Part 64

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These minor and more purely personal matters at an end, the weightier allegation remains, that at Belfast I misused my position by quitting the domain of science, and making an unjustifiable raid into the domain of theology. This I fail to see. Laying aside abuse, I hope my accusers will consent to reason with me. Is it not lawful for a scientific man to speculate on the antecedents of the solar system? Did Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel quit their legitimate spheres, when they prolonged the intellectual vision beyond the boundary of experience, and propounded the nebular theory? Accepting that theory as probable, is it not permitted to a scientific man to follow up, in idea, the series of changes associated with the condensation of the nebulae; to picture the successive detachment of planets and moons, and the relation of all of them to the sun? If I look upon our earth, with its orbital revolution and axial rotation, as one small issue of the process which made the solar system what it is, will any theologian deny my right to entertain and express this theoretic view? Time was when a multitude of theologians would have been found to do so--when that archenemy of science which now vaunts its tolerance would have made a speedy end of the man who might venture to publish any opinion of the kind. But, that time, unless the world is caught strangely slumbering, is for ever past.

As regards inorganic nature, then, we may traverse, without let or hindrance, the whole distance which separates the nebulae from the worlds of to-day. But only a few years ago this now conceded ground of science was theological ground. I could by no means regard this as the final and sufficient concession of theology; and, at Belfast, I thought it not only my right but my duty to state that, as regards the organic world, we must enjoy the freedom which we have already won in regard to the inorganic. I could not discern the shred of a title-deed which gave any man, or any class of men, the right to open the door of one of these worlds to the scientific searcher, and to close the other against him. And I considered it frankest, wisest, and in the long run most conducive to permanent peace, to indicate, without evasion or reserve, the ground that belongs to Science, and to which she will assuredly make good her claim.

I have been reminded that an eminent predecessor of mine in the Presidential chair, expressed a totally different view of the Cause of things from that enunciated by me. In doing so he transgressed the bounds of science at least as much as I did; but nobody raised an outcry against him. The freedom he took I claim. And looking at what I must regard as the extravagances of the religious world; at the very inadequate and foolish notions concerning this universe which are entertained by the majority of our authorised religious teachers; at the waste of energy on the part of good men over things unworthy, if I may say it without discourtesy, of the attention of enlightened heathens; the fight about the fripperies of Ritualism, and the verbal quibbles of the Athanasian Creed; the forcing on the public view of Pontigny Pilgrimages; the dating of historic epochs from the definition of the Immaculate Conception; the proclamation of the Divine Glories of the Sacred Heart--standing in the midst of these chimeras, which astound all thinking men, it did not appear to me extravagant to claim the public tolerance for an hour and a half, for the statement of more reasonable views--views more in accordance with the verities which science has brought to light, and which many weary souls would, I thought, welcome with gratification and relief.

But to come to closer quarters. The expression to which the most violent exception has been taken is this: 'Abandoning all disguise, the confession I feel bound to make before you is, that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life.' To call it a 'chorus of dissent,' as my Catholic critic does, is a mild way of describing the storm of opprobrium with which this statement has been assailed. But the first blast of passion being past, I hope I may again ask my opponents to consent to reason. First of all, I am blamed for crossing the boundary of the experimental evidence. This, I reply, is the habitual action of the scientific mind--at least of that portion of it which applies itself to physical investigation. Our theories of light, heat, magnetism, and electricity, all imply the crossing of this boundary. My paper on the 'Scientific Use of the Imagination,' and my 'Lectures on Light,' illustrate this point in the amplest manner; and in the Article entitled 'Matter and Force' in the present volume I have sought, incidentally, to make clear, that in physics the experiential incessantly leads to the ultra-experiential; that out of experience there always grows something finer than mere experience, and that in their different powers of ideal extension consists, for the most part, the difference between the great and the mediocre investigator. The kingdom of science, then, cometh not by observation and experiment alone, but is completed by fixing the roots of observation and experiment in a region inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which we are forced to fall back upon the picturing power of the mind.

Passing the boundary of experience, therefore, does not, in the abstract, constitute a sufficient ground for censure. There must have been something in my particular mode of crossing it which provoked this tremendous 'chorus of dissent.'

