Then, in the third place, any plausible conceptions we can form of the ultimate nature of matter lead to the belief that even that is an event or effect, a something derivative and caused. It must be admitted that the most plausible of these conceptions are vague and conjectural. We have a practical and relative knowledge of matter which is both exact and trustworthy,—a knowledge of its properties from which we can mathematically deduce a multitude of remote consequences of an extremely precise character—but we are hardly entitled to characterise as knowledge at all any of the views which have been propounded as to what it is in itself. It is only the unreflecting who fancy that matter in itself is something very clear and obvious, which they may apprehend by merely opening their eyes and stretching out their hands. Those who have never reasoned on the subject are apt to imagine that the nature of matter is of all things the easiest to understand, and they unhesitatingly invest it with their own sensations and perceptions. That is the so-called commonsense view of matter; but the slightest inquiry proves it to be delusive and nonsensical. Colour, for example, is just what is seen, and sound just what is heard; they are not qualities inherent in objects independent of the eye and ear: the matter which is supposed to cause by its motions on our senses these and other perceptions of the material world, we cannot see, hear, or apprehend by any sense. Change our senses and the universe will be thereby changed, everything in it becoming something other than it was before, green perhaps red, the bitter sweet, the loudest noise a gentle whisper, the hardest substance soft. As soon, then, as we thoughtfully ask ourselves, What is matter? we begin to discover that it is in itself something utterly mysterious. The collection of phenomena which we call its properties are quite unlike the phenomena of mind in this most important respect, that whatever they may be they are not what they appear to be. A state of mind is what we feel it to be; a state of matter is certainly not what we seem to ourselves to perceive it to be. No one, of course, knew all this better than Mr Mill. He, as a philosopher, had asked himself what matter is; he had formed a theory in answer to the question. And what is his theory? Just this,—that we cannot find a permanent element in matter; that we have no right to suppose that there is a permanent real existence or actual substance in matter; that all that we are warranted to affirm about the ultimate nature of matter is that it is a permanent possibility,—the permanent possibility of sensations. That was the conclusion which he arrived at when he theorised on matter without any theological aim. But he appears to have forgotten it when he came to criticise the argument for a first cause. He could not otherwise have written as if it were quite certain that there was in matter "a permanent element," not an underlying possibility but an inherent real substance. Had he remembered what his own theory as to the nature of matter was, he would have avoided as utterly untrue and misleading every expression which could suggest the notion of there being a permanent element in matter, and would have admitted that very probably the permanent possibilities of sensation, the causes of all material phenomena, lay in the Divine will, since he had been unable to find anything else permanent in which they could be supposed to subsist. That is a view which many profound thinkers have adopted. They have been led to hold that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that the whole material world is ultimately resolvable into forces; and that all its forces are but manifestations or outgoings of will-force. If so, the whole material world is not only dependent on, but is, the will of God, and has no being of any kind apart from the will of God. If so, God's will is not only the cause and controlling power of nature, but its substance, its self. And this view, that what alone substantially underlies all the phenomena we designate material is an acting mind, an energising will, has not only been reached by mental philosophers and idealistic speculators, but by those physicists who, like Boscovitch and Faraday, have found themselves forced to conclude that what is constitutive of matter is not indivisible particles, even infinitesimally small, but mere centres of force, since force necessarily implies some sort of substance, and, therefore, spirit where not matter.
But suppose the substratum of the universe to consist of a countless number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, and do we not even on this hypothesis reach by a single step the truth on which theism rests, and on which only theism can be based? "None of the processes of nature," says one of the most eminent of our physical philosophers, "since the time when nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. On the other hand, the exact quality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent. Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which science must stop. Not that science is debarred from studying the external mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural."[16] I believe that no reply to these words of Professor Clark Maxwell is possible from any one who holds the ordinary view of scientific men as to the ultimate constitution of matter. They must suppose every atom, every molecule, to be of such a nature, to be so related to others, and to the universe generally, that things may be such as we see them to be; but this their fitness to be built up into the structure of the universe is a proof that they have been made fit, and since natural forces could not have acted on them while not yet existent, a supernatural power must have created them, and created them with a view to their manifold uses. Every atom, every molecule, must even in what is ultimate in it bear the impress of a Supernatural Power and Wisdom; must, from the very nature of the case, reflect the glory of God and proclaim its dependence upon Him.
In like manner the latest speculation regarding the nature of matter—the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson—seems, so far from having any tendency to exclude creative action, necessarily to imply it. He supposes that the atoms may be small vortex-rings in the ether, the rotating portions of a perfect fluid which fills all space. But a perfect fluid can neither explain its own existence nor the commencement of rotation in any part of it. Rotation once commenced in a perfect or frictionless and incompressible fluid would continue for ever, but it never could naturally commence. There is nothing in a perfect fluid to account either for the origin or cessation of rotation, and consequently nothing, on the vortex-atom hypothesis, to account either for the production or destruction of an atom of matter. The origin and cessation of rotation in fluids are due to their imperfection, their internal friction, their viscosity. The origin or cessation of rotation in a perfect fluid must be the effect of supernatural action; in other words, every vortex-atom must owe the rotation which gives it its individuality to a Divine impulse.
