As Berkeley says to the mathematicians, "Logic is logic, and the same to whatever subject it is applied." When, therefore, the cultivators of the inductive sciences allege a theory or hypothesis which contradicts in any respect the ideal formula, however firmly persuaded they may be that it is warranted by the facts observed and analyzed, we tell them at once, without any examination of their proofs or reasonings, that their hypothesis is unfounded, and their theory false, because it contradicts the first principle alike of the real and the knowable, and therefore cannot possibly be true. We deny no facts well ascertained to be facts, but no induction from any facts can be of as high authority as the ideal formula, for without it no induction is possible. Hence we have no need to examine details any more than we have to enter into proofs of the innocence or guilt of a man who confesses that he has openly, knowingly, and intentionally violated the law. The case is one in which judgment à priori may be safely pronounced. No induction that denies all science and the conditions of science can be scientific.
The ideal formula does not put any one in possession of the sciences, but it enables us to control them. We can entertain no doctrine, even for examination, that denies any one of the three terms of the formula. If existences are denied, there are no facts or materials of science; if the creative act is denied, there are no facts or existences; and finally, if God is denied, the creative act itself is denied. God and creature are all that is or exists, and creatures can exist only by the creative act of God. Do you come and tell me that you are no creature? What are you, then? Between God and creature there is no middle term. If, then, you are not creature, you must be God or nothing. Well, are you God? God, if God at all, is independent, necessary, self-existent, immutable, and eternal being. Are you that, you who depend on other than yourself for every breath you draw, for every motion you make, for every morsel of food you eat, whom the cold chills, the fire burns, the water drenches? No? do you say you are not God? What are you, then, I ask once more? If you are neither God nor creature, then you are nothing. But nothing you are not, for you live, think, speak, and act, and even reason, though not always wisely or well. If something and not God, then you are creature, and are a living assertion of the ideal formula. Do you deny it, and say there is no God? Then still again, what are you who make the denial? If there is no God, there is no real, necessary, and eternal being—no being at all; if no being, then no existence, for all existence is from being, and if no existence, then what are you who deny God? Nothing? Then your denial is nothing, and worth nothing.
It is impossible to deny any one of the three terms of the formula, for every man, though he may believe himself an atheist or a pantheist, is a living assertion of each one of them, and in its real relation to the other two. We have the right, then, to assert the formula as the first principle in science, and oppose it as conclusive against any and every theory that denies creation, and asserts either atheism or pantheism. Do not think to divert attention from the intrinsic fallacy of such a theory by babbling about natural laws. Nature, no doubt, has her laws, according to which, or, if you please, by virtue of which, all natural phenomena or natural effects are produced, and it is the knowledge of these laws that constitutes natural science or the sciences. But these laws, whence come they? Are they superior to nature, or inferior? If inferior, how can they govern her operations? If superior, then they must have their origin in the supernatural, and a reality above nature must be admitted. Nature, then, is not the highest, is not ultimate, is not herself being, or has not her being in herself; is, therefore, contingent existence, and consequently creature, existing only by virtue of the creative act of real and necessary being, which brings us directly back to the ideal formula. God denied, nature and the laws of nature are denied.
The present tendency among naturalists is to deny creation and to assert development—to say with Topsy, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, only generalizing her doctrine, "Things didn't come; they growed." Things are not created; they are developed by virtue of natural laws. Developed from what? From nothing? Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing nothing can be developed. A universe self-developed from nothing is somewhat more difficult to comprehend than the creation of the universe from nothing through the word of his power by One able to create and sustain it. You can develop a germ, but you cannot develop where there is nothing to be developed. Then the universe is not developed from nothing: then from something. What is that something? Whatever you assume it to be, it cannot be something created, for you deny all creation. Then it is eternal, self-existent being, being in itself, therefore being in its plenitude, independent, immutable, complete, perfect in itself, and therefore incapable of development. Development is possible only in that which is imperfect, incomplete, for it is simply the reduction of what in the thing developed is potential to act.
There is great lack of sound philosophy with our modern theorists. They seem not to be aware that the real must precede the possible, and that the possible is only the ability of the real. They assume the contrary, and place possible being before real being. Even Leibnitz says that St. Anselm's argument to prove the existence of God, drawn from the idea of the most perfect being, the contrary of which cannot be thought, is conclusive only on condition that most perfect being is first proved to be possible. Hegel makes the starting-point of all reality and all science to be naked being in the sense in which it and not-being are identical; that is, not real, but possible being, the abyssus of the Gnostics, and the void of the Buddhists, which Pierre Leroux labors hard, in his L'Humanité and in the article Le Ciel in his Encyclopédie Nouvelle, to prove is not nothing, though conceding it to be not something, as if there could be any medium between something and nothing. In itself, or as abstracted from the real, the possible is sheer nullity; nothing at all. The possibility of the universe is the ability of God to create it. If God were not himself real, no universe would be possible. The possibility of a creature may be understood either in relation to its creability on the part of God, or in relation to its own perfectibility. In relation to God every creature is complete the moment the Divine Mind has decreed its creation, and, therefore, incapable of development; but, in relation to itself, it has unrealized possibilities which can be only progressively fulfilled. Creatures, in this latter sense, can be developed because there are in them unrealized possibilities or capacities for becoming, by aid of the real, more than they actually are, that is, because they are created, in relation to themselves, not perfect, but perfectible. Hence, creatures, not the Creator, are progressive, or capable, each after its kind, of being progressively developed and completed according to the original design of the Creator.
