himself in sending us down water through the sieve of a monster watering-pot.
Ignorance, we must confess, very often imparts a certain plausibility to science, when the connexion of causes and effects is regarded in this way, by attributing a phenomenon to a final intention which does not exist, and which is dissipated before the light of superior knowledge. [p516]
Thus, in former days, before men had any knowledge of electricity, they were frightened by the noise of thunder, being able to recognise in that astounding voice, bellowing amid the storm, nothing less than a manifestation of Divine wrath. This is an association of ideas which, like many others, has disappeared before the progress of physical science. Man is so constituted, that when a phenomenon affects him, he searches for the cause of it; and if he finds out that cause, he gives it a name. Then he sets himself to find out the cause of that cause, and so he goes on until he can mount no higher, when he stops, and exclaims, “It is God; it is the will of God.” This is his ultima ratio. He is arrested, however, only for the moment. Science advances, and soon this second, third, or fourth cause, which had remained unperceived, is revealed to his eyes. Then science says, This effect is not due, as we believed, to the immediate will of God, but to that natural cause which I have just discovered. And man, after having taken possession of this discovery, after having gained this step in the region of science, finds himself, so to speak, one step farther removed from the region of Faith, and again asks, What is the cause of that cause? And not finding it, he persists in the ever-recurring explanation, “It is the will of God.” And so he proceeds onwards for indefinite ages, through a countless succession of scientific revelations and exercises of faith.
This procedure on the part of mankind must appear to superficial minds to be destructive of every religious idea; for is the result of it not this, that as science advances, God recedes? Do we not see clearly that the domain of final intentions is narrowed in proportion as the domain of natural causes is enlarged?
Unhappy are they who give to this fine problem so narrow a solution. No, it is not true that as science advances, the idea of God recedes. On the contrary, what is true is that, as our intelligence increases, this idea is enlarged, and broadened, and elevated. When we discover a natural cause for what we had imagined an immediate, spontaneous, supernatural act of the Divine will, are we to conclude that that will is absent or indifferent? No, indeed; all that it proves is, that that will acts by processes different from those which it had pleased us to imagine. All that it proves is, that the phenomenon which we regarded as an accident in creation occupies its place in the universal frame; and that everything, even the most special effects, have been foreseen from all eternity by the divine prescience. What! is the idea which we form of the power of God lessened when we come to see that each of the countless results which we discover, or which escape our [p517] investigations, not only has its natural cause, but is bound up in an infinite circle of causes; so that there is not a detail of movement, of force, of form, of life, which is not the product of the great whole, or which can be explained apart from that whole.
But why this dissertation, which is foreign, as it would seem, to the main object of our inquiries? The phenomena of the social economy have likewise their efficient cause, and their providential intention. In this department, as in natural science, as in anatomy, or in astronomy, men have frequently denied the final cause precisely because the efficient cause assumes the character of an absolute necessity.
The social world abounds in harmonies, of which we can form no adequate or complete conception until the mind has remounted to causes, in order to seek their explanation, and descended to effects, to discover the destination of the phenomena. . . . .