Nations, like individuals, have, according to the professor, their infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death. But why do nations grow old and die? The individual grows old and dies, because his interior physical machinery wears out, and because he must die in order to attain the end for which he lives. But why should this be the case with nations? They have no future life to which death is the passage. The nation does not rise or fall with the individuals that found it. One generation of individuals passes away, and another comes, but the nation survives; and why, if not destroyed by external violence, should it not continue to survive and thrive to the end of time? There are no physical causes, no known physiological laws, that prevent it. Why was not Rome as able to withstand the barbarians, or to drive them back from her frontiers, in the fourth century, as she was in the first? Why was England so much weaker under the Stuarts than she had been under the Tudors, or was again under the Protector? Or why have we seen her so grand under Pitt and Wellington, and so little and feeble under Palmerston and Lord Russell? Can you explain this by a change of climate and geographical position, or any change in the physical conditions of the nation, that is, any physical changes not due to moral causes?
We see in several of the States of the Union a decrease, a relative, if not a positive decrease, of the native population, and the physical man actually degenerating, and to an extent that should alarm the statesman and the patriot. Do you explain this fact by the change in the climate and the geographical position? The geographical position remains unchanged, and if the climate has changed at all, it has been by way of amelioration. Do you attribute it to a change in the physical condition of the country? Not at all. There is no mystery as to the matter, and though the effects may be physical or physiological, the causes are well known to be moral, and chief among them is the immoral influence of the doctrine the professor and his brother physiologists are doing their best to diffuse among the people. The cause is in the loss of religious faith, in the lack of moral and religious instruction, in the spread of naturalism, and the rejection of supernatural grace—without which the natural cannot be sustained in its integrity—in the growth of luxury, and the assertion of material goods or sensible pleasures, as the end and aim of life. There is always something morally wrong where prizes need to be offered to induce the young to marry, and to induce the married to suffer their children to be born and reared.
So, also, do we know the secret of the rise, prosperity, decline, and death of the renowned nations of antiquity. The Romans owed the empire of the world to their temperance, prudence, fortitude, and respect for religious principle, all of them moral causes; and they owed their decline and fall to the loss of these virtues, to their moral corruption. The same may be said of all the ancient nations. Their religion, pure, or comparatively pure, in the origin, becomes gradually corrupt, degenerates into a corrupt and corrupting superstition, which hangs as a frightful nightmare on the breasts of the people, destroying their moral life and vigor. To this follows, with a class, scepticism, the denial of God or the gods, an Epicurean morality, and the worship of the senses; the loss of all public spirit—public as well as private virtue, and the nation falls of its own internal moral imbecility and rottenness, as our own nation, not yet a century old, is in a fair way of doing, and most assuredly will do, if the atheistic philosophy and morality of the physiologists or positivists become much more widely diffused than they are. The church will be as unable, with all her supernatural truth, grace, life, and strength, to save it, as she was to save the ancient Graeco-Roman Empire, for to save it would require a resurrection of the dead.
The common sense of mankind, in all ages of the world, has uniformly attributed the downfall of nations, states, and empires, to moral causes, not to physiological laws, climatic influences, or geographical position. The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. Righteousness exalteth a nation, and sin is a reproach to any people. This is alike the voice of inspiration and of universal experience. The traveller who visits the sites of nations renowned in story, now buried in ruins, of cities once thronged with a teeming population, the marts of the world, in which were heard, from morning till night—till far into night—the din of industry, and marks the solitude that now reigns there; the barren waste that has succeeded to once fruitful fields and vineyards, and observes the poor shepherd that feeds a petty flock on the scanty pasturage, or the armed robber that watches for a victim to plunder, receives a far less vivid impression of the dependence of nations on physical causes and conditions, than of the influence of the moral world on the natural, and reads in legible characters the meaning of that fearful penalty which God pronounced, when he said to the man: "And the earth for thy sake shall be cursed." The physical changes that have come over Assyria, Syria, Lybia, Egypt, and Palestine, are the effects of the moral deterioration of man, not the cause of that deterioration.
The professor, after dilating almost eloquently, and as a sage, on the changeability, the transitoriness, the evanescent nature of all the visible forms of things, says: "If from visible forms we turn to directing law, how vast the difference! We pass from the finite, the momentary, the incidental, the conditional, to the illimitable, the eternal, the necessary, the unshackled. It is of law I am to speak in this book. In a world composed of vanishing forms, I am to vindicate the imperishability, the majesty of law, and to show how man proceeds in his social march in obedience to it," (Ibid. p, 16.) This sounds well; but, unhappily, he has told us that communities and nations, like individuals, are under the control of physical conditions, and therefore of law. If therefore of law, then under the law of physical conditions, and consequently of a physical or physiological law. He dwells on the grandeur of this conception, and challenges for it our deepest admiration. But we see not much to admire in a purely physical law manifesting itself in ceaseless instability, metamorphosis, and death. Will the author forgive us, if we hint that he possibly does not very well understand himself, or know precisely what it is that he says? Hear him. "I am to lead my reader, perhaps in a reluctant path, from the outward phantasmagorial illusions which surround us and so ostentatiously obtrude themselves on our attention, to something that lies in silence and strength behind. I am to draw his thoughts from the tangible to the invisible, from the limited to the universal, from the changeable to the invariable, from the transitory to the eternal; from the expedients and volitions so largely amusing in the life of man, to the predestined and resistless issuing of law from the fiat of God." (Ibid. p. 16, 17.) Very respectable rhetoric, but what does it mean? If it means anything, it means that the visible universe is unreal, an illusion, a phantasmagoria; that nothing is real, stable, permanent, but law, which lies in silence and strength behind the phantasmagoria, and that this law producing the illusion, dazzling us with mere sense-shows, is identically God, from whose fiat the phantasmagorial world issues. Is not this grand? is it not sublime? The scientific professor forgets that he may find readers, who can perceive through his rhetoric that he makes law or God the reality of things, instead of their creator or maker, simply their causa essentialis, the causa immanens of Spinoza, and therefore asserts nothing but a very vulgar form of pantheism, material pantheism, indistinguishable from naked atheism; for his doctrine recognizes only the material, the sensible, and by law he can mean only a physiological law like that by which the liver secretes bile, the blood circulates through the heart, seeds germinate, or plants bear fruit—a law which has and can have no indivisible unity.
