Religion and Science Part 5

Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fas.h.i.+on of religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always spontaneous, and sometimes it is pa.s.sionate and poetic. His religious experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because non-intellectualist), but rich and deep:

"I can find no more worthy adoration of G.o.d than the silent admiration which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be expressed by any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh 'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26]

Here we have one form of the religious spirit; for the mystic it is always true that "there is neither speech nor language." The mystic and the dogmatist stand at opposite poles, for dogmatism is always an attempt at definition even when that which is to be defined is indefinable; and here is to be found the common denominator between Kant and Rousseau. The former, by his a.n.a.lysis of reason, discredited dogmatism: the latter, by his apotheosis of feeling, contributed towards the same result.

ROMANTICISM IN GERMANY.--This strong movement of feeling, created on the one hand by Kant's _Critique_, and by the mysticism of Rousseau, took different forms in the two countries to which these two philosophers belonged. In France the new philosophy became the hot-bed of revolutionary ideas; whereas in Germany it found vent in a ferment of speculative systems, and in an outcrop of artistic production. It produced the philosophies of Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling, and Hegel, and the prose and poetry of Goethe and Schiller.

"It was the age of 'beautiful souls' and of 'n.o.ble hearts'; men believed themselves capable of the highest things; the immediate needs of the heart were set over against reason ... under many successive forms Romanticism prevailed in literature, effecting the re-birth of human fancy after the long labour of intellect."[27]

THE GOAL OF PHILOSOPHY.--Philosophic young Germany had set itself an ambitious programme. Kant, indeed, had cleared the ground for them, but his warnings that an eagle cannot soar beyond the atmosphere which supports it, were disregarded.

The philosophy of Kant himself was felt by the successors to be lacking in the _idea of totality_--in the conception of a whole. His division of existence into Appearance and Reality seemed to indicate a certain lack of finish in his philosophy; and they set themselves to explore the root of reality which to Kant seemed undiscoverable, but in which the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds are united, and from which they have emerged. This task became and remained the grand problem of philosophy for a whole generation of thinkers. All externality, isolation, and division were to disappear, all existence must be shown to be but degrees and phases of the one infinite reality. Spinoza's work had to be done again in the light of increased psychological knowledge.

FICHTE.--Of the thinkers who addressed themselves to this ambitious task, only two need be considered here; and these are chosen because they attacked the problem from different directions.

In the first place, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who had been the first to lay down the programme of thought with explicitness, realised and admitted that the task which philosophy had set itself was beyond the powers of any logical train of thought. The "higher unity" of existence, the demonstration of which was the goal of philosophy, could be reached only by a process of intellectual intuition,[28]

it must be guessed or divined; for it presents itself (and this is a characteristically "Romanticist" idea) to the human mind in the immediacy of feeling, and not by discursive thought.

It was of the essence of Fichte's philosophy, as it had been of Spinoza's, that a point may be attained where the mind feels itself to be at one with the truly real, and only when this point is reached--i.e.

_sub specie aeternitatis_, will it arrive at and retain the conviction of the universal order and unity of existence. From this standpoint, and from this alone, does it become possible to grasp "the meaning of those dualities and contrasts which we find around and in us, the differences of self and not-self, of mind and matter, of subject and object, of appearance and reality, of truth and semblance."

HEGEL.--It has been said, perhaps with justice, that "philosophy is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." The remark might seem, at least in the eyes of some, to be particularly applicable to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Not because his arguments are bad, but because he attempted to establish by strict logic the conclusions which Fichte sought to reach by means of intuition, and which perhaps are only attainable by that method. Hegel attempted to climb, by a strict process of reasoning, to the position from which the Fichtean landscape might spread itself below as a logical whole: he claimed to be a reasoner as well as a seer. And thereby he may be said to have furnished "the programme of thought for a certain cla.s.s of intellects which will never die out."

Thus Hegel was something of a hybrid, and may be described as a rationalistic-romanticist. Nor are his arguments the easiest to understand. "The only thing that is certain," writes a commentator who stands at an opposite philosophical pole, "is that whatever you may say of his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make no claim to understanding it; I treat it merely impressionistically."[29] And this is all we can do here.