Let us calmly reason the point out. I hold the nebular theory as it was held by Kant, Laplace, and William Herschel, and as it is held by the best scientific intellects of to-day. According to it, our sun and planets were once diffused through space as an impalpable haze, out of which, by condensation, came the solar system. What caused the haze to condense? Loss of heat. What rounded the sun and planets? That which rounds a tear--molecular force. For aeons, the immensity of which overwhelms man's conceptions, the earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. It is now covered with visible living things. They are not formed of matter different from that of the earth around them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone, and flesh of its flesh. How were they introduced? Was life implicated in the nebula--as part, it may be, of a vaster and wholly Unfathomable Life; or is it the work of a Being standing outside the nebula, who fashioned it, and vitalised it; but whose own origin and ways are equally past finding out? As far as the eye of science has hitherto ranged through nature, no intrusion of purely creative power into any series of phenomena has ever been observed. The assumption of such a power to account for special phenomena, though often made, has always proved a failure. It is opposed to the very spirit of science; and I therefore assumed the responsibility of holding up, in contrast with it, that method of nature which it has been the vocation and triumph of science to disclose, and in the application of which we can alone hope for further light. Holding, then, 'that the nebulae and the solar system, life included, stand to each other in the relation of the germ to the finished organism, I reaffirm here, not arrogantly, or defiantly, but without a shade of indistinctness, the position laid down at Belfast.

Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, but with the definiteness belonging to the understanding, the scientific man has to put to himself these questions regarding the introduction of life upon the earth. He will be the last to dogmatise upon the subject, for he knows best that certainty is here for the present unattainable. His refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of knowledge than a protest against the assumption of knowledge which must long, if not for ever, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is the source of perpetual confusion upon earth. With a mind open to conviction he asks his opponents to show him an authority for the belief they so strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. Profoundly interesting, and indeed pathetic, to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded like potter's clay; its authority as a system of cosmogony being discredited on all hands, by the abandonment of the obvious meaning of its writer. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful. To knowledge its value has been negative, leading, in rougher ages than ours, to physical, and even in our own' free' age to moral, violence.

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No incident connected with the proceedings at Belfast is more instructive than the deportment of the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland; a body usually too wise to confer notoriety upon an adversary by imprudently denouncing him. The 'Times,' to which I owe a great deal on the score of fair play, where so much has been unfair, thinks that the Irish Cardinal, Archbishops, and Bishops, in a recent manifesto, adroitly employed a weapon which I, at an unlucky moment, placed in their hands. The antecedents of their action cause me to regard it in a different light; and a brief reference to these antecedents will, I think, illuminate not only their proceedings regarding Belfast, but other doings which have been recently noised abroad.

Before me lies a document bearing the date of November 1873, which, after appearing for a moment, unaccountably vanished from public view. It is a Memorial addressed, by Seventy of the Students and Ex-students of the Catholic University in Ireland, to the Episcopal Board of the University; and it constitutes the plainest and bravest remonstrance ever addressed by Irish laymen to their spiritual pastors and masters. It expresses the profoundest dissatisfaction with the curriculum marked out for the students of the University; setting forth the extraordinary fact that the lecture-list for the faculty of Science, published a month before they wrote, did not contain the name of a single Professor of the Physical or Natural Sciences.

The memorialists forcibly deprecate this, and dwell upon the necessity of education in science: 'The distinguishing mark of this age is its ardour for science. The natural sciences have, within the last fifty years, become the chiefest study in the world; they are in our time pursued with an activity unparalleled in the history of mankind. Scarce a year now passes without some discovery being made in these sciences which, as with the touch of the magician's wand, shivers to atoms theories formerly deemed unassailable. It is through the physical and natural sciences that the fiercest assaults are now made on our religion. No more deadly weapon is used against our faith than the facts incontestably proved by modern researches in science.'

Such statements must be the reverse of comfortable to a number of gentlemen who, trained in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, have been accustomed to the unquestioning submission of all other sciences to their divine science of Theology. But this is not all:

One thing seems certain,' say the memorialists, viz, that if chairs for the physical and natural sciences be not soon founded in the Catholic University, very many young men will have their faith exposed to dangers which the creation of a school of science in the University would defend them from. For our generation of Irish Catholics are writhing under the sense of their inferiority in science, and are determined that such inferiority shall not long continue; and so, if scientific training be unattainable at our University, they will seek it at Trinity or at the Queen's Colleges, in not one of which is there a Catholic Professor of Science.'

Those who imagined the Catholic University at Kensington to be due to the spontaneous recognition, on the part of the Roman hierarchy, of the intellectual needs of the age, will derive enlightenment from this, and still more from what follows: for the most formidable threat remains. To the picture of Catholic students seceding to Trinity and the Queen's Colleges, the memorialists add this darkest stroke of all: 'They will, in the solitude of their own homes, unaided by any guiding advice, devour the works of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell; works innocuous if studied under a professor who would point out the difference between established facts and erroneous inferences, but which are calculated to sap the faith of a solitary student, deprived of a discriminating judgment to which he could refer for a solution of his difficulties.'

