Thoughts on Religion

by George John Romanes

No sooner have we reached the conclusion that the only hypothesis whereby the general order of Nature admits of being in any degree accounted for is that it is due to a cause of a mental kind, than we confront the fact that this cause must be widely different from anything that we know of Mind in ourselves. And we soon discover that this difference must be conceived as not merely of degree, however great, but of kind. In other words, although we may conclude that the nearest analogue of the causa causarum given in experience is the human mind, we are bound to acknowledge that in all fundamental points the analogy is so remote that it becomes a question whether we are really very much nearer the truth by entertaining it. Thus, for instance, as Mr. Spencer has pointed out, our only conception of that which we know as Mind in ourselves is the conception of a series of states of consciousness. But, he continues, 'Put a series of states of consciousness as cause and the evolving universe as effect, and then endeavour to see the last as flowing from the first. I find it possible to imagine in some dim way a series of states of consciousness serving as antecedent to any one of the movements I see going on; for my own states of consciousness are often indirectly the antecedents to such movements. But how if I attempt to think of such a series as antecedent to all actions throughout the universe ...? If to account for this infinitude of physical changes everywhere going on, "Mind must be conceived as there," "under the guise of simple-dynamics," then the reply is, that, to be so conceived, Mind must be divested of all attributes by which it is distinguished; and that, when thus divested of its distinguishing attributes the conception disappears—the word Mind stands for a blank.'

Moreover, 'How is the "originating Mind" to be thought of as having states produced by things objective to it, as discriminating among these states, and classing them as like and unlike; and as preferring one objective result to another?'[25]

Hence, without continuing this line of argument, which it would not be difficult to trace through every constituent branch of human psychology, we may take it as unquestionable that, if there is a Divine Mind, it must differ so essentially from the human mind, that it becomes illogical to designate the two by the same name: the attributes of eternity and ubiquity are in themselves enough to place such a Mind in a category sui generis, wholly different from anything which the analogy furnished by our own mind enables us even dimly to conceive. And this, of course, is no more than theologians admit. God's thoughts are above our thoughts, and a God who would be comprehensible to our intelligence would be no God at all, they say. Which may be true enough, only we must remember that in whatever measure we are thus precluded from understanding the Divine Mind, in that measure are we precluded from founding any conclusions as to its nature upon analogies furnished by the human mind. The theory ceases to be anthropomorphic: it ceases to be even 'anthropopsychic': it is affiliated with the conception of mind only in virtue of the one fact that it serves to give the best provisional account of the order of Nature, by supposing an infinite extension of some of the faculties of the human mind, with a concurrent obliteration of all the essential conditions under which alone these faculties are known to exist. Obviously of such a Mind as this no predication is logically possible. If such a Mind exists, it is not conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any attributes.

Thus much on general grounds. Descending now to matters of more detail, let us assume with the natural theologians that such a Mind does exist, that it so far resembles the human mind as to be a conscious, personal intelligence, and that the care of such a Mind is over all its works. Even upon the grounds of this supposition we meet with a number of large and general facts which indicate that this Mind ought still to be regarded as apparently very unlike its 'image' in the mind of man. I will not here dwell upon the argument of seeming waste and purposeless action in Nature, because I think that this may be fairly met by the ulterior argument already drawn from Nature as a whole—viz. that as a whole, Nature is a cosmos, and therefore that what to us appears wasteful and purposeless in matters of detail may not be so in relation to the scheme of things as a whole. But I am doubtful whether this ulterior argument can fairly be adduced to meet the apparent absence in Nature of that which in man we term morality. For in the human mind the sense of right and wrong—with all its accompanying or constituting emotions of love, sympathy, justice, &c.—is so important a factor, that however greatly we may imagine the intellectual side of the human mind to be extended, we can scarcely imagine that the moral side could ever become so apparently eclipsed as to end in the authorship of such a work as we find in terrestrial nature. It is useless to hide our eyes to the state of matters which meets us here. Most of the instances of special design which are relied upon by the natural theologian to prove the intelligent nature of the First Cause, have as their end or object the infliction of painful death or the escape from remorseless enemies; and so far the argument in favour of the intelligent nature of the First Cause is an argument against its morality. Again, even if we quit the narrower basis on which teleological argument has rested in the past, and stand that argument upon the broader ground of Nature as a whole, it scarcely becomes less incompatible with any inference to the morality of that Cause, seeing that the facts to which I have alluded are not merely occasional and, as it were, outweighed by contrary facts of a more general kind, but manifestly constitute the leading feature of the scheme of organic nature as a whole: or, if this were held to be questionable, it could only follow that we are not entitled to infer that there is any such scheme at all.

Nature, as red in tooth and claw with ravin, is thus without question a large and general fact that must be considered by any theory of teleology which can be propounded. I do not think that this aspect of the matter could be conveyed in stronger terms than it is by 'Physicus[26],' whom I shall therefore quote:—

'Supposing the Deity to be, what Professor Flint maintains that he is—viz. omnipotent, and there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture! Is it said that there are compensating enjoyments? I care not to strike the balance; the enjoyments I plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the pains, and this whether or not evolution is due to design.... Am I told that I am not competent to judge the purposes of the Almighty? I answer that if there are purposes, I am able to judge of them so far as I can see; and if I am expected to judge of His purposes when they appear to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged also to judge of them when they appear to be malevolent. And it can be no possible extenuation of the latter to point to the "final result" as "order and beauty," so long as the means adopted by the "Omnipotent Designer" are known to have been so [terrible]. All that we could legitimately assert in this case would be that, so far as observation can extend, "He cares for animal perfection" to the exclusion of "animal enjoyment," and even to the total disregard of animal suffering. But to assert this would merely be to deny beneficence as an attribute of God[27].'

