And soon the result ensues, which might naturally be expected. Is it possible to imagine any discouragement heavier, than the feeling that we can effect little to acquire a knowledge of truth, goodness, and God;—a feeling, that do what we will, all we want most—all that is truly Divine—must remain to us a darkness or a dream? Let any man think in his heart, that what ought to rule his life, and raise him higher than his lower self, is a secret unknowable, and he loses the fear of doing wrong;—for how can he help it?—and the hope of a brighter and better future;—for how shall he attain it? Then, he sits down to wrap himself in cynical self-sufficingness. Inevitable ignorance is soon developed into intellectual Pessimism. The death of hope and fear, makes the man himself a moral Pessimist. Our conscience, sympathy, devotion, happiness in higher and in lower things alike,—if unstirred by vivid emotions—must become dull and blunted. Next follows
"The waveless calm, the slumber of the dead;"—
a state of suspended animation, broken only by fierce stimulants—the galvanisms of, our lower life. These are succeeded, in due course, by spasmodic susceptibilities, which demand at no distant day the anodyne and the narcotic. And—
"Oh, that way madness lies!"—
Therefore we repeat it,—and it cannot too often or too earnestly be repeated,—let no man excuse himself from the pursuit of practical truth[z] by any amount of speculative difficulty whatsoever. It would be a false optimism to say there is no difficulty in thinking truly;—to represent its difficulties as trifles;—or to forget the painful fact that they beset our age of cold erudite criticism, like pitfalls in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. But, must not all things really great and good be toilsome to men who are neither very good nor very great? And have we not, every one of us, who tries to be good, our proper fields of hard yet repaying work? The bee gathers honey where one idle schoolboy sees only thorns and briers—and where another sucks poison.
In our days, Doubt is thorough. So thorough, that it soon ceases to be doubt, and the mind passes quickly from its dim twilight to a rayless blank. Mr. Herbert Spencer puts the case of Theology as follows (First Principles p. 43): "Criticising the essential conceptions involved in the different orders of beliefs, we find no one of them to be logically defensible. Passing over the consideration of credibility, and confining ourselves to that of conceivability, we see that Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism, when rigorously analysed, severally prove to be absolutely unthinkable." These three conceptions the writer does in fact analyse after his own fashion,—briefly first, pp. 30-36,—and further on argues the whole question in extenso. The result, of course, is that all three "beliefs" must finally be abandoned. What then becomes of the Absolute ground, or First Cause of all things? Spencer is too clear-sighted not to acknowledge that there must in reason be a First, and an Absolute. "M. Herbert Spencer," says Ravaisson,[107] "en proclamant la grande maxime que nous ne connaissons rien que de relatif, a fait cependant une réserve importante. L'idée même du relatif, remarque-t-il, ne saurait se comprendre sans celle à laquelle elle est opposée. Et nous concevons, en effet, au delà de toutes les relations de phénomènes, l'absolu: c'est ce quelque chose qui est placé au delà de toute science, et qui est l'objet de la religion; quelque chose seulement de mystérieux, d'obscur, sur quoi on ne peut avoir, selon M. Spencer, aucune lumière." The last negative clause is amply justified on p. 113 of "First Principles." "By continually seeking to know, and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as The Unknowable." And this closing word becomes with Spencer, the constant name of a Power, the consciousness, of which is "manifested to us through all phenomena."[108]
Such a position, maintained by such a writer, has of course met with ample consideration. Mr. Huxley appears to have arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion. Of Religion he says,[109] "Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present has become more scientific than that of the past; because it has not only renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs, and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions, by worship 'for the most part of the silent sort' at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable."
Concerning this general idea (or negation of Idea) Mr. J. Martineau has made antagonistic observations, by way of criticism on Mr. Spencer's book. "To say," he writes,[110] "that the First Cause is wholly removed from our apprehension is not simply a disclaimer of faculty on our part; it is a charge of inability against the First Cause too.... And in the very act of declaring the First Cause incognizable, you do not permit it to remain unknown. For that only is unknown, of which you can neither affirm nor deny any predicate; here you deny the power of self-disclosure to the 'Absolute,' of which therefore something is known;—viz., that nothing can be known," And again with much force,[111] "You cannot constitute a religion out of mystery alone, any more than out of knowledge alone; nor can you measure the relation of doctrines to humility and piety by the mere amount of conscious darkness which they leave. All worship, being directed to what is above us and transcends our comprehension, stands in presence of a mystery. But not all that stands before a mystery is worship."[aa]
Mr. Mill (doing battle with another antagonist) denies every attribute claiming faith and worship, to the idea of a morally Unknowable God. The passage occurs in his Examination of Hamilton, pp. 123-4. "If, instead of the 'glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that 'the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving' does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him."[ab]
Now, suppose that instead of siding on this occasion with Mill and Martineau, we were to accept the alternative offered by Spencer and Huxley. Would this surrender of Natural Theology—or rather of all Theology—necessitate in reason any other vast surrender also? We have already answered in the affirmative. The surrender would penetrate every field of knowledge and of thought. We have already shewn this. For, the thread binding the present section into a connected whole runs thus: Survey the conditions of interrogating, first, nature; secondly, our own highest nature; next, our senses; finally, our consciousness; and add to them the enormous difficulties which attend every step taken in compliance with those indispensable conditions. Indispensable, that is, to our knowing anything, of any sort, in any way whatsoever. You have, then, no right to isolate Theism. It is false logic, to speak of the intellectual difficulties attaching to our apprehension of the Deity, as if they were substantial objections. In this respect, Theism stands within the same category of speculative perplexity, and reasonable necessity, as do other supreme truths.[112]