Part 23 (2/2)

But there are other questions in regard to natural phenomena to which the experimental methods of the positive sciences can offer no reply. They can tell us nothing about the _wider_ ”how” which resolves itself into a ”why.” They can give no information about the ultimate causes, origins, reasons, or essences, of those phenomena. As Pasteur and other equally ill.u.s.trious scientists have proclaimed, experimental science is essentially positive, _i.e._ confined to the proximate phenomenal conditions and causes of things; it has nothing to say, nor has it any need or any right to say anything, about the ultimate nature, or first origin, or final destiny, of the things and events of the universe.

Yet such questions arise, and clamour insistently for solution.

_How_ is it, or _why_ is it, that natural phenomena are uniformly linked to certain other phenomenal antecedents or ”physical”

causes? Is it absolutely impossible, inconceivable, that this sequence should be found not to obtain in even a single individual instance? Why should there be such uniform ”sequences” or ”laws”

at all? Are there exceptions, or can there be exceptions to these ”laws of physical nature”? What is the character and what are the grounds of the _necessity_ of these laws? Every living organism comes from a living cell-not from _any_ living cell, but from _some particular kind_ of living cell. But _why_ are there such kinds of cells? Why are there living cells at all? Whence their first origin? Again, granted that there are different kinds or types of living cells, _why_ should a particular kind of cell give rise, by division and evolution, to an organism of the same kind or type as the parent organisms? Why does it not _always_ do so?

Why are what biologists describe as ”monsters” in the organic kingdom possible? And why, since they are possible, are they not as numerous as what are recognized as the normal types or kinds of living organisms?

Now these are questions in regard to which not only every professing physical scientist and every professing metaphysician, but every thinking man, _must_ take up some att.i.tude or other. A refusal to consider them, on the plea that they are insoluble, is just as definite an att.i.tude as any other; nor by a.s.suming this att.i.tude does any man, even though he be a specialist in some department of the positive or physical sciences, escape being a ”metaphysician” or a ”philosopher,” however much he may deprecate such t.i.tles; for he is taking up a reasoned att.i.tude-we presume it is such, and not the outcome of mere prejudice-on ultimate questions. And this is philosophy; this is metaphysics. When, therefore, a physical scientist either avows or insinuates that _because_ the methods of physical science, which are suitable for the discovery of the _proximate_ causes of phenomena, can tell him nothing about _ultimate_ questions concerning these phenomena, _therefore_ there is nothing to be known about these questions, he is not only committing himself, _nolens volens_, to definite philosophical views, but he is doing a serious disservice to physical science itself by misconceiving and mis-stating its rightful scope and limits. He has just an equal right with any other man to utilize the established truths of physical science to help him in answering ultimate questions. Nay, he may even use the unverified hypotheses and systematic conceptions(514) of physical science for what they are worth in helping him to determine his general world-view. But his competence as a specialist in physical science does not confer upon him any _special_ qualification for estimating the value of these truths and hypotheses as evidence in the domain of ultimate problems. Nor can he, because he is a scientist, or even because he may go so far as to a.s.sert the right of speaking in the name of ”science,” claim for his particular interpretation the privilege of exemption from criticism; and this is true no matter what his interpretation may be-whether it be agnosticism, mechanism, teleologism, monism, or theism. These observations may appear elementary and obvious; but the insinuation of positivism and phenomenism, that whatever is not itself phenomenal and verifiable by the experimental methods of the physical sciences is in no wise knowable, and the insinuation of mechanists that their world-view is the only one compatible with the truths of science and therefore the only ”scientific”

philosophy, justify us in reiterating and emphasizing even such obvious methodological considerations. Bearing them in mind, let us now examine the uniformity and necessity of the laws of physical nature.

