The loftiest object of human thought is to discover how far the material universe is en expression of supreme unity, of rhythmic activity, and of rational order. But for this, the mind must take a range that transcends, without limit, all physical sequences, laws, phenomena. Taking the broad basis of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, we must relate sequences, interpret phenomena, and, however remotely and imperfectly, endeavour to account for ‘laws.’ But in doing this we must remember that we have pushed our way beyond the last outpost of physical research. We have passed beyond the region where ‘quod erat demonstrandum’ is used. We have threaded our mental path into solitudes where no electrometer will be responsive, no spectroscope analytical, no lens revealing. We have come to the edge of all that we know and can demonstrate; and then, impelled by the moral and rational light within us, we judge and balance all that we know, and all that we are, and we reach, not a demonstration, for that cannot be, but a conviction, a moral and intellectual certainty, of the being of a primordial cause, which is second, in its firmness and security, to nothing within the area of mind.
Since the time of Newton and Leibnitz the laws of ordinary dynamics have been settled; but between dynamics, and the so-called ‘imponderable forces,’ by which it was assumed that an explanation was furnished of heat, chemical action, electricity, magnetism and the rest, there was a great gulf. That has been bridged over by a common measure of value, giving rise to a general dynamic law of all the forces of the universe. This is known as the ‘Conservation of Energy.’ It demonstrates, with more or less completeness, that all physical phenomena are the different appearances resulting from different groupings of matter by force. Both matter and force are eternally changeless in quantity. They can be neither diminished nor increased, neither created nor destroyed. The ‘modes of motion’ that produce the varied phenomena are interchangeable. Light may become heat, heat may become electricity; but there is no loss. When motion seems to disappear, it is only transferred into another mode. The phenomena of light, heat, electricity, result from changes wrought in matter by motion. Every ray of sunshine, for instance, is an interwoven group of powerful energies. Whence do they come? From changes in the matter of the sun. For every measure of sunshine received by the earth an equivalent measure of solar matter has been changed. Through the sunbeam the varied forms of energy produced in the sun have been received, and stored up on this earth. For incalculable centuries the world has been clothed with abundant vegetation. This will only grow in sunlight. The energies in the sunbeam act on living matter, as on a spore or a seed, causing it to grow. That is to say, under the influence of vital action, the forces of the sunbeam are changed into wood. A section from a pine mast, or an oak trunk, stands for a measurable quantity of sunshine. But coal is wood; forests buried and carbonized. Coal then has, as it were, fixed the energies of the sunbeams that poured upon the earth millions of years ago. Put coal where it will be in contact with oxygen and heat, and what follows? You get heat, light, chemical action; that is to say, the locked-up energies of the sunbeams of a measureless past are set free.
Here then, all the activity of the universe, every phenomenon, and every vibration of every atom, from the centre to the margin of the immeasurable whole, is directly related to a unity of primal power. Nothing has happened to-day in the remotest or nearest part of creation, but was linked in an unbroken chain to the first throb that thrilled the incipient universe in the mystery of ‘the beginning.’ Nothing is isolated through all duration and all space. Because, everywhere and always, the resulting phenomena are self-acting and rhythmic to our mode of research, shall we say that they have no cause, or that they have determined their own condition? because we find that the self-adjustments and sublimity of Nature, transcend infinitely all the conceptions of earlier generations, will it be logical to argue, that therefore Nature may be the more readily explained as causeless and devoid of mind? that, being self-adjusting and self-acting, it needed no cause? or shall we not the rather realize that this unbroken line of physical continuity and interaction through all duration to ‘the beginning’ brings us there, face to face, with the inscrutable Power, by which that unchanging unity and continuity of purposeful action was caused?
Every phenomenon is motion; motion can only begin in force. Within the range of human experience and thought, as it has been long without answer contended, there is no force known but will: could any other cause than the volition of a mind, have primarily directed force to affect matter so as to produce, for ever, the infinite harmonies and self-adjusting interactions of this vast Universe?