HEGEL'S METHOD.--Hegel proceeds by means of what he calls the _Dialectical Method_. He understands by "dialectic" (1) a property of all our _thoughts_ in virtue of which, each particular thought necessarily pa.s.ses over into another; and also (2) a property of _things_, in virtue of which every particular thing necessarily belongs to, or is related to, all other things. A thing "by itself" is nothing.

Hence a similarity or parallelism between the _method of thought_ and the _nature of things_. Logic is of the nature of things. The way in which thought reaches truth is also the way in which things exist. Hegel expressed this in his well-known saying "the real is the rational, and the rational is the real." Perhaps more poetically or obscurely the same proposition is expressed by declaring: "When we think existence, existence thinks in us," and "The pulse of existence itself beats in our thinking."

Hegel's logic may, in fact, be described as an attempt to conceive the movement of thought as being at the same time the law of the universe.

Logic (to repeat what we said before) is of the nature of things: reality is rational, and what is rational is real.

Thus logic for Hegel did not mean (as it meant for Kant) the forms or laws of thought: it signified the very core of reality. For all that Kant knew, reality might or might not be rational: all he a.s.serted was that the human mind rationalised reality (or parts of it). For Hegel, logic or reason was the living and moving spirit of the world. The essence of reality and the essence of thought were one. The absolute reality was spirit.[30]

HEGELIANISM.--Hegel's philosophy may be described as an attempt to reach the standpoint of religious mysticism by means of purely rational processes. It is the finding of rational grounds for supra-rational intuitions. The attempt is laudable, and, in the eyes of many, it was successful. And, as we shall see, Hegelianism had an important future, especially in England; nor, as a system of thought, is it yet extinct.

Its central conception is that which, in one shape or another, will never cease to appeal to mankind--that existence is, at bottom, spiritual in character--that spirit is the only ultimate reality.

That Hegelianism provides a rational basis for a spiritual religion is obvious enough; nor is it necessary to indicate the possibilities of linking up the Christian doctrine of the Logos with a philosophy for which Reason was the very core and ground of existence. Hegel may indeed be said to have laid the foundation of Christian theology afresh; or rather to have restored what was best in the old theology, and given it the prestige of modernity.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY.--In fact, for Hegel as for all rationalists whose att.i.tude is also religious, religion and philosophy were two forms of the same thing. Religion contains philosophic truths under the form of imagination: philosophy contains religious truth under the form of reason. The difference is one of form only, not of content. This had not been the view of Rousseau, nor is it the deepest view; and it was not the view of a thinker of the Romantic school who did more than any individual among his predecessors to bring the religious problem to the point where it now stands.

SCHLEIERMACHER.--While the sun of Romanticism was at its zenith, the spirit of Kant's critical philosophy was kept alive by a thinker of as deep spiritual and intellectual insight as Hegel himself.

Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) brought the religious problem down from those alt.i.tudes to which Romanticist metaphysics had raised it, to what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience."

He approached religion from the side of inner experience, the point of view of psychology. The profound insight of Kant had already shown that this was the direction on which future thought would travel, by tracing back the religious problem to a _personal need_ more clearly and penetratingly than ever before--a need set up by the incongruity of the real and the ideal.

HIS VIEW OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS.--Just as Rousseau, owing to his own religious experience, was in a better position to attack the religious problem than the philosophers of the "enlightenment," so Schleiermacher had the advantage of some Romanticists. As a boy, he had been put to school with the Moravians, and throughout his own life he never ceased to declare that the years spent among them had been of vital importance to the development of his views. In 1801 he writes:

"My way of thinking has indeed no other foundation than my own peculiar character, my inborn mysticism, my education as it has been determined from within."