Understanding by natural law the natural inclination or tendency of the creature to a definite line of activity, this law is of itself determining or necessitating. Moreover, it is absolutely inseparable from the essence of the creature. Granted that the creature exists, it has this tendency to exert and direct all its forces and energies in a definite, normal way, for the realization of its end. This _nisus naturae_ is never absent; it is observable even where, as in the generation of ”monsters” by living organisms, it partially fails to attain its end. A law of nature, taken in this sense, is absolutely necessary to, and inseparable from, the created agent; it admits of no exceptions; no agent can exist without it; for it is identical with the very being of the agent

But the uniformity of action resulting from this natural tendency, the uniform series of normal operations whereby it realizes its end, is not absolutely necessary, inviolable, unexceptional. In the first place the Author of Nature can, for a higher or moral purpose, prevent any created agency supernaturally, miraculously, from actually exercising its active powers in accordance with its nature for the prosecution of its natural end. But apart altogether from this, abstracting from all special interference of the First Cause, and confining our attention to the natural order itself, we have to consider that for any physical agency to act in its natural or normal manner certain extrinsic conditions are always requisite: oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, will combine to produce water, but only under certain conditions of contact, pressure, temperature, etc. This general requirement arises from the fact already mentioned, that physical agencies co-exist in time and s.p.a.ce and are constantly interacting. These extrinsic conditions are, of course, not expressly stated in the formulation of those uniformities and quant.i.tative descriptions called ”laws of nature” in the second and third interpretations of this expression as explained above. It is taken as understood that the law applies only if and when and where all such conditions are verified. The law, therefore, as stated categorically, does not express an absolutely necessary, universal, and unexceptional truth.

It may admit of exceptions.

In the next place, when we come to examine these exceptions to uniformity, these failures or frustrations of the normal or natural activities of physical agencies, we find it possible to distinguish roughly, with Aristotle, between two groups of such ”uniformities” or ”laws”. There are firstly those which, so far as our experience goes, seem to prevail _always_ (?e?), unexceptionally; and secondly, those which seem to prevail _generally_, _for the most part_ (?p? t? p???), though not unexceptionally. The former would be the outcome of active powers, energies, forces, _de facto_ present and prevalent always and everywhere in all physical agencies, and of such a character that the conditions requisite for their actual operation would be always verified. Such, for instance, would be the force of gravity in all ponderable matter; and hence the law of gravitation is regarded as all-pervading, universal, unexceptional. But there are other natural or normal effects which are the outcome of powers, forces, energies, not all-pervading, but restricted to special groups of agencies, dependent for their actual production on the presence of a great and complex variety of extrinsic conditions, and liable therefore to be impeded by the interfering action of numerous other natural agencies. Such, for instance, would be the natural powers and processes whereby living organisms propagate their kind. The law, therefore, which states it to be a uniformity of nature that living organisms reproduce offspring similar to themselves in kind, is a general law, admitting exceptions.

Operations and effects which follow from the nature of their causes are called natural (?a?? ??t?, ?a? ? ?at? s?e????).(515) Some causes produce their natural effects _always_ (t? ?? ??????? ?a? ?e? ???????a), others produce their natural effects _usually_, _as a general rule_ (t? ??

?p? p??? ?????e?a).(516) Operations and effects which are produced by the interfering influence of extrinsic agencies (t? ?a??? ”violent,” as opposed to natural), and not in accordance with the nature of their princ.i.p.al cause, are called by Aristotle _accidental_ (t? ?at? s?e????, t? ??de??e?a ?????s?a?); and these, he remarks, people commonly describe as due to chance (?a? ta?ta p??te? fas?? e??a? ?p? t????).(517)

All are familiar with events or happenings described as ”fortuitous,”

