Part 20

The moral progress of the species depends, of course, on the moral progress of the individuals embraced in it. Religion is the sum of those influences which determine the motives of men’s actions into harmony with the Divine perfection and the Divine will. Obedience to these influences constitutes the practice of religion, while the statement of the growth and operation of these influences constitutes the theory of religion, or doctrine.

The Divine Spirit planted in man shows him that which is in harmony with the Divine Mind, and it remains for his free will to conform to it or reject it. This harmony is man’s highest ideal of happiness, and in seeking it, as well as in desiring to flee from dissonance or pain, he but obeys the disposition common to all conscious beings. If, however, he attempts to conform to it, he will find the law of evil present, and frequently obtaining the mastery. If now he be in any degree observing, he will find that the laws of morality and right are the only ones by which human society exists in a condition superior to that of the lower animals, and in which the capacities of man for happiness can approach a state of satisfaction. He may be then said to be “awakened” to the importance of religion. If he carry on the struggle to attain to the high goal presented to his spiritual vision, he will be deeply grieved and humbled at his failures: then he is said to be “convicted.” Under these circumstances the necessity of a deliverance becomes clear, and is willingly accepted in the only way in which it has pleased the Author of all to present it, which has been epitomized by Paul as “the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ.” Thus a life of advanced and ever-advancing moral excellence becomes possible, and the man makes nearer approaches to the “image of God.”

Thus is opened a new era in spiritual development, which we are led to believe leads to an ultimate condition in which the nature inherited from our origin is entirely overcome, and an existence of moral perfection entered on. Thus in the book of Mark the simile occurs: “First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear;” and Solomon says that the development of righteousness “shines more and more unto the perfect day.”

δ. Summary.

If it be true that general development in morality proceeds in spite of the original predominance of evil in the world, through the self-destructive nature of the latter, it is only necessary to examine the reasons why the excellence of the good may have been subject also to progress, and how the remainder of the race may have been influenced thereby.

The development of morality is then probably to be understood in the following sense: Since the Divine Spirit, as the prime force in moral progress, cannot in itself be supposed to have been in any way under the influence of natural laws, its capacities were no doubt as eternal and unerring in the first man as in the last. But the facts and probabilities discussed above point to development of religious sensibility, or capacity to appreciate moral good, or to receive impressions from the source of good.

The evidence of this is supposed to be seen in—First, improvement in man’s views of his duty to his neighbor; and Second, the substitution of spiritual for symbolic religions: in other words, improvement in the capacity for receiving spiritual impressions.

What the primary cause of this supposed development of religious sensibility may have been, is a question we reverently leave untouched. That it is intimately connected in some way with, and in part dependent on, the evolution of the intelligence, appears very probable: for this evolution is seen—First, in a better understanding of the consequences of action, and of good and of evil in many things; and Second, in the production of means for the spread of the special instrumentalities of good. The following may be enumerated as such instrumentalities:

1. Furnishing literary means of record and distribution of the truths of religion, morality and science.

2. Creating and increasing modes of transportation of teachers and literary means of disseminating truth.

3. Facilitating the migration and the spread of nations holding the highest position in the scale of morality.

4. The increase of wealth, which multiplies the extent of the preceding means.

And now, let no man attempt to set bounds to this development. Let no man say even that morality accomplished is all that is required of mankind, since that is not necessarily the evidence of a spiritual development. If a man possess the capacity for progress beyond the condition in which he finds himself, in refusing to enter upon it he declines to conform to the Divine law. And “from those to whom little is given, little is required, but from those to whom much is given, much shall be required.”

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SCIENTIFIC ADDRESSES.

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TYNDALL’S ADDRESSES.

On the Methods and Tendencies of Physical Investigation.

The celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on the “Vocation of the Scholar,” insisted on a culture for the scholar which should not be one-sided, but all-sided. His intellectual nature was to expand spherically, and not in a single direction. In one direction, however, Fichte required that the scholar should apply himself directly to nature, become a creator of knowledge, and thus repay, by original labors of his own, the immense debt he owed to the labors of others. It was these which enabled him to supplement the knowledge derived from his own researches, so as to render his culture rounded, and not one-sided.

Fichte’s idea is to some extent illustrated by the constitution and the labors of the British Association. We have here a body of men engaged in the pursuit of natural knowledge, but variously engaged. While sympathizing with each of its departments, and supplementing his culture by knowledge drawn from all of them, each student amongst us selects one subject for the exercise of his own original faculty—one line along which he may carry the light of his private intelligence a little way into the darkness by which all knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the geologist faces the rocks; the biologist fronts the conditions and phenomena of life; the astronomer, stellar masses and motions; the mathematician the properties of space and number; the chemist pursues his atoms, while the physical investigator has his own large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acoustical, and other phenomena. The British Association, then, faces nature on all sides, and pushes knowledge centrifugally outwards, while, through circumstance or natural bent, each of its working members takes up a certain line of research in which he aspires to be an original producer, being content in all other directions to accept instruction from his fellow-men. The sum of our labors constitutes what Fichte might call the sphere of natural knowledge. In the meetings of the Association it is found necessary to resolve this sphere into its component parts, which take concrete form under the respective letters of our sections.

