Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

[97] Prof. Huxley, who claims a sort of patent right or priority of invention in the term and doctrine "agnosticism."

[98] "There are some things I know and some things I believe," said the Syrian; "I know that I have a soul, and I believe that it is immortal." ...

"I wish I could assure myself of the personality of the Creator," said Lothair; "I cling to that, but they say it is unphilosophical!" "In what sense," asked the Syrian, "is it more unphilosophical to believe in a personal God, omnipotent and omniscient, than in natural forces, unconscious and irresistible? Is it unphilosophical to combine power with intelligence?"—Disraeli's "Lothair."

[99] The practice of judging of the future by the past is sometimes treated as if it were a mere habit of the uncultivated and undisciplined part of mankind—a kind of mental weakness. Undoubtedly, our past experience is not always an infallible guide to what is to be our experience in the future. We often have to correct our past experience, by carefully separating the accidental from the essential; by more comprehensive analysis of the facts which constitute our former experience. But when we have full, comprehensive, and accurate views of that which has happened to us heretofore, our beliefs in what is to happen to us hereafter are not only attained by a safe process of reasoning, but that process is imposed upon us by a law of our mental constitution.

[100] "Nineteenth Century" for November, 1884, p. 827.

[101] Grote's "Plato," iii, pp. 284, 285.

[102] Grote's "Plato," iii, p. 285, and notes.

[103] Grote's "Plato," iii, p. 181 et seq.

[104] The contradictions between Plato's ideas of the origin of beliefs in the gods, as given in his various writings, are of course unimportant in reference to the present discussion. In the "Timæus," as Mr. Grote has pointed out, Plato "accepts the received genealogy of the gods, upon the authority of the sons and early descendants of the gods. These eons must have known their own fathers; we ought, therefore, to 'follow the law and believe them,' though they spoke without either probable or demonstrative proof.... That which Plato here enjoins to be believed is the genealogy of Hesiod and other poets, though he does not expressly name the poets." (Grote, iii, p. 189, note.) In other words, the sons of the gods are authoritative witnesses to their genealogy, whose ipsi diximus must be believed. On the other hand, in his "Republic" and "Leges," Plato rejects the authority of those witnesses, and boldly proclaims that their legends are fictions, which must be displaced by better fictions, more consonant to a true ethical conception of the characters of the gods. It is the province of the lawgiver to supply these better legends, but they are all the while fictions, although the multitude do not know that they are so. Mr. Grote accounts for these and other discrepancies in the writings of Plato by explaining that his different dialogues are not interdependent productions, but separate disquisitions. (See his admirable and critical examination of the Platonic canon, in Chapters IV, V, VI, of his first volume.)

[105] The reader will understand that I do not assert this to be what astronomers teach, but I maintain it to be a rational deduction from the facts which they furnish to us.