themselves, and adopts too many of their principles and conclusions, to be able to battle effectively against them. No doubt he urges much that is true against them, but his arguments, as far as effective, are inconsistent with his position as a Protestant, and are borrowed from Catholicity, or from what he has retained from Catholic instruction and Catholic tradition, not from his Protestantism. Having no authority but his own private interpretation of the Scriptures to define what is or is not Christianity, he knows not how much or how little he must defend against the Positivists, or how much or how little he is free to concede to them. He practically concedes to them the Creator. He defends God as the efficient cause, indeed, but not as Creator, producing all things by his word from nothing. He would seem to hold it enough to defend him as the organizer and disposer of materials already furnished to his hand. God does not seem to him to be his own causa materialis. He works on a pre-existing matter. He constructs, the author concedes, the existing worlds out of “star-dust,” or disintegrated stars, without telling us who made the stars that have dissolved and turned to dust, and without bearing in mind, or without knowing, that Christianity teaches us that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and therefore could not have formed them out of “star-dust” or any other material.
The Protestant divine accepts and defends Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by “natural selection,” though he does not believe that it applies universally, or that man has been developed from the ape or the tadpole. He denies that Huxley’s protoplasm can be developed from protein, or life from dead matter; maintains that all life proceeds from
a living organism, that the plant can spring only from a seed, and the animal only from a living cell or germ; and yet concedes that some of the lower forms of organic life may spring or may have sprung from spontaneous generation, and even goes so far as to tell us that some of the most eminent of the fathers held or conceded as much. What becomes, then, of the assertion that life cannot be evolved from dead matter? He would seem to hold or to concede that man lived, for an indefinite time, a purely animal life, before the Almighty breathed into his nostrils and he became a spiritual man, and quotes to prove it St. Paul’s assertion that “not first that which is spiritual, but that which is animal; afterwards that which is spiritual” (1 Cor. xv. 46). He seems, in fact, ready to concede any and everything except the intelligent Mind recognized by Plato and Aristotle, that has arranged all things according to a preconceived plan, and throughout the whole adapted means to ends. He insists on efficient causes and final causes, but hardly on God as the causa causarum or as the causa finalis of all particular final causes.
Throughout, as we have already remarked, there is a want of unity and universality in his philosophy, as there necessarily must be in his Protestant theology, and a sad lack of logical consistency and order, or co-ordination. His world is a chaos, as is and must be the Protestant world. Herbert Spencer undertakes to explain the universe without God, or, what is the same thing, with an absolutely unknowable God, which is of course an impossibility; but he has a far profounder intellect and a far more logical mind than Dr. McCosh. He is heaven-wide from the truth, yet nearer to it than his Presbyterian critic. His logic is good;
his principles being granted, his conclusions, though absurd, cannot be denied. His error lies in his premises, and, if you correct them, your work is done. He will correct all details, and arrive at just conclusions without further assistance. But Dr. McCosh is one who, however much he may talk about them, never reduces his doctrines to their generic principles, or reasons from principles. He is a genuine Protestant, and cannot be refuted in refuting his principles, which vary with the exigencies of his argument, and are really no principles at all, but must be refuted in detail; and when you have convinced him twice three are six, you have still to prove that three times two are also six.
Now, such a man—and he is, perhaps, above the average of Presbyterian divines—is the last man in the world to attempt the refutation of positivism. No Protestant can do it. Indeed, all the avowed Positivists we have known regard Protestant Christianity as too insignificant a matter to be counted. It is too vague and fluctuating, too uncertain and indefinite, too unsubstantial and intangible, too unsystematic and illogical, to command the least respect from them. They see at a glance that it is too little to be a religion and too much to be no-religion. It cannot, with its half affirmations and its whole denials, stand a moment before an intelligent Positivist who has a scientific cast of mind. The Positivist rejects the church, of course, but he respects Catholicity as a logical system, consistent with itself, coherent in all its parts, and for him there is no via media between it and positivism. If he were not a Positivist, he says openly, he would be a Catholic, by no means a Protestant, which he looks upon as neither one thing nor another; and we respond that, could we cease to be
a Catholic, we should be a Positivist, for to a logical mind there is no medium between the church and atheism. The middle systems, as Protestantism, Rationalism, Deism, etc., are divided against themselves, and cannot stand, any more than a house divided against itself. Their denials vitiate their affirmations and their affirmations vitiate their denials. They are all too much or too little.
The Positivists reject for what they call the scientific age both theology and metaphysics. They believe in the progress of the race, and indeed in all races, as does Dr. McCosh. They distinguish in the history of the human race or of human progress three epochs or stages—first, the theological; second, the metaphysical; and third, the scientific. Theology and metaphysics each in its epoch were true and good, and served the progress of man and society. They have now passed away, and the race is now entering the scientific age, which is the final stage, though not to last forever; for when the field of science is exhausted, and all it yields is harvested, the race will expire, and the world come to an end, as having no more work to do. It will be seen there is here a remarkable difference between the real Positivists, or believers in Auguste Comte, and our author and his Protestant brethren. The Positivists never calumniate the past, but seek to appreciate its services to humanity, to acknowledge the good it did, and to bury it with honor, as the children of the New Dispensation did the Old, when it had lived its day. One of the finest appreciations from the point of view of humanity of the services of the mediæval monks we have ever read is from the pen of M. E. Littré, the chief of the French Positivists, and one of the most learned men of France. It said not all a Catholic would say, but
scarcely a word that could grate on a Catholic ear. Dr. McCosh also believes in progress, in the progress of our species, and, for aught we know, in the progress of all species and genera, and that we outgrow the past; but he takes pleasure only in calumniating it, and like a bad son curses the mother that bore him. Because he has outgrown his nurse, he contends the nurse was of no use in his childhood, was a great injury, and it would have been much better to leave him to himself, to toddle about at will, and toddle into the fire or the cistern, as he saw proper.
Now, we think, if one believes in the progress of the species or the perfectibility of man by development or by natural agencies, the Positivist doctrine is much the most reasonable as well as far the most amiable. Its effect, too, is far better. We—we speak personally—owed much to the doctrine, which we borrowed not from Comte, but from Comte’s master, Saint-Simon, the influence of which, under the grace of God, disposed us to return to the old church. It softened the animosity, the bitter hatred, toward the past which we had inherited from our Protestant education, and enabled us to study it with calm and gentle feelings, even with gratitude and respect, and disposed us to view it with impartiality and to appreciate it with justice. Studying the past, and especially the old church which we had complacently supposed the race had outgrown as the man has outgrown the bib and tucker of his childhood, in this new and better mood, we soon discovered that there was much more in the past than we had ever dreamed of, and that it was abundantly able to teach us much more than we or any of our Protestant contemporaries supposed; and we were not long in beginning to doubt if we had