Part 8 (2/2)
These three stages he called the theological, metaphysical and positive. In the first stage history shows that man explained the origin of everything by explicit reference to wills like his own, though, of course, invisible; and ultimately, by an appeal to one supreme Will. Thus, a thunderstorm, the rise and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of tides, the succession of seasons and crops are all explained by the agency of unseen wills, powers, or divinities. As time advances, progress is so far made that all minor deities are merged in the belief in one supreme Being who created the universe and is ever responsible for its continuance in existence.
But man at length awakens to the need of a more proximate explanation of phenomena, and, by such experiment as he is capable of, endeavours to ascertain, through their intrinsic properties or their outward manifestations, the cause or causes of their being. He leaves the skies and comes to earth, and seeks to read the secret of things by examining the things in themselves. This, Comte denominates the ”metaphysical” stage, mainly, because the solutions given were bound up with abstractions of physical realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a ”nutritive soul,” or principle, which enabled it to a.s.similate food. If one asked why heavy bodies fall, or why flame and smoke ascend, the answer would be because everything tends to go to its _natural_ place, implying, thereby, that there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about Nature ”abhorring a vacuum,” tolerating no ”breaks,” and the wonders of her ”curative force”. These phrases about abstractions were held to be adequate explanations of any of the facts about nature or man.
At length, there came the period when men demanded a straightforward answer to plain questions, and refused to acquiesce in the reply that opium puts us to sleep because there is a _dormitive virtue_ resident in it. The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it became possible by scientific test and a.n.a.lysis to satisfy the desire for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that water is water, not because it possesses the form of _aquosity_, as the Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of oxygen and hydrogen. This last stage Comte called the ”positive,” and hence we perceive what he means when he calls his entire system by that name. It marks his conviction that those methods which are so successful in the discovery of truth in scientific matters should be applied to the solution of the problems of sociology and religion. In other words, ”positive” and scientific are practically synonymous terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer with the stars. And the same is also true of religion.
Such is the famous _Law of the three States_, which has always been treated by friend and foe as the key to the Comtean philosophy. It only concerns us now to describe the use he made of it in abolis.h.i.+ng the belief in G.o.d, and thus attempting to revolutionise the conception of religion.
Closely a.s.sociated with his Law of the three States is another which he calls the _Law of the Wills and Causes_. In fact, there is practically no difference between that law and the first or theological stage through which human knowledge goes. It may be enunciated thus: Whenever the human mind is in ignorance of the proximate causes of a given phenomenon, it tends to ascribe it to the agency of superior and invisible powers. Hence, ignorance of nature, which modern science has largely remedied, led men to ascribe to ”the act of G.o.d” innumerable events, even the appearance of Halley's comet, which we now unhesitatingly refer to subordinate agencies. Why, then, urged Comte, should we continue to believe in even one supreme Cause, when we may hope, with the advance of science, to give an explanation of every natural occurrence or fact? Convinced on social grounds that belief in the Deity had been of no service to mankind, he sought for philosophical reasons to justify his surrendering the tenet, and thus formulated the famous law which has just been enunciated. If that law is valid and universal in its application, we should have to surrender all hope of Comte's co-operation with what we hold to be rational religion.But it is because I am so convinced that it is that very law, so finely framed and stated by Comte, which makes it impossible to dispense with belief in a supra-mundane Power, that I adhere to the ideal which I sketched in the beginning, that Kant and Comte will be found to be, after Christ, the master builders of the second temple which is to be the religious home of the ages to come.
For what does his famous law amount to? To nothing beyond this, that we are warranted in believing that no single fact, no individual phenomenon, of nature exists, but will be one day explained by the all-conquering advance of physical science. But surely his most enthusiastic adherent will admit that when every phenomenon has been singly explained, only half the work, and that by far the less significant part, has been done. If the human mind is eager, and legitimately eager, to explore the scene of nature's manifestations, much more will it be necessary to attempt some solution of the vaster fact of their concatenation, of their miraculous combination into that whole which we call the universe. It is not so much the isolated phenomena which strike the mind with such overpowering bewilderment, as the manifest fact that in their infinite diversity and innumerable varieties, they are all subordinated to one vast end--the const.i.tution and the good of the whole. Explain every sun that lines the eternal path into the Infinities, where no telescope can penetrate--what is that to the mind that knows that the numberless series is bound together by laws which they as unhesitatingly obey as an animal when it walks? Hence, by the very terms of his own law, Comte is compelled to restore to the human mind its belief in a Power other than the world, for if our only justification for discarding that belief is that science will explain one day the _individual_ phenomena of the universe, it is plain that man's science can never hope to explain the origin of the worlds themselves and the infinite complexities of their mutual relations. And if science cannot hope to do that, the mind of man must, under penalty of going to disruption, a.s.sent to the belief that there is a World-Power who is responsible for the conscious production of the universe, and therefore of ourselves.
And I am glad to be able to say that Comte never expressly excluded this belief. On the contrary, he a.s.serts that if a cosmic hypothesis is to be held at all, that of an intelligent Mind is far more probable than atheism. Indeed of atheism he has written as caustically as the most orthodox could wish. He expressly contends that the theory of design is far more probable than blind mechanism, and if he excludes theism, it is not so much for philosophical as for social reasons.
Consumed with a pa.s.sion for human betterment, seeing that the ”love of G.o.d” had deplorably failed as an incentive to morality, he made the tremendous effort of endeavouring to subst.i.tute the love of man as a stimulus towards the accomplishment of duty. If Comte denied G.o.d, let the Churches and ecclesiastics of France and of Europe bear the responsibility. It was the disastrous condition into which Europe had fallen under their guidance which led him to despair of ”G.o.d” as a rallying point for humanity.
But there is, I submit, no inherent necessity in the Positivist system to insist on the dogmatic exclusion of such theism as we profess under the guidance of Emerson and Kant, and it is gratifying to be able to quote so sympathetic a supporter as J. S. Mill in favour of this interpretation. ”Whoever regards all events as parts of a constant order, each one being the invariable consequent of some antecedent condition, or combination of conditions, accepts fully the positivist mode of thought: whether he acknowledges or not an universal antecedent on which the whole system of nature was originally consequent, and whether that universal antecedent is conceived as an intelligence or not.” [1]
I need not say that to us who believe in Mind as the necessary antecedent to all things, the positivist spirit, so defined, is essential truth. We believe in the Great Being revealed in the eternal order of the physical worlds and in the eternal order of the moral law.
Our wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d is therefore a wors.h.i.+p of goodness or morality, an ideal of justice, as seen in the lives of only the elect spirits of the race, and thus ”the wors.h.i.+p of Humanity” is also the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d.
For where is G.o.d revealed as _wors.h.i.+pful_ except in the lives of the great and good? And if religion be defined to be morality as taught in the lives of the holiest servants of mankind, in what do we differ essentially from the enn.o.bling conceptions of Auguste Comte? The service of man is seen to be the service of G.o.d, for we know nothing of G.o.d until we have learnt to serve goodness and minister to our brother man. The day will come when Comte will be honoured in the universal Church as an apostle of true religion, because, like Kant, he showed men that there is nothing holier or diviner on this earth than a life consciously conformed to the obedience of august laws. Comte, no less than his brother philosopher, is a servant of humanity, and therefore a servant of G.o.d, and we conceive that both thinkers have laid mankind under an immeasurable debt by showing us that that emotion of reverence which all men instinctively feel towards a Power greater than man, cannot be worthily satisfied except by a conscious endeavour to live as befits our rational nature, and to serve ”the brethren” out of love.
[1] _Auguste Comte and Positivism_, p. 15.
XIII.
THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW
AS SEEN IN _HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_.
Cynical observers of the tendencies of the age tell us that, like the Athenians of Paul's days, we are ”lovers of new things”. Doubtless we are, for this century, this ”wonderful century,” as it has recently been described, is a new age or there never was one. Hence, just as Spinoza saw everything _sub specie aeternitatis_, we may very well have a tendency to see many things _sub specie novi_. New things, astonis.h.i.+ngly new things, in every imaginable department of life have been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and _fin-de-siecle_ as we are, the capacities of man are apparently as inexhaustible as ever.
It would indeed be pa.s.sing strange were religion an exception to the uniform progress everywhere in operation. Doubtless the aspect of that supreme concern of life does change less rapidly, but change it does and must: _eppur si muove_. And it is significant, as one of the most striking results of the beneficent movements of our time, that, in the English-speaking countries at least, one of the most powerful, because the most far-reaching, stimuli to religious progress has been supplied by the hand of a woman.
It has always seemed to me that Mrs. Humphry Ward's _Robert Elsmere_ was the making of an epoch, and when so shrewd an observer of the times, so enthusiastic an admirer of ”the old ways” as Mr. Gladstone, thought the book worth criticising and censuring, he bore eloquent testimony to the effect it was evidently destined to produce. Its influence has unquestionably been great. There are many people who owe to it their first acquaintance with modern religious thought. Numbers of the younger clergymen of the Establishment must have been profoundly moved by it, because the faith of an Anglican is a comparatively elastic thing compared with the rigidity of supernatural conceptions which distinguishes the Roman Catholic communion. It may even be true that these sporadic outbreaks of Ritualism, which are so seriously threatening to ”trouble Israel's peace,” owe no little of their force to the far-reaching effects of the new religious controversy. The Newcomes of to-day, like their prototype in the novel, may very well have come to the belief that there is no salvation from that besetting demon of reason and ”intellectual pride,” but in a religion of sensuousness and externalism which Sydney Smith, himself, of course, a clergyman, once contemptuously designated as ”painted jackets and sanctified watering-pots”. _Panem et Circenses_! Bread and games!
Give them fumes of incense, blare and blaze of sounds and lights, and they may learn to forget that there ever was such a thing as a school of biblical criticism which has turned orthodoxy into a heresy against reason by telling the truth about the Bible.
Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanis.h.i.+ng point, there is nothing left but to appeal to the Church--not, indeed, to the Church of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms, but to that venerable fiction, ”the undivided Church” of the first few centuries of our era, and thus brand religion with the stigma of retrogression by proclaiming it the only thing which is incapable of progress.
Not infrequently is a progressive movement attended at first by a partial reaction, and it is not at all unlikely that Ritualistic clergymen have been terrified into an increased reliance upon forms and rites by the disastrous effects produced upon many of their followers or fellow-churchmen by the new controversial methods of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Now, what is this new controversy? It consists in the adoption of the handiest implement available to literary genius, namely, the novel, or fictional history, and by consummate critical and constructive skill, showing the disintegration of the old faiths and the building up of the new in the life of some representative man or woman. There is much more in such a novel than appears. First, there is the work of the scholar, of the man of research. He is like the miner who works underground and digs out of the hard earth that ”gem of purest ray serene,” the truth. Then comes the artist, just as cultured as the scholar, and only less learned, who polishes the gem and gives it its setting in pages of brilliant writing, and what is more important still, weaves it subtly into the daily life of some human being to whom it has been slowly and always painfully introduced. Or, to vary the metaphor, this new controversy is an inoculation performed by one who possesses a masterly acquaintance with the circulatory system of the spiritual anatomy, and is enabled thereby to describe with unerring accuracy the precise effects of the new ideal at every stage of its progress through the soul. You see before you the experiment of a new ideal, at first only suggested, then partially welcomed and even loved.
Then the awful struggle in which no quarter can be given on either side, and the final victory of the truth. Such is the new controversy, the world of truth brought down to the world of life, the fertilising streams of knowledge turned by some strong, wise hand, into the narrow channel of an individual existence for the purification and recreation of life.
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