The positive knowledge about the world possessed at any period by the human race cannot fail to modify both theology and metaphysic. Theology, while philosophizing the immediate data of faith, professes to embrace and account for all known facts in a comprehensive system, which includes the hypotheses of revelation; while popular religion rests upon opinions and figurative conceptions formed concerning the first cause of the phenomena observed around us and within us. The systems of theology and the opinions of popular religion must, therefore, from time to time in the world's history, vary according as more or less is actually known, and according as the mind has greater or lesser power of analyzing and co-ordinating its stores of knowledge. Metaphysic is the critical examination and construction into a connected scheme of the results obtained by experience—mental, moral, and physical—subjected to reflection, and regarded in their most abstract form as thoughts. It follows of necessity that any revolution in the method of observation and analysis, like that which has been going on during the last three centuries, whereby our conception of the world as a whole is altered, must supply metaphysic with new subject-matter and new methods, and force it to the reconsideration of important problems. Meanwhile, the faculty of thought itself undergoes no essential transformation; our mental and moral nature remains substantially the same. What has always happened, and what alone can happen, is that fresh pabulum is offered to the thinking being, which has to be assimilated to its organism and digested for its nourishment. Consequently we cannot expect to have a sudden and illuminating revolution in psychology and ethics. But, while we learn fresh facts about the universe, our notions concerning the nature of the first cause and the relation of man to his environments, whether expressed in systems by theology and philosophy, or in opinions by popular religion, must of necessity be exposed to alteration. To adjust ourselves to this change without sacrificing what is vitally important in religion as the basis of morality is our difficulty.
Physical science, to begin with, has destroyed that old conception of the universe which made this globe central and of paramount importance. The discoveries of Galileo and Newton first led to a right theory of the planetary movements. The chemists of the last hundred years have substituted an accurate analysis of primitive substances for rough guesses at the four elements. The establishment of the law of the conservation of force has demonstrated the unity of all cosmical operations from the most gigantic to the most minute. Geology, together with the speculations of comparative anatomists and naturalists, has altered all our notions with regard to the age of the world, and to the antecedents and early history of the human race. The results gathered during the last three centuries in these and other fields of investigation render it certain that mankind has occupied but a brief moment in the long life of our globe, and tend to prove that our duration here will, at an enormously but not incalculably distant period, be rendered impossible by the action of those very forces which called us into being. The years of humanity are therefore "a scape in oblivion." Man, for whom, according to the author of Genesis, the sun and moon and stars were made, is shown to be among the less important products of the cosmical system. We are no permanent owners, but the brief tenants of our tiny globe. Nor need this terrify or startle us. Each man expects the certainty of his own dissolution. The race must learn that it also is ephemeral. For this our religions have already prepared us. But what is new in the prospect revealed by science is that, not by a sudden tempest of vindictive fire from heaven, but in the tranquil course of the long life of nature, such euthanasia is prepared for men. As the universe subsisted countless æons before our birth, so will it survive our loss, and scarcely keep a trace of our existence.
At the same time the spiritual conditions of humanity remain unaltered. Men we are; men we must be: to find out what is truly human, essential to the highest type and utmost happiness of man, is still our most absorbing interest. Nor need we abandon that noblest of all formulas: "To fear God and to keep his commands is the whole duty of man;" provided we are careful to accept the word God as the name of a hitherto unapprehended energy, the symbol of that which is the life and thought and motion of the universe whereof we are a part, the ideal towards which we are forever struggling on the toilsome path of spiritual evolution, the unknown within us and without us which is the one vital, irremovable reality. Science, which consists in the determination of laws,[297] compels us to believe that, as in the physical world invariable sequences are observed, so also in the moral nature of man must comprehensive rules and explanations of phenomena be observable. It is but the refusal to apply to moral problems the scientific method with unflinching logic which leads certain otherwise positive thinkers to recognize "the freedom of human volition" as an incalculable and arbitrary element, and thus to withdraw human conduct from the sphere of exact investigation. To know God in the physical order is to know what has been, and what is, and what will be in the economy of primeval forces. To know God in the moral order is to know what has been, and what is, and what will be within the region of the human consciousness. To obey God in the physical order is to control those forces for our own use as far as our constitution will permit; for thus we energize in harmony with the universe. To obey God in the moral order is to act in accordance with those hitherto discovered laws which have carried the race onward from barbarism to self-knowledge and self-control, and with all our might and main to strive for further precision in their determination. But even here is the debatable ground; here is the point at issue; here confessedly is the region that has never yet been subjected to science.