A theist has certainly no need, then, to be afraid of researches into the ultimate nature of matter. Our knowledge thereof is exceedingly small and imperfect, but all that we do know of it, all that we can even rationally conceive of it, leads to the inference that it is not self-existent, but the work of God. The farther research is pushed, the more clearly, we may be assured, will this become apparent, for the more wonderfully adapted will the ultimate constituents of matter be found for assuming countless forms and composing countless objects—the air, the land, the sea, and starry heavens, with all that in or on them is. Research has already shown us reason to believe "that even chemical atoms are very complicated structures; that an atom of pure iron is probably a vastly more complicated system than that of the planets and their satellites; that each constituent of a chemical atom must go through an orbit in the millionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in which it successively or simultaneously is under the influence of many other constituents, or possibly comes into collision with them; that each of these particles is, as Sir John Herschel has beautifully said, for ever solving differential equations which, if written out in full, might perhaps belt the earth."[17] Now, what does this mean, if not that every ultimate atom of matter is full to the very heart of it with evidences of the power and wisdom of God, and that every particle of dust or drop of water is crowded with traces of the action of the Divine Reason, not less marvellous, it may be, than those which astronomy exhibits in the structure of the heavens and the evolutions of the heavenly bodies? Those who hoped that molecular science would help them to get rid of God have obviously made a profound mistake. It has already shown far more clearly than ever was or could have been anticipated, that every atom of matter points back beyond itself to the all-originating will of God, and refuses to receive the idolatrous homage of those who would put it in the place of God.
To these considerations it has to be added that some of our ablest physicists believe that in the present age a strictly scientific proof has been found of the position that the universe had a beginning in time. "According to Sir W. Thomson's deductions from Fourier's Theory of Heat, we can trace down the dissipation of heat by conduction and radiation to an infinitely distant time when all things will be uniformly cold. But we cannot similarly trace the heat-history of the universe to an infinite distance in the past. For a certain negative value of the time the formulæ give impossible values, indicating that there was some initial distribution of heat which could not have resulted, according to known laws of nature, from any previous distribution. There are other cases in which a consideration of the dissipation of energy leads to the conception of a limit to the antiquity of the present order of things."[18] If this theory be true, physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly teaches that creation took place, that the present system of nature and its laws originated at an approximately assignable date in the past. The theory is supported by the most eminent physical philosophers of this country, and if there be any oversight or error in the principles or calculations on which it is founded, it would appear not to have been as yet detected. It is a theory on which, however, only specialists are entitled to pronounce judgment; and therefore, although those who assume that matter was not created are bound to refute it, I do not wish myself to lay any stress upon it—the more especially as I believe that apart from it there is amply sufficient evidence for holding that "Nature is but the name for an effect whose cause is God."[19]
II.
It seems to me, then, that the universe when examined must be concluded to be throughout—from centre to circumference—alike in what is most permanent and what is most changeable in it,—an event or effect, and that its only adequate cause is a Supreme Intelligence. It is only such a cause which is sufficient to explain the universe as we know it, and that universe is what has to be explained. The assertion of Kant that the principle of causality cannot take us beyond the limits of the sensible world is only true if causality be confined to strictly material events which display no signs of law and order, and the progress of science is one long uninterrupted proof that no such events are to be discovered; that it is hopeless to look for them; that matter and its changes are ordained, arranged, adjusted phenomena. The assertion of Kant is clearly false, if we are not to exclude from the event anything which demands explanation; if we are to reason from the universe itself and not from its name; if we are to infer a particular cause from a knowledge of the nature of a given particular event. This, the so-called concrete use of the principle of causality, is the only use of it which is legitimate, the only use of it which is not extremely childish.
The opposite—the absurd—notion that the principle of causality is abstractly applied, has led some to argue that it leads legitimately to nothing else than an infinite regress—an eternal succession of causes and effects. But whatever it may lead to, it certainly does not lead to that conclusion, and has never led any human being, either legitimately or illegitimately, to that conclusion. Those even who have maintained that the principle of causality cannot lead to a first cause, to an eternal self-existent cause, but only to an eternal succession of causes and effects, have all, without a single exception, allowed themselves to be led by it to a first cause and not to an eternal succession of causes. They have all believed what they say they ought to have disbelieved; they have all disbelieved what they say they ought to have believed. They have all accepted as true that there is a first and self-existent cause, although some have supposed it to be matter, some mind, some within the world, some without the world. They have differed as to what it is, but not as to that it is. None of them have adopted the conclusion to which they have said the argument founded on causation logically leads. No man has ever adopted that conclusion. The human mind universally and instantaneously rejects it as inconceivable, unthinkable, self-contradictory, absurd. We may believe either in a self-existent God or in a self-existent world, and must believe in one or the other; we cannot believe in an infinite regress of causes. The alternatives of a self-existent cause and an infinite regress of causes are not, as some would represent, equally credible alternatives. The one is an indubitable truth, the other is a manifest absurdity. The one all men believe, the other no man believes.
This takes away, it seems to me, all force from the objection that the argument founded on the principle of causality when it infers God as the self-existent cause of the universe infers more than is strictly warranted, a self-existent cause being something which does not in itself fall under the principle of causality. That every event must have a cause will be valid, it is said, for an endless series of causes and effects; but if you stop, if you affirm the existence of what is uncaused, of what is at once, as it were, cause and effect, you may affirm what is true, but you affirm also what is independent of the principle of causation. You claim more than your argument entitles you to; you are not developing a logical conclusion, but concealing under a term which seems to express the same idea what is really the vaulting of the mind to a higher idea which cannot be expressed under the form efficient cause at all.