In the light of the knowledge given by this courageous memorial, and of similar knowledge otherwise derived, the recent Catholic manifesto did not at all strike me as a chuckle over the mistake of a maladroit adversary, but rather as an evidence of profound uneasiness on the part of the Cardinal, the Archbishops, and the Bishops who signed it. They acted towards the Students' Memorial, however, with their accustomed practical wisdom. As one concession to the spirit which it embodied, the Catholic University at Kensington was brought forth, apparently as the effect of spontaneous inward force, and not of outward pressure becoming too formidable to be successfully opposed.

The memorialists point with bitterness to the fact, that 'the name of no Irish Catholic is known in connection with the physical and natural sciences.' But this, they ought to know, is the complaint of free and cultivated minds wherever a Priesthood exercises dominant power. Precisely the same complaint has been made with respect to the Catholics of Germany. The great national literature and the scientific achievements of that country, in modern times, are almost wholly the work of Protestants. A vanishingly small fraction of it only is derived from members of the Roman Church, although the number of these in Germany is at least as great as that of the Protestants. 'The question arises,' says a writer in an able German periodical, 'what is the cause of a phenomenon so humiliating to the Catholics? It cannot be referred to want of natural endowment due to climate (for the Protestants of Southern Germany have contributed powerfully to the creations of the German intellect), but purely to outward circumstances. And these are readily discovered in the pressure exercised for centuries by the Jesuitical system, which has crushed out of Catholics every tendency to free mental productiveness.' It is, indeed, in Catholic countries that the weight of Ultramontanism has been most severely felt. It is in such countries that the very finest spirits, who have dared, without quitting their faith, to plead for freedom or reform, have suffered extinction. The extinction, however, was more apparent than real, and Hermes, Hirscher, and Gunther, though individually broken and subdued, prepared the way, in Bavaria, for the persecuted but unflinching Frohschammer, for Doellinger, and for the remarkable liberal movement of which Doellinger is the head and guide.

Though moulded for centuries to an obedience unparalleled in any other country, except Spain, the Irish intellect is beginning to show signs of independence; demanding a diet more suited to its years than the pabulum of the Middle Ages. As for the recent manifesto in which Pope, Cardinal, Archbishops, and Bishops are united in one grand anathema, its character and fate are shadowed forth by the Vision of Nebuchadnezzar recorded in the Book of Daniel. It resembles the image, whose form was terrible, but the gold, and silver, and brass, and iron of which rested upon feet of clay. And a stone smote the feet of clay; and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the gold, were broken in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, and the wind carried them away.

Monsignor Capel has recently been good enough to proclaim at once the friendliness of his Church towards true science, and her right to determine what true science is. Let us dwell for a moment on the proofs of her scientific competence. When Halley's comet appeared in 1456 it was regarded as the harbinger of God's vengeance, the dispenser of war, pestilence, and famine, and by order of the Pope the church bells of Europe were rung to scare the monster away. An additional daily prayer was added to the supplications of the faithful. The comet in due time disappeared, and the faithful were comforted by the assurance that, as in previous instances relating to eclipses, droughts, and rains, so also as regards this 'nefarious' comet, victory had been vouchsafed to the Church.

Both Pythagoras and Copernicus had taught the heliocentric doctrine--that the earth revolves round the sun. In the exercise of her right to determine what true science is, the Church, in the Pontificate of Paul V, stepped in, and by the mouth of the holy Congregation of the Index, delivered, on March 5, 1616, the following decree:

And whereas it hath also come to the knowledge of the said holy congregation that the false Pythagorean doctrine of the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun, entirely opposed to Holy writ, which is taught by Nicolas Copernicus, is now published abroad and received by many. In order that this opinion may not further spread, to the damage of Catholic truth, it is ordered that this and all other books teaching the like doctrine be suspended, and by this decree they are all respectively suspended, forbidden, and condemned.

But why go back to 1456 and 1616? Far be it from me to charge bygone sins upon Monsignor Capel, were it not for the practices he upholds to-day. The most applauded dogmatist and champion of the Jesuits is, I am informed, Perrone. No less than thirty editions of a work of his have been scattered abroad for the healing of the nations. His notions of physical astronomy are virtually those of 1456. He teaches boldly that 'God does not rule by universal law... that when God orders a given planet to stand still He does not detract from any law passed by Himself, but orders that planet to move round the sun for such and such a time, then to stand still, and then again to move, as His pleasure may be.' Jesuitism proscribed Frohschammer for questioning its favourite dogma, that every human soul was created by a direct supernatural act of God, and for asserting that man, body and soul, came from his parents. This is the system that now strives for universal power; it is from it, as Monsignor Capel graciously informs us, that we are to learn what is allowable in science, and what is not!