The analogy of scientific discovery forces us to look no longer for the actual fiats of a divine voice on Sinai, but to expect that by interrogating humanity itself we shall ultimately demonstrate those unchangeable decrees by conforming to which our race may pass from strength to strength. We must cease to be clairvoyants and become analysts, verifying our intuitions by positive investigation. For the old term Commandment, which implies the will of a sovereign, our present condition of knowledge leads us to substitute the new term Law as defined above.[298] This, although the subject-matter and even the practical result remain unchanged, is no slight alteration. It implies a new motion, both popular and scientific, of the divine in nature, a new criterion of what is right and wrong, and in the last resort a new metaphysic.
But with a view to this end we have to introduce a more stringent and painstaking method into ethics. We must be content to abandon dogmatism upon insoluble questions, however fascinating and imperious; we must above all things quit delusions, however sanctioned by ancient reverence. And here both faith and courage are needed. To believe that the moral laws are within us, requiring to be disentangled, without the aid of an authentic revelation, from the mass of phenomena, in the same way as physical laws have been abstracted from facts by scientific reasoning, demands a virile and firm confidence in the order of the universe and in the intellectual faculty of man.
Hitherto in ethics we have proceeded on the a priori road; we have assumed certain hypotheses, or supposed fixed starting-points, concerning the origin and the destiny of mankind, about both of which things we know absolutely nothing for sure. Starting with a theological system, which accounted for the creation of man and the nature of evil in close connection with a definite but delusive cosmogony, taking a future state of happiness or misery for granted, we have brought our dreams to bear upon the springs of conduct. It is precisely at this point that science, partly by the revolution effected in cosmical theory, partly by the exhibition of the true method of analysis, helps to free us from what is fanciful, and to indicate the right way for the future. It has proved in one realm of knowledge that an advance towards truth must not be expected from systems professing to set forth the causes of phenomena, but from a gradual and patient exploration of the phenomena themselves. Not matter, but the qualities of what we call matter as subject to our senses are the object of physical science. Not God, but human conduct, must be the object of moral science, albeit the ideal that guides human conduct will continue to be worshipped as our God. Nor will it here avail to demur that the human will is essentially free, and therefore not subject to law in the strictly scientific sense. Each step we make in the investigation of heredity, and all the other conditions to which man is subject, forces us more and more plainly to the conclusion that the very seat of our supposed liberty, our desires and personal peculiarities, distinctive tastes and special predilections, are determined for us in great measure by circumstances beyond our own control. The force of these circumstances, separately and in combination, could be estimated if we possessed but the complete data for forming such a calculation; nor does this certainty destroy the fact that each new personality introduces a new element into the sequence. It narrows the field wherein volition can move freely, but leaves the soul still self-determining and capable of being shaped. What is really incalculable is not the sphere of action for the individual, but the source of energy in the universe, in vital connection with which we live both physically and mentally. We are what we are, each of us, by no freak of chance, by no act of arbitrary spontaneity; and our prayers must take the form dictated by Cleanthes:
Lead thou me, God, Law, Reason, Motion, Life!
All names alike for thee are vain and hollow.
Lead me; for I will follow without strife;
Or if I strive, still must I blindly follow.