If the professor means simply that in the universe all proceeds according to the law of cause and effect, he should bear in mind that there are moral causes and effects as well as physical, and supernatural as well as natural; but then he might find himself in accord with theologians, some of whom, perhaps, in his own favorite sciences are able to be his masters. It is not always safe to measure the ignorance of others by our own. No theologian denies, but every one asserts the law of cause and effect, precisely what no atheist, pantheist, or naturalist does do, for none of them ever rise above what the schools call causa essentialis, the thing itself, that which, as we say, makes the thing, makes it itself and not another, or constitutes its identity. Every theologian believes that God is logical, logic in itself, and that all his works are dialectical and realize a divine plan, which as a whole and in all its parts is strictly and rigidly logical. If the professor means simply to assert not only that all creatures and all events are under the control of the law of cause and effect, but also under the law of dialectics, there need be no quarrel between him and us; but in such case, if he had known a little theology, he might have spared himself and us a great deal of trouble, for we believe as firmly in the universal reign of law as he or his Grace of Argyle. But he would have gained little credit for original genius, depth of thought, profound science, or rare learning, and most likely would not have lived to see any one of his volumes reach a fifth edition.
But we must not be understood to deny in the development of nations or individuals all dependence on physical conditions, or even of climate and geographical position. Man is neither pure spirit, nor pure matter; he is the union of soul and body, and can no more live without communion with nature, than he can without communion with his like and with God. Hence he requires the three great institutions of religion, society, and property, which, in some form, are found in all tribes, nations, or civil communities, and without which no people ever does or can subsist. Climate and geographical influences, no doubt, count for something, for how much, science has not yet determined. There is a difference in character between the inhabitants of mountains and the inhabitants of plains, the dwellers on the sea-coast and the dwellers inland, and the people of the north and the people of the south; yet the Bas Bretons and the Irish have not lost perceptibly anything, in three thousand years, of their original character as a southern people, though dwelling for that space of time, we know not how many centuries longer, far to the north. Among the Irish you may find types of northern races, some of whom have overrun the Island as conquerors; but amid all their political and social vicissitudes, the Irish have retained, and still retain, their southern character. The English have received many accessions from Ireland and from the south, but they remain, the great body of them, as they originally were, essentially a northern people, and hence the marked difference between the Irish character and the English, though inhabiting very nearly the same parallels of latitude, and subject to much the same climatic and geographical influences. The character of both the English and the Irish is modified on this continent, but more by amalgamation, and by political and social influences, than by climate or geography. The Irish type is the most tenacious, and is not unlikely in time to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon. It has a great power of absorption, and the American people may ultimately lose their northern type, and assume the characteristics of a southern race, in spite of the constant influx of the Teutonic element. What we object to is not giving something to physical causes and conditions, but making them exclusive, and thus rejecting moral causes, and reducing man and nature to an inexorable fatalism.
In the several volumes of the professor, except the first named, we are able to detect neither the philosophical historian nor the man of real science. The respectable author has neither logic nor exact, or even extensive, learning, and the only thing to be admired in him, except his style, is the sublime confidence in himself with which he undertakes to discuss and settle questions, of which, for the most part, he knows nothing, and perhaps the sublimer confidence with which he follows masters that know as little as himself.
We own we have treated Professor Draper's work with very little respect, for we have felt very little. His Intellectual Development of Europe is full of crudities from beginning to end, and for the most part below criticism, or would be were it not that it is levelled at all the principles of individual and social life and progress. The book belongs to the age of Leucippus and Democritus, and ignores, if we may use an expressive term, though hardly English, Christian civilization and all the progress men and nations have effected since the opening of the Christian era. It is a monument not of science, but of gross ignorance.
Yet in our remarks we have criticised the class to which the author belongs, rather than the author himself. Men of real science are modest, reverential, and we honor them, whatever the department of nature to which they devote their studies. We delight to sit at their feet and drink in instruction from their lips; but when men, because they are passable chemists, know something of human physiology, or the natural history of fishes, undertake to propagate theories on God, man, and nature, that violate the most sacred traditions of the race, deny the Gospel, reduce the universe to matter, and place man on a level with the brute, theories, too, which are utterly baseless, we cannot reverence them, or listen to them with patience, however graceful their elocution or charming their rhetoric.