[172] Since Comte's time it has been shown that mental development is no very difficult process, provided we assume that several principles which consciousness distinguishes and sometimes places in antagonism, may be treated as equivalents, and be resolved into each other interchangeably. For example, we have been apt to reverence those who suffered the loss of all things rather than accept the Expedient as the Right, and who died resolute in disallowing the rule of policy to be pleaded in foro conscientiæ. We have also in common parlance asserted a distinction between these two principles, while holding that the one claims the other for its assured attendant. Honesty, we said, is the best policy; and we never meant thereby that thorough policy is the best policy. What we did mean was that a regard to expediency fails of the success which a straightforward observance of right deserves, and will at last obtain. But to make mental development easy, antitheses must appear fluent, the noble be convertible with the useful, the human with the merely animal. Thus, when Comte adored Clotilde, and Dante immortalized Beatrice, they rehearsed for a millionth time the loves of preadamite plants. Coleridge used to maintain that the test of a philosophy was its ultimate coincidence with common sense. In the theories under consideration, right is philosophically resolved into the greater happiness of the greater number, and this equivalent exactly coincides with the common sense of starving thinkers who are possessed by a fixed idea that the happiness of the impoverished many is promoted by an opportune pillage of the wealthy few.
It is less easy to verify mental development than to theorize upon it, yet verification may not be impossible! If disbelief in a future life, denial of responsibility, duty, and morality, as opposed to expediency, make sufficient way in the world, and if practice harmonize with speculation, progress may become more evidently regress, and Man be proved a brute animal at last. The promising events in France are patent to every one; a less known, but still more encouraging fact, which we learn on scientific authority, is that certain Basuto tribes have lately adopted the (to them) novel custom of cannibalism.
Pending the hoped-for verification, if an identity of human with animal nature be accepted as provisionally true, it may be as well to anticipate a few of its logical consequences. Eating the flesh of our instinctive congeners ought positively to be discountenanced; or, as men and women are simply animal, all carnivorous human beings should on compulsion become cannibals. Despotism being the form of government adopted by us with general applause, as regards the animal kingdom, it cannot be too soon transferred to our own mismanaged nationalities. In a word, our practices in reference to men, women, beasts, fishes, birds, and reptiles, ought to be made uniform. Above all, the new school-boards should be charged with the education of our poor relations, and the linguistic professors of Oxford and Cambridge be instructed to use every effort for the promotion of a universal language. Charity may be thought by some to begin at home, therefore a commencement may be made with the domesticated irrationals, finches spaniels, cats, hackneys, sheep, mules, all asses, all pigs, and all monkey favourites. It is just possible that volatile creatures unaccustomed to habits of reflection (some tribes of light-minded birds, for example) may find abstract ideas and declarative sentences a little difficult. Yet, after all, it need not be such a long step in the case of contemplative owls; and we may then apply the old proverb, "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte." At all events, the "Simious process," so successful in our world of fashion, will be likely to suffice with every well-disposed chimpanzee; the circle of knowledge will continually widen until the world of animals becomes identified with the world of man. Then, but not till then, the astonished psychologist may cease his useless labours, and record the inauguration of a new era by acknowledging
"Omnia jam fient fieri quæ posse negabam;"
or, still more conclusively,
"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything, and everything is nought."
ON SCIENCE AND REVELATION.
[173] In an answer to this lecture by "Julian," it is replied that "Belief is the easiest thing possible for weak and ignorant minds." But Julian by belief means acquiescence; and every church-goer is aware that the worthlessness of mere acquiescence is constantly being urged upon them from the pulpit. It holds the same relation to faith that respectability—i.e., acquiescence in the ordinary standard of morality—holds to holiness. The subject is too difficult to be discussed adequately in a note; but in my first Bampton Lecture I have shown how belief, though gained by a struggle, is equally possible for the unlearned and the learned, but in every case it has to be won by an effort (Mal. xi. 12).
[174] "Julian" asserts that there ought not to be any difficulty. "There ought not to be the least shadow of doubt whether a given book is from God or not" (p. 5): "If the handwriting of Jehovah in the Scriptures be doubtful, it cannot be divine." But, as Bishop Butler has shown in his "Analogy," there are no difficulties, as regards Revelation, different in kind from those which we daily encounter in common life. "Julian's" easy assertions involve a tremendous difficulty; for what he virtually affirms is that God ought to have acted, in matters of religion, in an entirely different way from that in which He has acted in the ordinary constitution of this world. The whole question turns upon something quite as much out of "Julian's" depth as it is out of mine; namely, what was God's purpose in creating man. By the study of "the constitution and course of nature," and of what is said in Holy Scripture, I arrive at the conclusion that God has, for some wise purpose, been pleased to place man here in a state of discipline. Such a state implies the existence of difficulties; the greatness and degree of these difficulties we can know solely by experience, being able only to guess at the reasons which have made a state of probation necessary for us. But the difficulties must not be insuperable; for if they were, then this present state would be a discipline no longer.
[175] Mr. Darwin, in his "Descent of Man" (i. 201–206), enumerates the several stages through which man is supposed to have passed, of which the first stage is an imaginary "group of animals, resembling in many respects the larvæ of our present Ascidians, which diverged into two great branches—the one retrograding in development, and producing the present class of Ascidians, the other rising to the Vertebrata." He further describes these Ascidians as "hardly appearing like animals, and consisting of a simple, tough, leathery sack, with two small projecting orifices." I must own that in Mr. Darwin's book I can find no proof either of the degradation of the present race of Ascidians or of the development of their cousins, whom Mr. Darwin has summoned into existence to serve his purpose, into apes. The work is full of interesting facts and ingenious speculations, but the speculations can scarcely be said to have consistency enough to merit the name even of a theory.