Hugh Miller

by W. Keith Leask

From about 1830 to 1850 the old metaphysical reign seems to have ceased; and Jeffrey, in the palmy days of the Edinburgh Review, could declare that the interest in psychology had well-nigh passed away with Dugald Stewart. Natural Science seemed to be taking its place, and the British Association movement lent impetus to the new régime. Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Owen, and others, followed by Huxley and Tyndall, appeared to herald the advent of an age when the most difficult problems could be read off the book of Nature, and the public turned eagerly from the Babel of the philosophers to the men of the new school in a sort of expectation of a royal road to learning, without missing their way in theological jungle or 'skirting the howling wastes' of metaphysics. Needless to say, the hopes were no more realised than were the expectations of a golden age of material prosperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The problem of man and his destiny remains as rooted as ever, and the metaphysician has not been dislodged. The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the domain of mental science, and when transferred to the natural sciences the fight was not productive of the expected results. The times, as Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve round that centre: there is no pure entire confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and the school of natural science was in possession of the field. Now the tide has turned, and the geologist is threatened with eclipse. Of the doyen of the new school, Richard Owen, Professor Huxley says:—'Hardly any of those speculations and determinations have stood the test of investigation. I am not sure that any one but the historian of anatomical science is ever likely to recur to them. Obvious as are the merits of Owen's anatomical and palæontological work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discuss them; and countless pages of analysis of his memoirs would not have made the general reader any wiser than he was at first.' Even Buckland is regarded by Boyd Dawkins as belonging to a type of extinct men. Thus is the deposition effected of the scientific Pope of the day. If such rapid supersession be the law, who can expect in departing to leave footprints in the annals of so shifting a science? Who can be a fixed star?

There is some comfort in the reflection that, as in Political Economy, so in Geology, it is the inspiration that lives and not the mere amount of positive contribution to knowledge. Bacon has effected nothing for science; in everything that he attempted it may be shown that he was wrong and that his methods have led to nothing. His name is associated with no new discovery, no new law, not even with a new or inductive method. But his niche is secure through the spirit in which he approached the question; if he did not see the Promised Land, at least he was a firm believer in its existence, and that spirit has outlived his unhappy detraction of greater men than himself in mental philosophy. His mind was swift to perceive analogies, and such a type of mind, if it adds little to actual knowledge, is at least valuable as a stimulus. Carlyle in his political pamphlets has certainly not advanced the lines of the 'dismal science'; he even contemptuously doubted its existence, and he has done harm to it through the ready-reckoner school of à priori economists who refer everything with confidence to their own internal consciousness. Yet Carlyle at his worst has his value. He has the merit of showing that the problem is in its very nature an everlasting one, and that the plummet line of the mere profit-and-loss moralist will never sound the depths of man and his destiny. Such thinkers are, however, rare; but in natural science they are the salt. Such are Oken, Cuvier, Darwin; their position is independent of the truth of their theories, and they have the gift of a fused and informing imagination, by which their theories are landmarks. Much of their work has already been recast, and some of their once supposed safest generalisations have been abandoned. But the progress of science revolves round them as central suns. Hardly one of Niebuhr's interpretations of Roman history has stood the test of subsequent investigations, any more than those of Ewald in the field of Biblical criticism. Yet in historical science no two men have a more assured rank.

It is this informing power that keeps alive the geologist. Hume owes his position in metaphysics to this power, and to his great gifts as a stylist. Few men of science have had graces of style. In Darwin it is lacking, and he has himself set on record that literature and art had ceased for him to exert any influence, and that a mere novel had become the highest form of intellectual amusement. Hutton needed a Playfair to make him intelligible, as Dugald Stewart was needed for the exposition of Reid. But it is this power that will keep Miller alive. His views upon the Old Red Sandstone, on the Noachian Deluge, on the Mosaic Cosmogony, may be right or wrong. But they have the sure merit of abiding literature, and men highly endowed with this gift have a lasting and assured fame. Mr. Lowell has declared Clough to be the true poet of the restlessness of the later half of the century, and Tennyson to be but its pale reflex. But the answer is ready and invincible: Tennyson is read, and Clough is already on the shelf. As a piece of imaginative writing, The Old Red Sandstone is not likely to be soon surpassed in its own line. 'I would give,' we find Buckland declaring, 'my left hand to possess such powers of description as this man has.' 'There is,' says Carlyle, 'right genial fire, everywhere nobly tempered down with peaceful radical heat, which is very beautiful to see. Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, strong, fresh, and breezy, like the "Old Red Sandstone" mountains in a sunny summer day.' We doubt if a single page of Sedgwick, or of Buckland even in his Bridgewater Treatise, be read—at least as literature. But a man, whose book upon the 'Old Red' has seen its twentieth edition, whose Testimony of the Rocks is in its forty-second thousand, and whose Footprints has seen a seventeenth edition, has only attained this popularity by his solid merits as a writer and thinker. Mere popularisation cannot explain it. When a man has fully mastered his subject, and his subject has mastered him, there is sure to emerge a certain demonic force in literature or in science, all the more if the writer be a man with a style.