The reasoning here appears as unassailable as it is obvious. If, as the writer goes on to say, we see a rabbit panting in the iron jaws of a spring trap, and in consequence abhor the devilish nature of the being who, with full powers of realizing what pain means, can deliberately employ his whole faculties of invention in contriving a thing so hideously cruel; what are we to think of a Being who, with yet higher faculties of thought and knowledge, and with an unlimited choice of means to secure His ends, has contrived untold thousands of mechanisms no less diabolical? In short, so far as Nature can teach us, or 'observation can extend,' it does appear that the scheme, if it is a scheme, is the product of a Mind which differs from the more highly evolved type of human mind in that it is immensely more intellectual without being nearly so moral. And the same thing is indicated by the rough and indiscriminate manner in which justice is allotted—even if it can be said to be allotted at all. When we contrast the certainty and rigour with which any offence against 'physical law' is punished by Nature (no matter though the sin be but one of ignorance), with the extreme uncertainty and laxity with which she meets any offence against 'moral law,' we are constrained to feel that the system of legislation (if we may so term it) is conspicuously different from that which would have been devised by any intelligence which in any sense could be called 'anthropopsychic.'

The only answer to these difficulties open to the natural theologian is that which is drawn from the constitution of the human mind. It is argued that the fact of this mind having so large an ingredient of morality in its constitution may be taken as proof that its originating source is likewise of a moral character. This argument, however, appears to me of a questionable character, seeing that, for anything we can tell to the contrary, the moral sense may have been given to, or developed in, man simply on account of its utility to the species—just in the same way as teeth in the shark or poison in the snake. If so, the occurrence of the moral sense in man would merely furnish one other instance of the intellectual, as distinguished from the moral, nature of God; and there seems to be in itself no reason why we should take any other view. The mere fact that to us the moral sense seems such a great and holy thing, is doubtless (under any view) owing to its importance to the well-being of our species. In itself, or as it appears to other possible beings intellectual like ourselves, but existing under unlike conditions, the moral sense of man may be regarded as of no more significance than the social instincts of bees. More particularly may this consideration apply to the case of a Mind existing, according to the theological theory of things, wholly beyond the pale of anything analogous to those social relations out of which, according to the scientific theory of evolution, the moral sense has been developed in ourselves[28].

The truth is that in this matter natural theologians begin by assuming that the First Cause, if intelligent, must be moral; and then they are blinded to the strictly logical weakness of the argument whereby they endeavour to sustain their assumption. For aught that we can tell to the contrary, it may be quite as 'anthropomorphic' a notion to attribute morality to God as it would be to attribute those capacities for sensuous enjoyment with which the Greeks endowed their divinities. The Deity may be as high above the one as the other—or rather perhaps we may say as much external to the one as to the other. Without being supra-moral, and still less immoral, He may be un-moral: our ideas of morality may have no meaning as applied to Him.

But if we go thus far in one direction, I think, per contra, it must in consistency be allowed that the argument from the constitution of the human mind acquires more weight when it is shifted from the moral sense to the religious instincts. For, on the one hand, these instincts are not of such obvious use to the species as are those of morality; and, on the other hand, while they are unquestionably very general, very persistent, and very powerful, they do not appear to serve any 'end' or 'purpose' in the scheme of things, unless we accept the theory which is given of them by those in whom they are most strongly developed. Here I think we have an argument of legitimate force, although it does not appear that such was the opinion entertained of it by Mill. I think the argument is of legitimate force, because if the religious instincts of the human race point to no reality as their object, they are out of analogy with all other instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom we never meet with such a thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly, and therefore the fact of man being, as it is said, 'a religious animal'—i.e. presenting a class of feelings of a peculiar nature directed to particular ends, and most akin to, if not identical with, true instinct—is so far, in my opinion, a legitimate argument in favour of the reality of some object towards which the religious side of this animal's nature is directed. And I do not think that this argument is invalidated by such facts as that widely different intellectual conceptions touching the character of this object are entertained by different races of mankind; that the force of the religious instincts differs greatly in different individuals even of the same race; that these instincts admit of being greatly modified by education; that they would probably fail to be developed in any individual without at least so much education as is required to furnish the needful intellectual conceptions on which they are founded; or that we may not improbably trace their origin, as Mr. Spencer traces it, to a primitive mode of interpreting dreams. For even in view of all these considerations the fact remains that these instincts exist, and therefore, like all other instincts, may be supposed to have a definite meaning, even though, like all other instincts, they may be supposed to have had a natural cause, which both in the individual and in the race requires, as in the natural development of all other instincts, the natural conditions for its occurrence to be supplied. In a word, if animal instincts generally, like organic structures or inorganic systems, are held to betoken purpose, the religious nature of man would stand out as an anomaly in the general scheme of things if it alone were purposeless. Hence we have here what seems to me a valid inference, so far as it goes, to the effect that, if the general order of Nature is due to Mind, the character of that Mind is such as it is conceived to be by the most highly developed form of religion. A conclusion which is no doubt the opposite of that which we reached by contemplating the phenomena of biology; and a contradiction which can only be overcome by supposing, either that Nature conceals God, while man reveals Him, or that Nature reveals God while man misrepresents Him.