In the face of such facts, which might be multiplied at will, it requires extraordinary bravery of mind, or a reliance upon public ignorance almost as extraordinary, to make the claims made by Monsignor Capel for his Church.

Before me is a very remarkable letter addressed in 1875 by the Bishop of Montpellier to the Deans and Professors of Faculties of Montpellier, in which the writer very clearly lays down the claims of his Church. He had been startled by an incident occurring in a course of lectures on Physiology given by a professor, of whose scientific capacity there was no doubt, but who, it was alleged, rightly or wrongly, had made his course the vehicle of materialism. 'Je ne me suis point donne,' says the Bishop, 'la mission que je remplis au milieu de vous. "Personne, au temoignage de saint Paul, ne s'attribue à soi-même un pareil honneur; il y faut être appelé de Dieu, comme Aaron." Et pourquoi en est-il ainsi? C'est parse que, selon le même Apôtre, noun devons titre les ambassadeurs de Dieu; et it n'est pas dans les usages, pas plus qu'il n'est dans la raison et le droit, qu'un envoyé s'accrédite lui-même. Mais, si j'ai recu d'En-Haut une mission; si l'Eglise, au nom de Dieu lui-même, a souscrit me lettres de créance, me siéraitil de manquer aux instructions qu'elle m'a données et d'entendre, en un sens différent du sien, le rôle qu'elle m'a confié?

'Or, Messieurs, la sainte Eglise se croit investie du droit absolu d'enseigner les hommes; elle se croit dépositaire de la vérité, non pas de la vérité fragmentaire, incomplète, mêlée de certitude et d'hésitation, mais de la vérité totale, complète, au point de vue religieux. Bien plus, elle est si sûre de l'infaillibilité que son Fondateur divin lui a communiquée, comme la dot magnifique de leur indissoluble alliance, que, même dans l'ordre naturel, scientifique ou philosophique, moral ou politique, elle n'admet pas qu'un système puisse être soutenu et adopté par des chrétiens, s'il contredit à des dogmes définis. Elle considère que la négation volontaire et opiniâtre d'un seul point de sa doctrine rend coupable du péché d'hérésie; et elle pense que toute hérésie formelle, si on ne la rejette pas courageusement avant de paraitre devant Dieu, entraine avec soi la perte certaine de la grâce et de l'éternité.'

The Bishop recalls those whom he addresses from the false philosophy of the present to the philosophy of the past, and foresees the triumph of the latter. 'Avant que le dix-neuvième siècle s'achève, la vieille philosophie scolastique aura repris sa place dans la juste admiration du monde. Il lui faudra pourtant bien du temps pour guérir les maux de tout genre, causés par son indigne rivale; et pendant de longues années encore, ce nom de philosophie, le plus grand de la langue humaine après celui de religion, sera suspect aux âmes qui se souviendront de la science impie et materialiste de Locke, de Condillac ou d'Helvétius. L'heure actuelle est aux sciences naturelles: c'est maintenant l'instrument de combat contre l'Eglise et contre toute foi religieuse. Nous ne les redoutons pas.' Further on the Bishop warns his readers that everything can be abused. Poetry is good, but in excess it may injure practical conduct. 'Les mathématiques sont excellentes: et Bossuet les a louées "comme étant ce qui sert le plus à la justesse du raisonnement;" mais si on s'accoutume exclusivement à leur méthode, rien de ce qui appartient à l'ordre moral ne parait plus pouvoir être démontré; et Fénelon a pu parler de l'ensorcellement et des attraits diaboliqes de la geometrie.'

The learned Bishop thus finally accentuates the claims of the Church: 'Comme le définissait le Pape Léon X, au cinquième concile oecuménique de Latran, "Le vrai ne peut pas être contraire à lui-même: par conséquent, toute assertion contraire à une vérité de foi révélée est nécessairement et absolument fausse." Il suit de là que, sans entrer dans l'examen scientifique de telle ou telle question de physiologie, mais par la seule certitude de nos dogmes, nous pouvons juger du sort de telle ou telle hypothèse, qui est une machine de guerre anti-chrétienne plutôt qu'une conquête sérieuse sur les secrets et les mystères de la nature... C'est un dogme que l'homme a été formé et faconné des mains de Dieu. Donc il est faux, hérétique, contraire à la dignité du Créateur et offensant pour son chef-d'oeuvre, de dire que l'homme constitue la septième espèce des singes... Hérésie encore de dire que le genre humain n'est pas sorti d'un seul couple, et qu'on y peut compter jusqu'à douze races distinctes!'

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