If there is one department of knowledge more than another in which a contemptuous disregard of the meditations and theories of distant periods and nations is misplaced, it is in the philosophy of man,—which can have no adequate breadth of basis till it reposes on the consciousness and covers the mental experience of the universal race; and to construct which out of purely personal materials, is like attempting to lay down the curves and finish the theory of terrestrial magnetism on the strength of a few closet experiments. No man, however large-thoughted and composite his mind, can accept of himself as the type of universal human nature. It will even be a great and rare endowment, if, with every aid of exact learning and unwearying patience, he is able to penetrate the atmosphere of others' understanding, and to observe the forms and colors which the objects of contemplation assume, when beheld through this peculiar medium. Simply to avail one's self of the experience of mankind, and know what it has really been, demands no little scope of imagination and versatility of intellectual sympathy. When these qualities are so deficient in a thinker that he cannot well achieve this knowledge, it is a great misfortune to his philosophy; when the want is such that he does not even desire it, it amounts to an absolute disqualification. Without, therefore, pledging ourselves to the eclectic principles which prevail in the present school of philosophy in France, we must beware of the intolerant dogmatism of Bentham in England, sanctioned, as we have seen, by one of the masters of the antagonist metaphysics in Germany. Indeed, it will be a chief purpose of all my lectures to enable you to profit by the light of other minds; in every province of the vast region which we shall explore together, to indicate the paths which they have traversed before, nor ever to turn away from their points of discovery, without raising some rude monument at least of honest and commemorative praise. To introduce you to the works, to interpret the difficulties, to do honor to the labors, to review the opinions, of the great masters of speculative thought in every age and in many lands, will be an indispensable portion of my duty;—a task most arduous indeed, but than which none can be more grateful to one who loves to trace, through all their affinities, the indestructible types of truth and beauty in the human mind; and to mark the natural laws, connecting together the most opposite continents and climes of thought, as parts, successively colonized and cultivated, of one great intellectual world. But in addition to the study of the several classes of psychological and moral doctrine as they present themselves in the order of science, it will be important to spread out the literature of philosophy before us in the order of time; to gain an insight into the natural development of successive modes of thought on speculative subjects; to notice the action and reaction of philosophy and practical life; to ascertain whether opinion on these abstract matters really advances into knowledge and has any determinate progression, or whether it oscillates for ever on either side of some fixed idea, or line of mental gravitation. In short, having surveyed our subject systematically, we shall go over it again chronologically; and call upon philosophy, when it has recited its creed, and revealed its wisdom, to finish all by writing its history.
The hints given in Mr. Martineau's frequent references to the bearing of scientific knowledge and laws upon theological speculations are very important. We adduce a single example.
PHYSICAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.
An accomplished and thoughtful observer of nature—Hugh Miller, the geologist—has somewhere remarked, that religion has lost its dependence on metaphysical theories, and must henceforth maintain itself upon the domain of physical science. He accordingly exhorts the guardians of sacred truth to prepare themselves for the approaching crisis in its history, by exchanging the study of thoughts for the apprehension of things, and carefully cultivating the habit of inductive research. The advice is excellent, and proceeds from one whose own example has amply proved its worth; and unless the clergy qualify themselves to take part in the discussions which open themselves with the advance of natural knowledge, they will assuredly be neither secure in their personal convictions nor faithful to their public trust. The only fault to be found with this counsel is, that in recommending one kind of knowledge it disparages another, and betrays that limited intellectual sympathy which is the bane of all noble culture. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, so far from succeeding to the inheritance of metaphysics, do but enrich its problems with new conceptions and give a larger outline to its range; and should they, in the wantonness of their young ascendency, persuade men to its neglect, they will pay the penalties of their contempt by the appearance of confusion in their own doctrine. The advance of any one line of human thought demands—especially for the security of faith—the parallel movement of all the rest; and the attempt to substitute one intellectual reliance for another, mistakes for progress of knowledge what may be only an exchange of ignorance. In particular, the study of external nature must proceed pari passu with the study of the human mind; and the errors of an age too exclusively reflective will not be remedied, but only reversed, by mere reaction into sciences