”accidental,” ”exceptional,” ”unexpected,” with things happening by ”chance,” by (good or bad) ”luck” or ”fortune”.(518) There are terms in all languages expressive of this experience-_casus_, _sors_, _fortuna_, t???, etc. The notion underlying all of them is that of something occurring unintentionally, _praeter intentionem agentis_. Whether chance effects result from the action of intelligent agents or from the operation of physical causes they are not ”intended,”-by the deliberate purpose of the intelligent agent in the one case, or by the natural tendency, the _intentio naturae_, of the mere physical agency in the other. Such an effect, therefore, has not a _natural_ cause; hence it is considered _exceptional_, and is always more or less unexpected. _Nature_, as Aristotle rightly observes,(519) never produces a chance effect. His meaning is, that whenever such an effect occurs it is not brought about in accordance with the natural tendency of any physical agency. It results from a collision or coincidence of two or more such agencies, each acting according to its nature. The hunter's act of firing at a wild fowl is an intentional act. The boy's act of coming into the thicket to gather wild flowers is an intentional act. The accidental shooting of the boy is the result of a coincidence of the two intentional acts. Similarly, each of all the various agencies which bring about the development of an embryo in the maternal womb has its own immediate and particular natural effect, and only mediately contributes to the general effect of bringing the embryo to maturity. As a rule these particular effects are favourable to the general effect. But sometimes the immediate ends do not subserve this ulterior purpose. The result is accidental, exceptional, a deviation from the normal type, an anomaly, a ”monster” in the domain of living organisms.

Aristotle's a.n.a.lysis, correct so far, is incomplete. It a.s.signs no ultimate explanation of the fact that there are such encounters of individual natural tendencies in the universe, such failures in the subordination of particular ends to wider ulterior ends. As a matter of fact these chance effects, although not ”intended” by the natures of individual created agencies, are not wholly and entirely unintended. They are not wholly aimless. They enter into the general plan and scheme of things as known and willed by the Author of Nature. They are known to His Intelligence, and willed and ruled by His Providence. For Him there can be no such thing as chance. Effects that are accidental in relation to created causes, effects that run counter to the nature or _intentio naturae_ of these, are foreseen and willed by Him and made to subserve that wider and more general end which is the universal order of the world that He has actually willed to create. It is only in relation to the natures of individual agencies, and to the limited horizon of our finite intelligences, that such phenomena can present the aspect of fortuitous or chance occurrences.

Before pa.s.sing on to deal, in our concluding section, with the great fact of order, let us briefly compare with the foregoing explanation of nature and its laws the attempt of mechanists to explain these without recognizing in the physical universe any influence of final causes, or any indication of a purposive intelligence. We have ventured to describe their att.i.tude as philosophic fatalism.(520) According to their view there is no ground for the distinction between phenomena that happen ”naturally” and phenomena that happen ”accidentally” or ”by chance”. All alike happen by the same kind of general necessity: the generation of a ”monster” is as ”natural” as the generation of normal offspring; the former, when it occurs, is just as inevitably the outcome of the physical forces at work in the particular case as the latter is the outcome of the particular set of efficient causes which do actually produce the normal result: the only difference is that the former, occurring less frequently and as the result of a rarer and less known conjunction of ”physical” causes than the latter, is not expected by us to occur, and is consequently regarded, when it does occur, as exceptional. Now it is quite true that what we call ”chance” effects, or ”exceptional” effects, result just as inevitably from the set of forces operative in their case, as normal effects result from the forces operative in theirs. But this leaves for explanation something which the mechanist cannot explain. He regards a physical law merely as a generalization, beyond experience, of some experienced uniformity; and he holds that all our physical laws are provisional in the sense that a wider and deeper knowledge of the actual conditions of interaction among the physical forces of the universe would enable us to eliminate exceptions-which are all apparent, not real-by restating our laws in such a comprehensive way as to include all such cases. We may, indeed, admit that our physical laws are open to revision and restatement in this sense, and are _de facto_ often modified in this sense by the progress of science. But the important point is this, that the mechanist does not admit the existence, in physical agencies, of any law in the sense of a _natural inclination towards an end_, or in any sense in which it would imply intelligence, design, or purpose. On the contrary, claiming as he does that all physical phenomena are _reducible to mechanical motions of inert ma.s.ses, atoms, or particles of matter in s.p.a.ce_, he is obliged to regard all physical agencies as being, so far as their nature is concerned, wholly _indifferent_ to any particular form of activity.(521) Committed to the indefensible view that all qualitative change is reducible to quant.i.tative (11), and all material differences to differences in the location of material particles and in the velocity and direction of the spatial motion impressed upon each by others extrinsic to itself, he has left himself no factors wherewith to explain the actual order and course of the universe, other than the purely _indifferent_ factors of essentially or naturally h.o.m.ogeneous particles of inert matter endowed with local motion. We emphasize this feature of indifference; for the conception of an inert particle of matter subject to mechanical motion impressed upon it from without, is the very type of an indifferent agency.

