Part 66 (2/2)
”But I should answer the negations of doubt by negation. Well, then, I ask you: Is there here on earth a single thing so self-evident that I am bound to believe in it? I will show you in a minute that you believe firmly in things that can act and yet are not beings, that can give birth to thought and yet are not spirits, in living abstractions which the understanding cannot grasp under any shape, which nowhere exist, but which you can everywhere find; which have no possible names--though you have given them names; which, like the G.o.d in human form whom you conceive of, perish before the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, and the absurd. And I will ask you: If you admit these things, why do you reserve your doubts for G.o.d?
”You believe in Number as the foundation on which rests the edifice of what you call the exact sciences. Without number mathematics are impossible.
Well, then, what impossible being, to whom life everlasting should be granted, could ever finish counting--and in what sufficiently concise language could he utter--the numbers contained in the infinite number of which the existence is demonstrated by your reason. Ask the greatest human genius, and suppose him to sit for a thousand years leaning on a table, his head in his hands, what would he answer?
”You know neither where number begins, where it pauses, nor where it ends.
Now you call it time, anon you call it s.p.a.ce; by number only does anything exist; but for number all substance would be one and the same; it alone differentiates and modifies matter. Number is to your mind what it is to matter, an intangible agent. But will you then make a G.o.d of it? Is it a being? Is it a breath of G.o.d sent forth to organize the material universe, wherein nothing takes shape but as a result of divisibility which is an effect of number? The most minute as well as the most immense objects in creation are distinguished from each other by quant.i.ty, quality, dimension, and force,--are not these all conditions of number? That number is infinite is a fact proved to your intellect, but of which no material proof is obtainable. A mathematician will tell you that infinity of number is certain, but cannot be demonstrated. And, my dear Pastor, believers will tell you that G.o.d is Number endowed with motion, to be felt but not proved.
He, like the unit, is the origin of number though having nothing in common with numbers. The existence of Number depends on that of the unit, which is not a number, but the parent of them all. And G.o.d, dear Pastor Becker, is a stupendous Unit, having nothing in common with His creations, but their Parent nevertheless.
”You must grant me that you are equally ignorant as to where number begins or ends, and as to where created eternity begins or ends? Why, then, if you believe in number, should you deny G.o.d? Does not creation hold a place between the infinite of inorganic substances and the infinite of the Divine spheres, as the unit stands between the infinite of fractions--lately termed decimals--and the infinite numbers you call whole numbers? Men alone on earth comprehend number, the first step to the forecourt leading to G.o.d, and even there reason stumbles. What! you can neither measure nor grasp the primary abstraction proposed to you, and you want to apply your puny standard to the ends of G.o.d's purpose? What if I should cast you into the bottomless depths of Motion, the force which organizes number?
”If I were to tell you that the universe is nothing but Number and Motion, we should already, you see, be speaking a different language. I understand both terms; you do not. What, then, if I should go on to say that motion and number are generated by the Word? This term, the Supreme Reason of seers and prophets, who of old heard the voice of G.o.d that overthrew St.
Paul, is a laughing-stock to you--you men, though your own visible works--communities, monuments, actions, and pa.s.sions--all are the outcome of your own feeble Word; and though without speech you would still be no higher than the Orang of the woods, the great ape that is so nearly akin to the Negro.
”Well, you believe firmly in number and motion, inexplicable and incomprehensible as force and result, though I might apply to their existence the same logical dilemma as just now relieved you of the necessity of acknowledging that of G.o.d. You, a powerful reasoner, will surely relieve me of the necessity for proving that the Infinite must be everywhere the same, and that it is inevitably one? G.o.d alone is the Infinite, for there obviously cannot be two Infinites. If, to use words in their human sense, anything proved to you here on earth strikes you as infinite, you may be sure you have in that a glimpse of one aspect of G.o.d.
”To proceed: you have found for yourselves a place in the Infinite of number; you have fitted it to your stature by creating arithmetic--if you can be said to create anything--the basis on which everything is built up, even society. Arithmetic, or the use of number, has organized the moral world, just as number, the only thing in which your professing Atheists believe, organizes physical creation. This science of numbers ought to be absolute, like everything that is intrinsically true; but it is, in fact, purely relative, it has no absolute existence. You can give no proof of its reality.
