He who starts from revelation, which includes the principles of universal science, can, no doubt, find all nature harmonizing with faith, and all the sciences bearing witness to its truth, for he has the key to their real and higher sense; but he who starts with the particular only can never rise above the particular, and hence he finds in the particulars, or the nature to which he is restricted, no immaterial and immortal soul, and no God, creator, and upholder of the universe. His generalizations are only classifications of facts, with no intuition of their relation to an order above themselves; his universal is the particular, and he sees in the plane of his vision no steps by which to ascend to science, far less to faith. Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte both understood well the necessity of subordinating all the sciences to a general principle or law, and of integrating them in a universal science; but starting with the special sciences themselves, they could never attain to a universal science, or a science that accepted, generalized, and explained them all, and hence each ended in atheism, or, what is the same thing, the divinization of humanity. The positivists really recognize only particulars, and only particulars in the material order, the only order the sciences, distinguished from philosophy and revelation, do or can deal with. Alexander von Humboldt had, probably, no superior in the sciences, and he has given their résumé in his Cosmos; but, if we recollect aright, the word God does not once appear in that work, and yet, except when he ventures to theorize beyond the order of facts on which the sciences immediately rest, there is little in that work that an orthodox Christian need deny. Herbert Spencer, really a man of ability, who disclaims being a follower of Auguste Comte or a positivist, excludes from the knowable, principles and causes, all except sensible phenomena; and although wrong in view of a higher philosophy than can be obtained by induction from the sensible or particular facts, yet he is not wrong in contending that the sciences cannot of themselves rise above the particular and the phenomenal.
Hence we do not agree with those Christian apologists who tell us that the tendency of the sciences is to corroborate the doctrines of revelation. They no more tend of themselves to corroborate revelation than they do to impair it. They who press them into the cause of infidelity, and hence conclude that science explodes faith, mistake their reach, for we can no more conclude from them against faith than we can in favor of faith. The fact is, the sciences are not science, and lie quite below the sphere of both science and faith. When arrayed against either, their authority is null. Hence we conclude, á priori, against them when they presume to impugn the principles of science as expressed in the ideal formula, or against faith which is, considered in itself objectively, no less certain than the formula itself; and we have shown, à posteriori, by descending to the particulars, that the sciences present no facts that impugn revelation or contradict the teachings of faith. The conclusions of the savans against the Christian dogmas are no logical deductions or inductions from any facts or particulars in their possession, and therefore, however they may carry away sciolists, or the half-learned, or little minds, greedy of novelties, they are really of no scientific account.
All that faith demands of the sciences as such is their silence. She does not demand their support, she only demands that they keep in their own order, that the cobbler should stick to his last, ne sutor ultra crepidam. Faith herself is in the supernatural order, and proceeds from the same source as nature herself; it presupposes science indeed, and elevates and confirms it, but no more depends upon it than the creator depends on the creature. The highest science needs faith to complete it, and in all probability never could have been attained to without revelation; but neither science nor the sciences, however they may need revelation, could ever, without revelation, have risen to the conception of a divine and supernatural revelation. It is idle, then, to suppose that without revelation we could find by the sciences the demonstration or evidence of revelation. Lalande was right when he said he had never seen God at the end of his telescope, and his assertion should weigh with all natural theologians, so-called, who attempt to prove the existence of God by way of induction from the facts which naturalists observe and analyze; but he was wrong and grossly illogical when he concluded from that fact, with the fool of the Bible, there is no God, as wrong as those chemists are who conclude against the real presence in holy eucharist, because by their profane analysis of the consecrated host they find in it the properties of bread. The most searching chemical analysis cannot go beyond the visible or sensible properties of the subject analyzed, and the sensible properties of the bread and wine nobody pretends are changed in transubstantiation. None of the revealed dogmas are either provable or disprovable by any empirical science, for they all lie in the supernatural order, above the reach of natural science, and while they control all the empirical sciences they can be controlled by none.
But when we have revelation and with it, consciously or unconsciously, the ideal formula, which gives us the principles of all science and of all things, and descend from the higher to the lower, the case is essentially different. We then find all the sciences so far as based on facts, and all the observable facts or phenomena of nature, moral, intellectual, or physical, both illustrating and confirming the truths of revelation and the mysteries of faith. We then approach nature from the point of view of the Creator, read nature by the divine light of revelation, and study it from above, not from below; we then follow the real order of things, proceed from principles to facts, from the cause to the effect, from the universal to the particular, and are, after having thus descended from heaven to earth, able to reascend from earth to heaven. In this way we can see all nature joining in one to show forth the being and glory of God, and to hymn his praise. This method of studying nature from high to low by the light of first principles and of divine revelation enables us to press all the sciences into the service of faith, to unite them in a common principle, and do what the Saint-Simonians and positivists cannot do, integrate them in a general or universal science, bring the whole intellectual life of man, as we showed in our article on Rome or Reason, into unison with faith and the real life and order of things, leaving to rend our bosoms only that moral struggle symbolized by Rome and the World, of which we have heretofore treated at length.
But this can never be done by induction from the facts observed and analyzed by the several empirical or inductive sciences. We think we have shown that the pretension, that these sciences have set aside any of the doctrines of Christianity, or impaired the faith, except in feeble and uninstructed minds, is unfounded; we think we have also shown that they not only have not, but cannot do it, because they lie in a region too low to establish anything against revelation. Yet as the sciences are insufficient, while restricted to their proper sphere, to satisfy the demand of reason for apodictic principles, for unity and universality, there is a perpetual tendency in the men devoted exclusively to their culture to draw from them conclusions which are unwarranted, illogical, and antagonistic both to philosophy and to faith. Against this tendency, perhaps never more strongly manifested than at this moment, there is in natural science alone no sufficient safeguard, and consequently we need the supernatural light of revelation to protect both faith and science itself. With the loss of the light of revelation we lose, in fact, the ideal formula, or the light of philosophy; and with the light of philosophy, we lose both science and the sciences, and retain only dry facts which signify nothing, or baseless theories and wild conjectures, which, when substituted for real science, are far worse than nothing.
My Meadowbrook Adventure.
"No, no, Tom; that is out of the question. I can't afford to go away just now. I am getting into a fine practice; the courts open in ten days; and besides, I am in the midst of an essay on the Law of Contracts which I promised for the next number of a certain law magazine. Your prescription is a very pleasant one; but really I can't take it. You must give me a good dose of medicine instead."
"I tell you what it is, Franklin, I don't let my patients dictate to me in that style. You have been fool enough to throw yourself into a nervous fever by working in this nasty den all summer, instead of taking a vacation-run to the country as you ought to have done; and now, if you don't follow my directions, I swear I won't cure you! Go off to some quiet farm-house for a week or two, and, if your essay on contracts weighs upon your mind, take the stupid stuff with you. I'll risk your working much at it after you get within scent of the fields."