Where Science and Religion Meet

by William Scott Palmer

If the train of reflexion thus suggested is followed up, some of us will find ourselves compelled to readjust certain beliefs in regard to spiritual life as related to the life of the body, and in regard also to bodily life as related to the life of the spirit. We shall perhaps learn that in looking upon spirit as altogether separate from matter or as connected with matter only by some fortuitous or indeed unhappy link, we may indeed have kept it safe from the attacks of the materialist, but only at the cost of emptying it of value for ourselves, except in so far as it is, perhaps, an all but invisible point de repère round about which our vague religious sentiments are grouped. Just as in the evolution of elements and compounds afterwards united in the marvel of life-jelly, we traced the preparation of a pathway for life moving towards its first manifestation, so we should trace in the successive phases of that manifestation a development of co-operative relations between spirit and matter, a development rendering matter more and more plastic to spirit, and spirit more and more responsive to the character of the far from inert instrument through which its purpose is effected.

The evolutionist philosopher has told us that we may picture life as a rising wave opposed by the contrary movement of matter towards stability. The greater part of the whole volume of the wave, after reaching one height or another, is arrested; and going no further it is at each several height converted into the whirling eddies, the contented plants and animals of which we have already spoken. At one point only, where it rises highest, does the wave find a free passage (and of this too we have spoken) along which it carries with it, converted to its further purpose, the material obstacle, condition, and means that will, in a sense and for a time, still in some degree encumber, but cannot now arrest, its advance. The life-current continues to flow, a gathering wave of conscious life grown to self-consciousness and world-consciousness. It flows on from this point of conquest through generation after generation of men in and to whom its spiritual character is now plainly revealed. For each man it is a rill from the great human river of life—life natural and spiritual, spiritual because so fully natural—which has become his own and is indeed himself. For each the material but living brain is the chief instrument and helper by means of which he himself stretches forth towards wider and wider relations, not only with material objects but with other spiritual beings. And as the spirit of a man thus expands, amassing life and becoming, by the sympathetic spiritual inclusion of other lives, greater in its reach and in itself, it is confirmed and consolidated in its self-ownership. You may say that as a self-knowing, self-governing, creative being, an owner of means and a seeker after ends, man's life has at last taken possession of the kingdom of itself, and that it has reached this all-important status through the medium and condition of a body and by the experience of an earthly world.

We will let the philosopher tell us the gist of this in his own words:—

'While we watch the birth of consciousness we are confronted, at the same time, by the apparition of living bodies, capable, even in their simplest forms, of movements spontaneous and unforeseen. The progress of living matter consists in a differentiation of function which leads first to the production and then to the increasing complication of a nervous system capable of canalizing excitations and of organizing actions: the more the higher centres develop, the more numerous become the motor paths among which the same excitation allows the living being to choose in order that it may act. An ever greater latitude left to movement in space—this indeed is what is seen. What is not seen is the growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time. Not only, by its memory of former experiences, does this consciousness retain the past better and better, so as to organize it with the present in a newer and richer decision; but, living with an intenser life, contracting, by its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number of external moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable of creating acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity. Thus, whether we consider it in time or in space, freedom always seems to have its roots deep in necessity and to be intimately organized with it. Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.'

Any philosopher, after writing or speaking some such words as these, may well ask us to consider—when we have watched the hard-won triumph of life over so great difficulties and so many obstacles, when we have discovered what seems to us clear evidence that it has for age upon age pursued with immeasurable power and resource a purpose which the spiritual consciousness of man is alone competent to fulfil, and that it has thus attained in man a position of supreme advantage for this fulfilment—whether we ought not to regard ourselves as paltering with reason if we expect that pursuit and that attainment both to be in vain. Is life, just where it seems in sight of final triumph, to be overcome at the last by death? Why should it be overcome by this when it has vanquished so much else? Why, if the world is rational, should we expect all the ages of preparation to be brought to naught, and the splendour of man's promise to be laid low in the grave?

We have to confess, I think, that reason is against this, and that when we allow ourselves to expect or to fear such an anti-climax we are influenced rather by prejudice, conscious or unconscious. Prejudice is born of our every-day dealing with things and our every-day notions about causes and about bodies. We think spirit is dependent upon matter, not as upon a living and responsive instrument of transmission and self-development to a certain necessary point of self-consolidation; but as most things we deal with depend upon other things, which, as we say, cause them, produce them, or make them do and be and happen. We suppose all too easily that just as steam ceases when the boiler-fires are drawn, so when the body dies life, its product, ceases too. We see the leaves fall from the trees to perish. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse,—it is the common lot of things and men. It is familiar—what more need be said? The burden of proof lies on the man who would tell us of exceptions to the rule.

Yet, if and when we come to examine things and men, do we discover any such rule applicable to men? Are we not all but compelled, reading the astounding story of evolution in the light cast upon it by its culmination in man, to question every uncriticized and easily formed opinion on a subject so complex and profound? If indeed there is evidence to show that life is neither produced by nor released from matter, but is in some sort conjoined with matter, lifting it from its own level, and using its powers in a way altogether different from their normal material course; if there is evidence that these powers are made to fulfil a purpose that can be no other than a purpose for life; then, obviously, matter, in the order of power and of nature, is life's subordinate. We must, indeed, as reasonable beings, correct those easy opinions—these things being thus. The similes and illustrations of every day do not fit the case. Intimate as is the relation between spirit and matter, there is no more reason to think life is produced by a material substance than to think the boiler-fire is produced by the steam. Both thoughts are equally absurd, and perhaps the chief cause of our thinking so easily the one and of our being quite unable to think the other is that we can see and touch boilers and the like, and cannot see and touch 'spirit and life.'

'Lamps burn in every house, O blind one! and you

cannot see them.

One day your eyes shall suddenly be opened, and