of outward fact and observation. These physical pursuits, followed into their further haunts, rapidly run up into a series of notions common to them all,—expressed by such words as Law, Cause, Force,—which at once transfer the jurisdiction from the provincial courts of the special sciences to the high chancery of universal philosophy. To conduct the pleadings—still more to pronounce the judgment—there, other habits of mind are needed than are required in the museum and the observatory; and the history of knowledge, past and present, abounds with instances of men who, with the highest merit in particular walks of science, have combined a curious incompetency of survey over the whole. Hence, very few natural philosophers, however eminent for great discoveries and dreaded by the priesthood of their day, have made any deep and durable impression on the religious conception of the universe, as the product and expression of an Infinite Mind; and in tracing the eras of human faith, the deep thinker comes more prominently into view than the skilful interrogator of nature. In the history of religion, Plato is a greater figure than Archimedes; Spinoza than Newton; Hume and Kant than Volta and La Place; even Thomas Carlyle than Justus Liebig. Our picture indeed of the system of things is immensely enlarged, both in space and duration, by the progress of descriptive science; and the grouping of its objects and events is materially changed. But the altered scene carries with it the same expression to the soul; speaks the same language as to its origin; renews its ancient glance with an auguster beauty; and, in spite of all dynamic theories, reproduces the very modes of faith and doubt which belonged to the age both of the old Organon and of the new.
The ultimate problem of all philosophy and all religion is this: "How are we to conceive aright the origin and first principle of things?" The answers, it has been contended by a living author of distinguished merit, are necessarily reducible to two, between which all systems are divided, and on the decision of whose controversy, all antagonist speculations would lay down their arms. "In the beginning was Force," says one class of thinkers; "force, singular or plural, splitting into opposites, standing off into polarities, ramifying into attractions and repulsions, heat and magnetism, and climbing through the stages of physical, vital, animal, to the mental life itself." "On the contrary," says the other class, "in the beginning was Thought; and only in the necessary evolution of its eternal ideas into expression does force arise,—self-realizing thought declaring itself in the types of being and the laws of phenomena." We need hardly say, that the former of these two notions coalesces with the creed of Atheism, and is most frequently met with upon the path of the physical sciences, while the latter is favored by the mathematical and metaphysical, and gives the essence of Pantheism. Each of them has insurmountable difficulties, with which it is successfully taunted by the other. Start from blind force; and how, by any spinning from that solitary centre, are we ever to arrive at the seeing intellect? Can the lower create the higher, and the unconscious enable us to think? Start from pure thinking, and how then can you get any force for the production of objective effects? How metamorphose a passage of dialect into the power of gravitation, and a silent corollary into a flash of lightning? In taking the intellect as the type of God, this difficulty must always be felt. We are well aware that it is not in this endowment that our dynamic energy resides. The activity which we ascribe to our intellect is not a power going out into external efficiency, but a mere passage across the internal field of successive thoughts as spontaneous phenomena. Nor have we, as thinking beings only, any option with respect to the thoughts thus streaming over the theatre of rational consciousness; our constitution legislates for us in this particular, and the order of suggestion is determined by laws having their seat in us. Finally, we are not, by mere thinking capacity, constituted persons, any more than a sleeper who should never wake, yet always be engaged with rational and scientific dreams, would be a person. Without some further endowment, we should only be a logical life and development. All these characters are imported into the conception of God, when he is represented as conforming to the type of reason. The activity of intellect being wholly internal, the phenomena of the Universe could not be referred to Him as a thinking being, were they not gathered up into the interior of his nature, and conceived, not as objective effects of his power, but as purely subjective successions within the theatre of his infinitude. Intellect again having no option, the God of this theory is without freedom, and is represented as the eternal necessity of reason. And lastly, in fidelity to the same analogy, He is not a divine Person, but rather a Thinking Thing, or the thinking function of the universe; we may say, universal science in a state of self-consciousness. The necessity under which Pantheism lies, of fetching all that is to be referred to God into the interior of his being, and dealing with it as not less a necessary manifestation of his mental essence than are our ideas of the mind that has them, explains the unwillingness of this system to allow any motives to God, any field of objective operation, any special relation to individuals, any revealing interposition, any supernatural agency.