What such an ent.i.ty will do, whether or not it will move, with what velocity and in what direction it will move-in a word, its entire conduct, its role in the universe, the sum-total of its functions-nothing of all this is dependent on itself; everything depends on agencies extrinsic to it, and on its extrinsic time-and-s.p.a.ce relations to these agencies; and these latter in turn are in the same condition as itself. Now is it conceivable that agencies of this kind, of themselves absolutely indifferent to any particular kind of effect, suitable or unsuitable, regular or irregular, orderly or disorderly, could actually produce and maintain the existing order of the universe? If they were themselves _produced by an All-Wise and All-Powerful Being_, and _definitely arranged_ in spatial relations to one another, and _initial mechanical motion in definite directions and velocities_ impressed on the different parts of the system, there is no denying that Infinite Wisdom and Power could, by Divine concurrence even with such indifferent agencies, realize and maintain a _cosmos_, or _orderly_ universe. Such _purely extrinsic finality_ (106) could, absolutely speaking, account for the existence of order, uniformity, regularity, system; though all the evidence furnished by the universe of our actual experience points to the existence of _intrinsic finality_ also as understood by Aristotle and the scholastics.

But the mechanist will not allow even extrinsic finality; he will not recognize in the actual universe of our experience any evidence of a Ruling Intelligence realizing a plan or design for an intelligent purpose; he denies the necessity of the inference from the data of human experience to the existence of a Guiding Intelligence. And what are his alternatives?

He may choose one or other of two.

He may restate in the more scientific and imposing terminology of modern mechanics the crude conception of the ancient Greek atomists: that the actual order of the universe is the absolutely inevitable and fatal outcome of a certain collocation of the moving ma.s.ses of the physical universe, a collocation favourable to order, a collocation which _just happened to occur_ by some happy chance from the essentially aimless, purposeless, indifferent and _chaotic_ motions of those material ma.s.ses and particles. We say ”chaotic,” for _chaos_ is the absence of _cosmos_; and _order_ is the fact that has got to be explained. In the concept of _indifferent, inert_ atoms of matter moving through s.p.a.ce there is emphatically no principle of order;(522) and hence the mechanist who will not admit the necessity of inferring an Intelligence to give these moving ma.s.ses or atoms the collocation _favourable to order_ is forced to ”explain” this supposed collocation by attributing it to pure chance-the _concursus fortuitus atomorum_ of the ancient Greeks. When, however, we reflect that the more numerous these atoms and the more varied and complex their motions, the smaller is the chance of a collocation favourable to order; that the atoms and motions are supposed actually to surpa.s.s any a.s.signable number; that therefore the chance of any such favourable collocation occurring is indefinitely smaller than any measurable proportion,-we can draw our own conclusions about the value of such a speculation as a rational ”explanation” of the existing _cosmos_. And this apart altogether from the consideration that the fact to be explained is not merely the _momentary_ occurrence of an orderly collocation, but the _maintenance_ of an orderly system of cosmic phenomena _throughout the lapse of all time_. No orderly finite system of mechanical motions arranged by human skill can preserve its orderly motions indefinitely without intelligent human supervision: the neglected machine will get out of order, run down, wear out, if left to itself; and we are asked to believe that the whole universe is one vast machine which not only goes on without intelligent supervision, but which actually made itself by chance!(523)

