British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV / July and October, 1871

by Various

It seems to us self-evident that we must seek for it, not in nature, but in man; not in the lower plane of the cosmical forces, but in the human will, the root of our personality. Comte begins with the lowermost grade of force (to wit, the mechanical), and ascends with it, bringing all the finer and more subtle forms under its sway, and interpreting the higher by the lower. We, on the contrary, begin with the highest known type, that which lies nearest ourselves, with which we are earliest acquainted, and whence we derive our notion of force beyond ourselves; and we descend with it as a light to guide our footsteps amongst the lower. This we hold to be the correct, to be indeed the only admissible philosophical procedure. If it is only through the consciousness of force within ourselves that we have any intelligible notion of it in nature (and are thus first initiated into the idea), we must come back to the will for an explanation of what the one force external to us is. Our own personality supplies us with the archetype of which we are in search. We thus throw the plank across the chasm between man and nature; we interpret the latter by the former (not the reverse); and the discovery of the correlation of forces, and the conservation of energy, becomes the scientific equivalent of the doctrine of philosophical theology, that one supreme Will pervades the universe, that in nature lives and moves and has its being.

If we can vindicate this procedure, and prove our right to interpret the forces, if not the phenomena of nature, as the outcome of a living will, the energy of a nature like our own, our goal is reached. But, say the Comtists, that is a mere imagination of theology, the creation of a superstitious mind, 'transcendant audacity,' 'a form of the mind's own throwing,' just as much as the teleological explanation of nature. It has been spoken of as presumptuous, as well as fanciful, betokening a lack of humility and philosophic caution; it being sheer egotism to interpret nature by what we are, and a return to the Protagorean doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things.' In reply, we give only hints and suggestions, for the region is high, and the atmosphere rarefied.

In the first place, it is to be observed that we do not take one class of phenomena to explain the inner nature of another class; the phenomena of will to explain, say those of electricity, in outward nature; for in that case we might as well, with just as much reason and plausibility, with just as much authority, take the latter class of phenomena to explain the former; and we should learn quite as much, that is to say, we should learn nothing at all. But we take a certain special noumenal force, one that is transcendant but revealed in our innermost life and consciousness, in the will's autocracy, and by the help and suggestion of this known force we explain (not the phenomena of Nature nor her laws), but the darker, the unknown noumenal Force, the pulse of nature.

In the next place, it is also to be observed that as the human will, while noumenally free, is phenomenally under law and governed most rigidly by motives, so the force which we interpret as the expression of personal will in nature, acts in perfect conformity to law. The laws of nature are the expression of its bondage. The minor scattered forces, which may be spoken of as the messengers and servitors of the supreme will, are no more fitful but no less capricious than is the human will, in which the causal nexus is not broken while it remains free. The supernatural reveals itself in an orderly fashion through the natural. Its will is expressed by law.

In the third place, so far as bridging the chasm between the two orders of phenomena, it is not accomplished by the poetic intuition (to which we shall immediately refer), but by the human intellect, it seems legitimated by analogy. In our inductive interpretation of nature we perceive resemblances, and infer a likeness. 'Analogy is the soul of induction.' If, therefore, it be an illicit act of the reason which ventures to trace a parallel between nature and man, and interpret the former by the latter, how fares it with the foundations of human knowledge, and with the pillars of science herself? Is not all physical science the rational interpretation of nature? If we may not read the meaning of the great central force in the light of that force which we carry in the will, how can we warrantably interpret the laws of nature, in the light of that which we carry in the intellect? Are we not left in uncertainty as to the character of the entire fabric of our knowledge? The oracle is altogether dumb. If the way which seems to lead from the interior of the human will into the temple of outward nature be really a cul-de-sac, what warrant have we for opening a door on the other side, and walking down the avenues of positive science, imagining that in these pathways we shall find the only key to nature? To bring the analogy into effect, let us take two instances: the force with which I discharge a projectile and the force of gravitation. The former proceeds from the will, which is the originating power, though mechanical and physiological causes intervene. Since, therefore, similar effects have similar or resembling causes, it is a strictly analogical inference that as the effects correspond, the causes will resemble each other, and the essential part of the correspondence will not consist in the apparatus used (the phenomena), but in the will underlying, which is noumenal.[17]