It need hardly be said that geology, from its very first appearance, had been associated with distinct views in Biblical criticism. The old chronology of Archbishop Ussher in the margin of the Authorised Version, by which B.C. 4004 was gravely assigned as the date of the Creation of the world, and B.C. 2348 for the Deluge, was in conflict with a science which required ages for its operations and not the limited confines of six thousand years, which form but a mere geological yesterday to the scientist like Lyell, who postulates some eighty millions of years for the formation of the coal-beds of Nova Scotia. The six 'days' of the Biblical Creation were thought unworthy, as a mere huddling of events into a point of time, of the Divine Wisdom, and impossible in conception. Mistakes in positive statement, no less than of implication, were also alleged against the Mosaic record, which was said to be admirable as literature if not immaculate in science. For long geology was regarded as a hostile intruder, and it required much time to assuage the fears on the one hand and lessen the rather vague pretensions on the other, before the lines of demarcation could be firmly drawn, if indeed, in a certain class of both theological and scientific minds, they can be said to be even yet settled. There is still the Voltairian type of thinker which is not yet exploded; and which, even in the case of Professor Huxley, has imagined that a mere shaking of the letter of a text or two is tantamount to an annihilation of the Christian faith. 'That the sacred books,' as Carlyle says, 'could be all else than a Bank of Faith Bill, for such and such quantities of enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world, value received; which Bill becomes a waste paper, the stamp being questioned; that the Christian Religion could have any deeper foundations than books, nothing of this seems to have even in the faintest matter occurred to Voltaire. Yet herein, as we believe the whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the question.' Science, in fact, after a long régime of even more than Macaulayesque cocksureness, is now abating its tone. It now no longer threatens like a second flood to cover the earth, and it is possible for mental and historical science to reappear like the earth out of the waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the limits of mind and matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no longer possible for a Voltaire to meet the theologian with a belief that the shells found on high hills were dropped by pilgrims and palmers from the Holy Land, any more than it would be possible to assert, with Dugald Stewart, that the words in Sanskrit akin to Greek were dropped by the troops of Alexander the Great. It is now as impossible to maintain, with the mythologists of legend, that the Ross-shire hills were formed by the Cailliach-more, or great woman, who dropped stones through the bottom of the panniers on her back, as it would be for any reactionary Chauteaubriand to assert that God made the world, at the beginning, precisely as we see it with all its completeness and antiquity, since he believed an infancy of the world would be a world without romance!—denying creation in periods, and asserting it in instantaneous processes, by which the fossils were even created just as we see them. Such a conception is not to exalt the Divine Power; or, if it appears to do so, it yet effectively annihilates a belief in the Divine Wisdom that could create pretty toys and useless fossils—a creation of mummies and skeletons that were never from the very beginning intended to be anything but skeletons, without any relation to living beings.

Miller accordingly makes it perfectly plain in what spirit he approaches the sacred record. The Bible, he says repeatedly, is neither a scientific text-book nor even a primer. Why, he asks, should it be regarded as necessary to promulgate the truths of geology when those of astronomy have been withheld? 'Man has everywhere believed in a book which should be inspired and should teach him what God is and what God demands of him, and this expectation is fully met in the Bible. But nowhere has man looked for the divine revelation of scientific truth, for it is in accordance with the economy of Providence, that Providence which is exhibited in gradual developments, that no such expectation has been or need be realised, the Principia of Newton and the discoveries of James Watt being both the result of the natural and unaided faculties of man.' Nay, more; there never could have been such a revelation given, for never yet has a single scientific truth been revealed. But, on the other hand, when he contrasts this clear perception of the demarcation of religion and science in the Bible, and the all too copious neglect of it in the other sacred books of the world, he is constrained to regard this very ability of distinction between two classes of truth as a strong argument for its inspiration.

On Man and his destiny he is no less clear, and he has many fertile suggestions to offer. His main thesis in this connection we have already seen as determining in his own life its central point. Man he regards as literally the fellow-worker with God. Up till his appearance upon the earth, nature had been remarkable only for what it was, but not for what it became. The advent of man marks the improver of creation—God made manifest in the flesh. Between his intellect and that of his Creator there is a relation, since we find creature and Creator working by the same methods. Precisely as we see China arriving at the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass without any connection with the West, so we see the works of the Creator in the palæozoic period repeated by the tiny creature-worker, without any idea that he had been anticipated. Thus Creation is not merely a scheme adapted to the nature of man, but one specially adapted to the pattern nature of God. Man made in the image of God is a real and fitting preparation for God's subsequent assumption of the form of man. 'Stock and graft had the necessary affinity,' and were finally united in the one person. History is, therefore, no mere finite record dating from a human act in Eden, but is the real result of a decree, 'in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme.'