And his own experience of religion established in him the conviction that the innermost life of men must be lived in feeling, and that this alone can bring man into immediate relation to the highest. His acceptance of Kant's criticism of reason led him to understand that intellectual concepts, in the religious sphere, (i.e. dogmas) must always be of secondary importance: _experience_ comes first. And his profound originality lies just here, and it is just here that Schleiermacher stands out as the forerunner of the modern view. He it was who first made it evident that religious ideas derive their validity from that inner experience which they are an attempt to describe. If a dogma is an expression of an experience felt by man in his innermost life, it is a _valid_ dogma, even if philosophic criticism hesitates to sanction it.[31]

WHAT IS RELIGION?--The distance of this position from that of the eighteenth century intellectualism which regarded religion either as a form of philosophy or of superst.i.tion, is obvious. Schleiermacher attacks two intellectualist prejudices in particular: (1) That according to which religion is conceived of primarily as a doctrine (either revealed, or grounded on reason), and (2) That which regards religion as merely a means towards morality.

Religion, according to Schleiermacher, has an existence independent of (though, no doubt, a.s.sociated with) philosophy, superst.i.tion, or morality. Its essence consists neither in speculation nor in action, but in a certain type of feeling, of inner experience. Schleiermacher characterised this particular type of feeling as _a feeling of dependence_: the immediate consciousness that everything finite exists in and through the infinite, everything temporal in and through the eternal.

That Schleiermacher should have described the specifically religious feeling in this particular way is comparatively irrelevant so far as our present purpose is concerned. The point of importance is that he was the first to recognise the _independence_ of religion, to see in it a legitimate and natural form of human activity, which exists, not for the sake of knowledge or of morality, but for its own sake, and on its own account.

Here, though Hegel took a different view, Schleiermacher is one in spirit with the Romantic school; indeed, he may be said to have drawn the logical conclusions of Romanticism. The independence and originality of religion is the necessary consequence of a philosophy which set itself against the unbalanced intellectualism of the "enlightenment."

The permanent significance of Romanticism lies here: That it discredited once for all the notion that there is only one road to reality--that of logic. It is not only philosophy, but religion and art that remove the veil which hides the supra-sensible world from us. And to close our eyes to the facts of religious experience, or to attempt to discredit them by the application of irrelevant terms such as "superst.i.tion," is not only to display ourselves as philistines, but also to forsake the highest traditions of science--veneration for experience, and the realms of fact.

CHAPTER VIII

MECHANISM AND LIFE

RECAPITULATORY.--We have already observed the mechanical theory, in the hands of Descartes, expanding itself to cover organisms and the phenomena of life, and in La Mettrie's _L'Homme Machine_, reducing even human beings to the status of automata. These theories were, however, known to be insecurely based upon somewhat hasty generalisations, for, in point of fact, the science of biology was as yet in its infancy; the _data_ for a complete vindication of the mechanical position were as yet wanting.

ADVANCE OF BIOLOGY.--Biological science, however, during the first half of the nineteenth century made considerable advances, and research continually kept bringing to light facts which seemed to substantiate the brilliant, if premature, hypothesis of Descartes. It will not be necessary for us to do more than take hasty note of certain important developments.

It was in 1828 that the German chemist Wholer (1800-1882) for the first time in biological history prepared an organic compound (urea) from inorganic materials--an achievement universally recognised to be of the utmost significance. As a distinguished historian of the science of chemistry puts it:

"This discovery destroyed the difference which was then considered to exist between organic and inorganic bodies, viz. that the former could only be formed under the influence of vegetable or animal vital forces, whereas the latter could be artificially produced."[32]

Ten years later another German, Schleider (1804-1881) propounded the cellular theory of the structure and growth of plants, a theory which was soon extended to animal organisms by Schwann (1810-1882). The publication of this famous theory was described by a contemporary as "a burst of daylight"; it indeed illuminated what had hitherto been buried in mystery and mythology--the structure and method of growth of plants and animals. It seemed to render superfluous any form of the old conception of a "vital force" to explain the phenomena of growth, if it could now be a.s.sumed that the cells automatically absorbed outside material, increased in number by the division of individuals, and built up the organism by continual repet.i.tion of this process.

