Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and good will, on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely mark a tendency toward a more, not a less, scriptural view of nature. Are they not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to escape from that shallow mechanical notion of the universe and its Creator which was too much in vogue in the eighteenth century among divines as well as philosophers; the theory which Goethe (to do him justice), and after him Mr. Thomas Carlyle, have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it, save possibly—for even that was only half believed—by rare miraculous interferences with the laws which He Himself had made? Out of that chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God, the human mind, in Germany especially, tried during the early part of this century to escape by strange roads; roads by which there was no escape, because they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific facts. Then, in despair, men turned to the facts which they had neglected, and said: We are weary of philosophy; we will study you, and you alone. As for God, who can find Him? And they have worked at the facts like gallant and honest men; and their work, like all good work, has produced, in the last fifty years, results more enormous than they even dreamed. But what are they finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show? A something nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve: namely, the life which shapes and makes—that which the old school-men called "forma formativa," which they call vital force and what not—metaphors all, or rather counters to mark an unknown quantity, as if they should call it x or y. One says: It is all vibrations; but his reason, unsatisfied, asks: And what makes the vibrations vibrate? Another: It is all physiological units; but his reason asks: What is the "physis," the nature and "innate tendency" of the units? A third: It may be all caused by infinitely numerous "gemmules;" but his reason asks him: What puts infinite order into those gemmules, instead of infinite anarchy? I mention these theories not to laugh at them. No man has a deeper respect for those who have put them forth. Nor would it interfere with my theological creed, if any or all of them were proven to be true to-morrow. I mention them only to show that beneath all these theories—true or false—still lies the unknown x. Scientific men are becoming more and more aware of it; I had almost said ready to worship it. More and more the noblest-minded of them are engrossed by the mystery of that unknown and truly miraculous element in Nature, which is always escaping them, though they cannot escape it. How should they escape it? Was it not written of old: "Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee from Thy spirit?"

Ah that we clergy would summon up courage to tell them that! Courage to tell them—what need not hamper for a moment the freedom of their investigations, what will add to them a sanction, I may say a sanctity—that the unknown x which lies below all phenomena, which is for ever at work on all phenomena, on the whole and on every part of the whole, down to the colouring of every leaf and the curdling of every cell of protoplasm, is none other than that which the old Hebrews called—(by a metaphor, no doubt—for how can man speak of the unseen, save in metaphors drawn from the seen?—but by the only metaphor adequate to express the perpetual and omnipresent miracle)- -The Breath of God; The Spirit who is The Lord and Giver of Life.

In the rest, gentlemen, let us think, and let us observe. For if we are ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but of the methods thereof, then we and the men of science shall have no common ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.

But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too high-minded to care for popularity themselves.

True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who own the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the "Emotions and the Will" (Second Edition, pp. 78, 79), then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.

Only wait; and fret not yourselves, else shall you be moved to do evil. Remember the saying of the wise man: "Go not after the world. She turns on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough she will turn round to thee."



Footnotes:

{1} An Address given to the Scientific Society of Winchester, 1871.

{181} A Lecture delivered to the Officers of the Royal Artillery, Woolwich, 1872.

{201} A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.

{223} For an account of Sorcery and Fetishism among the African Negros, see Burton's "Lake Regions of Central Africa," vol. ii. pp. 341-60.

{229} A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.

{262} A Lecture delivered at the Mechanics' Institute, Odiham, 1857.

{290} Lecture delivered at Reading, 1846.

{313} Novalis, I think, says that one's own thought gains quite infinitely in value as soon as one finds it shared by even one other human being. The saying has proved true, at least, to me. The morning after this paper was read, I received a book, "The Genesis of Species, by St. George Mivart, F.R.S." The name of the author demanded all attention and respect; and as I read on, I found him, to my exceeding pleasure, advocating views which I had long held, with a learning and ability to which I have no pretensions. The book will, doubtless, excite much useful criticism and discussion in the scientific world. I hope that it may do the same in the clerical world; and I earnestly beg those clergymen who heard me with so much patience and courtesy at Sion College, to ponder well Mr. Mivart's last chapter, on "Theology and Evolution."

{320} Quoted from Schleiden's "The Plant, a Biography."—Lecture XI. in fine.

{326} I am well aware what a serious question is opened up in these words. The fact that the great majority of workers among the social insects are barren females or nuns, devoting themselves to the care of other individuals' offspring, by an act of self-sacrifice, and that by means of that self-sacrifice these communities grow large and prosperous, ought to be well weighed just now; both by those who hold that morality has been evolved from perceptions of what was useful or pleasurable, and by those who hold as I do that morality is one, immutable and eternal. Those who take the former view (confounding, as Mr. Mivart well points out in his Genesis of Species, "material" and "formal" morality) have no difficulty in tracing the germs of the highest human morality in animals; for self-interest is, in their eyes, the ultimate ground of morality, and the average animal is utterly selfish. But certain animals perform acts, as in the case of working bees and ants, and (as I hold) in the case of mothers working for and protecting their offspring, which at least seem formally moral; because they seem founded on self-sacrifice. I am well aware, I say again, of the very serious admissions which we clergymen should have to make if we confessed that these acts really are that which they seem to be. But I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being; I am ready, with Socrates, to follow the Logos whithersoever it leads; and I hope that Mr. Mivart will reconsider the two latter paragraphs of p. 196, and let his "thoughts play freely" round this curious subject. Perhaps, in so doing, he may lay his hand on an even sharper weapon than those which he has already used against the sensationalist theory of morals.

THE END