The problem of the origin of evil is of course a difficulty viewed in relation to the decrees of God, in whom no evil can exist. In the present state of things he regards evil as due to man himself. The deputed head of creation has voluntarily and of his own free will not chosen to be a fellow-worker with God, who, while binding him fast in the chain of events, has yet left his will free. To ordain sin would be a self-contradiction of the idea of God; He but creates the being that in turn creates sin. 'Fore-knowledge,' as Milton says, 'had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain unforeseen.' Perhaps this is as near as we are ever likely to get. But the Fall in its theological aspect, while it must be fully apprehended by faith, has nothing to fear from science, which teaches, if it can be said emphatically to teach one thing, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. With Coleridge, therefore, he regards the Fall as a necessary stage in the history of thought and of man. The creation of the non-absolute gives a pivot without which all subsequent events would be inexplicable. It gives the true means of colligating the phenomena: Man, if at the Fall he lost Eden, gained a conscience and a moral sense.

More remarkable is his attempted reconciliation of science and the Mosaic cosmogony. Chalmers had regarded the Biblical account as relating only to existing creations, and believed in the existence of a chaotic period of death and darkness between this present world and the prior geological ages. Pye Smith, on the other hand, had regarded chaos as both temporary and limited in extent, and believed that outside this area there had existed lands and seas basking in light and occupied by animals. But subsequent geological knowledge had shown that this theory of cataclysms and breaks was without evidence—many of the present plants and animals co-existing with those of the former periods; nor could Smith's theory of light existing round the coasts of the earth be brought to square with the distinct statement of the primal creation of light in Genesis. On the other hand, Miller notices that geology, as dealing not with the nature of things, but only with their actual manifestations, has to do with but three of the six days or periods. The scale of all geologists is divided into three great classes. Lesser divisions of systems, deposits, beds, and strata may exist; but the master divisions, as he calls them, are simply those three which even the unpractised eye can detect—the Palæozoic, the Secondary, and the Tertiary. The first is the period of extraordinary fauna and flora—the period emphatically of forests and huge pines, 'the herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit.' The second is the age of monsters, reptiles, pterodactyls and ichthyosaurs, 'the fowl that flieth above the earth, the great sea-monsters and winged fowl after its kind.' The Tertiary period is that of 'the beasts of the earth and the cattle after their kind.' In each age, it is true, there is a twilight period, a period of morning-dawn and evening-decline; but in the middle of each period it is that we find the great outstanding features above. Thus there would be no contradictions in the record. This, it must be allowed, summarises truly enough the process of creation; but it leaves out of sight the invertebrata and early fishes of the first period, and regards the succeeding carboniferous era as the leading features, while perhaps in some subordinate details it inverts the order of other appearances.

To the wider objection to the Biblical record, with its light before the creation of the sun upon the fourth day, the vegetation on the third independent of the sun's warming rays, and to other real or supposed contradictions, Miller has a highly ingenious reply. We do not think it fully meets the necessities of the case, but it has unquestionably the merit of imaginative power, and is in full harmony with the nature of man's mind, and is therefore preferable to any theory which would assert the exact science of the Mosaic record by its anticipation of the theory of Laplace and Herschel, by which the earth existed before the sun was given as a luminary, and was independent of the sun for light. Perhaps the theory of progressive revelation will commend itself to most as the truest and the simplest explanation, though it should be noted that the extraordinary approximation of the Biblical version to the latest science does really set it far above the merely human speculation of some old Hebrew Newton or Descartes.

While regarding the 'days' as ages, Miller views the record as the result of an optical vision presented to the writer. He truly enough remarks that any exact revelation would have defeated its own object through an elaborate statement to man at an early stage. Man would not have believed it, as it would have contradicted his own experience. He would no more have believed that the earth revolved on its own axis than that molluscs had preceded him on the earth. The record, therefore, he regards as according to appearance rather than to physical realities: 'The sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was not until the fourth day of creation that they became visible from the earth's surface.' The six days or periods he takes to correspond with the six divisions in a successive series of the Azoic, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Oolitic, and Tertiary ages. To the human eye of the seer, the second day would afford nothing to divert it from the atmospheric phenomena; on the fourth the celestial phenomena would alone be so prominent as to call for specific mention. But, familiar to most readers as the famous passage is, we here present it as the best example of his descriptive and imaginative powers. If there are to be reconciliations at all, as either necessary or desirable, it would be hard to beat this fine piece of fused strength and imagination.[4]