Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.
Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes).
The above are from a series of word-pictures (see pp. [86], [122]).
If the collective energies of the universe are identified with Divine Will, and the system is thus animate with an eternal consciousness as its moulding life, the conception we frame of its history will conform itself to our experience of intellectual volition. It is in origination, in disposing of new conditions, in setting up order by differentiation, that the mind exercises its highest function. When the product has been obtained, and a definite method of procedure established, the strain upon us is relaxed, habit relieves the constant demand for creation, and at length the rules of a practised art almost execute themselves. As the intensely voluntary thus works itself off into the automatic, thought, liberated from this reclaimed and settled province breaks into new regions, and ascends to ever higher problems: its supreme life being beyond the conquered and legislated realm, while a lower consciousness, if any at all, suffices for the maintenance of its ordered mechanism. Yet all the while it is one and the same mind that, under different modes of activity, thinks the fresh thoughts and carries on the old usages. Does anything forbid us to conceive similarly of the cosmical development; that it started from the freedom of indefinite possibilities and the ubiquity of universal consciousness; that, as intellectual exclusions narrowed the field, and traced the definite lines of admitted movement, the tension of purpose, less needed on these, left them as the habits of the universe, and operated rather for higher and ever higher ends not yet provided for; that the more mechanical, therefore, a natural law may be, the further is it from its source; and that the inorganic and unconscious portion of the world, instead of being the potentiality of the organic and conscious, is rather its residual precipitate, formed as the Indwelling Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim on the upper margin of the ordered whole, and especially on the inner life of natures that can resemble him?
James Martineau (1805-1900) (Modern Materialism).
The remarkably fine and suggestive essay in which this passage occurs was written in 1876, in the course of a discussion raised by Tyndall’s Belfast Address. It is not easy to appreciate the speculation that Martineau offers in direct opposition to the theory of Darwinism without reading his preceding argument.
It may be well to begin with a quotation from his sermon, “Perfection, Divine and Human”: “However vast and majestic the uniformities of nature, they are nevertheless finite: science counts them one by one; a completed science would count them all. God, however, is not finite; He lives out beyond the legislation He has made; and His thought, which defines the rules of matter, does not transmigrate into them and cease else-how to be; but merely flings out the law as an emanating act, and Himself abides behind as Thinking Power.”