Aristotle, whom it is the fashion just now to sneer at, avoided the error of our modern sophists; he did not place the possible before the real, for he knew that without the real there is no possible. The principium, or beginning, must be real being, and, therefore, he asserted God, not as possible, but real, most real, and called him actus purissimus, most pure act, which excludes all unactualized potentialities or unrealized possibilities, and implies that he is most pure, that is, most perfect being, being in its plenitude. God being eternally being in himself, being in its plenitude, as he must be if self-existent, and self-existent he must be if not created, he is incapable of development, because in him there are no possibilities not reduced to act. The developmentists must, then, either admit the fact of creation, or deny the development they assert and attempt to maintain; for, if there is no creation, nothing distinguishable from the uncreated, nothing exists to be developed, and the uncreated, being either nothing, and therefore incapable of development, or self-existent, eternal, and immutable being, being in its plenitude, and therefore from the very fulness and perfection of its being also incapable of development. If the developmentists had a little philosophy or a little logic, they would see that, so far from being able to substitute development for creation, they must assert creation in order to be able to assert even the possibility of development. Is it on the authority of such sciolists, sophists, and sad blunderers as these developmentists that we are expected to reject the Holy Scriptures, and to abandon our faith in Christianity? We have a profound reverence for the sciences, and for all really scientific men; but really it is too much to expect us to listen, with the slightest respect, to such absurdities as most of our savans are in the habit of venting, when they leave their own proper sphere and attempt to enter the domain of philosophy or theology. In the investigation of the laws of nature and the observation and accumulation of facts they are respectable, and often render valuable service to mankind; but, when they undertake to determine by their inductions from facts of a secondary order what is true or false in philosophy or theology, they mistake their vocation and their aptitudes, and, if they do not render themselves ridiculous, it is because their speculations are too gravely injurious to permit us to feel toward them anything but grief or indignation.
None of the sciences are apodictic; they are all as special sciences empirical, and are simply formed by inductions from facts observed and classified. To their absolute certainty two things are necessary: First, that the observation of the facts of the natural world should be complete, leaving no class or order of facts unobserved and unanalyzed; and, second, that the inductions from them should be infallible, excluding all error, and all possibility of error. But we say only what every one knows, when we say that neither of these conditions is possible to any mortal man. Even Newton, it is said, compared himself to a child picking up shells on the beach; and after all the explorations that have been made it is but a small part of nature that is known. The inductive method, ignorantly supposed to be an invention of my Lord Bacon, but which is as old as the human mind itself, and was always adopted by philosophers in their investigations of nature, is the proper method in the sciences, and all we need to advance them is to follow it honestly and strictly. But, every day, facts not before analyzed or observed come under the observation of the investigator, and force new inductions, which necessarily modify more or less those previously made. Hence it is that the natural sciences are continually undergoing more or less important changes. Certain principles, indeed, remain the same; but set aside, if we must set aside, mathematics and mechanics, there is not a single one of the sciences that is now what it was in the youth of men not yet old. Some of them are almost the creations of yesterday. Take chemistry, electricity, magnetism, geology, zoology, biology, physiology, philology, ethnology, to mention no more; they are no longer what they were in our own youth, and the treatises in which we studied them are now obsolete.
It is not likely that these sciences have even as yet reached perfection, that no new facts will be discovered, and no further changes and modifications be called for. We by no means complain of this, and are far from asking that investigation in any field should be arrested, and these sciences remain unchanged, as they now are. No: let the investigations go on, let all be discovered that is discoverable, and the sciences be rendered as complete as possible. But, then, is it not a little presumptuous, illogical even, to set up any one of these incomplete, inchoate sciences against the primitive intuitions of reason or the profound mysteries of the Christian faith? Your inductions to-day militate against the ideal formula and the Christian creed; but how know you that your inductions of to-morrow will not be essentially modified by a fuller or closer observation of facts? Your conclusions must be certain before we can on their authority reject any received dogma of faith or any alleged dictamen of reason.
We know á priori that investigation can disclose no fact or facts that can be incompatible with the ideal formula. No possible induction can overthrow any one of its three terms. It is madness to pretend that from the study of nature one can disprove the reality of necessary and eternal being, the fact of creation, or of contingent existences. The most that any one, not mad, does or can pretend is, that they cannot be proved by way of deduction or induction from facts of the natural world. The atheist Lalande went no further than to say, "I have never seen God at the end of my telescope." Be it so, what then? Because you have never seen God at the end of your telescope, can you logically conclude that there is no God? For ourselves, we do not pretend that God is, or can be asserted by way of deduction or induction from the facts of nature, though we hold that what he is, even his eternal power and divinity, may be clearly seen from them; but the fact that God cannot be proved in one way to be does not warrant the conclusion that he cannot in some other way be proved, far less that there is no God.
We do not deduce the dogmas of faith from the ideal formula, for that is in the domain of science; but they all accord with it, and presuppose it as the necessary preamble to faith. We have not the same kind of certainty for faith that we have for the scientific formula; but we have a certainty equally high and equally infallible. Consequently, the inductions or theories of naturalists are as impotent against it as against the formula itself. The authority of faith is superior, we say not to science, but to any logical inductions drawn from the facts of the natural world, or theories framed by natural philosophers, and those then, however plausible, can never override it. No doubt the evidences of our faith are drawn in part from history, and therefore from inductive science; but even as to that part the certainty is of the same kind with that of any of the sciences, rests on the analysis of facts and induction from them, and is at the very lowest equal to theirs at the highest.