Schwann was also responsible for initiating a number of minute physiological investigations which led to a far more intimate knowledge of the action of nerves and muscles, and interpreted these in mechanical terms. "Investigations which were carried on with all the resources of modern physics regarding the phenomena of animal movements, gradually subst.i.tuted for the miracles of the 'vital forces' a molecular mechanism, complicated, indeed, and likely to baffle our efforts for a long time to come, but intelligible, nevertheless, as a mechanism."[33]

Subsequent researches, notably of Helmholtz (1821-1895) and Meyer, lent strong support to this interpretation. The conception of the conservation of energy (an important axiom of the mechanical theory) was successfully applied by them to the economy of organisms. The organism was found not to _create_ energy, but only to contain remarkably efficient means of deriving it from materials absorbed as food. Thus animal warmth and the power of motion are originally "sunlight transformed in the organism of the plant," and afterwards appropriated by the animal. The power with which we move our limbs is as much the product of combustion as is the power of a steam engine, the only difference being that the organism is, of the two, the more efficient converter of energy.

THE MECHANICAL THEORY SUBSTANTIATED.--Thus, whether biologists were considering the _structure_ or the _behaviour_ of organisms, they were arriving at the same conclusions. The structure was revealed as physical and chemical structure, and the behaviour as the resultant of familiar physical and chemical processes. Hence biology came to be regarded as a compartment of physics and chemistry, for life itself was nothing but a complex physical or chemical phenomenon. Life could thus be satisfactorily expressed in terms of matter and energy. The speculations of Descartes seemed to be established by experimental science.

THE FINAL OBSTACLE.--The situation, already satisfactory to those whose hope it was to see the mechanical theory impregnably established, was marred, however, by one untoward circ.u.mstance. The phenomena of organic structure, growth, and behaviour having been reduced to order, and expressed in terms of physics and chemistry, certain important facts still resisted explanation, and stood out as a last stronghold of the older view.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.--The existence of definite forms of animal and vegetable life, whose infinite variety and complexity was continually being increased by research[34]--still remained a mystery. How did these innumerable species naturally and automatically come into being? was the question that must be satisfactorily answered before the mechanical view could be held to cover all the facts.

The direction in which to look for a reply had been indicated by a number of thinkers. The French naturalist Buffon, the philosopher Kant, and the poet Goethe--besides other thinkers--had already in the eighteenth century familiarised the idea that species are not immutable, but that, by some means or other, new forms of life are derived from pre-existing ones. The conception had gained a firm foothold in England, where it was hospitably entertained by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and where it formed the staple of a book which caused a good deal of controversy in its day, and which is not yet forgotten.[35]

LAMARCK.--The evolutionary idea, however, though attractive to philosophers, and even to men of science, was insufficient as an explanation of the origin of species so long as the processes of transformation remained obscure. Naturalists could not accept an hypothesis for which there seemed to be such imperfect evidence. An ingenious French scientist, J. Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) had indeed, in 1809, propounded the theory--ever since known by his name--that the use or disuse of particular organs might, after a long series of generations, result in the formation of new species. (The ideas denoted by the words "environment," "adaptation," "acquired habits"--now so familiar--may be said to have been introduced by him).

But the scientific prejudices of the time were against Lamarck's theories, and he had to lament their inhospitable reception. Indeed Lamarck's critics did not hesitate to exercise their powers of ridicule, or to make fun of the giraffe who derived his long neck from the attempts of his ancestors to browse on high trees. Darwin himself talks of "Lamarck's nonsense," and of his "veritable rubbish"--language, however, which he was subsequently able to retract.

THE NEW GEOLOGY.--Perhaps the most stubborn obstacle which Lamarckian theories had to meet was the current prejudice as to the age (or youth) of the earth. Contemporary geologists were by no means prepared to grant Lamarck the illimitable periods of time which his transformation processes seemed to require. Consequently it is not surprising that the new theories, perhaps for the first time, received a measure of justice at the hands of one who himself became responsible for a revolution in the science of geology.

"I devoured Lamarck _en voyage_," writes Charles Lyell, describing a journey from Oxford in 1827. "His theories delighted me more than any novel I ever read, and much in the same way, for they address themselves to the imagination.... That the earth is quite as old as he supposes, has long been my creed."[36]