Naturally such an ”explanation” of the universe does not commend itself to any man of serious thought, whatever his difficulties may be against the argument from the fact of order in the universe to the existence of an Intelligent Designer. Add to this the consideration that the mechanist theory does not even claim to account for the first origin of the universe: it postulates the existence of matter in motion. In regard to this supreme problem of the _first origin_ of the universe the att.i.tude of the mechanist is avowedly _agnostic_; and in view of what we have just remarked about the ”chance” theory as an ”explanation” of the _existing order_ of the universe, it is no matter for surprise that most mechanists reject this theory and embrace the agnostic att.i.tude in regard to this latter problem also. Whether the agnostic att.i.tude they a.s.sume be negative or positive, _i.e._ whether they are content to say that they themselves at least fail to find any satisfactory rational explanation of the _origin_ and _nature_ of the _cosmos_, or contend further that no rational solution of these problems is within the reach of the human mind, their teaching is refuted in Natural Theology, where the theistic solution of these problems is set forth and vindicated.

110. THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE; A FACT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS.-The considerations so far submitted in this chapter, as pointing to the existence and influence of final causes in the universe, will be strengthened and completed by a brief a.n.a.lysis of _order_ and its implications.

We have seen already (55) that the apprehension of order in things implies the recognition of _some unifying principle in what is manifold_. What, in general, is the nature of this principle? It is the _point of view_, the _standpoint_ from which the unifying arrangement or disposition of the manifold is carried out; in other words it is the _end_, _object_, or _purpose_, of the orderly arrangement. The arrangement, and the order resulting from it, will vary according to the end in view-whether, for instance, it be an arrangement of books in a library, of pictures in a gallery, of materials in an edifice, of parts in a machine. Hence St.

Thomas's definition of order as the due adaptation of means to ends: _recta ratio rerum ad finem_. When this adaptation is the work of human intelligence the order realized is _artificial_, when it is the work of nature the order realized is _natural_. Art is an extrinsic principle of order, nature implies indeed also an intelligent extrinsic principle of order, but is itself an intrinsic principle of order: the works of nature and those of art have this feature in common, that they manifest adaptation of means to ends.(524)

The _subordination_ of means to ends realizes an order which has for its unifying principle the influence of an _end_, a _final cause_. The group of _dynamic_ relations thus revealed const.i.tutes what is called _teleological_ order, the order of _purpose_ or _finality_. The realization or execution of such an order implies the simultaneous existence of _co-ordinated_ parts or members in a system, a realized whole with complex, co-ordinated, orderly parts, the principle of unity in this system being the _form_ of the whole. This realized, disposed, or const.i.tuted order, is called the _esthetic_ order (55), the order of co-ordination, composition, const.i.tution. In ultimate a.n.a.lysis, however, these two orders, the _teleological_ and the _esthetic_, having as respective unifying principles the _final_ cause and the _formal_ cause, are not two really distinct orders, but rather two aspects of one and the same order: we have seen that in the things of nature the intrinsic end or final cause of each is identical with its _forma substantialis_ or formal cause (108). But the final cause is naturally prior to the formal cause, and consequently the teleological order is more fundamental than the esthetic.

St. Augustine's definition of order as ”the arrangement of a multiplicity of things, similar and dissimilar, according its proper place to each,”(525) reveals the _material_ cause of order in the multiplicity of varied elements, the _formal_ cause of order in the group of relations resulting from the arrangement or _dispositio_, and the _efficient_ cause of order in the agent that disposes or arranges them. The _final_ cause, though not directly mentioned, is implied in the fact that the place of each factor in the system is necessarily determined by the function it has to fulfil, the part it is suited by its nature to play, in contributing to the realization of the end or purpose of the arrangement.

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