The very intellect, which finds so noble a vocation in the researches of science, and which is so brilliantly employed in penetrating into, and opening up, the intelligibility of the physical universe; and by that means demonstrating the congruousness of the cosmos; is the same intellect that is conscious of itself, and of its power; which knows itself as possessed of causative capacity; and which has absolutely no other source of knowledge concerning power, save that which arises in itself. The very rationality of the Creation, in our deepest analysis and broadest survey of it, leads the mind, by the conditions inseverable from its reasoning faculties, to see in its perfect relations the inevitable congruity of an intelligent cause. And all this, be it observed, results after science has disclosed the splendid treasures of its knowledge, the beauty and indisputable accuracy of its methods, and the new senses with which it has endowed itself by its instruments. Yes; the mind goes out to this conclusion, not defiant of science, but gratefully paying toll to it for an infinitely enlightening and ennobling passage through the marvels of phenomena, and the splendour of Nature’s methods, right to the very margin, beyond which science herself declares she cannot go; and although the physicist may declare he does not need it, and the mathematician that he can dispense with it, although all their immediate problems can be worked without it, yet the mind goes forth on the wings of its rational powers, its moral consciousness, its judgment; and leaving the margin of matter, it seeks audience, as it were, with the very mystery that enshrouds the universe; and it rises to the conviction that its quest has not been vain; it has realized, dimly, imperfectly, and, as it were, faint with awe, the necessity of the presence and action of Eternal Mind.
No search into the relations of matter and motion can ever affect our consciousness of causality. We cannot be conscious of our own being without being simultaneously conscious that whatever begins to be, must have a cause, a reason, for its being. The very validity of our mental acts is imperilled, if the congruity of the principle of causality be doubted. Permit an illustration: a minute and beautiful crystal of unknown nature is before us. By a mental necessity we know—we cannot free ourselves from the conviction—that this crystal occupied a measurable time to become a crystal, and that being such, it occupies a measurable portion of space. May we rely on this fundamental act of mind? Is it truth? If not, there is not a mental act that ever was, or ever can be, veritable. But if it be true, then, since for man to produce a physical effect involves (1) the consciousness of power to do it, and (2) the volitional exercise of that power; and since the human mind is absolutely without a trace of knowledge of any other way in which power can be exercised, in earth or heaven; is not the insistence of reason that there must be a cause for cosmic phenomena, a mental act of the same order as that which insists on time and space as inseverable factors in the origin and existence of a crystal?
Causality in its mere mechanical relations may be considered for convenience, and translated as, ‘mechanical law:’ contemplated in its relation to a living organism, we may render it by such an expression as a ‘law of life’. But carry causality to its spring, trace it back to consciousness and thought, and it admits of no disguise; it is power, it is volition; there is no halting in its phrase; it is, ‘I can,’ ‘I will.’
Herbert Spencer himself affirms, ‘The force by which we ourselves produce changes, and which serves to symbolize the causes of changes in general, is the final disclosure of analysis.’[3] ‘I can,’ ‘I am able,’ is a knowledge that emerges within us simultaneously with ‘I am.’ It involves a consciousness of power, which is the essence of causality. We possess it, in precisely the same way as we possess ourselves, or our thoughts. Our knowledge of power is not even derived from effort or resistance. We know as clearly what we mean by ‘I am able,’ as we do when we affirm ‘I am here.’ Being able, and knowing we are able, are absolutely different. A telephone is mechanically able to transmit vocal sounds and language. But how different to man, who is not only able, but knows that he is able. This knowledge of our power to act is the immutable foundation of our belief in causation.
We may make two separate affirmations: as, for example, that ‘the thermometer is 6° F. below zero,’ and that ‘water has become solid;’ or, again, we may state, ‘my fingers rest upon the key-board of an organ,’ and ‘now they move, and a symphony of Beethoven’s is floating in the air.’ These are ‘sequences;’ but is that enough? No. Instantly the mental act that interprets them is supplied. In both cases, our consciousness and reason are compelled to demand the exercise of power, by means of which one event succeeds the other. We are absolutely and irresistibly certain, in the latter case, that it must be so. A direct act of volition changed the fingers from rest into rhythmic motion, causing the organ to pour out music; and, by an intellectual necessity, we see that a diminished temperature, and frozen water, are not sequences merely; they must be related: and this conviction is not changed, though, by means of research, we find their sequential relation to be the result of the continuity of prior effects; we still retain the unaltered judgment, that, if we go back far enough, we must be in the presence of a cause. The mind cannot dispense with the link of power uniting sequences.
Then, if by long trains of sequential effects and secondary causes we are led up, not by demonstration, but by irresistible moral conviction, to a Primordial Power, a source of all, what is such creative cause? Is it inevitably God? Is the universe, as we know it, infinite? Who dare say? Though we know that the vast looming firmament, in which the ‘milky way’ stretches its depths and winds its awful amplitudes, is beyond all finite power to follow; yet, it may be but a complex particle in a universe of universes, stretching on, and for ever on, over the bourneless immensity of the unknown.