”To begin with, though this science is apt at summing up organized substances, it is impotent as applied to organizing forces, since these are infinite, whereas the former are finite. Man, whose intellect can conceive of the Infinite, cannot deal with it as a whole; if he could, he would be G.o.d. Hence your arithmetic, as applied to finite things and not to the Infinite, is true in relation to the details you apprehend, but false in relation to the whole which you cannot apprehend. Though nature does not vary in her organizing forces and her elementary causes, which are infinite, she is never the same in her finite results. Hence in all nature you will find no two objects exactly alike.
”Thus, in the order of nature, two and two can never really make four, since the units would have to be exactly equal; and you know that it is impossible to find two leaves alike on one tree, or two specimens alike of the same species of tree. This axiom of arithmetic then, which is false as regards visible nature, is no less false in the invisible nature of your abstractions, where there is the same dissimilarity in your ideas which are derived from the objects of the visible world, only extended in their relations; in fact, differences are even more strongly marked there than elsewhere. Everything there being modified by the temperament, the strength, the manners, and the habits of individuals, who are never alike, the most trifling matters are representative of personal character.
”If man has ever succeeded in creating an unit, it was, no doubt, by a.s.signing equal weight and value to certain pieces of gold. Well, add a rich man's ducat to a poor man's, and tell yourself that to the public treasury these are equal quant.i.ties; but in the eyes of a thoughtful man, one, morally speaking, is unquestionably greater than the other; one represents a month's happiness, the other the most transient caprice. Two and two only make four in the sense of a false and monstrous abstraction.
”A fraction, again, has no existence in nature, since what you call a part is a thing complete in itself; and does it not often happen--and have we not proof of the fact--that the hundredth part of some substance may be stronger than what you call the whole? And if a fraction has no existence in the natural world, far less does it exist in the moral world, where ideas and feelings may be as various as the species of the vegetable kingdom, but are always a whole. The theory of fractions, then, is another concession of the mind. Number, with its 'infinitely small' and its 'infinite total,' is a power of which a small part only is known to you, while its extent evades you. You have built a little cottage in the infinitude of number; you have adorned it with hieroglyphics very learnedly designed and painted; and you have said, 'Everything is here!'
”From abstract number we will pa.s.s on to number as applied to solids. Your geometry states it as an axiom that a straight line is the shortest way from one point to another; and astronomy shows you that G.o.d has given motion only in curves. Here, then, in the same science, are two facts equally well proved--one by the evidence of your senses, aided by the telescope; the other by the testimony of your mind; but one contradicts the other. Man, who is liable to error, a.s.serts one, and the Maker of the worlds--whom you have never found in error--contradicts it. Who can decide between rectilinear and curvilinear geometry?--between the theory of straight lines and the theory of curved lines? If, in His work, the mysterious Maker, who attains His ends with miraculous directness, only makes use of the straight line to divide it at a right angle and obtain a curve, man himself cannot rely on it: the bullet a man wishes to send in a straight line follows a curve, and when you want to hit a point in s.p.a.ce with certainty you propel the ball on its cruel parabola. Not one of your learned men has arrived at the simple induction that the curved line is that of the material world, and the straight line that of the spiritual world; that one is the theory of finite creation, and the other the theory of the infinite. Man alone--he alone here on earth having any consciousness of the infinite--can know the straight line; he alone, in a special organ, has the sense of the vertical. May not the predilection for curved lines in some men be an indication of the impurity of their nature, still too closely allied to the material substances which engender us? and may not the love for straight lines, seen in lofty minds, be in them a presentiment of heaven? Between these two lines lies a gulf as wide as between the Finite and the Infinite, between Matter and Spirit, between Man and the Idea, between Motion and the Thing moved, between the Creature and G.o.d. Borrow the wings of Divine Love and you may cross that gulf. Beyond it the revelation of the Word begins!
”The things you call material are nowhere devoid of thickness; lines are the edges of solids having a power of action which you ignore in your theorems, and that makes them false in relation to bodies regarded as a whole; hence the constant destruction of human works, to which you have unwittingly given active properties. Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws: can you name one to which no fact makes an exception? The laws of statics are contradicted by a thousand incidents in physics; a fluid overthrows the most stupendous mountains, and so proves that the heaviest substances may be upheaved by imponderable agents. Your laws of acoustics and optics are nullified by the sounds you hear in your brain during sleep, and by the light of an electric flash, of which the rays are often overpowering. You do not know how light is brought to your intelligence, any more than you know the simple and natural process by which it is changed to ruby, sapphire, opal, and emerald on the neck of an Indian bird, while it lies dim and gray on the same bird under the misty sky of Europe, nor why it beams perpetually white here in the heart of the polar regions. You cannot tell whether color is a faculty with which bodies are endowed, or an effect produced by the diffusion of light.
