Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

The outlook is certainly serious, yet not altogether disheartening. Perhaps we cannot now safely separate the wheat from the tares, but must let them grow together unto the harvest. Nobody expects in this world to ascertain the limits between design and contingency. Nobody expects to demonstrate any design, except his own to himself by consciousness; he cannot really prove his own to his bosom friend; though his assertion may give his friend, and his actions may give his enemy, convincing reasons for inferring it. But we are sure that every intellectual being has designs, that the reach and pervasiveness of design must be in proportion to the wisdom; and that the designs of the Author of Nature, if any there be, must be all-pervading and fathomless. Yet if they be wrought into a system of adaptations, some of the adaptations themselves may be such as irresistibly to suggest their reason to our minds. At least they suggest reason, even if we fail to apprehend, or wrongly apprehend, the reason. The sense that there is reason why is as innate in man, as that there is cause whereby.

Now, to adopt the apt words of Francis Newman, "after stripping off all that goes beyond

• In Contemporary Review, 1878, p. 445, &c.

the mark of sober and cautious thought, there remain in this world fitnesses innumerable on the largest and the smallest scale, in which alike common sense and uncommon sense see design, and the only mode of evading this belief is by carrying out the cumbrous Epicurean argument to a length of which Epicurus could not dream. We cannot prove, we are told, that the eye was intended to see, or the hand to grasp, or the fingers to work delicately. Of course we cannot. But what is the alternative? To believe that it came about by blind chance. No science has any calculus or apparatus to decide between the two theories. Common sense, not science, has to decide, and the most accomplished physical student has in the decision no advantage whatever over a simple but thoughtful man."

Arrangements innumerable, extending through all nature, subserving all ends, of course involve innumerable contingencies. The theist is not expected to have any definite idea of the respective limits of these. He can only guess at the limits of intention and contingency in the actions of his nearest neighbor. The non-theist gains nothing by eliminating instances, unless he can eliminate all design from the system.

Until he does this, he gains nothing by showing that particular fitnesses come to pass little by little, and under natural causes. He cannot point to a time where there were no fitnesses, apparent or latent, and if he argues that all fitnesses were germinal in the nebulous matter of our solar system, he does not harm our case. The throwing of design ever so far back in time does not harm it, nor deprive it of its everpresent and ever-efficient character. For, as has been acutely said, "If design has once operated in rerum natura (as in the production of a first life-germ), how can it stop operating and undesigned formation succeed it? It cannot, and intention in Nature having once existed, the test of the amount of that intention is not the commencement but the end, not the first low organism, but the climax and consummation of the whole."

I am not going to re-argue an old thesis of my own that Darwinism does not weaken the substantial ground of the argument, as between theism and non-theism, for design in Nature.t

• Mozley, Essays, ii. 412. See also Lord Blachford in The Nineteenth Century, June, 1879, p. 1035.

↑ Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews pertaining to Darwiniam. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1876.

I think it brought in no new difficulty, though it brought old ones into prominence. It must be reasonably clear to all who have taken pains to understand the matter that the true issue as regards design is not between Darwinism and direct Creationism, but between design and fortuity, between any intention or intellectual cause and no intention nor predicable first cause. It is really narrowed down to this, and on this line all maintainers of the affirmative may present an unbroken front. The holding of this line secures all; the weakening of it in the attempted defence of unessential and now untenable outposts endangers all.

I have only to add a few observations and exhortations addressed to Christian theists.

If intention must pervade every theistic system of Nature, if we give credit to Mr. Darwin when in this regard he likens his divergence from the orthodox view to the difference between general and particular Providence, is it safe to declare that his theory, and his denial that particular forms were specially created, are practically atheistical? I might complain of this as unfair: it is more to my purpose to complain of it as suicidal. It is in effect holding a theistic conception of Nature for our pri

vate use, but acting on the opposite when we would discredit an unwelcome theory. Or else it is trusting so little to our own belief that we abandon it as soon as any weight is laid upon it. As soon as you do this, by conceding that the evolution of forms under natural laws militates against design in Nature, you are at the mercy of those reasoners, who, looking at the probabilities of the case from their own point of view, coolly remark that:

"On the whole, therefore, we seem entitled to conclude that, during such time as we have evidence of, no intelligence or volition has been concerned in events happening within the range of the solar system, except that of animals living on the planets.'

You may say that implicit belief of intention in Nature affords an insufficient foundation for theism. But you are not asked to ground your theism upon it, nor upon the whole world of external phenomena.

You may reiterate that you cannot believe that all these events have occurred under natural laws. Nothing hinders your assuming what you need from the supernatural'; but

• Clifford, Sunday Lectures, quoted in The Spectator.

'allow that the need of other minds may not be identical with yours.

As I have said before, what you want is, not a system which may be adjusted to theism, nor even one which finds its most reasonable interpretation in theism, but one which theism only can account for. That, it seems to me, you have. An excellent judge, a gifted adept in physical science and exact reasoning, the late Clerk-Maxwell, is reported to have said, not long before he left the world, that he had scrutinized all the agnostic hypotheses he knew of, and found that they one and all needed a God to make them workable.

[ocr errors]

When you ask for more than this, namely, for that which will compel belief in a personal Divine Being, you ask for that which He has not been pleased to provide. Experience proves that the opposite hypothesis is possible. Some rest in it, but few I think on scientific grounds. The affirmative hypothesis gives us a workable conception of how "the world of forms and means" is related to "the world of worths and ends." The negative hypothesis gives no mental or ethical satisfaction whatever. Like the theory of the immediate creation of forms, it explains nothing.

[ocr errors]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »