LEWIS HAINSWORTH. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. LIFE AND WORKS OF THE LATE JAMES HINTON. LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES HINTON. Edited by ELLICE HOPKINS, with an Introduction by Sir W. W. GULL, Bart., and Portrait engraved on Steel by C. H. JEENS. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 8s. 6d. CHAPTERS ON THE ART OF THINKING; and other Essays. With an introduction by SHADWORTH HODGSON. Edited by C. H. HINTON. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 8s. Qd. THE PLACE OF THE PHYSICIAN. To which is added ESSAYS ON THK LAW OF HUMAN LIFE, AND ON THE RELA- TION BETWEEN ORGANIC AND INORGANIC WORIDS. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. 64. PHYSIOLOGY FOR PRACTICAL USE. By various Writers. With 50 Illustrations. Third and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s. AN ATLAS OF DISEASES OF THE MEM- BRANA TYMPANI. With Descriptive Text. Post 8vo. Price 66. THE QUESTIONS OF AURAL SURGERY. With Illustrations. 2 vols. Post 8vo. Clth, price 12s. 6d. THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. New Edition. Fcp. 8vo. Cloth limp, Is. OTHERS' NEEDS. Sewed, 2d. LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, Paternoster Sq. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION SELECTIONS FROM THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LATE JAMES HINTON EDITED BY CAROLINE HADDON LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1881 [The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.] EDITOR'S PREFACE. THE anomalous literary form of this book requires a few words of explanation. Its contents can be classified neither under the head of Sermons, Essays, Diary nor Table Talk, although they partake by turns of the nature of all these. The readers of James Hinton's Life and Letters will remember that from the time he began his career as a philosophical thinker he was accustomed to write down every day the ideas that presented themselves to him. Wherever he might be in the street, in society, at a concert, in church he would jot down memoranda of the thoughts that struck him, and these he would write out clearly in the evening. This habit was first begun as a necessity of his mental life ; he could not, he said, push on to new discoveries unless he thus disencumbered his mind of its burden. Afterwards he pursued the practice with a more distinct conviction of the usefulness of such a record of the process of the intellectual life as was thus afforded. Owing to the peculiar nature of his thinking, no mind could furnish a more admirable field for such observations. For the more the mental operations re- 701006 vi Editor s Preface. semble the unconscious animal functions, the more do they lend themselves to scientific observation. No doubt there is a thought life in humanity, whose laws, if we could trace them out, are as invariable as all other laws of nature, but it is not generally possible to observe this life in the individual, in whom self-consciousness, arbitrary determination, or a timid conventionality, interferes with the freedom of the mental operations. Still more rare is a mind that can register its own operations without dis- turbing their spontaneity, or can commit to writing the utterance of tender and passionate emotion without ren- dering the fountain of feeling turbid and impure. But it is this that James Hinton has done in four large volumes of printed MSS. and an equal mass of written pages. It is a wealth which his executors feel as a burden of responsibility as long as it is practically locked up from the public. The printed volumes have been placed in the British Museum, and they may be purchased ; but their voluminous nature prevents any, save the few, from ex- ploring them, and many gems of thought and expression are thus hidden. At the request of numerous lovers of James Hinton's writings, I have attempted to extract some of these. As the MSS. follow no order except that of time, and are as promiscuous as the entries in a diary, the arrangement of them was not an easy task, and it was rendered still more difficult by the habitual parallelism of James Hinton's thinking. He always saw one thing in and through another. Kegarding matter and mind as the phenomena of Spirit, how could he avoid speaking of Editor s Preface. vii the one in terms of the other ? " Every man who tells us anything worth knowing tells us one thing," he says somewhere ; and this is eminently true of himself. Passion controlled, or motion resisted, is the one thing he sees in the moral as in the material world : this is holiness ; this, too, is physical life. How can they be kept apart ? Every- where, in the life of the individual body and mind, and in the larger life of humanity, he beholds this double process, nutrition and function, which constitutes the vibration of Life. It is by this that truth is evolved, and that the moral development of the race is effected. To one not familiar with these large generalizations, the symbolic language used for brevity by Mr. Hinton is sometimes enigmatical. He will condense into a single expression a whole series of analogies previously worked out and habitually present to his mind. This kind of shorthand wants deciphering, and in the Preface to the original volumes which follows this, will be found -expla- nations of the chief terms used with special meanings. It will be readily understood that this altruistic method of James Hinton's thinking made it difficult to classify a series of extracts under any one title. There are many passages which might be equally called meta- physical, physiological, ethical or religious. From his metaphysics the translation to ethics is easy and inevitable. The central idea of the former is that the "self" is a defect, a " not," or minus quantity : by this conception he transforms the whole field of experience ; it becomes a key in his hand to unlock some of the most intricate mental problems. But removed from that abstract region viii Editor s Preface. into the sphere of practical ethics, this truth becomes the very principle of Love. For if the self be a deadness, a negation, self-sacrifice can be nothing but an entering into Life, and all pain, regarded as the instrument and means of sacrifice, changes its character and reveals itself as good. Evil to the self cannot but be good to that Being of which self is the negation. The bearing of this principle upon the conduct of life is obvious. Its appli- cation is the very " secret of Jesus," the easy yoke that makes the burden light, the conquest of ills by self- renunciation, humility, and trust. Thus the classification of these selections was rendered difficult by the very characteristic of Mr. Hinton's thinking which gives his work its chief value, that complete interpenetration of heart and intellect which harmonized all his conceptions, and made them converge, as it were, into one focus. I must disclaim, on behalf of this book, any attempt to set forth a coherent or complete account of the author's metaphysical and ethical system. It may, rather, be looked upon as presenting a transcript of his table talk, bringing back the image of the man as he appeared to those who lived in daily converse with him. James Hinton was, too, by the nature of his genius, emphatically a seer, not a constructor of systems. He simply took the conception, to which he gave the name of Actualism, and flashing it like a torch upon the various dark problems of life and mind, revealed everywhere glimpses of order and beauty. He offers no other proof than this : " that which doth make manifest is light." That much remained still obscure no one was more aware than himself. " I Editor s Preface. ix have not seen that yet," he would frequently say ; and it filled him with an amazement not of admiration to find most people ready with a " view " of every subject. He used to say that wherein he differed most from other men was in knowing the " feel " of ignorance. I must call attention to the fact that these extracts are from the earlier series of MSS., and represent the growth of the writer's thoughts from 1856 to ahout 1861. This early date should be borne in mind, because many things in these papers may seem at variance with the later utterances of the writer. No man was ever more indif- ferent to the charge of inconsistency ; not from any dis- regard of accuracy, still less of allegiance to principles, but because he viewed all thought as a life, the imperfect stages of which must seem to contradict one another until surveyed in their completeness. That a statement was true was no reason why it should not be denied ; indeed that process was needful to its fuller re-affirmation. He was therefore most tolerant of " deniers," and held them to be eminently useful ; whilst that anyone should rest contented in a negative stage indicated to him a curious sort of paralysis of the mental life. He had, he said, but one advice to learners in the art of thinking : Go on. This habit of his mind should be remembered in reading the religious passages, when his language is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from the crudities of pulpit theology. Those who are accustomed to his phraseology know that he often used theology as the allegorical presentation of philosophy. Illustrations of this will be found in the following pages, a 2 x Editor s Preface. I have not, therefore, altogether discarded such pas- sages. To have done so would have been to lose some- thing of the freshness and force with which these thoughts were originally presented, and also of the interest which attaches to them as anticipations of truths afterwards more completely attained. He himself called these anti- cipations "affirmations of the moral sense," and knew that they could not be held permanently in that form : other intellectual elements would come in and demand recognition, to the temporary exclusion of the truth first discerned. But it was his delight to trace how these suppressed affirmations were restored with fuller evidence at a subsequent stage ; and it was this that induced him, on revising the MSS., to leave untouched some of those crude expressions. It is for their suggestiveness that these " thoughts " will be chiefly valued. They must not be compared with the polished sentences of pensee writers such as Joubert or Novalis. They might rather be called " chips," frag- ments from the workshop of a great builder. The important later series of MSS. have not been used in the preparation of this volume. They are chiefly con- cerned with working out the position which Mr. Hinton latterly adopted in regard to some questions in ethics. To selections from these writings, to which he himself attached greater value than to any other part of his work, I propose to devote a subsequent volume. CAROLINE HADDON. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. THIS volume contains a transcript, unaltered, except by omissions and by verbal corrections, of papers written at various intervals, simply as a private record of my thoughts. They embrace subjects of many kinds, often having no special connection, save that they were regarded from a common point of view, and were felt to throw on each other a mutual light. To render them intelligible, a few things should be stated. These papers are not to be assumed to represent my present opinions. They are not a statement of my thoughts, but a history of them, and present, not the results, but the process. Necessarily, therefore, they contain that which I now think erroneous or partial. Here and there I have indicated this by a brief remark, but on the whole I have treated the papers as documents merely, and not as subjects for criticism or statements for revision. I have, indeed, specially sought not to exclude my errors, wherever they seemed to me to have any vital connection with the progress of my ideas, because the chief value which I attach to the papers is that of being an exact transcript of a process that xii Author s Preface. has taken place quite independently of any volition of mine, and the record of which may perhaps have the same interest that Science finds in every natural event, quite apart from its intrinsic importance. I take, however, this opportunity to explain a few terms which occur in meanings other than their customary ones. The terms nutrition and function I have adopted from physiology, and applied to the mental and moral life of man. They mean always the production of a tension, and its ceasing ; with this idea also implied, that the tension is produced in an " organization," that is, under conditions wherehy the ceasing of the tension produced definite results, or a " function." For example : the process of a reductio ad absurdum, with its impossible consequences enforced hy sound logic, and ending in a correction of the premiss, is a mental " nutrition," ending in a " function ; " the tension against reason is the nutrition. The change of hasis, in which the tension ceases, is the function. So too in the cases in which a false thought of right enforces a false duty, making a " tension " against the moral reason, which ceases with a truer apprehension of the duty : here is a moral nutrition and a function. The words theory and interpretation are used in a sense precisely corresponding. Theory means that which is imposed on us as true while there is an error in the hasis of our thought; interpretation, the rectifying of the basis. The word polarity has been used rather in unusual Authors Preface. xiii connections than with unusual meaning. It denotes nothing more than an oppositeness in two things, which implies in them a special tendency to union. The positive and negative electricities are examples of polar opposites. Continuous and transitive vibrations are sufficiently ex- plained by the context. The motion of a pendulum is a continuous vibration, the upward motion being of the same form as the downward ; a body falling into water, and making the water rise, is a transitive vibration ; the upward motion, though equivalent to the downward, being changed in form. One new word I have introduced, which I would prefer to have omitted if it had not been too much interwoven with the thoughts the word actualism. This term I gave, for convenience, to the general conception I had formed : it is parallel to idealism, materialism, posi- tiveism, &c., and was adopted to express the idea that all existence is truly active or spiritual, as opposed to inert or dead. As I have been re-perusing these writings, I have grown more and more conscious how far my words have often been from conveying my whole meaning ; how my very thought, indeed, has changed and grown beneath my hands, and from being what seemed like a clear per- ception, has become only a suggestion of far distant things. I have felt this especially in relation to God and Nature. To me, Nature means God's action towards me and towards man ; and it is so much, and grows to me perpetually so much more, and so joins itself with xiv Author s Preface. Bevelation, and becomes one with all that I have most prized in that, that all seems to come into it, and I cannot draw a line; nor can I even try. But I know this is no end my eyes are dazzled ; others will judge for me. To any reader who has felt interest enough to extend his glances at these papers even to their end, let me say that I hope he has felt this ahout them, that with whatever weaknesses and errors and waste of time and thought they are mixed, yet there is in them some sign of the opening of a road into farther truths. This is all they were wished to afford. JAMES HINTON. CONTENTS. I. METAPHYSICS. THE nature of the world The hypothesis of matter The universe is God's action perceived as motion Nature is action Nature is one with man Berkeley's error The mind is not more real than the external world The laws of Nature are given by man The work of Science is to harmonise our perceptions with our conceptions Can we know the fact of the world ? How come we to perceive a physical world ? Wherever sin is, matter is The law of cause and effect is a form of thought God's act is not the cause but the fact of the world Granting illusion, all mysteries are removed The error of regarding this as an imperfect physical world The mental is physical Things are forms of the spiritual Science now is too abstract The error of " inherent tendencies," etc. Nature is a process felt as matter Metaphysics is a Mathematics The world is the symbol of an unknown quantity Matter = x Science, like Mathematics, exists for the sake of the un- known quantity The point, that is, absence of matter, is the only infinite, and the symbol of God The molecule is in reality a point Chemistry and Physics correspond with Mathematics Metaphysics and Science must be used together What will make Philosophy popular? The tendency of Positivism The life of Metaphysics II. NATURE KNOWN BY THE MORAL EMOTIONS. Man's response to right The actual is known by the conjoint use of sense, intellect and moral being Man fell by the conscience Men really judge by their feelings The evil of xvi Contents. PAGE thinking that God acts for results Mysticism is allied to Science The Mystics are interpreters The intellect attains freedom by subjection to the moral sense The physical is the moral Nature is Holiness Nature is man's bride Nature is " the hands of the living God " We must recognise negation of Being Love of God is the love of all things The world as a work of genius The organic is not the highest in Nature The future Science Nature's secrets are won by sympathy Evil of the doctrine of special creations " Design " is a necessary consequence of the assumption of matter Science is done for love To be natural is to love Nature is perfectly beautiful, therefore ideal beauty is less perfect Nature is God's ideal All mental life is the representation of Nature To account for error is to show it beautiful Evil is nutrition Painting recalls to us the spiritual fact of Nature The function of Art is to reveal the holiness of Nature Art will advance as Science has The future of the world . 52 III. MENTAL PHYSIOLOGY. Moral and emotional facts stand on the same basis as physical facts False perceptions are the condition of mental life Nature is always first misunderstood There is no method for discovery The relation of logic to imagination The place of those who want logic The significance of paradox Sleep in mental life Breathing in mental life Genius and talent Talent is nutrition, genius function Man's mind is female, woman's male How genius and talent are affected by paradox Genius is common sense Mental life arises from failure Men are parts of a whole May genius be found common ? In humanity, as in genius, there is no design Nutrition and function are the life in thinking Submission to the thought of others is disease Saying is seeing The mental life of humanity 100 Contents. xvii IV. THE ART OF THINKING. PAGE How to think rightly Truth is suppressed and comes back in higher form All thought is necessary Opinions are like insti- tutions Necessity of surrendering good opinions Opinion is form only, and must change to preserve its value We only know form ; to know the fact is to love That which must be thought must be distinguished from that which is true Use of analogy Thought is Nature, and therefore cannot be false All opinions are true under their conditions The danger of fear in thought The value of logic What are axioms ? Newton's work great by its incompleteness Truth is the union of opposites The minus in thinking Necessity of sacrifice in thought The nature of hypothesis All advance in thought comes by right use of words No ends in thinking Thinking is an especial work Parallel of thinking to art Imagination the chief element in true thought The Art element in true thought parallel to the Gentile element in Christianity 133 V. THE SELF AND CONSCIOUSNESS. Individuals are states of humanity Individuals are separate because physical Man as a parasite The self is negation Eternal life is deliverance from the self Descartes perverted modern thought by starting from the self The untrust- worthiness of consciousness True consciousness is the opposite of self-consciousness Unsatisfactory nature of the doctrine of immortality The desire for immortality is not man's highest aspiration What absorption into God means Love is not self-sacrifice We want martyrs To give love is to create Men are sacrificed for man How happiness is attained Only love can satisfy Happiness is a putting aside of consciousness Pleasure comes from want Personality is not highest God is not personal The Trinity God is Being No mind without body God as light The fact is love and is shown by Christ 163 xviii Contents. VI. THE BIBLE. PAGE Nature interprets the Bible The work of the Bible is to give man life What death means Inspiration No need for inspira- tion To have life is to be inspired We must not be afraid of the Bible The source of the Bible's power We put the divine element away from the present The difference between physical and spiritual is one of perception Kedemption can- not be partial Religion must not appeal to the selfish emotions The mistake of our Christianity The supposition of a physical hell Hell cannot be remorse The world ac- counted for by God's act and man's death Christ does not save from the punishment of sin What God's hell is Heaven is love Christ's work will cease " This is my body " shows the spiritual nature of all existence Prayer changes, not the fact, but the phenomenon Christianity is not a theology but a fact Our Christianity is dead How Christianity may be surpassed 189 VII. HOLINESS. Nature is self-control The moral life is parallel to the mental To be moral is to act Ago ergo ego Misery only removed by removing selfishness No action but right action There is no true arbitrary action or free-will Arbitrary action is sin Freedom because necessity Man cannot fail because he is a part of Nature The only mystery is man's death The moral lesson of Science Our moral life is passion controlled The phenomenal nature of evil Sin as inaction The analogy of disease to sin Evil to the individual is good to the race Life comes only from death We are redeemed, not tempted, by matter Creation is self-control God has no physical power " Creation out of nothing " The creature is one with the Creator Self-sacrifice is not loss A selfish world is the necessary phenomenon of an altruistic world No nutrition without a final function The resurrection of the dead comes by Man 216 Contents. xix VIII. ETHICS. PAGE The practical problem is to unite work for man with the devotion connected with work for God Howto keep upthe enthusiasmof religion Not imagination but faith Stoicism and actualism The world is altruistic Man's business is with the present The practical as existing for the sake of the reflective The evil of exalting individual over general regards The self as the devil Genius is a sufferer, not a doer Our Christianity cannot give the enthusiasm which only can raise men above selfishness Self-sacrifice is extended politeness Poverty does not involve loss of refinement A return to Nature Good manners in the sphere of morals The child state of humanity The value of good manners as showing the pattern for life The world goes best by being let alone Mill's argument for liberty What martyrdom is The eternal necessity of martyrdom Sociology Social evil is nutrition The life of society Trade should be made a profession The world was never worse than now The evil of our modern life of refine- ment Good is determined by its relations Woman, like religion, needs to be liberated Egoism is not the true basis of man's life To be heroic we must advance Future times will owe to this age the culture of the heart 245 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION, I METAPHYSICS. THE nature of the world The hypothesis of matter The universe is God's action perceived as motion Nature is action Nature is one with man Berkeley's error The mind is not more real than the external world The laws of Nature are given by man The work of Science is to harmonise our perceptions with our con- ceptions Can we know the fact of the world ? How come we to perceive a physical world ? Wherever sin is, matter is The law of cause and effect is a form of thought God's act is not the cause but the fact of the world Granting illusion, all mysteries are removed The error of regarding this as an imperfect physical world The mental is physical Things are forms of the spiritual Science now is too abstract The error of " inherent tendencies," etc. Nature is a process felt as matter Metaphysics is a Mathe- matics The world is the symbol of an unknown quantity Matter = x Science, like Mathematics, exists for the sake of the unknown quantity The point, that is, absence of matter, is the only infinite, and the symbol of God The molecule is in reality a point Chemistry and Physics correspond with Mathematics Metaphysics and Science must be used together What will make Philosophy popular? The tendency of Positivism The life of Metaphysics. MEN may adopt three views concerning the nature of the world. (1) That there is a material and an actual (spiritual), both truly existing, and necessarily with a certain antagonism between them ; this leads rightly to asceticism. (2) That there is only the material; this B 2 Philosophy and Religion. being the true existence (at least to us), and such as we perceive it. There is (to us) no actual. This is positivism, as it speaks. (3) That the sole true existence is the actual ; and that this material, or real, is our way of perceiving it. This last is actualism (or positivism as it truly is), the practical inference being that we have to deal with the real, but on the principle that it is truly actual, if v. T e could see it aright, getting at the true Being by leaving out the negation. Now which is the best ? Newton says, "the first cause is certainly not mechanical." This is just the point at which science stops : the conversion as it were of this first cause into mechanical cause, or motion. Or as the problem may be better put: what is that wherein consists the act of spirit becoming motion ? This is the problem, to bridge the gulf which separates a spiritual act from motion the mystery of creation is here. The hypothesis of matter or a substratum in which motion inheres as one of its properties is evidently simply a mode of solving the difficulty ; the hypothesis was manifestly invented for that object. It appeared, I suppose, simpler that a spiritual being should create matter and put it in motion, which motion would then " naturally : ' continue, or continue by the laws of motion (whatever that means) than that a spirit's action should itself be motion. And indeed at first sight this solution does seem to have some ad- vantages ; to our minds it does seem natural that matter should move, there is a conformity between the nature of the two things : also it does not seem so hard to under- stand that a spirit should put matter in motion: not that the idea is at all simple or intelligible, but I suppose we readily accept the supposition because we are conscious of being able to do the same thing ; by our Metaphysics. 3 spiritual act, our will, we move matter. The idea has that deceptive appearance of comprehensibility which arises from familiarity. Also by supposing a creation of matter once and putting it in motion, which continues as a matter of course, we throw back the difficulty if we do not diminish it : it does not press on us as a present mystery the thing was very wonderful when it took place, but it was so very long ago that it does not concern us much, and besides it was altogether a different process from any that takes place now, so that it is no wonder if we find it mysterious. But upon this we may remark (1) That it does not really relieve the difficulty. (2) That it rather substitutes a greater difficulty for a less one. (3) That it is in point of fact utterly inadmissible. If a spiritual may become a physical action at any time, why not now? Why suppose two processes or orders of things when one, which must in any case be supposed, will suffice ? And again, as has been said, we are conscious continually in ourselves of a spiritual act becoming a physical act ; why should we exclude God from doing that which we do ourselves ? If part of the motion which exists is our spiritual act, why is not the rest of it God's spiritual act ? Why two different causes for like events. But the difficulty is, by the hypothesis of matter, really rendered greater. We cannot see how a spiritual act, either our own or God's, can produce or be (which is a better term) motion ; but hard as this may be we do at least perceive it in our own experience, whereas the creation of matter is a thing at once much harder to conceive, and entirely beyond experience. It is not only inconceivable as a process but is illustrated by no analogies. That God creates the world by a spiritual act, as we by spiritual acts take a part in the production of the phenomena, appears by the B 2 4 Philosophy and Religion. side of this past and done creation of matter, a thing of course, so simple by comparison, that we almost forget that it too is an impassible mystery. But also this hypothesis of matter is inadmissible (as long seen) on scientific grounds. Useless and worse than useless as an explanation of the fact which it was invented to explain, it is positively shown to be false alike by metaphysics and by science. It fills the world with needless mysteries without helping in the least to remove a necessary one. But though the hypothesis of matter only makes bad worse, the problem may be attempted in other ways, and, as it seems to me, somewhat mitigated if not solved. Berkeley tried to do this by affirming the world to be God's action upon man's mind, which is at least better than the material hypothesis, although open on one side to fatal objections. I propose this view : That the universe is God's action absolutely, and quite indepen- dently of any percipient. But God being a spirit, His action, of course, is spiritual action. How then do we see it as physical, i.e. as motion, which is not a spiritual attribute ? (I do not say as matter and motion, because the idea of matter is evidently derived from motion, viz., through resistance, which is only motion opposed to motion.) This is my solution. We perceive God's spiritual action as motion, because we ourselves, by our own finite nature, impose a limit on it ; i.e. God's action being in itself unlimited, having relation neither to time nor space, we, by virtue of our finitude, perceive it in relation only to such boundaries : that is, we see it as motion, the material universe. This is why the laws of Nature are truly the laws of our minds, why the conceptions by which material phenomena are bound into science are supplied from within, not gathered from without ; why it is in truth Metaphysics. 5 himself that man studies in the universe. Science is man's view of (rod's action. Doubtless each order of intelligent heings has a different science; according to the limit their nature compels them to put upon the divine action. Our perceptions themselves involve the ideas of space and time ; they are only human " forms," not actualities; and we can conceive of force only as motion ; whatever God might do, if we perceived it, it would be motion to us. We must have action, getting rid of matter altogether. The one error of science is the considering action as substance ; and so, in its advance, we get rid of substance continually, seeing nature more and more truly, till at last, giving up substance altogether, we get the true nature, the spiritual, the divine. And we take with shame, yet a shame that should be full of hope and joy, the " inertia " wholly to ourselves. Inertia is selfishness, the subjectness to passion, the not acting, the true or spiritual death. Surely Nature is one because knowledge is one. To comprehend anything is to have it in us one with our own central " thought." Surely we " comprehend " nothing but axioms : comprehension is of one fact, at once primary and ultimate. As I have said of life, it comprehends all and is comprehended in the least. Our comprehension is of life ; our minds being life we com- prehend life. This and this alone we understand or know. To understand a thing is for it to become one with us. The mere accumulation of ideas and theories nutrition is not truly knowledge, in fact it is error, which is opposed to it : it is a mere preparation for it. Knowledge is the result of interpretation or function, 6 Philosophy and Religion. which is always one, however various the nutrition or assimilation or resulting organization ; the functional process has ever an absolute oneness. In short we know a thing only when we see that it is merely a form of our own thought our own thought being ever and neces- sarily one. The conformity of all our senses, the constant im- pression produced, is due to the fact of organization, and our forming part of one universal organization. To affirm of any thing or fact that it is " seen " or " perceived " is to assert that it is only phenomenal ; but not therefore that it does not indicate a reality; that is the very thing it does do, by virtue of the prin- ciple of causation. Its object and end is to show us the reality. Eemember the two-fold relation to us of the universe; to our bodies, as subserving our physical life, and to our minds ; how much more essential the former seems to be ; yet is this surely only a phenomenon, for what is our life, our body and mind, but simply one miration produced on our spirit by the Divine act ? When that Ceases, still remains the spirit, still remains the Divine act. These are eternal and have no relation to time. Still is there passion in our spirit produced by the Divine act, still do we live. Our physical and mental life are but one form of the ever-changing phenomenal passion, nothing is lost or ceases when that ends ; so the apparent primary importance of the physical life is deceptive or phenomenal. And our bodily and mental life is really as it were only one vibration out of the boundless series of vibrations which constitute the passion produced by God's action on the spirit. This life is one vibration of the music produced in the human spirit by God's action influencing it. Human spirits are like lyres Metaphysics. 7 which vibrate when breathed on by the wind, but the wind does not blow for them, or in order to produce that music. And our bodies and minds are one note of such music, which swells and dies away, but only to be suc- ceeded by another and different one. I perceive that people are puzzled by confounding relations between phenomena with the view of the phenomenon as a whole : the relations of phenomena are not affected in any way by the subjective view. Just as the sun's path among the stars is merely phenomenal, yet as a relation among phenomena remains unaffected by the subjective view of the sun's motion. It is only understood, which surely is no detriment. All phenomena and phenomenal relations are real in relation to our bodies and minds; as real as they are. Things, qualities, time, space, are actualities to our bodies and minds ; really affect and influence them ; these are relations between phenomena. We are apt to think of the external world as unreal in comparison with our own bodies and minds, but the relation of the external world to them is not altered in the least. In fact the phe- nomenon remains altogether just as it was, only we understand it. Thus no alteration is made at all in our common-sense treatment of phenomena, which are as ever in relation to each other, and our bodily and mental interests continue the same as ever. As for the wonder of perception sensation, thought, &c. this is the fact of organic mind; and physiology must afford the explanation. Thus not only is the externality of the universe conceded in every possible sense, viz. its externality to our bodies, but the reality also in every sense in which there is the least evidence or possibility of it, viz. in relation to our minds and bodies. It was a fatal error of Berkeley's to make the mind 8 Philosophy and Religion. a reality in relation to the external world as phenomenal ; thus he denied the reality of the external world in an inadmissible sense. The mind being also a phenomenon, the full reality of the external world is maintained in every sense, except an artificial one, that might possibly be asserted by controversialists, but certainly rests on no possible evidence even of the least conclusive description. It is real in relation to men's minds and bodies ; that is all they know or care to maintain, and that is true. The question is, What are it and our minds and bodies also ? And this is the question of questions for all, though disregarded ; it is the " Know Thyself." It is because the laws of nature exist in ourselves, have their origin and cause in us, that we know truth when we see it. We recognize its conformity with our own mental constitution; see ourselves in it, in fact. But then how is it that before knowing the truth we always err ? Surely only because the universe is too large for us to grasp ; we cannot for a very long time comprehend the simplicity of nature. Therefore we look wrongly upon things, but the error is in detail not in principle. The principles of natural doctrines are ever true, axioms do not deceive us, enlargement of view is all that is needed to help us to apply them rightly. And truth ever succeeds ; it must indeed, for truth is but the natural action of the mind : and to " arrive at truth " is only this that the laws and forms the mind imposes upon that part of God's action with which it has to do, should not be arbitrary but consistent. And the mode in which we err is most suggestive ; for what is it but that we invent things and properties which have no existence. Error is the seeing what does not exist ; seeing in fact many things where there is only one. The progress of Metaphysics. 9 truth consists in the rejection of multiplicity and the substitution of unity and simplicity of conception. But this shows what the prerogative and necessary action of the mind is. No one would say that we are made to err arbitrarily in our progress towards knowledge ; these erroneous " creations " or forms imposed on nature by the mind are the legitimate steps of its advance. Its prerogative is not to receive but to give laws to nature : the work of science is how best to do this. Man is the ruler and lawgiver : things have to conform to him, not he to them. As he is more and more filled and penetrated by God's work, so does he rule nature better ; so does he carry out to greater perfection his own mental action : and instead of many partial and discordant powers, pro- perties, and laws, comes to see around him one act : the normal operation of his own mind, and that alone, ever presented and repeated before him in that which God does. Knowledge is not a being filled to the brim; science is not a submission of the intellect to laws. Knowledge is power; science is dominion. Hence the twofold aspect of science: it sprang first complete into existence. Man gave laws and right laws to the world when first he was placed upon his throne : he enunciated right laws when by the first philosophers his statute books were written. But also he had need of larger knowledge of God, of a nearer approach to Him in His work, before he could use his power fully. Man by studying nature brings himself into communion with God, that from Him he may learn how to discharge his Godlike office of Lawgiver. Man constructs Science as the bird builds its nest ; the bird arranges things in a way accordant with its nature, and its sensations ; it does what it must, it carries i o Philosophy and Religion. out its laws of thought, just as man does in Science : it puts them right, it groups them in what appear to it their natural and necessary relations, solely with reference to themselves and then it is a nest ! So Science becomes a moral nest, in which man's spirit reposes. Woman being taken out of man affords an excellent allegory to illustrate the relation of man and nature. Nature is " taken out " of man ; it is himself that he sees thus as something external and secondary, and sub- ordinate to himself. Yet not himself merely not a phantom or illusion but God and he working together ; not man without God nor God without man, but God using man, as it were. In nature God uses man's mental constitution to educe out of His spiritual action a material universe suitable to himself. Nature is thus, as woman was, the product of God's action and man's " substance." It is man's mental substance or constitu- tion, which, brought into relation with God's (spiritual) action, is nature: i.e. man imposing a limit on God's action (itself infinite) perceives it as matter and motion. And the relation of nature to man should be that of woman to him it should be his second self : it should be known to be so : it should be treated so. Man has degraded alike woman and nature to be his material minister : miserable error, miserable loss. Both are his spirit's peers and friends. It was the old practical error of the a priori philo- .sophers that theories to be true needed only to agree with the laws of our own conceptions ; it is the recent practical error of the empirical philosophers that theories to be true needed only to agree with the facts. In each case the same error of defect. Instances of the disregard of the laws of our own Metaphysics. 1 1 conceptions in the formation of recent scientific theories are innumerable : in fact that vice pervades the whole scheme and structure of modern science. Either way, of course agrees equally with the facts; indeed the facts suggest rather the wrong than the right, and therefore by men who thought their only or chief business was to make their theories accord with facts, the wrong was naturally adopted. But the structure of our minds demands the reversal of these views : an entire turning round of science, a re-assertion of the laws of mind. The a priori chimeras had at least this advantage, that in the very nature of them they were obliged to be expressible, and therefore conceivable ; but the chimeras of experimental science will not even submit to this slight restraint. They float, many of them, in such an equivocal region, that when you want to speak of them, their enunciation is found to be no less than impossible. . That was a great error of Bacon's : he thought truth was in nature instead of in man, and that formulae cor- rectly expressive of natural facts must therefore be true. The very error of the a priori men, in another form, but still identical, for they believed that formulae correctly expressive of laws of thought must be true. And has not this falsified science ever since, the idea that formulae correctly expressing facts must be true? The error is palpable those only are true formulae which bring facts into accordance with the laws of thought. Is not this the error of the mathematicians ; using hypotheses merely as means of calculation? Bacon thought also that by changing externals he could alter internals ; could eradi- cate a false intellectual habit by substituting a new method. Just what those men do who are for reforming mankind by altering institutions. It was the one-sided- ness of men that wanted removing, and Bacon essayed to 1 2, Philosophy and Religion. do this by turning men altogether to the opposite side. But I also am wrong in thinking that I could improve history. What is this alternate excess but a vibration, what the union of the two but development ? We must excuse the vagaries of the period of liberty ; variety and apparent caprice are its element. The future science shall embody both the law and the liberty in one. The law of science is, to make our perceptions and conceptions harmonize : thus it is altogether an internal thing. How recent science has failed even to aim at this, is palpable : of the two it is more important that our theories should rightly correspond with our conceptions than with our perceptions ; [for after all these are what we mean by facts]. Laws may be true although not agreeing with facts, the facts being incorrectly observed or regarded; but laws that do violence to conceptions cannot be true. The universal error of putting pheno- menon before cause, almost necessarily arises from the idea of receiving laws from nature instead of giving them to her. How simple, comparatively, it makes the mystery of perception that we are the cause of the facts which we perceive, i.e. the cause of their being as we perceive them. All that mystification about the " authority of the senses," &c., ceases. Let us trust ourselves, trust our senses, our mental senses as well as our bodily ones. Now we place much reliance on our external senses and none on our internal, as, before, much on internal and little on external. We should learn to rely on both : for what is the good of talking about the external world, when it is absolutely ourselves that we study and trust. Are not the senses as much we, Metaphysics. 1 3 as the intuitions ? Have the senses any authority which they did not derive from us ? By the senses we acquire a subjective knowledge, viz. of an effect upon ourselves. By the internal senses or perceptions we learn, from this effect on ourselves thus known through the senses, the cause which is external to ourselves. The internal senses, the rational powers, are in immediate relation with that which is external to us, which the senses are not. By the senses we learn the effects on ourselves and their relations ; that is their value. Our knowledge is entirely bound in effects on ourselves ; this is the reason of the necessity for the use of the senses ; without them no basis for any knowledge ; we cannot know causes if we do not know effects. Our internal faculties, reasoning, intuition, &c., bring us into relation with that which is not subjective, with the causes of these effects on our- selves which we perceive by the senses ; but these internal faculties can have valuable results only when they are employed upon materials gained by the senses. Without these they are, of course, misleading; trying to learn cause without knowing effects, is of course hopeless ; for the effects are the causes in the "present," existing where alone we can know them. In one sense the old philosophers were not too much subjective, but too little. They reasoned of things external to them, without knowing what was internal ; tried to get at true external causes of effects on them, not having first learnt what those effects were. Our philosophy is becoming as extremely subjective as theirs was external. They busied themselves wholly about the causes affecting them without caring to know what were the effects on themselves ; we busy ourselves wholly about the effects on ourselves and their relations to each other, without caring to know their cause external to us. This 1 4 Philosophy and Religion. is the true relation of the two philosophies. Our material universe, as we consider it, is altogether an effect on ourselves (for our reference to God having once created it, or to His now and then doing or creating some things in it, is idle in the extreme). The old philosophy was full of guesses ahout what might be the cause or causes of the effects on ourselves ; not knowing what those effects were, nor caring to know, save in the most superficial and inaccurate way. Put the two things together, and we have a depth, something satisfactory and worthy of manhood. Here is the point for positivism : do we certainly know (as it affirms) that we do not and cannot know the fact and being of things ? If so, how and why do we know this ? If we know this much, surely we may know more ; for we could not know this unless we knew why we cannot know it. It is " because of the subjective element in all phenomena ; " but then can we not find out this subjective element ? This " self," which must be perceived as external but is not, what is it ? The positivists do not see that they are cutting the bonds which have tied philosophy's feet, and then saying to her : do not walk. They do not see that their argu- ments about it, and the presumption from its failure hitherto, lose all their force in that very fact of the new starting point they give her. The question is altogether another one now, and susceptible of an entirely new treatment ; now that we know that this assumption, that things exist such as we perceive them, is an illusion ; and that the cause of our perception is not and cannot be this. Positivism must aim to put us into one with the fact of the world around us. And this it does by saying : Sacri- Metaphysics. 1 5 fice yourselves, live for others. Then this must be the fact of the world around us, not passive, not getting ; but giving, acting. The positivist says : I speak of the law only, and that is self-sacrifice, love for others ; but as for the fact, I will not even think what that may be. But none the less is it involved in this law that the fact is Love : is that which, in relation to us, is self-sacrifice. The problem of science (of interpretation) always is, the phenomeoa being given by accurate observation, to find something which, being considered as the fact, the pheno- mena shall necessarily be as we see them; and where such a fact is found, as it does inevitably force itself upon the mind of some man, it is self-evidently true ; comes with irresistible conviction ; it is the fact, we cannot help seeing it to be ; that which makes the pheno- menon necessary is unquestionably the cause of it. This is a good way of seeing it ; it identifies physical cause and connection in reason. Now the fact which makes the physical necessary (and has this self-evidence) is a sub- jective inertia of humanity. Cause is ever that which makes necessary ; the motion of the earth makes it neces- sary for us to perceive, therefore it is the cause of our perceiving. Now surely all finding out of cause is inter- pretation in this sense ; is it not ? And all other suppos- ing of cause is hypothesis, making phenomena their own cause, as gravitation, e.g. : we have to interpret gravita- tion as gravitation is interpretation of planetary motions. And see the beauty of this ; our perceiving is the primary fundamental fact, and necessarily so ; we can have no other basis to start from or rest on. There is ultimately nothing else to explain or give cause for ; all questions of cause resolve themselves into this, the cause of our perceiving, or of our sensations rather. This is as it 1 6 Philosophy and Religion. should be ; the final answer, too, must be that which gives some condition of ourselves as the fact. The question respecting the universe is not, " How comes there to be a physical, or what is the physical world ? " but " How come we to perceive a physical world ? " He must be dull who cannot see that this is the " fact," the question, especially with astronomy to help him, in which the same history has been. Astronomers started with the assumption that the heavenly motions existed as such, and puzzled themselves. They did not ask the right question. In like manner we do not face the true problem ; we have made assumptions instead of keeping to facts. The question is, how come we to perceive a material world ? This we answer by guessing ; we assume, we jump at once to a conclusion, do everything that is unphilosophical and sure to land us in error ; we lay it down, without any reason at all, that it is because the physical exists externally to us. Let us keep to the fact and give our attention to the real question, How do we come to perceive a physical world? That is the question, and the only question ; to be answered by investigating first what we perceive. With regard to the question, "When did the physical begin ? " I answer, " It began with the not-being of man, the Fall." It is like the question, when did the sun begin to move round the earth ? when man began to perceive. They are alike affairs of perception. All that is remains the same ; nothing was altered when the physical began; but a mode of perception commenced in man. When and wheresoever there is sin, suppression of moral Being, there is the physical, there is time and Metaphysics. 1 7 space, there is nutrition ; i.e. there is redemption or development. This is the great life. This constitutes the spiritual universe, this is our not-being from other spiritual Being, our nutrition-producing failure, our tendency and function. All other forms of life flow from, are included in, and re-present this. What more is there in what I say than this : that God is all around us and we do not perceive him ? It is this simply. But then our not perceiving God is our perceiv- ing matter. Postulate Being instead of not-being ; and that is the universe. This also I see; the law of cause and effect, under which we see nature, is a form of thought. It is nothing real, truly belonging to the essential action which con- stitutes the universe ; but a relation like that of time and space and motion, arising from our constitution ; it arises as time does from the limit we impose on that which is unlimited. Hence its absolute authority, hence its absolute non-entity. It is one of those things which is and is not (like time and space). And now the value of this thought : this relation of cause and effect, succes- sion of " second causes," what is it except the mode in which we view God's immediate action ? Therefore when we say anything occurs under or by virtue of this law of cause and effect, what is it that we affirm ? See if it can be anything else than that God does it ? We see God's action as a chain of causes and effects ; seeing them so by virtue of our finiteness of view, just as we see things in time. Cause and effect, because they are cause and effect, may be known to be God's direct action. And it follows that if cause and effect be God's direct action, God's direct action consists in cause and effect : and therefore c 1 8 Philosophy and Religion. to affirm direct creation is to affirm creation by second causes : the two things are one. To see the law of cause to be a form of thought removes that apparent difficulty also. God's act is not the cause of things but the fact of them. When we ask for the cause, we ask for the cause in time ; that which preceded it, which was and is not : which God's act cannot be, being eternal. The idea of cause, thus, I see to be wholly phenomenal. If we consider God's act only as the cause of the origin of the universe we deny the existence of His act, for the cause exists only in the effect ; and the effect has all the reality, the necessity, the fact, of the cause. The cause is not, and never was, more than the effect ; the effect contains it in full. We have fallen into horrible con- fusions from this word " cause," using it with so little understanding. I see it now clearly ; and that it is above all necessary to separate from it all idea of efficiency, that is, acting. We have confounded cause with actions. In tracing a chain of " causes " we are not tracing a " thing " which really exists, but imposing upon nature accurately and wisely the law of our own minds. We are bound to make the " facts " agree with our " ideas," and do not see the facts until we have done so. Our idea of cause and effect is the true and only possible fact of cause and effect. There is no other " law " in nature but a law which we make. God is not the " Lawgiver " to Nature He is the Doer of it ; we are the Lawgivers. This strong persuasion that there may really exist space, infinite space, without matter, is very striking ; the actual is felt in it dimly and unconsciously. Space is " the unknown God ;" it is our ignorance makes the Metaphysics. 1 9 actual to be " space." We are in space because we are in God, and do not know it. Being is a property of God ; not-being of the pheno- menon : they are parallel ; the phenomenon is the Divine, but without its " Being." This is the puzzle of theology a God apart from Nature is both asserted and denied. It means that the absolute of Nature is God ; but this which we take to be, is not, as it cannot be, God. The old heathenism identified Nature and God ; ours is a suppression of this, with a " hypothesis " of God. God is Nature not the phenomenon but the Fact, the Being : this is the interpretation. So the classic life was more harmonious and whole than ours. If we once get it into our minds that an effect on us, or passion produced in us, as sentient Beings, causes us to perceive material things, there is surely no more diffi- culty about the material world. Then all we have to do is to ascertain the cause of this passion in us, which causes us to perceive the material universe, and all is done. And this of course is a work of induction : how is it to be settled without any trouble, a priori ? I want to know what this is, that I am caused to perceive. If I wish to ascertain a cause, all right reason teaches me to examine the effect. How is it likely we should be able to answer this question alone without taking any trouble ? People say at once that the cause of this passion in us is that a material universe exists which we perceive. Now I do not insist upon the absurdity of this answer ; I will suppose it to be possible, and even rational : but I say it is a mere guess ; it is a priori : it is doing the very thing which the same men are never tired of abusing our forefathers for doing. We argue from our senses, c 2 20 Philosophy and Religion. which is the very thing that is under dispute ; a most vicious circle. Men who maintain cause to be a form of thought, an universal law of mind, do not see that if it be so it must exert an absolute authority over all " primary qualities"; that the mind as imperatively demands a cause of gravity as of the ascent of a balloon, and can no more rightly be put off by a reference to a direct act of God in the one case than in the other : both are equally God's act. That is why we perceive them as links in a chain of cause and effect. To call a thing God's act is to bid us find its cause that we may see it to be so that is how we see God acting. The mind, in short the man, I should say, humanity rejects everything except action. One action it accepts as the universe ; properties are mockeries, feeding a hungry and thirsting soul with dust. God ! is its cry. Let me see God and I see all things. Blind me not, dare not to stifle me, with those dark veils of matter ; clothe not the universe in sackcloth. Life pants for life. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait. In affirming action the intellect is only doing for the whole what it does successively for each of the parts. It is the exclusion of a hypothesis, a " not ; " or rather it is a trans- ferring a " not " from without to within. It is but showing us why there must be this subjective passion in us, which makes us infer the external world (and such a one) ; viz., love acting on " not." It is important to observe that the subjective must ever be first, and that what we call perception of the external must necessarily be second, a hypothesis. The not recognising this has put us wrong, has made us think of " our senses deceiving us." The truly instinctive must be that which recognises Metaphysics. 2 1 sensations as in us. Surely this is before intellect properly so called. Surely intellect begins with the first inference, i.e. hypothesis. And is not that the first conception of the external ? As for children, when they first perceive or infer the external, their apparent knowledge of " things," as external and acting in rela- tion to them appropriately, by no means involves that they have any such conception as that of " external things," or that all is not purely subjective to them. An infant (even anencephalous) sucks immediately ; but it knows nothing of any breasts. Children act well and truly in relation to " external things," not knowing that there are, or thinking whether there are, any external things at all, conscious only of sensations purely sub- jective, but prompted thereby to actions which are perfectly adapted to their relation to " things." It is the same with animals. This suggests (among other thoughts) how we may be acting with a true reference to spiritual things, influenced by them and responding to them, and taking our place among them, while utterly unconscious and unthinking of them. While engaged with our own sensations alone (which material things are, when regarded as physical only), we yet are truly acting among, and in relation to, spiritual facts though we are heedless of them utterly and do not perceive them at all. Yes, our unconsciousness of the spiritual, while yet that is the whole fact, is like a child, playing with " things " and educated by them, without any thought but of his own sensations. After a time, that which was to him a mere sensation becomes to him a " thing." The perception of physical " things " is an interpretation of the physical sensation. Humanity is such a child taking no thought but of the physical, and educated thereby to see true existence. 2 2 Philosophy and Religion. It is quite right that man should perceive the material world ; this is perceiving the " not," which is the great thing for him to know. Save as knowing this " not " in himself he cannot be saved ; and he must first perceive or " suppose " this " not " as external, before he can know it as internal (this we know by the history of the human mind). This is why man is in a material world : to show him the " not " in himself, he must first see it as without (i.e. humanity must), and then he will come to know it as within. (In the meantime individual men, feeling it by conscience and revelation, are redeemed.) This is the infancy of humanity ; and still, as we see in the animal world, the embryonic form remains. Humanity is just now waking up from perceiving only its own sensations to perceive the actual around ; just as when a child first interprets its sensations into external things. All mysteries are removed if we once grant our feeling not true. It does indeed seem strange at first, and unlikely, that we should be thus living a life of illusion feeling as one thing what is another but then this is just the mystery of our life : it is odd and unlikely we should have been as we are. Why not this oddness, as well as any other ? There is this strangeness, in fact ; whether we regard it as a mystery or as an unlikely fact : so far as expressing the case is concerned, we may take either view ; we have certainly one or the other. In the untrue feeling is the basis and explanation of the prac- tical wrongness of our life, and of the theoretical puzzles. But in fact there are mysteries and wonders any way ; and this view too gives us the world as larger and more ; it only means that we are too small. And again: this fact (of an untrue feeling) is only strange at first, before it is reflected on and examined ; Metaphysics. 23 then it is seen evident and most natural ; it is involved in our finite being only. And observe, this is putting one oddness, or strange and unlikely thing, in place of many. It has the law of parsimony on its side. If we do not grant that, we must affirm innumerable mysteries, and each of them beyond all proportion greater than it. And against it is absolutely nothing except a strong natural tendency the other way, which is involved in the fact itself that we do feel wrongly. Observe that Copernicus's was exactly the same argument ; that we must admit one strange thing, that we are feeling wrongly, instead of many. And with regard to the moral objections which at first appear, they soon range themselves on the other side ; it is a great relief to the moral sense. Before astronomy was known, men necessarily believed there was a heaven such as they had impression of by sight. Till this time we have necessarily believed there is a material world, answering to the impression we have by touch. And clearly this arises from our relation to these bodies ; but in the same way it was from our having sight our relation to eyes that men were obliged to believe in such a heaven. There is no such thing ; but they, having eyes (and in relation with the true pheno- menon) were necessitated to think so; we understand why, for our impressions are still the same. So is it not by our having muscles and nerves that we are compelled to believe " matter ? " Being so sensed, and brought into relation with the true world, we must have believed so. It is surely to our senses we must look for the explanation of those necessary false beliefs. Here is our folly, our damnation ; not even for the sake of taking the deadness out of all the universe besides, will 24 Philosophy and Religion. we consent to take it to ourselves ! Let the universe be dead, but respect our life. Let sun and stars whirl round us like childish toys, but question not our stedfastness. So we seem to have control over Nature ; it seems that the sun rises and sets for our convenience ! It is clearly wrong to regard the " not " as the fact, as we do with our material world ; but there is also another erroneous way, that of Plato, the considering this world as an imperfect image of a world similar to it in all respects except that imperfection the considering this as an imperfect physical world. To this I conceive is parallel the theological conception of the world as physi- cally depraved, i.e. as having been originally in a superior and perfect physical state from which it is now fallen [and the same of man]. Plato's super-sensible world is the right idea ; but it errs in this, that it is not truly spiritual or moral ; and so also our conception errs. The Fall, the " not," relates to the moral ; and the " not " of the moral is that which makes the world physical. But as physical, it is perfect, as much now as ever, as much as possible. Clearly it is so, by the axiom of least resistance. This is the point to recognise : that the " not " in the universe is a " not moral," and it is that which causes it to be physical ; but that as physical, it is not, and cannot be, depraved. And seeing that this "not" is a moral, actual " not," there can be no longer any question as to the seat of it, viz. that it is the moral " not " in us. Our conception makes God intellectual, as conceiving ideas, instead of moral. This parallel of the ordinary conception of the effects of the Fall to Plato's doctrine, shows how far it is from being an absurd imagination or chimera. And now one sees why the present doctrine of " real matter " was Metaphysics. 25 necessary ; it was necessary that it should be seen that the " not " is the very essence of the physical. The other doctrine, that the physical was imperfect, would not do ; because it implied that without the " not " it was still physical. Only by seeing that the very fact and essence of the physical is this " not," can it be seen that the true fact (apart from the " not ") is moral or spiritual; that the Fall introduced the physical ; i.e. only by the belief in a " real matter " and in the necessity of the physical processes and laws, could recognition of the spiritual be introduced. Seeing that the " not " is the essence of the physical, and that it is only from and in ourselves, we see how the physical is from ourselves, is our mode of perceiving that which is spiritual or moral. Therefore men have invented a real matter, have introduced this hypothesis of " sub- stance " ; it was necessary before they could realise the moral Being that constitutes the universe. This is the function of that nutrition. The introduction of " matter " is the nutrition ; its exclusion reveals a fact. And see it was introduced by suppressing an instinct. An act is an act or a passion, according to the view that is taken of it. It is an act in relation to the doer, a passion in relation to its effect on others. Act and passion are two words for one thing. The external universe is God's act, and at the same time passion in spirits ; and regarded in this two-fold manner, it stands before us, as it were, completely revealed. When .1 used to think of the universe simply as 'God's act, the question would arise, on what does He act. We have been accustomed to think of Him as acting on matter; and .we seem somehow to want a substratum or recipient for the action. This our own experience suggests to us. 2,6 Philosophy and Religion. And I conceive this idea is a just one in some sense ; and that God's act is an act on something ; viz., on the world of spirits. That God first created spirits, and that His act, which constitutes the universe, is His act upon them. Thus I approach towards the great question, " What is that act of God's which produces such passion on spirits, that we perceive it as nature ? " How difficulties and contradictions disappear by seeing the universe as an act, and not as a thing. And this simple view is again the first instinct ; always, whatsoever we perceive, we first, and by our nature, suppose some one does it. This is the superstitious form of first science, to which last science returns. The great difficulty in science seems to have been the want of seeing that all force, motion, or passion, must flow from, or rather perhaps, be the re-appearance of, some previously existing force or passion, precisely equal. See how this has vitiated physiology, as in the idea of " vital " force as a ' property " of matter, or any " force " as a property at all ; not perceiving that life was passion, and must be referred to equal pre-existing" passion. So with regard to function, physiologists did not see that the force of the function involved an equal force as previous to it, which the function is, in another form : so that they talked about the contractility of a muscle, and its contraction causing waste. And throughout science, the false and impossible doctrines I think must all of them have rested on this one error, of supposing physical passion [or psychical] to begin, as it were, not recognizing the force or passion as ever the same passion with some previous form. Now the root of this error may be clearly seen and is beautiful. It is nothing less than that we are spirits, and can act ; and our consciousness as agents has Metaphysics. 2 7 led to our attributing in thought (though not designedly) active powers to " things." The whole philosophy of science, I think, lies in this; the source of all error, and therefore of all advance; i.e. of nutrition and of growth. Our consciousness of acting has been a continual illusion to us in nature ; we have thought that " actions " acted. Just as we have thought ' actions" were real Beings, by virtue of our consciousness of Being. So simple and natural to us is this idea of "acting" or " free-will," that the whole advance of science consists in separating it from that to which it cannot belong. In brief this is science : to get rid altogether of " properties of matter," and to see all such properties as passions, the same in another form as some pre-existing form of passion, which becomes the property or passion in question. It is no wonder there has been so much materialism, confounding as we have done, the spiritual with the mental. The mental is truly physical, one with the rest of the bodily life, and is only perceived as is the rest of it. It is our mode of perceiving that very same passion which constitutes our bodies, and of course it depends on our bodies ; there is nothing about it other than physical, i.e. passional. As to animals we are all of necessity poets. The poet says of a flower that it is " thirsty ;" and he does not speak figuratively, but strictly. The flower is thirsty ; if that which is in the flower were in us we should perceive the thirstiness, or as we say, " be thirsty." This is only the perception of a bodily condition ; which condition does not depend on our perceiving it ; nor can it rightly be called by any other name. The poet has true and fine perceptions; but the most ordinary man 28 Philosophy and Religion. is a poet respecting animals, and says of them " they are hungry " or " thirsty." All recognise in them that which in themselves they perceive as hunger and thirst. Of course the animal is hungry, just as we are; but we are " a Being " to perceive or be conscious of the hunger ; there is no Being to be conscious of or to perceive the hunger of the animal ; it is altogether a thing. If the hunger were not there (independent of our perception), how could we perceive, feel, or be conscious of it ? Does our consciousness create that of which we are conscious ? How can we feel hunger, except because there is hunger to feel ? We have been deceiving ourselves here as if our consciousness or perception were something in itself, instead of a perception of something. It is just an inversion here of the fancy of a real matter external to us ; we make in one case that which is internal external ; in the other that which is external internal. Or again, how can I be conscious of (or perceive), under the form of hunger, a condition of the body in respect to proportion of fluids or of salts ? It is hunger that I feel. These " conditions of the body " are hypotheses, theories. I do not perceive them, they are suppositions which I infer or invent to account for what I perceive. This advantage for religion is gained by seeing that the phenomenon is effect and not cause of the subjective passion, viz., that though when the phenomenon is put first, some people may deny that it has a cause, no one, I think, will be found to deny that our subjective passion has a cause. This is the very basis on which the belief in an external world reposes ; and has availed to maintain that belief all these years in defiance of the most conclusive metaphysical proof to the contrary. If it once was shown that it is the subjective passion which Metaphysics. 29 demands a cause and not the phenomenon, there is surely no class of men that will deny the necessity of a cause for that. Unfortunately by making it the phenomenon that demands a cause, unnecessary difficulties are placed in the way of a full recognition of the divine act as the cause. The effect does not agree in many ways, as is plain, and is shown by consequences, e.g., the referring of the act to a distant period ; the dividing it into direct and indirect, or supposing it to consist altogether in the institution of laws, or to be amended and altered : the whole series of inappropriate and unconceivable pecu- liarities which are supposed to attach, and one can hardly avoid attaching, to the Divine act as manifested in " creation." The one source of all the error is the attaching the idea of God's act to the phenomenon instead of the reality. There is but one cause appropriate to the universe, and that is a subjective passion of the human spirit. It is the cause of that passion which we must look for in the Divine act ; and so seeking it we find it to be in accordance with its effect, what it must be in itself, an eternal spiritual act, having for its one emphatic characteristic, holiness. Interpretation perceiving true relation among phe- nomena, or perceiving phenomena to be subjective is merely looking naturally at the facts, as it were closing our eyes and forgetting our former artificial ideas, and opening them again to look the facts fairly in the face. It is like a man who has perplexed himself in vain with an affair overnight, and after a night's rest sees the same matter under a totally different aspect and as simple as anything can be. Genius takes this morning view. The difficulty lies in the first false perception. At first we cannot see things in their true relation, we 'do not know 3 o Philosophy and Religion. the facts sufficiently : then as we discover the facts we assimilate them, arrange them according to our false view; and so at last require just to forget them entirely and look again naturally, to see how they really are. To suppose that we can perceive " things " or matter or anything hut force or passion, is an unsound dynamical view ; it involves the origination of force or passion. For perception is a passion ; and all passion is produced by passion, i.e. by force. It can of course be only force which produces the passion or perception. We only need to remember what we are talking about. Is not a " thing " wholly an affair of relation to us [an image] ? It begins and ceases ; i.e. it was and becomes not ; but that is because it ever is not ; if it were, it could not cease to be. That it is not, is included in the doctrine that nothing (that is) can be annihilated. Now I see ; time or succession does not relate to being at all ; to any thing even ; only to form, but that is surely only to " appearance " : is not this also a matter of definition ? How strange it is, we feel no surprise at form beginning and ceasing, in spite of our conviction that nothing begins or is annihilated. Clearly it is involved that nothing that is can be truly in time. Consider now how it is, and what we perceive as form. Now I perceive : these forms (that pass away) are the things the physical they are the images of the spiritual : they constitute the physical. We know it ; we say things cease to be ; they become other things : the " thing " is the "form." Neither the unchanging matter nor the force is the thing. The universe is real, i.e. it consists of " forms," which become and cease ; i.e. are not, are but images. It is the things or the forms that are images Metaphysics. 3 1 of or correspond to the spiritual; it is the " thing," not the abstract matter or force, that is the symbol. The question well arises : things are forms forms of what ? They say of matter or force ; I say by no means ; forms of spiritual action. In this sense I use the word " form " as an equivalent to that of '* image." This is the thing to insist upon. What we " perceive " in this world is not mere matter and motion, but more, infinitely more. They are things, the forms or images of the spiritual ; it is the materialists who deny it. They are things ; " forms " replete with divine energy and meaning. Thus it is that a real world is given to mankind; a world of things, which the present science denies, and substitutes an abstract world of matter and force. " Things " have meaning, they are forms ; forms of fact or act, which matter and force are not. There are no " things " to science as yet, only to artists and poets ; but when science has things it deals with meaning and significance. Think of this word significance. Things are " signs." Perhaps this word sign is better than image, for the relation of the real to the actual. What a glory and brightness surrounds the world now to my gaze. That these things which science has taught me to look on with such cold curiosity, are in truth more real, more " significant," than ever enthusiast dreamed. Science outvies in meaning and depth of revelation the inspirations of the artist and the poet. " Things " are forms in which the spiritual appears. This is the basis of poetry and art, for the emotional is also in a true sense the spiritual. Let science give us back our real world again. It is the present phenomenal science that is unreal, is abstract, dealing with our own conceptions. The old " metaphysical " science had its faults doubtless, 3 2 Philosophy and Religion. and of course was only a half ; but at least it had a real world, i.e. a world of things, of forms or signs, each with its meaning or reality. It did not confine itself to abstractions as ours does. I perceive that what I cannot tolerate are those primary or inherent properties mystical values or powers : e.g. " contractility," " irritability," the " vital force," the " inherent tendency to specific form." I see that to go against these is what I have been doing from first to last : trying to see all as necessary ; but that is, as forms. It is curious, for each of these aspects of life function, nutrition, and form there has been supposed an inherent primary property. This is how the case has stood: first, there is an inherent tendency to form ; then there is a peculiar vital property; then there is an unaccountable irritability, a property of performing special functions. How clearly this is mere hypothesis ; how miserably monotonous, if nothing worse. All the known, certain laws of physical action, adapted as they are to the results, are set aside as if they were not. The tension that must be from the manifest forces at work where life exists ; the tendency to action from such tension; the necessary moulding into different forms all these are ignored ! And as for the recognition of these doing away with the wonder the recognition of and reverence for God let us be rational, and apply our wonder and reverence to these, and to Grod in them. But the basis and foundation of all this is evident it lies in the assumption of the existence of the phenomenon. The " primary qualities " must be supposed in some way or other on that hypothesis : there must be a first, an inherent virtue or nature. So that it is clear the reject- ing these means the rejecting of a real matter. This is Metaphysics. 33 in the nature of Science : its entire work is the doing away with these primary and inherent virtues ; its work is precisely that of showing that the phenomenon does not exist, freeing us from this illusion, and thereby necessarily revealing to us the fact. How a process may have effect like a substance, one sees in a jet of water supporting a ball ; as it were by a solid mass. Is it not thus Nature is to us : a process, an operation, felt as " substance " by us ? And as for this view of the " actual " making us feel that our apprehen- sion is so false and mistaken, is not that exactly right ? Ought not science to press home upon us this very cor- rection that spiritual realities are our true concern, not such things as we feel ? Surely that case of the jet .of water supplies a good idea of "life" the physical organic. The body is a process, appearing as a substance. Surely it is right to call the separate forces, as elec- tricity, " things." The forces are forms, i.e. things, and the one abstract force bears the same relation that the abstract matter does. The separate forces cease to be ; therefore they never were. Surely the fact is just the same, whether we draw water from the earth by a bucket and pass it into a receiver, or whether we draw electricity by a machine, and pass it into one. The fact is as truly the same as the process appears identical ; in neither case have we operated on any real matter, alike only on form. I see in reading the writings of the mathematicians, so far as I can understand them, that my reasoning is a mathematics. I do not go into details and employ for- mulas, but as to the essential nature and self-evident and D 34 Philosophy and Religion. demonstrative character of their reasonings, it is alike. Mine is a mathematics of things, where arbitrariness has been. God writes in an unchanging present "on the instant Eternity " a Geometrical Diagram ; and we deal with it in the strangest way. In the first place we are apt not to perceive at all that it is one, but to regard it as a series of isolated lines and figures, arbitrary, any part of which might have been otherwise without detri- ment to the whole ; nay we even consider it rather irre- ligious to say the contrary. And these isolated lines and portions of the figure we endeavour to trace out in their relations to each other; i.e. to gather from them any consistent meaning that is most obvious : but to make them accord as parts of one whole, tending progressively to one result, does not enter our heads. We do not feel justified in insisting that each single group shall repre- sent clear geometrical principles; we have no right, as we think, to do that, we only want to know what they are, we are " ministers and interpreters " only of Nature, and whether there be any strict mathematical relations between the parts we do not know. And then, stranger still, when we do find out such true relations, such logical connections of things the meaning of each part we straightway call them causes ; and imagine that in these relations exists the power which produces the figures between which they hold. Only that which we cannot understand do we give God the credit of doing i.e. directly : anything that is reasonable and intelligible we seem to think unworthy of Him, and as soon as we have traced its relations to other things we sever it from His hand. But this surely is simply a form of anthropo- morphism ; because we consider Him to be and to act like ourselves. We, acting on things only by taking part in God's action, i.e. only on something that is without on Metaphysics. 35 a substratum in short do really act primarily and secondarily; institute chains of causes; do some things directly and others indirectly ; act " immediately at first " and " afterwards through the powers of nature " as Newton says. But this is the very sign of our imperfec- tion ; it is the result of our creative incapacity. It is because we are man and not God that we do this, and it is because the Creator is God and not man that He does not. This poor fancy rests clearly upon the idea that God acts and requires to act upon a substratum as we do. Metaphysics in truth is but a species of mathematics ; it is only more comprehensive. Mathematics we may say perhaps is the " metaphysics of quantity," but it rests wholly on the mental processes; and the fundamental conception of the transcendental mathematics is entirely metaphysical, i.e. it is simply a fact of our mental action, accurately observed. And metaphysics has the demon- strative character of mathematics, if it be rightly used the words rigorously defined and kept to their meaning. It is then quite on a par with mathematics in that respect ; both treat merely of the relations of our concep- tions, and are absolutely alike ; both having also direct and immediate application to things, mathematics not more than metaphysics. But the latter is larger, and therefore more difficult and less advanced. The processes of mathematics, I believe, will be found to be, in detail, precisely correspondent to those of a sound metaphysics ; and hand in hand how prettily the two might walk together. In short, mathematics is simply a branch of metaphysics. But of late years it has been separated from metaphysics, and hence the misery of our Science, the load of absurd hypotheses. D 2 36 Philosophy and Religion. Mathematics surely is so certain, and deductive or independent of observation, because it is seen to be a science of forms only [i.e. of relations]. Experimental science professes to be not of forms, but of that which truly exists ; yet it is not really so : all science is properly of forms [which " things " are] and of forms alone, and when this is rightly seen surely all will be like mathe- matics in certainty and deductive character. What per- plexes science, and puts us at fault, is the supposition that the objects with which it deals truly exist as such apart from us. The mathematician does not stand so in respect to his science; he admits an existence to which his forms relate (matter, &c., in space and number), but passing this by altogether, he concerns himself only with forms. Now all science must come to be thus ; admitting a true existence, an actual to which all " things " relate, of which they are all forms, we must see that we, in science, have not to do with this existence at all, but only with forms. Then we may know. Should we not see " things " to bear some such relation to the " actual " as the mathematical conceptions do to " things " ? Then as the pursuit of these conceptions a priori results in propositions which are true and necessarily true in respect to the " things," would the pursuit a priori of " things " result in propositions true of the " actual " ? But here a new conception appears ; is not our inductive science just such a pursuit of " forms " as the mathema- tician's ; and do we not find what we have thus indirectly learnt of the forms, or things, to hold good of the actual or spiritual ? It is clear if the mathematician considered his " forms," or geometrical conceptions, as existing in nature, his science would be altered altogether; it would become Metaphysics. 37 then merely experimental, lose all its certainty and uniformity, all its value and use indeed. He never would find in nature, nor make, any one of them. His very definitions are impossible, they exclude that which is essential to reality. Just so " things " cannot be, in true actual existence ; the very nature of them excludes that which is essential to true Being, viz. action. But it is interesting to note this parallel between the deductive treatment of mathematical abstraction and the experi- mental treatment of things ; both are processes dealing with forms, which result in conclusions that apply to that which is relatively fact ; abstractions give us results which apply to " things " ; " things " results which apply to Being. So that, in truth, mathematical deduction and experimental induction are parallel rather than contrasted ; they are the same process in relation to forms which have a different relation to us. Mental forms, or abstractions, are to be treated by mental induction, or a priori ; sensa- tional forms, or " things," by sensational induction, or by experiment. Is not the idea of sensational forms for things a right one ? The physical is a sensational form, even as the mathematical is a mental form. Experi- ment and observation being the same process in respect of the sensational that deduction is in respect to the abstract. Let me think how observation and induction correspond with mathematical thought ; both are a similar putting ourselves into relation with the respective subjects. They are using our senses, bodily and mental respectively. The mathematician does, in respect to conceptions, just what the experimenter does in respect to things. Both alike exert themselves, use their active faculties, bring them- selves into relation with the subject of their thoughts, and vary their relation to them. Is there not a strict 38 Philosophy and Religion. parallel here ; the same life exhibiting itself in many forms ? I perceive now a more right way of dealing with the question of a real matter. By denying that there is matter we put ourselves in a wrong attitude; virtually conceding the very point in question. We speak of " matter " as if it were a thing that could be asserted or denied ; while the case is that matter is not in a position to be either. " Matter " is a mere symbol or expression, without any meaning of its own, for some unknown fact. To deny it is no less absurd than to assert it : it is to be interpreted. Clearly if a mathematician were foolish enough to affirm as a great fact that some unknown quantity say the diameter of the sun were = x ; we should be entirely beside the mark in affirming that it could be x ; or denying that there could be x : the question would never be settled so ; the whole dispute would be mere nonsense. So is that about a real matter. In truth the man who affirmed the x would have the advantage of him who denied it ; for he could certainly show that we were obliged to suppose such a conception, to have some such symbol, to fill the gap which other- wise there would be. Our ignorance exists only by virtue of our knowledge and capacity of knowing. We do not say a beast is ignorant ; to be ignorant means that we ought to know. So, to be not-Being means that we ought to be. All terms of negation are necessarily relative. That of which we are ignorant we express by a symbol ; but only because we know it must be, although we are ignorant of it. So our selfishness has relation only to a love which ought to be. We suppose a physical or inert in Metaphysics. 39 nature, i.e. a symbol or unknown, because we perceive that a fact, a Being, is there which we do not know. We know it must be there, although we do not know it ; and we call it (not intelligently, as the mathematicians do x, but with a poor conceit of knowing) "matter," " physical laws," " motion," " force," anything whereby we can cheat ourselves. Let us thank God and nature, who carry us on in spite of ourselves, and will not let us rest in our symbols, as we fain would do. Now, how come we to perceive that there is this unknown fact and these circumstances and conditions of it whereby we determine our symbols ? Can I see how the mathematician, starting from the smallest point of known value, lays hold of more and more unknown ; con- verting more and more into the known, by means of relations established between them ? So we, starting with some true knowledge, some spiritual, some con- sciousness, some conscience rather ; some love or sense of holiness (yes, all consciousness flows from the con- science, the moral Being ; the physical is a symbol standing for an unknown moral) ; starting from this Being or known love, and brought into relation with other Being or love which is not known, is not in us (we being selfish) this unknown love is " passion " in us. And we, perceiving that it is, but not knowing what, use a symbol for it, and call it " physical " or " matter." This we do by virtue of our ignorance, even as the mathematician does. Only the mathematician does not mistake his symbol for the true existence he is in search of ; and we do. Because in reference to our moral Being there is a " not " in us, which there is not in reference to our intellectual. Scientific speculations are very well in their place, but 40 Philosophy and Religion. do not let them intrude into other regions. It is very well for physicists to speak of " matter " ; but for men generally to call this " a material world " is an absurdity. Should we call it an #-world it would mean as much, viz., that we do not know what it is. Matter is a symbol for an unknown fact ; the world is not a material world, it is a world of things. To call it an x- world would be a gain, for then we might suppose there were some reality and meaning in it at the bottom, if we could find out what it was ; whereas this word " matter " passes with us as a sort of voucher that there is truly nothing, no signifi- cance, in the world at all. Let us abstain from calling it matter until our wise men have given us a known quantity for the symbol. Again, see how the unknown quantity is that for the sake of which mathematics exists altogether. So it is in Science : it is by hypothesis that it exists, and for the sake of the unknown. And only by means of the symbol for the unknown (the hypothesis), and by using it as a reality, can the progress, the interpretation, be. Even so, in all thought, we must use our hypotheses as if they were real facts ; we can interpret, or do away with the hypotheses themselves, only by so using them : to refuse so to use them because they are only hypotheses, would be like turning out the unknown quantities in a mathe- matical problem. Berkeley's idea is just this. It is easy enough to prove " matter " to be merely a non-entity ; but that is the very reason why we should work with it. We must use this symbol in order that we may know what it stands for. By bringing it into all sorts of rela- tions, more and more complete and extensive, with the known, we are able at last to say, " it means that" How we might advance in thought with this conception well Metaphysics. 41 held in view ! Surely all thought then may have, must have, mathematical precision. It is a mistake to suppose that mathematics is so certain because of the peculiar nature of the subjects it deals with : it is not at all so ; quantity has no peculiar certainty about it ; the certainty lies in the method. Mathematics, dealing with so limited a subject, has been able soonest to arrive at a practical (not indeed a theoretical or intelligent) realization of the right method that is all. All thought can be as certain as mathematics ; and even mathematics itself may be much beholden to other thought for an explication and extension of the method which it has unintelligently instituted. I say with reference to the life of thought, that nutrition must precede function ; that we must think wrongly before we can think rightly. It is only saying that before we can know an unknown we must have a symbol. Think what we lose by clinging to hypotheses as real ; to a real matter as if it were the thing we were to rest in. We lose nothing less than all ; we stop short of the very point ; we take up with " nothing," when that very " nothing " is given us only as a means of getting at something. We deprive ourselves of all that is of any true value in our Science, just as if a mathematician rested in his unknown symbols. Is it not one chief advantage of mathematics that it goes straight on with each inference, without this refer- ence to other considerations ; that it deals with each sequence of ideas solely in and for itself? It does not profess to deal with the real absolute truth, but only with what is under the given conditions, only what follows from definitions and axioms. And therefore going straight on and never swerving, it does arrive at the real 4 2 Philosophy and Religion. truth, and does interpret nature ; because it has assumed its right position. All reasoning must become similar, and then will avail equally. We must learn to remember that in reasoning we have to do, not with that which really exists, but with our own definitions, postulates, and data ; and to see what follows from them, and that only, quite irrespective of whether or not anything " ex- ternal " agrees with them, or with our deductions from them. Acting thus we shall have an available art that will not fail us. In a word, we have to give up the idea that thinking is a means of arriving at truth, and to remember that it has its own purpose and use for which it must live freely its own life. The contradictions of mathematics to nature are most interesting here ; they are such as would never be tolerated in any other form of thinking ; and the superiority of mathematics as a mode of thinking, which is so inseparable from these " absurdities," is a good demonstration of the nature and right relations of the thinking process. The question is not are the things true, but are they good natural mental life ; if so, no fear but they will effect their function. Suppose the mathematician were to falter, and qualify his deductions respecting the triangle because no perfect triangle exists in nature ? Mathematical truths are not true to nature. We let the inadmissibility of a conclu- sion vitiate the process of deduction, instead of reacting upon the premisses ; we let the bond go, the bar yield. It is as if a mathematician, landed in a result which gave him a part greater than the whole, should refuse to apply his axiom, instead of arguing back as he does. The reason of the greater advance of mathematics is partly the simplicity ; but partly also that mathematical reasoning does not bring the intellect and the heart into opposition, as philosophical reasoning seems to do, and so has never Metaphysics* 43 been vitiated by that stress. It is no matter that a mathe- matical deduction should be inconsistent with the facts of nature ; no moral difficulty arises ; there is no forcing of the mathematical argument to make it agree. There is no remedy for philosophy but to draw the distinction between the truth (or belief) and the life of the intellect. If our thought be natural it will in the end be sure to agree with nature. Would it not be well to have the axioms employed in philosophical and moral reasoning explicitly stated, as those of geometry, and referred to, and unflinchingly adhered to ; and the definitions and postulates also ? The simplicity of mathematical ideas is not directly the cause of the great advance of mathe- matics ; but this and their very limited scope have allowed thought to proceed unchecked in those respects, and hence its advance, as a lower form of life. There has been resistance to the higher. I seek to make all thought truly mathematical, to extend the mathematical process to all. They develope in the same form. Do I not see this in respect to the point, that it is the only infinite ? This is what mathematics does when it deals with the infinite ; it simply gets rid of substance, becomes spiritual. The point alone has no bounds, no limits, because it has no dimensions. So soon as ever we arrive at, or think of, the infinite, we have laid aside the physical ; no limits mean no " matter." It is wonderful that in order to treat of the real, or things, mathematics must go to that which is immaterial ; only from thence can we gather the power : as the physical flows from the eternal, so must the interpretation. The point is infinite ; it has no bounds. It is all in one ; not only the circle and ellipse in one the two dimensions but all three, all absolutely in one, are the point; and this is 44 Philosophy and Religion. the idea of the point, and so absolute unity involves infinity, and infinity absolute unity ; i.e. no dimensions, no physicalness. Thus the absolute unity of God in- volves His infinitude, and His spirituality. The point is actual [the atom with no substance] ; and it is one, and infinite. The " point " is the symbol of God. We look wrongly at this ; the point is the denial of substance, but if there be no substance there is the spiritual no-thing, but therefore spiritual Being. The infinite is to space as the eternal is to time ; it is no space at all, it is neither much nor little ; or, if either, still less much than little ; to assert infinity is to deny space. The conception of the infinite as very large, is parallel to our conception of the eternal as very long. Surely there must be something bearing a similar relation to time that the point does to space ; that we consider nothing, yet is symbol of eternity ; something which has neither past, present nor future. Would not such a con- ception be aidful to Science, even as that of the point is ; be to metaphysics, perhaps, as that of the point to mathematics? Are not our metaphysics perplexed for the want of it ? If mathematics wants to be freed from substance, surely much more metaphysics from duration ? This mode of conceiving infinitude and eternity as very much of time and space instead of as having nothing to do with them, is "natural," it is true, to us, who are by deadness in a physical world, and in absence of the physical see absolute not-being. Our way of regarding the point as absolute negation, our physical conception of the infinite and eternal, is proof and exemplification of man's actual deadness. Metaphysics. 45 Again, with respect to the point : consider how all physical conceptions relate essentially to molecules ; e.g. gravitation of masses is only gravitation of molecules, and of masses through them. But the only true idea of a molecule is an ultimate molecule, that which cannot be divided ; but this is having no parts, which is no dimen- sions, no substance ; it is a point. Here is the true con- ception of the atom ; it is that which has no substance ; it is only the physical conception of the point : it is the " infinitesimal " physics, that is all. It is at the basis, like the point in geometry. Have not much of our con- fusion and difficulty arisen from not seeing this, but introducing the idea of substance into it ? Is not this what makes mathematics so superior to all other Sciences its spirituality ; its having discarded the idea of sub- stance ? With a-chrons for metaphysics, and true atoms, or points, for physics, will not an equal exactitude be given ? Clearly I see this about the atom ; physics is essentially " non-substantial." And surely here is the reason metaphysics is behind ; as the greatest, of course, it is the least developed; it has not yet emancipated itself from the conception of time, as Science has from that of space. The perplexity that still is in physics is probably much from the atom, or molecule, not being yet recognised as a true point (or infinitesimal) ; the con- ception of true substance still adheres to it, though not entirely. Here is the philosophy of Boscovich's concep- tion, surely, as points, surrounded by infinite spheres of force ; but was he not wrong in introducing space again ? Is not the true infinite the point itself? Substance comes, in physics as in metaphysics, from action of the point, the atom or molecule ; it is secondary, and not primary. I must think of the full bearing of this ; that physics 46 Philosophy and Religion. too is wholly based on action without substance ; how it clears up that great mystery of the molecular constitution of bodies, that infinite division which yet is not infinite ! Mathematics and physics alike derive things from points, and interpret them by it. And do I not see, it is chemistry that especially relates to the atomic or molecular, i.e. to the point or infinitesimal ? It is in this especially distinguished from physics ; and here is the key to it : it is the Science of infinitesimals. How strange that we should think of it emphatically as the Science of substances! The doctrine of atoms is the doctrine of points. It corresponds with the infinitestimal mathematics; the other portion of mathematics with physics proper. The doctrine of the molecular consti- tution of bodies lies at the basis of all, as the idea of the point does in mathematics ; but the infinitesimal mathematics is " atomic," i.e. chemistry. A physical thing or body no more truly " consists of " molecules or atoms than a mathematical " thing " or figure consists of points, for an atom cannot occupy any space, any more than a point. Space cannot be atomic. Therefore atoms cannot constitute, or make up a body, any more than points. A million points occupy no more space than one ; and just so a million atoms. We must introduce the mathematical conception here. Its " things " do not consist of points, but are generated by action of points. So physical things do not consist of atoms, but are generated by action of atoms, i.e. action without substance ; by pure action, i.e. spiritual action. Is it not plain that nature is spiritual ? Physical science refuses to have it any other way. The true use of metaphysics and science is together : metaphysics, alone, is a failure ; science alone unsatis- factory and " superficial." They have one object, and Metaphysics. . 47 should be employed in union. It is as if touch and sight were used separately; how, in that case, touch alone would fail of any clear or intelligible result ; and sight would give us knowledge merely of appearances. How palpably the faculties science employs answer thus to sight ! But the existence of that unsatisfactory metaphysics demonstrates other faculties, which might be the very ones to make the knowledge of phenomena the interpreter of fact ; as knowledge of appearances is of " substance." The phenomenal relation of science, and the failure of metaphysics, give no ground for any con- clusion ; like touch and sight, they may be the very things which mutually give the needful completeness to each other. The failure of each alone surely is what ought to be. We have previously argued that the physical (scientific) and the spiritual (metaphysics) are one ; let us treat them on this plan, and see if metaphysics will not be fruitful (certain and practical), and science penetrate below appearances : e.g., in physics all action is vibratile; all the " laws " = no external change ; therefore subjective, &c. [Metaphysics, in fact, thus is Science.] This presents us with another parallel, viz. that of science to sight, and metaphysics to touch. Like touch, metaphysics assures us of something more real than the objects of science, but gives us no satisfactory intelligence of them. Science, like sight, must be the interpreter for it, recognising the relation of the phenomena it deals with. The true revealer has a sort of wonderful power of making things quite new and different from what we thought them. But there are two kinds; the one showing us unthought-of wonders and problems in things of which we previously were ignorant, and knew 48 Philosophy and Religion. we were ignorant, and had only vague impressions, but no contrary ones ; another presents to us, in entirely new lights and ways, shows us unsuspected wonders in things which we felt and were convinced we perfectly under- stood. So the latter meets with an opposition and refusal the other does not encounter. People think that philosophy can never be in itself influential on, or regarded with interest by, the people generally. I am not so sure of this, when philosophy is renewed. It was so of old, when it referred to matters of universal interest, to the instincts of truth, justice, piety, in a word, to rightness. Why may it not become so again ? I grant the modern is not, and cannot be, but the reason is plain; our modern philosophy is nutritive force- absorbing has no power in the nature of things. But a philosophy that brings home nature to man's heart, and sees in the universe the very passions that are agitating his own bosom, is another thing. Whether men can find time and attention and love for that, remains to be seen. Why should we prejudge so ? We always think nothing can be but what we are used to. Absolutely all that our modern philosophy has for the heart is proof that God is very wise and very powerful, and, on the whole, rather good than otherwise; and strangely enough these proofs are made to consist in what we can understand. Moreover, our philosophy and science have been not only divorced from but almost ever opposed to religion never one with it, and it has been therefore watched like a thief, and men ever sought to bind it in new chains as it burst the old ones. Abstract philosophy " interpretation," the answer to the question " why " in its ultimate form, the moral why, was ever man's passion, is now, and ever will be. This is Metaphysics. 49 re-introduced with all the added scope and power of five centuries' nutrition. Our modern nutritive science has been doing all it can to put it down and keep it from operating, and in the main, though with hard struggles, it has succeeded, as indeed was right and necessary ; but the passion, the tendency, is there still as ever ; becoming indeed more powerful the more it is opposed (as chemical affinity does in nutrition) : it will have its way again at last, indeed the nutrition exists only that it may, and that in doing so it may effect objects higher than itself the function, that is, of Science. Surely platonism arose from a kind of positivism : indeed it is necessary that the reality of the physical should be denied, before a doctrine which puts another reality in place of it can be conceived. So here one may clearly see the tendency of positivism. One may point to experience, and say to the positivist : " Yours must come to a more spiritual doctrine. Look at platonism ; it could only have come into existence by aid of a doctrine akin to yours ; and as your denial is deeper and more complete, so shall the resulting spiritual doctrine be also. The platonist fails because of still keeping hold of some kind or degree of true reality in the physical : this defect you must remove." The doctrine of a present and only real spiritual waits for and solicits some one to remove the reality of the physical. Positivism must come to an actual doctrine of the universe : it carries a new platonism in its bosom. It is like the chrysalis to the butterfly, or the bud to the flower: the restraint and coercion are for development. Positivism is negative now, by accident as it were ; i.e. by the law of the case, this must precede the positive. 50 Philosophy and Religion. But a positive form must come : there must arise some view of the existing. Platonism, as well as actualism, is a system based on a correction of our impressions and tendencies to think : i.e., considering the subjective elements, it is essentially the same. Positivism, or science, taking away the reality to which the platonist holds, demands the platonic process to be repeated in new relations. But the former platonism is proof that this will and can be done ; it failed because not complete enough. One chief thing I want to do is to show the life of metaphysics; how it has been working in a necessary way to a most important end ; how all has been good ; how even the nonsense and contradictions are hypotheses by which the fact is revealed, and the " not " more and more excluded. How, e.g., less and less value is being attached to arguments for the existence of God from the visible world ; and yet the rejecting all such arguments, as some have done, saying we can know nothing thereby, is just an anticipation, suppressing hypothesis, but not putting the fact in its place. (It is as " spiritual," not as physical, that the world reveals God.) Is it any better argument, that to create " mind " the creator must be intelligent, than that to create " matter " he must be material ? Matter and mind alike are from " not." Let me come nearer to Thee, oh God ; know more truly what it is Thou doest. How sad a disappointment it is to me to find that these principles of Thy acting, as I have thought, are but shadows projected from myself! I would know, not more of myself, but more of Thee. I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory. Hide not Thyself from my desiring eyes. What is nature to me, of what Metaphysics. 5 1 value are beauty, delight and use, of what satisfaction the simplest and the grandest laws, if Thou be not in them ? May I never know what Thou doest ? Wilt Thou be recognized alone by faith and love ? Dost Thou say to me, in these earnest but futile strivings, " Who by searching can find out God? But with that man will I dwell who is of an humble and a contrite spirit, and who trembleth at my word." E 2 5 s Philosophy and Religion. II. NATUKE KNOWN BY THE MOKAL EMOTIONS. Man's response to right The actual is known by the conjoint use of sense, intellect and moral being Man fell by the conscience Men really judge by their feelings The evil of thinking that God acts for results Mysticism is allied to Science The Mystics are inter- preters The intellect attains freedom by subjection to the moral sense The physical is the moral Nature is Holiness Nature is man's bride Nature is " the hands of the living God " We must recognise negation of Being Love of God is the love of all things The world as a work of genius The organic is not the highest in Nature The future Science Nature's secrets are won by sympathy Evil of the doctrine of special creations " Design " is a necessary consequence of the assumption of matter Science is done for love To be natural is to love Nature is perfectly beautiful, therefore ideal beauty is less perfect Nature is God's ideal All mental life is the representation of Nature To account for error is to show it beautiful Evil is nutrition Painting recalls to us the spiritual fact of Nature The function of Art is to reveal the holiness of Nature Art will advance as Science has The future of the world. THE strongest feeling in human nature is our response to right ; deepest in man's breast, and ineradicable, lies that fundamental passion ; it is king and ruler, and though driven from the actual throne by meaner feelings, never abdicates its authority. "People will fight for truth and justice, or that which they think to be such," sa^s the Times. If we can therefore but make nature embody to us the idea of right, how much more it will be to us; how much profounder and more over-ruling our love. Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 53 It only needs to use our whole being in the induction, and then we know the actual. By sense alone we only know the apparent (not the real) ; by intellect alone we only know the abstract. Now taking both, and so bringing to bear a larger part of our being, we attain a better and truer knowledge, i.e. of the real. But sense and intellect still are but part of us : by them we can of course only know the real still the illusion, though not so merely an illusion as sense or intellect separately. But where is the moral nature ? That which the sense alone learns cannot be true for the intellect also ; that which the intellect alone learns cannot be true for the sense also : so that which sense and intellect alone learn is not true for the moral being also. The definition of the actual now is : that which is true for, which answers to, the whole being of humanity; that which will bear investigation by sense, intellect, and moral being, the latter correcting the former two, even as they correct one another. It is that which is learnt by the joint action of sense, intellect, and moral nature. And here one may think further respecting that " it is not good for man to be alone." Take this idea of the woman as represented by the moral " faculty." Is it not remarkable to see how well then the old Greek philosophy will answer to man's state ? For that philosophy wanted precisely these higher elements. It was "very good," but it was not well for it to be alone ; and a help meet was given it in the newly-awakened, almost newly- originated, conscience : and see, iifell thereby. As is well seen in the early ages of the Christian Church, in the unscientific, unphilosophical, superstitions of the Fathers, dictated, evidently, by the moral element. Thus we see how natural, how necessary it is, that men 5 4 Philosophy and Religion. should turn with such admiration and delight to that old classic literature. It is like the longing look back to Paradise, to the true, right, attitude of man ; nor can this cease till the same attitude is restored and perfected : and this is what we should seek, or at least be ready to welcome and expect. And may not this be the true reason for man's clinging to classical studies ? What a strange thing it is that people imagine they decide on doubtful points by their intellects, and not by their feelings ; and they are even angry if the contrary is suggested. What a putting of the inferior above the higher nature : but how beautifully herein does God attain His higher ends even by human error ! What is really done when a person with sincere and earnest heart undertakes to weigh the evidence on a doubtful religious point such as future punishment, personal reign, &c. is that under the idea of letting his reason judge, he listens calmly and intently to the voice of his inner nature. Painfully and with prayerful resolve he lays aside prejudice and passion, he puts off indolence and judges as he feels. Herein is a deep beauty. To what good all this toilsome process ? Certainly not the attain- ment of truth ; because equally earnest and capable people arrive by such means at opposite results; and evidently not, because such a process has in itself no adaptation to lead to truth ; and the less, the more purely intellectual it be made. To arrive at truth involves many conditions in the person which in the vast majority are sure to be wanting. What then ? Does the process fail of its result ? Are the prayers, the tears, the hours of meditation, the agonizing renunciation of old ties, all of no avail ? Not so. They fail not of God's purpose, which is the discipline and development of the moral nature ; Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 5 5 the education of the soul. In this strife the child grows into the man : the end is gained. What he thinks about future punishment or millenarianism is of no consequence : that he should bring his soul before God, and struggle earnestly to do the right, that is the point. The doctrine of virtue or moral Tightness being that which most promotes happiness (Paley's doctrine), goes with that view of natural theology, which sees in creation only God's wisdom in the sense of design and skill. Nature truly viewed teaches a better lesson ; she is law ; she does not exist for results. God in nature acts according to an absolute rule independently of results. What an infinite (yes, and eternal, for it is moral) meaning there is in this law of science. God acts by an invariable rule, and not for results : blessed be the men who have sought to establish this as a fact of science. Therefore He does not act in time ; He acts morally. We think we exalt God by attributing to Him an optional creation, a supreme and absolute self-determina- tion apart from any law. We forget that love includes law, and can only be by it. It is true we act, or seem to act, optionally, or without any determining power : but this is our misery, our degradation, our death; it is because we are passional, inert, not loving. There is no mere optional with Him, all is holy. Our own true human characteristics and dignity are entirely in abey- ance in respect to those things in which we act optionally. It is amusing how, with all our Science and triumph of common sense, Mysticism is not put down ; here it appears again in its extremest form. The cure for it has not been found yet. Nay, it is clear that Science cannot 56 Philosophy and Religion. put a stop to it; Science only feeds it. For see how these Mystics have been the very men who have had the largest grasp of Science, have done most in it. Not to speak of Moses, passing hy Plato also, let us come to modern times look at Swedenhorg and Newton. It is clear that we must look elsewhere than to the prosecution of Science for the cure of this disorder of the intellect, if it is such. As Science grows so does that tendency, that conviction gain increasing power. Nay, it allies itself to Science, rests upon it, turns to its own use the means brought for its destruction. It urges on to perfect fulfilment all those discoveries and tendencies which are announced as its destruction. In this unity of the sensible and spiritual, one sees the basis of ceremonies in religion; why, too, they are so misconceived and misused from our separation of the two, from our thinking that the sensible has any other being than that which is one with the spiritual, and that therefore, as sensible, they are of spiritual power or value. " This is my body ; " " As often as ye eat it ; " that is, in all eating. It is interesting to trace the different states of feeling on the subject of necessity in Nature. The ordinary supposition of design, i.e. arbitrary will, not necessity implies that we do understand, that we know all about the thing, that our faculties are tests and capable. Seeing it as necessary, we feel that we do not understand it, that it is something infinitely wonderful to be under- stood. So we gain, not only a grander conception, but also a hope of a future understanding above any that now we think possible. Those who rebuke the belief that we can understand, do not see the humility that is its source. Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 5 7 They are too modest to think that men ever will under- stand more than they themselves do. Think how the Mystics are the dynamical men : men who ask why. (See Newton especially.) This is their character. The mere laying out of phenomena in order does not satisfy them ; they insist on the knowledge of causes. Hence they discover the physical causes; and hence too they see the physical as efflux and effect from the actual, which is their Mysticism, especially so called. It is one tendency, one faculty, that makes them dis- coverers in Science and Mystics. They show causes; they cannot rest in appearances, but must go to fact; that is all. Find the fact of the physical, and we have the actual, the absolute : this is what they do. They apply practically Comte's principle, that the intellect has to do only with relations ; so in regarding the fact they go constantly to that which is not in the intellect, to the actual. This is the fact to them, and necessarily they see the physical as an " appearance " flowing from that ; as indeed Positivism shows it cannot be anything else. For the fact that the intellect cannot deal with the absolute, by no means shows that we are cut off from it it only shows that we cannot intellectually know it ; but we have other faculties, other Being and nature besides the intellect, which Comte seems to forget in this con- nection, though he fully recognizes them in others ; as where he shows, e.g., the inferiority and subordination of the intellectual to the moral. Comte is, in truth, a Mystic himself; only stunted; if he had carried out this last idea of his he would have had a lofty place among them. The Mystics are precisely interpreters : they show the phenomena necessary and also they show the fact. The 58 Philosophy and Religion. non-mystics, the men of talent or theory, do not, in truth, seek causes at all in any genuine sense. They virtually say of the phenomenon, it is " because it is." This is the sum of it, though of course they put it under a pretence of cause ; all these ultimate inherent properties of matter or things are nothing hut this. As for saying, God made them so because He chose, this is truly an irreverent thought. It no more applies to them than to any other physical fact or process to which superstition might assign it; yet the feeling that there must be an ultimate of which this is true, is a wise one : why does it not lead men to see the eternal fact which alone truly is ? Sense alone gives the phenomenal ; intellect alone the abstract ; conscience alone the moral ; sense and intellect alone the scientific; sense, intellect, and conscience to- gether, the true real, actual or spiritual, which alone truly is. But I do not say this is true Being ; it is as much as we are ; but it has our own negation in it. The true Being is not man, or such as he, but Grod. So I may admit that true knowing is impossible to man ; but I say that man can know according to his whole Being, though his knowledge must be subjective; that he can therefore know altogether more than he does now, in an entirely different way ; that this knowledge of ours does not answer to man as he really is. This is the basis of actualism: that we are as much mistaken as the men who believed appearances uncorrected by reason. Comte's position practically is just as if, in old days, any one should have said : Do not trouble yourself about the intelligible world ; this sensible is all that concerns us, meaning us to put up with the uncorrected appear- ances. Now this would not do. It was because this did Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 5 9 not answer to the whole man that the " intelligible " was invented. Yet would such a man have had a certain right on his side ; for the separate intelligible word was a chimera. So has Comte ; but his real does not answer to the whole man, and will not do ; and because it did not do, the separate spiritual was invented for the con- science to have its full development and scope in, just as the intelligible was for the intellect. But the intellect was given to man to interpret the sensible by ; and so is the conscience. The real world will fulfil, and more than fulfil, all our moral demands, if we will employ our moral faculties on it ; even as the sensible world contents our intellectual faculties when they are employed on it. See how, by union of sense and intellect together, an entirely new " reality " is given to the world. It is a different thing : the " intelligible world " has ceased to be a chimera. So from the union of real and spiritual a new universe is given, and the spiritual ceases to be a chimera. The eternal is no longer an " everlasting time," no longer future. Of course we cannot understand the eternal, with our separate real and spiritual; our spiritual is in fact only an abstract sensible ; just as the old intelligible was the sensible, not truly different, only chimerical, with the same sort of " eternity " as ours. Bacon said : " You must take the sensible into your intelligible, and not go dreaming." So I say of the spiritual : we must take the sensible into our spiritual, and not go dreaming. Only so, by conforming our imagined spiritual to the sensible, shall we know the true spiritual. What we talk about now is our imagination merely. What an apparent reversion in my thoughts ! Yet the spring of it all has been intolerance of the chimerical spiritual, the Design argument, and the " sen- sational " heaven. I have come to this through the 60 Philosophy and Religion. medium of metaphysics, from the love, not of the sensible, but of the spiritual. Now I can understand Bacon better It was not that he regarded the sensible especially ; but he could not endure the old chimerical "intellectual." He saw that to be worth anything it must be conformed to the real or sensible ; in short that the sensible was not that mere phenomenal that it was supposed to be, but was more. " Conform the intelligible to it, and see," he said. I say exactly the same ; the sensible is not the mere phenomenal that it is supposed to be, it is more \ conform your spiritual to it, and see. So it was by metaphysics too that Bacon did his work. He was not an experimenter ; his world was in the intellectual. The essential point in inductive science is the authority of the intellect over the senses. This is what distin- guishes it. (E.g., our knowing the stars for worlds.) It is the only means of discovering truth, the only true science ; because the only one subordinating sense abso- lutely, and compelling it to conform. The " actual " philosophy deals by the intellect as the " inductive " by the senses, denies its authority, and subordinates it, and makes it conform to a power or faculty, together with which it uses it in investigation. Thus, of course, the " actual " makes more use of the intellect, even as the inductive does of the senses. This denial of the authority of the intellect, taken with the assertion and employment of the moral sense, constitutes a new inductive science, in which the intellect bears the same part as, in our present inductive science, the senses do, is at once the foundation, and yet subordinate. It was only by subjecting the senses to the intellect that they could be properly and freely used. So long as Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 6 1 they were held to deal with the real, they were neglected, held so fallible, and a limit placed upon their use; because they gave results against the intellect against a part of man felt to be superior. So Bacon necessarily liberated them ; stimulated, and indeed gave unbounded play to their use, and relieved them also from the stigma of being unable to discover. Bacon said : " Do not take ideas superficially abstracted from the senses." Now just such is the case with the intellect. See how it is unused, neglected, repressed by some ; and by all, friend and foe alike, held incapable, except under narrow limits. By subordinating the intellect to the conscience, I think it is set free; its use is stimulated, rendered certain and unlimited; and the idea of its incapacity overthrown. This does for the intellect what Bacon did for the senses. Eefusing to accept from it as truth anything that does not conform to the demands of the conscience, it is com- pelled to go on, and Nature is subdued again. All the reasons which now repress it are removed. First, the religious reasons : it is no longer opposed to the part of man felt to be superior to it. Second ; the reasons that make men say we cannot know by it ; just as Bacon removed what made men say they could not know by the senses, the attributing authority to them. Now we see that the intellect can explore absolutely, that it has a boundless field, that nothing it can come into relation with can be beyond its exploration. Of old the intellect had to be trained and developed before the senses could be rightly used ; i.e. made servants, not masters ; so the conscience had to be trained and developed before the intellect could be rightly used. Is not the future attitude of thought to be this: that what the woman's emotions demand is to be thought; 6 2 Philosophy and Religion. that that is to rule, as intellect or conscience does now ; but that its demands are to be rightly interpreted, by sense, intellect, and conscience, working. For here it is, as it was with intellect of old : its true demands could be found only by uniting it with the senses, and actively working by them. The ruling faculty, without this, takes too little ; invents something not enough, based on the acceptance of the uncorrected impressions of the inferior faculties. What union, harmony, beauty and delight will there be, when men and women are united thus ; each understanding their position, and each using it ! This were, indeed, a making of twain one new man. And into what harmony that discord of the faculties will then be resolved ; the discord comes from what the earth abhors the servant-faculties taking upon themselves to rule. Man has various " faculties " to exercise on one world the world that is ; but his plan has been to make as many worlds as he has faculties. Of old there was that absurd " sensible " world, through which the intellect could not work, and an " intelligible " ; even as we have an " intelligible " world, morally absurd (through which the conscience will not work) and a " spiritual." We must invent a world for a faculty that comes into active exercise, if it will not work in the already recognised one ; and surely the tendency to do this is felt as each faculty comes into activity. So now our spiritual world rests on conscience, as the old intelligible one on the intellect : the invented world rests, for its evidence, on the faculty which demands it ; and this is the relation which ever wants inverting. Yery instructive and inte- resting is the reference to conscience to prove the spiritual world : what it proves is that the other (known) world needs to be differently seen. Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 63 Note how the intellectual life of man simply re-presents the moral history, springs from it, exists only by relation to it. Not the moral is like the intellectual ; but the mental is only a partial and typical, or veiled, presenta- tion of the moral; and the physical, as corresponding with the intellectual, repeats it again. Now may not this life, which to us is bodily and intellectual, be in truth moral, a true spiritual life, only seen by us with an inertia in it, and so to us physical ? This, that we see as physical, necessarily corresponds to the moral; because it is moral ; it represents it to us in a lower form because we do not perceive the moral element in it. We suppose cause and effect, &c., not seeing that it is true action or love. The physical is the moral with the love left out ; and therefore the form without the fact. All the physical palpably is just that the form of the moral without the fact. So the law is as we see it ; yet truly it is the very fact of love ; the not-love, which constitutes it " Law," is only in us. And so of all : so of the physical world ; it is the very fact of love ; the not-love which constitutes it physical, is only in us. The way to understand nature is by patience and gentleness, being willing to be ignorant, not using force. How violent and arbitrary, and therefore unmeaning, is that idea that we perceive things as we do because they are so. It is an invention forcibly introduced. Let us be content with that which nature gives us ; not being in such a hurry and so violent. There is no possible connection between things being as we perceive them and our perceiv- ing them so. Let us think in least resistance ; not insist on making a thing clear, but leaving it obscure if necessary, above all things distinguishing thoroughly between things that differ, not forcing things into unnatural union. 64 Philosophy and Religion. The moral sense cannot say of the intellectual pheno- menon that it cannot he thus ; or it must he thus it cannot deny the phenomenon. That would he like the intellect asserting or denying what is or must he to the senses. Scientific inferences or theories should never he affirmed or opposed on moral or religious grounds. The point is, not to assert or deny respecting the phenomenon as such ; hut to show the phenomenon to he only pheno- menon, and to learn the fact from it. I see two things in Nature ; giving as it were a douhle solution to the problem. One of them has reference to the reality, the other to the human perception of it. The latter is vibratile motion in direction of least resistance ; the former God's holy act. The language of sensation translated into the language of reality, or the reality deduced from, and seen in, the appearance ; rising from the phenomenon to the cause : this is the course of true Science. And this last deduction is the truest Science ; Science cannot stop short of it, it is her mission to deduce causes from phenomena. Nor is anything in Nature truly known until it is thus known ; till it is seen that moral action is the very heing of all things, Science is but on the threshold of her domain. She is husied with subjective impressions, with sensations and ideas which she professes, and rightly, to despise, and has not entered on her true work, which is to explore the objective reality. It must rise to spiritual facts and moral deeds or it does but sport with illusions, and remains an idle classifier of sensations. What you would say of him who thought to study optics by comparing, arranging and grouping colours unenquiring whence they arise, holds true of all who trace the laws of matter and ask not what spiritual fact is there. And here is a new branch of knowledge Nature Known by the Moral Emotions. 65 opened ; the correspondence viz. of the spiritual and moral world with Nature ; the parallel, I should say, not only of Thought and Nature but of character and Nature. If Nature he holy action, then shall holy action be in some sense Nature. And we must seek to trace all things not only in the intellect but in the moral sense ; not only truly to understand Nature by seeing her repeated in intellect, but to appreciate her by tracing her again in the virtues. Then Nature shall be known. What a glory it casts over the working of the laws of Nature to regard them as expressions of holiness ! How it changes them from darkness into light, and renews the face of the earth ! G-od will not do anything for any one, nor save anyone from any evil (as we see He will not), except according to those laws ; not because there is any- thing in the law, but because it would be wrong. No necessity is in the laws, only rectitude in the deed ; no iron bonds of matter, but only free choice of right. This we do not tremble at, nor submit to, but love. Fearful and appalling are those laws which work generally for good, but do harm sometimes ; and with a lurid ludicrous- ness superadded, because they are represented as binding the very hand and heart of God. Because it would be wrong otherwise, it is that God drowns him who saves others from a watery death ; that God cuts off by quick disease or wasting penury the best and noblest men, capable of the highest deeds ; that He gives no success save by means adapted to secure success. It would be wrong : and therefore we who suffer thus are glad, and will rejoice. Co-operation with God in the laws of Nature is choice of right, the spirit's life. What madness can be like that of living in the midst 66 Philosophy and Religion. of eternal verities and busying ourselves exclusively with a few subjective phenomena, as if we and our thoughts were all ? Matter, and the sciences founded upon matter, .are subjective, and touch not the real basis of things; our knowledge is but a well-ordered dream, until, opening our eyes to the real light of heaven, we see that each thing has its place as a moral deed forms part of a holy act ; is that. What we perceive it as, relates not to its essential nature, nor is the question true science takes cognizance of, except to enquire why we so perceive it. We are not mind and matter ; we are spirit, and our true concern is with moral beings, and moral action. To that all things tend; all material, all mental knowledge is but a stepping-stone. The bringing all things into relation to the spirit, seeing them as moral, is the end and mean- ing of all knowledge and all experience. Until things are spiritual they affect not us ; they are outside us ; far, far away, as material things, nay, even as intellectual things ; dreamy mysteries, unintelligible, strange, fan- tastic ; in which we see a glimpse of meaning here and there, but the whole is a riddle ; filling us with joy, indeed, but with a joy mixed with awe, almost with terror, and full of strange misgivings. If we can see Nature to be a spiritual deed, a holy act, then we understand her, then she is ours. A right act ? There is no mystery in that ; that is native to us ; what we were born to and would do. It draws us absolutely; not one thing too much, not one too little, if it be right ; our inmost spirits claim it all for ours ; the mean and the noble, the painful and the pleasant. If it be right it is man's, it is human ; it is our very own. God has done it for us ; we, had it been our place, would ourselves have done it. Yes, this world we would have made, with its darkness and pains and sorrows, its mysteries and doubts, its aspirations that Nature Known by the Moral Emotions. 67 end in disappointment, its temptations that rule with a sway so bitter. The love of Nature is man's instinctive and unalienable joy in right action ; it is the attractiveness of virtue, but working as yet blindly, and without a just appreciation of its objects. And, in truth, herein lies the real mean- ing of that relation of Nature to man, which so many have expressed under the image of a marriage. Nature is the bride of the soul : not wedded yet, indeed, but to be wedded. And is it not with man's love for Nature as ever with love? Beauty excites it first; it is an irre- sistible drawing towards the lovely, but that is not its end. Its end is for the inmost soul. This play of charms leads us on through a path of flowers to most serious duty. When man truly weds Nature he will find that he has taken to his heart, not a beautiful body, but a deep and earnest spirit ; not his sensuous or intel- lectual faculties, but his spirit, his conscience, will be mated there. " It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of- the living God." The " hands of the living God " are what we call the " laws " of Nature. When God is spoken of as the " living," it is ever with special reference to Nature. It is Nature, the creation, that is the life of God. It is thus, in respect to ourselves ; our life is that which we produce by our self-sacrifice ; we are living in respect to that which we have so created by self-control. Thus the passage means what we daily see. It is a fearful thing for a man living in this universe to be wicked ; Nature infallibly and fearfully avenges every wrong. Not that I mean to bring down the awful mean- ing of these words to a mere passive operation of physical and moral laws ; that is just what I wish not to do. This F 2 68 Philosophy and Religion. universe, these " laws," these facts, are God, and there is none other. I mean that this avenging of sin by Nature is the falling into the hands of the living God ; that this one fact is stated truly, as it actually is, in the Bible ; and falsely, unperceivingly, by men of science and moralists. We have to lift up our conceptions from the dust and raise them even to heaven, and to see that it is the hands of the living God that lay hold upon us in these natural circumstances. Think of this which we have so over- looked : the power of Nature to make us sin, i.e. act wickedly, if we are selfish. Is it not a fearful thing to be unloving, dead, inert, in a world of action, which operating so on us makes us the willing instruments of crime ? Because I assert all Being to be Divine, or God, I do not therefore assert that we are Divine, or that matter is. Even as in asserting all motion, or light, to be vibration, I do not therefore assert darkness to be vibration. I assert (relative) not-being also ; i.e. not-being affecting us, or appearing to us, as Being. Here is the great error : men, having assumed the negation which affected them to be Being, were compelled to suppose some Being not Divine. Hence all the mystification, past and present, from which no system has escaped ; not even Pantheism, though it has altered the form of it, and asserts the negation to be Divine. For clearly here is the error of Pantheism : it asserts that to be God which is not-God ; i.e. it asserts that to be Being which is not-Being. This is the true relation of Actualism to Pantheism : there is no harm in asserting all Being to be God, if we only recognize negation or not-Being. The main error of philosophy is this of not recognizing negation. Is not this, in part, why love to God is so much a true Nature Known by the Moral Emotions. 69 passion, an all-absorbing joy ? It is not only a love of some unseen person hard to conceive, from which love to creatures flows merely as corollary ; it is a love of the universal, the absolute, the infinite Being, that is, the love of all. It is being united to the source of all delight, the very height and consummation of all beauty. It is to be one with Nature, to love, to know God ; what man longs for, has longed for, in all ages. We need not wait to be dead for that ; we may be it nj^w.. This is the bridal union of Nature and the soul. To see God is to love Him, to see in all Nature that one fact of God Himself, and to be joined with it in love. Nothing is now unloved, nothing unloving. Now we know her; know why she has stood before us so long with deep sad meaning in those gentle eyes. She has wished us to know and to love her, but our blindness would not let us ; we have felt indeed what she must be, but we could not truly know her. When we sought to clasp her to our hearts oh horror it was a corpse cold and dead, a painted image with no heart within. But now we know her, and know it was our own death alone that made her dead. This is the love of God, the being one with Nature, the being holy : no more enslaved, no more doing as we like. It is the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Words cannot tell it ; words, which have been poured forth in vain to paint the joy of human love, how shall they tell of the Divine? Yet words must be used; for when was joy silent ? It is thought alone that is " material " ; man has made matter, made it by his sin, his selfishness. We see matter, because only love can see love ; and where there is not- love is matter. Christ Himself would have been but matter to a crocodile. Alas, to how many of us is God 70 Philosophy and Religion. only " matter " for tlie same reason. Our taking all this world to be mere matter, and using it only for the supply of our animal wants, and generally for our physical .and mental purposes, is like a wild beast devouring men as if there were nothing in them save so much food for its stomach. The reason is plain ; we have not eyes, we are not alive, we are not-man. Poor miserable lost creatures miserable herein, that we might be better off. The Africans stole the glasses of Anderson's telescope to ornament their bodies with ; it was merely " matter " to them. So we use the world, laughing in our ignorance at those who remonstrate with us. Logic is a lever by which we elevate ourselves. But for that purpose we must use it firmly. It is like a pole by which pressing on the solid earth we push ourselves up an ascent. But we, feeling the resistance, are so apt to cease to push ; we come to a " paradox," and say, "Ah, this is beyond the reach of reason, we must not adhere to logic here, it is above that." Fools ! let us push and push and hold hard to our pole ; and though in truth we shall not move the solid earth, we shall move ourselves, which to us is of much more consequence. Logic may prove nothing ; certainly it alters nothing ; but it may rectify our premisses. We know of God's gifts only by finding that we have them. The earnest work given to Science, the faithful, self-denying loving labour, live to end in better than mere material knowledge. Love, aspiration, hope, and toil of the soul, yea, spiritual life and love, have been given up, freely expended; is the result to be merely material knowledge, sensuous advantages ? Oh no ; for spirit spirit shall be given. Love for love. Life for life. The weary brow, the throbbing pulse, the aspiring heart, Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 7 1 the longing sighs addressed to God for knowledge of Himself, are not squandered thus. Men have sought to know God, that is the good of Science, and lo ! God shows Himself to them. Physical things prepare the way, fit us for the revela- tion; but they are not the fact itself. The fire and the whirlwind are the knowledge of the phenomenal ; spiritual science is to the phenomenal which it follows as the " still small voice." The true deep impulse to Science is love for God, desire after Him ; and if God gives not to man love in return, He is still the debtor. For love can only be paid with love ; not with material gifts, not even with such as are God's gifts to man. Science is man's prayer : " I beseech Thee show me Thy glory." How can God answer it but by showing us His love ? In Science man has given himself to God ; he cannot be repaid with universes. Shall love be repaid with " things ? " To repay Science God must give Himself. The eyes of shepherds turned long ago to heaven, thinking that in those stars they saw the very heart of God. They were not deceived ; we, their late descendants, do see in those stars the very heart of God. They poured out their love, not that we might exult in knowledge and traverse unerringly the seas; this were a poor reward. Their love, their life comes back to us as love, as life. The true desire of Science has been to know God, not His works ; and it must end in knowledge of Him. It was our spirits, we, that desired to know, to know that which is like ourselves. I cannot express truly the sight that flashes on me ; yet ifc is the very fact. The material and psychical world is (as I have seen it must be) passion in spirits ; i.e. conscious 7 2 Philosophy and Religion. passions, emotions ; it can be nothing else. Therefore it " becomes " in us conscious passions, i.e. passion in our spirits; we are surrounded by an universe of feelings, sensations, hopes, fears, sorrows, joys ; an universe, in a word, of " passion." Here is the foundation of poetry ; here the truth of imagination ; here their marriage with logic and with Science. This I have been saying so long, and did not know it : that the universe was passion in spirits, not seeing that this is sensation, thought, emotion. Thus it is that we have no words for spiritual things, but those derived from physical ; the physical are spiritual. If I have any power of investigating Nature, it is because the world is a work of genius and I love it. God's heart is in it, and I know it as a friend. The solemn throbs and pulses of its vast vibrations are not merely mechanical events to my eye, I feel them as the beatings of a heart pressed close to mine. I throw myself on Nature and press myself upon her bosom in the passionate embrace of a friend ; our thoughts are one because we love. The imaginative view of God that which attributes to Him the human, as " passion," " the world a work of Genius," and so on goes to the heart of theology. It is not itself the truth, but the road to it. The introduction of fictions, the theory which leads to interpretation, is the living theology; the imaginative view of things, which gives to them human attributes is the truest. But, alike in respect to things and to the Deity, it should be remembered, that this imaginative view is not final, but only a means to an end ; that it is the introduction of fictions, necessary indeed, to enable us to grasp the phe- nomena, but whose design is not to remain for ever, but Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 73 to reveal the fact. [This idea was seen afterwards to be one with that of the calculusj] It is truly therefore mind, design, thought, emotion, that are at work, and embodied in Nature ; even as in our thoughts, feelings, and so-called " actions." And surely our mental passion may appear " a world " to other beings. It is design and feeling that are in Nature ; but not God's. It is His act, His Holiness, which becomes feeling, emotion, and all those human passions, when it becomes passion ; i.e. as it affects created spirits. The design, the goodness, the wisdom, are in the passion, the result ; not in the act ; they are phenomenal. As in a musical composition each sound exists because the musician chooses it, but each is as it is because it is right ; and to show each note to be the right note is to show the cause or reason of its existence ; so Nature is music, and each vibration in it is such because it is the right vibration ; the only reason for its being is that God chooses so to act ; but acting, God acts so because that is the right act. Herein appears again the likeness of Nature to a work of Genius. Both are right : but the Tightness of a spiritual act is Holiness. That other Tightness of material adaptation flows from this, and expresses it. It is a secondary thing, having relation only to those Beings who perceive God's act as matter. The laws of Nature, as we call them, are the relations or connections of our sensations. They are beautiful, nay glorious ; they are well worth knowing ; they must be known; they constitute the very basis of all our knowledge. They are what bring us into relation with God's action, which is the thing to be known. But they are not themselves the objects of knowledge, but only a means to it ; as we use colours and sounds for learning 74 Philosophy and Religion. optics and acoustics. That, in our sensation, motion must take direction of least resistance, and all motion be vibration, and develop by interference and subdivision, and follow in the definite order of cause and effect, and so on, is beautiful, interesting, and absolutely necessary to be known. But all this is not what we want to know. This is not the fact ; this is the effect upon ourselves : it is the cause of all this that is the true object of know- ledge ; what is it that thus affects us ? Nature being thus a representative and expression of moral rightness, how she justifies and repays an un- bounded love ! Right is the only thing we cannot love too much. Will it not be a good thing when the sepa- ration of the love of Nature from the love of holiness is no longer possible ? Shall we not be willing to submit, and to take part with her ? Do we not acquiesce, nay do we not rejoice? Can we not lay even our torn and bleeding hearts upon that altar ? Nature obeys the man who acts right, for he takes part with God. In right action Nature has her origin and her existence ; to right action she owes an absolute allegiance. Hence it is, sin works its own punishment : there is no deception, no defect, no error in Nature's justice ; each wrong, however it may seem for a time to succeed, is fully avenged. No criminal can overrule her process by his power, no secrecy elude her vigilance. It is indeed a fearful thought : weak as an insect as man is in Nature's grasp, absolutely and passively within her power, how shall he dare to put himself in opposition to her ! Inevitably those fatal wheels will crush him ; yet this he does when he does wrong, for Nature is holiness. The earth's motion, fearful as it is to contemplate, hurts us not, because we move with it. Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 75 We are so constituted that the fall of one loved one outweighs, in our feeling, the happiness and good of any number ; and so Christ speaks in his parallel of the hundred sheep. Why have we that feeling ? In what lies the charm, to a loving heart, in the wandering and sinning of a loved one ? Is not our heart so because God's is ? Does not the fact demonstrate some unknown value and meaning and depth of fact in such wandering itself, which we have yet to learn ? And as to the illus- tration, on the other side, of the multitude of seeds of which only a few develop, is there not an inversion in our view, arising from our perception of the organic as the highest in Nature ? Do not those seeds which are restored to the inorganic reach the highest place ? That is a beautiful thought of Shelley's, that the dead are one with Nature. Cannot he who sneers at it see that Nature is infinitely more to the poet than to him so much more, that it fills the poet's mind with an emotion and enthusiasm unknown to him ; making him even willing and happy to die ? I rejoice to think of the future Science. How our children instead of being overwhelmed with the vastness and multiplicity of Nature, will delight in her simplicity, will play with her as with a child, and take sweet counsel with her as with a friend whose whole heart is open to them. And what a friend ! One who is pure and fresh ever from the hand of God, holding before us constantly a pattern of the right, answering to our unceasing enquiry, What would God have us to do? "God does this." Nature is gentle and " easy to be entreated " ; all her 76 Philosophy and Religion. secrets may be gained by sympathy, by self-devotion. The way to comprehend her is not to put her to the torture, and attempt to wring out her laws by crucial experiments. She gives deceitful answers in her agony, or indignantly refuses to respond. Confide in her, love her, talk with her as a friend, woo her by secret, silent, reverential dwelling of the mind and heart upon her beauties ; be a lover to her, and she replies with love, and makes the heart that thus with self-abnegation devotes itself to her, the participator of her most che- rished secrets. There is no limit to such a man's insight into Nature but his own power of comprehending what she tells him. All this artists and poets have long known. They have wooed Nature, and not in vain. In their verses, on their canvas, her inmost heart stands revealed. But men of Science have done otherwise. With brutal violence they have sought to wrest from her those pledges of affection which are due to love alone, and they have rightly failed. Science and poetry and art are truly one, and must be cultivated in one spirit. When men of Science are reverential lovers and worshippers of Nature, as artists and poets are, then shall they also, as artists and poets do, comprehend her. The study of Nature is a study of physiognomy, needing for its successful presentation not the scalpel of the anatomist, but sympathy. It is so far from being the fact that our knowledge of the laws of Nature is founded on microscopic and telescopic observations or indeed on minute examinations of any sort, that in truth our knowledge of the laws of these remote facts is based upon their analogy with those facts which are obvious. It is only in so far as we can reduce the former to a sameness with the latter that we know Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 7 7 anything about their laws. Hence e.g. it is right to call the two forms of polarity male and female. Herein also lies an idea full of joy : as the external and obvious in Nature is full of artistic and poetic beauty, so also must that be which is remote and concealed. The excessively minute, the overwhelmingly large, are one with those exquisite forms of which our eyes can realise the beauty and our art idealize. As the external superficial world has a moral meaning, a sympathizing heart ; as it speaks to us of our own joys and sorrows, and raises within us tender emotions and lofty aspirations, so is that world which is hidden from us bound to us also by ties as close. The stars that roll through space, the minutest particles of which millions constitute an atom, are our brethren also, even as trees and flowers are, share our emotions, reciprocate our love. This noble work the men of Science have, to extend the artistic and poetic appreciation of Nature beyond the scope of the senses, to show that she is the same in the vast and in the minute as she is in the forms which we speak of as forms of beauty. I feel within myself the spirit of those old Greeks who symbolized Nature and man's relation to it under so many legends and in so many statues. Science is the " loves of man and Nature : " Cupid and Psyche speak to me of it ; but it is love fraught with no disaster. Tearful, painful, full of doubt it has been indeed, unconscious of its divine and joyful nature, a blind yearning, torturing and harassing the soul of man all these long ages, while he knew not what it was ; his soul passionately smitten with the beauty of Nature, yet knowing it not, nor how to express his vague yearnings, knowing only that he was miserable. Such is ever the dawn of love. Inconceivably removed and unapproachable appears to us the object of our passion. Enough for us it seems to kiss the hem of her 78 Philosophy and Religion. garment, to adore her at a distance ; we shrink into utter insignificance before her. Thus appears to each man's heart his destined hride, thus to the universal heart of man has Nature yet appeared. Oh miserable days and nights of tears, prophetic of unutterable joy ! Loved even as he loves, although he knows it not, one soft reply to stammering, half-uttered words, raises him to bliss he had not dared to dream ; gives him the empire the dearest to his soul, his rightful empire too, for there enthroned he has his home. Does man love Nature, and Nature not love man ? It is not so ; she is his bride, his wife ; bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, soul of his soul. Oh union made in heaven and yet to be accomplished on earth, has not thy day come even now ? To affirm special creation, is a step towards atheism. The certain effect of introducing God specially into the past is to exclude Him just so much from the present. A reality is exchanged for an hypothesis ; a seen and felt reality for an inconceivable hypothesis. The universe in truth is full of God ; so full that nothing can be added thereto. No possible mode of regarding Him as working can bring Him closer than He is. Only those whose God is afar off can even conceive of Him as brought nearer. It is our privilege, and a privilege full of exquisite joy it is, to see that God does all things so directly, that it is impossible He can do anything more directly. No cause, nor chain of causes, has intervened ; God did it : God does it : just as directly, just in the same sense, as He is supposed to " create a species." If any one says this makes no difference, I repeat that he cannot know till he has tried how much he loses by referring God's immediate agency to the past. If that idea has any excellence or virtue, if it be glorious or delightful, if it be true, let us Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 79 have it now. It sanctifies the world and makes it holy ; a sacred, awful, joyous thing is that which God is doing. And worst of all, the best of people with the best of motives, are committing Christianity to a scientific hypothesis. It must not be. Christianity is too precious to be, not indeed imperilled, but impeded so. It matters not whether the hypothesis be false, as we think it, or true as so many hold ; the point is, that the oak shall not cling to the ivy. The remedy for apparently irreligious scientific dogmas is not to affirm a contrary scientific dogma, but to show that Nature is so full of God that no scientific doctrine, rightly stated, can be irreligious. True science teaches the same thing as the heart dictates; puts only into definite expression the indefinable emotion. If creation had been, as is supposed, by design and contrivance of each particular thing, it would have been as Kuskin describes the " wi-imaginative " painting ; and just as far from its present perfection. Indeed it surely is our perception of what we think failures and defects and evils in Nature that makes us take this view of it as arbitrary, or as a work of talent. Once let us see or realize its absolute perfection, and we shall immediately conceive it rather as a work of genius. Here come a group of vibrations sweeping through the air, mere matter and motion ; and lo ! they fall upon a human eye, a human ear, and straightway are become thought and emotion, an overwhelming passion of love, or joy, or grief; virtue or penitence, or heroism. If those vibrations were truly matter and motion here is a miracle. But what if those vibrations, as we thought them, were, in very truth, God's spiritual act ; His 8o Philosophy and Religion. thought, emotion, passion, surging against another spirit's bosom ? What then more natural and just ? The miracle resolves itself into sympathy. How can we so stultify ourselves as to think that what originates and ends in love and gladness, becomes matter on the way ? Poet nor madman ever feigned such a metamorphosis ! I adhere to common sense. That which is once spiritual is spiritual for ever. We have to introduce design because of our assumption of " matter." To deny that, and leave the " matter," is manifestly bad : but the inadequacy, the impossibility of design, its making God in time, and indeed altogether denying Him in fact all this is proof of the wrongness of our conception. The " design " is a hypothesis necessary from the wrong assumption. It involves the personality of God too ; and the very impossibility of it is evidence of the wrongness of the view, and the means (in part) of rectifying it. So I find this idea of design to be as it were the " evil " by which a negation is removed : and the atheistic argument holding matter but denying design is an anticipation : it doos not show us why we perceive design. We must perceive design in Nature because we perceive it as real or in time (putting our own " condition " into it) ; only by seeing it as eternal can design be excluded: for as truly as there is cause and effect, there is design. Now if we know why we must perceive design, we can exclude it; just as, knowing why we must perceive (or infer) the epicycles, we can exclude them. This I must apply more widely. The feeling of in- tolerance which some experience towards the " design " idea is like that of Copernicus towards the epicycles. He felt that it could not be so, even though he might not Nature known by the Moral Emotions. 8 1 be able to show it otherwise. Probably he denied them long before he showed the motion of the earth. But the assertion of actualism is involved in this feeling against design ; even as the motion of the earth is latent in the disgust at epicycles. Design cannot be got rid of without making the world eternal, spiritual ; otherwise there is a blank, a denial of plainest facts. We cannot deny that we perceive design : and seeing the actual as " real " involves seeing it as design ; like seeing God as " personal." That God is the direct doer of every thing in Nature, that this present world is full of Him, is not so much seen with the intellect as felt with the heart. I feel it throb through all the pulses of my life. I cast myself on the great ocean of Nature, on my mother's bosom, and feel God's arms around me, and His loving heart pressed to mine. It is no longer Nature, it is divine love and holiness that hold me in their embrace. In my own experience there is a good illustration of the identity of two opposite opinions. For example : formerly I could not be brought to admit special creations, because it appeared to me that all was law, and accom- plished by second causes. Now I see that there is no special creation, because all is God's direct and special act. Formerly I saw the law, now the liberty ; but not two things : these are one, the chain of causes is God's absolutely free and direct action. These two are one, just as in Nature necessity and freedom are united in motion in direction of least resistance. The advance is to see the liberty, but not to see it as exceptional, and opposed to the law. Because law and liberty are one it