”You believe the whole sea to be salt without having ascertained that it is so in its deepest places.
”You recognize the existence of various substances which traverse what you call the Void: substances intangible under any known form a.s.sumed by matter, and which meet and combine with it in spite of every obstacle. That being the case, you believe in the results obtained by chemistry, though as yet it knows no method of estimating the changes produced by the currents to and fro of those substances as they pa.s.s through your crystals and your instruments on the inappreciable waves of heat or of light, conducted or repelled by the affinities of metals or vitrified flint. You obtain no substances but what are dead, out of which you have driven the unknown force which resists decomposition in all earthly things, the force of which attraction, undulation, cohesion, and polarity are manifestations.
”Life is the mind of body; bodies are but a mode of detaining it, of delaying it in its transit; if bodies were themselves living things, they would be a cause; they would not die. When a man establishes the results of the motion of which every form of creation has its share in proportion to its power of absorbing it, you call him a Learned Man, as though genius consisted in explaining what exists. Genius should lift its eyes above effects. All your learned men would laugh if you should say to them, 'There is a certain connecting relation between two beings, such as that if one of them were here and the other in Java, they might feel the same sensation at the same instant, and be aware of the fact, and question and answer each other without a mistake.' And yet there are some mineral substances which exhibit sympathies as far reaching as that of which I speak. You believe in the power of electricity when it is fixed on the lodestone, but you deny it as emanating from the soul. According to you, the moon, whose influence over the tides seems to you proven, has none over the winds, over vegetation, or over men; it can move the sea and eat into gla.s.s, but it cannot affect the sick; it has undoubted effects on one-half of the human race; none on the other half. These are your most precious convictions.
”We may go further: You believe in physics; but your physics are based, like the Catholic religion, on an act of faith. Do they not recognize an external force apart from bodies to which it imparts movement? You see its effects, but what is it? Where is it? What is its essence, its life? Has it any limits?----And you deny G.o.d!
”Thus most of your scientific axioms, though true in relation to man, are false in relation to the Whole. Science is one, and you have divided it. To know the true sense of the laws of phenomena, would it not be necessary to know the correlations existing between the phenomena and the laws of the whole? There is in all things an appearance, a presentment, which strikes your sense; behind this presentment there is a soul moving--the body, and the faculty. Where are the relations which hold things together studied or taught? Nowhere. Have you, then, no absolute finality? Your best ascertained theses rest on an a.n.a.lysis of the forms of matter, while the spirit is constantly neglected.
”There is a supreme science of which some men--too late--get a glimpse, though they dare not own it. These men perceive the necessity for considering all bodies, not merely from the point of view of their mathematical properties, but also from that of their whole relations and occult affinities.
”The greatest of you all discerned, towards the end of his life, that all things were at the same time cause and effect reciprocally; that the visible worlds were co-ordinated to each other and captive to invisible spheres. He groaned over having tried to establish absolute principles.
When counting his worlds, like grains of sand scattered throughout the ether, he explained their connection by the laws of planetary and molecular attraction. You hailed that man.--Well, and I tell you that he died in despair. a.s.suming that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he invented to account for the universe, were absolutely equal, the universe would stand still, and he insisted on motion, though in an undefined direction; but a.s.suming the forces to be unequal, the worlds must at once fall into confusion. Thus his laws were not final; there was another problem still higher than that of attraction, on which his spurious glory was founded. The pull of the stars against each other, and the centripetal tendency of their individual motion, did not hinder him from seeking the branch from which the whole cl.u.s.ter was hanging. Unhappy man; the more he extended s.p.a.ce, the heavier was his load. He told you that every part was in equilibrium; but whither was the whole bound?
”He contemplated the s.p.a.ce, infinite in the eyes of men, that is filled with the groups of worlds, of which a small number are registered by our telescopes, while its immensity is proved by the rapidity of light. This sublime contemplation gave him a conception of the infinitude of worlds, planted in s.p.a.ce like flowers in a meadow, which are born like infants, grow like men, die like old men, which live by a.s.similating from their atmosphere the substances proper to nourish them, which have a centre and principle of life, which protect themselves from each other by an intervening s.p.a.ce, which const.i.tute a grand whole, that has its own life, its own destination.
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