This section (A) is called the Mathematical and Physical section. Mathematics and Physics have been long accustomed to coalesce, and hence this grouping. For while mathematics, as a product of the human mind, is self-sustaining and nobly self-rewarding,—while the pure mathematician may never trouble his mind with considerations regarding the phenomena of the material universe, still the form of reasoning which he employs, the power which the organization of that reasoning confers, the applicability of his abstract conceptions to actual phenomena, render his science one of the most potent instruments in the solution of natural problems. Indeed, without mathematics, expressed or implied, our knowledge of physical science would be friable in the extreme.

Side by side with the mathematical method, we have the method of experiment. Here, from a starting-point furnished by his own researches or those of others, the investigator proceeds by combining intuition and verification. He ponders the knowledge he possesses and tries to push it further, he guesses and checks his guess, he conjectures and confirms or explodes his conjecture. These guesses and conjectures are by no means leaps in the dark; for knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries. There is no discovery so limited as not to illuminate something beyond itself. The force of intellectual penetration into this penumbral region which surrounds actual knowledge is not dependent upon method, but is proportional to the genius of the investigator. There is, however, no genius so gifted as not to need control and verification. The profoundest minds know best that nature’s ways are not at all times their ways, and that the brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact. The vocation of the true experimentalist is the incessant correction and realization of his insight; his experiments finally constituting a body, of which his purified intuitions are, as it were, the soul.

Partly through mathematical, and partly through experimental research, physical science has of late years assumed a momentous position in the world. Both in a material and in an intellectual point of view it has produced, and it is destined to produce, immense changes, vast social ameliorations, and vast alterations in the popular conception of the origin, rule, and governance of things. Miracles are wrought by science in the physical world, while philosophy is forsaking its ancient metaphysical channels, and pursuing those opened or indicated by scientific research. This must become more and more the case as philosophic writers become more deeply imbued with the methods of science, better acquainted with the facts which scientific men have won, and with the great theories which they have elaborated.

If you look at the face of a watch, you see the hour and minute-hands, and possibly also a second-hand, moving over the graduated dial. Why do these hands move, and why are their relative motions such as they are observed to be? These questions cannot be answered without opening the watch, mastering its various parts, and ascertaining their relationship to each other. When this is done, we find that the observed motion of the hands follows of necessity from the inner mechanism of the watch when acted upon by the force invested in the spring.

This motion of the hands may be called a phenomenon of art, but the case is similar with the phenomena of Nature. These also have their inner mechanism, and their store of force to set that mechanism going. The ultimate problem of physical science is to reveal this mechanism, to discern this store, and to show that from the combined action of both, the phenomena of which they constitute the basis must of necessity flow.

I thought that an attempt to give you even a brief and sketchy illustration of the manner in which scientific thinkers regard this problem would not be uninteresting to you on the present occasion; more especially as it will give me occasion to say a word or two on the tendencies and limits of modern science, to point out the region which men of science claim as their own, and where it is mere waste of time to oppose their advance, and also to define, if possible, the bourne between this and that other region to which the questionings and yearnings of the scientific intellect are directed in vain.

But here your tolerance will be needed. It was the American Emerson, I think, who said that it is hardly possible to state any truth strongly without apparent injury to some other truth. Under the circumstances, the proper course appears to be to state both truths strongly, and allow each its fair share, in the formation of the resultant conviction. For truth is often of a dual character, taking the form of a magnet with two poles; and many of the differences which agitate the thinking part of mankind are to be traced to the exclusiveness with which different parties affirm one half of the duality in forgetfulness of the other half. But this waiting for the statement of the two sides of a question implies patience. It implies a resolution to suppress indignation if the statement of the one half should clash with our convictions, and not to suffer ourselves to be unduly elated if the half-statement should chime in with our views. It implies a determination to wait calmly for the statement of the whole before we pronounce judgment either in the form of acquiescence or dissent.

This premised, let us enter upon our task. There have been writers who affirmed that the pyramids of Egypt were the productions of nature; and in his early youth Alexander Von Humboldt wrote an essay with the express object of refuting this notion. We now regard the pyramids as the work of men’s hands, aided probably by machinery of which no record remains. We picture to ourselves the swarming workers toiling at those vast erections, lifting the inert stones, and, guided by the volition, the skill, and possibly at times by the whip of the architect, placing the stones in their proper positions. The blocks in this case were moved by a power external to themselves, and the final form of the pyramid expressed the thought of its human builder.