We may add that a subtle argument is often like a sharp thin blade, cutting clean into the very heart of a question. If it indeed prove a home thrust, few things ought to be more fearlessly and cheerfully welcomed by those who desire to dissect out the naked, intrinsic truth. We will, therefore, dissect a little deeper, following the Professor's track of demonstration.
We find him, then, reaching down to a septum, or, as botanists prefer to speak, a strong dissepiment between a law of Nature or physical causation, and a true Cause in the highest and most emphatic sense[q].
Such a separation is not to be sought from a writer of Paley's date, when the modern notion of law was unformed, or rather was in process of formation. Thus Newton's discoveries were thought by many persons irreligious, because the stability of the heavens appeared like something necessarily determined. Respecting this opinion, Powell observes (and from his point of view with truth), that "such necessity of reason is the highest proof of design." Paley, on the contrary, felt inclined to despair of discovering much evidence of Design in Astronomy, but he looked upon the starry heavens as affording the most ample and glorious confirmation of the agency of an intelligent Creator, when proved from some other source. In his next chapter (the 23rd) he proceeds to reprehend the mistaken sense of law, growing up amongst physicists in his own day. "It will," he says, "be made to take the place of power, and still more, of intelligent power," and will "be assigned for the cause of anything or of any property of anything that exists." In this remark he shows his accustomed penetration. Law, antecedent and consequent, with their series of physical evolutions, have been talked of by men who confuse physics and metaphysics, as if they could thereby account for a whole universe.[30] Now, from this cloudy confusion[r], Professor Powell is exempt. He accepts (as obviously he must accept) the natural-science idea of law, which looks at it as an orderly expression of force, and tells us that "law and order, physical causation and uniformity of action are the elevated manifestations of Divinity, creation and providence."[31] But from the conception of Mind or Intelligence thus given us, which, though invisible to the eye, is yet, in its effects, plainly visible, he distinguishes, over and over again, the idea of a true originating first Cause.[32] We see the necessity of a moral Cause as distinguished from a physical antecedent, when we survey Nature. But Nature does not contain the idea in an explicit shape. She only necessitates its acceptance. This idea, we find, he tells us, manifest in our own moral nature,—by analogy we discern it in the Divine. He likewise severely blames those who commingle in words the two contrasted thoughts and lines of inference, and mentions Coleridge and Sterling[33] by way of example. As concerns his own mode of establishing the idea of causation in its proper and peculiar force, Professor Powell agrees with a large number of metaphysicians, ancient and modern. It might seem superfluous to name as an instance the late Dean Mansel, were not a passage in his "Prolegomena" so full of good matter on the topic.[34]
In this view of causation, then, Powell advanced nothing new. But what he did advance was really valuable. The man who can rise no higher than law or succession as he sees it impressed on outward nature, stands in a totally different position from the man whose insight into Reason and Will has shown him the idea of true Causation. For, he has seen that whoever is the author of his own act, does something which puts in movement a new series of antecedence and consequence,—a new train of events, the issue of which no man can foresee;—though of what has come, and is coming, he, the individual man, is the truly responsible cause[]. But if he can introduce into the order of the outward world a new antecedent carrying after it a chain of new consequents, what shall he think respecting the absolute Cause of all worlds, things and beings, the thinker himself included? Who shall persuade him to deny the reasonableness of a Providence following creation? Who can reprove the man when he feels and asserts his own moral power, for a belief in Miracles? Above all, who will demonstrate that prayer is inefficacious, if we can rise (as Baden Powell says we can rise) "by analogy with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, to the Supreme Mind and Moral Cause of the universe?"
It is no slight praise to say that Professor Powell clearly saw, and no less clearly expressed, a truth not always apprehended among physicists. By giving it expression, he rendered a substantial service to Natural Theology. It is, indeed, a serious drawback and impediment to Natural Theologians that their argument requires some acquaintance with more than one wide field of knowledge. They have to reason from the material world,—they have also to reason from the world of mind; and in countries like England, France, and Germany, where division of labour penetrates every calling, literary as well as manufacturing, a combination of this sort is a matter of infrequent occurrence. To this retarding circumstance may be ascribed the want of progress in several mixed sciences,[35] which, like the subject we are treating, occupy two distinct tracts of border-land territory.
The separating wall between Law and Cause built up by Professor Powell, was founded on fact, and will probably remain unshaken. But he added to it a theoretical limitation of the term, Natural Theology, which, like many changes in verbal usage, does not appear defensible,—particularly as its bad effects are plainly shown in Professor Powell's own book.
Within two pages of the passage on Causation last quoted, he startles the unwary reader by saying (p. 173) that "Natural Theology confessedly 'proves too little,' because it cannot rise to the metaphysical idea or scriptural representation of God." It is generally vain to inquire what may be meant by "Metaphysical." Few people are aware that everybody, learned or unlearned, talks metaphysics either well or ill; and usually (as M. Jourdain talked prose) without knowing it. The epithet "metaphysical" figures often enough as another name for what is unintelligible;—and most Englishmen apply it to all "ideas" not strictly commercial or practical. Here it seems to stand along with Scripture, in opposition to Natural Theology; while the latter term is in turn opposed to the science of the human mind. Yet does not Powell distinctly trace a Mind and Intelligence analogous to the mind and intelligence of Man, throughout the world of outward Nature; and does he not further determine that this same analogy, fairly carried out, leads to what he now calls "the metaphysical idea, or scriptural representation of God?" In other words, when discussing the question of Evidence, he finds Mind pervading outward Nature,—he treats Mind as the ordering and sovereign part of the Natural world, which visibly shows the effect of its invisible direction, and bids us follow up this higher nature in its analogies to God, of Whose operation the order and arrangement of the Universe are external manifestations. But, when he speaks of Natural Theology, that higher nature seems to disappear; intellect, volition, and the power of moral causation, slip out of sight, and are blotted from his catalogue of natural facts. Human nature must thus be treated as no part of universal Nature, in order that a needlessly narrow and purely theoretical fence may be drawn round the science of Natural Theology! Natural Theology and Natural Religion are, in truth, terms originally adopted as mere antitheses to Revelation. The first signifies what mankind might have known, or may know, of the Divine Being, prior to, or apart from, any direct message sent by Himself. The second is intended to comprehend those relations between that Divine Being and ourselves, which must ensue immediately upon the acceptance of Theism.[36] The ideas expressed by these two terms are as old as Revelation itself,—a strong reason why their meaning should not be lightly altered.[37] But this antithetic usage was never intended to prejudge the question whether the results of Natural Theology and Religion do not coincide to a very great extent with the teaching of revelation. Much less was there any idea of answering this question in the negative, as a hasty reader of certain isolated passages in Professor Powell's book might easily be led to answer it.[38]