Is it however true, that human belief can only choose between these two extremes, and must oscillate eternally between the Atheistic homage to Force, and the Pantheistic to Thought? Far from it; and it is curiously indicative of the state of the philosophic atmosphere in Germany, that one of her most discerning and wide-seeing authors should find no third possibility within the sphere of vision. In any latitude except one in which moral science has altogether melted away in the universal solvent of metaphysics, it would occur as one of the most obvious suggestions, that the intellect is not the only element of human nature which may be taken as type of the Divine, and as furnishing a possible solution to the problem of origination. Quitting the two poles of extreme philosophy, confessedly incompetent in their separation, we submit that Will presents the middle point which takes up into itself Thought on the one hand and Force on the other; and which yet, so far from appearing to us as a compound arising out of them as an effect, is more easily conceived than either as the originating prefix of all phenomena. It has none of the disqualifications which we have remarked as flowing from the others into their respective systems of doctrine. It carries with it, in its very idea, the co-presence of Thought, as the necessary element within whose sphere it has to manifest itself. Its phenomena cannot exist alone; it acts on preconceptions, which stand related to it, however, not as its source, but as its conditions, and are its co-ordinates in the effect rather than its generating antecedents. If therefore all things are issued by Will, there is Mind at the fountain-head, and the absurdity is avoided of deriving intelligence from unintelligence. While it thus escapes the difficulty of passing from mere Force to Thought, it is equally clear of the opposite difficulty of making mere Thought supply any Force. The activity of Will is not, like that of Intellect, a subjective transit of regimented ideas, but an objective power going out for the production of effects; nay, it is a free power, exercising preference among data furnished by internal or external conditions present in its field; and it thus constitutes proper Causality, which always implies control over an alternative. We need hardly add, that all the requisites are thus complete for the true idea of a Person; and an Infinite Being contemplated under this type is neither a fateful nor a logical principle of necessity, but a living God, out of whose purposed legislation has sprung whatever necessity there is, except the self-existent beauty of his holiness. Thus, between the Force of the physical Atheist, and the Thought of the metaphysical Pantheist, we fix upon the fulcrum of Will as the true balance-point of a moral Theism.
It would be impossible, perhaps, to find anywhere a finer instance of perspicuity in condensation, than is given in the following reference to
LESSING'S THEOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS.
Lessing refused to surrender Christianity, on proof of error in its first teachers, uncertainty in its reported miracles, contradictions in its early literature, misapplication of Messianic prophecies. All these he regards as but the external accidents, the transitory media, of the religion, constituting, it may be, its support in one age and its weakness in another. They do not belong to its inner essence, in which alone the real evidence of spiritual truth is found; and he who detects anything amiss with them may even render a service by driving men from sham-proofs, that really persuade no one, to true ones that lie at the heart of things. Religious doctrine cannot be deduced from mere historical facts without a μεταβασις εις αλλο γενος vitiating the whole process. Facts indeed may become the proper ground of moral and spiritual faith; but then they must be facts which come over again and again, and betray an element that is permanent and eternal; which form part of the experience and consciousness of humanity; and ally themselves with the Divine by not losing their presence in the world. But unrepeated facts, which limit themselves to a moment, which are the incidents of a single personality, and are left behind quite insulated in the past, show—were it only by your not expecting them again—that they are detached from the persistent and essential life of the universe and humanity. They are but once and away; and least of all, therefore, can testify of the untransitory and ever-living. The real can teach us only so far as it has an ideal kernel, redeeming it from the character of a solitary phenomenon. Among the various expositions and applications of this favorite theme of Lessing's, we select the following sentences from his Axiomata.
1. "The Bible evidently contains more than belongs to Religion."