For many centuries physical science itself suffered from the dead weight of abstract notions accepted as data, and was inert for want of a true method. Its recent successes are an index to the advance which moral science might make if it could adopt the right way of investigation, comparison, and reflective reasoning. At the same time it must be confessed that for moral science this method has not as yet been made either easy of application or fruitful of results. Our subject-matter is so complex and so apparently distinct from sensible existence as to seem intangible. Both thought and language are the heritage of countless generations, wherein a medley of guesses and confused conceptions are stored. Of general laws in ethics we have as yet but instinctive, and as it were æsthetic, perceptions, fortified and enforced by theological beliefs, or converted into intellectual notions by philosophy. Still, this need not disturb us, when we reflect how long it was before the true method of scientific discovery in the analysis of matter was brought to light, and what a continuous progress from one determination to another followed upon the single law established in explanation of terrestrial gravity. The scientific solution of one ethical problem, whether that be ultimately effected through physiology by the establishment of correspondences between the physical and moral functions of humanity, or through comparative history and the study of evolution, may prove as fruitful for ethics as the discovery of Galileo was for physics. It is impossible to utter dogmatic predictions at this point of our knowledge. Yet we may indulge in hopes that are of the nature of dreams. Can we not in this way venture to anticipate that the men of the future may obtain demonstrated certainty with regard to man considered as an integral portion of the universe; that they may understand the conditions of his conduct as clearly as we now apprehend the behavior of certain gases; and that their problem will be, not how to check healthy normal appetites, but how to multiply and fortify faculties? Can we not dream that morality will be one branch of the study of the world as a whole, a department of τὰ φυσικά, when φύσις, regarded as a total unity, that suffers no crude radical distinction of mind and body, has absorbed our scientific attention?
We need not fear that either the new notion of Deity forced upon us by the extension of our knowledge, even should this destroy the last vestige of anthropomorphism, or the involved application of a positive method to ethics, will lead to what is dreaded as materialism. If materialism be not a mere name, it is feared because it is thought to imply egotism, immersion in sensuality, and indifference to ideas. But what is the prospect unrolled before us by science?[299] What is, in effect, the new intellectual atmosphere to which we must acclimatize our moral and religious sensibilities? Surely the most sublime, the most ideally imaginative, which it has ever been given to man to contemplate. The spectacle of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, alike of the mental and the physical, the natural and the supersensible, subordinated to unchangeable laws, and permeated by one single energy, revealed to us by science, contains nothing that need drive us to a stolid atheism, but rather such considerations as give the value of positive certainty to Christ's words about the sparrow. We know now that the whole past history of the universe is involved in the blood-beats of the smallest animalcule discernible by the microscope, that the farthest fixed star to which our telescopes have any access obeys the laws that determine the action of our muscles, that our thought holds in solution the experience of all preceding ages. If the religion of the future is to be founded on scientific bases of this nature, there is surely less room for the extravagances of egoism and sensuality than there was in the Catholic system from which emerged a Sixtus IV. and an Alexander VI. What St. Paul conceived but dimly, the physicist declares to us: we are all parts and members of the divine whole. It is the business of science not to make God nowhere in the universe, but everywhere, and to prove, what previous moralists have guessed, that the happiness and the freedom of man consist in his self-subordination to the laws of the world, whereof he is an essential, though an insignificant, part. Against the decrees of God, conceived as a sovereign subject to like fluctuations of emotion with ourselves, it was possible to offend again and again without losing the hope that at some facile moment, some mollia tempora fandi, he might be propitiated. The laws of the world are inexorable; they alone enforce with absolute equity the maxim τῷ δράσαντι παθεῖν.
Instead of materialism, it might be more reasonable, perhaps, to dread fatalism; but fatalism is a rock on which all systems, philosophical and religious, when carried to abstract conclusions, have tended to drift. Science cannot be more fatalistic than Calvinism; yet the instinctive belief in the liberty of the individual has survived all logic, and is likely still to do so till such time as the prevailing intuition shall be positively proved. And even were the conviction that we are not free agents in the old sense of the phrase to be forced upon us, the sting of fatalism would be extracted together with the belief in an omnipotent personality, framing men of set purpose for honor and dishonor. It was the clash of the human and the divine wills, both equally finite, though the latter was isolated by abstraction and ticketed with the epithet of infinity—in other words, the fiction of a despot ruling over slaves—that gave its terror to necessity.