In the fourth place, as the force of the will is both higher and better known than the mechanical, chemical, and vital forces of nature, we are warranted in interpreting the lower by the higher, and not in reducing the higher to the level of the lower. As we ascend in nature from the lowest vital forms to the highest type of organization, we find that the higher is not only an advance upon the lower, but that it includes it; and no naturalist would describe a vertebrated animal by that which it held in common with the mollusca. That in which it differs from the types beneath it is held to be its distinctive and descriptive feature. When, therefore, we reach man at the top of the scale, separated by a distinct endowment from the classes beneath him, yet conserving all their main characteristics in his nature, and describe him not by what he has in common with the lower animals, but by that in which he differs from them, we act on the principle of selecting the highest feature we can find, and taking it as our guide. And similarly when we are in search of the Supreme Principle of the universe, the causa causarum, we interpret it by the highest features in human nature, because that nature is the highest with which we are experimentally acquainted. And we may validly throw the burden of proof upon the positivist, and ask why the great cosmical force that rules in nature should be radically different from the volitional force which is the root of our personality? Reverting again to the force of gravitation, why should it not be the outcome in nature of a Will vaster than man's, resembling, yet transcending it? To what does that force amount? The phenomenalist cannot arrest our inquiry by simply drawing the veil of nescience over it. He cannot slip a lid over the end of our telescope turned skyward by merely exclaiming 'mystery of mysteries, all is mystery.' And it seems to us that we must either divest the word gravitation of all intelligible meaning, or while perceiving the unlikeness at a glance, we must 'invest it with a human or quasi-human vitality.'

Quasi, for again in the fifth place, this all-pervasive protean force assumes many a phase which is exceedingly unlike the operations of a personal power. In many of her moods, Nature has the countenance of the sphinx. She is sublimely silent as to her inmost essence. Cold, stern, inflexible, neutral, taciturn, apathetic—all these terms seem applicable to her at times, as we gaze across the chasm between man and the universe. But the regulative idea, which we find in the analogy of the human will, is not to be regarded as exhaustive or exclusive of other notions which may unite with it. The personal force may at the same time be more than personal. Its highest quality becomes to us what we have called its regulative idea; but it contains elements within the infinite compass of its nature, different from those features of which we find the mirror in ourselves.[18] It is sufficient if we know that the causa causarum, the all-pervading life of the universe, can in any sense be described as personal, that we can speak of 'the soul of nature,' without being the dupes of a fanciful analogy, dealing merely with figure and hyperbole. Be it admitted by every theist that there are myriad facets which the subtle life of nature may present to the beholder. We not only may, we must think of it as

'He, they, one, all, within, without,

The power in darkness which we guess.'

It reveals itself to us now as personal, awakening and responding to the instinct of worship, calling forth our wonder and reverence, with the hunger and the thirst of the human spirit in rising to its source; now it turns its cold, impassive, silent face towards us; and as we feel its immeasurable transcendency we are warned against the error of construing it into a mere exaggeration of ourselves. We thus learn on the one hand, the indefinite unlikeness between man and the Supreme Spirit of the universe, and on the other their positive likeness or kindredness. We escape the prevailing error of mediævalism, and the equally fatal error of the modern scientific spirit. The tendency of the schoolmen was to interpret all the laws of nature in the light of à priori notions of the mind. They did not search laboriously for her own meaning, and wait patiently for her revelations; but distorted nature by outré hypotheses fetched altogether from within. It is, however, an equal if not a greater onesidedness to do exactly the reverse; to interpret the human spirit in the light of external nature and organic law. The apotheosis of man was at least no worse—(we think it rather better)—than making a fetish of nature, and explaining the sublime mysteries of the human will by the phenomena of molecular action. We therefore maintain that amid the many possible manifestations of the infinite Life, they may be reduced to two primary forms, the one impersonal and the other personal. God is infinitely unlike the creature. He is also the archetype of which we are the type. And we have less need to be philosophically warned against the possible caricature of the latter doctrine (of which the teachers of nescience remind us), than to be cautioned against the partial truth of the former, which, in isolation, may so easily drift into exaggeration and a lie.