LONDON:
T. WOOLMER, 2, Castle Street, City Road, E.C.,
and 66, Paternoster Row, E.C.
1887.
TO
JAMES S. BUDGETT, Esq.,
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
A FRIENDSHIP
WHICH HAS INFLUENCED BENEFICENTLY
MUCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK;
THIS LITTLE VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED BY
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
The following discourse was prepared as a lecture. With the exception of the insertion of passages which it was found necessary to omit in delivery, on account of too great length, it is printed as it was spoken. It addressed, and in its present form addresses, thoughtful and earnest minds, not concerned specially with questions of philosophy, metaphysics, and science, but alive to the advanced knowledge and thought of our times, and anxious to know, so far as in such a form it could be expressed, how the great foundation of religious belief, the existence of Deity, is affected by the splendid advance of our knowledge of nature. To have written more than the following pages contain, in answering this desire, would have necessitated what I have earnestly endeavoured to avoid, a change from a discourse into a treatise. It is hoped that, as it is presented, it may to some extent be found useful to those who sought it—not so much students, as men interested in the deeper thought of our age, but whose time is occupied with the labours and engagements of a busy life.
W. H. Dallinger.
Wesley College, Sheffield,
September 1, 1887.
THE CREATOR, AND WHAT WE MAY KNOW OF THE METHOD OF CREATION.
In spite of the lucid and far-reaching reasoning of Hume, which aimed at effacing causality from our conceptions of phenomena, and making invariable sequence supplant it; in spite of Auguste Comte’s stern effort to ‘get rid of the vain pretension to investigate the causes of phenomena,’ and the affirmation that ‘forces are only movements, produced or tending to produce;’ nay, in spite of all the logical effort of all the following years, there remains unaltered, that inalienable property of the human mind, consciousness of power; the ability to realize ‘I can’ simultaneously with ‘I am.’ In this originates our universal explanation of external phenomena. Because we can act and produce phenomena, we infer that all phenomena were inevitably produced by some transcendent but equivalent act of conscious power. If we think of a plane surface or a sphere, we can only think of them as occupants of space: so, if we think of the light beams of Sirius, or the motion of Mars, we realize the normal necessity of thinking of them ultimately as caused. This is an inevitable sequence of our consciousness, reason, and experience. A phenomenon appearing in time evokes the mental demand for something which is not that phenomenon, but without which it would not have existed.
In this lies the insatiable desire of mind to peer into the origin of, and reason for, the existence of this universe. Deepening knowledge brings broader light and expanding mystery, but this only quickens the intellectual purpose of the race to seek to solve the problem, why we are circled with the splendid phenomena of heaven and earth, and possessed of the mystery of ourselves?
But to meet this mental demand is no part of the business of science. The study of phenomena, their succession and their classification, is the essential work of science. It has no function, and is possessed of no instrument with which to look behind or below the sequence, in quest of some higher relation. The eye and the mind of the experimentalist know only of antecedent and consequent. These fill the whole circle of his research; let him find these, and he has found all. But since a cause is no more a phenomenon, than a thought is a material manifestation, that which fills the whole circumference claimed by science does not fill all the area legitimately held by reason. A prevision of the order, and the methods of the changes of the universe, is the ideal of science. But mind in its entirety refuses to be locked within such limits. It looks deeper than sequences, and farther back than phenomena; it demands, by the very laws of its existence, their cause. A continuity of transformed causes undoubtedly explains a wide, and ever-widening area of sequences. But that cannot annul the demand of reason for causation. It simply drives it farther back, and higher up, and indicates that the modes of action and relation originated by the primal cause are only the more sublimely rhythmic. Count this a lingering survival of ‘mere metaphysics’ who will, it is withal so stalwart, so perennial in our consciousness, amidst all vicissitudes of knowledge and reasoning, that whatever science may do, philosophy must give it audience.